On September 1, a Miami-Dade Police detective walked into Kareta Kafe on Bird Road in West Miami-Dade and sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer, which the bartender happily handed over. He then ordered $20 worth of cocaine, and the bartender gave him that too.
Mary Luis Brown, a disabled woman missing both her legs, was caught panhandling for a single dollar at a Chevron gas station this past Saturday when two Miami-Dade Police officers tried to arrest her. Thanks to a bystander’s footage of two cops handcuffing her and dropping her to the ground, that confrontation went viral.
Few energy projects in recent memory were more blatantly damaging and offensive than the Dakota Access Pipeline. After regulators worried the pipeline was too dangerous to pass near Bismarck, North Dakota, the pipeline was re-routed — straight into sacred Native American land. After the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe basically stood…
Miami Beach — a paradise for both tourists and the people who cater to tourists — remains one of the most repressive cities in America when it comes to room-sharing. In most of the city’s residential zones, short-term rentals have long been illegal. Lately, the city has dropped the hammer on Airbnb users, jacking up fines to $20,000 a pop this year. The city has levied more than $3.2 million in fines since March.
Women make up more than half the population of Miami-Dade County. They also make up half the world’s general population, and, above all else, are human beings. We somehow still need to repeat that last part in 2016. But according to a report released yesterday, women in Miami-Dade are doing objectively worse than their male counterparts…
Florida is basically one gigantic hunk of porous limestone with pythons, buildings, and Medicare frauds sunning themselves on top. Underneath is South Florida’s main source of drinking water, the Biscayne Aquifer, a pristine pool of underground liquid that’s become increasingly susceptible to pollution and saltwater intrusion.
A note to all celebrities visiting Miami for A-list events like New Year’s Eve, Ultra Music Festival, and Art Basel: Miami is a real place, with real problems, and you don’t live here. That’s typically still true for famous people who own Miami property: There’s a clear distinction between people like Iggy Pop and DJ Khaled, who live here year-round and give back to the community…
There comes a point during every Art Basel season when you find yourself staring at something patently ridiculous — be it a painting of Fran Drescher making out with Dwight D. Eisenhower, or a sculpture of Felix the Cat reading a copy of Eat, Pray, Love — without cracking a smile even once.
Protect Our Elections, a liberal-leaning group based in Washington, D.C., says that more than 160,000 votes in Florida weren’t counted during last month’s presidential election. The group claims each of those votes matters a great deal, since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 112,911 votes in the Sunshine State. Trump…
If you’ve spent any time with out-of-towners during Art Basel, you’ve probably sighed deeply as they referred to Wynwood as “Miami’s Brooklyn.” At this point, “Brooklynization” is a worldwide scourge: Whether you travel to Miami, Portland, Paris, or Istanbul, you’ll see the same “third-wave” coffee locations, 1920s-style speakeasies, and twee childcare facilities full of parents in beanie hats. Hipster creativity is dead.
The very concept of “Florida” is bad for the environment. America saw the Everglades, shining, glorious, and pristine, and agreed to put people — trash-burning, alligator-punching, Panda Express-eating people — smack in the middle of the area. Florida became a state 172 years ago and has been shoveling vomit and oil runoff into the Everglades for 172 of those years.
On November 12, more than a dozen Americans were arrested for disrupting work at a natural-gas construction site. One man locked himself inside a tanker truck delivering water to the work area, and protesters say law enforcement officers punished a crew of demonstrators and arrested them all.
In 2015, state Rep. Manny Diaz Jr. and state Sen. Rene Garcia tried and failed to persuade the state to crack down on Miami-Dade County’s rock-mining industry. Over the years, the mines, concentrated heavily in Northwest Miami-Dade near Hialeah and Opa-locka, have been blamed for scores of environmental issues…
It takes a preposterous amount of gall to dump a gigantic vat of oil into the ocean. It’s cartoon-level evil, like something Biff Tannen’s toxic-waste company BiffCo from Back to the Future Part II would do. But in real life, that’s exactly what a subsidiary of Miami’s Carnival Corporation has been doing for years.
First, the good news: Bottlenose dolphins still live along the South Florida coast and within the Everglades despite humanity’s century-long quest to murder every creature native to the River of Grass. Now, the bad: Those dolphins are dying, and Florida International University scientists now say the aquatic mammals that live in the Glades have soaked up more mercury than dolphins in any other habitat on Earth.
Will Donald Trump strip a group of Miami cops and U.S. military veterans of their citizenship? If he makes good on his promise to crack down hard on anyone caught desecrating the U.S. flag, he’ll now have to: Today the City of Miami Police Department tweeted a photo of a group of military veteran officers signing their names on an American flag.
Donald Trump has been the president-elect for exactly three weeks. As he has endlessly Twitter-beefed and mulled over cabinet picks, though, it seems as if he’s been president-elect since Tsar Nicholas II was assassinated. But there’s already been a darker side to Trump’s ascendency than watching the future leader of the free world go on unhinged social-media rants.
The word “basel” is actually old German for “Please help, I cannot stop belching wads of money into the sky.” Art Basel Miami Beach, which begins this week, may be America’s most frightening display of the useless expenditure of wealth. Pretty much the entirety of Manhattan and Los Angeles converges on…
Few parts of the lexicon of American politics are more brazenly undemocratic than “legalized monopoly.” The phrase conjures images of failed nation states and robber-baron America in the 1890s. Government-backed corporations abuse vital resources with impunity, hike fees and scam customers with glee as the government pretends things are cool…
Depending upon your income bracket, Art Basel either conjures images of yacht cruises from Martha’s Vineyard to Biscayne Bay or standstill traffic full of wailing babies on the MacArthur Causeway. Driving in Miami sucks all year, but the hordes of wealthy tourists who arrive for Basel take congestion to hellish levels.
The nation’s HIV and AIDS infection rates have steadily dropped over the past handful of years. With medication, HIV-positive individuals can now lead long, healthy lives. And through diligent self-care (or use of the preventative drug PrEP), some infected individuals even safely date HIV-negative people. But nobody, apparently, has told Florida.
In most instances, it’s perfectly legal to record police officers in public. Yet cops regularly arrest and harass people filming them, which is why one of the most followed police-accountability websites is called Photography Is Not a Crime. City of Miami Police still haven’t figured out that they can’t pester…
