In January, experts from the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere issued Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez a stern warning: If he bowed to President Donald Trump’s toothless demand to crack down on so-called sanctuary communities, they said, he’d be opening the county up to expensive lawsuits.
Evan Ross is a little-known but well-connected lobbyist in Miami-Dade County. He’s also fairly active within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party: He’s the former chair of the Miami-Dade Young Democrats and is now a precinct captain within the local party. He’s used to operating behind the scenes and keeping a low profile in the local press.
Data shows Florida’s Stand Your Ground law is awful. The rule lets you kill anyone you want in self-defense, even if you’re the person who started a fight. In the years since the law went into effect, the state’s murder rate has shot up dramatically. The law has been used to exonerate…
When the weather in this town is just right, the sunbeams stretch down and light up the hard, oiled bodies sunning themselves on the beach, those glistening men and women eyeing one another voraciously along the surf. It’s like the appetizer for a nighttime buffet. Later on, a throng of …
Well, 2017 is officially halfway over — and when it comes to crime news, Miami always crams more insanity into six months than most cities do in a year. This year has been no different: We’ve been subjected to a handful of criminal plots that could each form the basis of a true-crime Netflix series.
These days, #Resisting Trump apparently encompasses a really broad spectrum of activities. On one hand, you’ve got your labor activists fighting for living wages, housing advocates battling for affordable homes, and a growing base of voters in both parties calling their representatives and asking them to institute single-payer healthcare. On…
A major study released this month warned that fetuses and babies who come in contact with naled, the hotly debated organophosphate pesticide Miami-Dade County uses to kill mosquitoes, could actually develop motor-skill issues as they get older. The study adds to the growing pile of research that suggests organophosphate pesticide exposure…
Across the nation, voters have asked for civilian-led police advisory panels, which review complaints about police separately from departments themselves. There’s a simple reason: Internal affairs officers often act to shield problem cops from discipline, while civilian-led panels can act independently to weed out bad cops.
Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach this year spawned two scandals over casually racist politicians. City Commissioner Michael Grieco, who is running an embattled campaign for mayor, demanded the city cancel Urban Beach Week, the city’s largest celebration centered on black tourists, after two people were shot this year, including one killed by cops.
Miami-Dade County’s median income — a scant $44,000 — is remarkably low compared to virtually every other city of its size. This creates a whole host of problems for local and longtime residents. International billionaires jack up the city’s property values, inflating rental prices and forcing Miamians to either leave town or spend the highest share of their income on rent compared to residents of any other American city.
A Miami Herald series earlier this year showed that Miami Beach’s luxury hotels — built for real-estate magnates, international billionaires, pro athletes, and reality stars — are staffed by low-earning housekeepers who can’t afford rent on the Beach and are forced to spend hours riding buses every day. The state minimum wage, capped at $8.15 per hour, has not kept up with the city’s luxury-level rents, and living a humane distance from work is virtually impossible.
In a Facebook Live session with his constituents last week, Sen. Marco Rubio laid out the things he wanted to see in the U.S. Senate’s then-secret Obamacare repeal package. He listed four criteria that would push him to vote in favor of the plan: Whether it protected people with preexisting conditions…
Local Democrats seem to have made their opinion very clear: They want Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, to resign over her decision not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black, schizophrenic inmate who some witnesses said was scalded to death inside a burning-hot prison shower.
Lutze Segu, a black civil rights advocate, thought she had chosen a safe location Saturday for her seminar on ending white supremacy. Segu, who holds similar meetings around South Florida, gathered a group of activists at the Stonewall National Museum in Wilton Manors, one of the nation’s premier LGBTQ museums, in a city that’s at least friendly to white cisgender gay men.
Hollywood, Florida, has three streets named for men who murdered people in order to keep black people enslaved. One of those three people also helped found the Ku Klux Klan. Hollywood has known about this for years, because efforts to rename the street signs only really jump-started after New Times Broward-Palm Beach’s Chris Joseph wrote a story in 2015 pointing out the real history of the streets’ namesakes.
On Wednesday, a small group of black-rights activists gathered outside city hall in Hollywood, Florida to ask that the city to stop honoring three Confederate Generals — Robert E. Lee, John Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest — with named streets. Forrest, in addition to being a general in the army…
Somewhere across the mystical river Acheron, the River of Woe, deep down in the darkest pits of the Malebolge, the undead servants of Hell are picking open a new prison in Cocytus, the frozen lake where God has permanently trapped Satan in the Homeric underworld. They await the arrival of a new Prince of Darkness, a Bringer of Sadness, a Miami man named Adrian Abramovich, who is accused of making 96 million illegal telemarketing robocalls in just three months…
Some of Miami’s business and political elite have argued that because it might be impossible to stop the effects of climate change, we should let the city flood, capitalize on it, and perhaps become a 21st-century Venice. Vanity Fair has reported that some Miami high-rises are now being built with “washout floors” designed to take consistent flooding.
A group of racial justice advocates gathered outside Hollywood, Florida’s city hall yesterday with a simple request: Change the names of streets honoring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, John Bell Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was also the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
In March, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle decided not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black prisoner with severe schizophrenia who multiple witnesses said had been placed in a scalding-hot prison shower and burned to death. Rainey had been serving a nonviolent cocaine-possession sentence.
Hollywood, Florida contains three streets that need new names ASAP. One is named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who has absolutely no ties to Hollywood, Florida. Another is named for John Bell Hood, who also fought to keep slavery legal in the United States. And the third is, astoundingly,…
Fritz Severe’s family believes police had no need to shoot him dead June 11, 2015. Severe was homeless, unarmed, and not posing much of a threat to anyone. He was standing in a park outside the Culmer/Overtown Branch Library and holding a three-foot-long metal pipe. According to the Miami Herald, a park worker called 911 to complain that Severe might have been bothering nearby children attending summer camp. But other witnesses said Severe was in the park every day and always carried his “little stick.”
