This year, Beasts of the Southern Wild's Quvenzhane Wallis, 9, became the youngest actress in the history of the Academy Awards to be nominated for Best Actress. So in today's Carpet Countdown we're taking a look back at the youngest and oldest Oscar nominees.
PICS: Who's in the Hunt for Oscar Gold?
Here’s a tip: don’t steal.
A Tribeca waiter at a popular bistro was busted after he swiped credit card information from dozens of unsuspecting customers — so he could go on an illicit $126,000 shopping spree, sources said.
Jaiquan Ibraheem, 30, used a skimming device to steal debit and credit card numbers from more than 120 patrons in the Kutsher’s Tribeca Restaurant on Franklin Street, according to court records.
He ran the ruse between Feb. 1 and April 30, records show.
During a two-month period, Ibraheem allegedly scammed 110 Chase credit card accounts — and later made nearly $90,000 in purchases at various Manhattan stores, records show.
Using the skimmer, he also compromised other credit card accounts from American Express, Citibank and Discover, court records show.
One of the banks noticed the illegal activity and quickly notified cops, sources said.
On Tuesday, detectives picked up Ibraheem, who was charged with multiple counts of grand larceny and scheme to defraud.
He is being held on $30,000 bond.
Ultra-luxury condominiums on South Beach are fetching nosebleed prices.
On Tuesday, a penthouse at the Setai Resort at 2001 Collins Avenue closed for $27 million — the highest price ever for a South Florida condominium, according to real estate agents.
“We’re definitely seeing the market turning upward,” said Jeff Miller, of Zilbert International Realty in Miami, who represented the buyer in the sale of the palatial 7,100-square-foot condominium. “We’re seeing buyers come in from all over the globe.”
Just a few weeks ago, Ohio coal mining businessman Wayne Boich Jr. completed the sale of his Icon South Beach penthouse at 450 Alton Road in the uber-trendy South of Fifth neighborhood for just under $21 million.
The 6-bedroom, 7 1/2-bath Icon condo sparked a bidding war that drove the sale $2 million above the listing price — a level that is three times the $7 million Boich paid in July 2007 in the depths of the bust. It was a record price for a Miami Beach bayside condo.
“The luxury market is on fire in South Beach — especially the South of Fifth neighborhood,” said Dora Puig, principal of PuigWerner Real Estate Services, who was the listing broker for the Icon unit. “It’s moving Miami to totally different pricing points.”
The Setai’s record may not reign for long.
Penthouse 2 in the decade-old Continuum South tower at 100 South Pointe Drive in the South of Fifth neighborhood is on the market for $39 million.
That is a record listing price for a Miami-Dade condominium, according to Puig, who also snagged that listing.
Amid the market sizzle, Puig bumped up the asking price late last summer from $35 million.
The penthouse, which has 11,000 square feet of interior space, belongs to Manhattan real estate developer Ian Bruce Eichner, who built the Continuum project at the tip of South Beach and kept the trophy for himself.
The Continuum penthouse, which has 6,000 square feet of deck and a rooftop heated pool, boasts sweeping 13 1/2-foot ceilings that give the feel of a single-family home. The floor-to-ceiling glass walls offer a 360-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean, Biscayne Bay, downtown Miami and Miami Beach from 40 stories up.
“It looks down on Fisher Island, way down,” Puig said with a smile.
The unit has a private interior elevator, of course, and stretches over two indoor levels and two largely exterior levels.
One big plus: It has a gated entrance and sits on an expansive enclave of rolling lawns and gardens adjacent to a city park at the tip of the island.
The unit comes with an additional 874-square-foot guest quarters that would delight most mortals. “The guest unit is intended for professional quarters: the maid, the nanny, the chef, the pilot,” Puig explained.
Also included is a snazzy cabana on the beach.
Eichner has used it as a vacation home and once rented it to Tom Cruise for a couple of months while he was in Miami to film Rock of Ages.
On Thursday, Puig hosted Miami’s power brokers for a look at the Continuum penthouse over champagne and hors d’oeuvres. Next week, she plans to spend three days in New York touting the property to high-end brokers.
Such palatial properties typically are paid for in cash. But what would a monthly payment be?
With a 20 percent down payment of $7.8 million, the buyer would have to finance $31.2 million.
