When Florida’s anti-pot lobby, the Drug Free Florida Committee, tried to scare Floridians away from legalizing medical marijuana for cancer and AIDS patients, the group warned that pot patients would be forced to buy their weed from unshowered “budtenders” with Bob Marley tattoos.
Arguably the biggest stain on Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s 24-year record involves the death of a mentally ill man. In 2012, witnesses claimed four prison guards at Dade Correctional Institution scalded schizophrenic inmate Darren Rainey to death inside a jerry-rigged prison shower as punishment for soiling himself.
After purchasing plywood, filling up on fuel, and buying enough food to feed the family, most Floridians are probably feeling a little strapped this month. Hurricane Irma may not have razed Miami, but for many people, it wiped out savings that will take equally as long to rebuild.
When a University of Miami student told a dean in 2013 that she’d been raped and was now being stalked by the rapist, the dean offered no help and told her to “avoid those situations” where she’d run into her assailant. Later, that same dean told the victim to “feel bad” for her rapist because he “did not have many friends”…
This season hasn’t exactly had a fairy-tale beginning for the Miami Dolphins. After losing starting quarterback Ryan Tannehill to a knee injury before the preseason, the team had to skip its first game with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers while Hurricane Irma lashed their hometowns.
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…
More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that no other developed nation subjects its citizens to a nightmarishly cruel health-care system that forces people to sell their homes to pay for cancer treatment. Many have realized that, through a combination of strict price controls and/or straight-up nationalized health care…
While tens of thousands of Floridians were without electricity or internet this week, Senate Republicans were busy devising new and ingenious ways to strip health care from millions of people. Now that most Floridians have cell-phone service again, they should spend the week calling Sen. Marco Rubio…
North Miami state Sen. Daphne Campbell has been ensnared in a remarkable series of corruption scandals throughout her career. But even for Campbell, her response to Hurricane Irma was nothing short of jaw-dropping. This past Saturday night, Campbell held a post-Irma “relaxation” party, complete with pizza, massages, and Scientologists, because of course she did.
Since 1933, Flamingo Gardens in Davie has been home to South Florida’s tallest tree — the Terminalia superba, otherwise known as the korina tree. Throughout the tree’s lifetime, it has survived bolts of lightning, gunshot wounds, and even the wrath of Hurricane Wilma. Alas, the hearty behemoth was no match for Irma, a Category 4 storm that tore up South Florida September 10.
Space is so close she feels like she can almost touch it. Nestled inside the Aero Commander, 27-year-old Geraldyne “Jerrie” Cobb coaxes her plane to 30,000 feet and then higher still. The oxygen canister and the rest of the equipment in the plane begin to float as Cobb stares out…
Florida Power and Light, Miami’s regulated electricity monopoly, has been collecting extra fees from its customers (everyone in South and East Florida) since Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005 to gird its power grid against tropical storms. But after Hurricane Irma knocked out power to roughly 90 percent of FPL customers…
Seven days after Irma, tens of thousands of homes in South Florida still have no electricity, even though FPL promised all power would be restored by this past weekend. Residents in many low-income communities, such as Allapattah, Little Haiti, Overtown, and Opa-locka, say they’ve had it the worst since FPL shut off power two days before Irma even arrived.
It’s been a little more than a week since Hurricane Irma rolled through South Florida, but just now are communities beginning to make a dent in the cleanup. Recovering from the strongest storm to hit South Florida since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 won’t be easy, but with everyone pitching in, things seem to be coming together day by day.
A group of young sailors stands helplessly on a deck as two skippers in yellow tow a shredded 200-foot-long dock away from the shore. Crushed behind it is a mangled wreck of nine sailboats, a couple of powerboats, and a 40-foot pontoon. As the dock drifts away, their worst fear is confirmed: Nothing is salvageable.
If Florida Gov. Rick Scott is wearing his blue U.S. Navy hat, it’s probably time to seek shelter. He pulls it on pretty much only when disaster is nigh. Once the National Hurricane Center begins warning that a storm is heading toward Florida, the blue brimmed beauty magically materializes on the top of his head. He never mentions it. It’s just there, covering his waxy turtle head, and we’re supposed to act like we don’t notice.
Hurricane Irma did more than decimate the Florida Keys — as Politico reporter Marc Caputo pointed out earlier this week, to “decimate” actually means to destroy every tenth person or thing, and Irma seems to have flattened much more than that in Monroe County. The same goes for Southwest Florida, and…
There’s a special place in Hell for people who price-gouge the poor and charge $99 for cases of water during a hurricane. But dangling directly above those people, locked inside cages with no room to stand or lie down, Satan has reserved a few extra spaces for pundits who waste valuable column inches…
What does it take to publish a brilliant feature story, pictures, and cover when there’s no electricity or internet, and writers are pinned down by 100 mile per hour winds? The answer is ingenuity, luck, and communication over more than 6,000 miles. Miami New Times doesn’t have fancy generators or…
As of Friday afternoon, almost a quarter-million of Florida Power & Light’s customers in Miami-Dade remained without power after Hurricane Irma. The widespread outages have already proven deadly: In Hollywood, eight elderly residents at a nursing home died without air conditioning, and a 7-year-old Lakeland girl was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator powering a home that had lost electricity.
Outside the Miami City Cemetery, tree limbs crowd the narrow sidewalk and a padlock secures the gated entryways. At the east end of the graveyard, dozens of tropical trees — some planted nearly 100 years ago — have toppled onto tombstones.
The South Dade Center is a subsidized housing project for the huge farmworker community in Homestead, the rural town south of Miami that has been repeatedly blasted by hurricanes since Andrew hit in 1992. Most of the area’s residents are of Mexican or Central American descent and make little money working in the sun-baked fields and plant nurseries that feed the rest of Florida.
