Here’s the good news for Miami: A tropical wave rolling this morning off Nicaragua that now has a 90 percent chance of morphing into a named storm isn’t likely to hit South Florida. Instead, the system is expected to clip the Yucatan and then head north before possibly impacting the Panhandle…
On Sunday, a madman armed with high-powered rifles he’d turned into virtual automatic weapons with perfectly legal slide-fire stocks massacred 59 people and injured more than 500 in Las Vegas. Congress could easily have prevented the scale of the tragedy by re-instating a federal ban on assault weapons, and making…
America is reeling this morning from the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history. At least 400 people were wounded and 50 killed in Las Vegas when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire with at least ten rifles from the 32nd floor of a hotel onto a concert crowd below.
Miami hasn’t come close to picking up all the gigantic mounds of rotting palm fronds and shattered ficus branches left over from Hurricane Irma. The Florida Keys will only officially reopen to tourists this Sunday. So of course, a new tropical storm might just whip out of the northwestern Caribbean and batter South Florida and the Keys this weekend with some extra wind and rain.
More than three million Americans are living through an unprecedented disaster in Puerto Rico, yet so far they’ve apparently ranked far below NFL protests and the concerns of the shipping industry on Donald Trump’s priority list. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio subtweeted Trump straight to Hell this morning, demanding the president immediately send more aid to the battered island.
In the middle of a decaying central square of closed junk stores and shuttered barbershops, Opa-locka’s gleaming, $8 million Town Center was eerily empty Wednesday morning. That’s because every elected official in town was huddled in a room with Florida Inspector General Eric Miller, the man tasked with unraveling…
If you’ve been saving a particularly nice bottle of bubbly for the day when Jeffrey Loria’s fat, greedy face finally leaves Miami baseball fans to suffer in peace, it’s time to pop the cork. Major League Baseball’s owners have unanimously approved the sale of the team to a group led by investor Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter.
The Florida Democrats are the Washington Generals. They’re the 1962 Mets. They’re Mike Dukakis, Steve Urkel, and pre-time-travel George McFly rolled into one. Yes, they’ve been steamrolled by gerrymandering and voter suppression, but they also rarely miss a chance to blast off their own feet en route to their latest, all-too-predictable loss.
Even in Miami Beach’s drunken carnival of a political scene, few elected officials have had quite as colorful a term as Commissioner Michael Grieco. The attorney has brawled with the NAACP over civil rights, sprinted down a drug dealer while out on his morning job, called a former opponent a “fucking scumbag” at a debate, and been embroiled in an unseemly fundraising committee now under state investigation.
Tiny North Bay Village has been the scene of big-time drama this year over old drug charges and new blackmail attempts. The case centers on Commissioner Douglas Hornsby, a local physician who stunned residents earlier this year when he revealed that he’d been convicted on cocaine charges back in 1992 — and…
The tens of thousands of Boricuas who live in Miami are anxiously staring at CNN and Twitter this morning, hoping against hope that everyone back in Puerto Rico stays safe as the apocalyptic Hurricane Maria rakes the island. Even as Miami can rest easier as the latest tracks show Maria…
For Miami residents, life is far from back to normal after Hurricane Irma. There’s no power — and probably won’t be for days or even weeks. Cell service is spotty. Canned beans have become an every-meal staple. But a few parts of Dade County are getting back to…
The sun is shining in South Florida and the wind is starting to die down. For the tens of thousands of Miami Beach residents who evacuated the barrier island before Hurricane Irma, it may seem like the perfect time to return home to assess damage and check out the neighborhood…
Across South Florida this morning, locals are waking up from whatever fitful few hours of sleep they managed in unbearably hot bedrooms closed in by hurricane shutters and heading outside to see just how badly Irma messed up their neighborhood. The good news is that few buildings seem to have…
If you’ve ever lived in South Florida during hurricane season, chances are you’ve learned to read the various storm projection models like a fortuneteller scanning tarot cards. “I’m sorry, but the European model shows a far stronger eastern trend than the GFS,” you’ve probably said in a serious tone at…
The National Hurricane Center has now made official what everyone in Miami has feared since late last week: The entirety of South Florida is now under a hurricane warning and a storm surge warning as massive Hurricane Irma bears down on the state. In its 11 p.m. advisory, the Hurricane…
As Hurricane Irma plows toward Miami, plywood and bottled water are roughly as hard to find as a good Donald Trump Twitter take, and lines for gas have grown to Soviet proportions. Through it all, the vast majority of Miamians have acted with grace, patience, and good humor. But not everyone has been totally cool under fire.
Hurricane Irma is gigantic. And it’s coming to South Florida. As of 8 a.m. today, the only real debate among forecasters is how strong the storm will remain when it arrives in Miami this weekend and whether its über-destructive eye wall makes a direct hit on our urban corridor and the 6 million souls who live there.
As of 8 a.m. today, Hurricane Irma is still a record-shattering monster in the Atlantic. As the storm churns 15 miles west of Saint Martin, Irma packs 185 mph sustained winds and frighteningly low central pressure of 918 mb. Irma is pounding the Leeward Islands, has Puerto Rico and the Bahamas in its sights, and — as of now — still looks like a very real threat for Florida.
Even a novelist reaching for a heavy-handed metaphor about Miami’s tendency toward unsafe overdevelopment would have winced at a Tuesday press release sent by the city. Because it seems the dozens of cranes towering over the new luxury condo towers rising over Brickell and Downtown could literally kill you if…
In just a few months, Miami will finally be rid of Jeffrey Loria. Whenever he finalizes his deal to offload the Marlins to a new ownership team including Derek Jeter, Loria’s big, dumb, taxpayer-cheating face will presumably never appear on this news site again. We can all hold a big party.
Corruption and bribery are as central to Miami Beach’s history as art deco hotels and poolside mojitos. This is a town where a former mayor was convicted on 41 counts of bribery and where hotels and restaurants have always known that the solution to bureaucratic red tape is an envelop stuffed with cash.
