The owners, management and staff of 1230 WBVP and 1460 WMBA wish you a very healthy and prosperous New Year.

Revelers around the world have welcomed the new year with tight security, prayers, fireworks and a crystal ball. Some Californians rang in 2018 by smoking marijuana, minutes after the state joined the list of places allowing recreational pot. In New York, as the glittering crystal ball dropped in Times Square, a crowd of about one million rang in the new year. Earlier, spectacular fireworks lit up the skies in Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.

President Donald Trump welcomed in the new year with a lavish party at his private club in South Florida. Joining friends at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump told reporters that he expects the new year to be tremendous and predicted the stock market would continue to gain ground and that companies return to the U-S at a rapid clip.

More than six dozen marijuana retailers have been licensed to start selling recreational pot in California today. The start of legal retail marijuana sales comes more than two decades after California paved the way for legal weed by passing the first medical marijuana law in the U-S. Alex Traverso, a spokesman for the state’s bureau of cannabis control, says the agency worked thru the weekend to process as many licenses as possible.

Costa Rican investigators are looking into what caused a charter aircraft to crash in woods in the country’s northwest soon after takeoff, killing 10 U-S citizens and two local crew members. A relative and a rabbi identified five of the dead as a family from a New York City suburb who were in Costa Rica on vacation. The pilot was a cousin of a former Costa Rican president.