Top 10 ski cities, USA

The best ski and snowboarding towns in the United States, as selected by contributors to the guidebook “Ski America & Canada”:

1. Park City, Utah

2. Crested Butte, Colo.

3. Stowe, Vt.

4. Ketchum, Idaho

5. Breckenridge, Colo.

6. Telluride, Colo.

7. North Conway/Jackson, N.H.

8. Steamboat, Colo.

9. Taos, N.M.

10. Manchester, Vt.

Florida’s Hollywood pins hopes on resort

Hollywood, Fla. (ap) After two years of construction, an $800 million luxury hotel has opened here and the locals hope it will juice-up the economy and bring back the tourists.

The Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa, named after the fabled Diplomat Hotel built in 1958 in Miami Beach and torn down 40 years later, will create 1,050 jobs and liven up a now quiet strip of Hollywood and Hallandale beaches.

Its opening Jan. 31 was met with joy by Hollywood officials, who have planned the city’s tourist economy around the project and say the Diplomat will be to Hollywood what Disney is to Orlando.

The original Diplomat Hotel was part of the Miami area’s glitzy past, when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Liza Minelli played concerts there and expensive parties were held in its Regency ballrooms.

With 1,058 rooms and 200,000 square feet of convention space, it is billed as the most expensive hotel project in South Florida history. The 39-story building, just a mile north of the Miami-Dade County line and about eight miles south of Fort Lauderdale, is also the tallest in Broward County.