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| Ramoncito Campo kisses his wife Hernelie Ruazol Campo on a flooded
street during a southwest monsoon that battered Manila, Philippines, in August. The newlywed couple pushed through with their scheduled wedding despite severe flooding that inundated wide areas of the capital and nine nearby provinces. Photograph by Ramoncito Campo / Reuters |
Jeffrey Wright uses wacky experiments to teach children about the universe, but it is his own personal story that teaches them the true meaning of life.
by Justin Berton
Reno -- A customer inside Mark Hessler's crowded gun shop in Reno pointed to the few remaining AR-15 rifles on a display wall and asked Hessler if he'd sent President Obama a thank-you card for hinting at a ban on assault weapons.
Hessler almost had to shout over the din of bustling salesmen, credit cards snapping on glass countertops and cash registers that spat out receipts.
"Obama is the best gun salesman since Bill Clinton," Hessler said, drawing laughs from his audience. "Every time a liberal opens his mouth and says something stupid about guns, I sell a gazillion of them."
As the Newtown, Conn., massacre sparked a national debate about gun control and the availability of assault weapons, gun sellers in Nevada enjoyed booming sales.
by Scott Wheeler
LAKELAND | A bell hangs from the entrance of The Gunshed, heralding each customer's arrival with a small ding.
It played a rapid melody this week to a stampede of customers who had their eyes trained on a row of tall, black assault rifles leaned upright in a corner, their muzzles to the ceiling.
The rush began quickly after the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre.
The day of the killing left employees numb.
"You feel a sense of helplessness," said Alex Wold, manager of the store at 1704 E. Edgewood Drive. "The idea of getting killed is awful."
Suppliers had a shortage of weapons and ammunition after the shooting, he said, and store workers taped signs on every shelf of bullets telling customers they were limited to five boxes.
Since then, The Gunshed has been able to replenish its stock of assault rifles. The long brown boxes stood behind a counter Friday. One sat open with a brand new rifle resting inside.
by Marcus Green
It was supposed to be a reliable way to help cover the cost of a new downtown arena: The building’s events would bring throngs of people downtown who would eat, drink and shop nearby. Their sales taxes would be captured to help pay for the KFC Yum! Center.
But the arena hasn’t added as much to tax revenues as expected during its first three years — producing less than one-third of the amount originally projected.
Arena officials have scraped together cash to deal with the shortfalls, nearly emptying a building renovation fund and notifying Louisville metro government that more city money may be needed as early as next spring.
The troubles have captured the attention of the bond market, with rating agency Standard & Poor’s lowering its confidence in the authority’s ability to repay the project’s debt to “negative” from “stable” over concerns about the sales tax revenue from the arena neighborhood.
Meanwhile, arena debt payments are scheduled to rise, totaling more than $800 million over the next three decades — in some years exceeding $30 million, compared with about $19 million now.
by Marino Eccher
If you have to ask the box how drunk you are, Shamrock's bar co-owner Ted Casper figures, "you already know it's time to get a cab."
But for some, a reminder might not hurt.
The "box" is the IntoxBox, a commercial device that measures blood-alcohol content when someone blows into it. It has made its way into about two dozen Twin Cities bars.
Its Eden Prairie-based makers bill it as a combination of entertainment and public safety designed to make potential drunken drivers think twice.
"It made sense to try to give people a resource at the point of decision to know when they should and shouldn't be driving," said Ryan Walden, co-founder and president of Walden Innovative Resources.
Walden, 24, got the idea while he was a student at Cornell College in Iowa. A friend went tailgating at a football game, stopped drinking for hours and left the game certain he was under the legal limit for driving, Walden said. But he still got pulled over for drunken driving.
Walden saw a niche for a product that could turn the guesswork on blood-alcohol content into a firmer answer. He explored existing devices but didn't find them appealing -- or accurate.
by Amy Renee Leiker
Chase Camarena gingerly placed his palm over his chest and grinned.
“I have two weird scars,” the soft-spoken 26-year-old said, tracing an “x” over his right pectoral.
