A Florida concert promoter is getting creative with new ways to encourage his community to get vaccinated. At an upcoming punk-rock concert, he'll be charging $18 for tickets to people who are vaccinated and $1,000 to those who are not.

Paul Williams of Leadfoot Promotions came up with the idea while brainstorming how to book the concert in a quick and efficient way, according to local station WFTS. With vaccines becoming widely available for people in the state and new CDC guidelines allowing the return of live events, Williams thought that offering a discounted ticket to vaccinated concertgoers was the first step to doing the show safely and creating an incentive for more folks to go out and get vaccinated, he told WFTS.

“We’re just trying to do a show safely. And they should go out and get vaccinated to protect themselves and their families and their community,” Williams told WFTS.

Royal Caribbean's Celebrity Cruises will begin welcoming passengers on June 26 from Florida.

This announcement comes after over a year of no cruising from US waters amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Celebrity's proof of vaccination policy violates Florida's ban on vaccine passports, the state says.

Meanwhile, a ballot initiative expanding Medicaid was rejected by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson last week after that state's GOP-controlled Legislature failed to provide funding for the program in the budget. In August, 53 percent of Missouri voters voted yes on Amendment 2, which would have provided health insurance to 230,000 low-income residents and help out struggling rural hospitals.

On Thursday, Parson — who had opposed the initiative — said he would not be expanding the program due to its costs not being covered. Amendment 2 did not specify where funding for the new coverage would come from, and the Legislature opted not to provide it, crippling the expansion.

“Without a revenue source or funding authority from the General Assembly, we are unable to proceed with the expansion at this time and must withdraw our State Plan Amendments to ensure Missouri’s existing MO HealthNet program remains solvent,” Parson said on Thursday.

The Supreme Court on Monday said it will review Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, taking up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade just a few months after its newest conservative justice joined the bench.

The Mississippi ban, which has been blocked by lower courts since it was enacted in 2018, will be one of the first reproductive rights cases argued before the Supreme Court since Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in October, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority that is widely expected to curtail abortion access.

Republicans in Congress want to raise the federal gas tax. Yes, the same Republicans who oppose tax hikes most of the rest of the time.

You won’t hear them say, “let’s raise the gas tax,” exactly. There’s a code phrase: “user fees.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, says Republicans will support $600 billion in infrastructure spending, as long as user fees cover the cost. “We’re happy to look for traditional infrastructure pay-fors, which means the users participate,” McConnell said in Louisville on May 3.

User fees would force Biden's hand

If Republicans controlled Congress, it’s extremely unlikely they’d raise user fees or impose new ones to pay for an infrastructure plan. The federal gasoline tax, which is supposed to cover the costs of the national highway system, is a classic user fee because people who buy gas—drivers—pay into the fund that maintains the roads they drive on. But the gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 center per gallon since 1993, and it’s now too low to cover all the costs it’s supposed to. President Trump supposedly wanted a big infrastructure plan, and his fellow Republicans controlled Congress during the first two years of his presidency. Yet they never mounted a serious infrastructure plan, let alone new user fees to pay for it.

So why do Republicans favor user fees now? Because they would force Biden to break a core campaign promise, damaging him politically. Biden pledged not to raise taxes on households earning less than $400,000 per year, and any user fee applied broadly to the public would violate that pledge. User fees are actually a sensible and proven way to pay for big projects, yet Biden, for better or worse, has effectively ruled them out as a funding source for his ambitious plans.

Everybody in Washington knows this is the game. Virtually no Republicans would vote to raise the federal gas tax, if it actually came up for a vote, and no Democrat would vote to put Biden in the position of breaking a campaign promise. Biden would veto such a bill if it landed on his desk. Yet Rs and Ds are pretending to negotiate as if Republicans would really raise the gas tax and Democrats might be open to the idea.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Calling Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings “not one of the bigger ones,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday that if smaller cruise lines want to leave the state because of bans on vaccine requirements, their void will be filled.

Miami-based Norwegian is the third-largest cruise line in the world and has three ports of departure in Florida — Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa. It also makes stops in Key West. But it hasn't operated in the U.S. since the federal government shut down all cruises last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the weeks and months since he was sent home, RJ Edwards found a job, bought a car, got an apartment for him and his mother and started working toward a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

He works as an operation manager for a solar company in Tampa, Florida, while taking online classes at Hillsborough Community College. He wears an ankle monitor and calls his halfway house every day to report his whereabouts – part of the terms of his home confinement. Twice a week, he attends drug therapy sessions, a consequence from years of drug and alcohol abuse. He also paints, a skill learned after nearly a decade of imprisonment.

Nine months since leaving prison, Edwards faces the possibility of being forced to return – a devastating scenario for him and potentially thousands of others who spent the past year rebuilding their lives.

Edwards, 37, is among the more than 24,000 nonviolent federal prisoners who have been allowed to serve their sentences at home to slow the spread of COVID-19 inside prisons. But a Justice Department memo issued in the final days of the Trump administration says inmates whose sentences will extend beyond the pandemic must be brought back to prison.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is declining to take up a challenge to Maryland’s ban on bump stocks and other devices that make guns fire faster.

The high court on Monday turned away a challenge to the ban, which took effect in October 2018. A lower court had dismissed the challenge at an early stage and that decision had been upheld by an appeals court. As is typical, the court didn't comment in declining to take the case.

Charlie Crist is making a "major announcement" Tuesday morning in St. Pete, and odds are strong that he'll tell us he plans to be the first Democrat to officially step up to challenge Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022.

Driving the news: Crist formed a political committee named "Friends of Charlie Crist," which would allow him to start raising money for a 2022 state-level election, Florida Politics reports.