NightBlogger

First Priority Bank was shut down by regulators on Friday, making the small Florida lender the eighth bank failure in the U.S. so far this year. SunTrust agreed to take on the deposits of First Priority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement late Friday. The six branches of First Priority will reopen on Monday as branches of SunTrust, it added. At the end of June, First Priority had $259 million in assets and total deposits of $227 million. There were roughly $13 million in uninsured deposits held in about 840 accounts that potentially exceeded insurance limits, the FDIC estimated. However, this amount will probably change after the FDIC gets more information from customers. SunTrust also bought about $42 million of the failed bank’s assets. The FDIC sold another $14 million of First Priority’s assets to LNV Corporation, a unit of Beal Bank Nevada. The FDIC said it will keep the remaining assets and sell them later. This bank failure will cost the FDIC’s insurance fund $72 million, the regulator estimated. More

It’s a mystery no more. In 2003, an unknown killer started attacking watermelon crops in Southwest Florida. It became known as watermelon vine decline, or WVD. Researchers now know the culprit: the squash vein yellowing virus, which is spread by whiteflies. And they’re looking for ways to combat the disease, which in 2005 alone caused $60 million in losses for Florida’s watermelon growers, according to a report by Science Daily. More

PENSACOLA, Fla. - Oil companies once viewed drilling in the deep waters off Florida as cost prohibitive. Politicians feared even the slightest sign of support would be career suicide. No more. Record crude oil prices are fueling support for oil and natural gas exploration off the nation’s shores. In Florida, movement was under way even before President Bush called on Congress last month to lift a federal moratorium that’s barred new offshore drilling since 1981. More

ABC News
An outbreak of salmonella poisoning linked to raw tomatoes has been traced to Mexico and Florida, according to federal health officials. Officials today said they will send teams of investigators to Mexico and Florida this weekend. They would not identify the farms that are being investigated, stressing that salmonella contamination could have occurred somewhere later along the distribution line.

“We don’t know for certain that the contamination occurred on a farm,” said Dr. David Acheson of the Food and Drug Administration. “The contamination could have occurred upstream of the farm, in a distribution center, or the packing shed or warehouse. And it’s important that we inspect in those areas to rule that out. We cannot assume that the contamination has occurred on a farm.”

A cluster of 285 salmonella cases has been reported in Texas in the past week, and federal and state officials there are working to determine the cause. All told, authorities have identified 552 people infected with salmonella in 32 states and the District of Columbia since April 10, according to the Centers for Disease Control. More than 50 people have been hospitalized. No deaths have been attributed to the outbreak. More

“Officials are saying there are bad tomatoes out there, but they can’t find them, they don’t know where they are from,” said Jim Mills, sales manager at Produce Express in Sacramento, which supplies fruits and vegetables to hundreds of local eateries. He said his office fielded more than 300 calls Monday from anxious customers. The outbreak was first spotted in New Mexico and Texas, where investigators identified 57 tomato-related salmonella infections, apparently from a common source, between April 23 and June 1. In the past week, genetic testing has linked dozens of additional salmonella infections in other states to the same source.

At this time of year, according to industry experts, most red round, red Roma and red plum tomatoes sold in California and across the country come from just two regions: Florida and Mexico. Since the FDA has been unable to narrow its investigation to a particular farm or packing operation, all three of the popular-variety tomatoes from those areas are suspect. More

MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida’s tomato industry is in “complete collapse” and $40 million worth of tomatoes will rot unless federal regulators quickly trace the source of a salmonella outbreak and clear the state’s produce, an industry official said on Tuesday. “We probably have $40 million worth of product we can’t sell. We’ve had to stop packing, stop picking,” said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange.
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The League of Women Voters in Florida and its 27 local groups have helped thousands of residents register to vote over the years. But just over a week ago, the organization’s leaders said they would have to stop their current drive because the state’s top election official planned to enforce strict deadlines and fines of up to $1,000 for groups that lose voter registration forms or turn them in late.

“We’re an all-volunteer organization,” said Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, president of the League of Women Voters in Florida, which plans to sue. “It’s a matter of being able to protect the leagues from liability.” According to independent elections experts at Pew’s Electionline.org and other organizations, it is now harder to vote here [Florida] than in nearly every other state in the nation. Some critics predict that tens of thousands of potential voters will be kept off the rolls — many of them poor, black or Hispanic.
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Salon
Ickes — deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and one of the great rules mavens of the Democratic Party since the 1960s — had come back from the three-hour break looking distraught as he silently paced back and forth before the committee reconvened. Confronted with the apostasy of the Clinton defectors, Ickes thundered before the Michigan vote, “This motion will hijack, remove, four delegates won by Hillary Clinton. This body of 30 individuals has decided that they’re going to substitute their judgment for 600,000 [Michigan] voters.”