“I don’t know that I’d be able to find anybody willing to go that high on one unit,” warned Steve Schneider, a mortgage broker who is owner and president of Abacus Lending Group in South Miami.
If a buyer could line up a 15-year fixed rate mortgage at 3.5 percent, the monthly payment for principal and interest would be $223,043.35.
“I’d hate to see the tax bill,” said Schneider.
According to Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser records, the 2012 property tax bill on the Continuum penthouse was $264,896.17. That was based on an assessed value of just $9.5 million, less than half what the Property Appraiser listed as the market value of $19.3 million. The tax break came as a result of the state law that caps increases in assessed values on non-homesteaded property at 10 percent a year.
The condo maintenance fee for Eichner’s unit runs $7,624 a month. “I think that’s low for what you get,” said Puig.
In the latest odd twist in the saga of Miami Beach’s oft-delayed convention center redevelopment, a city commissioner on Wednesday alleged that a project bidder may have had improper “contact’’ for possible bid-rigging with the city’s former procurement director, who is facing unrelated public-corruption charges.
Commissioner Deede Weithorn, who raised the allegation in a commission meeting and in a subsequent public statement, did not name the bidder or specify the nature of the alleged contact. She later acknowledged in a brief interview she has “no proof,’’ but said the allegation came from a trusted, unnamed “source.’’
Weithorn made the claim as she asked fellow commissioners to “reconsider’’ a December vote that narrowed down the field of development teams competing for the massive project to the two groups that scored highest in a city evaluation. Though Weithorn voted with the majority, 6-1, she later said the decision was made with insufficient analysis and wanted consideration of adding a third team.
Though she could not get another commissioner to go along with reopening the decision, Weithorn won agreement to require all five bidders to submit affidavits attesting they had no improper contact with former procurement director Gus Lopez or his “agent.’’ A false affidavit could lead to perjury charges, she noted.
Representatives of the two top-ranked teams, Portman-CMC and South Beach ACE, said they were willing to sign. The city attorney’s office will draft the affidavit.
But Weithorn’s latest sally cast a new shadow over the troubled, years-long effort by the city to renovate its aging convention center, add a hotel and redevelop 26 acres of city land around it with a combination of housing and commercial buildings to be financed mostly privately. The 52-acre project in the middle of South Beach, which the city says could cost anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion, is considered to be among the most significant in the country.
The bidding for the project, launched a year ago after an earlier effort ground to a halt, was suspended again while state investigators looked into the allegations against Lopez and a business associate, Pierre Landrin Jr. The bidding process resumed last fall after prosecutors assured the city that their investigation had yielded no evidence that the convention center bids were tainted “at this time.’’
On Wednesday, a spokesman for the state attorney’s office said he had nothing new to add to that previous statement.
Some bidders and observers raised concerns that Weithorn’s allegations could derail the complex project by giving the deep-pocketed investors necessary for its success cold feet.
Anthony Alfieri, director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami’s law school, said Weithorn’s vague allegation and the commission’s demand for affidavits also raise some potential issues related to fairness and the integrity of the city’s bidding process. He said the bidders are put in a difficult position by being asked to “prove a negative’’ in denying an allegation whose details they are not privy to.
“The commission has essentially created a cloud over the bidding process and the bidders. They have to prove they did not engage in unethical or unlawful conduct, but without a clear-cut method of doing so. They are at a significant disadvantage in proving their own innocence when they haven’t been accused of clear-cut misconduct,’’ Alfieri said.
WATERLOO, Ont. – Call it BlackBerry Town, even if the name isn’t official.
In the lead up to the BlackBerry smartphone unveiling later this month, creator Research In Motion is turning its Waterloo, Ont., home base into a celebration of the device.
The company plans to decorate light poles in areas of Waterloo and neighbouring Kitchener with banners that promote its latest smartphone and thank the community for its support.
City councillors in Kitchener voted earlier this week to make an exception to rules that prevent corporations from using public property to advertise.
RIM says it is making plans for other events as well.
The company will hold skating rink parties at Kitchener City Hall and in Waterloo Town Square on Jan. 30 to coincide with the unveiling of its new BlackBerry devices.
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
The Wanted aren't releasing their new I Found You music video until next week, but we have a special preview for fans today!
