For a few delirious hours yesterday, Florida’s junior senator made his home state proud. Marco Rubio relentlessly grilled Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, on human rights violators such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, demanding to know whether Tillerson believed Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal” and whether he’d listen to intelligence agencies about Russia’s hacking.
By now you’ve woken up to the Black Mirror-worthy headlines: President-elect Donald Trump has spent all night angrily denying he paid Russian prostitutes to perform an R. Kelly-approved routine at a Moscow hotel while FSB spies secretly filmed blackmail material.
In November, 71 percent of Florida voters backed legal medical marijuana. In Miami Beach, the approval rating was nearly 80 percent. So it’s bizarre that the very next day, the city voted to block dispensaries from the island for at least four months. Commissioner Ricky Arriola, who sponsored the move, says he simply wants to hit pause to allow the city more time to decide where distributors can operate.
As far as bank robberies go, a holdup at Brickell’s Navy Federal Credit Union yesterday afternoon was remarkably chill. A bald man in a neat sports coat calmly told a teller he had a bomb and then watched her fill a pink envelop with cash. Then, as his Uber driver streamed…
Last week, everyone from city officials to Pitbull himself barraged Miamians with a simple plea: Try to celebrate the new year without firing your handguns like Yosemite Sam. It’s not clear how many people watched Pibtull’s “One Bullet Kills the Party” promo and decided not to fete the new year with live ammunition. But as 2017’s first workweek dawns in South Florida, this much is clear: Gun violence didn’t take a break for the holiday weekend.
To an international traveler, there aren’t many moments worse than sitting in a stale metal tube for countless hours, finally landing at a destination, and then turning the corner inside the airport to see a Kafka-esque nightmare of a line between you and the exit.
By most sane measurements, 2016 has been worse than a straight-to-Netflix movie starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James. But for long-form journalism at New Times, it’s been a hell of a great 12 months. We’ve crunched the numbers, and these were our ten most popular longreads of the year.
On a surface level, Miami is a prosperous place — new condo towers are forever rising in Edgewater and South Beach, luxury cars are lined up at valet stations, and foreign cash seems drawn to South Florida development like an unscrupulous retiree to a Ponzi scheme. But beneath that sheen lies one of America’s least equal distributions of wealth. And that inequality includes a sizable and worrying gender gap, with more than one in every five women in Miami-Dade County living below the poverty line.
We all agree that 2016 was an epic dumpster fire of a year. To be honest, it was more like 12 months of increasingly large dumpsters filled with increasingly terrible-smelling refuse being lit into ever-bigger pyres of reeking, flaming garbage. No one disputes this. However, some truly great things also happened right here in Miami in the past year. Before sending 2016 out with the drunken binge it deserves, let’s recall some of that good stuff.
Hey there, newcomer! ¡Bienvenido a Miami! Our beaches are a year-round paradise, and our water is tranquil. Ibiza trembles with envy at our clubs. Anthony Bourdain lies awake at night, tormented by the sheer power of our restaurant scene. Everyone is attractive as hell. Oh, and also literally no one here cares about anyone else. Probably should mention that part too!
Donald Trump owes so much of his ascendency — and his continued commitment to sowing world chaos — to Twitter that it’s appropriate the first big black eye of his White House came via some tweets. And Miami’s own A.J. Delgado, an attorney and Trump campaign advisor, appears to have…
Bank heists are a dangerous business. A skilled crew has to case a place for weeks, acquire weapons and masks, and then pull off a risky holdup within minutes before the cops show up. Of course, stealing huge piles of cash is a hell of a lot easier when you can…
In Florida, the Gunshine State, it’s not a terrible idea to assume just about everyone is armed and ready to fire. In the past month, at least three residents around Miami have fatally shot would-be home intruders. Now an Uber driver has joined the Stand Your Ground…
Throughout his rise to fame, sold-out arenas, and cheesy Bud Light ads, Pitbull has refused to throw his “dales” behind either political party. Even as many Latin celebs backed Hillary because of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant xenophobia, Pitbull refused to wade in, suggesting instead that both parties are equally mierda. (And…
Natasha Joseph’s almond-shaped eyes brim with tears as she cradles her pregnant belly and recounts the horror of her journey to the United States. There were the dust-choked buses, the corrupt cops, and the thieving coyotes. Some stretches of Central America were so perilous that walking in the dead of night was the only option.
The rumors spiked across Twitter on Friday: David Beckham was finally ready to pull the plug on his tortured attempts to bring Major League Soccer back to Miami. Instead, one soccer writer suggested, he was turning his sights to the more pliable city of Las Vegas.
The strange saga of Alberto Chang-Rajii — the tech guru who wowed Miami with an elaborate backstory that turned out to be totally made-up — took an even stranger turn earlier this year when he fled to the tiny isle of Malta as his business imploded and criminal charges were filed in his native Chile.
Last month, a truly heroic traveler strolled into Miami International Airport, strode up to the TSA security line, and whipped out a gold-plated gas mask spiked with high-caliber ammunition. Turns out, as the TSA notes, “post-apocalyptic, bullet-adorned gas masks” are not allowed aboard airplanes. Who knew?
Mary Luis Brown is missing both of her legs. She’s also 52 years old, gets around in a wheelchair, and isn’t armed with any kind of weaponry. It’s hard to imagine any situation where she’d be a serious threat to trained police officers. So why did two Miami-Dade cops…
Florida International University is one of the most diverse schools in the nation. Some 81 percent of students are racial or ethnic minorities, and FIU advertises itself as the country’s largest “Hispanic-serving institution.” Some of those students are undocumented “dreamers” who have benefited from President Barack Obama’s DACA plan, which allows them to attend college legally.
For years, Alberto Chang-Rajii charmed Miami power brokers with his rags-to-riches story of immigrating from Chile to attend Stanford University, meeting Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and investing in Google before the company blew up. He turned that origin story into a multimillion-dollar tech investment fund and a board seat with Endeavor Miami.
As Wynwood has transformed from gritty, graffitied artist haven to high-rent hipster district, developers have turned to a new frontier. Little Haiti has already seen galleries and trendy restaurants creep in. Now the traditionally Caribbean neighborhood will get a huge signature project.
