A1A South

JACKSONVILLE, FL — Some say it’s just another measure to insure your protection while others say it could be a liability. Either way the Florida House and Senate passed a bill allowing you to take a gun to work as long as you leave it in the car.

The Second Amendment’s right to bear arms has always been a touchy subject.
In the past some employers have prohibited their workers to bring guns on their property regardless of concealed weapon permits.

Law makers passed a bill that states businesses cannot prohibit employees or customers from keeping a legally owned gun locked inside their cars, as long as the gun owner has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Opinions differ among employees. James Matteu says he’s not a fan.

“You got guns in vehicles out in parking lots. Cars get broken in to. That just gives people more access to those who want to circumvent the proper channels for obtaining firearms,” says Matteu

Others say toting the extra steel shouldn’t be a big deal. It is your right.

“I personally don’t have a problem with it because if they have a permit to carry a gun and they’ve had a background check and all the necessary safety requirements have probably been met for them to even carry a gun, it’s okay,” says Isaac Chapman III.

“The office is probably going to say no you can’t anyway and then the people are going to follow or not follow the rule like they did before,” says Hillary Pharies.

The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 26-13 but
the bill hasn’t gone into effect just yet. Governor Charlie Crist still has to sign off on it but he says he plans on giving it the O.K.

Source: First Coast News

I always had one in my car regardless of how the employer felt about it.

CARACAS — President Hugo Chávez’s decision Wednesday to nationalize Venezuela’s biggest steel maker — just six days after announcing plans to take over the country’s major cement companies — is an attempt to take politically popular measures, analysts say.

Chávez is showing his renewed commitment as well to putting key foreign-owned sectors of the economy under government control, the experts said. His government also is planning to impose a windfall profits tax on foreign oil producers.

Until the recent flurry of activity, Chávez had taken a more hands-off approach to the economy after voters rejected proposed changes to the Constitution in December that included a call for Venezuela to become a Socialist state.

But Chávez’s popularity is sagging amidst rampant crime, rising inflation and widespread food and housing shortages. Political jockeying already has begun for elections on Nov. 23, when Venezuela will elect mayors and governors.

”Chávez is looking to address critics who have brought the government to task for not building enough housing and infrastructure,” said Patrick Esteruelas, a risk analyst with the New York-based Eurasia Group. “He is using the foreign-owned cement and steel companies as a scapegoat in an attempt to boost the government’s standing in the run up to the November elections.”

Nationalizing the Argentine-owned steel company — whose formal name is Siderúrgica del Orinoco or Sidor — and the three cement companies could cost the Chávez government more than $3 billion to fully indemnify the owners, according to Esteruelas.

But the windfall tax on oil companies of 50 or 60 percent on oil above $70 per barrel could produce at least $1 billion to the government, Oil Minister Rafael Ramírez said Wednesday.

Venezuelan economist Pedro Palma said the government has been having cash-flow problems but has enough money to pay for the nationalizations if senior officials want to dip into its $49 billion of foreign reserves.

The economy continues to grow rapidly, fueled by record high oil prices.

But various government takeovers and threatened nationalizations seem to be taking their toll.

Venezuela had the lowest level of foreign investment in 2007 among Latin American nations, at less than 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product, according to new figures from the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2007, the government nationalized privately-owned electricity and telecommunications companies and took a majority share of the remaining privately-owned oil companies operating in Venezuela.

But Chávez backed off intervening so overtly in the economy until he recently announced the nationalization of two Venezuelan companies — a major dairy and a meat packing chain — in an effort to quell consumer complaints about the frequent absence of milk and meat from supermarket shelves.

Vice President Ramón Carrizález said on Wednesday that the government had no choice but to nationalize Sidor. The company, which had been privatized in 1998 by Chávez’s market-friendly predecessor, had been the target of at least five strikes this year by workers demanding better pay and working conditions.

Ternium, a subsidiary of an Argentine conglomerate, the Techint Group, owns 60 percent of Sidor. The government and current and former workers each own 20 percent.

Chávez had threatened to nationalize Sidor last year unless the company increased production for suppliers.

”The intransigence of the company has forced the government to act on behalf of the workers,” Carrizález said on Wednesday, accusing Ternium officials of having a ”colonial” attitude toward the workers and Venezuelan government.

Sidor’s workers applauded the nationalization.

