Debby made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on the Big Bend coast of Florida early Monday, first hitting the small community of Steinhatchee. It damaged homes and businesses, sent floodwaters rising, caused sweeping power outages across the state and Georgia and led to several fatalities. Debby was downgraded to a tropical storm midday Monday.

But experts say the worst is yet to come as the storm system is expected to stall over the Southeast region.

How much rain is expected?

Forecasters say the system could pummel the Southeast with widespread areas of up to 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain and some totaling up to 30 inches (76 centimeters).

That would be a record-setting rainfall, shattering the record from a tropical system in 2018’s Hurricane Florence. More than 23 inches (58 centimeters) of rain was recorded in South Carolina after that storm hit the Carolinas.

Although Debby was classified as a Category 1, “It really is worthy of a Category 3 or 4 rating, if you want to talk about rainfall impacts,” said Jeff Masters, founder of Weather Underground, now with Yale Climate Connections. “That’s going to cause a lot of damage.”

What areas are at risk?

Northern Florida as well as low-lying areas including Savannah, Georgia, and Hilton Head Island and Charleston, South Carolina, are expected to see the most severe flooding. North Carolina could also be impacted.

Officials in Savannah warned the area could see a month’s worth of rain in four days if the system stalls. There were also flooding concerns for Tybee Island, Georgia’s largest public beach 18 miles (28.97 kilometers) east of Savannah. On top of any torrential downpours that Debby dishes out, the island could get even wetter from 2 to 4 feet of storm surge, according to the National Hurricane Center.

“We don’t know how much rain is going to fall. But we have to prepare for the worst,” Hilton Head Island Mayor Alan Perry said on a video posted to Facebook. “If that happens, we will see an event we have never seen on Hilton Head before.”

Meanwhile, Charleston County Interim Emergency Director Ben Webster called Debby a “historic and potentially unprecedented event” three times in a 90-second briefing Monday morning.

Few places in South Carolina are as susceptible to flooding as Charleston. Much of the city and surrounding areas founded in 1670 were built on land created by using fill dirt and other debris. Rising sea levels cause a number of minor flooding events even without a storm and like many coastal cities, Charleston can’t drain well.

The city doesn’t expect a massive amount of flooding from the ocean, but the storm is still dangerous. Heavy rain can back up into the city, also causing flooding.

What’s causing this storm to stall?

Some hurricanes make landfall and move quickly, experts say, while others slow substantially.

“Really what happened, and why the storm has stalled, is because there’s basically high pressure areas to the west of the storm and to the northeast, and that’s kind of pinned the storm,” said Phil Klotzbach, senior research scientist at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science. “With a hurricane you always have wind problems, but when you have a storm moving at 3 to 5 miles an hour, it’s going to be over any specific location for a very long period of time, so flash flooding and just tremendous rainfall totals are going to be very likely.”

Experts say the warming atmosphere plays a role in the severity of storm surges such as Debby.

Warming water in the northeast Gulf of Mexico is increasing Hurricane Debby’s heavy rains, as more moisture evaporates from the waters, Masters said. Some research says climate change can impact the forward motion of hurricanes, he added, making them go slower.

“It’s something we’ve been seeing more of lately,” Masters said.

How long could this last?

The worst of the rain is expected during the first half of the week, but it could last through Saturday, forecasters said.

___

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The Broward County school board voted 5-4 to suspend without pay Jessica Norton ‘s employment at Monarch High School, where her 16-year-old daughter played on the varsity volleyball team the last two seasons. She can also no longer work as a computer information specialist but must be given a job with equal pay and responsibility.

The board found that Norton’s actions violated the state’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which bars transgender females from playing girls high school sports. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature adopted it in 2021, over the Broward board’s opposition.

“Our employee made a choice not to follow the law,” said board member Debbi Hixon, who proposed the censure. But, she said, “It was a first offense. We would not terminate someone on their first offense.”

Norton, who was removed from the school after the violation was discovered in November and then placed on paid leave, called the vote an “incorrect decision” but said it was better than being fired. She said she wasn’t sure if she would accept the punishment and return to work. She wanted to talk it over with her daughter, who left the school even though she had been her class president and a homecoming princess. Maybe they could return together, she said.

