Arguably the biggest stain on Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s 24-year record involves the death of a mentally ill man. In 2012, witnesses claimed four prison guards at Dade Correctional Institution scalded schizophrenic inmate Darren Rainey to death inside a jerry-rigged prison shower as punishment for soiling himself.
When a University of Miami student told a dean in 2013 that she’d been raped and was now being stalked by the rapist, the dean offered no help and told her to “avoid those situations” where she’d run into her assailant. Later, that same dean told the victim to “feel bad” for her rapist because he “did not have many friends”…
More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that no other developed nation subjects its citizens to a nightmarishly cruel health-care system that forces people to sell their homes to pay for cancer treatment. Many have realized that, through a combination of strict price controls and/or straight-up nationalized health care…
While tens of thousands of Floridians were without electricity or internet this week, Senate Republicans were busy devising new and ingenious ways to strip health care from millions of people. Now that most Floridians have cell-phone service again, they should spend the week calling Sen. Marco Rubio…
North Miami state Sen. Daphne Campbell has been ensnared in a remarkable series of corruption scandals throughout her career. But even for Campbell, her response to Hurricane Irma was nothing short of jaw-dropping. This past Saturday night, Campbell held a post-Irma “relaxation” party, complete with pizza, massages, and Scientologists, because of course she did.
Florida Power and Light, Miami’s regulated electricity monopoly, has been collecting extra fees from its customers (everyone in South and East Florida) since Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005 to gird its power grid against tropical storms. But after Hurricane Irma knocked out power to roughly 90 percent of FPL customers…
If Florida Gov. Rick Scott is wearing his blue U.S. Navy hat, it’s probably time to seek shelter. He pulls it on pretty much only when disaster is nigh. Once the National Hurricane Center begins warning that a storm is heading toward Florida, the blue brimmed beauty magically materializes on the top of his head. He never mentions it. It’s just there, covering his waxy turtle head, and we’re supposed to act like we don’t notice.
Hurricane Irma did more than decimate the Florida Keys — as Politico reporter Marc Caputo pointed out earlier this week, to “decimate” actually means to destroy every tenth person or thing, and Irma seems to have flattened much more than that in Monroe County. The same goes for Southwest Florida, and…
There’s a special place in Hell for people who price-gouge the poor and charge $99 for cases of water during a hurricane. But dangling directly above those people, locked inside cages with no room to stand or lie down, Satan has reserved a few extra spaces for pundits who waste valuable column inches…
The South Dade Center is a subsidized housing project for the huge farmworker community in Homestead, the rural town south of Miami that has been repeatedly blasted by hurricanes since Andrew hit in 1992. Most of the area’s residents are of Mexican or Central American descent and make little money working in the sun-baked fields and plant nurseries that feed the rest of Florida.
Four days after Irma, millions of Floridians are still stuck without power in the sweltering summer heat. Those outages have now killed eight elderly people trapped in a Hollywood nursing home without air conditioning, due to circumstances that FPL was warned about at least two days before the tragedy.
Most of South Florida remains in the dark after Hurricane Irma, and with each day that passes without power, tragedies become more likely. Today, five nursing home patients in Hollywood succumbed to the Florida heat and died early this morning. Broward County officials said three died at the property on 1200…
If you steal three pairs of shoes from Foot Locker, a worldwide retail chain that made a $664 million profit in 2016, Florida’s news stations will broadcast images of you stealing things on TV, Fox News will call you a menace to society, and people will tweet about how you…
If the latest projections are accurate, Hurricane Irma’s devastating eyewall won’t hit Miami’s downtown, urban core. Since this morning, the models have shifted west and suggest the heart of the storm is more likely to nail the Southwest Florida coast after plowing straight over the Florida Keys. But the latest…
Miamians who’ve lived here for more than 25 years have likely spent the week telling war stories about surviving Hurricane Andrew in 1992, reminding themselves how they rode out the storm. But there’s ample evidence Irma is a storm unlike anything South Florida has seen before. For one, it’s projected…
With roughly 72 hours before Hurricane Irma is projected to hit Miami as a Category Four or Five storm, weather forecasts continue to get worse for central Miami. In response, County Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced just after 2:15 today that he’s expanding the mandatory evacuation zones across the area: Those…
If you live on any of Miami-Dade County’s barrier islands or low-lying coastal areas, now is the time to get out. After hurricane forecasts put Miami square in the center of Hurricane Irma’s path, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez late Wednesday ordered a mandatory evacuation of all residents of barrier…
Hurricane Irma forecasts this morning seemed to give Miami a glimmer of hope. The world’s major storm-modeling programs showed Irma inching closer toward the Atlantic Ocean, and potentially missing South Florida entirely much like Hurricane Matthew did last year. The National Hurricane Center’s latest update offered no such respite. This…
As of 11 a.m., Hurricane Irma drifted toward the Leeward Islands with winds churning at 180 mph, which makes the storm the strongest ever recorded outside the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Miami got lucky during last year’s hurricane season — the Category 5 Hurricane Matthew barely missed the city and wound up making landfall on the north end of Florida. But things don’t quite look as good right now: The Category 5 Hurricane Irma is rapidly approaching the Caribbean, and is…
A few Miami politicians are trying to make it safer to ride a bike here. Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell has pushed for painted bike lanes downtown, which cyclists love but drivers now blame for screwing up traffic patterns in the area. But anyone who’s ever ridden a bike here…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group is one of the most powerful private-prison companies in America — and a major player in state and federal politics. GEO throws campaign money at Florida lawmakers from both parties: Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson, Gov. Rick Scott, Reps. Carlos Curbelo and Mario Diaz-Balart,…
