Things To Do In SW Florida

By SYLVIE CORBET, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.

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X and Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain’s data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok. read more

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport saw its string of annual traveler growth snapped last year as some airlines serving Broward County encountered financial troubles, cut back service and flew passengers to other destinations.

Overall, passenger traffic was down 8.5% for 2025 to more than 32.2 million against the prior year’s 35.2 million, according to statistics posted by the airport for the full calendar year. Six of the airport’s “Top Ten” carriers flew fewer passengers to and from the airport last year than in 2024.

Among the contributing factors for the decline:

• Spirit Airlines, the financially-troubled Dania Beach-based discounter which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last August for the second time in a year, still ended up as the leader in market share at 28%. But it is now a smaller airline serving fewer destinations while operating a smaller fleet. The number of passengers carried fell by 18.3% from nearly 11.1 million  in 2024 to slightly more than 9 million last year. read more

Persistence and patience were the keys to the sale of a unique Orlando home.

You might remember Entrelagos, a 14,706-square-foot property with ornate wood carvings and metal railings with foliage throughout. It took nearly five years — and a price reduction of more than 50 percent to the original $25 million listing — to land its new owners.

When it first hit the market in 2021, listing agent Richard Dempsey with Saunders Real Estate said, “Almost every bit of the finishing on the interior of the property is done with woodwork that was hand-carved by Filipino artisans and then shipped to the site.”

A grand spiral staircase through a library was a focal point of the house, along with the flowers and leaves carved into multiple huge columns. Many of the interior doors had inlaid mother-of-pearl.

“The sellers had spent a lot of time and thought as to what exactly they wanted and fashioned it to their taste, for sure,” Dempsey said about the house after the sale closed.

Back in 2021, the home and an adjacent vacant lot were listed for $25 million, had a price reduction to $19.5 million in 2024, and just sold in January 2026 over two transactions for a combined $11 milllion, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.  read more

By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Labor Department, citing the partial federal government shutdown, said Monday that it will not release the January jobs report on Friday as scheduled.

In a statement, the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said: “Once funding is restored, BLS will resume normal operations and notify the public of any changes to the news release schedule.’’ It is also postponing the December report on job openings, which was supposed to come out Tuesday.

The jobs report and other key economic statistics were previously delayed by a record 43-day government shutdown last fall.

Economists had expected the January jobs report to show that employers added 80,000 jobs last month, up from 50,000 in December.

The delay in data comes at a bad time. The economy is in a puzzling place.

Growth is strong: Gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — advanced from July through September at the fastest pace in two years.

But the job market is sluggish: Employers have added just 28,000 jobs a month since March. In the 2021-2023 hiring boom that followed COVID-19 lockdowns, by contrast, they were creating 400,000 jobs a month. read more

If you’re house hunting, last weekend’s record-breaking snowfall is a valid reason to put your search on ice. But winter weather doesn’t faze Desirae Allen, a real estate broker with Sound Realty in Valdez, Alaska. In a city that gets more than 300 inches of snow in a season, that’s just business as usual.

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“I’ve got a showing that all of a sudden came unexpectedly, and I haven’t got a guy over there to plow the driveway, ” she says. “I’ve got to tell the buyers, you know, ‘Grab your boots or grab your snowshoes — we’re going to wade our way in.’” read more