“I did nothing wrong. Nothing,” Norton said.

Treatment of transgender children has been a hot-button issue across the country over the last few years. Florida is among at least 25 states that adopted bans on gender-affirming care for minors and one of at least 24 states that’s adopted a law banning transgender women and girls from certain women’s and girls sports. The Nortons are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit trying to block Florida’s law as a violation of their daughter’s civil rights. It remains pending.

During Tuesday’s hour-long debate, Hixon proposed Norton’s punishment after casting the deciding vote against an earlier motion, which called for a five-day suspension with no change in jobs. She said that was not severe enough. It failed by a 5-4 vote.

But, Hixon argued, firing Norton was too harsh for a seven-year employee with sterling evaluations and a caring reputation among students.

“This isn’t somebody who abused or harmed children,” Hixon said. “This is really about not following the law.”

Still, Hixon said, Norton put the district in a legally difficult spot by falsely attesting her child was born female on her state athletic eligibility form. The Florida athletic association fined Monarch $16,500 for violating the act, put the school on probation, and the district could be sued under the act if another student believes she was kept off the volleyball team and lost scholarship opportunities because of Norton’s daughter.

Hixon said she wanted Norton moved from her job as a computer information specialist because in that position she could learn of another transgender student who was playing girls sports and might not report that to administrators.

“That puts us as a school district in a bad place,” Hixon said.

The four other “yes” votes believed a five-day suspension or no punishment was appropriate but agreed to the 10-day ban as a compromise they could live with. They pointed to previous three-, five- and 10-day suspensions that were given to employees who had physically or verbally abused students as evidence Norton was being punished too harshly.

“I believe this case is unique,” member Allen Zeman said. “You can correctly surmise there have been problems with how we (the board) have dealt with it. You can also correctly surmise that rules and laws have been broken. But I think it is important that we come up with a solution that is consistent with the others.”

At least three board members supported Superintendent Howard Hepburn’s recommendation that Norton be fired because she had knowingly violated the law. Hepburn had overridden a committee’s recommendation that Norton be suspended 10 days.

Member Torey Alston said he believes the past suspensions cited by Norton’s supporters were too lax and shouldn’t preclude them from firing her. He said the board was sending the message that it would “go soft” on employees who violate statutes simply because they disagree with them.

“I have zero tolerance for breaking the law,” Alston said.

Norton and her husband stormed out of the meeting when member Brenda Fam repeatedly called her child a boy. Fam argued that Norton should face criminal charges though the Fairness act only carries civil penalties aimed at violating schools. She compared Norton to a parent who falsifies an address to get their child into a better school, an act that is a crime under Florida law.

Fam said she supports the Fairness act because it protects biological girls from having to compete against transgender girls who may be bigger and stronger. Norton and her supporters have argued her daughter has been on puberty blockers and estrogen for several years and has no physical advantages over her teammates or opposing teams.

“This was not a question about her son or her family, it was an issue about what she did as an employee and how she harmed others,” Fam said. She later denied misgendering Norton’s child, saying she was quoting from a newspaper article.

Norton, after the meeting, said Fam intentionally misgendered her child to anger her.

“It worked. I don’t think that a school board member should be misgendering children,” Norton said. “It’s a horrible thing.”

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The regulation also adds protections for pregnant students and students who are parents, and details how schools must respond to sexual misconduct complaints.

For schools, the impact of the court challenges could be a combination of confusion and inertia in terms of compliance as the academic year begins.

“I think it is likely that school district-to-school district or state-to-state, we’re going to see more or less a continuation of the current status quo,” said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

The rights of transgender people — and especially young people — have become a major political battleground in recent years as trans visibility has increased. Most Republican-controlled states have banned gender-affirming health care for transgender minors, and several have adopted policies limiting which school bathrooms trans people can use and barring trans girls from some sports competitions.

