Regional Briefs 8/20/2014

On May 1, reproductive care in Florida will change. Anyone more than six weeks pregnant will be prohibited by law from getting an abortion. Obstetricians who work privately, or on a hospital staff, already are fielding questions from patients, while also trying to understand the effect on their practices. A wrong call could lead to criminal charges — for a woman or a doctor. There are exceptions to the new abortion law.

Palm Beach County Democratic Party Chair Mindy Koch may be back in office after being removed by Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, but many of the issues that caused her to be removed in the first place remain. As depicted in a recent Sun Sentinel editorial, there are valid issues that have been cast aside relative to non-compliance on party bylaws by Koch.

Both of Florida’s U. S. senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, recently voted against the aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. They were in a group of 18 senators voting no (as 79 voted yes). Again and again, they disappoint America and the people of Florida. If polled, the majority of Florida citizens would want to aid these countries that are allies, upholding our democratic values.

Dear Amy: My friend “Tina” and I have been friends since college and are now in our 50s. When we met we were members of a campus religious organization, however as the years passed we both drifted away from our religious affiliations. I now would call myself agnostic. Recently, Tina had a difficult break-up with a significant other.

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden didn’t waste time. Just minutes into his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday, Biden launched into the issues dominating the 2024 election, including his age and former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. “The 2024 election’s in full swing and yes, age is an issue,” Biden said in a roughly 10-minute speech.

By MIKE SCHNEIDER (Associated Press) ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — During three years of working as a parade performer at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California, Zach Elefante always has had a second or third job to help him earn a living. Unlike the experiences of his peers at Disney’s parks in Orlando, Florida, where there is a much smaller talent pool, the performers who play Mickey Mouse, Goofy and other beloved Disney characters at the California parks aren’t always provided a consistent work schedule by the company. It’s among the reasons the California performers are organizing to be represented by a union now, more than four decades after their Florida counterparts did so. While Disney asks character performers to be available to work at any time, that demand isn’t always rewarded with scheduled work hours, the California performers said. “A lot of performers get the sense that if they don’t give their full availability, we won’t be in shows … and that will impact other jobs we need to sustain a living in this area,” said Elefante, who lives in Santa Ana, California. Earlier this month, the California character performers and the union organizing them, Actors’ Equity Association, said they had filed a petition for union recognition. It’s a different era and a different union doing the organizing this time around, so the California character and parade performers likely will avoid some of the bad blood that the Disney performers in Florida have experienced with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. It has been a rocky four-decade marriage in Florida between the performers who put the “magic” in the Magic Kingdom and the Teamsters, a union historically formed for transportation and warehouse workers which had deep ties to organized crime until the late 1980s. Why now for the California character performers, so many decades after their Florida counterparts organized?