The single, from The Wanted's upcoming album Third Strike, is already gaining traction on the web and -- according to the band's Twitter feed -- fans are in for a "massive treat."
RELATED: Wanted Singer Wears 'Free Lindsay' Shirt
The full music video premieres Tuesday, January 22 on ET! You can see the video in its entirety on Vevo.com and ETonline.com on Tuesday night.
A Brooklyn man says a gang of gay-bashing cops savagely beat him and hurled nasty slurs after responding to a noise complaint at a gay pride party at his home early Sunday.
“They were yelling ‘you f---ing fag!’ and ‘homo!’”, Jabbar Cambell, told The Post, recounting how a group of nine NYPD officers allegedly joined in the beatdown. “I couldn’t block the blows. I was fighting to stay conscious [but] I was blacking out because of the hits I was taking.”
Cambell recounted the alleged attack in his lawyer’s office today, shortly after filing legal papers indicating he intends to sue the city and nine NYPD officers.
The alleged beating occured after cops responded to a call about excessive noise at Cambell’s apartment on Sterling Place in Crown Heights.
Cambell saw the police arrive through the surveillance camera at the building.
A short time later, police disabled the camera, according to Cambell, who provided a timestamped videotape that appears to show three officers looking at the camera for about two minutes before one of them reaches up and tampers with it.
“I noticed them turning the security camera and I got scared,” Cambell, a soft-spoken six-footer, said.
When he went to answer the door, he says, two or three officers were banging with batons and flashlights and trying to force their way into the building. Campbell’s 8-room apartment takes up the entire second floor of the two-story building; there is no tenant on the ground floor.
“I opened the door and one officer used his foot and arm to hold the door open,” Cambell said. “There was a sergeant, he yelled ‘get him!’ and that’s when I got attacked.”
“They kept saying, ‘stop resisting’ but I wasn’t resisting. I didn’t have any time to respond,” the soft-spoke, 6-foot-tall Campbell said.
According to a criminal complaint, police claim Campbell ignored their demands to “discontinue a party” and then pushed Sgt. Juan Morero, attempted to flee and flailed his arms at cops and behaved “belligerently’ as he tried to fight with them.
Campbell was charged with resisting arrest, attempted assault, and pot possession.
He said two officers held back his arms while another pushed Campbell’s head forward, and a fourth cop delivered a steady stream of upward blows to Campbell’s face.
“One particular officer had a gloved fist and was hitting me in the face,” he said.
Campbell said he got a black eye, split lip and bloodied mouth in the attack, and was still bleeding when he was taken to the precinct.
Cops later took him to Kings County Hospital for treatment, he said, before holding him in custody for 24 hours.
Campbell, who works as a computer forensics investigator, said he had been paid $300 by a party planner to host the gay pride bash at his house.
About 80 people, mostly gay men and transsexuals, showed up, paying $5 apiece to get in.
Campbell’s lawyer, Herb Subin, said the cops “were screaming anti-gay epithets” and are guilty of a “hate crime.”
“I was an innocent person in my home that night,” Cambell insisted. “What scares me most is that the NYPD are the people you call on to help you. I’m scared now. “
A bill drafted by the Miami Dolphins would give Florida sports teams $3 million a year in state money to improve older stadiums, provided the owner pays for at least half the cost of a major renovation.
Under the law, the stadium would need to be 20 years old and the team willing to put in at least $125 million for a $250 million renovation. That’s less than the $400 million redo of Sun Life Stadium that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross proposed this week, which he hopes will win state approval thanks to his offer to fund at least $200 million of the effort to modernize the 1987 facility.
Miami-Dade and Florida would fund the rest through a mix of county hotel taxes and state general funds set aside for stadiums. Sun Life currently receives $2 million a year through the program, and the Dolphins want to create a new category that would give them an additional $3 million.
While the Miami Marlins and Miami Heat both play in stadiums subsidized by county hotel taxes, the Dolphins receive no local dollars. The bill would change that by allowing Miami-Dade to increase the tax charged at mainland hotels to 7 percent from 6 percent, and eliminate the current rule that limits the money to publicly owned stadiums. Sun Life Stadium, in Miami Gardens, is privately owned but sits on county land.
