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.
Authorities say aspiring local rapper Darrish Bernard Martin, AKA Young Bernie, was part of a crime ring that broke into dozens of pharmacies across South Florida and made off with bottles of prescription-strength cough syrup that were then sold to Lil Wayne and other “purple drank” aficionados. In a letter…
With slightly more than two weeks to go before massive, international crowds wash over Wynwood for Art Basel, Miami officials are quietly finalizing a plan to shut down the neighborhood’s main street — NW 2nd Avenue — to vehicular traffic from Friday, December 8 through Sunday, December 10. The city…
Hunting invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades is no easy task: Trackers have to spot the world’s largest snake species amid the sawgrass and swamps of the protected land, but they’re often no match for the highly camouflaged constrictor. But one team of snake hunters has a new tool for finding pythons: high-tech thermal drones.
You know how fashion trends repeat themselves every 30 years or so? The same thing seems to be happening in politics. Cheesecake-brained, women-abusing lunatics seem to be in vogue once more. Roughly a year after Donald Trump rode into Washington on a sled pulled by Rascal scooters, 1990s Miami Mayor Joe Carollo — almost certainly the craziest person to hold office in South Florida — has returned to the Miami City Commission just in time for 2017.
After voters overwhelmingly legalized medical marijuana a year ago, Florida was supposed to issue ten new pot-growing licenses to nurseries by October 3. But the state has dragged its feet in implementing nearly every aspect of the law, from issuing cards to patients to passing basic regulations on who can smoke cannabis and when they can smoke it.
For more than two decades, John Rivera was the ideal of what most cops think a police union president should be: He lied constantly, threw tantrums at even the slightest personal insult, and had zero qualms about blaming black kids for getting themselves shot by the officers he represented.
In the wake of Hurricane Irma, power outages shut down almost 70 percent of traffic lights in Miami-Dade County. The result proved what most of us already instinctively knew: Literally no one in South Florida knows how to use a four-way stop.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 24,000 Haitian nationals live between Miami and Palm Beach under temporary protected status (TPS), which is given to immigrants from nations devastated by political turmoil or natural disasters. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, has been struck by both, including the infamous 2010 earthquake that leveled the island…
The last time Joe Carollo sat on Miami’s city commission, the police chief accused him of — no joke — trying to obtain an illegal concealed-weapons permit for a visiting sheikh tied to the Saudi royal family; telling the police he was being stalked and calling them into “secret” meetings that he would then refuse to show up for…
They don’t call this place the Magic City for nothing,” Louis Aguirre says with a chuckle. “Coming back to Miami is my full-circle moment.” You know Aguirre. He spent years on local TV before heading to the West Coast to become cohost of CBS’s Entertainment Tonight spinoff, The Insider. But…
Police blocked off the streets and locked the doors to Miami-Dade County Hall as a group of infuriated protesters gathered outside. It was January 27, the day after Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced he would cooperate with Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, and emotions were running high. The idea that residents…
It’s easy to mistake Steve Leifman for a psychiatrist. He’ll happily rattle off statistics about the incidence of schizophrenia in Miami-Dade County, quote a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article, or digress at length about the effects of childhood emotional trauma. Leifman is actually a criminal court judge…
As the public spat unfolded in Tallahassee this past April, it felt like the perfect metaphor for the raging culture wars in Trump’s America. Rep. Kionne McGhee, a black Democrat from Miami, was fighting for a monument to the innumerable slaves who worked and died in Florida before the Civil…
Stephanie Myers was onstage at a Democratic unity rally at the Knight Center, giving a speech about answering the call to get involved, when a voice rang out from the crowd. “Run for office!” a woman yelled. Myers, a lead organizer of the filled-to-capacity Women’s Rally of South Florida, laughed…
When 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson was murdered by police in Panama City in 2006, Jasmen Rogers was just starting college at Florida State. Then only 17, she remembers it as the first time she understood “wow, the world isn’t fair for black people.” Eleven years later, Rogers is one of…
When a tipster told Miami Waterkeeper that a leaky sewage pipe was spewing human waste right into Biscayne Bay, the environmental organization wasted no time sending a diver to investigate. Sure enough, they discovered the pipe was blasting the bay with thousands of gallons of harmful waste. But the worst…
Megachurches are often scams. Their owners and preachers become obscenely wealthy and don’t have to pay taxes. And a remarkably huge percentage of megachurch leaders become ensnared in ethically dubious (at best) conduct: Ultra-rich Houston pastor Joel Osteen infamously neglected to open his megachurch to Hurricane Harvey victims for days…
Last week, the FBI released its yearly log of hate crimes reported across the nation. In Florida, the data appears to show that hate-crime reports jumped 33 percent between 2015 and 2016. But that wasn’t the entire story: Many of both the Sunshine State’s and the nation’s largest police departments appear to be neglecting to report hate crimes to the FBI.
Wynwood brewery J. Wakefield Brewing is working on rushing out its new Turnover IPA in the hopes it will be ready to hit Canes fans’ lips in time for their team’s bowl game. The beer is named for the chunky gold necklace that Canes coaches award players on the sideline after they record turnovers.
In 2010, the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, a state body that loans money to build affordable housing, flunked an Atlanta developer called the American Opportunity Foundation (AOF) “due to past defaults, assignments, bankruptcies, or foreclosures” issued against the company’s properties in years past. As of 2010, state regulators warned that 22 of the 80 loans listed on the foundation’s report at the time were in default, so “AOF is not considered an acceptable general partner.”
A Miami ordinance allows for up to 100 pedicabs to operate within city limits, but unnecessary obstacles in permitting have stifled pedicab companies from breaking in. Consequently, Miami is one of few major cities without pedicabs as part of its public transportation system.
