Things To Do In SW Florida

As the full moon sank below the horizon, silhouetting palm trees at Jetty Park, the light of dawn ushered in the arrival of the world’s largest cruise ship to its new homeport on Florida’s Space Coast.

Royal Caribbean’s Star of the Seas, the company’s second Icon-class ship, docked at Port Canaveral for the first time Saturday and will begin sailing with vacationers on Aug. 16. Weighing 250,800 gross tons, the floating behemoth features 20 decks, seven pools, six waterslides and more than 40 venues for dining and drinking. The giant vessel can accommodate 5,610 passengers at double occupancy and more than 7,000 passengers at full capacity, plus 2,350 crew.

Playing host to both Royal Caribbean’s newest and second-newest ship, the Oasis-class Utopia of the Seas, is a sign of growth for Port Canaveral — the second busiest cruise terminal in the world by passenger movements, just behind PortMiami.

“Port Canaveral has been getting a lot of new ships lately. I think having Star of the Seas, which is sort of the crown jewel of Royal Caribbean’s fleet, is a huge sign of the incredible impact that Port Canaveral has on the cruising industry and how important it is,” said Colleen McDaniel, editor-in-chief of Cruise Critic. “I think passengers are going to really love having a ship of this size sailing from Port Canaveral.” read more

Hollywood has come for Apocalypse Manufacturing, the Pompano Beach-based truck customizer that converts big Jeeps, Hummers, Land Rovers and more into six-wheeled monstrosities with names like HellFire and Bone Saw.

Truck Dynasty, a new reality series set to premiere Tuesday, Aug. 12, at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel, puts the operation under a microscope.

Viewers will meet celebrities, sports stars and wealthy business leaders who can afford $150,000 or more to buy converted vehicles or to have their own trucks retrofitted.

They’ll see how the shop’s crew customizes each build to serve specific needs of their customers, like Nick “the Wrangler” Bishop, a snake hunter who in the premiere reacts to the conversion of a Jeep into an amphibious camper that can plunge deep into the Everglades.

And they’ll meet the energetic family members who run everything.

There’s owner Joe Ghattas, a former car dealer who over 10 years turned a side hustle souping up Jeeps into a multimillion-dollar business headquartered in a $10.7 million plant near the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Powerline Road. read more

The four members of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission climbed aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance and departed the International Space Station on Friday evening for an overnight trip back to Earth.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov launched to the station back on March 14 from Kennedy Space Center arriving a day later.

After 4 1/2 months on board, they undocked at 6:15 p.m. and are nearing their 17 1/2-hour trip home for a planned splashdown off the coast of California at 11:33 a.m. Saturday.

“Crew is ready to return to the atmosphere, ” Crew-10 commander McClain said with about an hour to go before landing.

“SpaceX copies. We’re excited to welcome your home,” replied the crew operations resource engineer at SpaceX Mission Control.

Dragon was prepped for its deorbit burn having performed a leak check and with astronauts in their spacesuits. The deorbit burn lasts more than 17 minutes to line it up to enter Earth’s atmosphere, then jettison its trunk over the Pacific to expose the spacecraft’s heat shield that will endure temperatures near 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it slows from as much as 17,500 mph to an eventual parachute-assisted, gentle 15 mph landing. read more

By DAMIAN J. TROISE and ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writers

U.S. stocks closed higher Friday, capping a choppy week of trading with the market’s third winning week in the last four and another milestone.

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The S&P 500 rose 0.8%, finishing just shy of the record it set last week. The benchmark index also wiped out its losses from a slide last week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.5%, and the Nasdaq composite added 1% to the all-time high it set a day earlier. read more

Nearly 4 in 5 Americans agree — the state of their finances is a matter for concern.

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More precisely, 79% had specific concerns when asked about their “current financial situation” earlier this year, in an April 2025 NerdWallet survey conducted online by The Harris Poll. All told, 64% of Americans had one or more worries about not having enough money saved, 44% about having too much debt and 26% about not making enough money.

While financial journeys vary from person to person, some experiences may be more common than you realize. Here’s some guidance on handling four of the most common money concerns, as revealed by the survey. read more