Rob Hiaasen’s newspaper columns were funny — actually, honest-to-god funny. In 2015, he noted his daughter had adopted a South Florida manatee named Squeaky as a gift for him; Hiaasen then spent part of a newspaper column wondering what advice to give his newly adopted sea-cow son. He decided on “Be safe.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart sure loves cigars. He enjoys them so much that at a February 14 federal budget hearing, the GOP congressman railed against the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to impose new regulations on the cigar industry. He claimed the rules were needlessly “burdensome” and unfair.
Miami Beach’s affordable-housing crisis is nothing new, and its elected officials know that. Seven years ago, the city adopted an ambitious plan to create at least 16,000 new affordable units by 2020. But last summer, commissioners admitted there was no way the city could hit that goal and voted to extend the deadline and reduce the goal to only 6,800 affordable units.
Two years later, the stark facts of Gregory Frazier’s death are still startling. Frazier was eating a chicken dinner in his Pompano Beach backyard September 9, 2016, when two Broward County Sheriff’s deputies stormed in with guns drawn. It was 10 p.m. Within minutes, the two cops had shot Frazier six times, killing him on the spot.
The Broward Transitional Center is basically a jail for people who haven’t committed crimes. It’s designed to hold “low-level” immigrant detainees slated for deportation after they’ve been arrested on minor charges — such as driving without a license — or picked up on no criminal charges at all.
For years, the Civilian Investigative Panel (CIP) has been warning the Miami Police Department that its cops keep refusing to use their body cameras. Despite the fact that more than $1 million in federal and local public money had been spent on the cameras, the CIP — an independent group that looks into complaints against police — found in 2016 that dozens of cops still weren’t recording or uploading footage. In 2017, the CIP criticized MPD a second time for not fixing the problem.
Legal recreational weed in Florida just got closer to becoming a reality. John Morgan, the Orlando attorney whose fortune and advocacy helped bring medical marijuana to the Sunshine State, says he’s throwing his weight behind an effort to get recreational pot on the ballot in 2020.
Being a Miami Marlins fan is a lot like being a garbage man: No one truly appreciates you, and they talk about you only when you don’t show up. It’s truly a thankless job. It wasn’t always that way, though. Being a Marlins fan was once cool. The Marlins were the new thing in town, and being a fan of them was your duty as a South Floridian.
Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez said last evening that if an August 2017 memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office accusing his cops of lying was accurate, his officers would indeed have been guilty of perjury and “committed a crime.”
Earlier this year, investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department and state prosecutors discussed whether to charge or discipline a group of MDPD officers for perjury, but they ultimately declined to do so. That’s according to documents New Times obtained today from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in the case of Ephraim Casado, who was beaten on camera after being pulled over for allegedly littering and driving recklessly.
Two hours after North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot behavioral technician Charles Kinsey — an unarmed black man — Det. Michael Gaudio interviewed Kinsey’s client with severe autism, 26-year-old Arnaldo Rios Soto.
Ephraim Casado allegedly did nothing but throw a bottle from his car March 27, 2017. According to documents and footage New Times obtained, Miami-Dade County cops responded by repeatedly punching him in the face, grinding his body into the asphalt, and painfully hoisting him into the air by his arms before arresting him on charges of “resisting an officer without violence.”
Sybel W. Lee stomps her foot on the vinyl floor in her kitchen. On the wall hangs a sign: Love makes a house a home. But the truth is, this house stopped feeling like a home a long time ago. Lee moves to another spot a couple of feet away…
One of the (only) fun parts of driving in the traffic hellscape of South Florida is that you never know what you might see: a woman twerking on the roof of a car, a truck towing a flaming boat, or a man sprawled on his stomach on the hood of a Benz blazing in an express lane.
For almost a decade, urban explorer David Bulit has been making his way into forgotten properties scattered across Florida, including Miami Marine Stadium, Glades Correctional Institution, and the Aerojet-Dade rocket facility. Many of them have long, storied pasts, which the 29-year-old Hialeah resident recounts on his blog, Abandoned Florida, alongside his behind-the-scenes photographs.
In late 2016, a 17-year-old Guatemalan teen fled her home. Her father was a prominent local politician and had been receiving repeated extortion threats over the past year. He had continually refused to pay, so his enemies warned they would kidnap his daughter. The threat was serious enough that she made the long, treacherous journey to the United States, where her aunt and uncle lived, to seek asylum.
The entire state of Florida has been in something of an uproar after New Times reported Monday that the Trump administration had quietly re-opened a camp for child migrants in Homestead and placed nearly 1,200 children there without informing the public. Since then, politicians, reporters, and protesters have descended on…
Florida senator, immigration-detention-contractor-donation-taker, and walking logical fallacy Marco Rubio decided today, out of the kindness of whatever exists where his heart ought to be, to tour the Homestead Temporary Shelter of Unaccompanied Children. And because he is Marco Rubio and said words in public today, a bunch of protesters rightfully…
In April 2017, just a few weeks before Sweetwater’s elections, Commissioner Isolina Maroño and mayoral candidate Saul Díaz were riding in a car together when they were stopped by police. Officers found inside the vehicle multiple absentee ballots belonging to Maroño’s relatives.
His House Children’s Home, a Miami Gardens facility that has housed young migrant children for the federal government, was accused in Broward County court of letting a small child fatally suffocate underneath a blanket. The boy was not an immigrant but a young minor brought to the facility in 2007 after being taken from his parents in Broward by the Florida Department of Children and Families.
Three days after controversial SoundCloud rapper XXXTentacion was gunned down outside a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, the Broward Sheriff’s Office has arrested a suspect in the killing.
Mascots have somehow been grandfathered in as normal in sports, but many of them closely toe the line between absolute horror show and lovable knockoff Disney character. Locally, we have quite a few that are pushing the envelop of creepiness. We love them, but even the biggest fans have to admit they’re nightmare fuel.
