The prez-elect electrified the newswires yesterday when word leaked he plans to issue an executive order during his first week in office — and maybe his first day — officially shutting down the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay.But before you start planning those Gitmo V-Day parades, Obama sounded a more…
Florida International University professor and all around curmudgeon Stanley Fish is up to his old — and we do me old — tricks in the New York Times again.You might recall Fish’s classic work of grumpy grandpa journalism in the Times last summer, when the 70-year-old eminent postmodern scholar “discovered”…
Chuckie Taylor Jr., the Orlando-raised son of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, already faces a world of pain in Miami’s federal courthouse this morning.In October, Chuckie became the first American convicted of orchestrating torture abroad, for the brutal crimes he carried out as the head of his father’s “Demon Forces” security…
Last month, a feisty Cuban-American protest erupted outside the Miami Beach premiere of Stephen Soderbergh’s new four-hour epic about Che Guevara.In an interview with the New Times the next day, Soderbergh laughed off the hubub as the cost of doing business in the heart of Cuban nationalism, saying “You can’t…
Janoris Jenkins’s path to college football glory — like a surprising number of players before him — stretches through the reed-clogged swampland that emerges from Lake Okeechobee. It’s a path littered with the corpses of hundreds of rabbits, sacrificed to the gods of speed, agility, and endurance. For decades, young…
Let’s count the ways that Charles Barkley, as usual, is the wisest guy in the room. No, Riptide isn’t applauding his DUI arrest a couple of days ago in Arizona. That was no good. We’re talking about his outraged and much-argued assertion last month that his alma matter, Auburn, hired…
The patron saint of Key West killed a man last night. Police in Steamboat Springs, Colorado say two men snapped and beat a 37-year-old Army sergeant to death after he played Jimmy Buffett’s insufferable classic on the jukebox. A Steamboat Springs police official told the Denver Post that Sgt. 1st Class…
As we prepare for the dawning of the age of Obama in exactly two weeks, this weekend provided another reminder it’s going to take more than a feel-great election and historic inauguration to clean up the mess of the past eight years.Obama has promised time and again to quickly shutter…
Herman Rosenblat, a Miami Beach Holocaust survivor, has already made quite a mess of things. First there was the whole made-up tale of triumph in the face of tragedy. Rosenblat sold the world and every authority that matters (ahem, Oprah) on a story that, in hindsight, just seems pretty ridiculous:…
Think things suck now? Don’t flip that dial to Russian state news agencies, or you might really be reaching for the Smirnov.According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia’s propaganda machines have lately been giving heaps of airtime to an academic named Igor Panarin, who has spent the last decade telling…
So is Bill Parcells a masochist, or what? This is the guy who voluntarily went to work for borderline-psychotic Dallas owner Jerry Jones, who left a cushy retirement to take over the staggeringly awful 1-15 Dolphins. For all Riptide knows, he’s got a side gig involving a rubber ball mouth-gag,…
Leroy Griffith makes his opinion abundantly clear as he laughs bitterly into the telephone: He really couldn’t give a shit who picks up an open seat on the Miami Beach City Commission next fall — as long as it’s not the woman who kept the champagne out of his strip…
Poor Plax. Just a year ago, the Giants wide receiver was riding pretty damn high — Superbowl champ, massive contract, best ridiculous name in professional football.How did it all fall apart? How, damnit?! Oh yeah, you shot yourself in the leg at a nightclub, then drove around bleeding for a…
Miami Beach officials tried to extort $30,000 in legal fees out of a strip club owner in exchange for a liquor license — so says Leroy Griffith, owner of Club Madonna. Griffith, whose club is the only nudie joint in SoBe, made his claims in a lawsuit filed against city…
You’ve got to give Tricky Dick some credit. The man sticks to his guns (even when they’re clearly shooting someone in the face).Amid the Bushie farewell tour over the past week, Cheney has time and again stuck up for his administration’s use of, ahem, “questionable” tactics in treating prisoners at…
Just three months ago, Riptide introduced Miami to William Guinaraes and Laetitia Casareto, a young French couple with the ridiculous plan to walk from Miami to Ushuaia, the southernmost point of South America.Despite a complete lack of preparedness for crocodiles, hurricanes and violent Florida criminals, armed only with a digital…
It’s just after 4 p.m. on a cold September Saturday in the highlands of Bolivia. Inside a two-story mud-brick home that smells of damp hay, a young mother lies in bed, wrapped in heavy alpaca blankets, still weak from giving birth a few days earlier. Her eight-year-old daughter Marlene is…
Strutting between piles of sopping green towels, a diamond-studded watch glinting on his wrist, Joey Porter holds court with a mosh pit of reporters on his way out of the Dolphins locker room. Fresh off a spine-crushing, game-clinching sack against the 49ers that sealed yet another win for the reborn…
They gathered in front of a rusty chainlink fence and a graffiti-covered “No Trespassing” sign: Mayor Manny Diaz, Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, and megadeveloper Tibor Hollo.Behind the fence, littered with plastic bottles and crushed Coke cans, stretched two acres of land facing an incredible view: Biscayne Bay lapping quietly against a…
After weeks of throwing a cabinet seat at any former Clinton administration official with a heartbeat, Prez-to-be Obama today finally got around to appointing a Hispanic to his top circle of advisers.Riptide knows a lot of you have been lying awake at night, feverishly imagining the nightmare scenario that Miami might lose…
The two most vicious hits in Sunday’s Dolphins-49ers defensive power struggle both came in the waning minutes of the ballgame. First, with the Niners sitting in the red zone, trying to punch in a touchdown and take their first lead of the day, a bunch of security guys absolutely destroyed some random dude in jean shorts who…
Geez, who can you trust these days? Definitely not those friendly neighborhood landscapers trying to give you a free estimate on your lawn, according to the Miami PD.Last week, grandparents Santiago and Gladys Rodriguez answered the door at their Coral Gables home just off Coral Way to find two men…
