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A 9-year-old boy in Miami Dade county has become the state’s first swine flu fatality. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, state health officials continue to emphasize prevention and treatment if you feel ill.

Health officials are saying little specific about why swine flu claimed the life of a 9-year-old boy in Miami Dade County.

“The young man passed away and the initial diagnosis is from Swine Flu, H1N1 swine flu,” Doc Kokol with the Florida Department of Health said. “We do want to let folks know that there may have been some underlying health issues with this case as well.”

The Death is Florida’s first, but the 45th in the nation. The governor sent his condolences to the family.

“It’s a tremendous tragedy,” Governor Charlie Crist said.  “It’s just very sad and all of our thoughts and prayers go out to his family.”

Monday’s count stood at 417 confirmed cases of swine flu here in Florida. That’s up 4 over the weekend.

Officials continue to urge prevention…including frequent hand washing.

“Most people recover without medical attention, they go on about their business, they’re sick for several days, but we really recommend that people go home, stay home, contact their physician,” Kokol said.

Parents are also encouraged to keep their children home if they’re showing any sort of symptoms.

National wide, seasonal flu claims more than 36 thousand lives a year.

The cost of a college education in Florida is going up, but the quality isn’t. All 11 of Florida’s public universities are seeking the maximum tuition increase allowed by the state, but as Whitney Ray tells us, many colleges will still cut programs and layoff professors.

Florida college students are looking for extra cash to cover a 15 percent tuition hike.

“I have enough money saved up right now to cover one semester, but next semester, in the spring, I’ll have to find a job,” said FSU Freshman Suzanna Denninghoff.

But even though students will be paying more, they won’t be getting an extra bang for their buck. The tuition hike will pump 35 million dollars into the state’s 11 public universities… not enough money to stop cut backs.

Florida State University is cutting 56 million dollar from its budget. To make ends meet the school may layoff 200 employees and cut programs. FSU Junior Amanda Davison feels cheated.

“The thing that makes me the angriest of all, it’s not as though they are raising tuition and taking away Bright Futures and keeping our departments. They are taking away our departments,” said Davison.

And it’s not just FSU scaling back. Three consecutive years of budget cuts have hurt all of Florida’s universities. Education activist Bud Chiles said the state will be paying for the cuts for years to come.

“You can’t replace those programs that are being decimated overnight. It takes 10 or 20 years. We’ve worked so hard in this state to build up a good university system and it’s being dismantled,” said Chiles.

And while raising tuition won’t save universities in the near future, a steady increase over time could go a long way to help stabilize funding. The University System’s Board of Governors is expected to approve the 15 percent tuition hikes for all of the schools at its Thursday meeting.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson is touring the state to rally support against offshore oil drilling.

An anti-drilling tour in Florida would have seemed unnecessary just two years ago, but rising gas prices have changed the minds of many Floridians. Congress is considering a plan to allow drilling 10 miles off of Florida’s coast. At a Monday morning news conference at the senator’s Tallahassee office, Nelson told reporters drilling is not the answer to the country’s gas problems.

“Drilling off the coast of Florida is not going to do a thing for gas prices. If you want to do something for gas prices, you’ve got to plug the Enron Loophole and stop the unregulated speculation, selling and buying of oil futures contracts on the unregulated oil markets,” said Nelson.

Floridaoil.org, a pro-drilling group, tried to attend Nelson’s news conference Monday, but were banned from the Senators Office.

The state is taking 700 million dollars from a trust fund named after the late Governor Lawton Chiles to help balance the budget, despite objection from the Chiles family.

The late governor’s son Bud Chiles is upset over the raid because the money in the fund was supposed to go to health care for children and seniors. The fund was set up with money from the state’s tobacco settlement. Bud Chiles said the state legislature and the governor betrayed his trust.

“My family’s betrayal really is not the issue, the betrayal that matters is the betrayal of the children of Florida and to the elderly, the people for which this was established,” said Chiles.

Last year the Chiles family threatened to sue if lawmakers continued to use the trust fund dollars from general revenue, but the suit has been called off.

Governor Charlie Crist signed a bill today allowing him to negotiate a gambling compact with the Seminole Indian Tribe.

