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 Jeb Bush — called the rule an outdated relic of the Cold War.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.”
If 2016 was bad for the United States, it was far worse for Haiti. The island nation had never really recovered from the 2010 earthquake when Matthew swept through, claiming more than a thousand lives and leaving approximately 175,000 Haitians homeless and another 800,000 in immediate need of food assistance, according to the United Nations. An electoral crisis left the country essentially without a president until last week, when Jovenel Moïse, a banana farmer and associate of former President Michel Martelly, took office. A third of Haitians are out of work, and roughly 9,600 suspected cholera cases have turned up since the hurricane.
Just so we’re clear, Marco Rubio is, by his own admission, not a scientist. He might actually be a large, brain-eating amoeba infecting the South Florida water supply. But whether he’s a living human senator or single-celled malignant disease, he sure talks like someone who knows next to nothing about the environment. He once blamed Miami’s flooding on “higher sea levels or whatever may be happening” and has said throughout his career that he doesn’t think human-made climate change is real.
In November, 71 percent of Florida voters backed legal medical marijuana. In Miami Beach, the approval rating was nearly 80 percent. So it’s bizarre that the very next day, the city voted to block dispensaries from the island for at least four months. Commissioner Ricky Arriola, who sponsored the move, says he simply wants to hit pause to allow the city more time to decide where distributors can operate.
As far as bank robberies go, a holdup at Brickell’s Navy Federal Credit Union yesterday afternoon was remarkably chill. A bald man in a neat sports coat calmly told a teller he had a bomb and then watched her fill a pink envelop with cash. Then, as his Uber driver streamed…
Stephen Bittel, a billionaire real-estate developer from Miami Beach, would like to lead the Florida Democratic Party. Most Miami Democrats see no issue with that. Bittel has been donating money to political campaigns for years and has helped prop up politicians such as U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The surfboard bobbed in the rolling waves off Huntington Beach, its fins facing toward the darkening sky. At first, the other surfers — at least a dozen of them, all soaking up the last bit of sunlight that late Sunday afternoon — didn’t notice. Then the yelling began. “Hey!” came…
Miamians adore Moonlight, the Barry Jenkins-directed paean to growing up poor, black, and gay in the Liberty City projects, because it truly gets Miami. Take a scene near the end, when the main character, Chiron, drives his long-lost love interest, Kevin, down Biscayne Boulevard and Kevin mentions he doesn’t have a car. Chiron is aghast — life without a car in Miami must be hell, he opines.
On a sweltering September morning last year, Adrian Henriquez and five friends hopped onto a yacht he’d chartered and set out for an afternoon cruise on Biscayne Bay. The group planned to shoot footage for an upcoming music video. Shortly after the luxury yacht left the Miami Beach Marina, one of the six passengers began smoking a cigar. But the seemingly innocuous display sent their captain, Robert Nobles, into a rage. That’s when, the passengers say, Nobles “became agitated, belligerent, and aggressive.”
