Word: florida
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...remember, too, sitting with Rove at a picnic table in Florida eight months later, on the day before the general election. Bush had been leading most polls in that crucial final week and seemed to be holding his lead despite the late revelation that he had once been arrested for drunk driving and had, as Texas Governor, tried to keep the arrest quiet. If Rove was worried, he didn't show it. In fact, he was convinced that Bush would win at least 320 electoral votes the next day, if not 340. He went state-by-state confidently explaining...
...turned more than a few heads in June when the United Nations' World Heritage Committee, which monitors the globe's important natural and cultural sites, removed the Everglades from its endangered list at the behest of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The circumstances behind the action have infuriated Florida Democrats and environmentalists - and cast more suspicions on the Bush Administration's penchant for bending science to suit its politics...
...This action is unacceptable," Florida's Democratic Senator, Bill Nelson, wrote this month to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, adding that it "warrants [the] removal" of one of Kempthorne's top officials. But the Administration insists Nelson and Everglades activists are the ones putting politics over empirical evidence - and at the expense of poorer countries that are trying to save important natural resources more endangered than the Everglades...
...Everglades, specifically Everglades National Park, has been on the U.N.'s endangered list since 1993. By then the levees and canals the Army Corps had dug, as well as breakneck South Florida development and agricultural waste products like phosphorous, were wreaking eco-havoc. An astonishing 90% of the Everglades' wading bird population, for example, had disappeared. Last February, the park's experts laid out benchmarks for Everglades improvement - "which when met," the report says, "would facilitate the removal" of the park from the U.N. list. The report made it clear that while progress was being made in areas like correcting...
...foul. Nelson, who is calling for Willens to be fired, even plans to convene a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that he chairs. Progress, he argues, hasn't been sufficient. The Everglades restoration project is still less than half finished and is still threatened by pressure from Florida developers; what's more, because of what critics call funding delays by the Administration and congressional Republicans, it is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. "The federal government really hasn't fulfilled its end of the bargain yet," says Mark Kraus, vice president and chief operating...