A1A South

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Ever been on the receiving end of an angry grandmother?It’s not pleasant.

They don’t hold back. Their eyebrows furrow. Their jaws clench. Any minute you think fire and brimstone may come out of their eyes and shoot through your forehead.

In short, it’s terrifying. Three teenagers in St. Petersburg had to learn this the hard way. They got the scolding of their lives, in the course of a crime.

81-year-old Maxine Cortimiglia looks like a docile, quiet lady. She lives alone, weighs less than 100 pounds, and stands just over five feet tall.

Looks can be deceiving.

Tuesday evening, Maxine wanted to take an early evening nap, even though it was just 6:00, with bright sunshine streaming through her windows.

She never thought someone would break into her home by smashing a glass window in her kitchen. Her first reaction: in her own words, fury.

“I can’t believe they would pick on me. I was mad. [Were you scared?] Scared of what? 3 kids, sheesh!”

She yelled at them, “If you think I’ve got money, you’re out of your mind!”

As they demanded cash, Maxine noticed something that got her even more fired up. Broken glass all over her kitchen. That, she says, was the final straw.

She yelled at the kids to clean up their mess.

“I was furious! Pick up the glass! Sweep it up! Make it hurry! You don’t leave glass laying around when there’s an old lady and cats.” She paused and got a huge grin on her face, “I’m the old lady!”

Yep, she schooled three thugs in her own kitchen, watching them as they took a broom and cleaned up their mess. Bold and brave. She says, it was her anger that took over.

Unfortunately, the teenagers didn’t leave empty handed. They got Maxine’s crucifix and wedding band from a jewelry box, plus $300.

In the end, she had one final message for these kids, who, as of Thursday night, remain on the loose.

“Drop dead!”  Source:  FirstCoastNews.com

Granny needs a gun. 

SANFORD, Fla. — A woman on Friday abducted a 1-day-old baby from a secure hospital unit and apparently managed to smuggle the child from the facility inside a tote bag, police said. Jennifer Latham, 39, of Sanford, was arrested a short time later after being pulled over by police in nearby Lake Mary, said Darrel Presley, deputy chief of the Sanford Police Department near Orlando.Officials at Central Florida Regional Hospital alerted police of the abduction around 1:45 p.m. after hospital alarms indicated the child had been removed from the newborn unit, Presley said.

The hospital was immediately locked down as officials searched the grounds, but the woman was apparently able to slip by security because she had the child hidden in a bag, he said.

“We believe at this point she had a large blue tote bag that she may have actually placed the child inside,” Presley said. “And she just apparently walked out.”

Presley said hospital staff acted appropriately and quickly.

“But in just those few minutes that it takes to gather the information and disseminate it, she was able to walk from the maternity ward through the exit and then depart the hospital,” he said.

Authorities initially believed they were looking for two women because the suspect wore street clothes into the hospital, then changed into a scrub-like shirt in an apparent attempt to blend in, Presley said.

Police in the nearby town of Lake Mary pulled over a vehicle at about 3 p.m. that matched a description of the vehicle witnesses described Latham driving, he said. The baby was found inside unharmed and has been returned to the hospital and reunited with the parents.

Read the rest at News4Jax.com.

JAKARTA, March 28 (Xinhua) — A 15-year-old boy from Indonesia’s West Java province died just after he was admitted to the Hasan Sadikin Hospital to receive intensive medical treatment for alleged bird flu symptoms, local press said Friday.    Hadi Jusuf, head of the hospital’s bird flu mitigation team, said the condition of the patient was very poor upon arrival at the hospital on Wednesday evening.

    ”He had breathing difficulties and was unconscious. Moreover he had acute lung wounds,” Hadi was quoted by national newspaper The Jakarta Post as saying.

    The boy from the town of Subang, identified with initials AY, had been treated at a smaller hospital four days earlier with doctors diagnosing him of dengue fever.

    A week earlier, his younger brother died because, according to the same hospital doctors, of dengue fever.