The bill pits enthusiasm for one of Florida’s most popular sports teams against a lean budget climate and lingering backlash against the 2009 deal that had Miami and Miami-Dade borrow about $485 million to build a new ballpark for the Marlins. Ross also must navigate a Republican-led Legislature that has twice rebuffed his requests for public dollars.
“I would be surprised if that bill even got a hearing in committee,” said Mike Fasano, a Republican representative from the Tampa area and a critic of tax-funded sports deals. “I’m a big Dolphin fan, and have been for years. But with all due respect, we’ve got people who are struggling throughout this state right now . .. The last thing we should be doing is giving a professional sports team or facility additional tax dollars.”
While the bill would open up the $3 million subsidy to other the teams, the Dolphins see it as unlikely that another owner would be willing to put up as much money for renovations as Ross, a billionaire real estate developer.
If the bill were enacted today, any stadium opened before 1993 would be eligible for the money, provided it could show the proposed renovation would generate an additional $3 million in sales taxes.
Ross and his backers are pitching the renovation as a boon to tourism, with Sun Life a magnet for the Super Bowl, national college football games and other major events. The National Football League is considering South Florida and San Francisco for the 2016 Super Bowl, and the Dolphins say approval of renovation funding is crucial to winning the bid.
Sen. Oscar Braynon, D-Miami Gardens, who sponsored the Senate bill, said the funding makes sense because when Sun Life hosts a Super Bowl, the entire state benefits from both tourism dollars and publicity.
“It’s a small price to pay for economic development, and for all the shine we get from major sporting events,” said Braynon, whose district includes Sun Life. Rep. Eduardo “Eddy” Gonzalez, R-Hialeah, is the sponsor on the House side.
TALLAHASSEE --
Florida’s campaign finance system is so riddled with holes that a state ethics watchdog group will urge lawmakers Wednesday to open the spigot and let an unlimited amount of campaign cash gush into campaign coffers.
Integrity Florida, a non-profit, independent ethics advocacy organization, will tell the Houses Ethics and Elections Committee that the state should allow no-limits campaign finance in exchange for public disclosure of all donors.
Disclosure would be made within 24 hours of every check deposited to any state or local campaign account and every expenditure paid. The group also wants the elimination of powerful political slush funds that whitewash funds and shield donors, known as Committees of Continuous Existence.
“There is no evidence that caps on contributions are effective,’’ said Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida. “The money is going to find its way into the system. It is broken in every possible way.”
House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who has made eliminating CCEs a political priority, told the Herald/Times that he is “open to considering” the removal of contribution limits.
“We already have a system that allows for unlimited money,’’ he said.
Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry said he supports any proposal “that creates more transparency,” but would leave it to lawmakers to work out the details.
Democratic political consultant Steve Schale said ending donation limits and requiring fast-track disclosure “is the only way to get rid of the fiction of limits and open the gates of sunshine.”
The proposal was unanimously supported by the board of Integrity Florida, which includes the president of the Northwest Florida Tea Party Mike Hill, the executive director of the First Amendment Foundation Barbara Petersen, and retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Martin Dyckman.
For about two decades, Florida has required political contributors to limit donations to candidates to $500 in the primary and another $500 in the general election. But those limits have been outmatched by a flood of money pouring into the system in the era of Super PACs and the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision to recognize corporate contributions as political speech.
In the 2011-12 election cycle, Integrity Florida found that $230 million of the $306 million raised — about three out of four dollars — went to parties and political committees, which skirt the campaign finance limits and were subject to fewer disclosure rules.
Many of those CCEs are controlled by legislators and used to raise money, which they transfer to other campaigns or use to pay for meals, travel, car expenses and even gifts. The process has allowed the Legislature’s most powerful lawmakers to amass more clout during the election cycle as they transfer funds to the campaigns and committees of other members in an attempt to consolidate power.
In the last cycle, lawmakers who have risen to the most powerful posts in the House and Senate, raised more money in their political committees than most special interest groups in Florida. Most of the money was transferred to other accounts, leaving the public no clear trail to follow the money.
The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee chairman, Sen. Jack Latvala, R-St. Petersburg, said he wants to close those spending loopholes by banning the use of CCE funds on gifts and meals. But he does not want to eliminate CCEs. Latvala is also not a fan of removing the contribution limit because he believes the $1000 per-cycle contribution cap is working fine.
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