Poor Jeb! After patiently waiting his turn to run for president, he was walloped mercilessly by schoolyard bully Donald Trump. The Donald branded him a “low-energy” candidate and gleefully taunted him for deploying his mother in campaign ads (“Jeb – mom can’t help you with ISIS, the Chinese or with Putin,” Trump tweeted).
We elected a president last year, which means D.C. politicians spent 12 whole months treating Floridians and their precious electoral votes like delicate French dauphins, catering to our every whim and promising us things like jobs, endangered species protections, and a sea that won’t swallow and drown us in a hundred years.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided there’s nothing wrong with Florida Power & Light’s plan to store radioactive waste and contaminated water in an aquifer connected to South Florida’s drinking water supply. Last Friday, NRC officials shot down a legal petition from an environmental group asking the agency to reconsider FPL’s plan.
The herd of false killer whales, a kind of endangered, oversize dolphin, wormed its way into the narrow channels of Everglades National Park sometime over the weekend. The massive creatures, which can grow to 20 feet and 1,500 pounds, were soon trapped in the silty water, thick with mangrove roots…
There’s plenty of argument raging online about how to best honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, especially when MLK Day falls just before the inauguration of walking racist meme Donald Trump. But there’s no doubt that mass violence is the worst possible way to remember the civil rights icon. So…
Protests against the Sabal Trail Pipeline, the energy-company-owned natural-gas project slated to run from Alabama to Central Florida, have reached a fever pitch. Over the weekend, hundreds of peaceful protesters picketed and chanted in Suwannee County. They demanded that the triumvirate of energy companies building the $3 billion pipeline — Duke Energy, Spectra Energy, and NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light — reconsider their actions.
“Hillary Clinton is like a godmother,” Evelio Medina says, chuckling. “She created us.” Trump got crushed in Miami-Dade on Election Day, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have die-hard backers in this blue county — few more vocal than Medina, who has embraced Clinton’s use of “deplorables” to describe…
South Florida sits atop two gigantic underground stores of water: the Biscayne and Floridan Aquifers. Miamians get most of their drinking water from the upper Biscayne Aquifer, while the government has used the lower portion of the Floridian to dump waste and untreated sewage — despite the fact that multiple studies have warned that waste could one day seep into the drinking water.
Miami is, more than most cities, optimized for people with entrenched, multigenerational wealth. Rent is nearly as expensive as other major American metro areas such as Seattle and Washington, D.C., but the city’s median income is a scant $44,000. That’s peanuts compared to cities like New York and Los Angeles…
Most cannabis activists, law enforcement professionals, and biologists agree that blood tests don’t work very well to police stoned drivers. Unlike alcohol, which dissolves in blood, THC, the active chemical in marijuana, dissolves in fat and doesn’t “peak” in the body while you’re actually high. In February, a Columbia University neurobiologist told NPR that it’s “really difficult to document drugged driving in a relevant way.”
Dear Stoner: If I breed a new strain from a male and female plant, can I name it whatever I want? Is there any sort of convention to follow? Bob the Breeder Dear Bob: You are free to name it whatever you come up with — no matter how stupid…
Over the past ten years, it’s been difficult to find politicians, be they left-leaning or right-of-center, to defend the U.S. government’s “wet foot, dry foot” Cuban immigration policy. Even during the Bush administration, politicos — such as then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — called the rule an outdated relic of the Cold War. Even Marco Rubio has said it’s time for the law to go.
Barack Obama will be the U.S. president for eight more days. But he’s decided something that will have lasting ramifications for Miami and South Florida: the end of the long-standing and controversial “wet foot, dry foot” Cuban immigration policy, which granted residency to Cuban immigrants who entered the United States without visas, according to the Associated Press.
Before taking the reins as mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine made a fortune as a cruise-ship media magnate who spent his spare time hobnobbing with celebrities like Mick Jagger, Annie Liebovitz, and Hillary and Bill Clinton. The minute Levine took office in 2013, he used his experience as a PR king to his advantage, rapidly turning himself into one of the nation’s highest-profile climate-change fighters.
Less than 1 percent of Florida gun transactions were denied due to mental health issues in recent years.
For a few delirious hours yesterday, Florida’s junior senator made his home state proud. Marco Rubio relentlessly grilled Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, on human rights violators such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, demanding to know whether Tillerson believed Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal” and whether he’d listen to intelligence agencies about Russia’s hacking.
In the fall of 2015, a Florida woman boarded the Carnival Breeze with her 15-year-old daughter and set sail for the Caribbean. It was October 3, the last leg of the eight-day voyage. As she had done several nights of the cruise, the girl stopped by Deck 4 to check out the ship’s alcohol-free club, which catered to 15-to-17-year-olds.
As a young immigrant to Miami, Haitian activist Marleine Bastien said she used to walk past the Sabal Apartments on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti — and the apartments used to be entirely full of Haitian people. In the years since, the project has switched owners, and names, and…
Most citygoers love Uber, but taxi drivers can’t stand the ride-sharing app. The company has successfully “disrupted” the taxi industry, put drivers out of business, and led to mass protests in the United States and Europe. Now Uber’s new business model could put its own drivers out of business: The company has launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh, where self-driving cars ferry Uber passengers from stop to stop.
When Charles Kinsey, an unarmed behavioral technician assisting an autistic client, was shot by a North Miami Police officer last summer, critics immediately assailed the department’s training procedures. Those cries only intensified when news broke that North Miami had recently lost its state accreditation in part due to problems with training its cops.
By now you’ve woken up to the Black Mirror-worthy headlines: President-elect Donald Trump has spent all night angrily denying he paid Russian prostitutes to perform an R. Kelly-approved routine at a Moscow hotel while FSB spies secretly filmed blackmail material.
After a wave of protests, Ohio Gov. John Kasich last month vetoed a bill that would have banned abortions in Ohio after six weeks — a period before many women even know they’re pregnant. Kasich received a brief round of applause before turning around and signing a 20-week abortion ban. Anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life still applauded Kasich’s decision, stating the “20-week ban was nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America.”
