Miami-Dade County

Over the past 20 years, a special team at the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department has rushed around South Florida, preventing venomous snake bites from turning fatal. 

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez and other officials rode an express bus along the South Dade Transitway Corridor on Tuesday morning to test new smart traffic priority signals meant to speed up public and private transit throughout the county. 

A second raccoon in South Miami-Dade has tested positive for rabies — and that means part of the Southwest Miami-Dade suburbia will be on a rabies alert until Sept. 2, another 60 days.

The alert area is bounded by Southwest 152nd Street on the north, 187th Street on the south, 117th Avenue on the east and 137th Avenue to the west. That doesn't include the main campus of Florida International University, though one person tweeted that he walked past a classroom and saw a raccoon "inside just chillin' ... acting like he paid tuition."

Traffic, sea-level rise and the Everglades are colliding after Miami-Dade commissioners voted Wednesday to advance a potential expressway extension to state regulators.

The proposal to extend State Road 836 aims to reduce traffic for commuters in the West Kendall area. Driving the 20 or so miles to downtown Miami during rush hour can take an hour and a half -- or more.

Half of the percussion section is lined up along a classroom wall, with whiteboards to their backs. Each young boy is shaking a shekere — a West African instrument made from a dried gourd and covered with a colorful beaded netting.

The rest of the musicians are sitting nearby in blue plastic chairs with djun djun and djembe drums at their feet. They bang on the instruments with one or two wooden sticks — or just their hands.

They’re laying down the beat for the girls, who are jumping and moving their bodies like waves to the music.

A plan to use treated wastewater to freshen Florida Power & Light’s troubled nuclear cooling canals will move forward, for now, without meeting strict water standards set for nearby Biscayne Bay.

On Tuesday, Miami-Dade commissioners authorized the county staff to negotiate the deal, but put off setting the standards.

Instead, terms of the costly treatment will be ironed out as the utility and the county staff work out details. Any project will ultimately come back to commissioners for final approval. But by then, critics worry it may be too late.

South Miami-Dade County is a popular destination for cyclists because of its national parks, fruit stands and (by South Florida standards) open roads.

Recent bike-car collisions in the area have prompted a push to educate cyclists and drivers on how to share the roads safely.