In April, President Joe Biden’s administration sought to settle some of the contention with a regulation to safeguard rights of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, the 1972 law against sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money. The rule was two years in the making and drew 240,000 responses — a record for the Education Department.

The rule declares that it’s unlawful discrimination to treat transgender students differently from their classmates, including by restricting bathroom access. It does not explicitly address sports participation, a particularly contentious topic.

It also enhances protections for students who are pregnant or have children, widens the scope of the sexual misconduct cases schools must investigate, and removes a Trump administration rule requiring schools to let the accused cross-examine their accusers in live hearings.

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court for permission to enforce the elements of the new regulation that don’t address transgender rights, but it’s not clear when the justices might rule.

Meanwhile, Title IX enforcement remains highly unsettled.

In a series of rulings, federal courts have declared that the rule cannot be enforced in most of the Republican states that sued while the litigation continues. In a ruling Tuesday, a judge in Alabama went the other way, allowing enforcement to start in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

A Kansas-based federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump added another wrinkle, asserting power over states led by Democrats: He said the rule cannot be enforced in schools attended by the children of members of Moms for Liberty or colleges with members of Young America’s Foundation or Female Athletes United. That’s keeping the regulation from taking effect in hundreds of colleges and some 1,700 schools in states where it can otherwise be enforced.

In many school districts across the country, the rule is to be enforced in some schools but can’t be followed in others.

“There aren’t many other parallels I can give you of two different sets of rules applying in the very same place, one school on one side of the street operating from a different playbook from a school on the other side of the street,” said Brett Sokolow, chair of the Association of Title IX Administrators.

Administrators have been frustrated by lack of guidance from the Biden administration, he said. When the Education Department recently sent schools information about implementing the new policies, it noted that they don’t apply in many places. Sokolow said some districts may need to consider having two separate teams — one trained on the previous rules, the other on the 2024 version — to be prepared for either scenario.

Jay Warona, the deputy executive director and general counsel for the New York State School Boards Association, said his state already offers transgender students some similar protections, but not all of the other components of the new regulation are addressed in state policy.

Warona said he’s fielding messages from school districts wondering what to do, and he’s telling them to check with their district lawyers.

Caius Willingham, senior policy advocate at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said it’s important to note that the injunctions don’t prevent school districts from having similar policies, even as they bar the federal government from enforcing its new regulations in some places.

Meanwhile, students are facing real impacts. Some people barred from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender hold their bladder all day, avoid hydrating or even drop out of school, he said.

“If you can’t meaningfully participate in the educational systems as your true self,” Willingham said, “you’re not going to be able to thrive.”

For Kaemo Mainard O’Connell, a transgender and nonbinary high school senior in Arkansas, the lack of federal protections seems like a signal to encourage behavior such as deadnaming and bullying.

“It means I’m going to have to work much harder to be respected by teachers and by students,” they said. “What not having federal protection does is, it makes it seem like my issues are not real issues.”

Since Arkansas now prohibits transgender students from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, Kaemo has instead been using a single-person restroom at the school, and is required to sign in and often wait before using it.

Similar worries are shared by families of trans kids in Utah, where lawmakers in June passed resolutions instructing state employees to disregard the Title IX directive. Utah is among the states challenging the rules in court, but is struggling to enforce its bathroom restrictions meanwhile: A tip form to report possible violations has been flooded with hoax submissions, and the state official tasked with filtering through them has made his lack of enthusiasm known.

“The bathroom law brought unpleasant conversations and definitely made our kiddo feel othered,” said Utah mom Grace Cooper, whose child is nonbinary. “It also brought a lot of allies out of the woodwork, but without federal protections, my worries as a mother are ever-present.”

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As of April 1 of this year, Florida had 23,002,597 residents, according to estimates released earlier this month by the state Demographic Estimating Conference.

Florida is the third most populous state in the U.S., trailing only California’s 39.5 million residents and Texas’ 30.5 million inhabitants.

Florida added almost 359,000 people last year and has been adding about 350,000 to 375,000 people each year this decade, according to the estimates.

The population growth is expected to peak this year and get smaller with each following year for the rest of the 2020s as the final cohort of baby boomers entering retirement gets smaller, according to the estimates.

