Until this week, chikungunya fever was a difficult-to-pronounce, extremely painful mosquito-borne disease that dozens of Floridians had contracted abroad — particularly in the Caribbean, where the illness has spread like wildfire through Haiti and other island nations. Now, chikungunya is a difficult-to-pronounce, extremely painful illness that’s spreading all on its…
The Russians invade a neighboring nation and annex new territory. The outraged Americans respond with financial sanctions and chest thumping. Moscow tips the conflict toward a boiling point by upping its military presence in Cuba, just a few hundred miles from Florida’s borders. Nope, it’s not 1962. All of the…
For nearly two months, UberX and Lyft have been operating their app-based ride-share services around Miami in direct violation of the county’s limo laws. In turn, the county has hit the services with dozens of citations and has even impounded drivers’ cars. All of that carnage could end if county…
The traffic stop looks ordinary enough. Miami Police Officer Marcel Jackson pulls over a silver Chevy for speeding and walks up to the driver’s window. And when the driver leaps from his car, Jackson reacts like any other cop: He throws the driver to the ground and tries to cuff…
When LeBron dropped his back-to-Cleveland bombshell this afternoon, Miami Heat fans weren’t just confronted with losing the greatest player in the game. Suddenly it seemed all too possible that MIA could go to from the Finals to the cellar overnight, with Chris Bosh fielding a monster offer from Houston and…
“Gerrymandering” is a big, strange word, but in Florida it describes a simple enough problem: The state’s legislative districts are so artificially drawn that one of the nation’s most purple electorates has a lockstep Republican state house that will never face a serious challenge. Four years ago, voters backed change…
The following is an excerpt from the book Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era, published by the Penguin Group and released this week. The story began in Miami New Times. Frankie Ratcliff’s phone buzzed just before 7:30 p.m. September 10, 2010. The text…
The tenuous Israeli-Palestinian relationship teetered on a knife’s edge last week when the bodies of three murdered Israeli teens were found. It threatened to tip into outright mayhem days later when a Palestinian teen was kidnapped and burned alive in a revenge killing. And this weekend, a Florida teenager was…
How dumb is the continued refusal of Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature to accept the federally funded Medicaid expansion? So dumb that even Gov. Rick Scott — who essentially ran on an anti-Obamacare platform — reversed course last year and admitted, yeah, a state full of uninsured poor folks probably should let…
Baseball fans already know that for significant portions of his career, Alex Rodriguez has used performance enhancing drugs. Back in 2009, A-Rod admitted to using steroids from 2001-2003 with the Texas Rangers after news broke that he’d failed a drug test in ’03, when he won an MVP award. Last…
The Venetian Causeway is Miami’s oldest bay-spanning bridge and the best bet for cyclists and pedestrians looking to get from South Beach to downtown. It’s also been an unbelievable mess lately. Ever since a bus punched a hole in a deteriorating bridge earlier this year, the County has been plotting…
There are some big advantages to hiding your meth lab inside a vehicle. Just ask Walter White. His Breaking Bad crew spent five seasons evading the DEA and local cops in part by cooking crank in a dilapidated mobile home in the New Mexican wilderness. John Day wasn’t quite that…
Around 2:30 this morning, gunfire strafed the courtyard of a Liberty City apartment building, wounding up to ten and killing two in the worst instance of mass violence in Miami this year. Police are still sorting through the chaos to determine what happened. “We have no motive at this time,”…
On Saturday, news broke about Cuba’s latest high-risk defection. Yasmani Tomas, a top slugger for Industriales, had fled Cuba for potential millions as a Major League Baseball star. But as All-Star Yasiel Puig’s harrowing tale showed the world earlier this year, that path from Castro’s island to big league ballparks…
This is not a test. Hide your family. Sell all of your belongings for canned food and weaponry. Prepare yourself for utmost destruction. The year’s first tropical disturbance is churning just off the coast of Florida, and the time has come to PANIC! Wait, what’s that? It’s basically just a…
The Opa-locka sergeant was convicted of felony false imprisonment and witness tampering for assaulting a youth counselor.
Earlier this month, disgraced ex-Congressman David Rivera got whacked by a state judge who found “corrupt intent” in the way he’d double-billed his campaign and fudged his spending records. His surprise bid to win the Republican primary for his old seat, meanwhile, has been stalled in the water with virtually…
One of the hazards of having a governor who financed his way into office with his own immense fortune is that he probably has money stashed in all kinds of places that conflict with his political decisions. That certainly applies to our own magnate-turned-leader. New disclosures this morning show that…
Compared to the miles-wide F5 monsters that roar across the Kansas and Nebraska plains, Florida’s tornadoes are usually quaint little dust devils that pop up momentarily and never get the space to grow into city-destroying catastrophes. Yet it’s the Sunshine State’s mini-twisters that are the deadliest in the nation, according…
On his MySpace and Youtube pages, Ronnie Candelaria is an odd presence, obsessed with kung fu master Bruce Lee and enamored of remixing videos of violent fight scenes with heavy metal tracks. In real life, the 21-year-old Kendall man was into guns and could be intimidating, acquaintances say. But no…
David Beckham’s downtown stadium is dead in the water, but Miami’s second-most contentious bayfront proposal is very much alive and kicking. Developer Jeff Berkowitz’s 1,000-foot tall paperclip, the SkyRise Miami tower, could be on a ballot for city voters as early as August. But first the city commission has to…
Need more proof that spending dump trucks full of cash can win elections in America? Take a look at Florida’s percolating governor’s race, where Rick Scott — yes, the same guy who has had trouble cracking 30 percent approval ratings for the past four years — has suddenly pulled even…
