Midday Roundup: Elderly Florida man fined again for feeding homeless

Do-good fine. Police in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., again cited a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless in a public park, in violation of a city ordinance. Arnold Abbott, who runs a ministry called Love Thy Neighbor Inc., was first cited on Sunday along with two pastors working with him. They face up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler said the ordinance is not designed to punish the homeless or those who serve them but to balance the needs of all the city’s residents. Abbott, who has been working with the homeless for 23 years, told a local TV station the city wanted to ignore a very real problem. “You can’t sweep the homeless under the rug,” he said. “There are 10,000 homeless in Broward County, most of them in Fort Lauderdale, and there isn’t a rug large enough to sweep them under.”

Power play. Less than 48 hours after watching his party tighten its control over Texas politics, Gov. Rick Perry appeared in court to face abuse-of-power charges. An Austin court indicted Perry earlier this year for threatening to withhold funding for the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County district attorney’s office unless the lead prosecutor resigned. Perry made that demand after the prosecutor, District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, was convicted of drunk driving last year. This morning’s courtroom debate centered on whether the special prosecutor had been properly sworn into office. Perry claims the case is a political witch hunt brought by a liberal court in retaliation for Republicans’dominance in the state.

No regrets. In one of her first interviews since being cured of Ebola at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital, Dallas nurse Amber Vinson defended her decision to visit family in Ohio while she was monitoring herself for signs of the deadly virus. Vinson, who treated the first Ebola patient diagnosed with the disease in the United States, faced criticism for flying from Dallas to Ohio and back again just days after patient Thomas Eric Duncan died. In an interview with NBC’s Today show, Vinson said she checked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make sure she was cleared to take each leg of the journey. As for working with Ebola patients in the future, Vinson said she would do it again without hesitation: “Nursing is what I do. I could never see a patient that needs help and not do everything I can to help them.”

Suspect surrendered. Police in Portland, Ore., have arrested the man suspected of killing a woman in Washington state and posting photos of the crime scene online. Along with the photos showing his dead girlfriend’s body, 33-year-old David Kalac posted comments saying he wanted to be killed by police. He has been charged with second-degree murder in 30-year-old Amber Lynn Coplin’s death. Despite his stated wish, Kalac surrendered peacefully to an officer who drove by him at a transit station.