Miami Fl

To fight crime in the Edgewater neighborhood, police have traded in their uniforms for a sexier look: shorts, tight blouses and a come-hither smile. Some officers have parked their patrol cars to lean up against lampposts. Others not posing as prostitutes may be packing their service revolvers under the shabby clothes of a vagrant. "You see the homeless people out there? Well, many of those guys with shopping carts are my guys," said Miami police Lt. Mario Garcia. "Male and female.

At the Haitian Relief Information Center hastily set up in the heart of Little Haiti, county social worker Shirley Sieger was, in theory, there to help people seeking information from quake-ravaged Port-au-Prince. But Thursday there was little she could do, for others or herself. Sieger had been calling the cellphone number of her mother, Olga Marie Dejean, 71, over and over again, to no avail. She shuddered as she recounted her efforts. Then the tears came. Her colleague, Irene Taylor-Wooten, enveloped her in a hug. "Come on, baby, come on," Taylor-Wooten said.

Had any surrealistic dreams lately? Hotel impresario Ian Schrager would certainly like you to have some at his ultrachic redesign of Miami's landmark Delano Hotel. In the eight months since he and French designer Philippe Starck transformed the angular 16-story tower that was built in 1947 and named for FDR, the new all-white Delano has been white-hot. Much has been written about the startling decor and sybaritic rooftop spa.

Fifteen minutes behind Paris Hilton. An hour behind Michael Caine. A day behind Queen Latifah. Everywhere I went in Miami I just missed a celebrity. The only name I didn't hear was Britney Spears. Everyone else in the celestial pantheon seemed to be making merry here. Such is life in Miami, where star sightings are as common as Hummer stretch limos in L.A. Southern California still reigns as the celebrity capital of the world, but Miami has gained a rep as Hollyweird South.

Workers here Wednesday raced to ready this city for the start of Pope John Paul II's whirlwind 10-day tour of the United States, in which he will glimpse a broad panorama of American cultural diversity and interact with the colorful, often independent-minded U.S. Roman Catholic flock he seeks to unify. The anticipation in the city was personified by Cuban-born architect Ruben Travieso, who on Wednesday draped a wall of a dilapidated downtown building with a 45-by-60-foot poster of the Pope.

A 7-year-old girl who was permanently injured in a car accident while still a fetus can sue her mother for negligence, a Florida appeals court ruled Wednesday. Barbara Goodman has been fighting for her daughter Kara's right to sue her for severe injuries suffered in a traffic accident in 1994, the day before Kara was born two months' premature. If her daughter wins the suit, Goodman's insurer, National Casualty, would have to pay for Kara's care.

Police in riot gear remained on alert and braced for possible violence Friday after a police shooting Thursday night set off sporadic incidents of rock- and bottle-throwing in two predominantly black neighborhoods. Two Latino officers on routine patrol shot and wounded a black man who they said was walking toward them with a gun.

A yearlong campaign by West Coast law enforcement officials to spotlight a shift in drug trafficking from Miami to Los Angeles--and plead for more federal assistance--took a turn toward the theatrical Tuesday with testimony by two former distributors. Wearing bright red ski masks, the two men--both now police informers--were marched behind a white screen to tell a state panel how some Colombian cocaine importers began bypassing Miami. "In 1985, I started losing business to the West Coast. . . .

A 30-year-old Miami police officer goes on trial here Monday, charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of a black motorcyclist fleeing a routine traffic stop. The deaths of Clement Anthony Lloyd and his passenger last January on an inner-city street touched off three days of rioting. But also on trial will be Miami itself, an ethnically divided city with a tradition of reacting violently to jury verdicts perceived as unfair.

A Boeing 707 cargo jet with a mechanical problem appeared as if it was going to crash into downtown Miami buildings before the pilot regained control and flew on safely, witnesses and the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday. "We are on the 46th floor, and we were looking down on the plane," said Sandra Andrade, who works in the 54-story First Union Financial building, about a block from Biscayne Bay.

For Cuban exiles and emigres who have been waiting for Fidel Castro's departure for decades, Tuesday's announcement that he was retiring as president was greeted with more cynicism than jubilation. "As far as I'm concerned, until they can show me a body in a casket, I'm never going to believe this is over," Eddie Lopez, an exterminator and U.S.-born Cuban American, said as he made his pest control rounds in Miami Beach.

New York photographer Charles Thompson, dressed in a cream suit, white shoes and sipping a strawberry smoothie, stood at the entrance to the Miami Beach convention center, just before the noon VIP opening. He was one of several hundred collectors waiting for the doors to open to the largest U.S. contemporary art fair. Thompson, a tall, blond collector of Russian contemporary art, waited patiently.

MIAMI -- As the pro football world mourned Tuesday's death of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor from a bizarre nocturnal shooting a day earlier, homicide investigators combed through the NFL star's troubled past and searched for a killer for whom they have neither a motive nor a description. Taylor, 24, never regained consciousness after being airlifted Monday from his walled and gated home where an intruder had burst in at 1:45 a.m. and shot him.

It stands like a sentry, on the lookout for tempests around the clock. Yet until this year, South Florida's primary weather Doppler radar had been unable to detect the most dreaded of tropical storms: those that explode in strength just before reaching land. Now, the bulbous installation in remote southwestern Miami-Dade County has been enhanced with a new program to better predict a storm's intensity at the point of impact.

It became clear in the second day of jury selection in the Jose Padilla terrorism trial just how raw the wounds of Sept. 11 remained in this city of immigrants and military veterans. Many summoned for jury duty for a trial that is expected to last until August conceded during voir dire -- the process to determine their suitability as jurors -- that they could not be fair and impartial.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center has received its share of audience gripes about sight lines, climate control and such at its new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, but things could be much worse. Consider the plight of Miami's Carnival Center, a three-venue performance mecca that also opened last fall, designed by the same team -- architect Cesar Pelli and acoustician Russell Johnson -- that brought us Segerstrom Concert Hall.

A civil disturbance broke out in this city's predominantly black Overtown area Monday evening, after police shot at two men on a motorcycle during a high-speed chase. The motorcycle slammed head-on into an oncoming car and the cycle's driver was killed, though police did not say whether a gunshot or the accident caused the death. The motorcycle passenger was critically injured and two people in the car were hurt. The incident happened at 5:45 p.m. The street immediately grew tense.

A man accused of sexually assaulting seven girls and women was recaptured late Monday, a week after escaping from jail by rappelling down the building on bedsheets, police said. Reynaldo E. Rapalo, 34, is accused of terrorizing the city's Little Havana section and a nearby neighborhood called Shenandoah in 2002 and 2003. At the time of his escape, he was awaiting a trial that could have sent him to prison for life.

There may be "One Game, One Dream," as Super Bowl XLI banners fluttering throughout the city proclaim. But advocates of the poor and homeless want the world to know there are two Miamis. As tens of thousands descend on this spruced-up city for the country's biggest sports party Sunday, the down and out are pointing beyond the sleek facade of high-rises, hip clubs and beachfront condos.

EIGHT cruise lines list Miami as their home port. The city calls itself the "cruise capital of the world." (By comparison, three lines call the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro home.) Happily for Miami's many cruise visitors, the port is close to South Beach, the Art Deco capital of America, a vibrant area that combines sea, celebrity and world-class people-watching.