'Half-Votes' Given to Michigan and Florida Delegates in Compromise

Democratic Party leaders agreed Saturday seat Michigan and Florida delegates with half votes into this summer's convention with a compromise that left Barack Obama on the verge of the nomination but riled Hillary Rodham Clinton backers who threatened to fight to the August convention.

Serial Execution-Style Killings at Boca Raton Shopping Mall

BRIAN SKOLOFF writes:

[In December, 2007,] The 911 call lasted a split second. Not even a breath was heard.

It was Nancy Bochicchio's last desperate plea for help.

The single mom and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, would soon be dead, each bound and shot in the head in the back seat of their black Chrysler Aspen.

March 23, 2007

Randi Gorenberg, 52, heads to the mall to do some shopping. It's a typical day for the bubbly, outgoing doctor's wife and mother of two.

Surveillance video shows her leaving the mall at about 1:16 p.m. She walks into the parking lot to her black Mercedes SUV.

Just over a half-hour later, at 1:54 p.m., witnesses spot her car driving through a park in nearby Delray Beach.

Then a gunshot.

Gorenberg's body falls limply from the passenger door, shot in the head.

Her Mercedes is found a few minutes later abandoned behind a Home Depot. Her purse and cell phone are missing. So are her black and white Puma shoes.

No one sees the killer. To this day, he's a ghost.

"It's been a very hard and sad year for me," said Gorenberg's mother, Idey Elias. "And whoever he is, he's still out there doing these evil things."

___

August 7, 2007

A 30-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son leave the Town Center mall on a balmy afternoon and head for their black Lincoln Navigator in Nordstrom's parking garage.

The woman puts her son in his car seat and loads her purchases in the back.

She gets behind the wheel and is startled to see a man sitting beside her child with a gun to his head. The gunman is dark-skinned, about 5'11", 180 pounds, wearing sunglasses and a full-brimmed floppy hat, possibly with a ponytail.

"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she tells him.

The man orders the woman to drive to an ATM where she withdraws $600.

He then orders her into the back seat, where he binds her feet with plastic ties, secures her hands with cheap novelty handcuffs and fixes her neck to the headrest with another tie.

He's calm but threatens to kill her. She doesn't resist. They drive back to the mall where he puts a pair of blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes.

He asks if she's OK, even gets her a drink of water and her inhaler for asthma. Then he disappears.

The woman eventually frees herself.

"He took my license and told me if his picture was on the news that he would come after me ... and my son," she would later say. "I'm terrified."

She has concealed her identity from the public out of fear for her own and child's safety, appearing before reporters on the condition that her name and face not be shown.

Three days after she was attacked, the same man is believed to have robbed a woman at gunpoint in a parking garage at another nearby shopping area.

___

Dec. 13, 2007

It's just after midnight at the mall. A security guard making his rounds notices a black SUV idling in the parking lot and calls police.

The Bochicchios are dead inside.

Just 10 hours earlier, Nancy Bochicchio picked up Joey from her second grade class for a doctor's appointment. The inseparable pair then hit the mall.

They enter between Neiman Marcus and Sears and come out the same way less than an hour later, spotted on surveillance video, their long shadows trailing them in the afternoon light.

Video from a nearby bank then shows their car at a drive-through ATM.

Bochicchio withdraws $500. No one knows what happens next but the killer.

Both are bound in the exact manner as the August victim. Their eyes, too, are covered with blacked-out goggles.

CNN Predicts Hillary Clinton Will Win Florida But No Delegates to be Awarded

CNN (just as the polls close in Florida) predicts Hillary Clinton will win Florida, resulting however in no award of any delegates. Presently, she has taken 48% of the Democratic votes.

Obama and Huckabee in Florida

Fifteen minutes before the polls close in Florida, Mike Huckabee has taken 13% of the Republican vote while Barack Obama has taken 29% of the Democratic vote.

Ahead Nationally: John McCain and Hillary Clinton

Mark Murray, Deputy political director of NBC News reports:

BOCA RATON, Fla. - Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama are leading in their respective parties' upcoming primaries, according to two new state surveys (in Florida).

But a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that their rivals — John McCain and Hillary Clinton — are ahead nationally, with Clinton leading Obama by 15 points and with McCain moving from fourth to first in one month.

The Republican Party Presidential Race: A Kaleidoscope

Glen Johnson writes:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - The Republican presidential race, it appears, has taken on the qualities of a kaleidoscope.

Every primary or caucus, the winner looks inside and sees something else, underscoring the volatile nature of a 2008 nominating contest that is still moving toward clarity.

Leading contenders are emerging, hangers-on are dropping away and in less than 10 days, the viability of Rudy Giuliani's unconventional political strategy will be judged in plain view.

The 57 delegates at stake in Florida, the virtual dead heat at the start of the campaign's final act and the momentum the winner could gain heading into the 20-plus contests being held Feb. 5 have the potential to turn Florida's Jan. 29 primary into the make-or-break contest of the race.

John McCain glided in, following up his win in the New Hampshire primary with another big-ticket victory Saturday in the South Carolina primary. To the Arizona senator, it was sweet justice, for it was South Carolina where George W. Bush pummeled him into submission in 2000 after McCain had similarly won the New Hampshire primary.

"It took us awhile, but what's eight years among friends?" McCain joked at his victory party.

40,000 Christmas Lights Dancing in Florida