Just last year, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called Breitbart News — the cartoonishly racist conservative news site that birthed Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ben Shapiro — “not a credible source.” In February 2016, Rubio told Fox News that Breitbart is a website that peddles “conspiracies.” (For once, he wasn’t lying.) Breitbart responded by bashing Rubio throughout the 2016 election cycle.
The Virgina-based company Libre by Nexus has an obvious financial incentive to make sure the United States continues deporting increasing numbers of immigrants: It offers steeply priced bail bonds to people trapped in immigration court. Over the past few years, Libre by Nexus has been accused of exploiting immigrants trapped in the nation’s kangaroo-court deportation system…
According to virtually every sociologist except Harvard University’s George Borjas, the Mariel Boatlift in the 1980s did not hurt the wages of the Miamians who were already living here. In fact, some research shows the huge influx of Cuban migrants raised city wages in the long term.
Miami flooded in biblical proportions last night thanks in part to rising seas and a warming planet. This goes without saying, but the deluge devastated Miami Beach business owners, people who own oceanfront property, and anyone who likes driving on streets that aren’t underwater.
Miami Beach has the second most properties threatened by rising seas in the world, so the city recently sank $500 million into a Sisyphean project to install up to 80 anti-flood pumps across the city. Though the system has helped suck away sunny-day tidal flooding, independent engineers have warned…
Well, uh, don’t drive in Miami right now. Thanks to the remnants of yesterday’s Tropical Storm Emily (which has since weakened to a depression), most of Miami Beach and a big chunk of downtown Miami sit under something close to a foot of water. Cars can’t move, trees have fallen into roads, and a flash-flood warning has been issued for Miami Beach until 5:45 p.m.
In Florida, speeding tickets cost a heck of a lot more if you’re driving more than 10 mph over the speed limit. As anyone who’s ever been pulled over knows, the interaction with an officer can sometimes resemble a negotiation: If you play your cards right, you could get off with a warning or perhaps a cheaper ticket for, ahem, getting caught driving exactly 79 mph on the highway instead of 80.
Last week, Democratic IT staffer Imran Awan was arrested for alleged bank fraud. In and of itself, that news would rate as a relatively minor political scandal. But Awan worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who inspires some of the weirdest conspiracy theories on Capitol Hill.
This past Friday, Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd of cops and told them to bang their suspects’ heads against their cruisers, in a clear endorsement of police brutality. So far, only two Miami-area police chiefs have stepped up and said publicly that Trump’s comments were wrong, and none did so voluntarily.
South Florida has the highest HIV rate in America thanks in part to intravenous drug use. But the head of the Miami’s police union, Javier Ortiz, has now repeatedly called for the city to kill a program designed to slow the rate of AIDS infections and save the lives of IV drug addicts.
So, uh, bodies might be buried in the backyard of a historic pump house on Miami’s Upper Eastside. The building, which was built in the 1920s, at one time was the home of serial killer Robert Bowman, and a New Times feature story published this week details that when cops were questioning Bowman in 1982 over the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl from Ohio, Bowman said he had killed someone else and buried the body behind the pump house.
Miami could very well become a tropical Venice — a balmy city with flooded streets where gondola operators ferry tourists past palm trees for a few dollars’ worth of tips.
It’s unclear what, if anything, Florida Rep. Charlie Crist believes. He won the Florida governorship as a Republican, spent his second term as an independent, and is now serving in Washington as a Democrat. He is a tanned, spineless nothing, a man with a backbone of a sea cucumber and apparently half the brain.
Modern-day robber barons Charles and David Koch inherited a glut of cash that their father Fred made in part by building a Nazi oil refinery for Adolf Hitler, according to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer’s landmark 2016 book Dark Money. Charles and David later turned their father’s company into Koch Industries…
Florida Power & Light, the third-largest utility in America and the private monopoly that Miamians are forced to pay for power every month, proposed building a coal-fired power plant as late as 2007 before state regulators forced the company to reconsider its plans. FPL still generates most of its power using natural gas, a fossil fuel that creates less carbon than coal but still pollutes the atmosphere and is dug from the ground using the carbon-intensive fracking process.
In May, New Times broke the news that Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the top prosecutor in a county of 2.7 million people, had not closed an investigation into the 2009 killing of Lawrence McCoy, a semihomeless man who was shot to death by a disgraced Miami Beach Police officer.
From Henry Flagler to Big Sugar, abusing the environment is a proud Florida pastime. The Sunshine State is a natural wonder, full of rare birds, beautiful fish, and people hellbent on killing every last living thing they encounter. Take, for instance, this week: On Monday, Capt. Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, the infamous Miami shark hunter New Times profiled in 2016, caught a group of would-be anglers torturing a shark by dragging it behind their boat until it died.
If Bruce Matheson wants to tank a real-estate deal, the heir to one of the richest and oldest families in all of Miami knows how to do it. Through sheer force of will, he’s successfully prevented the ultra-rich owners of the Miami Open tennis tournament from plowing over portions of Crandon Park…
If there are two things Floridians are fantastic at, it’s wrestling alligators and racketeering. This week, New Times chronicled one group of particularly enterprising Sunshine State residents who combined the two: an alligator-thieving ring that took the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission two years of undercover tracking to nab.
Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is already leaking dangerous salt water into the aquifers that are Miami’s largest source of drinking water. Despite that alarming fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently ruled that FPL can move forward with a plan to build two new…
Another day, another Florida Democratic Party official saying something racist, xenophobic, or otherwise offensive. Loose, extremely stupid lips have already gotten several Florida Democratic officials in trouble this year: Party Chair Stephen Bittel called the Democratic Black Caucus “children,” and the party’s second-in-command, Sally Boynton Brown, was taped saying poor…
The last time O.J. Simpson lived in Miami, he allegedly spiraled into drug addiction, had the FBI raid his house, and by most accounts allowed the city’s worst impulses to totally consume him. According to the recent documentary O.J.: Made in America, the football star-turned-accused murderer sank deep…
