Bradenton Herald launches candidate forums

UPDATE, Friday, 6-29: This is a link to all of the candidate forum videos.
The Bradenton Herald launched its election forums this week in partnership with Manatee Educational Television. And Manatee County has a healthy plate of contested races to cover this election season.

Editorial Page Editor Chris Wille leads each forum, and I join him on the panel to ask each candidate about their campaigns. A Bay News 9 representative also plans to join us in most of the debates.

We started Tuesday afternoon with one forum for the four Supervisor of Elections candidates and one for the two Manatee sheriff candidates. Each provided more than a half-hour of informative insights. No big surprises yet, but stay tuned. We're gearing up for the two contested Manatee school board races on Friday, and four county commission forums next week. That's a lot of grilling.

METV has begun televising the first forums -- here are the times tonight (we'll post schedules at Bradenton.com/politics as soon as they're available):

8 p.m.: Supervisor of Elections Candidate Forum
8:47 p.m.: Sheriff Candidate Forum

And here's a channel guide:
Manatee County)
Bright House channel 614
Comcast channel 19

(Manatee & Sarasota)
Verizon FIOS channel 31

A deadly 2012? Tracking Manatee homicides

Manatee County has recorded another homicide this year, putting this area on a deadly track to break previous records. The slaying of Regina Nunez marks the 12th reported this year -- the grand total for all of 2011, as reported in this story by Herald reporter Richard Dymond.

We already had plans to start an online database, but this foreboding volume brought this to the top of the list. Web developer William Winter has launched this homicide interactive on Bradenton.com, starting with the first homicide on Jan. 1, 2012. He will continue to add dimensions, including statistics from past years. It already includes locator maps, the latest updates on each case, images from the crime scene, the victim and any suspects, and links to related stories.

Here's the link for you to bookmark:
http://www.bradenton.com/2012/06/06/4067200/manatee-county-homicides.html

Need a Facebook cover? Check this out

I'll admit upfront: Facebook is not my friend. So it takes a lot to grab my attention enough to want to blog about it.

Thanks goes to Web Developer William Winter. He has created Bradenton Herald Facebook Covers for you to use on your own Facebook page.

Who wouldn't want these beautiful scenes gracing their Facebook page? I mean, how lucky are we in Bradenton?! The image above of Robinson Preserve is exactly one mile from my front door...

You can download these images by right-clicking on the picture you like, then selecting "Save Picture As..." or "Save Image As..." and saving it to your desktop. And Facebook has these instructions to help you from there.

Let us know if you see one of our photographers' images you'd like us to consider adding, too. We have bragging rights to this slice of heaven.