Real-estate mogul Moishe Mana, the largest landowner in Wynwood, has huge plans for the arts district. He’s trying to convert a space he owns in the neighborhood’s southwest corner into a full arts-themed village, complete with a promenade, shops, galleries, and 24-story residential towers. Mana’s team has spent months crafting…
‹ Left Center Right Resize Cancel Crop 67 x 100 ?i › Back in February, State Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla used his powers as chairman of the State Senate’s Judiciary Committee to prevent the senate from voting on two controversial pro-gun laws. One would have allowed 1.5 million…
It can be hard for non-pregnant Miamians to gauge how much they should really worry about Zika. On one hand, a new University of Florida study predicts South Florida’s outbreak should top out at 400 locally transmitted cases and end by the winter. But another new study paints an more…
In Miami Beach, it’s no secret that the hotel industry is the city’s biggest economic engine. City Hall certainly knows who pays the bills. Back in March, the city voted to start fining AirBnB-type short term renters a whopping $20,000 a pop. Hoteliers say the new fines protect the tourism industry…
Earlier this month, a Miami-Dade County mosquito control plane buzzed over New Times’ Wynwood office building at around 11:15 a.m., wafting the organic, larva-killing bacterial pesticide Bti over the neighborhood. A nearby worker noticed a reporter taking photos and chimed in. “If you’re under the cloud, it gets on your skin,”…
When installing a bat house, which is just like a bird house except with a slit-shaped hole for the tiny flying mammals, it’s important to keep the box out of direct sunlight. Bats are notoriously temperamental, and if the lighting isn’t quite right, the home could get too hot or…
Mosquito repellent isn’t trendy, plus it’s sticky and smells like floor cleaner. So for Miami adults who aren’t worried about pregnancy, it’s been pretty easy to rationalize leaving the house unprotected amidst the Zika outbreak since the virus allegedly is only harmful to growing fetuses. Bad news: A study released…
When New Times sat down with medical-marijuana advocate and political consultant Ben Pollara earlier this month, Pollara said he wasn’t concerned that Carol Jenkins Barnett, daughter of Publix founder George Jenkins, had donated $800,000 to a group trying to keep medicinal weed illegal. “I still think ‘shopping is a pleasure,'” Pollara…
The Miami-Dade County Commission will hold a special meeting on Monday to start counting 127,000 petitions demanding that the county reform its campaign-finance laws. It only took a week’s worth of protests (including a sit-in at county hall), a national Twitter campaign, and a full-on lawsuit for that meeting to…
Just 14 hours after Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine stood in front of reporters and said there was “no Zika outbreak in Miami Beach,” Gov. Rick Scott announced in a press conference today that five locally transmitted Zika cases had been identified in the city’s highest-traffic tourist area. The Centers…
So yeah, Florida is a state where people routinely murder others and then chew off parts of their victims’ faces. When it comes to weirdness, the state sets a high bar for itself. But, every Friday, we’re here to catalog the strangest things that happen in Florida — here are…
The Zika virus has been transmitted locally to two people in Miami Beach, Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez told New Times via phone today. The Florida Department of Health had previously assumed active transmissions were just confined to a small area surrounding Wynwood. Reading from a memo sent by City Manager Jimmy…
A few years ago, Tomas Kennedy, an immigration and civil-rights activist, spent some time working as an aide at County Hall. In all that time, Kennedy says, he’d never seen a security officer brandishing a semi-automatic gun for any reason. So Kennedy says his jaw dropped when he showed up…
When Martin County police arrived Monday to find 19-year-old Austin Harrouff standing over the bodies of two bleeding victims, violently biting at man’s face, police first fired stun-guns. When those didn’t work, cops then unleashed a dog. When that didn’t work, three officers pulled Harrouff off the man and brought him…
As Austin Harrouff stabilizes in a Palm Beach County hospital, the public may soon get answers as to why the 19-year-old allegedly murdered two strangers, stabbed another, and proceeded to eat the dead man’s face as police repeatedly Tasered him. Behind all the bizarre headlines around the case, though, are two…
Time to play a guessing game: How much would it cost Miami-Dade County officials to search for a week’s worth of emails from commissioners, and then to print those messages out and hand them to someone? Would $21,600 sound reasonable? In what might be the most expensive printing operation ever…
In 2011, 38-year-old Cristina Siekavizza disappeared in Guatemala City. A frenzied manhunt ensued. Cops canvassed town after town. Guatemalan national magazine Contrapoder wrote an entire feature on her death, and the case sparked a national debate about domestic violence after her family organized marches throughout the nation’s capital. Eventually, police pointed their fingers…
When the U.S. Marshals issued an arrest warrant for Anibal Mustelier back in 1995, Mustelier had a thick head of bushy brown hair sprouting atop his head. His face was unblemished, and light stubble gave his face a youthful glow. After Mustelier, 66, was arrested on Sunday, his latest mugshot…
In 2013, Austin Harrouf was starring as a defensive tackle at Suncoast Community High School — a Palm Beach County school ranked among Newsweek’s 10 best schools in America at least eight different times in the last decade. He’d also been taking advanced-placement classes in the schools’ International Baccalaureate program. Why or…
Hop off your starfish-shaped bicycle from Burning Man and take a break from your home-schooling classes: Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is coming to Miami tomorrow! Before this year, Johnson had mostly been famous for vetoing hundreds of bills as governor of New Mexico, smoking weed at a regular clip…
When an activist group called Accountable Miami-Dade sent the county 127,000 petitions, each demanding the government reform its campaign-finance laws to help stop public corruption, the county — by law — had 30 days to start counting up the signatures. But so far, neither the commission nor the mayor will…
Last month, Florida’s Environmental Regulation Commission took the alarming step of changing state rules to allow more cancer-causing chemicals in Florida’s water. That change is currently on hold thanks to the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which sued the state over the change — and they’re far from alone at being alarmed at…
