ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Robert Larry Hobbs, an Associated Press editor who guided coverage of Florida news for more than three decades with unflappable calm and gentle counsel, has died. He was 83.
Hobbs, who went by “Larry,” died Tuesday night in his sleep of natural causes at a hospital in Miami, said his nephew, Greg Hobbs.
From his editing desk in Miami, Hobbs helped guide AP’s coverage of the 2000 presidential election recount, the Elian Gonzalez saga, the crash of ValuJet 592 into the Everglades, the murder of Gianni Versace and countless hurricanes.
Hobbs was beloved by colleagues for his institutional memory of decades of Florida news, a self-effacing humor and a calm way of never raising his voice while making an important point. He also trained dozens of staffers new to AP in the company's sometimes demanding ways.
“Larry helped train me with how we had to be both fast and factual and that we didn’t have time to sit around with a lot of niceties,” said longtime AP staffer Terry Spencer, a former news editor for Florida.
Hobbs was born in Blanchard, Oklahoma, in 1941 but grew up in Tennessee. As an adult, he lived in Florida where he had family before enlisting in the Navy in the early 1960s, said Adam Rice, his longtime neighbor.
Hobbs first joined AP in 1971 in Knoxville, Tennessee, before transferring to Nashville a short time later. He transferred to the Miami bureau in 1973, where he spent the rest of his career before taking a leave in 2006 and officially retiring in 2008.
In Florida, he met his wife, Sherry, who died in 2012. They were married for 34 years.
Hobbs was an avid fisherman and gardener in retirement. He also adopted older shelter dogs that otherwise wouldn't have found a home, saying “'I’m old. They're old. We can all hang out together,'” Spencer said.
But more than anything, Hobbs just loved talking to people, Rice said.
This undated photo shows Robert Larry Hobbs, an Associated Press editor who guided coverage of Florida news for more than three decades. (AP Photo)
This undated photo shows Robert Larry Hobbs, an Associated Press editor who guided coverage of Florida news for more than three decades. (AP Photo)
In this photo provided by Adam Rice, Larry Hobbs stands on a boat off the coast of Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 14, 2014. (Adam Rice via AP)
OSLO, Norway (AP) — The Norwegian equality minister said Thursday that she found it “completely unacceptable” that men on average earn 13% more than women as she reacted to a government report stressing that the pay gap in egalitarian Norway persists.
The conclusion of the report, which covers the period 2015-2022, was on par with the figures in the European Union of which Norway isn't a member. According to the European Commission, the gender pay gap in the 27-member EU stood at 12.7 % in 2021 and has only changed minimally over the last decade.
The report, which had been commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Equality and was published Thursday, said that since 2015, there has been little change in the wage differences between women and men performing the same work.
“I find it completely unacceptable that women and men who have the same job, the same experience and the same competence, end up with different salaries," Culture and Equality Minister Lubna Jaffery told Norwegian news agency NTB.
The report by the Institute for Social Research, concluded that women who work in the same sector, industry and profession, have the same length of education and experience and similar job size, earn 8% less than men. If women also have the same professional title and employer, they earn 6% less than men.
“An important explanation is that men and women work in different parts of the labor market with different wage levels,” the 122-page Norwegian report said.
“We show how the wage gap varies across sectors, industries, education groups, occupations and labor market regions,” it said. “We find that women on average have longer education than men, but within fields of study with lower wages. The gap between men and women with equally long education is therefore larger than between all men and women.”
Norway, a country of 5.6 million, has often been described as at the forefront internationally in terms of gender equality and living standards. According to official Norwegian figures, about 70% of women participate in the workforce.
In October, the annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau said that in 2023, the gender wage gap between men and women working full-time widened year-over-year for the first time in 20 years. It said that women working full time earned 83 cents on the dollar compared to men in 2023, down from a historic high of 84 cents in 2022.
FILE - The sun reflected in the windows of the skyline of the so called 'Barcode Project' neighborhood at dusk in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