By the early 2030s, Florida’s growth rate will be under 1% after hitting an expected 1.6% this year.

Since a little bit before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, all of Florida’s growth has come from people moving to the Sunshine State from other parts of the United States or abroad. Deaths have outpaced births in Florida since late 2019 and early 2020, and that trend is predicted to continue well into the next decade.

Almost 10% of Florida’s residents are age 75 and older, second only to Puerto Rico among U.S. states and the territory.

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Gauff, the reigning U.S. Open champion, is set to make her Olympic debut at the Paris Games and will be the first tennis athlete to carry the U.S. flag. She and James were chosen by Team USA athletes.

“I mean, for me, the Olympics is a top priority. I would say equal to the Grand Slams. I wouldn’t put it above or below, just because I’ve never played before. This is my first time,” Gauff said earlier this year. “Obviously, I always want to do well, try to get a medal.”

Gauff and James, the 39-year-old leading scorer in NBA history, both compete in sports that are outside the traditional Olympic world and get attention year-round, not just every four years.

The 20-year-old Gauff made the American team for the Tokyo Games three years ago as a teenager but had to sit out those Olympics because she tested positive for COVID-19 right before she was supposed to fly to Japan.

Now Gauff, who is based in Florida, is a Grand Slam title winner in singles and doubles. She won her first major championship in New York in September, defeating Aryna Sabalenka in the singles final of the U.S. Open, then added her first Grand Slam doubles trophy at the French Open this June alongside Katerina Siniakova of the Czech Republic.

The same clay courts at Roland Garros used for the French Open will be where matches are going to be held for the Paris Olympics. The draw to set the brackets is Thursday, and play begins on Saturday.

Gauff is seeded No. 2 in singles, matching her current WTA ranking behind No. 1 Iga Swiatek of Poland, and will be among the medal favorites.

She and her usual doubles partner, Jessica Pegula, are seeded No. 1 in women’s doubles. It’s possible Gauff could also be entered in mixed doubles, but those pairings have not been announced yet.

“I’m not putting too much pressure on it, because I really want to fully indulge in the experience,” Gauff said about her Olympics debut. “Hopefully I can have the experience multiple times in my lifetime, (but) I’ll treat it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

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A lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Justice Department alleges employees of Southwest Key Programs Inc. sexually abused and harassed children in their care for at least eight years. During that time, the nonprofit organization amassed billions of dollars in government contracts and continued to house thousands of unaccompanied migrant children entering the U.S.

It remained unclear Friday how many children are currently in Southwest Key shelters, and federal officials did not respond to questions about whether any actions would be taken in response to the lawsuit. Critics say it reflects a system that has lacked accountability for years.

“The whole point of this complaint is that there’s this pattern and practice,” said Leecia Welch, deputy legal director at Children’s Rights. “If they’re bringing this complaint that they saw a pattern and practice of sexual harassment and violating these kids while still placing kids at Southwest Key during the same time period, that’s why I have such a disconnect.”

Southwest Key, which operates under grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has 29 child migrant shelters — 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California — with room for more than 6,300 children.

The department did not respond to emailed requests for comment asking whether children will continue to be placed there. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment beyond the lawsuit announcement Thursday. Southwest Key did not respond to an additional emailed request for comment Friday.

“ORR continued to contract with Southwest Key despite knowing of some of these issues, so right now there isn’t in another place to put all these kids,” said Diane de Gramont, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law. “And we would be extremely concerned if kids then ended up in border patrol facilities for longer periods of time because ORR didn’t have enough beds for them.”

The Border Patrol must transfer custody of unaccompanied children within 72 hours of arrest to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which releases most to parents or close relatives after short stays at Southwest Key or shelters operated by other contracted providers.

The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a nonprofit organization that advocates for immigrant children, called for children in custody to be immediately reunited with family members and have access to attorneys as well as “independent courts who will hear their claims of harm.”