One is from the knife blade that pierced his skin that Saturday night, he explained.
A tube doctors used to drain blood from his right lung left the other.
At times, Camarena laughed as he spoke of an attack that left him in a Wichita hospital fighting critical injuries for eight days.
He joined the J.C. Penney loss prevention team a little more than a year ago. A tax preparer by day, Camarena decided to pair his degree in business administration with a bachelor’s in accounting. He needed money to pay for more schooling.
Working part time as a loss prevention officer — hired by retailers to recover stolen merchandise — added excitement to his otherwise orderly work day.
But on Nov. 10, following a confrontation with an armed shoplifter, he lay in the parking lot of Towne East Square, unsure he’d live to see Nov. 11.
by Alaine Griffin
Dawn Hochsprung kept politics out of her professional life.
But after the November election, Hochsprung, a registered Democrat, couldn't help sounding off to her Facebook friends in an exuberant post using the pseudonym "Dinna Fash," a term for "don't worry."
"Happy for my daughters, whose right to make decisions about their own bodies are preserved for four more years. Just happy."
Five weeks later, the president would hold Hochsprung's 6-month-old granddaughter, Alyson, and pinch her little cheeks during a meeting with loved ones of those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
"She was the biggest Obama fan," Hochsprung's daughter, Erica Lafferty said in an interview with The Courant on Tuesday night. "That would have been the highlight of her life."
Family and friends gathered Thursday for Hochsprung's funeral in Woodbury, where she lived with her husband, George. The hilly Litchfield County town of nearly 10,000 residents is about 15 miles from the Newtown school where she and 20 children and five school staff members were killed Friday.
Tuesday night, solemn mourners holding burning candles stood in pouring rain on the town green in Naugatuck, where Hochsprung graduated from high school in 1983, to remember the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal's life — 47 years marked by a string of both personal and professional milestones.
Loving daughter. Hard-working student-athlete. Passionate, award-winning teacher. Admired school principal. Devoted wife. Dedicated mother and grandmother.
And someone who ran toward the gunfire instead of away from it, an act worthy of acknowledgment by the president of the United States.
"We know that when danger arrived in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary, the school staff did not flinch, they did not hesitate," President Obama said in a memorial service last week in Newtown.
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| Newly re-elected President Barack Obama and his
wife Michelle are showered with confetti after his acceptance speech in Chicago, on November 7. (Reuters/Philip Andrews) |
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| Mitt Romney delivers hs concession speech in Boston, on November 7. (Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images) |
January...Photoshop is fun! Proof that Fidel Castro is still alive!
February...the post that almost got filmmaker Billy Corben sent to jail. Billy Corben is on jury duty
March...So Fla's most interesting TV reporter gets into a little scuffle. WPLG Reporter Bob Norman assaulted
April...a look back at a fun assignment at Federal Court. Sept. 22, 1988: Just another day on the job
May...a lot of people have forgotten about Sergio Pereira. I haven't. Corruption in South Florida: Here to stay
June...why does Aventura need a S.W.A.T. team? Aventura S.W.A.T. to al Qaeda: 'Bring it on!'
July...Miami Herald believes its mission is to bring South Floridians together. Here's a look at a headline that did anything but that. And now for some Kumbaya...brought to you by the folks at the Miami Herald
August...a clueless Miami politician forgets what happens when City Hall tries to tell Hollywood how to make movies. 'Burn Notice' producers remind Marc Sarnoff that TV explosions are fake
September...Republican Paul Ryan stops by the Versailles to drink some Cuban coffee...but as we learned last month, it didn't help him or Mitt Romney one bit. Stop me if you've heard this one before
October...the Miami Herald's Marc Caputo is one of the most persistent reporters...ever. After watching Marc Caputo question Sen. Marco Rubio, I'm convinced Rubio is guilty of something
November...a post I've been meaning to write for a few years. Isn't it time Miami named a street after Sam Cooke?
