A few months ago, Miami Beach Police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez joked over the phone with a New Times reporter that someone had made a parody Twitter account pretending to be him. At the time, the page seemed like a gag.
Thanks to sea-level rise, Florida’s unique topography, and poor city planning, areas of Miami-Dade County look like a hurricane hit them today. But there’s not even a tropical storm in town. Instead, mere weeks after a real hurricane did damage major parts of South Florida, the Miami area is massively flooding thanks to a combination of some moderate storms hitting during king tides, when the sea is at its highest point all year.
Census surveys say the Sunshine State has one of the highest uninsured populations in the nation, and of the top 25 metro areas, Miami ranks in the bottom three for health-care coverage. Among the local homeless population, medical debt now tops the list of reasons people end up on the streets, according to a new survey in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is built directly on the waterfront in Homestead — a location that has exposed the plant to serious natural disasters in the past. The reactor survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but the storm’s 175-mph winds did knocked out the plant’s communication lines, disable the emergency…
Oh, no. Not again. Just when you thought it was safe to stick those Miami Hurricanes flags on your car, fill it with gas, and head north on the Turnpike for this Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. game against the Florida State Seminoles, Mother Nature has once again wagged her dreaded hurricane finger in the general direction of the Sunshine State.
For 12 Miami-area police officers, killing an allegedly drunk driver in a hail of 116 bullets, shooting four innocent bystanders, costing city taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements, refusing to speak to local prosecutors, and drawing national scorn and embarrassment were not fireable offenses.
Here’s the good news for Miami: A tropical wave rolling this morning off Nicaragua that now has a 90 percent chance of morphing into a named storm isn’t likely to hit South Florida. Instead, the system is expected to clip the Yucatan and then head north before possibly impacting the Panhandle…
Since 1929, Sugarloaf Key’s towering bat bastion has welcomed nearly every kind of creature — except the one it was built to host. The 30-foot-tall tower was never effective at attracting bats to eat mosquitoes, as its builders had planned, but it became successful at attracting tourists and nesting ospreys.
When Miami SWAT Officer George Diaz fired eight shots into a moving car outside Club Space in 2011, his case should have been clear-cut for internal affairs investigators: Miami cops aren’t allowed to shoot into moving cars because they could cause an accident or hit innocent people inside the vehicle.
Despite what the National Rifle Association claims, gun laws influence gun deaths. For example, it’s completely legal in Las Vegas to walk around town holding a loaded, military-style rifle. No one can stop you, which is likely one reason terrorist Stephen Paddock was able to carry an arsenal of assault weapons into a Mandalay Bay hotel room and use them to murder 59 people and wound more than 500 others over the weekend.
On Sunday, a madman armed with high-powered rifles he’d turned into virtual automatic weapons with perfectly legal slide-fire stocks massacred 59 people and injured more than 500 in Las Vegas. Congress could easily have prevented the scale of the tragedy by re-instating a federal ban on assault weapons, and making…
Plenty of South Florida walls are covered with eye-catching murals, but the developers behind one Miami Beach project have another idea for filling the blank space: ginormous LED screens — one of them nearly 91 feet wide and 38 feet tall. The two screens proposed for “1212 Lincoln Road,” a Crescent Heights…
In June 2015, a 17-year-old girl told multiple news outlets that Hialeah Police Sgt. Jesus “Jesse” Mercado Jr. threatened to sexually assault her while he was on-duty. The teen told multiple TV stations that Mercado arrested her for making an illegal U-turn, cornered her in a Hialeah Police station, and…
Santiago Perez grabs for the carabiner, but it slips from his frostbitten fingers. His glove liners are worn away, so ice crystals form on his skin. Fearing he might lose digits, he tries to flex his hand inside the cavity of an unwieldy mitten, but it merely twitches. Nothing can…
So many terrible ideas come out of Tallahassee every year that it’s often hard to guess whether a random law was enacted in Florida or Saudi Arabia. Case in point: One of those two states passed a law in March 2016 forcing anyone giving “advice” about abortion — from a…
America is reeling this morning from the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history. At least 400 people were wounded and 50 killed in Las Vegas when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire with at least ten rifles from the 32nd floor of a hotel onto a concert crowd below.
A lot of smart journalistic voices are writing about sports right now. But for every thought-provoking, boundary-pushing thinker, there’s an Armando Salguero, the Miami Herald Dolphins columnist who once told a war veteran he “sucked as a soldier” and now has the gall to lecture black athletes on how to respect the flag.
With so much #FakeNews floating around on Facebook and Twitter, the Florida-based PolitiFact has become an invaluable tool for parsing out what’s true and what’s not. The social media giant itself has acknowledged that truth, joining forces with the national fact-checking site late last year in an effort to identify…
It’s getting increasingly difficult to believe that Jim Larrañaga, the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes Men’s Basketball team, doesn’t know the identity of the anonymous UM coach named in FBI corruption documents this week. Larrañaga is something of a folk hero in South Florida — he’s taken an upstart…
In the view of the Miami-Dade County Commission, uttering the word “damn” is more damaging than plans to defund public transportation, cut bus routes, or jack up police spending. At a public meeting over the county’s $7 billion taxpayer budget last night, a man was kicked out — and escorted away…
Calling him a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation, the City of Miami fired Officer Adrian Rodriguez for administrative violations in June 2016. Rodriguez — who has never been charged in the 2007 killing in question — appealed his termination, and in May an arbitrator said he should get his job back.
Miami hasn’t come close to picking up all the gigantic mounds of rotting palm fronds and shattered ficus branches left over from Hurricane Irma. The Florida Keys will only officially reopen to tourists this Sunday. So of course, a new tropical storm might just whip out of the northwestern Caribbean and batter South Florida and the Keys this weekend with some extra wind and rain.
