American Traffic Solutions (ATS) certainly seems to be one of the most hated companies in America. The Arizona-based firm runs red-light-camera ticketing services for hundreds of cities and counties across the nation. If you’ve ever been fined $150 after a camera caught you driving through an intersection, you can probably blame that company.
Ditech, one of America’s largest home-loan companies, achieved fame in the 1990s with TV commercials that showed its competitors complaining they had “lost another loan to Ditech.” The company largely vanished during the 2008 housing crisis but has since rebounded and remains one of the largest mortgage service firms in America. It brings in revenues in excess of $1 billion per year and handles thousands of home-foreclosure cases annually.
Pascual Diaz-Plasencia was arrested on misdemeanor drug possession charges June 29, 2012, after police caught him with less than 20 grams of marijuana. Diaz-Plasencia had recently undergone a kidney transplant and had to take a set of pills twice daily to ensure his body didn’t reject the organ.
This past July, a group of young Florida bros filmed themselves dragging a live shark behind a boat until the poor thing disintegrated into a bloody pulp. The crew of numbskulls then sent the clip to Miami’s infamous shark hunter, Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, because they thought the famed fisherman would find the footage entertaining.
Mention the cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station around a local environmentalist, and you’ll likely get to watch that activist’s face turn all shades of red and purple. Florida Power & Light owns the plant in South Miami-Dade, and evidence strongly suggests FPL has known for decades that the plant’s canals were leaking saltwater into the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami’s largest source of drinking water.
The North Miami Police Department’s interim chief, Larry Juriga, claimed in a lawsuit two years ago that the police department “discriminated” against him for being a “white redneck.” As ridiculous as that claim might be, it seems another NMPD officer (and reported friend of Juriga’s) is so incensed about racial diversity…
Art Basel teaches you that rich people are exceedingly weird. They’re the people you see walking around San Francisco or Manhattan in Balenciaga shoes, the folks who seem really normal and put together and content to be driving their steel-gray Mercedes sedans from venture-capital pitch to venture-capital pitch.
On Saturday, November 11, 65,000 delirious fans packed Hard Rock Stadium for the University of Miami’s biggest home game in years against the hated Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Bars swelled with orange-and-green-clad crowds, and closer to UM’s campus, raucous house parties erupted. One of the largest bacchanals was at a residential home in the nearby neighborhood of Glenvar Heights, where partiers arrived by the busload.
Florida Democrats are, for the most part, huge failures. Democrats outnumber Republicans in both Miami-Dade County and in the state as a whole — but they’re so terrible at messaging that local and state politics are dominated by GOP wackadoodles. During Donald Trump’s first year in office, one would think…
It wasn’t just media hype: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents really did ramp up their enforcement efforts during Donald Trump’s first year in office. According to year-end figures ICE released yesterday, the agency arrested 6,192 immigrants in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands this year — a 75 percent jump from last year, in which only 3,524 people were apprehended.
The New York Times yesterday chronicled how conservative megadonors such as the Koch brothers are funding so-called grassroots, door-to-door campaigns to drum up support for the GOP tax bill, which will hand billions of dollars to the nation’s richest at the expense of the poor and middle class. The Times followed volunteers in Miami…
Donald Trump’s decision yesterday to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel pissed off the United Nations, the European Union, virtually all of America’s allies, Palestinian people everywhere, and even the pope. Intelligence analysts are so worried about an upswell of violence that U.S. diplomats have been ordered to stay away from the city until further notice.
Miami Beach’s complete ineptitude when it comes to building affordable housing would be funny if it weren’t screwing over taxpayers and the poor. Earlier this year, the city admitted its affordable-housing practices had failed to create homes that the city’s workforce can use, thereby forcing many of the food-service workers and housekeepers to make hours-long bus commutes on and off the barrier island every day.
During this year’s state legislative session, a bill transparently designed to cripple labor unions came close enough to passing that Florida public schoolteachers had to go on a PR blitz to beg lawmakers not to rip their rights away. Teachers, nurses, housekeepers, and every other union-protected industry breathed a sigh of relief when the measure failed during the 2017 legislative session — but the bill has been revived verbatim for 2018 and yesterday passed through its first voting hurdle toward becoming law.
The Art Basel traffic apocalypse is nigh. Gridlock looms over the horizon. For local residents who plan on staying indoors this weekend, it’s time to buy bread and milk and screw in some hurricane shutters. For visitors and Basel partygoers, however, the weekend’s horrible, recurring traffic problems are but a…
The Miami-Dade County Commission must sign off on any grants or funding requests county police ask for. But at today’s commission meeting, elected officials will be asked to retroactively approve a $450,000 Department of Justice grant that MDPD oddly already applied for. Even more…
Today, a group of pro-immigration protesters gathered outside the building housing the offices of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart to demand protection for Dreamers, who were brought undocumented to the U.S. as children. Local police quickly began harassing their small group of activists, seven of whom,…
Regularly reading Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Twitter feed is a great way to step into the mind of someone with a cerebral hemorrhage. Sentences made mere hours apart contradict one another, phrases lose all meaning, concepts such as “dignity” and “self-respect” are put through a figurative wood chipper.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a hall-of-fame-level cretin, plans to vote on a tax bill that will redistribute billions of dollars from the poor to the rich, exacerbate the nation’s terrifying problems with income inequality, and force more poor Americans into bankruptcy while cutting taxes for major corporations and conglomerates. Because Rubio is a monster…
If you’ve been delaying your visit to Miami’s Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, or the 18th-century Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, now is the time to make arrangements. The same goes for scientists: If you’re planning, say, a study of the indigenous civilizations that lived in the Everglades thousands of years before Europeans arrived, start digging tomorrow.
Jeremy Bernstein, a 42-year-old who spends half his year in Miami Beach, says he has lost about $4,000 trying to sell Pepe the Frog-themed hot sauce to the racists and neo-Nazis on 4chan, Twitter, and the rest of the dark, sweaty armpit of the internet who worship the alt-right meme.
Major companies love to use Art Basel Miami Beach, a flytrap for rich people who have enough spare money to jet around the world and get so blitzed they black out and buy Basquiat paintings, as a testing ground for ideas and eye-catching publicity stunts. Last year, for example, Uber let people order sea-plane and luxury-yacht rides across Biscayne Bay.
