Category: Uncategorized

Police have arrested the mother of the suspected killer of a convenience store owner and his sister on charges of helping him after the robbery, and are looking for his girlfriend, according to Leesburg police. Alex Lopez, 25, was arrested and charged with first-degree premeditated murder in the robbery of Raied Shihadeh, 51, at his…

A teacher who drugged a foreign exchange and attacked him sexually will now face life behind bars, the city of Mount Dora has announced. Orange County teacher Dimitri V. Kostyunin was arrested last year by city police, with the aid of the FBI and charged with sexual battery on a minor. A jury in March…

TAVARES – The lone surviving member of a family who and shot and killed one Lake County sheriff’s deputy and wounded two others in an Aug. 2 ambush has been indicted by a grand jury. Court records also show an interesting hint of the legal to come. The sheriff’s office announced Monday that Julie Ann…

I have often joked that journalists have the attention span of gnats. The “hot” news of the day is back-page filler the next – if that. Consumers have the same tendency but it’s not their fault. News can change in a digital minute. Take this year’s presidential race for example. It was former President Donald…

I’m all about the First Amendment, the establishment of a free press and speech, but the college campus protests about the crisis in Gaza have WRONG stamped all over them. There is nothing wrong about being horrified by war, especially when innocent civilians are caught between the combatants. Unfortunately, there will always be such casualties….

  Making it easier for public figures to sue news media outlets for libel might sound like a good idea, especially if the public figure is someone we like and we think criticism is unfair, but it would be unconstitutional and undermine our democracy. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, an undeclared candidate for president in 2024,…

Who doesn’t have a stash of classified documents in their home or offsite office? It might be THE question in Washington these days in light of the mishandling of secret papers by President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and ex-Vice President Mike Pence. One shocking discovery after the other. What does it mean? The…

Advances in artificial intelligence has everyone freaking out. With the touch of a button, you can get a program called ChatGPT  to write a term paper, an op-ed piece in the New York Times, a speech or fill out a job application. Some of the job applications are supposedly better than the ones filled out…

I love books. The ones I have, the ones I’ve read, even the ones I haven’t read yet, because if they are worthwhile, there’s a gem of truth, a bit of humor, or a moment of clarity within the pages, maybe all in the same paragraph. Some are trashy, of course, offensive, disgusting, maybe even…

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. He was right, of course. It’s the mark of every good writer. Take John D. MacDonald, the great fiction writer whose detective hero, Travis McGee, lived on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale. “There are no…