A little more than a year ago, activist Marleine Bastien stood outside on a clear December day, waving signs in front of the headquarters of Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami, her Little Haiti-based women’s rights organization. The group was demanding one thing from the City of Miami: Slow the rapidly snowballing pace of gentrification in the historically working-class Caribbean neighborhood.
The West Perrine community where Jamar Rollins lived is still reeling from his December 30 shooting death at the hands of Miami-Dade County Police officers. Though MDPD says Rollins pointed a gun at cops before he was shot last month, eyewitnesses contend that Rollins’ hands were raised and that he did not own a gun. (A gun was recovered from the scene, police say.)
Fabricated rape allegations — the type where someone falsely accuses another person of rape just to hurt that person — are statistically rare. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that between 2 and 10 percent of sexual assault allegations are made up, and women’s rights activists say the few high-profile fake accusations discourage real survivors of sexual assault from reporting crimes.
Club Madonna is suing the City of Miami Beach, arguing that officials are trying to drive the strip joint out of business.
Dear Stoner: I think pot will help my grandfather’s arthritis. Is there a kind of pot product — flower, edible, whatever — you’d recommend? Scott Dear Scott: According to science, you’re probably right. A study by the University of Oxford showed that cannabis-based medicine administered orally helped reduce rheumatoid arthritis…
On a hot summer day in June 1966, Norman Wade was shopping in the Russ Supermarket in Pompano Beach when the store’s owner reached out and slapped him. Wade, who’s black, was 10 years old. The store owner was white. Racial change was in the air; two years earlier, the…
When Stephen Bittel, a wealthy Democratic megadonor from Miami Beach, announced plans to run for the top job at the Florida Democratic Party, pushback was inevitable. Bittel, who made the majority of his fortune selling properties on Lincoln Road, is the public face of Florida Strong, an organization that donates Koch brothers-style “dark money” to Democratic candidates. Many progressive Florida Democrats disliked Bittel’s modus operandi.
In February 2013, thousands of amateur Gladesmen and vitamin D-deprived reporters descended upon the Everglades for Florida’s very first Python Challenge. The goal of the contest, which came with a $1,500 grand prize, was to put a dent in the state’s increasingly frightening Burmese python problem. But when the four-week challenge came to an end, the contest’s participants had captured just 68 of the invasive pythons. The hunt was scrapped until 2016, when participants fared only slightly better.
South Florida is full of drivers who treat stop lights like vague suggestions. So the area is also full of red-light cameras, which ticket motorists who plow through intersections with reckless abandon. Those cameras can be annoying — who wants to dish out $150 every time they run a yellow? — but there’s some evidence to suggest they can cut down on deadly crashes.
The more David Yuzuk uncovered, the more he wondered whether the man who’d been overlooked for years could have secretly been working as a government contractor, a black-market gunrunner, or even a spy with the perfect cover story.
Miami Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo love to position themselves among the most center-leaning GOP members in Congress. Ros-Lehtinen is passionately pro-LGBT rights. Curbelo ran for reelection as a hard #NeverTrump Republican. But both Miamians voted yesterday to all but eradicate the Office of Congressional Ethics, which was formed to police government corruption.
Last week, everyone from city officials to Pitbull himself barraged Miamians with a simple plea: Try to celebrate the new year without firing your handguns like Yosemite Sam. It’s not clear how many people watched Pibtull’s “One Bullet Kills the Party” promo and decided not to fete the new year with live ammunition. But as 2017’s first workweek dawns in South Florida, this much is clear: Gun violence didn’t take a break for the holiday weekend.
To an international traveler, there aren’t many moments worse than sitting in a stale metal tube for countless hours, finally landing at a destination, and then turning the corner inside the airport to see a Kafka-esque nightmare of a line between you and the exit.
At Hialeah Gardens High School, Javier Cuenca was a popular assistant basketball coach — until four students told authorities he’d molested them and in some cases given them steroids. Now two of those former students have filed lawsuits against their former coach, further detailing their claims that he molested them in the summer of 2013.
Florida really outdid itself this year. Cuba Gooding Jr. came here and ate a cell phone, which should be enough to catapult this year to the top of Florida’s all-time ranking of strange trips around the sun, but Gooding Jr.’s antics barely cracked the list of the weirdest things to…
Voice Media Group (VMG) announced today it has completed the combination of its South Florida publications, Miami New Times and New Times Broward-Palm Beach. Moving forward, the company’s award-winning editorial coverage and business operations will be handled through Miami New Times, a consolidation consistent with VMG’s nationwide emphasis on expanding…
By most sane measurements, 2016 has been worse than a straight-to-Netflix movie starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James. But for long-form journalism at New Times, it’s been a hell of a great 12 months. We’ve crunched the numbers, and these were our ten most popular longreads of the year.
Here’s your yearly reminder not to shoot your gun into the air on New Year’s Eve.
Biking in any major city is dangerous. But biking in Miami every day can be straight-up suicidal. One study shows Miami is the fourth most dangerous city in America to commute on two wheels — behind Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando, three other Florida cities. Miami’s roads aren’t just crowded and poorly protected; they’re also full of drivers who seem to openly hate cyclists. In June, one bike commuter told New Times that an 81-year-old woman berated her after the elderly driver ran her over near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line.
Most people don’t know this, but Florida has its very own version of Santa. Some know him only by the choking, smog-like mist that shrouds him whenever he appears or by the warm scent of stale Coors Light that wafts through the air when he’s especially close. Those who have seen the deity’s physical form typically refer to him by one name: Harry the Meth Snake.
On a surface level, Miami is a prosperous place — new condo towers are forever rising in Edgewater and South Beach, luxury cars are lined up at valet stations, and foreign cash seems drawn to South Florida development like an unscrupulous retiree to a Ponzi scheme. But beneath that sheen lies one of America’s least equal distributions of wealth. And that inequality includes a sizable and worrying gender gap, with more than one in every five women in Miami-Dade County living below the poverty line.
We all agree that 2016 was an epic dumpster fire of a year. To be honest, it was more like 12 months of increasingly large dumpsters filled with increasingly terrible-smelling refuse being lit into ever-bigger pyres of reeking, flaming garbage. No one disputes this. However, some truly great things also happened right here in Miami in the past year. Before sending 2016 out with the drunken binge it deserves, let’s recall some of that good stuff.