A Ternium press release said the company offered to increase workers salaries, boost pension payments and turn 600 contract employees into salaried employees.

The company has some 5,400 workers and another 9,000 contractors. Carrizález said the contract workers are ”exploited” by receiving less pay for doing the same work as salaried employees.

The nationalization did not please investors. Ternium’s shares declined Wednesday by seven percent on the New York Stock Exchange.

Only last week that Chávez announced he would nationalize three foreign-owned cement companies. He blamed a housing shortage on them, saying the companies have restricted production to boost prices.

While Chávez frequently rails against ”the empire” — his favorite name for the United States — as with Techint, the three cement companies are owned by non-U.S. companies: Mexico’s Cemex SAB, France’s Lafarge SA and Switzerland’s Holcim Ltd.

Carrizález said he didn’t think the nationalization of Sidor would harm relations with Argentina. The Argentine government offered no immediate response.

Mexico, for its part, condemned the nationalization and demanded a meeting with Venezuela’s ambassador immediately after the Cemex announcement.

On Monday, Cemex issued a statement “expressing its willingness to talk with [Venezuelan] authorities to find a mutually acceptable solution.”

With all of the recent nationalizations, the Venezuelan government has said it would be willing to accept no more than a 60 percent share of the companies.

Source: Miami Herald

Yep, it worked for Mugabe. Why, look what a shining example Zimbabwe’s economy is to the world.

VERO BEACH, FL — Troy Westover says he’ll never forget what he saw in the water while surfing with his sons off Vero Beach.

“This little thing high in the water looked like a Nerf football, black and white. I said ‘Oh my God that’s gotta be a toy.’,” he recalled.

When he got closer, he saw it was in fact a bird that looked just like a penguin darting through the water.

Troy and his son say they tried to follow it, but it was too fast.

Then, two weeks later, the Westovers found another bird, just like it, dead, and washed up on the shore.

“I mean it’s really disturbing to see a bird you would expect to see sitting up on an iceberg or somewhere close to an iceberg up in the Arctic,” Troy said.

The Westovers brought the bird to Dr. Greg Bossart at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Ft. Pierce.

“It kind of intrigued me because lately we’ve been seeing some strange animals turn up in Florida that don’t belong here,” says Bossart.

He says the bird is a razor-billed auk, a sub-arctic bird, that’s a close relative of the puffin.

He calls it the northern hemisphere version of a penguin.

“We do know it was markedly underweight and likely died of starvation,” Bossart said.

This is just the latest arctic creature to wash up on a Florida beach.

In the past couple of years, Bossart has treated a bearded seal, two hooded seals, and several mellon-headed whales which were discovered on local beaches.

His theory?

They’re all signs of global climate change.

“Elevated water temperatures, shifts in food supply, possibly shifts in currents.

These are some of the things you’d have to consider as to why you’ve got multiple arctic or sub-arctic species showing up in a tropical climate,” said Bossart.

He says the bird was too decomposed to provide much valuable information about its death.

He plans to send it to a state laboratory at the University of Florida.

Source: FirstCoastNews

Nice theory, except for the little fact that the oceans have been cooling, not warming (eye roll). Perhaps the oceans got too cold and they needed to travel to a warmer area.

NEW ORLEANS, April 7, 2008 — Despite oil prices that hover around $100 a barrel, it may take at least 10 or more years of intensive research and development to reduce the cost of solar energy to levels competitive with petroleum, according to an authority on the topic.

“Solar can potentially provide all the electricity and fuel we need to power the planet,” Harry Gray, Ph.D., scheduled to speak here today at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). His presentation, “Powering the Planet with Solar Energy,” is part of a special symposium arranged by Bruce Bursten, Ph.D., president of the ACS, the world’s largest scientific society celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Beckman Scholars Program.

“The Holy Grail of solar research is to use sunlight efficiently and directly to “split” water into its elemental constituents – hydrogen and oxygen – and then use the hydrogen as a clean fuel,” Gray said.

Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. He is the principal investigator in an NSF funded Phase I Chemical Bonding Center (CBC) – a Caltech/MIT collaboration – and a principal investigator at the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research (CCSER).

This research has the goal of transforming the industrialized world from one powered by fossil fuels to one powered by sunlight. The CBC research focuses on converting sunlight to chemical fuels while research in the CCSER focuses on generating electricity from sunlight and developing fuel cells.

