Forbes has named former Department of Health data specialist Rebekah Jones its Technology Person of the Year.

Jones rose to national prominence in May when the Department of Health fired her for what Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ administration called insubordination. However, Jones contends department officials asked her to manipulate data to make it appear as if the state was ready to begin reopening. She claims she was fired for refusing the request.

She again captured the nation’s attention earlier this month when Department of Law Enforcement officers searched her home and seized her hardware after connecting her address to a security breech at DOH. Jones denies involvement in the hack and has sued the DeSantis administration, arguing the search was ordered as a punishment.

“Regardless, she is the latest technologist who stepped up to fill the vacuum left by governments during COVID-19,” wrote Forbes deputy technology editor Helen A.S. Popkin.

ORLANDO, Fla. - We can all pretty much agree it has been one wild year. The pandemic has forced many people to stay at home, surfing the web much more than usual.

Well, Florida alligators haven’t been worrying about social distancing and have been out and about, making for some shocking internet footage.

An inadvertent glimpse of what Gov. DeSantis is really like when a secret tape is running

But last week he inadvertently gave us a glimpse of what he’s really like.

His views were secretly shared with the leaders of the state’s business community at a closed-door Orlando gathering staged by Associated Industries of Florida. Someone in attendance taped his remarks and Politico reporter Gary Fineout has enlightened us with the contents of the tape.

Unfortunately the governor of Florida says he is supporting a fight to overturn legitimate election returns in a number of states that helped defeat Trump.

DeSantis urged Trump to keep fighting despite the fact that judges in state after state have rejected multiple lawsuits filed by Trump’s clownish legal team. They’ve forced recount after recount in several states, only to prolong the drama and add to President-elect Joe Biden’s vote totals.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucy Morgan was chief of the St. Petersburg (Tampa Bay) Times capital bureau in Tallahassee for 20 years, retiring in 2006 and serving as senior correspondent until 2013. She was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame and the Florida Newspaper Hall of Fame. The Florida Senate named its press gallery after Morgan, in honor of her two decades covering the Legislature.

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – In the midst of this pandemic, a SunSentinel investigation found that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration had been misleading the public about the crisis from the beginning.

According to thousands of pages of documents and over 50 interviews conducted by the SunSentinel, the governor and his team have done it through misinformation and spin as well as by muzzling local health officials across the state.

Q: Did your investigation actually reveal misinformation that was put up by the governor’s office? Because it’s one thing to focus on the positive. It’s another thing to deliberately mislead people. Did you find that?

A: Yes, indeed, yeah. This is one of the more difficult things to talk about. So we found that the governor spokesperson on his personal Twitter account, at least 16 separate times, discussed mask wearing in a way that experts consider to be misinformative. In keeping with the DeSantis administration’s greater position on masks, which is that you know where I’m if you want, the spokesperson would go ahead and say, Fred Piccolo, Jr., you know, there’s no need for a math mask mandate, they don’t work. That’s not factually accurate. They are shown to work. And in several instances, he actually compared COVID-19 to the flu, and said that the flu was equally deadly. That’s not accurate, either. And so this is a public official, and, you know, the governor’s number one spokesperson, and so we felt the need to fact check that misinformation coming out.