(there used to be a button that just started the slideshow automatically, but now I think you have to roll the mouse to the right or to the left to see the slideshow in full after you click the play button. maybe. I used to find Vuvox slideshows to be really easy, but maybe now there’s a better way of doing these.)

A man who lost most of his face and his eyesight in last year’s face-chewing attack in Miami has a message for the people who donated to his care: Thank you.

If you want to send a message back, tag your tweets #Wishes4Poppo, and his nurses will read him the notes.

MIAMI (AP) — A homeless man whose face was mostly chewed off in a bizarre attack last year in Miami says he doesn’t want any more reconstructive surgery.

Ronald Poppo spent nearly a month in a hospital after the attack alongside a Miami highway. Since then, he’s been living in a long-term care facility.

The attack left him blind and disfigured. Poppo’s doctors said Tuesday he knows he’s lost his nose and his left eye completely, but he’s satisfied with the surgeries and skin grafts that have closed his wounds.

A video posted online by the hospital that has been caring for Poppo shows him sitting in a hospital bed, wearing a baseball cap and strumming a guitar.

Facing the camera, Poppo thanks the public for their contributions and support.

Donna Karan has been working with Haitian artisans through her Urban Zen Foundation since the 2010 earthquake. The video above was produced for urbanzen.com.

Karan was in Miami this week to talk about her work in Haiti, coinciding with the opening of the Discover Haiti Exhibition at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. 

“What we have to do is give them the tools to produce a product that is equal to their competition. That doesn’t mean factory. That means artisanal,” Karan told The Associated Press.

Miami, Florida on Flickr.

MIAMI (AP) — The handbag Donna Karan was showing off Friday lacked her signature logo, or any designer’s logo. It was made of paper mache and, the fashion designer said, represented Haiti’s handmade carnival masks — in wearable form.

She said the tote bag and other similar fashion and decorative items made by Haitian artisans are part of her “dressing and addressing people” campaign: taking art to where the most people will buy it.

“A painting can say anything, but let’s get it out there in the world where people buy T-shirts,” Donna Karan said at the opening of a Little Haiti Cultural Center exhibition of art, accessories and furnishings produced by artisans in Haiti and sold through Karan’s Urban Zen Foundation.

It’s no charity craft fair. The items artfully displayed in the Miami gallery would sell in any mainstream home furnishings store. What sets them apart is their origin: handmade in Haiti from stone, wood, metals and textiles sourced or repurposed in the Caribbean country. … (read more)

dear knee injury: please improve so that I can go back to class, which looks like this in my head, but in reality is not this graceful at all. kthnxbye. 

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

MIAMI (AP) - There’s finally a crack in the dam blocking the natural flow of water into Everglades National Park.
    
The Tamiami Trail that traverses South Florida’s wetlands has kept water from flowing into the park for more than 80 years. On Wednesday, a backhoe broke through a 1-mile stretch of the old roadway that has been replaced with a bridge.
    
The bridge opened in March. The Department of the Interior says getting $30 million to raise the next 2.6-mile section of the bridge is a top priority.
    
The bridge and the removal of the old highway are among Everglades restoration projects that languished through funding and legal challenges since Congress approved them in 2000.
    
The park has long suffered from a lack of water due to various water-control structures and the highway.

National Hurricane Center director’s comments on water, water everywhere, make the front page in The Villages, Florida.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) _ Last year’s hurricane season drove home some big lessons, the nation’s chief hurricane forecaster said Tuesday: Storm surge and flooding are dangerous and difficult to predict, and sometimes it’s even harder to communicate that sense of urgency to the public.

It wasn’t just high winds that posed a threat and caused damage, said National Hurricane Center Director Rick Knabb, who joined Florida’s emergency managers in Fort Lauderdale at the annual Governor’s Hurricane Conference.

“2012 was all about water, water, water. Debby, Isaac, Sandy,” Knabb said. “It was storm surge from the ocean, it was inland flooding, it was river flooding.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Hurricane-center-chief-focusing-on-water-hazards-4495842.php#ixzz2SjP9vesG

jnkay:

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 6 to 10 pm

Exhibit runs through May 31, 2013

 An IPC Visual Lab exhibit curated by award-winning Miami Herald photojournalist Carl Juste. View an eclectic collection of works by professional photojournalists Carl Juste, CW Griffin, Charlie Trainor, Andrew Kaufman. And, their advanced lab students: Jenny Babot Romney, Rubyann Smith Hernandez, Nanci Thomas, Zeus Shama, Jennifer Kay, and Ethan Britton. DJ ONEWAY will be spinning the tunes. Free. 

