Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The State of Florida is nearly ready to approve a major project from Florida Power & Light, but environmentalists are adamant that it could irreparably harm the Everglades. There are so many scandals swirling around FPL’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station…
Affordability is the most pressing political issue in Miami. City and county officials continue approving luxury-rental complexes in the Magic City despite a leviathan of data telling them to stop because they’re actively contributing to a housing crisis.
Florida’s United for Care campaign spent two full election cycles — 2014 and 2016 — drafting, fighting, and pushing Floridians to legalize medicinal cannabis for demonstrably sick people. Last year, 72 percent of Floridians voted to amend the state constitution to legalize medical weed for people with diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. Now it’s up to the Florida Legislature to adopt medical marijuana rules.
Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine might genuinely be the nation’s closest Democratic relative to Donald Trump. Levine can’t stop himself from tweeting out garbage: He spent last week calling the right-leaning Sunshine State News “#FakeJournalism,” for one. Then he spent Friday on an emoji-laden Twitter tirade against Airbnb, the home-sharing company that Levine is working hard to ban from the city.
For now, Donald Trump can dismiss New York Times reports about his incompetence as “fake” and get away with it, because without knowing who’s leaking White House information, Americans will always have a sliver of doubt about whether Trump’s administration can really have become such a deranged Tilt-a-Whirl.
Pro tip for any organization with a public social media page: Don’t fight with critics using the company account — especially people accusing you of furthering rape culture by apologizing for someone accused of sexual assault. That’s pretty much exactly what WPLG Local 10’s Twitter account did today. The station’s official account launched a petty fight against New Times staff writer Jessica Lipscomb…
This week, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s office will release a report detailing how the county could sell or lease 2.8 million square feet of publicly owned downtown land to developers. The vague plan is already sparking outcry, but it turns out one concrete negotiation in the proposal is already underway: All Aboard Florida, the company behind the Gov. Rick Scott-tied Brightline train system, is already in talks with Dade to bulldoze part of the county hall complex.
Greg Steube is a nightmare. Steube, a lawyer and military veteran, represented Sarasota in the Florida House of Representatives for six years before earning a promotion to the Florida Senate in 2016. With larger shoes to fill, Steube now appears to be swinging for the fences. He’s chucked a remarkable number of bills against the wall in the hopes that some will stick — and nearly all of them are next-level bananas.
After weeks of fiery protests and a contentious vote of support from the Miami-Dade County Commission, Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s move to back Donald Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities has been tossed out in court as unconstitutional. Miami-Dade Judge Milton Hirsch made the ruling Friday morning.
Ifoxa Predestin has worked for the City of Miami’s Department of Solid Waste for the past 11 years. His life as a sanitation worker has been full of surprises — some good, some bad. The good: In 2015, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado honored him at a city commission meeting after Predestin used CPR to save a 2-year-old girl’s life on the job.
Any sane person running Miami-Dade County would take a look at downtown’s traffic-clogged streets and crane-packed sky and realize developers are already running roughshod over the town. Such a reasonable leader might understand that failing to regulate sprawling developments had left the city in dire need of more open, green space.
Tamarac, a sprawling South Florida suburb, is not all that special. For starters, the city’s name doesn’t come from a special natural wonder like a lake or, as it was long rumored, a nearby Native American tribe. No, the city was simply named for a local car wash called Caramat. “Tamarac” is just “Caramat” spelled backward. Caramat’s owner, Ken Behring, founded the city.
It turns out the city where Diddy punched Drake in the face, Nicki Minaj made fun of a homeless person, Joaquin Phoenix fought a fake heckler, Pitbull built a thriving rap career, and Cuba Gooding Jr. ate a smartphone has something of a drinking problem when it goes clubbing. Who knew?
Things that are not true: Denzel Washington endorsed Donald Trump; Miley Cyrus is leaving the country now that Trump is president; Barack Obama is about to be charged with treason. Things that are true: According to a BuzzFeed News investigation, two dudes are cranking out totally false headlines from a house in Miami as part of a huge bipartisan #FakeNews operation.
On June 30, 2015, Miami dentist Jesus Enrique Del Valle’s Ranger Rover hit a landscape worker on the road in Miami Beach, reportedly leaving the victim with permanent brain damage. But police say Del Valle didn’t stop to see if the worker was OK. Instead, he drove to a body shop owned by his girlfriend’s cousin to hide the damage to his SUV, the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office says. Del Valle apparently couldn’t cover the repairs in cash alone and needed an insurance quote, so he called Florida Highway Patrol Officer David Casillas to write a fake accident report.
The Miami-Dade Police handbook presumably does not authorize random joyrides to commit revenge beatings. In fact, that’s an idea so boneheaded it sounds like a technique Tammany Hall cops used during the 1863 New York City draft riots.
Recent reports suggest U.S. Customs and Border Protection is giddy about Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Department of Homeland Security agents have been ready to “take the shackles off” for years and feel “a new freedom to deport” under Trump.
Solutions to Miami’s slow-simmering Zika virus crisis have included the following: fumigating the city with possibly dangerous pesticides; releasing bats into the sky, Hunter S. Thompson-style; desperately avoiding Zika “hot zones”; and genetically modifying the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito so they all die.
In addition to being a charlatan, power-grabber, and unbridled coward, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is also just really, really bad at lying. He doesn’t lie like Donald Trump, who vomits falsehoods so outlandish that they take four full news-cycle days to rebut. He also doesn’t lie like, say, most mainstream Democrats, who promise people things such as universal health care or student-loan forgiveness every four years while blatantly knowing they won’t accomplish any of those things while in office.
The Muslim son of America’s most famous boxer says he was stopped at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, questioned twice about his religion, and then held for at about two hours this past February 7.
Sen. Marco Rubio did not show up to a citizen-initiated town-hall meeting held in South Miami-Dade County last night. He was replaced by something that many of his constituents believe might be more useful: an empty suit that said and did nothing all night.
Marco Rubio spent the first half of the week in Europe on some sort of mystery tour through Germany and/or France. Details of that trip are remarkably scarce — but in that time, the U.S. senator from Florida used the journey as an excuse to skip out on a citizen-organized town-hall meeting in Tampa.
