Bay News 9

Bay News 9 was honored with a prestigious Sigma Delta Chi award for best breaking news coverage for its continuous reporting on a tanker truck explosion along Interstate 75 last year. The award given by the Society of Professional Journalists recognizes the best in professional journalism in 53 categories.

Bay News 9 competed against stations in the top 50 U.S. markets, including New York City and Los Angeles. The station was given the award based on its coverage of a June 2008 accident that killed the driver of a tanker truck, which careened off the I-75 bridge at U.S. Highway 301. Bay News 9 is a 24-hour local news channel serving over 1 million cable households in the Tampa Bay area, including Manatee County.

MANATEE — Manatee County is seeking five members for the Tourist Development Council advisory board. Members of the board will serve in an advisory capacity to the Manatee County Commission. Four of the members will be hoteliers and one will be an interested citizen. Applications for the positions are being sought by July 10. Those interested in applying should contact Monica Luff of the Bradenton Area Convention & Visitors Bureau at 729-9177.

Nancy Shevell

Nancy Shevell beamed for hundreds of cameras in London's Leicester Square, a green silk jacket on one arm and Paul McCartney on the other. The 49-year-old trucking heiress dazzled on the red carpet at a movie premiere with the ex-Beatle, her boyfriend of 18 months. Two days later, Shevell shielded herself behind a colleague, turning away from cameras recording a Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting where she cast a vote to raise city subway fares 25 percent.

Few who have seen Shevell photographed in Israel, Antigua and at the Grammy Awards with McCartney know of her other life as an executive at a New Jersey trucking company and board member of the nation's largest mass transit agency. But her public and behind-the-scene personas have collided more and more since the socialite began seeing McCartney in the Hamptons in late 2007.

Since January 2008, Shevell has missed four full board meetings, more than any voting member, according to MTA meeting minutes reviewed by The Associated Press. She attended one Finance Committee meeting in the past year, and has 26 absences total, according to the agency's records. Shevell skipped an MTA committee meeting approving a controversial fare hike the day she walked the red carpet in London. Since early 2008, the unpaid appointee has the worst attendance of any voting board member, sometimes missing meetings to travel around the world with McCartney.

Liza Marquez

Liza Marquez alleges that Caruso "engaged in an ongoing strategy of intimidation, isolation and control...with the goal of asserting and maintaining power…extending to all areas of her life and work during their relationship." Caruso's camp has yet to comment on the suit, which paints him as extremely jealous and quick to charge her with being unfaithful, at various points in their relationship accusing her of having affairs with his personal assistant and even her own cousin and making sexual advances to his best friend, as well as to actors Greg Kinnear and Billy Dee Williams.

Caruso and Marquez dated and lived together for three years, from 2004 to 2007, after meeting while Marquez was working as a travel coordinator on CSI: Miami. Per her suit, he promised Marquez that he would provide for her financially for the rest of her life and as such informed her that she "no longer needed to work, or should work, so that she could be there" for him.

During a stop in Paris in July 2004, she claims Caruso "asserted an irrational, jealous and abusive reaction" after she spoke to another man at an Internet café, and that he "proceeded to berate and emotionally abuse her" to the point where she was forced to "retreat to the bathroom and vomit." In the fall of 2004, during a Jane Goodall event in Malibu, Caruso allegedly became "enraged" when he spotted Marquez speaking to fellow partygoer Kinnear, launching into a three-hour tirade as to how "disrespectful her actions were and how humiliated he was."