    AY’s blood samples had been sent to a laboratory of the Ministry of Health in Jakarta to ascertain whether AY was infected with the H5N1 virus or not, Hadi said.

    Bird flu has infected 129 Indonesians so far, killing 105 of them, which is the highest death toll in the world.    

Source: Xinhua

Symptoms of Dengue Fever (from WrongDiagnosis.com)

The list of signs and symptoms mentioned in various sources for Dengue fever includes the 21 symptoms listed below:

• High fever - up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit
• Severe headache
• Retro-orbital pain - pain behind the eye
• Severe joint pains
• Muscle pains
• Muscle aches
• Swollen lymph nodes
• General weakness
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Rash
• Children get non-typical symptoms
• Fever
• Weakness
• Prostration
• Severe headache
• Pain behind the eyes
• Severe muscle pain
• Slowed heart rate
• Enlarge lymph nodes
• Maculopapular rash

Symptoms of Bird Flu (from the CDC):

Symptoms of Avian Influenza in Humans

The reported symptoms of avian influenza in humans have ranged from eye infections (conjunctivitis) to influenza-like illness symptoms (e.g., fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches) to severe respiratory illness (e.g. pneumonia, acute respiratory distress, viral pneumonia) sometimes accompanied by nausea, vomiting and neurologic changes.

While some of the symptoms do overlap, it would be interesting to know if the brother of the deceased who died last week also suffered from severe respiratory symptoms.

A lot of information about different Florida regions.  Florida Trend’s 2008 Economic Yearbook

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK — The 8-foot Burmese python hissed and flapped its mouth open, apparently wanting to clamp onto one of the nearby humans who surely was bothering the powerful snake by crowding around it, one a photographer just a few inches away.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., warned everyone about the worst-case scenario, a python killing a small child. And pythons threaten the endangered Florida panther and the rest of the Everglades ecosystem, where the state and federal governments have spent nearly $11 billion trying to restore the polluted wetlands.

“It’s an accident waiting to happen,” Nelson said Wednesday, standing next to a biologist holding the snake.

Those billions of dollars and that snake — captured Tuesday, leaving thousands slithering in the wild throughout the state — were the reason that Nelson stopped at the Shark Valley Visitor Center in northwest Miami-Dade County, where the Miccosukee Indians make their home, and the rest of civilization seems a million miles away.

Nelson is a staunch supporter of restoring the Everglades, which gets about 1 million visitors a year, and he wants the federal government to put the python on its injurious species list, a designation that would make most breeding and importing of the snake illegal and help prevent it from damaging the national ecosystem.

Pythons cost taxpayers up to $150,000 a year to monitor and control and are part of an invasive species list that has an annual economic impact of $100 billion, according to the National Invasive Species Council, which is part of President Bush’s Cabinet.

“You would be amazed at where pythons can live,” Nelson said. A possible habitat “map goes all the way through the Sun Belt, to California, and up to Sacramento.”

He is fighting to get Congress to appropriate $370 million for restoration this year. Completing the project will cost at least another $19 billion and take another four decades to complete, according to the country’s Government Accountability Office.

The Everglades suffer from neglect after years of growth in Southwest Florida. Car oil, fertilizers and other pollutants have spilled into the Everglades on the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Earlier in the day, Nelson was in the Picayune Strand, about 40 miles west, stumping for restoration.

That includes removing pythons, which came to the U.S. from Southeast Asia.
They first were discovered in the Everglades in the mid-1990s, said Skip Snow, a biologist at the park. And they became famous — or infamous — after a couple of incidents. One involved an alligator carrying a python in its mouth while part of the snake was wrapped around the gator. It was a 30-hour battle. The other was the photo seen in media around the world, of the python that burst open after trying to digest a gator.

Last year, a 9-foot Burmese python was trapped at the Beach Club Apartments on Winkler Avenue Extension in Fort Myers.

“Part of the problem is we don’t give it any forethought if we should bring the snakes into the country, if we should let them out,” said Skip Snow, a biologist at the park.

Adding the python to the injurious species list would make its import into the country or transport over state lines illegal, except for cases of medical research, zoos or exhibits, Snow said.

