The Fort Myers Beach Film Festival is raising the curtain this week for five days of screenings, including a full-length feature film shot entirely in Southwest Florida.

The atrocities of the Holocaust are the focus of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in late January, but the observation of Yom HaShoah in late April is a date on the Jewish calendar set aside specifically to remember the nearly 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazis and their collaborators.

A Southwest Florida nonprofit focused on empowering teen girls through fitness, leadership, and more says it's pushing girls in the region to reach literal and metaphorical summits.

Five veterans from Southwest Florida are sharing their stories through the Telling Project with performances in late April and early May. Friday at 1 p.m. on Gulf Coast Live, three of those veterans join the show to discuss how they shaped their experiences of life and the military into stories they can share.

Shorebird nesting season is happening along Florida's coast, and a dedicated group of volunteers, the Collier and Lee Shorebird Stewards , are taking it upon themselves to help protect the areas where these birds nest.

Seven years ago today, the offshore drilling unit known as the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people died, and the destruction blew out the undersea well nearly a mile below the surface. Scientists are still studying how the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and the release of more than 4.9 million barrels of oil, is impacting the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

Receiving dozens of frantic phone calls a day from people at their most desperate is a job that requires patience, training, and a particular temperament to see people through emergencies great and small. That’s the job of a 911 operator, a job the Collier County Sheriffs' Office says it needs filled at its new 911 call center.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau through 2016 shows Florida continues to grow : nearly 2 million new people arrived in the state since 2010, a nearly 10 percent boost. In the last year alone, more than 340,000 new Floridians flocked to the state. Historians are asking what Florida could lose as that growth continues, and how to best preserve state history amid a seemingly endless boom.

A march designed to defend the role science plays in "our health, safety, economies, and governments" is taking place Saturday— Earth Day —in Washington, D.C., and like related marches in recent months, the Science March is being supported by thousands of satellite marches across the nation , including several in South Florida.

Gulf Coast Live is going on location behind the scenes at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota. We’ll talk about the exhibits the lab offers, and the research they do into the animals and marine environment along Florida’s Gulf Coast and beyond. Evan Barniskis , Assistant Vice President of Mote Aquarium, talks us through the exhibits alongside Amanda Foltz, an aquarium biologist who helps to care for the otters in Mote's otter exhibit.