The legislation establishes parameters for the negotiations. Under the new rules, the state can only give the tribe to keep blackjack at its Broward and Hillsborough County casinos. The rules also keep the state from offering the tribe exclusive rights to new card games. The Tribe’s attorney Barry Richard said the rules will make it harder to reach an agreement.

“The Tribe is prepared to work with the governor and the legislature in an effort to accommodate some of the things that the legislature was looking for, maybe most of them. There are provisions in the bill that we believe need to be revisited because they do create some problems,” said Richard.

The federal government will have to approve any deal between the tribe and the state. Withholding exclusive rights to card games could be a deal breaker for the federal government.

Legislation to curb smoking is headed to President Barack Obama’s desk. Today the House passed a bill that would cut the amount of nicotine allowed in tobacco and require stronger warning labels on cigarette packages. As Whitney Ray tells us, the war on smoking isn’t just being fought in Congress, soon Florida will raise it’s tobacco tax.

With the stroke of a pen Governor Charlie Crist approved a dollar tax increase on every pack of cigarettes sold in Florida.

“Ronald Reagan used to say if you want to kill something tax it. Well maybe it wouldn’t be bad if we killed smoking,” said Governor Charlie Crist after signing the state budget last month.

The increase will go into effect in July, but smokers are already feeling the pressure.

“I believe they are just trying to make everyone quit smoking,” said Chastity Dixon.

“I don’t want to feel like I’m being forced to quit, but at the same time I can’t afford to keep smoking,” said Derek Young, who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day.

The increase comes just months after the federal tobacco tax was raised 61 cents. Now a second wave of anti-smoking legislation is heading to the Presidents desk.

This week Congress voted for stronger warning labels on cigarette packages. They also want to limit the amount of nicotine in a cigarette. The American Lung Association says cutting the nicotine will help people quit.

“If you can get the addictive product out of tobacco hopefully people will have an easier time quitting,” said Brenda Olsen, a spokeswoman for the American Lung Association of Florida.

Still many don’t want to quit.

“Is it good for your health? No, but at the same time you should be able to do what you want,” said Smoker Robert Dixon.

But if doing what you want is smoke, Congress and the state have a target on your back. The cigarette tax increase will generate an estimated one billion dollars for the state.

A push to change the way Florida’s voting districts are drawn is underway.

The group Fair Districts Florida says the state’s boundaries have been gerrymandered. Gerrymandering is when the party in power divides up voting districts based on demographics to help their candidates win elections. ACLU Spokesman Larry Spaulding said if the districts were divided evenly in Florida, there would be a power shift in the state legislature.

“In Florida it’s likely that the Democrats would be more competitive because the Republicans wouldn’t be able to pick and choose all of the seats. The idea is if you have competitive races, that people get elected because of their ideas, not because they save a seat that has been guaranteed to them by their respective legislature,” said Spaulding.

Fair Districts Florida is gathering signatures to put two constitutional amendments on the 2010 ballot. The amendments would prohibit using political or racial statistics to draw legislative and congressional districts.

The 2010 election is still 18 months away, but polls are picking leaders and candidates are already disputing the results. A recent poll gave gubernatorial hopeful Alex Sink a four point lead over her Republican rival Bill McCollum, but as Whitney Ray tells us, the state Republican Party says those results are flawed and points to other polls that show their candidate ahead.

The 2010 gubernatorial election is still 18 months away but the fight over who’s on top has already begun. A Quinnipiac Poll gave gubernatorial hopeful Alex Sink a four point lead over her Republican rival. Her rival questioned the results.

“This is the only one that showed me behind. I think I’ll take the one that showed me ahead nine,” said Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Quinnipiac defends its poll, attributing Sink’s lead to a Republican backlash.

“The GOP brand is down and that’s obviously affected McCollum in the horse-race,” said Pollster Peter Brown.

But the state Republican Party insists Quinnipiac polled an unfair number of Democrats.

“The margin of Democrats to Republicans he used in that particular poll was twice what the actually registration margin is,” said RPOF Spokeswoman Katie Gordon.

