IN MY OPINION

A heartbreaking request: Take my child

Death estimates flog the imagination. The streetscape remains a tapestry of rubble and disorder. Bodies, in a tangle of grotesque poses, are dumped in burial pits. Food lines stretch into the horizon. Most of the city still sleeps under tattered tarps and bed sheets suspended from sticks and strings. The smell of rotting flesh mingles with human waste.

Freed inmate must go back to Tuttle hell

Vindication gets Eduardo Galego out of prison and back into the netherworld where Miami-Dade sequesters sex offenders.

Lawyer's high life ends in disgrace

South Florida's most audacious fraudster shuffled into the federal courtroom without a hint of his old gangster bravado.

A look at Dominican Republic-Haiti relations

DUVERGE, Dominican Republic -- The sunny, happy Dominican Republic of international tourist promotions seemed a bit less cordial on the road out of Haiti. Along the way, soldiers brandishing black assault weapons manned 11 military checkpoints.

Lack of sanitation nurturing diseases in Haiti's myriad tent cities

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- We stopped on the roadside to photograph two cute little boys kicking an empty water bottle like a soccer ball, a reminder that this brown dirt pitch, before the catastrophe, was once a playing field.

THE EARTHQUAKE ZONE

Fred Grimm: `So much death. Life here is so bad.'

The Cayes depot swirled with dust and noise and chaos, and frenetic earthquake survivors clamoring to get the hell out of Port-au-Prince.

FRED GRIMM

A question, an answer -- and words fail

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- ``Hey Francesca. What have you eaten today?''

It was my standard question, walking through makeshift homeless camps that, seven days after the earthquake, have now spread from parks, lawns of public buildings, fields, entire blocks, to almost any open area. Until it seems that most of Port-au-Prince, the survivors in a city of three million, has moved outdoors.

WORSHIP

A celebration of faith, even among church ruins

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Dawn was still an hour away when the voice of a Haitian woman in the grip of an escalating religious fervor startled me from sleep.

Wretched misery endless, overwhelming

Dusk and the smoke of a thousand rubbish fires conspired to make the long, long line of hungry Haitians in the U.N. feeding line seem to fade into the infinite.

Costly reelection of Michelle Spence-Jones resolves nothing

Her reelection, however evanescent, came packaged as redemption.

Michelle Spence-Jones walked into her storefront headquarters on Northwest 62nd Street on election night and the room burst into triumphant cheers and a chanted rendition of her campaign slogan. ``Right the wrong! Right the wrong! Right the wrong!''

Life-and-death medical calls being made now

For months now, opponents of healthcare reform spread rumors that the proposals simmering in Congress would establish death panels, leaving medical bureaucrats to make life-and-death decisions.

Scandals center on money, not political beliefs

Reporters documented the insanely expensive Italian sports cars, the Rolls, the Bentleys, and, for slumming around town, Scott Rothstein's Corvette.

Spence-Jones has no shame, but may be right

Words like shame, disgrace, embarrassment weren't written into Section 112.51 of the Florida statutes, but they've always lurked there, hidden in the subtext.

Prosecutors frustrated by outrageous law

John Timoney's concerns about Florida's ``stand your ground'' law in 2005 sound like prophecy in 2010.

South Florida had its share of lowlights in '09

Economics alone would have slathered 2009 in gloom.

But South Florida's latest turn around the sun offered plenty more ignominy than record bank foreclosures, plummeting real estate values, soaring unemployment and desperate hoteliers.

Did Rothstein's powerful pals wear blinders?

A penchant for vulgar ostentation proves nothing, of course. But gold toilets? Come on, guys.

Surely a police chief or a former attorney-general-turned-governor might have suffered a flicker of unease as they lowered their bottoms onto one of Scott Rothstein's gilded thrones.

A selfless community hero deserves better

Makes about as much sense as believing in Santa Claus, but we harbor an irrational notion that even street thugs and common thieves hold to some minimum code of conduct.

`Honest Services Fraud' law mushy but necessary

Supreme Court justices tossed around the term ``honest services fraud'' with considerable contempt this week.

Justice for mentally ill must evolve

It shouldn't require a hero to fix this.

Judge Steven Leifman certainly qualifies for the appellation, leading (or, more accurately, dragging) Miami-Dade away from ineffective, costly, cruel policies that turned the Miami-Dade County jail into the nation's second-largest mental-health ward (after the Los Angeles County Jail) .