December...stumbling upon an old Miami Daily News story about Al Capone's first visit to Miami was like finding gold! The way we were...Jan., 1928: Al Capone visits Miami for the first time...It's 'warmer than California'
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| Tom Hunker, left, and Alphonse Capone. |
... Flush with millions of dollars seized from drug dealers, [...] financed a freewheeling spending spree: $3,200 for a Miami-Dade police chiefs golf outing at Miami Shores Country Club; $1,000 for two nights’ stay at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and thousands more in sumptuous meals at Carpaccio Restaurant in the Bal Harbour Shoppes.Chang also reports that according to U.S. Department of Justice findings, Bal Harbour's drug task force "operated like a rogue unit," and the department's "detectives made no arrests related to money laundering, and never presented a case for prosecution for money laundering, according to the Justice Department. The unit produced no investigative reports."
There were trips galore to Home Depot and Party City, for items such as cooking fuel and folding tables and chairs; to Publix and BJs Wholesale Club for food platters, dessert trays and picnic supplies; to BrandsMart USA for a flat-screen TV, a microwave oven and other appliances.
What did these expenses have to do with the department’s duty of serving and protecting Bal Harbour?
Little to nothing, according to the findings of an investigative report released last week by the U.S. Department of Justice that slams a Bal Harbour police task force that traveled the country picking up drug cash and laundering it during undercover investigations. The Justice Department said the task force laundered more money for criminals than it seized, and made no significant arrests or prosecutions — but spent the cash it did seize lavishly on salaries and benefits for officers, exceeding government spending guidelines with first-class flights, luxury car rentals and posh lodgings during undercover operations.
Even when police were not working undercover, they tapped federal forfeiture funds to buy hundreds of dollars worth of pizzas, sodas and snacks for Mothers Against Drunk Driving events or Crime Watch meetings, and they pulled out all the stops for DUI checkpoints, which frequently became occasions for catered cookouts for the cops, according to Bal Harbour credit card statements.
Expense records show Bal Harbour police routinely spent hundreds and sometimes thousands on party supplies and other items that had little to do with actual law enforcement, such as $1,500 worth of Apple iPads and accessories purchased at the Aventura Mall in August 2011 for a drug-prevention event.
The New York City Children’s Chorus, dressed in matching red robes, sang the popular Christmas hymn “Silent Night,” with the particularly apropos refrain, "Sleep in heavenly peace."
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At least one Miami police officer has been relieved of duty in connection with the federal probe, and arrests of several officers are expected in January.
BY KATHLEEN MCGRORY AND JAY WEAVER
At least a half-dozen Miami Police officers have been targeted by the FBI for their alleged roles in providing protection for a Liberty City sports gambling operation that was uncovered more than a year ago, according to authorities familiar with the case.
At least one Miami officer has been relieved of duty in connection with the investigation into the bookmaking business, which has been shut down, authorities said.
The initial probe by the FBI, which has been assisted by the police department, evolved into a broader investigation involving some of the officers. Arrests of at least six Miami officers — and possibly more — are expected as early as January, according to authorities.
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| May 8, 1949. |
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| May 8, 1949. |
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| May 9, 1949. |
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| Miami Daily News, May 9, 1949. |
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| May 11, 1949. |
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| May 19, 1949. |
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| May 20, 1949. |
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| May 20, 1949. |
GAMBLING WAS A SAFE BET AS EARLY MIAMI LURED TOURISTS
by Marc Fisher
Gambling and South Florida have gone together since Henry Flagler built tony gambling casinos alongside his hotels from Palm Beach to Miami, where the pioneer developer opened the Seminole Club beside the old Royal Palm Hotel at the mouth of the Miami River.
Throughout the first half of the century, illegal gambling prospered openly in Dade County mainly because, as one-time Miami Herald columnist Jack Kofoed wrote, "Even pious people were nudged by a conviction that a resort city cannot survive without betting."
Within a few years after the city was born, gambling joints thrived on Miami Avenue, in the area called the Tenderloin, a wild and wide-open cut of what is now downtown. A Miami grand jury reported in 1923 that in much of the city, tourists and residents alike could find "numerous slot machines, punchboards and other gambling devices that even little children may play without being molested."
