Reader Question: Some people fear another real estate market crash. We see the real estate market has recovered in many markets. We are considering selling our current home and buying or building another house. With these conflicting opinions, it is difficult to figure out whether to go ahead. Do you think the housing market will experience a significant correction soon? Monty’s Answer: To look into the future direction of the real estate market is complicated. It is for this [...]

ORLANDO — Two students have been arrested following a fight at a Florida middle school that ended with an officer using pepper spray and a stun gun.Orlando police officials say the fight broke out Tuesday morning at Glenridge Middle School.The school's resource officer sprayed the chemical on the students when they didn't comply with his commands to stop fighting. Local news outlets report the officer used the stun gun when the pepper spray didn't stop the students. [...]

NICEVILLE — A Fort Walton Beach resident wants the Okaloosa County School Board to develop a process on the formation of new policies and procedures.During the public comments section of Monday's School Board meeting, Gene Earley asked the members to develop a standardized process after he said he found faults in multiple policy drafts in recent months."You would think after all of this time, trial and error, statutory reviews of the laws and the process over all of [...]

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told the panel that he "probably would have found enough shortcomings in this to vote against it."

SHALIMAR — A 33-year-old woman was charged with two counts of felony child cruelty after dropping her two young children in a parking lot and going into a restaurant.Temperatures were in the mid-40s and the children weren't wearing jackets, according to Jana Lynn Bronson's Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office arrest report. The wind chill was 36 degrees.According to the report, Bronson was driving erratically and had just caused a crash. Witnesses told deputies that she [...]

The substance in the letter turned out to be cornstarch.

Rex, New Orleans' oldest parading Carnival group, is celebrating the city's tricentennial with 21 of its 28 floats commemorating its history from those who lived in the area before Europeans settled it in 1718 to the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

MIAMI — Vic Damone, whose mellow baritone once earned praise from Frank Sinatra as "the best pipes in the business," has died in Florida at the age of 89, his daughter said.Victoria Damone told The Associated Press in a phone interview Monday that her father died Sunday at a Miami Beach hospital from complications of a respiratory illness.Damone's easy-listening romantic ballads brought him million-selling records and sustained a half-century career in recordings, [...]

A police department spokesman says a preliminary test of the powder indicated it wasn't dangerous.

PANAMA CITY — A man in a motorized wheelchair was struck and killed by a vehicle at the intersection of 23rd Street and State Avenue Sunday night. Panama City Police say they responded to the scene around 10 p.m., where a Chevy truck driven by Michael Lipford, 24, of Panama City, had been traveling eastbound on 23rd Street and struck 65-year-old George Betsey of Panama City as he crossed 23rd Street in his motorized wheelchair. Betsey died at the hospital, [...]