A1A South

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office called him stupid Tuesday. But Frank Singleton could almost write the book on how to turn a misdemeanor into a felony without ever leaving the jail’s parking lot.

“This is one of the stupid criminals,” Sheriff’s Office spokesman Paul Miller said.

Singleton, 21, of West Palm Beach, got released from the county lockup Tuesday after being arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge.

He immediately ran out into the visitor’s parking lot and, in an apparent effort to get away as quickly as possible, tried to carjack a 2006 Nissan 350Z, Miller said.

The woman who was driving it, Justine Lapierre, was just getting out of her car when Singleton ran at her saying, “I want your car,” Miller said.

He pushed Lapierre out of the way, grabbed the keys and jumped into the Nissan. But it was a manual transmission and Singleton couldn’t operate it, Miller said.

Hearing the commotion, Sheriff’s Office Pastor Leo Krug walked up and, holding his handgun by his side, ordered the barely free Singleton to the ground so a deputy could handcuff him.

Singleton was booked on a carjacking charge.

“I don’t think he wanted to go back to jail,” Miller said. “I think he really wanted to get away and was looking for a car.” When the detective was making the arrest, he asked Singleton why he did this.

“I didn’t feel like walking,” Singleton said.

Source:  Sun Sentinel

The Pastor was at the jail to lead a Bible study.  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

JACKSONVILLE, FL — Elections are months away, but the campaigns are in full swing.

While most campaigns are running the conventional way, the House of Representatives race in District 18 is a different story.

Four Candidates are in the race. Candidates are Elaine Brown, Dr. Ronald Renaurt, Dave Smith and Jack Capra.

Capra’s campaign is the one catching attention. Capra, who is a lawyer and a Navy Reservist is being deployed for six months to Iraq April 24, 2008.

Capra just got the notice a few weeks ago. He says even though he won’t be here for the August primary, he may not make it back in time for the general election in November, and he can’t campaign door to door, he is still keeping his hat in the race.

As much of a challenge as its presented, it’s also presented some unique opportunities,” says Capra.

While the government will limit what Capra can do, his plan is to campaign through emails, a blog and videos sent through his campaign website, all from his post in Baghdad.

“This is all new territory…we’ll have to play it by ear.”

This is the fifth deployment for Capra since 2001. He spent time in Iraq before. In 2004, he was wounded by an IED and was awarded a purple heart for his service.

First Coast News

Hmmmm.  I wonder…..Democrat or Republican?  Anybody?

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Just 24 hours after Jacksonville’s latest fatal police-involved shooting, Sheriff John Rutherford spoke out attributing the city’s violent crimes to an epidemic the nation faced two decades ago — crack babies. The sheriff on Wednesday was very candid with Channel 4 as he sat down and talked with reporter Jim Piggott about the recent crime wave and the surge in police-involved shootings in Jacksonville.”It’s not just the violence, but the gratuitous nature of the violence,” Rutherford said.

He said there is a new mentality on the street with a complete disregard for life. Rutherford pointed to something that happened 20 years ago as one of the main causes of today’s problem — crack cocaine and the babies born addicted to the drug.

“Go back 20 years, crack cocaine was prevalent. The big discussion then was all the crack babies that were being born. Well, guess what. They’ve all grown up and that’s who we’re dealing with out on the street — these people who have grown up in that culture,” Rutherford said.

In 2005, there were five police-involved shooting. There were also five police shooting in 2006. However, that number more than tripled in 2007 when there were 18 police shootings.

There have already been eight police shootings in Jacksonville this year. Five of the suspects shot have died.

The sheriff said the number of police-involved shootings also shows that there is an attitude of no fear in Jacksonville.

“Years ago, when I was riding the streets, they used to want to get away. Now, they want to actually shoot a policeman,” Rutherford said.

After Tuesday’s scene in Arlington, where an officer shot and killed a mentally ill man who they said was armed with steak knives, many questioned the increasing use of police force. Some have even criticized the sheriff’s office for acting too quickly in some cases.

Rutherford said he disagrees with that criticism.

“I would absolutely disagree with that. You show me the case where these officers have had guns pulled on them and they’ve been fired at — in fact I would propose to you that my officers have shown incredible self-restraint in many situations where they could have shot someone and yet they didn’t,” Rutherford said.

He said in 2007 there were 74 incidents in which officers had guns or knives drawn on them and they did not fire back when they could have. In 2006 there were only 44 incidents.

“I think there’s a culture out there that has been raised without value for life,” Rutherford said.

Criminology professor Dr. Michael Hallett said while there’s not a direct link between those who were born addicted to crack and violence, he agrees with what Rutherford said.

