Florida | featured news

A 34-year-old Florida woman apparently killed her two children in their house and then committed suicide by hanging herself from a ceiling fan, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said Saturday.

A man who tried to steal undershirts valued at $16 from a Wal-Mart in Margate, Fla., shot and killed a loss prevention employee there Friday evening, police said.

A new Fox News poll shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney in three key states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia. The president leads by 7 percentage points in both Ohio (49%-42%) and Virginia (50%-43%), Fox says. In Florida -- where Obama campaigns today --- he leads Romney, 49%-44%.

 A postal employee was arrested in Orlando, Fla., on charges he was delivering cocaine while on his mail route, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede. The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

The Secretary of Explaining Stuff, also known as former President Bill Clinton, is coming to Florida. The Obama campaign announced this afternoon that Clinton will take part in a campaign event for Obama in the Miami area on Tuesday and another in the Orlando area on Wednesday. Obama was in central Florida today for the first day of a two-day bus tour.

Why the battle to take credit for Ohio’s ever-so-slightly above-average economy could swing the presidential election...While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around.

Clint Eastwood earned plenty of bad reviews for his latest performance: a bizarre, rambling endorsement of Mitt Romney. "Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic," tweeted film critic Roger Ebert as Eastwood ad-libbed Thursday night to an audience of millions - and one empty chair - on stage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. "He didn't need to do this to himself. It's unworthy of him."

A federal judge said on Wednesday that he planned to block provisions of a Florida measure that made it harder for organizations to register voters in the state. The measure, part of a broad and contentious 2011 election law in Florida, had a serious impact on third-party voter groups, like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote, which filed the suit along with the Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. The groups asserted that the new requirements were onerous and made volunteers vulnerable to fines and even felony charges.

A Florida appeals court has granted defendant George Zimmerman's request for a new judge in his murder trial, Zimmerman's lawyer said Wednesday.