Two big-spending candidates trumpeting their reform credentials are vying in Miami-Dade's closely contested mayoral runoff election, but have voters just tuned them out?

Julio Robaina and Carlos Gimenez are fighting down to the wire. Robaina, the mayor of Hialeah, edged Gimenez, a county commissioner, in the initial round of voting and he maintains a sizable fundraising lead, as well as the backing of the influential Latin Builders Association.

Speaking to a cheering crowd at the National Right-to-Life Committee (NRLC) annual meeting in Jacksonville, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, now making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, slammed President Barack Obama for undermining the rights of Americans.

I very much feel at home here, said Santorum as he accepted the applause of the pro-life activists meeting on the First Coast. He praised them for all their efforts, calling them warriors of love.

Stuck in Washington as Congress faces votes on continued funding of American military action in Libya, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, making his third bid for the White House, spoke via Skype to pro-life activists convening in Jacksonville.

I talk a lot about right-to-life, said Paul, who called it the most important issue of our age.

Paul, who was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1988 and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, called abortion a very bad sign for civilization.

Two of the candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination to take on Barack Obama in 2012 announced late last week that they will participate in the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) Presidency 5 straw poll in Orlando in September.

While former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Republican nomination and the leader in polls at both the national level and those focused on Florida, has already announced that his campaign will not take part in the straw poll, other candidates are starting to see it as an opportunity.

Please, God, give me three more years. I'll be good. Just let me live to see what Shouping Hu can possibly study about the Bright Futures scholarship program that hasn't been studied 10 times over.

In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year's end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves.

For the third year in a row, undergraduate students at Florida universities will pay 15 percent more in tuition.

The governing board for the State University System approved a 7 percent increase in tuition on Thursday. Thats on top of an 8 percent tuition increase approved by the Legislature earlier.

Dry conditions throughout much of Florida continue to fuel fires throughout the state, even as officials from the Panhandle to South Florida try to stamp out the blazes.

According to the Florida Division of Forestry, as of Thursday morning, there were 380 separate fires in the state, burning more than 300,000 acres of state and federal lands.

The fires have already claimed the lives of two firefighters.