From the start, Dade's gambling was more than a back-alleys sideshow. Even Miami's most honored pioneers sanctioned gambling: Games abounded in Flagler's hotels and at the Tuttles' family home.
Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher was considered an anomaly for insisting that casinos attracted the wrong crowd. Fisher managed to keep casinos off the Beach for a time, but that attitude dissipated as South Florida boomed. (Indeed, even Fisher -- or at least his mansion -- came to be part of the gambling scene. In the '30s, the pioneer's home became the Bath and Tennis Club, a high society casino.)
Before long, there was the Palm Island Club, later known as the Latin Quarter, and the Brook Club in Surfside, combination casinos and nightclubs that offered the biggest names in entertainment: Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker.
Big Bill Dwyer's Palm Island Club set the pattern for South Florida casinos. Opening in the late '20s over the protests of the swank island's residents, the club was primarily a nightspot, a showcase for top-dollar stars and semi-nude chorus girls. Of course, to pay the bills, the club had a casino. And to keep the peace, Dwyer's boys delivered "ice" -- cold cash -- to the police, city officials and others who might have thought about ruining some swell's night on the town.
Ice became part of the local routine. By the late '30s, payola at the Royal Palm in downtown Miami came to $25,000 a week, chickenfeed compared to the casino's nightly take of $200,000 and even an occasional $2 million.
[...]
World War II crimped the casino trade. Like most large buildings in South Florida, the casinos were used to house soldiers. The Colonial was home to an Army Signal Corps unit: Enlisted men lived in the gambling room. After the war, the casinos reopened, but business wasn't the same. Politicians, once protectors of the casinos, began to change their tune. In 1948, the state attorney's office closed down the Colonial. Most other casinos disappeared soon thereafter.
But the bookmakers of the S&G Syndicate continued to operate in the open, with no pressure from police. Like any thriving business, the syndicate had offices, at least six of them scattered around the heart of Miami Beach, control points for a network of, by one count, 314 bookmaking operations.
Sam Friedman and Jules Levitt ran one office in a Washington Avenue apartment building. Another operated out of the Mercantile Bank building. In each office, employees who had been through the S&G's bookmaking school sat with telephones at long tables divided by boards into stalls. On the wall, a blackboard was filled with entries and odds of all the U.S. race tracks then running.
Miami Beach police not only failed to enforce anti-gambling laws, but they protected the S&G from competition. When New York gambler Frank Erickson paid the Roney Plaza Hotel $45,000 for a three-month bookie concession, Beach police raided the place and sent Erickson packing, returning the hotel to S&G control.
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NEW YORK — Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” continued to gather awards momentum as the National Board of Review named the Osama bin Laden hunt docudrama the best film of the year.
The board is the second notable group to name “Zero Dark Thirty” best film, following the New York Film Critics Circle. The two early awards suggest the film may be the Academy Awards frontrunner, four years after Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” triumphed at the Oscars.
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| Miami Daily News, Feb. 22, 1939. |
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| Miami Daily News, Feb. 24, 1939. |
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| Miami Daily News, May 27, 1955. |
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| Miami News, Dec. 14, 1958. |
Zorita started dancing professionally when she was 19.
Her daughter Tawny Petillo doesn't know where her mother got the name Zorita. "She told me a lot of stories, but she never told me that one. She liked to sound exotic," Petillo said. "All I know is it had a `Z' in it, and you could make it into a snake ."
In her signature, Zorita would put a little curve on the ``Z'' so it looked like the head of a snake with a little line, like a tongue, coming out of it.
"When she first started, she was on the road an awful lot. She did a lot of shows in Baltimore and Chicago, California, Panama and other places," Petillo said. "Once I arrived, she sort of settled into the Miami Beach area."
Zorita still traveled for some shows, but she was based in Dade County and danced at places like Miami's Gaiety Burlesque and Martha Raye's Five O'Clock Club before she opened her own nightclub, Zorita 's Show Bar, on Collins Avenue and 176th Street in Sunny Isles Beach in the 1960s.
