What could you do with 64 extra hours of time this year? You could marathon every Star Wars movie ever produced three times in a row. You could road-trip from Miami to San Francisco with 20 extra hours to nap along the way. Hell, you could ride your bike all the way to Atlanta if you’re into that kind of thing.
When Miami’s comically inept leaders signed off on the worst stadium deal in American history, one provision they proudly pointed to required team owner Jeffrey Loria to share a chunk of the profits if he sold the franchise. That seemed only fair, considering taxpayers were artificially inflating the worth of the club by gifting him a $2 billion ballpark.
The defendant had already pleaded guilty and a gaggle of reporters had shuffled out of the federal courthouse Thursday morning. But Judge Federico Moreno wasn’t in any rush to leave, and neither were the half-dozen veteran prosecutors and defense attorneys. After all, this case had been more than two decades in the making, dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy heyday.
Three City of Miami Police officers raced down the train tracks, desperately waving their arms at the freight train barreling past the NE 54th Street intersection. A few hundred feet down the tracks, a dark-green SUV was stuck on the rails. If the train hit the car at full speed, it could easily derail the miles of shipping containers.
The fútbol fanatics who packed the Knight Concert Hall Monday afternoon primed for a big fiesta starring David Beckham and his best political and business buds got just what they wanted. But the hundreds of reporters and photographers from around the world who came hoping for more concrete info about his planned Major League Soccer team might as well have stayed home and watched some old Real Madrid highlights.
There are Miamians now close to graduating from high school who were freshmen when David Beckham announced he planned to bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami. When Beckham took the stage at Pérez Art Museum, Pharrell’s insidious earworm “Happy” had recently topped the charts and The Lego Movie was tearing up the box office. It was a long-ass time ago.
Casting a vote is the most basic right in any democratic society. The entire system of government rests on the idea that every person of a legal age has a chance to make their voice heard in the distribution of power. Don’t like the way things are going? Vote, you…
Last week, a video went viral showing a Jamaican-born grandmother being hauled off a Greyhound bus at a Fort Lauderdale station. The woman was returning from visiting her grandchild for the first time in Orlando, according to activists who mounted a campaign to pressure the bus line to stop granting federal agents access to randomly demand papers from its customers.
Democrats haven’t had much to celebrate in South Florida recently, but they’re pretty sure they can gain back a Congressional seat this fall with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen retiring from a heavily blue district. Among the cluster of eight candidates slugging it out in the primary, there are some legitimately good options…
Florida’s law denying the right to vote to anyone ever convicted of a felony is racist. Full stop. It was passed in 1868 by white-supremacist lawmakers enraged at the 14th Amendment, knowing full well that a crooked criminal justice system would ensure far more blacks than whites would be stamped with lifetime voting bans.
“This is new?” a worried passenger asks while she films U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stalking the aisle of a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale and demanding proof of citizenship from the riders. Moments later, the agents arrest a passenger, pulling her and her luggage off the bus.
It was early morning in the Florida Capitol, and Sen. Jack Latvala — among the most powerful men in the Senate — was furious. He wanted doughnuts, and there were no doughnuts to be found. He was so angry he berated a junior staffer for the Senate majority leader, who then called in Rachel Perrin Rogers, a high-ranking aide.
The concept of Christmas is strange in Miami. Children are fed baffling images of a heavily clothed, bearded man pulling large deer-like creatures through some sort of white substance on the ground while listening to hours of music celebrating mysterious concepts such as “cold weather” and “fireplaces.”
Sen. Marco Rubio has gleefully pushed the GOP tax bill even though analysts say it will do nothing for Miami’s middle and working classes while giving huge tax breaks to millionaires in Brickell. But Rubio has tried to put some gloss on that plutocrat’s dream package by insisting that his colleagues slightly increase the corporate tax to pay for tax breaks for 9 million low-income families with children.
Miami’s Knight Foundation has millions of dollars at its disposal, a holdover from its eponymous family’s former media empire (which included the Miami Herald during its glory days). Now a sizable piece of that money is devoted to “advancing journalistic excellence in the digital age.”
Comedian Hannibal Buress has made Wynwood something of a second home in recent years, regularly showing up for surprise shows at Gramps when he’s not filming Broad City or the Eric Andre Show. It’s not clear exactly what he was doing in Miami last night, but a cell phone video…
Wherever he’s brought his giant inflatable caricature of Donald Trump as a snaggle-toothed rat, John Post Lee has been amazed by the response from others horrified by the regime. But when he started calling around and looking for a place to set up his signature balloon during Miami Art Week, the…
Miami-Dade is a gigantic county, larger than Rhode Island, packed with two million people and perpetually understaffed and overworked regulators. All of which is to say, you/ can get away with a lot of crazy stuff on a remote piece of land: cockfighting rings, grow-house empires, illegal horse slaughterhouses. Even…
As a historical preservationist and a native Floridian who loves the Everglades, Matt Stock had always wanted to find a unique way to use his work as a fine art photographer to capture one of America’s most singular places. Then he met Charles J. Kropke, a longtime Everglades explorer and…
For weeks, Donald Trump gleefully boasted about the job his administration had done in helping Puerto Rico weather the monstrous Hurricane Maria, particularly noting that only 16 people had supposedly been killed. “Look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and… you look at what happened here,” Trump said of the death toll in New Orleans…
Miami Beach residents have a contentious relationship with drones. Hang out on the sand on a sunny weekend and you’re bound to see at least a few buzzing over the surf, filming crowd shots of scantily clad sunbathers. In fact, there are so many that Miami Beach passed an ordinance banning the flying devices from filming through condo windows…
In September 2016, Ari Sweetbaum told the Miami City Commission a devastating story. His parents had bought a house in Coconut Grove in 1980 next to Blanche Park. His mom toiled every day in their yard, building a thriving tropical garden behind the home where Ari grew up.
