Miami Beach is 53 percent Hispanic, so you’d be forgiven for assuming its 46 boards and committees would reflect those demographics. But a recent survey shows that’s not the case — as of last month, just 17 percent of those appointed by city commissioners were Hispanic. Black residents are also…
The history of Florida is the adjustment to intrusion. In the state’s short 172-year history, armed U.S. troops have chased native Seminoles out of the Everglades, pristine beaches once considered worthless land have become vacation hot spots, and cattle pastures have given way to Disney World food courts.
If you’re a sentient human in Miami, you know by now that trying to walk or ride your bike around town can be downright scary. Last year, 1,508 pedestrians lost their lives on South Florida roads — the third highest death toll in the nation, trailing only the New York and Los Angeles metro areas.
There are a lot of skills that can be learned over a long weekend in a Holiday Inn ballroom. Meditation techniques. Speed reading. The basics of budgeting. But a new bill moving through the Florida Legislature wants to add something a bit more technical to the list: namely, eye surgery…
Miami appointed its first female city attorney, Lucia Allen Dougherty, way back in 1984. In fact, women have held the city’s top legal position for 16 of the past 33 years. But when a staffer in Commissioner Ken Russell’s office was flipping through the city code recently, she noticed…
While you’ve been sitting at your stupid desk all week, thousands of sunburned Midwesterners have been bonging beer and Instagramming selfies at the beach for spring break. It’s unfair, but you can’t blame them for taking advantage of the weeklong rite of passage while they’re young and their livers are still somewhat virginal.
Eleven times in one year, Miami Police received calls for help at a tree-lined, three-bedroom house in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Some came from tenants in distress inside the home. Others were placed by neighbors concerned about loud arguing. All reflect back on White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who rented the house for his most recent ex-wife in 2015 and 2016.
Since Donald Trump’s election, minority groups have been under attack by hateful speech and unrelenting harassment. Jewish community centers across the nation have been the victims of bomb threats, and anti-Muslim groups have tripled. In Miami, a homeowner in Kendall lynched a dark-skinned dummy as a “Halloween decoration” and a…
Spring break season is upon us. Starting in late February, thousands of tourists have descended on Florida to fulfill their warm weather fantasies. Between now and April, many of them will make pit stops in Miami and Fort Lauderdale before heading south to the Caribbean. For visitors who are Bahama-bound,…
This past Friday, Bill Todhunter was bringing in the trash cans from the driveway when he heard his wife screaming. He left the cans and rushed out back to the couple’s deck at their home overlooking Port Everglades. There, just a short distance away, the 2,850-passenger Celebrity…
In South Florida, the regulated monopoly of Florida Power & Light is the only game in town when it comes to keeping your lights on. That means that despite FPL’s history of jacking up rates, fighting to store radioactive waste beneath our aquifer, and spending $8 million on a deceitful anti-solar amendment, consumers basically have no other choice but to patronize the utility giant.
Into the quiet, a voice rang out amid the trees. “Everyone remain in prayer!” a man in a brown jacket instructed. “Keep your prayers focused! Keep your intentions pure!” Beneath the blue Suwannee County sky, someone tapped out a beat on a tribal drum. Two young women sat cross-legged behind…
When an audit revealed in mid-December that many Miami Police officers weren’t wearing their department-issued body cameras or downloading the footage, Police Chief Rudy Llanes told New Times he was ready to get to the bottom of the issue. But, much like Marco Rubio, he said he needed more information first about why the $1.3 million equipment, paid for by taxpayers and a Department of Justice grant, wasn’t being used.
For two days, she holed up in her stateroom and hoped it wasn’t real. Stuck on the luxury yacht with her rapist, the woman — a passenger traveling on an upscale European cruise — says she spent the days after the attack trying to process what had happened.
Last week, as Miami-Dade commissioners voted 9-3 to comply with President Donald Trump’s harsh new immigration policies, dozens of residents stormed out of County Hall, shouting, “Shame on you!” The pleas of mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons who had asked commissioners to reconsider seemingly weren’t enough. Commissioner Rebeca Sosa went as far as to say those emotional appeals for empathy were irrelevant.
There are lots of reasons to tread carefully when finding a roommate in Miami. If you’re not in a relationship, your choices basically boil down to a high-school friend you will grow to hate, a co-worker you already see way too much of, some predatory old dude essentially looking for a live-in college-aged prostitute, or an uptight neat freak who will flip out if you don’t use a coaster on her very expensive West Elm coffee table. Worst case, you end up with a creepy rando from Craigslist who actually tries to murder you.
On a cold February day in 2013, Warren Papove deplaned in Vancouver with 65 cents to his name. After living in South Miami for ten years without committing a crime, Papove — a homeless handyman who did odd jobs for Commissioner Bob Welsh — had been reported to immigration officials and rounded up by ICE. Six months into his lockup at the Krome Detention Center, Papove was deported to his native Canada in the middle of winter without so much as a jacket to keep himself warm.
Fueled in part by President Donald Trump’s flame-throwing speeches, the number of hate groups in the United States rose for the second year in a row, according to a new analysis released last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
You can’t put a price on public safety. But technically speaking, if you want to split hairs, keeping Miami disease-free costs real money. Jaws dropped last fall when Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez revealed the county spent roughly $10 million fighting Zika, a figure it was no doubt unprepared…
Most burglars wouldn’t bother cutting the lawn. But on an April day in 2014, that’s exactly what raised the suspicions of a woman in one Miami neighborhood. When she saw a strange man cutting the grass outside a home on SW Fourth Street, she called the homeowner to let him know.
This morning in a courtroom in Tallahassee, the seven justices of the state’s Supreme Court will hear a case that should be of interest to any Floridian concerned about bad cops. At stake is the question of whether citizens have the right to investigate police or whether we should trust…
More than six million people follow DJ Khaled’s insanely popular Snapchat account. But this past weekend, as many of his celebrity peers spoke out against Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, Khaled seemingly tiptoed around the divisive issue, simply posting a video of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
