Local Democrats seem to have made their opinion very clear: They want Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, to resign over her decision not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black, schizophrenic inmate who some witnesses said was scalded to death inside a burning-hot prison shower.
On November 14, just a few days after Donald Trump’s election, Chuck Redding was driving home in Sarasota in a car with marriage equality and pride bumper stickers. Suddenly, Redding noticed a man in a Jeep Cherokee tailing him. Once Redding parked in the driveway, the bearded man jumped out, banged on Redding’s window, and yanked the door open.
Hollywood, Florida, has three streets named for men who murdered people in order to keep black people enslaved. One of those three people also helped found the Ku Klux Klan. Hollywood has known about this for years, because efforts to rename the street signs only really jump-started after New Times Broward-Palm Beach’s Chris Joseph wrote a story in 2015 pointing out the real history of the streets’ namesakes.
In March, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle decided not to charge four state prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey, a black prisoner with severe schizophrenia who multiple witnesses said had been placed in a scalding-hot prison shower and burned to death. Rainey had been serving a nonviolent cocaine-possession sentence.
As Democrats go, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a dreadful candidate. Her donor pool is dominated by corporate raiders and predatory capitalists, the list of important bills she’s written is slim, and she helped drive her party toward catastrophic losses while she was the head of the Democratic National Committee. In theory, it should be easy to challenge her by refusing to take money from corporations, supporting single-payer health care, and generally being progressive in a post-Trump, post-Brexit world.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: By almost every expert analysis, the American Health Care Act is a moral nightmare that will seriously harm the poor and defenseless. Cutting $880 billion from Medicaid will bankrupt families and strip coverage from 200,000 poor black and Hispanic children in Florida. That should be reason enough not to support it.
On Thursday, Tim Canova — the Nova Southeastern University Law Professor, former D.C. legislative aide, and Wall Street economics expert — announced that he’s running for congress for the second year in a row. Canova’s campaign last year was perhaps the most hotly covered 2016 congressional race after Bernie Sanders…
Inside the Oval Office, President Trump sits behind the resolute desk. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio sits to his right, Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart to his left. Both men whisper their plans on how to take down Raúl Castro. The two agree to conduct their negotiations in secrecy, passing handwritten notes to Trump through intermediaries like Gov. Rick Scott.
Just behind the Manuel Artime Theater, an elderly Cuban man in a fedora stood with a microphone. “Donald Trump is a true patriot that wants liberty for Cuba,” he hollered in Spanish into the mike. Then he offered his personal theory about why Barack Obama wasn’t hard enough on the regime: Obama, he yelled, was gay and in a homosexual relationship with Raúl Castro!
For Juan Morales, a graduate student at Florida International University, Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to his college campus today dredges up memories from when he was 14 years old of the brutally divisive politics in his homeland, Venezuela. At a school with a heavily immigrant and international student population, he…
In late June 2015, Giancarlo Sopo got off a plane in Havana, Cuba, where his cousins waited for him in a 1980s-era Lada. He wasn’t sure what they looked like, but was immediately embraced by his relatives, who recognized him from photos. He stayed for ten days in Santos Suarez, a suburb just outside the city, in the same home where his family had lived for four generations.
Donald Trump has a curious relationship with Miami. The Magic City, in many ways, represents everything Trump rails against. We live in a chaotic melting pot of people from around the world — and have one of the highest percentages of undocumented residents in the United States. Miami also voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, which is not the kind of move to endear yourself to a guy pathologically obsessed with whether he won the popular vote.
Marco Rubio wants you to know he’s very tough on Russia. He even sponsored a bill to rename the street outside the Russian embassy after a slain opposition leader. Take that, Vlad!
Last week, the Miami Herald outed Daniel Perez, a Miami Republican running for an open House seat, for taking his engagement photos in Cuba — a move that could seriously hurt his chances with older Cuban Republicans who might see celebratory wedding photos as a tacit endorsement of Barack Obama’s detente with the Castro regime…
After another Memorial Day weekend marred by gunshots, a stabbing and a fatal police shooting, Miami Beach politicians’ responses ran the gamut from straight-up racist to deeply misguided to reactionary. This morning, the city will debate where exactly on that spectrum falls Mayor Phillip Levine’s call to roll back drinking hours on…
Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle is reportedly considering a run for a statewide seat — perhaps even governor. That’s an interesting development in light of the fact that a sizable portion of Rundle’s own local Democratic Party believes her office worked to cover up the death of Darren Rainey…
After four years and an absurd hopscotch around Dade County in search of a stadium site, David Beckham and his partners are closer than ever to finally bringing a Major League Soccer team to Miami. Commissioners voted 9-4 this afternoon to sell a county-owned parcel of land in Overtown to Beckham’s group for $9 million — the final piece of land needed to begin work on a stadium next to the Miami River.
A few weeks before the November 2016 election, all 67 county elections supervisors in Florida got a call from the FBI with a warning: Hackers were trying to break into their voting systems. The FBI insisted no one had been hacked yet, but told supervisors they needed to be wary.
For 17 years, Purdy Lounge has been the low-key antidote to South Beach’s overhyped, overpriced, and overcrowded club scene. The Sunset Harbour mainstay has never charged a cover to enter its dimly lit interior, where separate rooms pump out old-school hip-hop and current dance hits, all with reasonably priced cocktails flowing.
How malicious and dumb is Donald Trump? He not only pulled out of the historic Paris Agreement to fight climate change this week, but he also announced he’ll hold a “Pittsburgh, Not Paris” rally to stress that he somehow is fighting for Americans instead of global climate scientists.
When State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office decided this past March not to charge four prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey — a black, schizophrenic prisoner scalded to death inside a locked shower — she announced the move in a late-Friday news dump without a press conference. But the decision caused national outrage, with critics noting that in her 24 years in office, Rundle has never charged a guard or cop for an on-duty death.
Roger Stone has been at the heart of three of the objectively worst things to happen in the Sunshine State in the 21st Century: When a group of angry white folks protested in 2000 to stop the Bush v. Gore recount, Stone later admitted he staged the whole thing to get Bush elected. When Scott Rothstein’s record-setting Ponzi scheme fell to pieces, it turned out Stone had an office at Rothstein’s law firm.
