Punta Gorda | featured news

CRYSTAL RIVER (AP) — A family out scalloping in the Gulf of Mexico spotted a missing fisherman and pulled him to safety.
Tampa television station WTSP reports 51-year-old Efstathios “Steve” Moumouris treaded water for nearly 24 hours after a bad storm to...

NEW SMYRNA BEACH (AP) — If you smoke, don’t bother applying for a job at Bert Fish Medical Center in New Smyrna Beach.
Starting Jan. 1, the hospital will no longer hire tobacco users.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports applicants will be tested for a ...

BRANDON (AP) —  A Brandon man says he plans to sell a perfectly round egg he found inside a carton he had bought at his local supermarket.
The Tampa Tribune reports that 25-year-old Carlos Vilar was making eggs for his daughter recently when he noticed th...

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) — Twin car bombs exploded outside mosques in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli Friday, killing at least 29 people, wounding over 350 and wreaking major destruction in the country’s second largest city, Lebanese Health Ministry of...

TOKYO — Deep beneath Fukushima’s crippled nuclear power station, a massive underground reservoir of contaminated water that began spilling from the plant’s reactors after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has been creeping slowly toward the Pacific.
Now, 2...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North and South Korea agreed Friday to allow reunions next month of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, the first such meetings in three years and the latest conciliatory gesture from the North after a spring that saw i...

NEW DELHI (AP) — A 22-year-old photojournalist was gang raped while her male colleague was tied up and beaten in an isolated, overgrown corner of India’s business hub of Mumbai, police said Friday. The case was reminiscent of the December gang rape and de...

BEIRUT (AP) — Russia on Friday added its diplomatic weight to demands for a swift probe into an alleged chemical weapons attack that has injected new vigor into calls for international military action in Syria’s civil war.
Russia, which is a close ally of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional Republican leaders and the Obama administration are trying to cut a deal that avoids a government shutdown in October while facing what could be an even bigger fight over the nation’s debt ceiling in the rest of the year.
...

FORT HOOD, Texas —  A military jury on Friday convicted Maj. Nidal Hasan in the deadly 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, making the Army psychiatrist eligible for the death penalty in the shocking assault against American troops by one of their own on h...