Back on December 7, when Governor Rick Scott announced that he’d come to an agreement for a gambling compact with the Seminole Tribe, legislators and casino experts warned of potholes, roadblocks and barriers en route to the necessary legislative approval. With only days remaining in this year’s legislative session, apparently the…
The Intracoastal Waterway is like a highway for boats, with cruisers passing through from the north on their way to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. Just outside of the channel, which is federally run, are safe, protected spots where boats can drop anchor for a night — or many nights. …
Julia Negron is cheering in her bed in Venice, on the west coast of Florida. She has her laptop propped on her bed watching the live stream of the Florida House vote on the Infectious Disease Elimination Act in Tallahassee. It would create the first needle exchange program in Florida…
The Everglades is a dangerous place. The list of animals able to kill you is comically large: One must stay on the lookout for pythons, alligators, bobcats, panthers, and even bears, not to mention mosquitoes, which can carry anything from dengue fever, to West Nile virus, to Zika. When human…
The bathroom sinks at Mar-A-Lago, the $14,000-a-year private club Donald Trump owns in Palm Beach, are plated with gold. Last night, after washing his hands, a TV news cameraman took out his phone and snapped a photo of the faucet. Another reporter, wearing an orange lanyard, walked up next to…
It all started out as a scenic way to lose weight. Andrew Royston lived near Fort Lauderdale Beach and figured an early morning beach walk before work would be good for his health. Royston would bring his iPhone with him and couldn’t resist snapping a few photos of the sunrise…
This Saturday, March 5th, the City of Coral Springs, Florida, is hosting a public rally to raise awareness about Bob Levinson. Levinson, a 33-year veteran of the FBI, went missing in Iran in 2007. His family long wondered whether he was dead or alive, but perhaps because of last year’s…
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation gives out grants around the world from its headquarters in Flint, Michigan. A lot of those funds support wonderful-sounding initiatives for education, children, and the environment. But protestors in Miami today say that the foundation is hypocritical – that it wins praise for giving out…
A highly controversial bill Florida’s Senate Appropriations Committee shot down last week could return for a vote again today, after Senator Lisbeth Benacquisto, R-Fort Myers, moved to “reconsider” her vote during last week’s meeting. The bill in question – SB 318 – may be the most widely debated bill of…
The South Florida Wildlife Center’s mission is to take in animals that can be rehabilitated and later released in the wild-like opossums and hawks. But over the years, the facility began taking in domesticated animals, mostly small exotic reptiles and bunnies, which cannot be released in the wild. So the…
The night of May 3, 2014, in the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, federal prosecutor Dana Seetahal sat before a slot machine. Gambling was her favorite form of relaxation and one of her only hobbies. Her law enforcement career had left her little time for much else, and the brainless…
Broward tokers, beware: if you’re caught in possession of marijuana, in much of South Florida, cops have the option to slap you with a civil citation rather than haul you off to jail on criminal charges. But city commissioners in Fort Lauderdale decided this month that an offense within city…
Gary Kollin, a civil rights attorney in Fort Lauderdale, is currently suing the Broward Sheriff’s Office, and deputy Jason Dorsett, for wrongful arrest, based on an incident in Parkland on April 11, 2013. Kollin had called police for help kicking his ex-fiancee’s sister out of the ex-fiancee’s home. But when…
Welcome to Spring Break 2016 in Fort Lauderdale! Let’s get weird! Over the course of the next two weeks, millions of bad decisions will be made here by Spring Breakers looking to blow off some steam. Spring Break is a runaway cargo train full of Fireball and suntan lotion that…
The Florida Senate Appropriations Committee voted 10-9 yesterday to shoot down a highly controversial bill that would have, in essence, banned local communities from regulating fracking, the controversial process by which water, sand, and undisclosed chemicals are pumped into the ground to extract oil and gas. The bill, SB 318,…
If Mean Girls was anything like real life, blonde cheerleaders would wear pink on Wednesday, date football players, and definitely not ask a young man with autism to prom. But that’s apparently not what blonde cheerleaders are like at Park Vista High School in Lake Worth. Senior Mikal Barostik, a…
Earth First! is a 30-year-old hardcore environmental organization known for its in-your-face activism: a lot of civil disobedience, a dose of mischief, and plenty of arrests. Its motto exclaims, “no compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!” and group members rose to prominence by “monkeywrenching” — dismantling bulldozers that would…
Vaporizer pens are the most high-tech way to inhale most everything nowadays: tobacco, marijuana. The vaporizer industry is in its “Wild West” stage at the moment: Companies like G-Pen, which are endorsed by the rappers Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg, have made hand-over-fist money in the last few years, and…
Dalia Dippolito claims she was acting when she asked an undercover Boynton Beach police officer, acting as a hitman, to kill her husband, Michael. Six years later, she says she didn’t actually want to hire someone to kill her rich husband, but that it was all part of an acting…
Kara Goucher’s smiling face has graced the cover of Runner’s World, Skechers ads and countless other running products, but earlier this month she briefly let fly with a saltier side. Goucher had just missed out on making the women’s Olympic Marathon team, finishing fourth. She graciously praised the trio that…
Angie Fernandez got Linda, a mini Schnauzer puppy, when she was 12 years old. Fifteen years later, Fernandez is now a second grade teacher, and the dog still barks whenever anyone walks through the door as though she is protecting the members of her family. Last Wednesday, though, a handyman…
A 23-person company headquartered in Boca Raton is currently looking to expand its facilities, and add an estimated 17 new jobs over the next three years. To help “convince” the company to stay in Boca, both the city and the state of Florida have been considering awarding the company $85,000…