ACND Gallery of Art 
at Archbishop Curley Notre Dame Prep

4949 NE 2^nd Ave
Miami, FL
33137

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 6 to 10 pm

Exhibit runs through May 31, 2013

 An IPC Visual Lab exhibit curated by award-winning Miami Herald photojournalist Carl Juste. View an eclectic collection of works by professional photojournalists Carl Juste, CW Griffin, Charlie Trainor, Andrew Kaufman. And, their advanced lab students: Jenny Babot Romney, Rubyann Smith Hernandez, Nanci Thomas, Zeus Shama, Jennifer Kay, and Ethan Britton. DJ ONEWAY will be spinning the tunes. Free. 

ACND Gallery of Art 
at Archbishop Curley Notre Dame Prep

4949 NE 2^nd Ave
Miami, FL
33137

Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, Florida on Flickr.

(AP) — New Interior Secretary Sally Jewell took an airboat ride through Florida’s Everglades on Wednesday during one of her first official trips as leader of the agency responsible for national parks and other public lands, highlighting the importance of a massive wetlands restoration project.

Jewell is an experienced mountaineer, but she didn’t get much above sea level in an airboat cutting through the sawgrass in Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Palm Beach County. She also planned an 8-mile hike through Everglades National Park.

Briefly stopping in a still patch of water under darkening rain clouds, Jewell said she has a lot to learn about the Everglades, particularly about invasive species, such as the Burmese python, that plague native wildlife. She defended the billions of dollars that have been directed to restoration projects, even though progress has been slow.

“If you do it right, as I think this Everglades restoration plan is doing, you’re involving all three: you’re taking care of the people, you’re taking care of the plants and animals, and you’re taking care of the resource for many generations forward,” Jewell said. … (read more)

Miami, Florida on Flickr.

Little Haiti storefront. 

Rum: It’s not just the alcohol that made you queasy in college. Sales of rum and other distilled spirits have steadily grown over the last several years, even during the recession.

Fueled by a cocktail revival on the food scene — as well as prominent billing on TV shows like “Mad Men” — liquors captured more than a third of the alcoholic beverage market last year, including sales of 25.5 million cases of rum in the U.S. alone, a 2.5 percent jump over the year before. Flavored and spiced rums account for more than half of that total.

In short, it’s time to move beyond the rum-and-cola.

Just as we wouldn’t lump together all red wines, we also shouldn’t treat all rums alike.

A growing awareness of the differences in regional rums — not to mention variances in how they are produced — opens new opportunities for appreciating each in its own way. And when it comes to cocktails, that opens fun and delicious possibilities for highlighting the nuances of each.

Miami, Florida on Flickr. A flight of rums set out for a blind tasting kind of looks like a round of Rum Bingo, doesn’t it? Everybody wins!

I stopped by the Miami Rum Renaissance Festival to ask an important question:

MIAMI (AP) — When you’re talking about rum, how much does the Caribbean really matter?

For the rum world, it’s a more serious question than it sounds, and the answer exposes a schism in the industry, a divide between massive producers who value uniformity in a global market and smaller players and connoisseurs who prefer nuanced production that reflects the time and place a rum is made.

Last month I reported that a Haitian attorney wants a human rights commission to hold Haiti’s government accountable for failing to provide reparations to the victims of a 2005 massacre at a soccer stadium and related attacks in a neighboring slum the following summer.

Evel Fanfan and attorneys from the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Social Justice filed a petition in December before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of more than 300 Haitians who lost relatives at the stadium or had their homes burned down in the subsequent attacks. Fanfan’s case has stalled for years in Haiti’s dysfunctional legal system, which often fails to prosecute even minor offenses. Thousands of prisoners have languished in squalid jails for years without being charged or seeing a judge. Now Fanfan’s colleagues at Seton Hall have launched an online petition to urge the commission take up the case. Click the link above to read the petition and see video testimony from some of the victims.