On September 7, the Miami-Dade Commission will convene to review the mayor’s proposed budget, which includes cuts to transit funding. Protesting the cuts are members of the Transit Alliance, who believe the new budget will cripple Miami’s public transit system.
If you’re a Miami Dolphins fan, give yourself a round of applause: For all you’ve been through over the past four decades, you’ve earned it. Dolphins fans have been through the ringer. It would be one thing if Miami’s NFL team were a perennial dumpster fire, but that is not the case.
The Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has exactly one job: act as a check on the state’s powerful local electricity monopolies such as Florida Power & Light. The board has to sign off on rate increases and regulates safety and service issues — but critics have long said the regulators are barely a rubber stamp.
Yesterday, in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum begged Gov. Rick Scott to take down a Confederate memorial in Tallahassee’s Old Capitol. Scott’s spokesperson sheepishly told reporters the governor had “received” Gillum’s statement. Nothing else.
In 1937, a young black man named John McBride was shot in the stomach by a car full of white men rumored to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. Hospitals in the area near the Pompano Beach shooting at first refused to admit him. A black physician, Dr. Von D. Mizell, ultimately persuaded one of them to take him in. But the hospital later insisted on moving McBride to a rundown sanitarium, where he soon died.
When a group called Sabal Trail began building a 515-mile natural gas pipeline from Alabama to Florida, protestors rightly worried about the possibility of a leak or explosion. All along, Sabal Trail representatives assured residents who lived by the pipeline that the risk of a gas leak was “minimal.”
Confederate monuments are falling across the United States, torn down by angry mobs in North Carolina and removed in the dead of night by Baltimore officials. The movement is a long-overdue reckoning with racist symbols that were often installed decades after the Civil War simply to intimidate black people.
When a South Florida Uber driver shot and killed an armed attacker late last year, Jose Mejia thought the company should have congratulated the guy. Mejia, who’s also a local driver, couldn’t believe it when the man’s job was called into question instead, thanks to an Uber policy barring firearms.
Save Southern Heritage is a national network committed to keeping monuments to the pro-slavery South alive and gleaming across the nation. At least one member of the group from Virginia attended last weekend’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where mobs of white nationalists beat people with sticks and drove a car into dozens of peaceful counterprotesters.
Julio Calderon, a undocumented immigrant from Honduras, clutches a megaphone in the sweltering August sun and wipes tears from his eyes. He has a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is speaking to a crowd of Miami-Dade police and political leaders just down the street. “I don’t think I should be criminalized and deported because I want to stay here,” Calderon says.
For years, the FBI has been pushing police to adopt “rapid DNA” testing technology, which would let cops quickly obtain the kind of analysis that crime labs usually take months to pull from hair samples or cheek swabs. But privacy experts have long warned that the emerging technology could also lead to huge databases of DNA used for all sorts of reasons by the federal government or local forces.
On August 10, PRISM founder David Pierce Rodriguez took his ghost-busting team on an investigation of the supposedly haunted rooms of Homestead’s Hotel Redland, where sleeping residents reportedly died in a fire a century ago. Known for its guided ghost tours at the Deering Estate, the team has done similar investigations at the Miami City Cemetery, Villa Paula, and the Gold Coast Railroad Museum.
Each time a new retailer began accepting Bitcoin as payment a few years ago, Mike Komaransky made a small purchase to signal his confidence in the digital currency.
Yesterday the pro-Confederate group Save Southern Heritage Florida issued a news release blaming leftists, members of the movement Antifa, and Black Lives Matter for the terror attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez is already a national embarrassment thanks to his yellow-bellied decision to cow to Donald Trump’s nationalistic immigration demands. Now, one of the most racist and ghoulish beings on Planet Earth will make that honor official by holding a speech in Miami tomorrow to praise our dear county mayor.
In June, a group of avowed white nationalists harassed a gathering of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who’d gathered in Hollywood to demand that the city change three streets named after Confederate generals and the original grand-wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive, multi-day PR boondoggle, the city…
Dominique Lefort, a Frenchman known to many as “Cat Man,” has developed an enormously popular pre-sunset show over three decades in Key West.
Over the weekend, a white supremacist drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The terror attack killed 32-year-old Virginia civil rights activist Heather Heyer and severely injured 19 others. Police have charged the driver, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., with second-degree murder.
Yvonne Rodriguez nervously rapped on the front door of a Westchester home. She’d arrived to see her brother’s santera, Dulce, for insight into her future. In a cramped backroom with a card table draped in a white tablecloth, surrounded by statues of saints and offerings of fruit, Yvonne paid her $21 fee and looked to Dulce for answers.
Last year, the Miami-Dade County Commission shot down a plan that would have forced local developers to include some affordable apartments in every new project. Commissioner Javier Souto claimed the idea was “social engineering,” one of the most profoundly stupid things said in South Florida politics this decade.
This past Saturday, a Nazi-obsessed 20-year-old plowed a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a brutal act of domestic terrorism that left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and dozens seriously injured — even though the president of the United States has so far refused to call it terrorism or even criticize the violent racist mob that the terrorist had come to Charlottesville to support.
Yesterday news broke that team owner Jeffrey Loria will officially sell the Miami Marlins for $1.2 billion and return to living in the primordial bog that birthed him two millennia ago. Former Yankee Derek Jeter will invest $25 million of his own cash into the team, but the major money is coming from investor Bruce Sherman, who lives in Naples and appears to be only a marginal improvement over Loria.
