News

North Perry and Boca Raton airports are among 149 small facilities nationwide where federal budget cuts have forced closures of air traffic control towers.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced the decision today, nearly a month after it released a preliminary list of towers that could be affected.  

The tower at Miami-Dade's Opa-locka Airport had originally been considered for closure, but it's now on the list of only 24 towers nationwide that will be kept operational.

The Archdiocese of Miami is using a TV ad to encourage the Catholic faithful to come to confession this weekend as part of the Lenten season.

Fifteen thousand people are leaving Puerto Rico every year, and half of them are coming Florida. Many are leaving because of an explosion of violence on the island. Over the last several years, the murder rate has been between five and seven times the national average. 

Miami New Times reporter Michael E. Miller traveled to Puerto Rico to find out how things got so bad. The answer? Drugs and police, says Miller. Here's what he found out. 

Inside Jose Moreno's Judaica shop in Aventura, there's an entire wall lined with Hebrew books.  Other shelves hold glistening menorahs and there's a rack filled with special Passover games and toys for children.

An elderly customer enters the shop wearing a yarmulke and Moreno greets him in Spanish.

Moreno, 71, was raised in Venezuela and for many years owned a similar store in Caracas.

"Most of the Jewish people had good businesses and [a] good living standard,” Moreno said.  “We had a lot of synagogues, temples, schools.”

Pope Francis may not be from the United States, but for many in South Florida, the fact that he's from Argentina is even better.

Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski has hailed the selection of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as a "great thing” for the hemisphere, and called the new Pope an American.

“Latin America, as Pope Benedict described it, is the continent of hope. And it is the continent in which we have the largest growing number of Catholics in the world.”

Over the weekend, public transit advocates in Miami built a temporary train station along an imaginary transit line. They called it the Purple Line, sticking with the theme of Miami’s other two commuter rail lines, the Orange and the Green. Organizers of the project say this mock train station is going to help improve public transit in the city.

All Tuesday night, we listened to South Floridians react to the death of Hugo Chavez. Many (most) of the reactions were celebratory. Those celebrations took the form of songs, drive-by shoutings and apparently an accordion death ballad.

Below is a roundup of the most colorful reactions to the death of Venezuela's oft-beloved and perhaps equally hated leader.

For tourists visiting Fort Lauderdale, a stroll across the massive 17th Street Causeway Bridge affords a rare panorama of bustling Port Everglades and the city-block-sized cruise ships that navigate the waters leading out to the Atlantic Ocean. For Jen Klaassens, it's an invaluable training ground.

"I go up and down the 17th Street Causeway Bridge and back and forth," Klaassens said. 

There's a chocolatier in Quito, Ecuador, who is trying to sweeten the economic history of South America.

Santiago Peralta was tired of watching his country's prized cacao beans being shipped around the world so others could create prize-winning chocolate.

He was also weary of the low wages that simply exporting raw goods produced in his country.

So he had an idea. Start his own chocolate-making company and send ready-made Ecuadorian chocolate bars around the world instead.

Audio includes spot, hard news and feature material by WLRN reporter Christine DiMattei.

Spot:  "Obama in Century Village"
Hard News: "Palm Beach County Floods"
Feature: "Jaco" -- Parts 1 and 2

The median price for a single family home in Broward County is back above $200,000, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. The exact number is $208,000, compared with $185,900 in 2011.

The median price is greater than half the selling prices of the year and less than the other half.

The 2012 figure is 12 percent higher than last year and the first time $200,000 has been seen since 2009.