JOURNAL ENTRY
On a side street off Second Avenue in Miami's Design District this week, I made a mistake and paid dearly for it. The mistake was that I assumed this street had free parking (admittedly, it had been a while since I'd been to the District). When I returned, the car was gone. I spent an hour tracking down where it had been towed. The cost of this error: $113 in fines.
Locating three luxury highrises on six bayfront acres next to Mercy Hospital was never a good idea for a neighborhood of single-family homes -- not if the city wanted to protect those neighborhoods, anyhow. Nor were three condo towers compatible with Vizcaya, the elegant Italianate estate on Biscayne Bay that is Miami's only National Historic Landmark -- not if the city valued that treasure, that is.
Hunters and anglers know that not all game that is caught should be kept or taken home. Some game should be let go or tossed back. Inspectors from the Miami-Dade Consumer Services Department should learn this lesson. The consumer-protection inspectors set up a sting operation to catch ''gypsy cab'' drivers who operate illicit taxi businesses. Fair enough: Go get 'em.
STRAIGHT TO THE POINT
Most Americans who could identify the name Robert Rauschenberg probably thought of him as a famous painter, but he was much more -- a choreographer, set designer and photographer, among his many talents. More than any particular work or ''school'' of art that he exemplified, his great contribution was to expand the frontiers of art in a variety of forms.
Miami-Dade County doesn't need another Urban Development Boundary line. It just needs county commissioners to enforce the line where it is now.
If Floridians have learned anything at all about windstorm insurance, it is that the path to constructive change is slow and painful. That has certainly been the case at the state level, where legislators resisted consumer-friendly improvements for years, until the argument for reform became too strong to resist. Apparently, much the same is taking place at the national level.
On the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, the most remarkable fact about the country remains its very existence. From the start, Israel has never known a second of real peace. As Israeli President Shimon Peres noted in a recent interview, ''We have had to face seven wars, outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered. And we won them all. But we never gave up the search for peace.'' Today, the search for peace goes on, as it must, but prospects are dimmer than usual and the peril inexorably...
It is nearly impossible to imagine the enormity of the disaster that struck China on Monday when an earthquake estimated at a magnitude 7.8 shook the Earth to its core. One can only begin to sense the scale of the disaster by its ghastly toll on human life -- estimated at more than 9,000 and rising -- and its merciless destruction of schools, houses, factories, apartment blocks. Jolts were felt as far away as Bangkok, Thailand, which is 1,243 miles southwest of the earthquake's epicenter in China's...
In lifting an injunction banning three rock mining permits in Northwest Miami-Dade County and remanding the case back to U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler for reconsideration, an appellate panel left the door open for the judge to review and strengthen his decision. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Judge Hoeveler didn't show proper deference to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' decisions to issue more rock-mining permits in a case pitting rock miners against...
In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill celebrated the daring crews of the Royal Air Force with stirring words: ''Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'' Today, something similar could be said about the men and women wearing the uniform of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never have so few U.S. soldiers been asked to sacrifice so much while so little was asked of the rest of us.
The decision by a jury in Brazil last week to acquit an Amazon rancher who was found guilty in an earlier trial of ordering the murder of American nun Dorothy Stang represents a stunning reversal of justice. The 2005 murder of Sister Dorothy, an environmental activist, has been seen as a test of Brazil's judicial system and its willingness to confront the culture of impunity that surrounds powerful landholders in rural areas. Brazil's public is outraged. It should be.
For several years, this Editorial Board has advocated replacing two sections of the Tamiami Trail in Everglades National Park with up to 11 miles of a skyway bridge to increase sheet flow, particularly to the Northeast Shark River Slough area. Most recently we urged the U.S. Corps of Engineers to rethink its latest plan to build a single mile-long bridge, make some road modifications and raise the water level in a canal north of the Trail to increase flow.
For more than a half century, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted voting law in a way that encouraged voting and access to the polls. But no longer. The court's recent ruling in an Indiana voter-identification case reversed the modern court's role as a champion of voting rights. Instead, the conservative-majority court has swung to the other side. This court is doing what states once did: making it more difficult for citizens to participate in their democracy.
LAWMAKERS GO HOME Whenever the Legislature convenes a new session, there is anticipation about what will be accomplished. Just as predictably when the session ends, there is disappointment about what was left undone. The 2008 Legislature was no different. Lawmakers faced the daunting task of setting state priorities amid a sinking economy, a $5 billion revenue shortfall and a bruising housing market. Not surprisingly, lawmakers left Tallahassee last week with a decidedly mixed record -- May 9.
Ask residents why they live in Pembroke Pines, and a good many will answer, ''The charter schools, of course.'' The city's seven schools have perennial waiting lists. Their graduation rate is near 90 percent, while the Broward County School District's rate is 66 percent.