Previous abuse at some Southwest Key shelters led to their closure, including two large facilities in Arizona in 2018. The state revoked their licenses for not properly conducting background checks on their employees, and further investigation revealed several cases of physical and sexual abuse, including accusations from the government of El Salvador.

The abuse reflects the important role of state oversight, something that is now lacking in states like Texas and Florida, where Republican governors revoked state licensing of facilities that house migrant children.

Critics say there exists no equivalent system to report and investigate child abuse and neglect through the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the housing of migrant children.

“If there is an incident of abuse, when the state is there, there’s a clear hotline for anybody to call,” de Gramont said. “There’s a mandatory investigation … there’s a strict series of events that’s supposed to happen there.”

Some experts also wondered why the complaint was filed as a civil lawsuit where no one would be held criminally liable.

Daniel Hatoum, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney whose experience includes defending children subject to the work of immigration contractors, said a criminal lawsuit could come later.

“Corporate liability can be a lot harder for the Department of Justice than civil liability and especially individual criminal liability,” he said. The civil lawsuit is seeking a jury trial and requesting monetary damages for the victims of the alleged abuse.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit comes less than three weeks after a federal judge granted its request to lift special court oversight of the Health and Human Services Department’s care of unaccompanied migrant children, known as the Flores agreement. This gave attorneys representing child migrants broad authority to visit custody facilities and conduct interviews with staff and other migrants, as well as register complaints with the court.

President Joe Biden’s administration argued that new federal safeguards rendered special oversight unnecessary 27 years after it began. In one court document, Health and Human Services Department official Toby Biswas painted a rosy picture of the new regulations’ numerous protections for unaccompanied children as well as independent accountability for their custody conditions.

Advocates instead saw a void in oversight.

Carrie Van der Hoek, deputy program director for the Young Center’s Child Advocate Program in Texas, said in an affidavit opposing the termination of the Flores agreement that her staff reported approximately 10 instances of alleged abuse and neglect to the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services since Texas revoked its licensing in 2021.

“When we have made these reports, in some cases, DFPS officials told us that they would not investigate the complaint because DFPS did not have jurisdiction over ORR facilities,” Van der Hoek said. “In other cases, we received no response and were not aware of any actions taken by DFPS or any other state agency to investigate the report.”

Van der Hoek also said that if a child called preprogrammed telephones in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, facilities that allow them to reach the state child abuse and neglect hotline, they would get the same response.

Biswas said they began conducting “in-depth reviews” of abuse allegations at Texas facilities beginning March 2022 and will begin its own investigations of alleged child abuse and neglect in Texas “or in any other state if it ceases to perform such investigations” as of July of this year.

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Temperatures in South Florida this month have reached the upper 90s Fahrenheit (mid-30s Celsius) with humidity reaching 70%, combining for “feels like” temperatures regularly exceeding 100 F (38 C).

Staff at the Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society use a variety of techniques to keep their animals cool. Zookeepers throw large piles of ice into the black bear enclosure for the animals to wallow in, chilling their pool to 74 F (23 C). The otters get ice blocks and frozen fish tossed into their water for playing and eating.

Tigers feast on more ingenious treats: They get frozen cow bones crammed into blocks of ice, along with a side of frozen goat milk. The big cats also like to swim.

Giant tortoises, native to the islands of the Indian Ocean, enjoy cool showers from a hose, which they can feel through their shells.

“Even though all of our animals are acclimatized to the South Florida weather, they look for ways to cool off during the hot days, just like we do,” said Mike Terrell, the zoo’s curator of animal experiences. “All of our animals that we have here at the zoo were specifically chosen because they’re used to warm climates. And so they’re totally happy in a high, high heat, high humidity environment.”

The zoo’s guests love to watch the animals cool down and children press their faces up against the glass for a better look, Terrell said.

“We absolutely love is nose prints,” Terrell said.

Figuring out what cooling activities the animals enjoy requires a bit of trial and error, he said.

“They really tell us what they like,” Terrell said. “We can take our best guess, but if we’re giving them something that they don’t like or they’re not interacting with, we’re not going to continue to give it to them.”