“He was talking about the culture, which I agree with. If you grew up in that environment, you’re going to be a product of it,” Hallett said.

He explained that the offenders of today are often those who only know life in Jacksonville’s poor, drug-ridden communities.

“Men with no options engage in expressive violence. They’ll be violent just for the sake of being violent, and I think we’ve got an increasing amount of that in Jacksonville,” Hallett said. “Obviously the absolute last thing a person should do is be confrontational with a police officer. If a police officer tells you do something, you do it and ask questions later. I don’t think that’s the relationship that many communities have with law enforcement.”

The professor also said that for too many people crime scenes have become an accepted, everyday part of life.

“We’ve got to try to reverse that somehow, and I don’t think were going to be able to do that just through law enforcement,” Hallett said.

Other cities in Florida have seen a significantly lower number of police-involved shootings than Jacksonville. In Tampa, there have been no police-involved shootings this year; and in Miami there have been three.

Source:  News4Jax

There are a lot of children that have been raised by aunts, great aunts, grandmothers, and great grandmothers while their mommas were out whoring for crack; their daddies missing or unknown.  A whole lot of kids have grown up raising themselves with their only value to others as a monthly check.  I’m not surprised that those children grow up mad at the world and everybody in it.

Some of the stories that you hear while working at an elementary school of what the children have already endured at a very young age will break your heart. 

It began with a cough. Then came the sniffles, and then a terrible fever.

No one thought it was anything more than the flu. And, indeed, that’s all it was. But the year was 1918, and this flu was one of the greatest killers mankind had ever known.

“I heard my father coughing, and I had never heard him the least bit sick before that,” says Lora Miller, a 96-year-old Los Angles resident whose father was killed by the epidemic. “He passed away pretty fast. It was a terrible shock. He was so young and strong. I never got over it.”

Ninety years after the deadliest flu swept through the world, scientists and health officials say that it could happen again. Not only is the planet overdue for another flu pandemic, scientists say, the United States is due for an influenza virus as bad or worse than the flu that killed more than 500,000 Americans in 1918 and 1919. Experts believe that if a similar pandemic struck again, with modern transportation moving unwittingly infected people quickly around the world, millions of Americans could die.

The federal government has made great strides in preparing for a pandemic — global virus surveillance has been beefed up, flu vaccine and anti-viral supplies expanded and detailed plans created to deal with a society in crisis. The problem is that no knows how much these efforts will actually help slow down a killer virus.

The pandemic of 1918 and 1919, known as the Spanish flu because it was erroneously thought to have come from Spain, was an unusual killer. Unlike conventional flu viruses, it killed the strong and the healthy, but passed over the old and the very young.

It killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. The disease killed more U.S. soldiers in WWI than were killed in combat.

“The clock is ticking, and we don’t know if time’s up,” says Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office at the Department of Health and Human Services. “A flu pandemic could happen at any time.”

A flu pandemic is an outbreak of a new type of influenza A virus that spreads throughout the world. Influenza A is a variant of the deadliest type of flu.

Historically, there have been flu pandemics every 30 to 35 years, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Asian flu of 1957-58 killed 70,000 Americans, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 killed 34,000.

The 1918 flu killed so many because it occurred at the end of WWI when millions of soldiers were crammed together in battlefields and camps worldwide before returning home. Now, with airplanes bringing people from one side of the world to the other in a matter of hours instead of weeks, officials worry that a pandemic could be far more deadly.

“With modern transportation, a flu pandemic could spread faster than any time in history,” says Richard Thompson, spokesman for the World Health Organization. “The death toll would be between 4 to 40 million deaths.”

The current flu vaccine would be ineffective against a new flu virus because it was created to fight a conventional flu. It would take months to develop a vaccine to combat a new killer-flu virus, experts said. A pandemic would be well under way before a vaccine would be ready.

Scientists are worried about avian influenza, which has decimated bird populations in southeast Asia in the past 10 years. Pandemic flu viruses are believed to originate from bird or swine viruses that mutate and transfer to humans. So far, the only way humans can catch bird flu is from birds. If the avian virus mutates so that it can spread by human-to-human contact, it could easily become a pandemic flu virus, experts say.

Miller says she dreads to see the effect a flu pandemic would have on society.

She thinks that people in 1918 could handle a disaster like the Spanish flu because they saw death far more often; infant mortality was still high, and the war had killed and maimed millions in Europe.

She is not sure that Americans could handle seeing hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying in just a few months.

“The world doesn’t know fear and fright anymore,” Miller says. “You won’t want to leave your house. I pray every day that it doesn’t come back. Every day.”

Source:  Sun Sentinel.com

Indeed, only the 3 youngest children survived in my grandmother’s family.