The poll shows Governor Charlie Crist with a huge lead in the US Senate Race but a surge in voter registration is giving Democrats an edge.”

“We think it is a very, very good sign for us,” said Lenard Joseph a spokesman for the Florida Democrats.

Crist isn’t concerned with rising number of registered Democrats, or the latest poll.

“The poll that matters is the one on Election Day,” said Crist.

And with many voters still undecided pollsters will continue to conduct surveys and the results will likely fluctuate. Twenty-eight percent of the people Quinnipiac polled say they still haven’t decided who they will vote for in the governor’s race.

A registered sex offender is asking the state clemency board for a pardon.

The board met today to review the cases of 80 former felons. The board restored the civil rights of several felons. Virgil McCranie was charged with a sex crime for sleeping with his 14 year old girlfriend when he was 19. The two later married but the conviction still remains. McCranie begged the board for a pardon.

“I just want a chance to be a regular person again. I mean, I’m not a monster. I’m just a regular person. I made a mistake when I was younger. Me and my wife were a few years age difference. I was modeling and my dad and her dad grew up together and he asked if I could get her into the modeling and we just built a relationship from there and 10 years later we are still married with four children and I’m still paying,” said McCranie.

The board is taking the case under advisement and could make a decision on McCranie’s case at the next clemency board meeting.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is 25 this year. The agency has saved thousands of children and equipped police to fight crimes against children. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, the national center actually began a year earlier here in Florida.

In 1983, John Walsh and wife Reeba watched then Governor Bob Graham sign legislation creating the nation’s first missing children’s agency. Housed in this nondescript office, a year later, it became the nation’s first Center for missing children. John Walsh has been hunting bad guys ever since.

“The center still is battling. It deals with missing and exploited children of many, many things the national center has to do,” Walsh said. “But it all started here in Florida.”

25 years later, there still plenty for the National Center to do. At 11am, more than 200 people were sharing child porn at this one internet site. The files had names like underage child daughter or daughter and dad. Many more were far too graphic to mention. While we were watching, so was the Department of Law Enforcement.

“We’re thinking, with over a hundred videos that this person is collecting, [they’re] very likely to molest a child,” Special Agent Mike Phillips said.

It is monitoring sites like this one that led to the arrest of 77 people. Once seized, copies of their computer hard drives are sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which helps identify victims. For Agent Mike Duffey, the job is both overwhelming and rewarding.

“You have that ability to stop that victimization and save that child,” Duffey said. “It really brings the good to the work that you do.”

FDLE estimates that at any given time, thousands of people are online sharing child porn.

Because there are so many people sharing child porn, the Department of Law  Enforcement is concentrating on the worst offenders who are collecting or sharing the most files.

11,000 Floridians now have access to Medigap coverage because of legislation Governor Charlie Crist signed Monday day.

This legislation will allow special patients of kidney failure under the age of 65 to receive medical treatment without the burden first having to sell their assets in order to be eligible for financial assistance. Insurance Companies had hoped for a veto because it increased costs.

“The concern I have over and above that is the cost of not doing this,” Crist said. “The cost in terms of lives. The cost in terms of quality of life to our fellow man. And it’s more important to be more focused on that than it is on some bottom line somewhere. We’ve gotta care about people first, always. And, uh, that’s the Florida way.”

Crist was joined by Alonzo Mourning who was the recipient of a kidney transplant. This former Miami Heat basketball player has been an advocate for this legislation and the voice for many kidney patients.

” Little did I know I was- just through that pain and suffering that I had to go through that I’ve been able to touch so many lives in the process,” Mourning said. “I feel like I have touched more lives off the court than I have on the court.”

Mourning has raised over $2 million for kidney disease research, education and relief for patients who could not afford treatment.

A congressional plan to drill for oil 10 miles off the coast of Florida would leave the state with some of the risk but none of the profits. Other states along the Gulf of Mexico would receive millions if Congress allows oil companies to drill closer to shore. As Whitney Ray tells us, Florida could net billions by lifting a ban on drilling in state waters, but environmentalists say the profits wouldn’t cover the cost of a spill.

