Barely three weeks ago, the Florida Supreme Court delivered yet another legal blow to the highly controversial red light cameras that have spawned like love bugs across the Sunshine State in recent years. The highest court in the state refused to reconsider a judgment that Hollywood’s cameras are illegal. But…
This afternoon, there’s going to be a big press conference about a professional soccer team officially coming to Miami. But David Beckham won’t be there, and neither will Marcelo Claure, his billionaire Bolivian business partner. In fact, the announcement has nothing to do with Miami’s long-percolating MLS team. Instead, South…
For the past eight years, Carlos Miller has operated the Miami-based website Photography is Not a Crime (PINAC), a nationally-known free speech and media advocacy blog with roughly a million visitors a month. But recently a Jacksonville judge ruled the organization couldn’t film the trial of its own correspondent because the…
Despite months of silence and political stalemate, professional soccer is still coming to Miami, MLS’ commissioner reiterated this weekend — and there’s still a good chance the new team will play right next to Marlins Park. At an event late last week, Miami-Dade Commissioner Xavier Suarez once again showed off…
Victor Mooney’s voice lowers and soars like he’s performing a one-man theater show. Sitting inside a hot, windowless room on the second floor of the Merrill-Stevens boatyard, not far from dozens of million-dollar yachts bobbing in the Miami River, Mooney is a youthful-looking 49, with a shaved head, broad face,…
Ocean Drive could be about to see last call. At yesterday’s Miami Beach city commission meeting, mayor Philip Levine proposed banning outdoor alcohol sales throughout the city after 2 a.m — meaning no more late night $40 margarita bowls and $19 mixed drinks at bustling sidewalk restaurants or outdoor bars…
It couldn’t have been much closer in Miami Shores. At yesterday’s village council election — which was tinged with county-wide significance because of the village’s recent high-profile spat over gay marriage rights — the top vote getter only beat the bottom by 143 votes: According to unofficial results, Alice Burch won…
Big changes could be coming to Lincoln Road, with the firm behind New York’s High Line cooking up plans to transform South Beach’s iconic but aging pedestrian mall. Those plans, combined with a vote at the city commission later this week on whether to let property owners form a business…
Miami Beach is losing its free public wi-fi system. But the bigger news to many Beach residents is likely that the city actually had a free public wi-fi system to begin with — it does. It’s just terrible. The Miami Beach city commission voted in fall of 2013 to…
He was finally sent back. Yesterday Carlos Vides, the former Salvadoran general, war crimes perpetrator, and central Florida resident was deported to El Salvador after being held for weeks at an immigration detention center in Louisiana. For Vides’ thousands of Salvadoran victims, and for the lawyers and activists in the…
Janet Yarbrough-Moody says she isn’t chasing a lawsuit. But she does have a whopper of a story about Burger King involving an ice-cream sundae and a metal screw — and she’s furious that the Miami-based corporation isn’t taking the allegations seriously. “It’s like they don’t even care,” she says. “I…
On Tuesday night Steve Berke, the Miami Beach filmmaker and mayoral candidate, received a horrifying phone call. His girlfriend was on the line, and in a frantic voice said she had just encountered an intruder in their Miami Beach home, holding Berke’s laptop in the couple’s bedroom. Berke’s girlfriend relayed…
Coral Gables residents have been fighting the city tooth and nail for months to clean up and reopen Merrie Christmas Park, a small green space contaminated with everything from arsenic to cadmium. Amid legal threats, the city caved in October and — with the help of an anonymous donation — agreed…
Early in the morning of August 4, 2013, Steven Sotloff walked across the border from southern Turkey into Syria. He passed through three security checkpoints, then a no man’s land between the two countries, on a road surrounded by olive groves, yellow flowers, and leftover mines. Sotloff, a stocky, bearded…
Good morning, Miami — hope you’re not planning on driving anywhere today! Let’s review just a few of the interesting things that are happening in your city today: The Miami Open, one of the world’s most popular tennis tournaments, continues with early round play in Key Biscayne. Critical Mass, the…
Edgar Ruiz says he just wants his art back. A studio representative says they’re considering legal action for harassment. Three works of art, valued by Ruiz at a total of around $1800, are nowhere to be found. “I just don’t understand what the hell happened,” the artist tells New Times…
Cesar Vasquez is a 28-year-old, soft-spoken AT&T customer service rep with a flowing imam-style beard and dark features. On a recent still, scorching day around 3 p.m., he leads me to a shady spot near the corner of a large apartment building in Naranja, five miles north of Homestead. Soon…
Of the City of Miami’s five commission districts, it’s District 2 that wields the most power: The district stretches along the city’s eastern edge from Coconut Grove north past Edgewater, encompassing Brickell’s moneyed condos and much of downtown. And eight months before the election to decide the district’s next commissioner,…
Ivan Gomez spent years in the U.S. Army, including a tour overseas during the Yugoslavia conflict in the early ’90s. Today he suffers from type 2 diabetes and other physical and mental ailments. To help him cope, he says, he keeps service animals. “My dogs are everything to me,” he…
As a top commander in El Salvador during that country’s brutal civil war, Carlos Vides presided over tens of thousands of civilian murders and systemic torturing. For decades Vides has lived with his wife in a comfortable home in Palm Coast, but now the former strongman is on the brink of…
Supporters say the bill would keep teachers and students safe in a school shooting. The Miami-Dade School Board isn’t buying it. “What’s going to happen,” says school board member and recently announced county mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado, “is you’re going to have more instances of violence, not less.” See also:…
For more than six decades, Mount Sinai Medical Center has been Miami Beach’s premier hospital. But now Baptist Health South Florida, another huge regional medical chain, wants to open a much smaller, urgent-care center in South Beach. Mount Sinai — along with the city’s planning board and chamber of commerce…
