Gulfstream Park was a hell of a place to work for some employees, full of cocaine and free gambling. When the scheme was finally discovered, hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from the casino and taxpayers, and the “family-friendly” racetrack was a potential public relations nightmare. A state investigation…
This past week, everybody’s been talking about this Time.com poll in which the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart wins most-trusted-newscaster status. Maybe it means that television news networks have become “disaffected” with network television news? Or that Americans are fed up with stuffy anchors who are too deferential to newsmakers.To their…
It looks like journalism. But if Spirit Airlines didn’t pay for this segment on Fox Business Network, it should have. CEO Ben Baldanza gets five minutes of cable time to field questions that all have the same answer: because we have low fares.They ran out of time before the anchor…
It’s hard to understand how Maikon Bonani, star kicker for the University of South Florida, could have possibly forgotten to lock the door of the gondola on the Skyride at Busch Gardens in Tampa. After all, that was his job. It’s doubly perplexing that after realizing his error, in a…
After reading New Times’ cover story about a rape at Palm Beach’s most exclusive country club, you may still have questions about this strange criminal case. It’s a complicated one, involving two employees who lived and worked at the Everglades Club — a white cook named Melissa and her alleged…
Aside from the racial and religious discrimination discussed in this week’s New Times cover story about the Everglades Club, there are some more eccentricities worth noting about life at the exclusive Palm Beach country club.First, there’s a significant portion of gray hair on the Worth Avenue campus. The average member…
That’s right: $7 (seven dollars). And yet seven in every ten students at the University of South Florida said, “Meh.” That, apparently, is too much to pay for the use of a car for one hour, a price that includes gas and insurance and inflated tires and OK WHAT THE…
Karen Berry got into private investigation the hard way: Somebody was stalking her, and she decided to take matters into her own capable hands. The 25-year Sunrise resident was working as property manager for a condo in Davie in the early ’90s, living alone while her military husband was overseas…
That’s the view from within the cockpit of Steve David’s hydroplane. And that flying yellow thing at the three-second mark is a near-death experience: another hydroplane that flipped right over him. That happened at a race on Washington state’s Columbia River in 2006, which is the fastest hydroplane track –…
Anyone else a little miffed that Barack and Michelle have chosen to go campaigning for health-care reform in Cleveland instead of South Florida? Is our health care not bad enough for you?Even the Plain Dealer acknowledges that the president is “us[ing] Cleveland as a backdrop to flog Congress into action.”…
Let’s be good sports and thank the Orioles for their 13 years of playing Grapefruit League baseball in Fort Lauderdale Stadium — a “dump,” as the team’s Baltimore-based beat writer so eloquently put it. Hey, if the guy lives in Baltimore, who are we to question his definition of dump?But…
Technical problems shut down this blog all morning, so I’m late with this post. Sorry about that, especially if you took the time to comment and couldn’t get through. The Sun-Sentinel front page is dominated by a picture of a giant Wheel of Fortune slot machine and the headline: “WHO…
Today’s South Florida forecast calls for a high of 94, which puts us just two fragile degrees below Fort Lauderdale’s record high for this day. But the residents of this region have an annoying habit of taking their usually bearable weather for granted. And so it’s in that spirit that…
At least a few real estate investors in South Florida have managed to crawl out of the crater that formed from the housing bubble’s burst. They’ve managed to wring profit from an otherwise lost art: renting.An article in next month’s Forbes magazine names Hollywood and West Palm Beach as two…
When the new capital budget for the Broward County School Board was released last week, there was something missing: the money. The budget, which stood at $3.5 billion a couple of years ago, was slashed to $1.2 billion. And the bulk of that money — $763 million — is going…
On the night of April 1, 2006, a young chef dropped by her coworker’s dorm room at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach to pass the warm hours with wine and music. Melissa, whose last name New Times is withholding to protect her privacy, was a 20-year-old white woman with…
Charlie Crist and wife Carole Rome are recently returned from a star-studded fundraising trip to the Hamptons. Rome’s ex, Todd Rome, was not invited, probably because he was a threat to give a toast like the one he gave to the New York Post:”THEY figure they might as well come…
Some of my colleagues are not impressed by Michael Jackson tributes, but I still am. Provided the tributes come with Jackson-esque dance moves, are shot with time-lapse video and produce a smashing piece of art. So David German of West Palm Beach, yours is a tribute worthy of the King…
In this week’s cover story, “The Chef and the ‘Amigo,'” New Times goes behind the scenes at Palm Beach’s oldest country club. When Esdras Cardona, a Guatemalan immigrant and dishwasher at the Everglades Club, was accused of raping a white coworker, the case put a spotlight on the club’s long…
Who knew that this weekend in Fort Lauderdale, the National Karate Federation staged its national championships? Clearly, this is a federation that needs some steel cages, a Kimbo Slice, and a sequel to the 1984 Ralph Macchio classic. Well… one outta three ain’t bad.Here’s video shot from this weekend’s tournament…
UPDATED: Packed day of Broward School Board stuff. School Board Member Stephanie Kraft wrote in an email today that Miriam Oliphant’s job at the School Board is being investigated by Supt. James Notter. The problem with that is that ol’ Notter already said he didn’t there was “special treatment” in the case…
Midway through this morning’s meeting of the North Broward Hospital District’s board, Commissioner Robert Bernstein decided it was time to acknowledge the “white elephant in the room.”A tantalizing prospect, because this room was positively teeming with white elephants. There was the pending criminal investigation of the commissioner seated a several…
