With Kendrick Meek leaving Congress to run for the U.S. Senate, a crowd of candidates has jumped into the Democratic primary to take his place.

Including Pembroke Pines, Miramar, North Miami and North Miami Beach, the district was 55 percent African American and 21 percent Hispanic as of the last federal census. The district also contains some of the largest Haitian communities in the nation, and almost 40 percent of the district was born outside the United States.

With more than 100 bills on the calendar when it convened Friday morning, the House plowed through a host of measures and amendments. Members passed a few, including a measure to expand placing cameras on stoplights, but they mostly set the stage to tackle more bills next week.

The seven-hour session Friday focused on amending measures that the House will vote on next week. But the House also passed efforts that increased legal penalties for credit and debit card crimes and exempted All-Star games and Pro Bowls from sales taxes.

Don't look now, but the University of Central Florida is huge.

It's surpassed even giants like the University of Florida to become the country's third largest university, with a student body numbering around 53,000. Leading those students are Brian Peterson and Michael McGriskin, who hold top jobs in UCF's Student Government Association and work to serve their peers' countless interests.

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Aiming for a piece of $2.5 billion in federal funding, Florida officials are seeking to restore passenger rail service between Miami and Jacksonville.

WASHINGTON -- Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum here, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps.

When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement, President Obama promised he would appoint someone like Stevens, who "knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens."

Florida Republican leaders Friday removed the last ties ousted former chairman Jim Greer held to the party, stripping him of his position on the state executive board and his post as Seminole County state committeeman.