America is jubilant today with the news of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of American operatives, and the president’s approval ratings are sure to take a leap after the one-two punch of decapitating the birthers and incapacitating the world’s most wanted terrorist. Those two things are totally equal…
Read on for the BSO report of what happened in the jail.On Tuesday night, Allen West held a “town hall” event in Fort Lauderdale, at which he took only preapproved questions. He got started by complaining about bloggers who want to “skin him alive,” then got held up by a…
We’ve come face-to-face with Broward Circuit Court Judge Ilona Holmes, and she runs a tight ship over in the courthouse. She once directly addressed a New Times reporter sitting in the back row during a pretrial felony hearing, asking his name and intentions.Apparently she has a similar take-charge philosophy on…
Another dispatch from the defunct Collide Factory creative-incubator space in FAT Village comes from Andrew Martineau, who collaborated with Collide owner Travis Webster to try to get the space off the ground.Martineau is a past president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the American Advertising Federation. “I wasn’t a business…
“SEA WEED.” That was Channel 7’s heading for the news of a beachside discovery of 50 pounds of pot over the weekend at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. This is as close as South Florida gets to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — clandestine traffic by drug runners on…
Wearing your money around your neck can prove a volatile investment. Gold necklaces and jeweled pendants have long been a preferred mode of conspicuous luxury for nouveau-riche athletes and musicians who have risen from poverty.A few days ago, Michael Mooney wrote about Dolphin Brandon Marshall’s role in a story about…
Our feature story this week tells of the life and times of FAT Village, an eclectic little arts neighborhood tucked into a sliver of downtown Fort Lauderdale. The people who work there are extremely talented, and word of mouth is spreading quickly, especially when it comes to the art walks…
UPDATE: Three years later, FAT Village has become a cultural core of Fort Lauderdale, giving the city an alternative to its long-standing Spring Break scene. First there was darkness. Then a single point of light exploded with the brightness of three suns, shattering the night with a crack and the…
It would appear that when a suspected fraudster gets elected governor and then uses questionable methods to achieve goals that he won’t explain to anyone — the man even refuses to use email so we won’t know what he’s thinking — the public actually still cares. When Rick Scott does…
Incredible news came out of Tallahassee last week: Rick Scott’s general counsel admitted that he had misled the Florida Supreme Court about the amount of money that had already been spent on the proposed high-speed rail corridor, making the remaining funds seem much lower than they were, so that Scott’s…
After a year in the making and just a couple of months open for business, the Collide Factory in FAT Village has closed its doors and rolled down its shutters for good.The space was billed as “a creative and collaborative idea incubator.” Founder Travis Webster needed a place to run…
Hackers. That’s the governor’s new concern regarding a pain-pill prescription database being launched by the Department of Health. Scott originally opposed the database, saying it impinged on privacy and was better left to private enterprise (even though the state was in the midst of a bidding dispute with a private…
Jose Lambiet, the Palm Beach Post celebrity gossip columnist and Page 2 Live blogger, is leaving his position at the Post and taking a job as executive editor of Radar Online, a TMZ-like gossip site based in Florida, New York, and Hollywood. Lambiet has not returned New Times’ call, but…
The City of Lauderdale Lakes, sitting at the heart of Broward County and already owing nearly $5 million to BSO for contracted services, has apparently lost $1.7 million, equal to about 5 percent of its annual budget.Not lost it in bad investments or unforeseen costs. Like, actually lost it. Buddy…
The federal government issued a cease-and-desist order last week for a beach-nourishment dredging project off Hillsboro Beach and Deerfield Beach. The order cites a leaky pipe that dumped sand on an area of “hardbottom,” or limestone that’s home to coral reef. The contractor, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, initially reported…
Sometimes when you adopt a kid, things go well. Sometimes they go wrong. And sometimes, they go so horribly, unimaginably wrong that your life becomes an unending battle to hide the wrongness from yourself, to use every available device of legislation, money, and geography to keep your children from destroying…
In more than two months since they took a statement from Charles Harper, 18, alleging past sexual abuse by Broward Circuit Judge John Bowman, the Plantation Police Department has been conducting an investigation and has been mum about its status or eventual completion.Many of the anonymous commenters (many of whom…
One time in first-grade art class, I said the word penis, or some approximation of it, to my classmate Will, who was a tattler. “I’m telling!” said Will, and suddenly I was at risk of having my blue ribbon taken away by my homeroom teacher. So, with some half-formed notion…
In the weeks following the shooting of James “Matt” Perdue by BSO deputies in Hollywood, little information has been released, except for testimonials by a few family members to Perdue’s once peaceful life as a family man. At last check, BSO was still conducting an internal investigation and was not…
“Omg have a total weirdo in my bathroom a little scared,” Sheri Carter texted to her boyfriend, Mark, on January 31. “Like think he’s on…” she didn’t finish the sentence.Carter was working in her Boynton Beach home as an independent escort. The man in the bathroom, police say, was Jimmy…
Michael Madfis refused to give up.He used to work as an architect, overseeing a team on large projects. His wife was an interior designer. Both of them made a living off South Florida’s housing bubble, and when it burst, they suffered. He lost his job, his house, “everything.” Legally blind,…
He’s a kompas king, a diaper-dancer and a firebrand, and he just may be Haiti’s best hope for a president with more efficacy than an ingrown hair. Votes are being counted, and it’s between former first lady Mirlande Manigat and our boy, Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly. Why ours, exactly? Well,…
