All political scandals run through Miami. The Magic City is a lawless Casablanca of sorts, a town where the world’s worst rich people all congregate, party together, and hatch crackpot schemes to defraud taxpayers and/or tip presidential races. In 2000, a bunch of GOP operatives caused a ruckus outside County…
The public has largely forgotten that Florida Gov. Rick Scott — a loose conglomeration of bats that accidentally got trapped inside a suit — once ran a hospital system that stole a record amount of money from poor, sick people. Scott ran Columba/HCA hospital system, which in 1997 got caught…
In February, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado proposed a law banning Airbnb-style rentals in two-thirds of his city, stunning the company, which says it previously had a cordial relationship with city officials. Regalado claimed for months that the crackdown was designed to protect residents from living next to de facto hotel rooms.
Among medical professionals, there’s virtually no debate: So-called conversion therapy, which claims to turn gay kids straight, is junk science — and potentially harmful. That’s why municipalities ranging from Miami Beach to the City of Miami to West Palm Beach have already banned the dubious practice.
Earlier today, Donald Trump Jr. released astonishing email correspondence with Rob Goldstone, a Russia-tied PR magnate who brokered a secret meeting with the elder Trump’s presidential campaign to hand over documents that were “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
If Vice President Mike Pence, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and the rest of President Donald Trump’s team of voter-suppressing ghouls want to create an extremely creepy database of the nation’s voter rolls, the group will have to fight through Miami thanks to a new lawsuit from the Florida ACLU and Florida Immigration Coalition.
Tens of thousands of baseball fans, officials, and journalists have arrived in Miami today for one reason: to see the worst owner in professional sports for themselves. The internet swelled this weekend with think pieces about garbage can Jeffrey Loria — and that was before his walking frat-boy smirk of a team president, David Samson, rudely disinvited the mayor from an event yesterday.
July 6, about 40 protesters went to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s Doral office to pressure him to vote no on the Republican health-care bill, which is estimated would boot 22 million Americans off health insurance.
With rents and housing prices soaring ever higher across Miami-Dade County, how do locals afford to live here? New Times set out to find out by talking to Miamians with varying income levels about how they make life in South Florida work for them. This is the second story in a series.
This past January 21, Luisana Perez, a Venezuelan immigrant living in Miami, traveled to D.C. to march alongside nearly half a million others protesting Donald Trump’s misogynistic comments. Later that day, she found herself in a room of like-minded women, all seeking to get more involved in local politics. They were brought together by Emily’s List…
In January, experts from the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere issued Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez a stern warning: If he bowed to President Donald Trump’s toothless demand to crack down on so-called sanctuary communities, they said, he’d be opening the county up to expensive lawsuits.
Few states have more at stake in the #Resistance than Florida, where immigrants are nearly a quarter of the population, hundreds of thousands would be left without insurance under the GOP’s Obamacare repeal, and climate change threatens to swallow the entire coast. Florida’s Democrats have never needed good candidates more.
Evan Ross is a little-known but well-connected lobbyist in Miami-Dade County. He’s also fairly active within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party: He’s the former chair of the Miami-Dade Young Democrats and is now a precinct captain within the local party. He’s used to operating behind the scenes and keeping a low profile in the local press.
Data shows Florida’s Stand Your Ground law is awful. The rule lets you kill anyone you want in self-defense, even if you’re the person who started a fight. In the years since the law went into effect, the state’s murder rate has shot up dramatically. The law has been used to exonerate…
These days, #Resisting Trump apparently encompasses a really broad spectrum of activities. On one hand, you’ve got your labor activists fighting for living wages, housing advocates battling for affordable homes, and a growing base of voters in both parties calling their representatives and asking them to institute single-payer healthcare. On…
Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach this year spawned two scandals over casually racist politicians. City Commissioner Michael Grieco, who is running an embattled campaign for mayor, demanded the city cancel Urban Beach Week, the city’s largest celebration centered on black tourists, after two people were shot this year, including one killed by cops.
After six years of screaming about repealing Obamacare, the GOP hilariously fell on its face this week. There are a multitude of reasons Sen. Mitch McConnell shockingly delayed a vote on the American Health Care Act: the gaping schism between conservative Republicans who want to slash all spending…
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.
