Morning Headlines For Thursday

The U.S. Coast Guard plans an update on a Sarasota family who disappeared during a trip to Fort Myers aboard their 29-foot sailboat. The agency will have a news conference at 10 a.m. Thursday in St. Petersburg. On Wednesday, officials recovered one body while searching a debris field in the Gulf of Mexico believed to be part of a sailboat. Missing are 45-year-old Ace Kimberly and his children, 13-year-old Roger, 15-year-old Donny and 17-year-old Rebecca, live on the sailboat. They left Sarasota Sunday for Fort Myers to have the boat repaired. Kimberly’s brother alerted the agency on Tuesday, saying he’d last heard from the boaters on Sunday, when Ace Kimberly told him they sailing in “rough seas and thunderstorms.” A debris field was found about 30 miles off Sanibel Island. Among the items found were six life vests, water bottles, a tarp, a propane tank, basketball and two kayaks that were attached to the back of the boat. The search continues.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s decision to run for president set off a scramble to replace him. His last minute decision to run for re-election set off a scramble, though much smaller, to get out of the Senate race. A crowded Republican Senate primary has become much less so after Rubio’s announcement Wednesday that he’ll seek a second term after spending months saying he wouldn’t. U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race and will run for re-election, a decision U.S. Rep. David Jolly made last Friday as it became more obvious that Rubio was leaning toward running again.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A drained and dwindling group of Democrats, some draped in blankets and toting pillows, carried their remarkable House floor sit-in past sun rise Thursday, disrupting the business of Congress with demands for gun-control votes in an extraordinary scene of protest broadcast live to the world.

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Officials believe that they have captured the alligator that killed the 2 year old boy at Disney World. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a news release Wednesday that it has suspended alligator trapping activities in the area. The release says officials have based their conclusions on expert analyses and observations by staff with extensive experience in investigating fatal alligator bites. A total of six alligators were removed.

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Pulse owner Barbara Poma hoping to show ‘Pulse Is Alive’ when hosting a block party Thursday evening in a neighborhood in downtown Orlando. The party will have a Latin theme, since it was “Latin night” at Pulse on June 12, when gunman Omar Mateen opened fire in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. In addition to those killed, another 53 patrons were wounded.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A new study finds that requests for abortion pills spiked dramatically this year in Brazil, Ecuador and some other Latin American countries that have had outbreaks of Zika virus, which has been shown to cause severe birth defects. The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, does not address how many abortions actually occurred in those countries. But it
gives an indication that women may be choosing to end pregnancies rather than risk birth defects stemming from Zika, even when abortion is banned. Access to abortion has been shrinking in Texas and Florida, two U.S. states considered among the most likely to experience a Zika outbreak this summer as the tropical mosquitoes that can spread Zika flourish.

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(Tallahassee, FL) — A committee will help decide who should replace the statue of a confederate general in Washington, D.C. Daisy Grimes says it should be Dr. Mary McLeon Bethune, founder of Bethune Cookman. The other two finalists include Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the famed environmental activist and mother of the Everglades preservation movement and George Jenkins the founder of Publix. The legislature has the final say.

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ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A friend of the gunman who shot “The Voice” singer Christina Grimmie after an Orlando concert says his friend had developed a fixation on her within the last year. A police report released Wednesday recounts an interview with Cory Dennington, who describes himself as the only friend of Kevin Loibl, the man police say fatally shot Grimmie on June 11.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida wildlife officials have voted against holding a bear hunt this year at their quarterly meeting. After nearly seven hours of comments Wednesday from staff and the public, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted 4-3 against a 2016 hunt. They also voted to have staff gather more information so that they could vote again next year on whether to hold a 2017 hunt.