Zorita wore long, sequined gowns and lush fur wraps as well as her boa constrictor wrapped around her body.
"She may have been an exotic dancer, but she was very, very classy," Petillo said.
And it seemed as if she was always on exhibit with her snake . Though people probably did not know she had two snakes , Oscar and Elmer, which she alternated in her routines. Zorita also had a snake handler that would care for and feed them.
A regular at Roberts Drugstore on Flagler Street in Riverside (now East Little Havana), she used to eat breakfast at 3 a.m. with her snake in a basket beside her. She fed it crumbs. She once walked the snake on a leash like a pet down Collins Avenue and was quickly arrested. It was what she wanted, her daughter said.
"She'd do almost anything for a little publicity," said Petillo. "She raised quite a few eyebrows."
"It was an interesting enough series, but it wasn’t a good image at all. It was all shooting and blood." -Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera Bower, quoted in the Financial Times on the impact "Miami Vice" had on Miami Beach's image. (-via rakontur)
"Everyone just imagines dolphins as smiling, non-biting animals with knobby teeth. You forget these are wild animals." -Jillian's mother, Amy Thomas, quoted in the Orlando Sentinel.
"In the end, they [Florida voters] rejected every one of the most eyebrow-raising proposals — from property tax breaks for snowbirds, to restrictions on abortion, to, yes, further tightening of the embargo on Cuba. That kind of patient thoughtfulness may not make for as exciting a headline as anti-Castro demonstrators, or celebrities behaving badly. But for those of us who actually live in Miami — who don’t merely parachute in to deliver glib verdicts — it’s reason to be hopeful about the future."
"Miami's climate is more healthful than Chicago's and warmer than California - that's why I'm here."...and the real estate market....
"I believe now is the time to buy down here and I'm thinking of going into the market rather heavily. I don't believe there will be any sensational climb in values [...] for five years, but I'm contented to wait that long."
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Check out this curious 25-second time-lapse/composite video that shows every airplane that landed at San Diego International Airport on Black Friday a week ago between 10:30am and 3pm. The giant planes whiz by overhead as if they’re part of a fighter jet squadron heading off to battle — not something you’d expect to see with commercial planes at an airport. It was created by photography and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker.Make sure you stick with the video until the end for a visual surprise.
Guys, c'mon.
You want to take on The Miami Herald for its Marlins ballpark coverage, we're fair game. But do it fairly then. Which of course you don't.
I'm getting really tired of your grievously reductive assessment of the newspaper's handling of the stadium issue, which seems to focus almost exclusively on the edit board and a sports columnist or two. Fine as far as that goes. But surely you know better. There's a lot more to this than you all let on, but then that would spoil your tidy black-and-white storyline.
The sometimes implied, sometimes explicit claim that the reporting staff was in the bag or disengaged or whatnot is absolute, one-sided horseshit. And I've just gone through dozens of clips in our archive (yes. it's publicly available) going back several years because I am royally pissed off on behalf of my hardworking colleagues in the newsroom.
Andres Viglucci
The reason everyone knows the Marlins deal was not a favorable one for the public, down to the decimal point, is through extensive in-depth reporting and analysis done before the contract was approved, and afterwards, too, by Chuck Rabin, Jack Dolan, Adam Beasley, Matt Haggman and others who laid bare the financials, the questionable assumptions and claims and their consequences in excruciating detail.
Not to mention numerous columns by Fred Grimm (who took the Herald edit board to task, in print, in early 2009: "Magical thinking was not just confined to county commissioners or Marlins fans. The Miami Herald's editorial page seemed to ignore the hard work of its own reporters to embrace the dream.'') and sports columnist and consistent stadium skeptic Linda Robertson (OK, she's my wife), and assists by others (including, not patting myself on the back since my contribution was minor, me, who wrote a long time ago that the stadium would do absolutely nothing for economic development in that neighborhood).
