Barely a week after South Florida resident Anita Britt joined the corporate board of American Outdoor Brands, Nikolas Cruz used one of the company’s AR-15 assault rifles to murder 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. That wasn’t Britt’s only high-profile role, though: Just a month earlier, she’d been hired as chief financial and administrative officer at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens.
The doors were locked at Mokai Lounge this past weekend after the City of Miami Beach shut it down over a viral video showing a horse freaking out and bucking off its scantily clad rider inside the club. Animal activists have poured vitriol on the nightclub’s social media accounts over the horse stunt, which the city said represented a threat to public safety.
For the past 24 hours, animal rights activists have been bombarding the social media accounts of South Beach nightclub Mokai and lighting up phone lines at Miami Beach City Hall to demand action over a viral video that shows a horse panicking in the middle of the club. It didn’t take city officials long to act on those demands.
A bikini-clad dancer rides a white horse into the middle of a raucous nightclub crowd — until the animal suddenly bucks, throwing off its rider and stamping in a panic around the club. The cheering crowd is suddenly horrified, gasping as the clearly distressed horse tries to escape the noisy room.
As politicians like Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have shown no appetite to buck their NRA donors by banning assault rifles after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre last month, activists have turned the pressure on corporate America instead. It’s worked: Dick’s has stopped selling the weapons, and major firms such as Delta have ditched the NRA.
At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, students are only in their second week back in class since the massacre that killed 17 classmates and teachers. It’s still a powerfully emotional time for the hundreds of survivors trying to return to normalcy in the place where they lived through the worst day of their lives.
Stormy Daniels’ attorney made the rounds on morning talk shows today to demolish any doubt about whether President Trump slept with the porn star while he was married to Melania. “Did she have a sexual relationship with the president?” a Today show host asked Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti. “Yes,” he replied.
As long as Miami had to stomach Jeffrey Loria, the spawn of Scrooge McDuck and Cruella de Vil, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross got a pass. Sure, his teams were just as putrid as the Marlins, but at least Ross didn’t donate to Donald Trump and stood up for his players’ right to protest police brutality during the National Anthem.
In 2003, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Defense Minister Carlos Sánchez Berzaín fled to Miami amid roiling protests in La Paz. The two had enraged indigenous Bolivians by trying to sell off the country’s natural gas reserves to private corporations and then had responded to peaceful protests by ordering out the army, which killed 58 civilians and wounded more than 400 people.
Go back and watch the CNN town hall on the Parkland massacre — you know, the one where Marco Rubio was repeatedly owned so hard that he could barely stutter out his canned lines — and the survivors and victims’ families repeatedly make three demands of the senator: Reinstate the federal ban on assault weapons, ban high-capacity magazines, and stop taking money from the Nation Rifle Association.
After Parkland massacre survivors roasted Sen. Marco Rubio like a pig in a caja china at CNN’s nationally televised town hall, he took to Twitter to complain that their demands for an outright ban on the military-style assault weapons that helped slaughter 17 people at the school were “well outside the mainstream.”
If you’re trying to predict what kind of new legislation Tallahassee will eventually pass in response to the Parkland massacre, just ask a simple question: What would Marion Hammer do? The über-powerful NRA lobbyist has spent the past 20 years methodically turning the Sunshine State into a heavily armed free-for-all, and so far, the bought-and-paid-for GOP Legislature has never failed to do her bidding.
For a moment, Broward Sheriff Scott Israel seemed like a breakout media voice in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. As he sparred with the NRA’s Dana Loesch at CNN’s town hall last week, his national clout exploded.
Onstage at the BB&T Center Wednesday night in front of thousands of grieving Floridians, including some family of the 17 students and teachers mowed down by a teen with a military-style weapon at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch showed at least a little decency. She admitted Nikolas Cruz shouldn’t have had the AR-15 he used in the massacre and that Florida’s background-check system doesn’t work.
Give Philip Levine this: He knows how to grab the pressing issue of the day and run with it for maximum media exposure. As Miami Beach’s mayor, Levine leveraged his office on the sea-level rise threatened barrier island to become an international voice for climate change, appearing regularly on CNN,…
In the days after their classmates were massacred by a disturbed kid who was allowed to purchase military-style weaponry, hundreds of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High survivors have become fiery gun-control advocates. Their message is simple: Nikolas Cruz never should have been able to buy the assault weapon that he used to mow down 17 people in mere minutes.
Everyone knew Nikolas Cruz was deeply disturbed. He’d been in and out of mental health treatment. He’d been kicked out of school. His Instagram page was full of photos of dead animals and weapons. He was so frightening to teachers that he’d been banned from even carrying a backpack into school.
Marco Rubio was still in his first year as a senator when a madman with an assault rifle murdered 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary. After the Miami Herald pressed him for a response, he said he hoped to “take a break from the politics of shooting for a few days to mourn.”
Sitting in an unmarked police car in a dark lot outside her Allapattah apartment, Sara was crying and shaking uncontrollably. The dashboard clock glowed 2 a.m. Three weeks earlier, she had called 911 to report that her boyfriend had violently raped her.
The 23,075 Marlins fans who filed into Little Havana May 17, 2015, had no idea they were about to witness history. The Fish were already six games under .500 that Sunday afternoon, and Miami soon stumbled toward another putrid 6-0 loss to the Braves. But then came the sixth-inning break.
Florida and marijuana are already a well-matched couple. Jimmy Buffett, the state’s de facto songwriter-in-chief, supported himself as a weed smuggler and wrote odes to mary jane. The tropical climate is perfect for growing herb. And finally given the chance on a statewide ballot, more than seven in ten voters hopped on the medical-marijuana train in 2016.
For months, Miami Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo has insisted that any federal budget bill must include help for the millions of Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought to America as children — before their legal protection under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan ends early next month.