There are hundreds of oil platforms in the Atlantic Ocean. A federal ban keeps them far from Florida’s coast but Congress may allow drilling just 10 miles from shore. Oil companies say there is plenty for which to drill.

“We know its out in the Gulf of Mexico, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and we can get to that with a very small footprint,” said Eric Hamilton with the Florida Petroleum Council.

But Governor Charlie Crist supports drilling that is far enough from the coast but 10 miles may be too far because it’s not close enough to bring Florida any money.

“I would have to review it more closely to be honest with you Whitney. I think it’s such an important issue that all the aspects of it particularly if it would mean any revenue to Florida to, I understand that it may not. That would be a deal breaker,” said Crist.

To make money off the deal, Florida would have to allow drilling in state waters.
The deal could generate 1.5 billion dollars a year for the state. But even if drilling brought billions of dollars into the state environmentalists say the profits would be lost if there was an oil spill.

“We’ve got this beautiful economy that every other state would envy, why would we put that at risk for a little bit of oil that’s not even going to bring that much money into the state of Florida,” said Eric Draper, a Spokesman with Audubon of Florida.

It’s a question that Congress and voters may have to answer. A push to put the issue on the 2010 ballot is underway. Oil companies say drilling technology is cleaner and safer than ever before. They also say drilling today would require fewer oil rigs and platforms.

Governor Charlie Crist surprised state agency heads Wednesday when he spontaneously appointed a new director to the Agency of Workforce Innovation.

Cynthia Lorenzo was serving as AWI’s interim director and participating in a meeting about how the state was spending economic stimulus dollars. When she finished her presentation Crist promoted her.

“You’re interim? Why is that? I don’t think about interim anymore. Is that alright with you,” Crist asked.

Lorenzo accepted. She later told reporters the appointment caught her by surprise.

“I have been interim director since February. So, I have absolutely been working very, very hard since day one. I served as deputy director for two years. But, yes, this was very much a surprise for me,” said Lorenzo.

The Agency for Workforce Innovation oversees the payment of unemployment claims, collects labor statistics, and helps out-of-work Floridians find jobs.

Governor Charlie Crist is the early favorite to win the Republican nomination for US Senate.

According to a Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday, Crist has a huge lead over former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio. Crist’s up 54 to 23 percent. Pollster Peter Brown said Rubio can still win, but he’s got his work cut out for him.

“Mr. Rubio would have to get every undecided voter and change the mind of a significant number of people who say they are for Governor Crist. Anything could happen in politics. Obviously Governor Crist is in a high profile job. If he were to do something that was very unpopular that could hurt his approval rating,” said Brown.

Less than 20 percent of people polled knew enough about the Democratic candidates for Senate to form an opinion.

New software for tracking the distribution of pornography has led to 77 people being charged with possessing child porn or sexual battery. The statewide sweep took place over the last ten weeks, and as Mike Vasilinda tells us officers also seized a “how to” be a pedophile power point.

Two registered sex offenders were among the 77 arrested from one end of the state to the other. The arrests were part of a ten week operation announced by the Governor, the Attorney General, the Department of Law Enforcement, and TV host John Walsh.

“Most of those children that were involved in these cases, whether they were molested or were in the videos, were under 12 years old,” Walsh said. “One of the children was one year old.”

Five children were rescued.

“There was ample evidence when we served the search warrants that they had been victimized,” FDLE commissioner Gerald Baily said.

Included in materials seized at 17 locations was a “how to” power point presentation too graphic to show you in detail. The arrests were made using new software to track its distribution.

They come from all walks of life. There’s even a father-son duo here. This guy was running an ROTC program; while this guy was molesting two daughters.

45 of the arrests were made in Polk County.

“We’re going to do whatever we can to put them in jail every time we get a chance,” Richard Sloan with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said. “And we cooperate well with all the other agencies.”

The governor says the arrests are a message for those who would prey on children.

“They ought to think twice because, in Florida, we’re going to catch you,” Crist said.

More than 90 search warrants were served in conjunction with Operation Orange Tree. Several arrest warrants are still outstanding.

A total of 22 law enforcement agencies participated in the sweep.