As a young immigrant to Miami, Haitian activist Marleine Bastien said she used to walk past the Sabal Apartments on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti — and the apartments used to be entirely full of Haitian people. In the years since, the project has switched owners, and names, and…
Most citygoers love Uber, but taxi drivers can’t stand the ride-sharing app. The company has successfully “disrupted” the taxi industry, put drivers out of business, and led to mass protests in the United States and Europe. Now Uber’s new business model could put its own drivers out of business: The company has launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh, where self-driving cars ferry Uber passengers from stop to stop.
After a wave of protests, Ohio Gov. John Kasich last month vetoed a bill that would have banned abortions in Ohio after six weeks — a period before many women even know they’re pregnant. Kasich received a brief round of applause before turning around and signing a 20-week abortion ban. Anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life still applauded Kasich’s decision, stating the “20-week ban was nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America.”
Just so we’re clear, Marco Rubio is, by his own admission, not a scientist. He might actually be a large, brain-eating amoeba infecting the South Florida water supply. But whether he’s a living human senator or single-celled malignant disease, he sure talks like someone who knows next to nothing about the environment. He once blamed Miami’s flooding on “higher sea levels or whatever may be happening” and has said throughout his career that he doesn’t think human-made climate change is real.
Stephen Bittel, a billionaire real-estate developer from Miami Beach, would like to lead the Florida Democratic Party. Most Miami Democrats see no issue with that. Bittel has been donating money to political campaigns for years and has helped prop up politicians such as U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Miamians adore Moonlight, the Barry Jenkins-directed paean to growing up poor, black, and gay in the Liberty City projects, because it truly gets Miami. Take a scene near the end, when the main character, Chiron, drives his long-lost love interest, Kevin, down Biscayne Boulevard and Kevin mentions he doesn’t have a car. Chiron is aghast — life without a car in Miami must be hell, he opines.
In addition to tearing apart communities and undermining public respect for cops, police brutality is really effing expensive. When an officer punches someone who doesn’t deserve it, taxpayers can be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements and legal fees.
After yesterday’s tragic mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Florida’s political leaders offered their “thoughts and prayers” while doing absolutely nothing to address the nation’s gun-control issues.
Had there been more guns at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Sarasota state Sen. Greg Steube says, today’s tragic shooting might have been prevented. So he’s sticking by a bill he filed December 9 that would allow Floridians to openly carry guns in Sunshine State airports.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office has confirmed five people are dead in a shooting in Terminal 2 at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Few issues unite Miamians across the political spectrum like the consistently frustrating, for-pay express lanes running north-south on I-95. Some critics claim the lanes kill people. Others say they let rich people pay to drive without traffic. But everyone can agree that few things are more infuriating that sitting in four lanes of dead-still traffic while two perfectly usable lanes sit empty across a makeshift lane barrier.
A little more than a year ago, activist Marleine Bastien stood outside on a clear December day, waving signs in front of the headquarters of Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami, her Little Haiti-based women’s rights organization. The group was demanding one thing from the City of Miami: Slow the rapidly snowballing pace of gentrification in the historically working-class Caribbean neighborhood.
The West Perrine community where Jamar Rollins lived is still reeling from his December 30 shooting death at the hands of Miami-Dade County Police officers. Though MDPD says Rollins pointed a gun at cops before he was shot last month, eyewitnesses contend that Rollins’ hands were raised and that he did not own a gun. (A gun was recovered from the scene, police say.)
Fabricated rape allegations — the type where someone falsely accuses another person of rape just to hurt that person — are statistically rare. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that between 2 and 10 percent of sexual assault allegations are made up, and women’s rights activists say the few high-profile fake accusations discourage real survivors of sexual assault from reporting crimes.
When Stephen Bittel, a wealthy Democratic megadonor from Miami Beach, announced plans to run for the top job at the Florida Democratic Party, pushback was inevitable. Bittel, who made the majority of his fortune selling properties on Lincoln Road, is the public face of Florida Strong, an organization that donates Koch brothers-style “dark money” to Democratic candidates. Many progressive Florida Democrats disliked Bittel’s modus operandi.
South Florida is full of drivers who treat stop lights like vague suggestions. So the area is also full of red-light cameras, which ticket motorists who plow through intersections with reckless abandon. Those cameras can be annoying — who wants to dish out $150 every time they run a yellow? — but there’s some evidence to suggest they can cut down on deadly crashes.
Miami Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo love to position themselves among the most center-leaning GOP members in Congress. Ros-Lehtinen is passionately pro-LGBT rights. Curbelo ran for reelection as a hard #NeverTrump Republican. But both Miamians voted yesterday to all but eradicate the Office of Congressional Ethics, which was formed to police government corruption.
Florida really outdid itself this year. Cuba Gooding Jr. came here and ate a cell phone, which should be enough to catapult this year to the top of Florida’s all-time ranking of strange trips around the sun, but Gooding Jr.’s antics barely cracked the list of the weirdest things to…
Biking in any major city is dangerous. But biking in Miami every day can be straight-up suicidal. One study shows Miami is the fourth most dangerous city in America to commute on two wheels — behind Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando, three other Florida cities. Miami’s roads aren’t just crowded and poorly protected; they’re also full of drivers who seem to openly hate cyclists. In June, one bike commuter told New Times that an 81-year-old woman berated her after the elderly driver ran her over near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line.
Most people don’t know this, but Florida has its very own version of Santa. Some know him only by the choking, smog-like mist that shrouds him whenever he appears or by the warm scent of stale Coors Light that wafts through the air when he’s especially close. Those who have seen the deity’s physical form typically refer to him by one name: Harry the Meth Snake.
Florida Panthers owner Vincent Viola could soon run an entire wing of the U.S. government. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Viola, a military veteran and low-profile New York billionaire, to serve as secretary of the Army. That job requires caring for the well-being of thousands of Americans who volunteer to do the hardest jobs, and serious empathy for those who develop mental illness in the service.
Red-light camera operators are the tow-truck drivers and repossession kings of today’s drone-flying, surveillance-obsessed world. Camera companies place tiny, cheap lenses on traffic lights, wait for you to inch too far into an intersection, and cackle into the sky as they and the cities that hire them siphon a few hundred dollars from your wallet. The cameras themselves might not even be legal in Florida.
