The conservative Canadian think tank Fraser Institute caused a stir last Wednesday when it ranked six Canadian provinces freer than the state of Florida. But a researcher at Florida State University takes issue with some of thosefindings.

The study was published in the 2012 edition of Fraser's annual "Economic Freedom of North America" report.

It grades the economic freedom of all 50 U.S. states and each of Canada's 10 provinces on a scale from 1 (least free) through 10 (most free), and ranks these territories in comparison with each other.

Allison DeFoor is in the news this week, leading the launch of the Project on Accountable Justice at Florida State University. The bipartisan think tank was created to develop information for making criminal justice decisions.

"The data will be its own advocacy," DeFoor said. "There are plenty of advocates in this mix. We don't need more advocates. We need more data."

The Naples-based hospital chain Health Management Associates rushed Friday to try to defend itself against a critical story that the CBS News show "60 Minutes" is expected to broadcast Sunday about hospital admissions of emergency-room patients.

One little-noticed and quite remarkable aspect of Election 2012 is that Barack Obama won a majority of the popular vote for the second consecutive time.

While most of the visitors to the Republican National Convention have long since left Tampa Bay, the millions of dollars in security costs awarded to local police departments have stayed put, engendering a new kind of technological surveillance state never before seen by Florida residents. Yael Ossowski has the story here.