Miami-Dade Schools Are Making Students Sign Anti-Vaping Pledges

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County School Board decided to consider installing sensors in school bathrooms to deal with what they called the epidemic of teens vaping on campus. The district is still researching that idea, but in the meantime has come up with a different solution: making kids sign…

Remember When Florida Dog Tracks Used Monkeys as Jockeys?

Almost 40 years ago, a query came into the Action Line, a long-gone Miami Herald column that pretty much played the role Google does today, answering obscure questions and giving out advice. The writer, “M. Weisbaum” of Plantation, had heard that dog-racing tracks once employed monkeys as jockeys. “This is…

Janet Jones Makes Women Top Dancers

All her life, dance has been a way of escape for Janet Jones. “When I danced,” she says, “everything would just flow out of me.” But when she was nearing the age of 30, the Miami native and former Heat dancer, believing it was time to grow up and get…

Zoo Miami’s Ron Magill Is a Friend to Fauna

He became the face of Zoo Miami entirely by accident. A passionate, lifelong animal lover, Ron Magill was the assistant curator of reptiles the day in 1986 when the zoo was hosting a news conference about endangered crocodiles born in captivity. It was an extremely rare, exciting moment, but you…

Miami’s Francis Suarez Wants to Be Strong Mayor

It’s just before 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in October, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is glad-handing with constituents at the Shenandoah Park recreation center. He shakes hands with a couple of uniformed cops and plants a kiss on an older woman’s cheek. Dressed in a trim navy suit, he…

Miami Artist Crowdfunds Gun Reform Billboard Along I-95

Stuart Sheldon’s oldest son was in elementary school the day 20 children were gunned down in their classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary. The idea of someone aiming an AR-15 at first-graders was the worst thing Sheldon could imagine, and when nothing changed in its aftermath, he responded the best way he…