This year’s mosquito season is shaping up to be a doozy already: Black salt marsh mosquitoes, which do not carry tropical diseases like the Zika virus or Dengue fever, arrived a few weeks earlier than usual. The bugs swarm in clouds thick enough to suffocate livestock, and Dade Mosquito Control…
For well over a year, Florida environmentalists and water protectors have been sounding the alarm about the Sabal Trail Transmission Pipeline, a behemoth, 515-mile natural gas pipeline cutting through the state’s vulnerable wetlands and above the Floridan Aquifer, our largest source of drinking water. At least 28 protesters have been arrested for civil disobedience as they rallied against the pipeline’s construction.
For years, the graying, muscular teacher with a bright tattoo of Buddha inked across his back has been a sought-after yoga guru in South Florida. Every weekend, dozens of students from Miami to Palm Beach have gathered at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach for classes by the man called Yoga Fox, who boasted of crafting his own style of yoga — complete with live harmonium playing — after years of intense study.
In late June 2015, Giancarlo Sopo got off a plane in Havana, Cuba, where his cousins waited for him in a 1980s-era Lada. He wasn’t sure what they looked like, but was immediately embraced by his relatives, who recognized him from photos. He stayed for ten days in Santos Suarez, a suburb just outside the city, in the same home where his family had lived for four generations.
Lawrence McCoy, a 29-year-old semihomeless man, was shot dead by Miami Beach Police Officer Adam Tavss in 2009. In 2011, a lawyer for McCoy’s family, Gregory Samms, sued the City of Miami Beach for wrongful death and claims McCoy was unarmed when he was shot. But the case remains open to this day. Once or twice a year, Samms drives to the Miami-Dade County Courthouse and files a motion to prevent the case from getting dismissed. But he says he can’t do much more.
When Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators began probing North Miami Police’s disastrous shooting of Charles Kinsey — an unarmed behavioral specialist trying to help a patient — Chief Gary Eugene described a force in turmoil and torn apart by infighting.
Thirty years ago this November, federal agents unsealed a litany of indictments against arguably the most famous drug traffickers in world history: The Medellín Cartel, led by the infamous drug-importing Ochoa crime family and its accomplice, Pablo Escobar. The indictments were billed as the end of Miami’s era of drug-riddled violence. In 1986, crime had skyrocketed to unforeseen levels: There were 12,000 incidents per every 100,000 people. (Turns out arresting Escobar didn’t solve the city’s problems. The crime rate jumped to 13,500 by 1989.)
If you’re a Miami sports fan, chances are you’re pretty bored right now. Sure, the Marlins have been playing OK, but they’re still seven games under .500. And if you’re among the majority committed to not giving Jeffrey Loria a cent of your hard-earned cash, you have three long, sweaty months left to dodge mosquitoes and hope for better entertainment come football season.
Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis and a friend, Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, had just finished a practice with the Republican congressional baseball team early this morning when they had an odd encounter with a man in the parking lot outside a Virginia baseball diamond. “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there,” DeSantis recounted to Fox News this morning. “It was just a little odd.”
Dr. Michael Salzhauer is many things — a famous plastic surgeon, a prolific Snapchatter, a shameless self-promoter — but subtle isn’t one of them. So when Bay Harbor Islands cited his medical office for a code violation, he showed up at a council meeting dressed in a red velvet robe and crown and declared independence from the tiny town.
When the Zika virus struck last year, Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control immediately began fogging with three pesticides: BTI, a group of bacteria that kills mosquito larvae; naled, a controversial chemical compound banned in Europe over links to developmental disorders in children; and permethrin, the active ingredient in home bug-killers such as Raid. Permethrin was sprayed at least seven times in Wynwood and five times in Miami Beach, but by the end of August, the county realized the poison had little effect and stopped using it.
The details of Miami-Dade County’s proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents.
Even in a year when Donald Trump vacuumed up all available political oxygen like a voracious orange Roomba, Miami’s local politicos still made some unbelievable headlines. From (maybe joking) promises to invade Cuba to bold stands against Florida Power & Light to failed attempts to trick voters into torpedoing solar power in South Florida, it was a hell of a year in South Florida’s halls of power.
Donald Trump has a curious relationship with Miami. The Magic City, in many ways, represents everything Trump rails against. We live in a chaotic melting pot of people from around the world — and have one of the highest percentages of undocumented residents in the United States. Miami also voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, which is not the kind of move to endear yourself to a guy pathologically obsessed with whether he won the popular vote.
A few weeks ago, Tatiana Arcia parked her car in what she thought was a public lot near McFarlane Road and South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove. When she returned less than ten minutes later, boots were locked on three of her wheels. A Premier Booting Services employee was about to affix a bright-orange sticker to her window. “Warning: Your vehicle has been immobilized!” it read.
Every year toward the beginning of rainy season, dense clouds of black salt marsh mosquitoes begin rising from the Everglades and coastal wetlands and descending upon Miami. For years, Miami and the Keys have fought back with a powerful tool: permethrin, a pesticide effective at killing the insects before they can make life miserable for South Florida.
Even under ideal circumstances, finding an apartment or house to rent is an utter nightmare. You spend weeks poring over misleading Craigslist ads with retouched photos, haggling over deposits and monthly fees, and trying to please NIMBY condo boards that hold your entire living arrangement in their hands.
South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard has somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the peacocks that roam his city. On the one hand, they’re beautiful and act as a kind of traffic control as drivers slow down to gawk at them or allow them to cross the street. On the other hand, they shriek “like someone is committing an ax murder” at 4:30 in the morning, attack their reflections on shiny cars, and leave poop all over the place.
When Florida overwhelmingly voted to approve medical marijuana last November, it’s a fair bet most of the millions of voters who checked yes on Amendment 2 imagined a future in which sick patients would be free to roll up a joint to smoke away their pain in peace.
Each year, about 5,000 Floridians are sent to one of the state’s seven mental health facilities. Some have been committed under the Baker Act for evaluation and treatment. Others are defendants found too mentally incompetent for a trial or guilty by reason of insanity. A smaller number are sexually violent predators deemed too dangerous to roam the streets.
To be poor in America is to give up every second of your free time. It means working ten- or 12-hour shifts folding towels at luxury Miami Beach resorts, only to ride multiple buses two hours there, two hours back, waking up at 4 a.m., and getting home at 8 every night. It means skipping voting or your kids’ graduation because you don’t get paid time off.
The way Miami Beach city commissioners tell it, Ocean Drive — the most famous street in Miami — has turned into a literal war zone. Drug dealers are roaming the streets, thieves are clubbing old ladies over the head, and you might lose your life if you hang out on the tourist-heavy street on the wrong night.
