A Florida saltwater fish of legendary proportions, growing to weights of nearly 800 pounds, the goliath grouper was hunted to within range of extinction in the 1980s. A ban on its capture was enacted in 1990, and its population has begun to recover. But the goliath is under threat again,…
A nondescript office building in downtown Lake Worth now houses the headquarters of Prison Legal News, one of the nation’s most aggressive and effective, if lesser-known, human rights organizations. The publication relocated to South Florida this summer. Fittingly, the new offices sit directly across the street from the city’s police…
Tea Party groups in Palm Beach County are getting hyped on the national movement’s latest hobby horse, a convention of states to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. The scheme is deeply, consciously antidemocratic, giving Wyoming, for example, with fewer than 700,000 residents, as much say in the process as California, with…
One of the more rabid of our local right-wing outfits proved itself mentally defective last weekend, posting a bizarro-world image with an anti-immigrant theme on its Facebook page. See also: – Everett Wilkinson: Tea Party Extremist, Media Darling Neither the image nor the sentiments were atypical of the group, the…
This is one of those columns that practically writes itself. In fact, I could just point you towards Ilya Katz’s website and let it go at that: www.katz4uscongress.com. But noooo. Annoying little twerp that I am, I’m going to have a bit of fun with Dr. Katz (trained in “Early…
In an example of ethical consumerism, and aligned with the same thinking that fires the locavore movement, two of Palm Beach County’s most visible alternative arts entrepreneurs are urging aesthetically adventurous, socially conscious holiday shoppers to “Shop Small, Shop Creative” this Saturday. They ask we patronize “the various art hubs,…
An image from Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath lingers in Phyllida Barlow’s imagination. It is that of a single tree amid the storm’s debris and a storm’s survivor who noted it as the mark of where his home once stood. “‘Home,’ he said, not house,” she explains. “Maybe it was insensitive of…
We entirely understand Lake Worth Commissioner Scott Maxwell’s failure to reply to our requests for comment. After all, the parody twitter account that poses as an arm of Maxwell’s re-election campaign hasn’t drawn much notice outside his little city. Or so it would appear from the number of followers it’s…
We know what you’re not doing on Black Friday. You’re not going down to Walmart for the blue-light specials, because you want to make clear you don’t support corporations that pay their employees poverty wages and whose overseas suppliers’ worker safety practices are suspect. If you do go, it will…
Our favorite local green anarchists are having a party in Lake Worth this weekend, taking it to the silver screen for three days of cinematic rabble rousing. The films are documentaries all, which you may not think your cup of meat, but the subject matter is wild stuff, much of…
Schadenfreude is a dish best served hot. So it was with great relish we learned that one of our least favorite people, Nixon protege/apologist and political hitman Roger Stone, folded like a cheap suit on L.A. talk radio last week at the first sign of resistance to Stone’s current scam,…
Everybody knows about the sea turtles, how the night lights of civilization disorient their newly hatched young, luring them inland rather than to the sea, and to their deaths. But light pollution may do more, according to the South Florida chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association, impacting human health and…
Another decade, another trade pact, another round of protest. Ten years since anti-globalization demonstrations at the FTAA in Miami broke down into a full-scale police riot, veterans of that battle and new adherents to their cause are gathering throughout South Florida to mark the date and raise the banner anew…
Putting teeth into the talk, the women scholars of FAU’s Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies are turning from theory to practice tomorrow afternoon with the program, “Ending Sex Trafficking in the State of Florida.” Florida Sen. Maria Sachs, for whom the issue is a major focus, will kick…
Misrepresenting your tax exempt status when dealing with the public and public officials? Not cool. Having the IRS make whole your puffery after the fact? Priceless. Just ask the folks at the Living Arts Foundation — the Florida non-profit that is sponsoring the Benzaiten Center for the Arts, a $1.75…
Tiki Tom is in the far end of the exhibition space when we arrive, in the black light room. Looking like a weatherbeaten, white Rastafarian, he’s fussing with a set of banged-up hub caps painted in fluorescent colors over a coating of his secret recipe of faux-cement surfacing. More typically,…
Out of the shadows and into the classroom, Palm Beach State College students who are undocumented but whose immigration status is unresolved are pressing the school to allow them to pay in-state tuition rates. The move comes on the heels of decisions by two other area schools to arrange such…
Starting this morning and running, jumping, leaping, twisting, twirling, flipping and flying through the weekend, some hundreds of devotees of the flow arts will fill Lake Worth’s waterfront park for the city’s third annual Flow Fest. A wide-ranging practice that incorporates elements of dance, acrobatics, yoga and martial arts, in…
Everything you always wanted to know (but were too stoned to ask) about medical marijuana laws and marijuana use in the US of A is now available in a report from the good folks at a Florida official body called the Financial Impact Estimating Conference. For a government publication, it’s…
Last night’s “Great Debate” at Palm Beach State College on marijuana legalization was informative, entertaining and, for the most part, fairly predictable. Who won? If audience reaction was any guide — and the audience was by no means a crowd of freaks, more your typical American whitebread college-y and working…
That “One Human Family” bumpersticker? The one you see around that’s inextricably linked with Key West, that speaks to that city’s eccentric, tolerant personality? It might just as well apply to Lake Worth, a similarly quirky, gay-friendly pot of many ethnicities where social/political lines — if they aren’t non-existent –…
Like we don’t have enough to worry about, now it’s forests. According to environmentalists touring the Southeast with the traveling teach-in “The Growing Threat,” the creation of enormous plantations of genetically engineered trees — by corporate interests allied with Big Energy — poses ecological risks and endangers human safety and…