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Hemingway Days started in 1981 with a short-story competition and a look-alike contest. This year’s celebration concluded Sunday on the 125th anniversary of Hemingway’s birth on July 21, 1899.

As a novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Hemingway’s spot in the pantheon of American literature is undeniable and his legacy permeates the culture and character of Key West.

Hemingway’s great-grandson, Stephen Hemingway Adams, was born nearly three decades after Hemingway died. Adams said working with his grandfather, Patrick Hemingway, who was Ernest Hemingway’s second son, helped him gain a deeper understanding of his famous ancestor.

“I got to work with my granddad, and we put out a book called ‘Dear Papa,’ which was all of the letters between Ernest and my grandfather,” Adams said.

The difference between the public perception and the documented reality of Hemingway can be fuzzy. He loved big-game fishing in the Caribbean and hunting in Africa. He loved bullfighting, baseball, boxing and barhopping. But he also was a serious artist who won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. He put so much of his life experiences into his writing that it can be tricky to separate the man from the myth.

Adams said he’s fine with some people loving the adventurer more than the writer.

“I think it’s a split, and I think that’s what’s fun,” Adams said of the throngs of look-alikes who visit Key West every year.

The Key West that Hemingway first visited in 1928 was a rustic fishing village, not a bustling tourist destination. Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, had only planned a brief stop to pick up a car during their move from Paris to Arkansas, where Pauline’s family lived. But the car wasn’t ready and they had to wait several weeks.

Hemingway quickly made friends with local business owners and fishermen. The couple made frequent visits to the island and eventually bought a French Colonial home on a 1.5-acre (0.61-hectare) lot in 1931.

After spending most of his 20s in Paris, Hemingway embraced the vastly different island lifestyle, according to Cori Convertito, a curator at Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House.

“He doesn’t come here to act like a recluse and just write,” Convertito said. “He’s out at the bars all the time. He’s out fishing with people. He’s interacting in boxing matches.”

Convertito pointed out that Hemingway was in his 30s for most of the time he lived in Key West, not the white-bearded “Papa Hemingway” most look-alike contestants emulate. “A Farewell to Arms” was finished shortly after he began visiting Key West and that book’s reception, along with his coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, increased his fame.

Much of Hemingway’s time in Key West was devoted to big-game fishing with friends. Convertito said Hemingway began to pioneer new techniques after getting his own boat, the Pilar, in 1934.

“He was desperate to land a fully intact marlin,” Convertito said.

The slow process of reeling in a trophy fish left them vulnerable to sharks, similar to the giant marlin caught in Hemingway’s 1952 novel, “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Hemingway focused on catching fish and removing them from the water quickly. He was an early member of the International Game Fish Association and named a vice president in 1940.

He also became an advocate for the Florida Keys and the people who lived there. “To Have and Have Not,” which was published in 1937, is set in a Key West ravaged by the Great Depression.

Hemingway was a vocal critic of how the federal government responded to the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The official death toll was 423, but more than 250 of the fatalities were World War I veterans hired through a federal jobs program to build the Overseas Highway, which connects the Florida Keys to mainland Florida.

Hemingway drove an ambulance during World War I and felt a particular kinship with the veterans. Corey Malcom, a historian with the Florida Keys History Center, said Hemingway joined the recovery efforts and used his own boat to pull bodies out of the ocean.

Michael Morawski, CEO of the Hemingway Home & Museum, credits his great-aunt, Bernice Dixon, as one of the first people to help preserve Hemingway’s legacy in Key West. The local jewelry store owner bought the house for $80,000 in 1961, shortly after Hemingway’s death. The home became a museum in 1964 and eventually was designated a National Historic Landmark.

“The only reason that she did it was to create a living memorial to Ernest Hemingway,” Morawski said.

Besides the historical and literary significance of the home, the museum also is famous for housing the Hemingway cats. About 60 polydactyl cats with a genetic mutation for extra toes continue to live at the estate. Some of these cats are descendants of the original white, six-toed cat that Hemingway was gifted from a ship’s captain.

