The mystery and tragedy that surrounds the disappearance of a Malaysian jetliner early Saturday is a story that makes you want to look away, but somehow you just can’t help but stare.
USA Today reported Sunday that Florida remains the go-to Spring Break destination for American students, and for good reason. South Florida residents live in a perennial tropical paradise, which explains why so many people from New York and New Jersey tend to retire — read: drive badly and complain about the lack of good pizza — there. And, of course, Panama City Beach in the panhandle remains a popular Spring Break destination, famous for its cheap accommodations, wild beach parties and inevitable drunken falling-off-balconies incidents.
How was your Spring Break? Meet anyone fun? Get a tan? Learn how to perform oral sex from your phone?
The Florida Legislature is attempting to seize total control of Lake Okeechobee, eliminating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from the process and giving total water management control to the South Florida Water Management District. This proposal is a bad idea, as it overlooks the history of the management of the lake and related water bodies in regard to the Clean Water Act.
That darn plastic bag!
Mayor Ed Braddy’s recent pledge to “revamp” the City of Gainesville internship program is nothing new. I interned for the City of Gainesville in the summer of 2011 and did much more than “shadow the City Commission,” as Braddy claimed in the Feb. 26 edition of the Alligator.
Conservatives flocked to Washington, D.C., last week for the Conservative Political Action Conference to rally behind conservative leaders and discuss their core ideological beliefs. Sadly, the week produced the same rhetoric spouted by conservatives — most of whom identify as Republicans — that many young Americans and minorities, more often than not, reject.
For all of you still lingering on campus and not burning rubber on the highway bound for Panama City Beach, here it is: your Spring-Break-forever-y’all edition of
She was 19, smart, silly and beautiful.
Eric Brown’s guest column demonstrated hypocrisy in two ways: Its title and its content emphasized why the viral video explaining today’s situation in Venezuela is one-sided. He then went on to emphasize the few improvements the Venezuelan government has accomplished while completely disregarding the country’s significant increase in murders, scarcity in basic day-to-day needs, tyrant rule over peaceful protests and censorship of the media.
Last Tuesday, a column ran in the Alligator titled “Viral video is one-sided” by UF student Eric Brown, in which he discussed Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez and Venezuela. After reading it, I realized some things he said were partially true and some partially false.
The land home to the Grand Canyon brought a slew of controversy this week when reactionary legislators passed a religious freedom bill. The bill is an amendment that rides on the shoulders of an act that began after Native American Church members were fired for using psychedelic cacti more than a decade ago. It enshrines Arizona citizens’ rights to religious freedom by declaring that anything done or not done because of a “sincerely held” religious belief is well and good, so long as it doesn’t conflict with government interests.
Predictably, as March approaches, news outlets will start releasing “shocking exposés” revealing the “dark side of Spring Break” as if we didn’t know drunken college students fall off balconies in Panama City every year. Trend writers would have you believe all students view Spring Break as a weeklong free-for-all, and while this isn’t necessarily true — we have Habitat for Humanity and other things to do, after all — it’s true that alcohol abuse is a pervasive problem in American university culture.
Think about the nature of the Internet. It’s anything and everything at your fingertips whenever you want it. One day, we will tell our children we lived in a time when information was truly free.
On Feb. 18, Michael Beato wrote a highly erroneous piece about increasing the minimum wage. Today’s minimum wage is far below what it should be historically and continues to lose value every year. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be about $10.75 an hour instead of $7.25. If the minimum wage had kept up with productivity, it would be $18.75. If it had grown at the same rate as wages for the top 1 percent, it would be more than $28.
The words in this column come difficult for me, as I have many friends and colleagues who are currently enjoying a momentous win with the Swamp Party.
Education has always been a hot-button issue in this country. One side of this polarizing issue demands respect for teachers unions; the other says standardized testing is paramount.
Yesterday, Apple released OS X 10.9.2, and if you haven’t already — download it ASAP.
A new study released by the Leroy Collins Institute on Florida’s economic and fiscal health paints a bleak picture of the state’s present and future.
Luckily, our FCAT days are behind us. After all, the snacks used as bribery tactics and all of the time out of class in the world couldn’t make up for the fact that state standardized testing is a waste of schools’ time and an unfair indicator of teacher and student success.
Solutions by The State News
