About a month ago, New Times published a story about an 11- year-old preacher named Terry Durham. Newspapers such as the New York Times had already printed feel-good articles about the talented Margate boy. But after spending time with Terry and the people who raised him, we realized there were…

Things are bleak in the world of publishing. Quick-fix readers gobble up blogs instead of books, journalists curse the Internet and collect unemployment checks, and even Rolling Stone has been looking awfully anorexic. Evolution is a cruel and messy bastard. That’s why you kinda have to hand it to Mike…

Yesterday we posted a blog about University of Miami administrators not allowing Back/Slash magazine on campus. Now, staffers from another paper say there’s more to the story. Chelsea Matiash, editor in chief of the school paper The Hurricane, contends distributors of the college lifestyle magazine didn’t play by the rules…

Things are bleak in the world of publishing. Quick-fix readers gobble up blogs instead of books, journalists curse the internet and collect unemployment checks, and even Rolling Stone has been looking awfully anorexic lately. Evolution is a cruel and messy bastard. That’s why you kinda have to hand it to…

Adrien Cegora stood outside Miami Beach City Hall yesterday with a crease in his brow. The fit firefighter wore a red Metro-Dade T-shirt, along with about 50 of his co-workers. They hoped to send city commissioners a message: Indian Creek and Surfside? That’s our territory. “Miami Beach is trying to…

Bound and Shackled at Jackson Memorial

At best, it was a heartfelt sociological experiment. At worst, it was a half-baked publicity stunt. Yesterday afternoon, a masked avenger of greed — who goes by the name Atlas — began giving away money to strangers on Biscayne Boulevard. Free cash. Atlas wore a handmade mask with comics pasted…

There’s a tall tale about female lobsters — one that’s supposed to serve as a grim analogy for womankind. As it goes, two things happen when you’re boiling a pot of live lobsters. (1) If the pot is full of males, they will scramble to form a ladder with their…

Lawyers working for Jackson Memorial Hospital have their hands full. The mammoth, publicly-funded facility has been sued over 160 times in the past five years. But few complaints are as disturbing as the one filed yesterday. It came from Lisa Burton, former acting director of patient care in the mental…

When the economy tanked, student haircuts and generic-brand sodas stopped sounding so bad. Sometimes you have to get crafty to keep yourself from going broke. But leave it to South Florida to take it one step further. Miami-Dade cops recently arrested Juan David Acosta – a Colombian-born 37-year-old with shoulder-length…

Racial Tension Rises at Barry

The Fuzz Buster Strikes Again

Maybe it’s street karma. After a decade as a pimp and a hit man, Overtown street hustler Big Red could finally be brought down by a small-potatoes probation violation.This past summer, New Times profiled the entrepreneurial ex-convict who faced long odds when it came to his goal: Survive on the streets of…

Miami-Dade police began an unholy crackdown on speeders this past week, leaving plenty of bad South Florida drivers to gripe about record-high $600 tickets. For road demons who are still stewing, meet the county’s latest citizen watchdog: A self-appointed speed trap sleuth who calls himself “The Fuzz Buster.” The sly,…

Zero swine flu cases have been found Florida, but that hasn’t stopped the Herald from reporting 20 people might, maybe, sorta-kinda be infected. So you can probably blame media — ourselves included — for the fact that heathy people have stopped buying bacon and started calling their doctors every 20…

On a treeless cement slab of Northwest Miami-Dade, a swarm of spruced-up families filters into New Harvest Missionary Baptist Church. In a cluttered office at the building’s rear, Terry Durham sits quietly on a folding chair, his knee bobbing anxiously. He’s dressed with flamboyant confidence in white alligator skin boots…

Florida is behind the times when it comes to gay rights, (Remember Amendment 2? And that whole adoption thing?) But at least the rest of the country is catching on. Back in 2004, New York Times/CBS conducted a poll in which they asked people, “Do you support gay marriage?” Only…

Words such as “Public Health Emergency” and “Global Pandemic” can awaken the dormant hypochondriac in the best of us. So when newspapers started using scary words to describe the swine flu yesterday, it occurred to Riptide that Florida has the second biggest wild hog population in the country. And then…

Annette Soler would make a kick-ass comic book character. The librarian by day/bodybuilder by night makes you wonder if she’s sporting a Superwoman costume under her white collared shirt. Though she’s not the largest of the oiled-up figure competitors, the formerly obese 32-year-old has overcome the most to produce her…

There were a thousand little reasons to cheer — or laugh or cry — at the first Miami Beach Gay Pride Parade this past Saturday. To name a few: A sweet-faced elderly couple carried a sign that read “George and Peter. Together 65 years.” Then there was the tight-bodied pack…