An old white man with forearm tattoos and gold hoop earrings stands at the front entrance of a condo in St. Petersburg. He’s got a cigarette in one hand and a solo cup in the other. With the growl of Kodak Black behind him, he rocks to the light percussion…
Last summer, the Broward Sheriff’s deputy who’d killed Jermaine McBean — a computer tech who was carrying an unloaded air rifle — tried something that had never been done before in Florida: He asked for a Stand Your Ground hearing. The bet paid off. In late July, a Broward circuit judge dismissed the manslaughter charge, leading to protests and pushback.
Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach this year spawned two scandals over casually racist politicians. City Commissioner Michael Grieco, who is running an embattled campaign for mayor, demanded the city cancel Urban Beach Week, the city’s largest celebration centered on black tourists, after two people were shot this year, including one killed by cops.
Miami-Dade County’s median income — a scant $44,000 — is remarkably low compared to virtually every other city of its size. This creates a whole host of problems for local and longtime residents. International billionaires jack up the city’s property values, inflating rental prices and forcing Miamians to either leave town or spend the highest share of their income on rent compared to residents of any other American city.
After six years of screaming about repealing Obamacare, the GOP hilariously fell on its face this week. There are a multitude of reasons Sen. Mitch McConnell shockingly delayed a vote on the American Health Care Act: the gaping schism between conservative Republicans who want to slash all spending…
Almost a year ago, the Florida Department of Health announced Wynwood was ground zero for Zika, the only place in the United States where the virus was being spread by mosquitoes. Soon after, the CDC began telling pregnant women to avoid traveling to the area, and a kind of panic hit local streets.
With rents and housing prices soaring ever higher across Miami-Dade County, how do locals afford to live here? New Times set out to find out by talking to Miamians with varying income levels about how they make life in South Florida work for them. This is the first story in a series.
A Miami Herald series earlier this year showed that Miami Beach’s luxury hotels — built for real-estate magnates, international billionaires, pro athletes, and reality stars — are staffed by low-earning housekeepers who can’t afford rent on the Beach and are forced to spend hours riding buses every day. The state minimum wage, capped at $8.15 per hour, has not kept up with the city’s luxury-level rents, and living a humane distance from work is virtually impossible.
Two men casually wandered through Dolphin Mall earlier this month, past the teenage shoppers and kiosks hawking watches, and headed for a quiet bathroom. One man gripped an envelope stuffed with $10,000 in cash. The other waited for a handoff in a stall. And lurking in disguise nearby, federal agents watched it all go down.
In a Facebook Live session with his constituents last week, Sen. Marco Rubio laid out the things he wanted to see in the U.S. Senate’s then-secret Obamacare repeal package. He listed four criteria that would push him to vote in favor of the plan: Whether it protected people with preexisting conditions…
While the Brewers walloped the Marlins on a steamy June evening, a Miami Police officer working crowd control outside the team’s Little Havana stadium pulled over a speeding silver Pontiac. The cop soon realized that the driver, 32-year-old Emmanuel Reyes, was wanted for previous traffic offenses.
Last Thursday night, the Miami Heat made Bam Adebayo, a 19-year-old, six-foot-ten, 260-pound power forward/center from the University of Kentucky the newest member of its little basketball club. For Heat fans who scoured mock drafts in the weeks leading up to the draft, this was one helluva curve ball. Few, if any, had Adebayo pegged as a potential Heat pick, making him a surprising, off-the-radar, head-scratcher selection.
Local Democrats seem to have made their opinion very clear: They want Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, to resign over her decision not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black, schizophrenic inmate who some witnesses said was scalded to death inside a burning-hot prison shower.
Lutze Segu, a black civil rights advocate, thought she had chosen a safe location Saturday for her seminar on ending white supremacy. Segu, who holds similar meetings around South Florida, gathered a group of activists at the Stonewall National Museum in Wilton Manors, one of the nation’s premier LGBTQ museums, in a city that’s at least friendly to white cisgender gay men.
On November 14, just a few days after Donald Trump’s election, Chuck Redding was driving home in Sarasota in a car with marriage equality and pride bumper stickers. Suddenly, Redding noticed a man in a Jeep Cherokee tailing him. Once Redding parked in the driveway, the bearded man jumped out, banged on Redding’s window, and yanked the door open.
Late last year, as he served a life sentence in prison, Ernesto Behrens received a notice informing him of problems discovered at the crime lab that had examined DNA in his case. Behrens, who was convicted of armed sexual battery in Broward County in 2000, immediately filed a flurry of motions asking for the evidence to be reviewed.
Hollywood, Florida, has three streets named for men who murdered people in order to keep black people enslaved. One of those three people also helped found the Ku Klux Klan. Hollywood has known about this for years, because efforts to rename the street signs only really jump-started after New Times Broward-Palm Beach’s Chris Joseph wrote a story in 2015 pointing out the real history of the streets’ namesakes.
On Wednesday, a small group of black-rights activists gathered outside city hall in Hollywood, Florida to ask that the city to stop honoring three Confederate Generals — Robert E. Lee, John Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest — with named streets. Forrest, in addition to being a general in the army…
Alex Martinez was surveying sea turtle nests in Miami Beach early Monday morning when a beachgoer flagged him down. On the shoreline at 10th Street and Collins Avenue was a 300-pound loggerhead turtle, dead in the sand near a freshly laid nest. A closer look at the nest revealed tire tracks and boot prints.
After Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement earlier this month, effectively ignoring the will of the American people, CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, and members of his own party, progressive leaders across the country vowed to battle climate change at the local level.
Somewhere across the mystical river Acheron, the River of Woe, deep down in the darkest pits of the Malebolge, the undead servants of Hell are picking open a new prison in Cocytus, the frozen lake where God has permanently trapped Satan in the Homeric underworld. They await the arrival of a new Prince of Darkness, a Bringer of Sadness, a Miami man named Adrian Abramovich, who is accused of making 96 million illegal telemarketing robocalls in just three months…
Some of Miami’s business and political elite have argued that because it might be impossible to stop the effects of climate change, we should let the city flood, capitalize on it, and perhaps become a 21st-century Venice. Vanity Fair has reported that some Miami high-rises are now being built with “washout floors” designed to take consistent flooding.
