Conexión Miami / Animals, fetishes and sex

As is known, Miami-Dade prosecutors have accused model Sara Zamora, 28, of torturing chickens and rabbits. What is not known is that Zamora has pleaded not guilty, as if the series of pornographic videos uploaded to the Web had been fiction, something borrowed from literature, not what it really was — or what the facts indicate — a slaughter of animals, a kind of zoological orgy supervised complicitly by Adam Redford, producer of the so-called “crush” videos — an innocent word — that show women lying on dead pigs or buffalos while practicing sex. It was also learned that Redford, who was free on parole for reasons similar to this one, was charged by Miami-Dade authorities, although he has not yet been arrested. The rest is well known: according to The Miami Herald, Zamora cut a chicken’s neck with hedge clippers while having sex with a man. She is also accused of karate-chopping several rabbits’ necks while they howled in pain. In addition, at the risk of making you think that we made all this up, Stephanie Hird, 29, was charged with crushing live fish while wearing provocative garb, shooting at mice and setting fire to a pile of mortally wounded animals, according to documents drawn up by the authorities.

Robbery in Hialeah stores

The City of Hialeah has learned how half a dozen commercial establishments were robbed. On Wednesday, the police arrested Christian Jesús González, whose fingerprints were found on the cash register at one of the stores. He faces charges of vandalism and intent to flee. The modus operandi was the same in all cases: after breaking the store windows with rocks, the thieves broke open and sacked the cash registers.

Gael García
Gael García

Gael García sensitized by migration from Central America

Mexican actor Gael García narrates and co-directs the documentary “Who Is Dayani Cristal?,” which denounces the atrocities suffered by a considerable number of undocumented migrants who, reaching the Mexico-U.S. border, hope to live The American Dream. According to data provided by the Border Patrol, 194 persons died along Arizona’s border, south of Tucson, during fiscal year 2013. García, known for his performances in “The Motorcyle Diaries,” “Amores Perros” and “Bad Education,” narrated the story of a young Honduran about whom all that is known is that he bore a tattoo saying “Dayani Cristal.” Co-director Marc Silver says that the documentary’s message is to humanize the migrants, to stress that their journeys do not begin along the border but from the moment they leave their homes.

‘Puig mania’ could fill the cinemas

Yasiel Puig, coming to a theater near you.
Yasiel Puig, coming to a theater near you.

Under the direction of Brett Ratner, RatPac Entertainment plans to film an important stage in the life of Yasiel Puig, the peppery Cuban baseball player hired in 2012 by the Los Angeles Dodgers in a $42-million 7-year deal. The news, published in the digital edition of The Hollywood Reporter, says the script will be based on the article “Escape From Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers,” written by Jesse Katz for Los Angeles Magazine. In it, Katz tells about Puig’s journey since the moment he left Cuba and how, as a result of the unexpected practices of human smuggling (apparently linked to a Mexican cartel), Puig was held against his will for about 20 days.

What you need to be a judge in Florida

Seven years after 73 percent of Florida judges were white and 65 percent were men, you’d expect that — in the same country that produced “Twelve Years as a Slave” — this clear imbalance in race and gender might have been reduced and that the uncontestable diversity of the state’s residents — let’s say, the crucible known as Florida — might have a more just representation in the court system. Naturally, that was too great an expectation. And today, despite the abundance of speeches about gender and racism, 80 percent of the judges are white and 74 percent are men. Are there no women qualified to be judges? Of course there are, as well as Latinos and Asians who can tell what’s right from wrong. What seems evident is the too-male-too-white practice of the Judicial Nominating Commission (JNC), which is intent on ignoring women and anything that is not “white men,” an absurd category. The problem gets complicated when we realize — as we have known for years — that Florida laws command the governor to make sure that the judiciary is a true reflection of the state’s ethnic, racial and gender diversity.