Citrus Greening
A bacterial disease called “citrus greening” is decimating orange trees throughout Florida. Some farmers are recording losses of up to 80%. In its prime, Florida citrus was booming; the state churned out more than 13 million tons of product during the 2003-04 season. During the most recent harvest season, Florida produced more than 90% less than that. Central Florida Public Media climate reporter Molly Duerig spoke with orange growers about coping with the blight – she joined Engage to parse out her findings.
Florida’s Flying Cars
Research firm Custom Market Insights is estimating the Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft industry could grow to a seventy-billion dollar industry inside of eight years . . . a trillion by 2040.
Vertical Takeoff and Landing vehicles – colloquially known as “flying cars” – are being positioned to infiltrate the private and corporate aircraft industry with its sights on mass transit and cargo shipping. The crafts themselves resemble space-age sky-cars . . . part drone-quad copter and part 80’s sci-fi space ship.
Florida is jockeying for a foothold in the industry with plans for “vertiports” – take off and landing structures peppering the Atlantic coast. Several start-ups have taken root in the Sunshine state, including Pompano Beach’s Doroni – which is preparing to roll out the “H1-X” flying car with a tentative price tag around three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars. Abe Dats is Doroni’s chief of marketing and investor relations – he joined Engage to talk about Florida’s role in the future of flying cars.
Legal Corpus Linguistics
In April of 2022, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida ruled that a Biden Administration policy requiring the wearing of masks while traveling would be struck down. The country was more than two years into the COVID pandemic and masks were, at the time, identified as the primary method of reducing the person-to-person transmission of the virus.
The wording of the ruling was unusual . . . as was the timing as it had come soon after Judge Mizelle had attended multiple all-expense-paid junkets with a number of other federal judges. Destinations included Orlando . . . and a posh golf resort in the mountains of West Virginia. The purpose of the trips was to engage the attendees in a workshop re-examining applications of arcane judicial theories.
Engage spoke with Molly Redden, a senior political reporter with HuffPost whose reporting uncovered a web of PACs, judges and legal theorists on the fringe.
Remembering D-Day
Today is the 80th anniversary of the Allied forces infiltrating the beaches of Normandy, in what was described as the largest amphibious invasion to ever take place in military history. The World War II operation converged Allied armies of land, sky and sea.
Earlier today, veterans, world leaders, and supporters met on the code name beaches of Utah, Omaha, and more in commemoration of the sacrifices made by the soldiers who stormed into the then Nazi-occupied France According to the Associated Press, there were 4,414 soldiers who died on D-Day.
There were over 16 million Americans who fought in WW2. But those numbers have shrunk significantly over the last 80 years. Today, there is a little over 114,000 American WWII veterans alive. According to the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs, 11,000 of them call Florida home.
Engage sat down with Dr. Amelia Lyons, a history professor at the University of Central Florida. She leads the Florida France soldier stories project, which has students document Floridians, who served in the European Theater in World War Two, died in service and were buried in one of five World War Two cemeteries in France.