The Hemingway Days festival started as a promotional stunt for Sloppy Joe’s Bar, one of Hemingway’s favorite hangouts. Michael Whalton was working as a manager at the bar in 1980 when he read about a Bad Hemingway Contest, where writers parodied Hemingway’s sparse, blunt style.

Whalton decided a look-alike contest and other activities around Hemingway’s July birthday might be a great way to attract costumers during the island’s slow season, when hot and humid weather scares many tourists away.

“I really didn’t know what to expect,” Whalton said. “I was getting nervous because we didn’t have anybody signed up for the look-alike contest, so I called everybody I knew in Key West who had a beard.”

The turnout was better than expected. The author’s younger brother, Leicester Hemingway, contacted Whalton and agreed to judge the look-alike contest with his wife and daughters. Whalton convinced another granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Lorian Hemingway, to judge a short story contest.

David Douglas, president of the Hemingway Look-Alike Society, began attending the competition in 2000 and won in 2009. The 70-year-old Houston resident continues to return every year as a judge.

“I love the contest, I love the camaraderie all the contestants,” Douglas said.

David “Bat” Masterson, of Daytona Beach, became the newest “Papa” on Saturday. The retired pilot beat out 121 others in this year’s look-alike contest.

The look-alike group has evolved over the years into a service organization with hundreds of members around the world that has funded more than $350,000 in scholarships for Florida Keys students. The organization also sponsors a youth baseball team in Cuba, where Hemingway moved after leaving Florida.

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Special counsel Jack Smith’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order is expected to tee up a court fight that might reach the U.S. Supreme Court and could result in the reinstatement of the indictment and even conceivably the reassignment of the case to a different judge.

There’s no scenario in which a revived prosecution could reach trial before the November election — and it presumably won’t take place at all in the event Trump is elected president and orders his Justice Department to dismiss it. Still, Cannon’s order ensures many more months of legal wrangling in a criminal case that became snarled over the last year by interminable delays.

“The only good thing about this is that it is finally a decision,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “The difficulty with Judge Cannon has been that she has made no decisions. She has simply sat on the case. And since she has made no decisions, there was nothing to appeal.”

The judge’s 93-page order held that Smith’s selection as special counsel violated the Constitution because he was named to the position directly by Attorney General Merrick Garland instead of being appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Prosecutors vigorously challenged that argument when it was raised by Trump’s lawyers, and filed a formal notice of appeal Wednesday to initiate the process.

It’s impossible to say whether the opinion will stand or be reversed on appeal, though other judges in other districts in recent years have reached opposite conclusions of Cannon, upholding the constitutionality of special counsels who were appointed by Justice Department leadership and funded by a permanent indefinite appropriation.

The Supreme Court, in a 50-year-old opinion involving President Richard Nixon, held that the Justice Department had the statutory authority to appoint a special prosecutor.

And even though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raised questions this month about the legality of Smith’s appointment, no other justice signed onto his concurring opinion in a case conferring broad immunity on former presidents.

The Smith team is likely to point to all of those court holdings in casting Cannon to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as an outlier who made not just a bad decision but one requiring swift reversal, said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law school professor.

A spokesman for Smith’s office, in announcing Monday that the Justice Department had authorized an appeal, said the opinion “deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel.”

But Jesse Panuccio, a former associate attorney general in the Trump administration Justice Department, said anger over Cannon’s opinion — which he called a “careful and scholarly” analysis — was misplaced.

“If you took out of the equation the derangement that comes from anyone analyzing anything that has to do with Trump and you just asked legal scholars 10 years ago, ‘Hey, are there any issues involving independent counsels, special counsels?’” he said, the answer would be yes.

Panuccio added: “I think this is a very serious issue, and it’s an issue frankly that when I was at the Justice Department, I had reservations about.”

Trump on Monday said the dismissal “should be just the first step” and the three other cases against him, which he called “Witch Hunts,” should also be thrown out.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, has exasperated the Justice Department since even before the indictment was filed, meaning if prosecutors do seek her removal, they could presumably cite a laundry list of grievances with her handling of the case.