In his talk at the ACS Presidential Symposium, Gray cited the vast potential of solar energy, noting that more energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour than all of the energy consumed on the planet in one year.

The single biggest challenge, Gray said, is reducing costs so that a large-scale shift away from coal, natural gas and other non-renewable sources of electricity makes economic sense. Gray estimated the average cost of photovoltaic energy at 35 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, other sources are considerably less expensive, with coal and natural gas hovering around 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Because of its other advantages – being clean and renewable, for instance – solar energy need not match the cost of conventional energy sources, Gray indicated. The breakthrough for solar energy probably will come when scientists reduce the costs of photovoltaic energy to about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, he added. “Once it reaches that level, large numbers of consumers will start to buy in, driving the per-kilowatt price down even further. I believe we are at least ten years away from photovoltaics being competitive with more traditional forms of energy.”

Major challenges include developing cheap solar cells that work without deterioration and reducing the amounts of toxic materials used in the manufacture of these cells. But producing low cost photovoltaics is only a step in the right direction. Chemists also need to focus on the generation of clean fuels at costs that can compete with oil and coal.

Gray emphasized this point: “The pressure is on chemists to make hydrogen from something other than natural gas or coal. We’ve got to start making it from sunlight and water.”

Gray noted that the NSF CBC program currently includes Caltech and MIT, but would expand in a second phase to include several additional institutions.

Source: Eurekalert

Ironically, this is much like what I heard about solar energy when I was a kid during the energy crisis of the 70s. Too bad the country listened to all the hippie dippie environmental scares about nuclear energy. We could be living in a nation far less dependent on petroleum products today.

NEW DELHI: In its gravest warning to India since bird flu first broke out in Maharashtra in 2006, the United Nations has said that the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus may have got entrenched in the Indo-Gangetic plains of India and Bangladesh.

While West Bengal is grappling with the H5N1 virus that has re-infected poultry in the four districts of Nadia, Malda, Murshidabad and Jalpaiguri, 47 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts are also reeling under a similar outbreak.
Speaking to TOI from New York, UN’s influenza coordinator Dr David Nabarro said the new outbreaks in India and the continuous circulation of the virus in Bangladesh had started to worry him. He said that with high chances of the virus getting entrenched in the Gangetic plains of West Bengal, the fear of a possible human pandemic remained high.

According to him, an entrenched virus would mean a longer time to stamp it out, higher risk of continuous re-infections and a greater cost — both financial and human — for the infected country. Entrenched viruses not only put the host country, but also neighbouring or distant nations at permanent risk of incursion.

“In light of the continuous re-infections in West Bengal and new outbreak in Tripura, there is a serious possibility that the virus is becoming entrenched in the Gangetic delta. I am seriously concerned about it. This is not something India should take lightly,” Nabarro said.

He said entrenched viruses would be a threat to the entire country and would cause sporadic outbreaks at regular intervals. It would multiply freely among poultry, keeping alive the risk of a human pandemic.

Reacting to Dr Nabarro’s concerns, animal husbandry secretary Pradeep Kumar said, “We have drawn Bengal’s attention to slack sanitisation operations and have told the government to immediately take remedial measures. The state has not carried out operations according to the action plan.”

Dr Nabarro said control and containment operations in West Bengal are a perfect example of what can happen when the virus infects densely populated regions where people are dependent on their livestock for nourishment and earnings. “I sympathise with the state government. Culling over four million birds is a massive operation. It’s very difficult to take poultry from poor people who depend on it to live. It’s then much harder to control the outbreak and stamp out the virus,” he said.

Meanwhile, India on Wednesday asked director general of FAO, Dr Jacques Diouf, to pressurise Bangladesh into stepping up control and containment operations. In Tripura, which announced an outbreak on Monday, over 19,000 poultry have been culled in the past two days by 26 rapid response teams even as fresh bird deaths in Rajnagar and Bishalgarh were reported.

Source: The Times of India

What a heartbreaking choice. By taking the chickens that may stand between a family and starvation, they could be causing certain death. By leaving possible infected poultry, it could spread the virus responsible for massive poultry die offs further and create even more economic chaos and the chance of being at the epicenter of a horrific breakout of human disease. The only good outcome would be the stamping out of H5N1 bird flu, but I suspect that this will not happen.