After the committee adjourned, Steed, a former DNC official, explained the logic behind the compromise in an interview, saying, “Our goal was what could be done to unify the party. The only unity proposal on the table was the Michigan proposal, so we accepted it.” Kamarck, a former top Gore aide, put it simply, “It was the only answer.” More

CNN
MEMBERS of a Democratic rules committee voted on Saturday to seat all of Florida’s and Michigan’s delegation to the party’s national convention and give their delegates a half vote each. A first vote, which would have seated all of Florida’s delegation with full voting privileges, failed.

After the results were announced, spectators started to boo and his and some started chanting, “Denver! Denver!” the site of the party’s convention in August. Democrats fear that a protracted battle over the issue all the way to the convention could split the party and weaken it’s chances of winning the White House in November. The panel must now vote on how to address Michigan’s disputed delegates. The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is hearing the two states’ appeals on its decision to strip all of their delegates because they moved their primary contests earlier on the calendar. More

Hillary Clinton supporters are gathering for what could be her last big stand Saturday, as the Democratic Party’s rules committee meets to decide how to resolve a dispute over Florida’s and Michigan’s 368 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

With only three primaries remaining, in Puerto Rico on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota next Tuesday, the Saturday meeting could be Clinton’s final major effort to overtake Obama. She needs a big victory from the 30-member panel, which is expected to meet all day, and her supporters plan a rally to help press her case.

The math and the process confronting the rules committee are complex, but it boils down to this:

WebMD Health News
Six young men died last year after swimming in lakes or pools infested with a brain-eating amoeba, the CDC reports. The bad blobs — known as Naegleria fowleri or N. fowleri — thrive in warm, fresh water all over the world. But the key word here is warm. The amoeba loves heat. In the U.S., it inhabits the relatively hot waters of lakes, hot springs, and poorly maintained pools in Southern or Southwestern states. All six of the 2007 cases were in Florida, Texas, and Arizona (the victims’ names and swimming sites come from local media reports.

That food source is the human brain. The CDC doesn’t like to call N. fowleri “the brain-eating amoeba,” but that’s what it does. “It actually is using the brain for food,” Yoder says. “So it is a very tragic situation for the person unfortunate enough to have that happen. After the amoeba enters the nose, it finds its way to the olfactory nerve. N. fowleri appears to be attracted to nerve cells, so it follows the nerve into the brain. That’s when bad things happen. More

TAMPA, Fla., May 28 (UPI) — A federal judge in Tampa, Fla., Wednesday ruled the Democratic National Committee has the right to make its own rules for party primaries and delegates. Judge Richard Lazzara tossed a lawsuit challenging the party’s decision not to seat delegates from Florida, CNN reported. The DNC stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates at the party’s convention because the two states moved their primaries to earlier dates.

Political consultant Victor DiMaio and his attorney said the decision could be compared to prohibitions against allowing African-Americans to vote. It is the second Florida lawsuit protesting the party’s decision to be disallowed, following a challenge by Rep. Alcee Hastings and Sen. Bill Nelson, both Florida Democrats. DiMaio said he was considering a U.S. Supreme Court appeal. Meanwhile, national Democratic leaders are likely to meet Florida and Michigan officials halfway in resolving the delegate issue, two rules committee members told CNN. More

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Nedra Pickler/Ap
A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to seat some delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully restore the two states as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to party lawyers. Democratic National Committee rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, the party’s legal experts wrote in a 38-page memo.

The memo was sent late Tuesday to the 30 members of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which plans to meet Saturday at a Washington hotel. The committee is considering ways to include the two important general election battlegrounds at the nominating convention in August, and the staff analysis says seating half the delegates is “as far as it legally can” go. Saturday’s meeting is expected to draw a large crowd, with Clinton supporters among those encouraging a protest outside demanding that all the states’ delegates be seated. More

Photo by jurek d.

Facing South
Fast-food giant Burger King announced this week that it fired two employees who posted libelous comments to public Web sites about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization pressing the company to pay a penny more per pound for tomatoes to boost pay for farmworkers. The company also told the News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla. that it has stopped using an investigative firm to spy on farmworker advocates.

The company would not identify the fired employees. But earlier this year, the News-Press reported that Steven Grover — Burger King’s vice president of food safety, quality assurance and regulatory compliance — used his daughter’s online alias to make false and derogatory comments about CIW. Last month, the paper also revealed that Cara Schaffer, the owner of the investigative firm Diplomatic Tactical Services, infiltrated the Student/Farmworker Alliance, a CIW ally. Read more