The Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has exactly one job: act as a check on the state’s powerful local electricity monopolies such as Florida Power & Light. The board has to sign off on rate increases and regulates safety and service issues — but critics have long said the regulators are barely a rubber stamp.
Yesterday, in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum begged Gov. Rick Scott to take down a Confederate memorial in Tallahassee’s Old Capitol. Scott’s spokesperson sheepishly told reporters the governor had “received” Gillum’s statement. Nothing else.
Save Southern Heritage is a national network committed to keeping monuments to the pro-slavery South alive and gleaming across the nation. At least one member of the group from Virginia attended last weekend’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where mobs of white nationalists beat people with sticks and drove a car into dozens of peaceful counterprotesters.
For years, the FBI has been pushing police to adopt “rapid DNA” testing technology, which would let cops quickly obtain the kind of analysis that crime labs usually take months to pull from hair samples or cheek swabs. But privacy experts have long warned that the emerging technology could also lead to huge databases of DNA used for all sorts of reasons by the federal government or local forces.
Yesterday the pro-Confederate group Save Southern Heritage Florida issued a news release blaming leftists, members of the movement Antifa, and Black Lives Matter for the terror attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez is already a national embarrassment thanks to his yellow-bellied decision to cow to Donald Trump’s nationalistic immigration demands. Now, one of the most racist and ghoulish beings on Planet Earth will make that honor official by holding a speech in Miami tomorrow to praise our dear county mayor.
In June, a group of avowed white nationalists harassed a gathering of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who’d gathered in Hollywood to demand that the city change three streets named after Confederate generals and the original grand-wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive, multi-day PR boondoggle, the city…
Over the weekend, a white supremacist drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The terror attack killed 32-year-old Virginia civil rights activist Heather Heyer and severely injured 19 others. Police have charged the driver, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., with second-degree murder.
Last year, the Miami-Dade County Commission shot down a plan that would have forced local developers to include some affordable apartments in every new project. Commissioner Javier Souto claimed the idea was “social engineering,” one of the most profoundly stupid things said in South Florida politics this decade.
Yesterday news broke that team owner Jeffrey Loria will officially sell the Miami Marlins for $1.2 billion and return to living in the primordial bog that birthed him two millennia ago. Former Yankee Derek Jeter will invest $25 million of his own cash into the team, but the major money is coming from investor Bruce Sherman, who lives in Naples and appears to be only a marginal improvement over Loria.
At this point, it’s unclear why Opa-locka, the city of 16,000 people in Northwest Miami-Dade County, has a right to exist or what good the city government does for anyone. The city is transparently corrupt, money for basic public services has been squandered, and the police are forced to regularly…
In any race for the Florida governorship, it’s fair to question why a candidate’s political committee took $200,000 from a Ukrainian-born billionaire oligarch who owns a huge stake in an aluminum company with direct ties to the Kremlin. It’s doubly relevant in 2017, as Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans continue to question…
Well, that was fun while it lasted. A mere 24 hours after prominent Miami nightclub La Covacha — a staple of the local Latin American music scene for decades — posted a video of multiple women stripping nude to try to win some concert tickets, the City of Sweetwater has…
Eight months ago, A.J. Delgado, a Cuban-American Donald Trump campaign adviser from Miami, hinted that Trump’s original White House spokesperson, Jason Miller, was having an affair with someone on the campaign staff. After she called Miller the “2016 version of John Edwards,” Miller resigned, and Politico later confirmed that the rumors…
There are two tropical disturbances brewing in the Atlantic Ocean right now. It’s likely neither will hit Florida. One, called Invest 99L, very likely could become a depression, but current models predict it will loop back out toward the center of the ocean without hitting us. The other, a tropical wave floating over the Bahamas…
The clip begins with police lights blasting red and blue strobes across an entire block of NW Fourth Street in Fort Lauderdale. A teenage girl stands handcuffed next to a white Infinity SUV as her mother screams at the officers and asks what they’ve done wrong, what law they broke,…
Seawalls. Hotel lobbies designed to flood. Raising roads. Installing pumps to suck floodwater underground. Miami-area politicians have undertaken a smorgasbord of projects designed to mitigate the effects of climate-change and sea-level-rise in America’s most ocean-vulnerable city. But a massive federal report on climate change leaked to the New York Times today…
In August 2016, a group of campaign finance reform advocates tried to stage a protest inside Miami-Dade County Hall. The protesters, many of whom were elderly, were peaceful. Yet the Miami-Dade Police Department sent an officer to patrol the crowd with a semi-automatic weapon — terrifying some protesters, who said they…
Tomorrow, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine will take the media on a tour of the Miami Beach Convention Center to show off the half-billion-dollar renovation the city mounted to expand and modernize the building. The tour will, however, have to carefully step around huge swaths of water damage. According to…
On March 8, an Uber driver named Sergio Morales pulled over at 729 SW First Street at 2:30 a.m. to pick up a customer when Miami Police Department Officer Daniel Crocker rapped on the window. When the driver asked Crocker if he was a cop or a security guard, he says, the…
David Beckham formally announced his plans to bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami back in 2014. Hilariously, Beckham said at the time that he assumed the team would start playing in Miami by 2016 or 2017. In hindsight that turned out to be little more than a joke — those…
Black athletes who have fought for civil rights have always taken a huge hit. In 1967, Muhammad Ali convened the famed “Ali Summit” in Cleveland, a gathering of black superstars who were opposed to the Vietnam War, including basketball’s Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and football’s Jim Brown. Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad, begged Ali not to oppose the draft because the backlash would kill the boxer’s earning potential. Sports officials had already threatened to revoke Ali’s boxing license.
