The Coral Gables Police Department, which patrols one of the safest, richest parts of Miami-Dade County, inexplicably has two military-grade, tank-like armored trucks called Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected trucks (MRAPS). The department got the truck from the U.S. Department of Defense, which outfits local cops with military-grade equipment for free, so long…
Longtime Overtown residents and Miami historians will both tell you that highway overpasses destroyed the neighborhood. The formerly segregated community, which used to be called “Colored Town,” was full of renowned clubs, brightly colored homes, churches, and a thriving mix of Caribbean and African cultures that played itself out in city streets each day.
There comes a point in life when you grow tired of living in six-person apartments, swatting flies from the leftover pastelitos your roommate left congealing on the table, and cleaning up after the feral cats your other housemate insists on bringing into your tiny space. For a huge number of people, that desire comes right after college ends.
Here is a brief but not exhaustive list of negatives surrounding North Miami Beach’s plan to outsource its water utility to a massive private company: The FBI looked into the deal. So did the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office. The city’s own Public Utilities Commission did not sign off on the plan.
Mosquito season in Miami begins every year when the so-called black salt marsh mosquitoes, a buzzing cloud of bugs not known to carry the Zika virus or other tropical diseases, descends upon the area. The insects arrived a few weeks early this year — so, after sundown tonight, Miami-Dade County will send airplanes to blast naled, the controversial mosquito-killing pesticide, over wide portions of Homestead, the Redland, Florida City, Cutler Bay, and South Miami-Dade.
Look, not wanting to be associated with Donald Trump right now is totally understandable. After years of eating little but cake, overcooked flank steak, and McNuggets (and refusing to exercise due to a set of nutritional beliefs that appear to date from Elizabethan England), Trump’s brain seems so oxygen-starved that…
Miamians still don’t spend enough time worrying about global warming. Sure, we’ve got multiple city task forces dedicated to making sure Dade County isn’t underwater by the year 2100. But construction across town has continued to boom, to the point that it seems like real-estate developers believe they’re building in landlocked Colorado as opposed to a city that can adequately be described as “pre-Venice.”
On April 3, the City of North Miami Beach began negotiating with a global engineering firm to take over the city’s water utility, which services close to 200,000 people in North Miami-Dade. Clean-water activists vehemently opposed the move, citing research that water utilities run by private companies tend to get much more expensive over time and typically provide services at “cheaper” rates by cutting staff or services.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Bruno Barreiro would like to be a congressman. He announced this past week he’s officially running as a Republican to replace longtime incumbent Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a moderate GOP congresswoman who will retire this year (and likely can’t stand dealing with Donald Trump’s carnival sideshow any more days than she legally must).
Miami Rep. Carlos Curbelo is demonstrably full of shit. According to the Miami Herald’s Patricia Mazzei, before Curbelo voted to repeal Obamacare last week, the U.S. congressman recorded two video statements — one to explain if he voted for the measure and one to explain if he voted against it.
Hepatitis C is not all that difficult to treat. A class of drug called direct-acting antivirals, or DAAs, has been proven at least 90 percent effective in curing the condition. Just 1 percent of the U.S. population typically lives with hep C — but that rate is far higher, up to 17 percent, among state and federal prisoners.
Florida Power & Light, the ultrapowerful electricity monopoly, and its parent company, NextEra Energy, spend millions lobbying in Tallahassee and Washington. And those lobbyists spend most of their time arguing against changes FPL’s customers actually want, like the right to cheap home solar panels or better clean-air regulations. Sometimes, they…
Unlike Sen. Marco Rubio, Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart actually had the guts today to take a stand on President Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey, the FBI Director heading up an investigation into Trump’s Russia ties. Of course, celebrating the fact that Diaz-Balart even took some sort of position is an extremely…
The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan — a state and federal project to restore the Glades to some semblance of its former glory — passed in 2000. That plan called for a 360,000-acre-foot reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee. But in the years since, climate scientists have warned that planners underestimated the amount of water the Glades needs to replenish itself, and that the original benchmark might not be large enough.
As Milo Yiannopoulos descended from the second floor of a place he advertised as an “abandoned cocaine mansion” in Miami last Friday night with a python named “Jared” draped around his arms, two models hid in a bathroom to avoid being photographed with the infamous anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant troll, one of those women tells New Times.
Sportswriters are wringing their hands and moralizing over Robby Anderson, a New York Jets wide receiver who was arrested Sunday night at the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival. Anderson, 23, was booked on charges of resisting an officer with violence and obstruction; an arrest report New Times obtained claims…
South Florida deserves Milo Yiannopoulos. We live amid glittering monuments to humanity’s most self-obsessed impulses. And Yiannopoulos, the racist, trans-phobic, public-harassment demon king of the white supremacist alt-right, is narcissism incarnate. There’s a reason he announced last month that he’s moving here.
Florida is is in the midst of a deadly heroin public-health emergency. Yet the governor might soon sign a bill that public health advocates say would make the problem far worse by introducing new mandatory minimums instead of putting more money into treatment and prevention.
Well, we’ve pretty much survived another 60-day Florida legislative session. As in most years, this lawmaking period involved hatred toward immigrants, crazy ideas about guns, extremely mean and regressive laws aimed at drug addicts, rules designed to destroy the environment, and liberal use of the N-word…
The campaign to pass Amendment 2, last year’s state constitutional amendment that legalized medical marijuana for patients with illnesses including cancer and Alzheimer’s, was largely bankrolled by one of the wealthiest and most powerful trial lawyers in Florida, John Morgan.
On November 2, 2016, the Professional Law Enforcement Association, a police union, requested Miami-Dade County Police airport cop Mark Allen’s body-camera footage from the week of September 7 that year. According to MDPD bylaws, the department must preserve nonevidentiary footage for a minimum of 90 days — the union requested copies of Allen’s footage in less than 60.
Two South Florida congressmen are treating a vote to rip health care away from millions of Americans — the sort of thing that would kill people, including your grandparents and children — with the relative seriousness of choosing their dates for senior prom.
