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MIAMI — Edward Villella, the artistic director of the Miami City Ballet, has abruptly left the company after nearly a year of financial struggles and management shake-ups that threatened to overshadow the troupe he founded and built into an internationally recognized company. Villella, 75, said last year he would retire after the 2012-2013 season ends in April. Ballet officials announced Tuesday that Villella has decided to leave now.

Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin known for her blood-soaked style of street vengeance during Miami’s “cocaine cowboys” era of the ’70s and ’80s, was shot to death in Medellin by a motorcycle-riding assassin Monday.

Republicans see Wasserman Schultz's seat as plum targetBy Erika Bolstad Posted on Thursday, 08.09.12 There's a wide field of Republicans hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also serves as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, but so far, the candidates have spent more time bashing each other than the incumbent. “We've clearly got a spirited primary on our hands here,” Richard DeNapoli, chairman of the Republican Party of Broward County, told a crowd earlier this summer when four of the candidates appeared in a debate.

A civilian working aboard a nuclear submarine drydocked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine admits to starting two fires causing $400 million in damage. Maybe he should have just called in sick? A man who set two fires to a nuclear-powered submarine, causing $400 million in damage, admitted he did it because he wanted to leave work early. Casey James Fury, 24, was working aboard the USS Miami in Kittery, Maine as a civilian painter and sandblaster when he purposefully set two fires this summer, according to a criminal complaint filed in the United States District Court in Maine....

Three women pleaded guilty in Miami federal court on Wednesday to stealing money from a government program, according to U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer. Simone West, 22, of Hollywood, Chante Sweet, 35, of Miami, and Ashley Rolle, 27, of St. Petersburg, admitted to siphoning approximately $21,932 in federal grant money from the City of Miami between 2007 and 2009, prosecutors said. . . Sweet was an employee of the City of Miami Neighborhood Enhancement Team at the time. She admitted to issuing checks to West and Rolle even though they performed no work for the Miami ACES program. They cashed...

Oscar Haza, a well known Miami Spanish-language broadcast journalist and anchor, scored an interview this week in Washington with President Barack Obama in which Obama said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has not posed a "serious" national security threat to the United States. The full interview aired Tuesday night on A Mano Limpia, Haza's nightly show on WJAN-Channel 41, better known as América TeVe. The show had shown portions of the interview Monday night, with Haza live in D.C., and teased to the president talking about Cuba and Venezuela. The Dominican-born Haza, who also hosts a daily morning radio show that...

MIAMI BEACH— The dramatic results of three drug busts on the high seas will be evident today when more than 3,800 pounds of cocaine are offloaded at the U.S. Coast Guardbase in Miami Beach. According to the agency, the cocaine has a wholesale value of more than $48 million.

(Reuters) - A fire that caused an estimated $400 million in damage to a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine docked in Maine may have been caused by a vacuum cleaner, authorities said on Wednesday. The fire in the forward compartment - which includes crew living, command and control spaces and the torpedo room - of the USS Miami on May 23 took about 12 hours to extinguish and injured seven firefighters. "Preliminary findings indicate the fire started in a vacuum cleaner used to clean work sites at end of shift, and stored in an unoccupied space," the shipyard's public affairs office...

A video of a prank zombie attack going around the internet is being heavily criticized as both insensitive and dangerous after the recent cannibal attack of a homeless man in Miami. The video shows a young man running around the streets pretending to be a zombie wearing a ripped, bloodied shirt, growling at people and scaring them away.

A video of a prank zombie attack going around the internet is being heavily criticized as both insensitive and dangerous after the recent cannibal attack of a homeless man in Miami. The video shows a young man running around the streets pretending to be a zombie wearing a ripped, bloodied shirt, growling at people and scaring them away. At the beginning of the footage, the screen says: 'On Saturday May 26, 2012, a naked man was chewing on the face of another naked man in downtown Miami.

Inside the synagogue, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who mindlessly called Israeli settlements obstacles to peace, was going to speak. Outside B’nai Torah, in Boca Raton, Florida, members were anxiously pointing out Alan Bergstein, writer and pro-Israel activist, to the reinforced law enforcement detail. Bergstein and other anti-Obama Jews were denied entrance and told by law enforcement to leave the property. How far and how shamelessly some in the Jewish community have sunk in their embrace of Obama is ineradicably seen in this action. A Jew being denied entrance to a synagogue brings to mind Germany in...

Temple Israel in Miami, Fla., canceled an upcoming speech by Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Thursday. Temple officials canceled the affair after a prominent Republican donor left the congregation in protest. According to Erika Bolstad of McClatchy Newspapers, the donor was 81-year-old philanthropist Stanley Tate, who has ties to the Romney campaign.

The scene in South Florida was surreal Saturday. On one side of the MacArthur Causeway, the side where police had braced for trouble, scantily clad men and women poured beer and testosterone into the streets, cafes and clubs, while thumping to the loud, restless beats of South Beach. Meanwhile, on the mainland side of the causeway, allegedly the quiet side this weekend, a naked man was shot to death by police after he was found chewing on another man’s face. Under the hot sun Saturday in South Beach, long before the nighttime partying began, revelers took videos, posed for photographs...

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami police shot and killed a man on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, and police sources told CBS4 they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his grisly meal. The bizarre shooting happened shortly after 2 p.m., when police responded to a 911 call about two naked men fighting on a bike path along the Causeway, which was packed with traffic on a busy holiday weekend....

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp, police said.

Miami Beach will be flooded with visitors this Memorial Day Weekend as part of the 13th annual Urban Beach Week, which is dubbed the largest Urban festival in the world. Due to the large number of people expected, upwards of 300,000 to 350,000 people, Miami Beach police are implementing some new procedures to ensure the safety of residents and visitors alike.

Four people have received medical attention in connection with a fire on a nuclear-powered submarine at a Maine shipyard, but none of the injuries were serious. Fire crews are fighting the blaze on the USS Miami SSN 755 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on an island in Kittery near Portsmouth, N.H. ... The ship's reactor was not operating at the time of the fire, which was reported at 5:41 p.m., the release said. The reactor was not affected by the fire.

Complete Title: The Soros Summit - Free Beacon exclusive: Inside the secret Miami meeting of George Soros’s liberal conspiracy ### A secretive network of left-wing billionaires and their political operatives descended on the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Miami over the weekend to discuss strategy for the coming elections. The location of the conference had been kept a closely guarded secret by the members and guests of Democracy Alliance (DA), a collection of ultra-wealthy liberal donors formed in 2005, and is reported here in a Washington Free Beacon exclusive. Attendees roamed the grounds at the 150-acre tropical resort on their way...

by John HillStand With Arizona As most Americans know, Florida is a state where a small number of votes can make a huge difference. After all, the 2000 presidential election was decided by just over 500 votes. So when there is evidence of potential voter fraud, officials better take it seriously. But they rarely have. Stand With Arizona, along with FAIR, have urged Florida to check on evidence of potential illegal alien voters for over a year with no action taken. That is, until a Tampa NBC affiliate uncovered shocking evidence of illegal aliens who voted in multiple elections...

(IMAGE AT LINK) [Miami, FL] When Miami-Dade fire captain Brian Beckmann let the word know how he felt about the whole Trayvon Martin thing, the reaction was swift in calling for his removal from the force. Sunshine Slate noted back on April 18 that Beckmann posted an offensive rant on Facebook, as originally reported by TheGrio.com. Here is his post in its entirety: “Listening to Prosecutor Corey blow herself and her staff for five minutes before pre-passing judgment on George Zimmerman. The state seeks reelection again, truth aside. I and my coworkers could rewrite the book on whether our urban...