Be glad to provide you chapter and verse if you're all too far up your own asses to look it up.
So to write that our reporters somehow dropped the ball when the truth is the exact opposite is unjustifiable, not to say unfair to the beat people who did loads of original reporting -- matched by one else in this town, by the way -- by going through hundreds of pages of contractual crap, financial statements and so on to dig up facts, talking to experts, confronting bureaucrats and politicos, etc etc., i.e., doing their damn jobs.
So, do yours, too, dear bloggers, if you're going to claim some blogging mantle of all-knowing superiority.
And please note that I write this as someone who considers at least one of you a friend, reads you all regularly and to a great degree respects what you do. Except when you fuck up. Which you've done here.
Cheers to all,
Andres Viglucci
The Miami Herald
To: Aminda "Mindy" Marques, Executive Editor, Miami Herald
Rick Hirsch, Managing Editor, Miami Herald
From: Bill, Random Pixels
Hi guys!
Hope you all had a restful and enjoyable Thanksgiving.
The reason I'm writing is to ask about Sunday's page one story on the hunt for the "Man-eating Croc."
Did you guys hire a headline writer from the National Enquirer? Because that was my first thought when I saw it. Either that or someone wrote the headline as a place-holder and then forgot to change it before the paper went to press.
Or maybe you guys got punk'd!
I couldn't believe it myself when I first saw it. I hope you don't mind, but I put together a little parody and posted it on my blog. (You know me and my sense of humor.)
But some aren't laughing. Someone - and I suspect it may be someone from the fifth floor - left this comment on my post:
[When] I saw that piece in the paper this morning and then the photo on the website, I thought, 'THAT'S the man-eating croc?' It speaks volumes about what's left of the Herald - not the sensationalism but the sheer fact that no one at any level in what's left of the newsroom said, 'Wait a minute. Let's not run THAT photo - not if the story is taking THIS approach.'Oh, and just today, the American Copy Editors Society blog singled out the headline for a special mention.
It's profoundly saddening and embarrassing to see the Herald do what it did today (and far too often) while its circulation craters as other newspapers pass it by with better and smarter...everything and, consequently, less loss of readership.
By the way, I thought I'd mention that while your people were scaring the hell out of the readers with that headline, a couple of other papers in Florida actually had some journalism on their front pages yesterday.
Did you guys happen to see the Palm Beach Post story yesterday on how the Republican Party of Florida conspired to suppress voter turnout?
And did you catch the excellent story in the Tampa Bay Times on Florida's vanishing springs?
Both are examples of top-notch journalism.
You guys at the Herald should try doing some of that again. Like you used to do many years ago.
And leave the tabloid stories to the Star and the National Enquirer.
Sincerely,
Bill
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| Joe Wasilewski with the Nile crocodile he captured. |
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Deep beneath the ground we stand on, below the strip malls and the condos and the lush green of the golf courses, runs a river of water that makes life in Florida possible. The underground aquifer rushes through Swiss cheese caverns, its hidden flow bubbling up to the surface in Florida’s estimated 1,000 springs -- the greatest concentration of springs on Earth.Read the rest of Pittman's story by clicking here and read other articles in the series here.
A century ago Florida’s gin-clear springs drew presidents and millionaires and tourists galore who sought to cure their ailments by bathing in the healing cascades. Now the springs tell the story of a hidden sickness, one that lies deep within the earth.
• The water in many springs no longer boils up like a fountain, the way they have for centuries. The flow has slowed. In some places it has even stopped or begun flowing backward.
• The water that does come out is polluted by nitrates.
• The pollution fuels the growth of toxic algae blooms, which are taking over springs and the rivers they feed and putting human health at risk.
• Finally, the fresh water coming out of many springs is showing signs of a growing saltiness, according to a study by the Florida Geological Survey.
All of it — particularly the saltiness — is a dark omen for the future of the state's water supply.
"It's the very same water we drink that's coming out of the springs," said Doug Stamm, author of the book Florida's Springs. "When they start to deteriorate, that's the water we drink deteriorating too."