Weeks after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in August 2022, Cannon granted a Trump team request to appoint an independent arbiter to review the seized records — a decision later overturned by a unanimous federal appeals panel. In April, prosecutors rebuked Cannon over potential jury instructions she floated that they said rested on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”

It is unclear if Smith’s team will seek to have Cannon reassigned in the event that the appeals court reinstates the case. A Smith spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday on that possibility. It’s an unusual request and one prosecutors in this case had avoided making.

But there is precedent for appeals courts taking that step, including in the same judicial district where the Florida case was charged.

“I think it would be quite a statement if the Circuit Court removes her from the case, but I think in this instance it would be warranted,” said Cheryl Bader, a Fordham University law school professor and former federal prosecutor. “There does seem to be a pattern of Judge Cannon bending over backwards to create delay and obstacles.”

In 1989, the 11th Circuit reinstated a criminal case in Florida of a man charged with trafficking counterfeit Rolex watches and reassigned the case to another judge after the trial judge described the case as “silly” and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The court laid out three considerations for deciding whether to assign a case to a different judge, including whether such a move is “appropriate to preserve the appearance of justice” and “whether the original judge would have difficulty putting his previous views and findings aside.”

Gerhardt, the North Carolina professor, said he did not see a downside to Smith’s team making such a request.

“Judges do make bad decisions sometimes,” he said. “But not good judges do it more often than they should, and she’s done it more often than any judge should.”

But Panuccio said he didn’t think Cannon’s order gave Smith’s team sufficient cause to complain, especially given that Cannon’s position was backed by a member of the Supreme Court.

“I think Jack Smith would be flirting with fire if he were to make that request based on this opinion simply because he lost an issue,” he said.

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Some 54,300 previously occupied U.S. homes were purchased by non-U.S. citizens in the 12 months ended in March, according to a report this week by the National Association of Realtors.

That’s the fewest homes sold to foreign nationals in data going back to 2009. Sales were down about 36% compared to the same period a year earlier.

Those transactions from April 2023 through March of this year totaled $42 billion, a 21.2% decline from the prior-year period, NAR said.

“International buyers face the same difficult market challenges as domestic buyers — lack of inventory, higher mortgage rates, the affordability condition,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “On top of that, for many international buyers the stronger dollar was not in their favor.”

The U.S. housing market has been stuck in a slump since 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. Existing home sales sank to a nearly 30-year low last year as the average rate on a 30-year mortgage surged to a 23-year high of 7.79%, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac.

The average rate has mostly hovered around 7%, limiting home shoppers’ purchasing power. At the same time, the supply of homes for sale, though rising in recent months, remains close to historic lows. That’s kept the market competitive enough to lift home prices to new highs.

On top of those affordability challenges, foreign buyers have to factor in the potential for additional costs when the U.S. dollar is stronger than their currency. The U.S. Dollar Index, which tracks the value of the greenback relative to a basket of foreign currencies, has risen 3.9% over the past 12 months.

“The strong U.S. dollar makes international travel cheaper for Americans but makes U.S. homes much more expensive for foreigners,” said Yun. “Therefore, it’s not surprising to see a pullback in U.S. home sales from foreign buyers.”

All-cash sales accounted for half the international buyer transactions, compared to just 28% of all existing-home buyers, NAR said.

The report defined international buyers as non-U.S. citizens with permanent residences outside the country and immigrants who had been in the U.S. less than two years when they bought a home. It also included purchases by non-immigrants living in the U.S. for more than six months under professional or educational visas, among others.

The number of existing U.S. homes purchased by international buyers peaked in the 12 months ended March 2017 at 284,500 properties, according to NAR. That was fueled in part by a surge in Chinese nationals snapping up homes.

Among the foreign nationals who bought a U.S. home in the 12 months ended in March of this year, buyers from China accounted for 11% of purchases, matching Mexico, NAR said. Home shoppers from Canada topped the list with 13%.

Where did most of the international home shoppers end up buying a home? Florida drew the most at 20% of all sales to foreign buyers, followed by Texas (13%), California (11%) and Arizona (5%). Georgia, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina each accounted for 4%, NAR said.

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