News

Something like that I often ignore the ball-busting demands of Fortune cookies. Pursue your wishes aggressively. Ummmm, ok. And online horoscopes are vague and inconsistent. And don’t get me started on a disappointing late night call to a psychic hotline – how long can you expect a girl to ignore…

At about one o’clock a.m. last night, I got a call that the Umoja Shantytown had burned to the ground. The call came from an a friend, someone tied into the haphazard network of activists that came together around the common cause of the shantytown. “I’m in for the long…

T-Bone and his muse When people started screaming about the flames that swept through Umoja Village last night — a homeless shantytown in Liberty City — T-Bone grabbed his radio and ran. T-Bone was one of the 44 people who lived in the camp. He had been there four months…

Last year Congress negated habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees. Now the U.S. Department of Justice has requested that a DC appeals court limit civilian lawyers’ access to Gitmo clients to three visits. The DOJ has also requested the right to read correspondence between lawyers and detainees. When it opened…

Eleven 40-caliber shell casings lay just beyond the front lawn of the little white house on Service Road. Blood ran like latticework from the street, up the driveway, and pooled in the doorway, where 23-year-old Major Johnson lay dying. His aunt stood back in the darkness of her house, her…

In the Kids’ Corner Filed Under: News There’s been no shortage of press coverage of the 101 Haitian “migrants” who arrived by sailboat on the shores of Hallandale Beach in March, and who now face potential deportation. But little has been written about the fate of the fourteen children among…

Miami-Dade County Commission Chairman Bruno Barreiro is holding court at a Little Havana library. It’s still early and his audience consists of about two dozen three- and four-year-old students from nearby Lincoln Marti School and Pin Pon Nursery School. The photogenic 41-year-old Cuban American is narrating We’ve All Got Belly…

Twenty-seven years before the greenhouse effect began making daily headlines across the United States, University of Miami geology professor Harold Wanless returned home from an Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored conference with a hypothesis. To check it, he started looking up tide-gauge records for Miami and Key West. The Magic City’s records…

In my upcoming restaurant review of Acqua, in the Four Seasons Miami, I write of having ordered a main course of Szechuan-glazed “White Marble Farms pork shank,” and then go on to explain that this pastoral moniker is a brand name cooked up by Sysco marketers for industrial pork from…

Since the late 70s, Miami has endured hurricanes, homicides, and cocaine wars. The city is a survivor, to say the least. It also may be an example for another down and out metropolis, one with just as much character and potential: New Orleans. According to a Big Easy business magazine,…

Former Hialeah abortion clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez is scheduled to be arraigned today in a Broward circuit criminal court. She is charged with practicing health care without a license. New Times published a story about the clinic this past October. According to police, forty one-year-old Gonzalez and her business partner…

It’s unclear whether Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez declined the invitation or if it was rescinded, but at last night’s NAACP meeting at the Joseph Caleb Center, the man was not there. The uproar of last month’s meeting, which featured a defiant Roosevelt Bradley protesting the forced end of his…

It seemed so small of former Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber to take his last shots at Bea Kalstein shortly after her death last week. “Always very friendly” he conceded about the passionate Beach activist, “but insufferable” he felt it necessary to add. “She was a regular at my podium,…

The Biltmore Hotel’s Sunday brunch, generally acknowledged as among the very finest in town, is now, according to press materials, “expanded” and “enhanced.” As far as we can tell, the main difference is a finer fizz, as each week a different champagne from one of France’s top producers is poured…

Traffic along Bird Road slowed to a crawl Thursday morning. Blaring horns and rally cries could be heard echoing over the creeping vehicles around SW Tenth Street, long before the cause had come into view. The pink coquina façade of the International Bank was obscured by an ocean of umbrella-waving,…

Psychologically torturing people for the purposes of public amusement is generally frowned upon in Western civilization. But it sure is funny. Especially when you add Pitbull, poultry and a hysterical 11-year old into the mix. With any luck; EL PAVO ES MIO will become part of the modern Miami patois.–Calvin…

Dorell Wright is prone to bold announcements. The sinewy forward leapfrogged college for the NBA in 2004 to become the youngest Miami Heat player of all time. But the announcement that shocked roommate Derrick Clark came last November, when Wright declared, “Yo, I’m going to cook Thanksgiving.” Clark knew his…

Floater Alert! Many of you have e-mailed us with your concerns about C. “Boss” Poop swimming and/or floating in our water. This is quite normal considering more than half of the sewage from Miami-Dade County is disposed of through ocean outfalls. When asked where he swims, Poop exhaled cigar smoke,…

Seven hours into a sweaty, bloody trek through dense-cut grass, Brazilian pepper, and wax myrtle in the remote Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, Mike Owen started shouting. “Home run! I’ve got a home run!” Owen, Fakahatchee’s loquacious park biologist, had found a ghost orchid clinging to a pond apple tree…

The Marlins beat Philadelphia 8-5 last Saturday and the crowd was plenty euphoric. But around the seventh inning, when the CBS 4 promo for Jim Berry’s Sports Wrap came on the jumbotron, it got downright giddy. We know it’s on television as well, but in case you haven’t seen the…