That’s going to take at least two years, said Paul Souza, a South Florida field supervisor with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

A risk assessment is under way and Souza expects completion of that report in December. Then comes a cost assessment. But the snake is competing with other candidates being petitioned for the injurious species list. A backlog of work has prevented the assessment to be completed on the animal.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife has “just a couple of personnel to go through that list,” Nelson said.

Souza said they understand the urgency.

“We’re ahead of the curve, ahead of more than 90 percent of other species,” he said. “But we need to act now.”

Nearly 300 pythons have been documented in the Everglades area. Either park employees caught them, or alligators and cars killed them, Snow said.

The biggest python ever caught at the park was 16 feet, and the biggest one Snow has caught was 15 1⁄2 feet.

Catching one takes at least a two people, Snow said. One person distracts the snake by touching its tail, while one or two others try to pin the python’s head to the ground, maybe with a branch.

“You want to make sure you can control the first fifth of the body,” Snow said. “Burmese pythons aren’t predators on people, but they can kill people.”

Nelson smiled.

“I’ve done a lot of things as a senator but I am not going to let this thing wrap around me,” he said.  Source:  News-Press.com

I rarely to never agree with Bill Nelson about anything, so this may be a first.  We need to get rid of these imported menaces now.

What’s worse: Dusk ruining a late-afternoon round of golf, or figuring out how to change the microwave clock twice a year?A state senator is sure it’s the latter, so he’s pushing a bill to abolish daylight saving time in Florida.

Saying it puts people through ”unnecessary jet lag” and the annoyance of having to change clocks in the spring and fall, Republican Sen. Bill Posey of Rockledge wants the Sunshine State to join Hawaii and parts of Arizona as DST rebels.

”The whole body gets out of its equilibrium,” Posey said Thursday at a Senate committee on governmental operations, where he is vice chairman.

The group favored the bill 4-1. It faces two more committee votes before the full Senate would take it up; there is no similar legislation in the House.

Sen. Jim King, the lone no vote, believes the extra hour of daylight is worth the aggravation of changing clocks twice a year. The draw of the Sunshine State is, of course, sunshine.

”The other side is the elongated lighted time in the summer months, which is when we entertain most of our visitors,” said King, a Jacksonville Republican. “It’s a plus that it doesn’t get dark until late.”

The practice of turning clocks back in the fall and ahead in the spring has been controversial since Americans began observing daylight savings in 1918. At the time, U.S. politicians borrowed the idea from their European allies to help conserve energy during World War I. The unpopular decision was repealed, even after President Woodrow Wilson — a golf fanatic — fought hard to keep DST.

Congress brought back DST during World War II and made it a law in 1966. States can opt out of observing DST, which begins the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November.

Posey’s idea is for Florida to ‘’stay off it all the time,” he said. He talked about the hassle of changing clocks, watches and cellphones, about work accidents going up during DST and the effect it has on people’s internal clocks.

Some early studies supported the theory that daylight saving time conserves energy, but some recent examinations found that it can increase energy consumption — partly because people have to run air conditioners longer into the evening and use heaters and lights when it’s still cold and dark in the morning.

One study, released in February by researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara reported that household electricity usage increased by 1 to 4 percent after Indiana adopted daylight saving time in 2006 — an additional cost of $8.6 million.

”Our main finding is that — contrary to the policy’s intent — DST increases residential electricity demand,” the researchers concluded.

Source:  Miami Herald

So, the reason we’re supposed to be using daylight savings time (saving energy) does not, in fact, work but we keep doing it anyway?  After this many years of expecting a different outcome, I would think that a lot more people would be saying “this is stupid”.  I enjoyed living in Arizona where time just stayed the same. 

It was just getting light enough outside to easily see the children standing outside waiting for the bus, then the time changed so they were standing beside the road in the dark again. 

This year, the time change coincided with the FCAT.  “Hey, kids, do your best on the test and WAKE UP!”  I was falling asleep, and I was one of the administrators.