Pension reform plan put on hold

TALLAHASSEE --
House Speaker Will Weatherford’s push to close the state’s $136 billion pension system to new state employees is on hold.

A report released Friday was supposed to provide an estimate of how much the change would cost to pay out benefits to the employees currently in the system while switching new state employees into 401(k)-style retirement plans.

Instead, the report was deemed incomplete. Weatherford said Monday he wants the missing information before he can decide his next move, and that won’t be until at least March 1.

Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, has made ending pensions for new employees one his top priorities of the coming legislative session. He says change is needed because the state’s current pension — which has about 145,000 current and future beneficiaries — is unsustainable and will require a mammoth taxpayer bailout sometime in the future.

Unions oppose the move because they say it shifts costs and risks to workers.

A report released Friday by Milliman, a Virginia actuarial firm, concluded that closing the state’s pension system to future employees would endanger the benefits of those currently enrolled in the pension plan. The problem: Because Weatherford’s proposal would turn away new workers, the pension plan would be forced to rely on a shrinking payroll base on which contributions to retirees are made.

To make up the shortfall, either workers or taxpayers would chip in more, the report stated.

Weatherford said he wasn’t surprised that the $70,000 report, which he had ordered, concluded it would cost more money to reform Florida’s retirement system.

“We know that doesn’t come free,” Weatherford said.

But what the report didn’t include were costs associated with keeping the pension plan intact, making it difficult to compare costs between reform and status quo.

Weatherford said he didn’t know why that estimate wasn’t included.

“We do need, I believe, to have that baseline so that we can give the citizens of Florida and the Legislature all the information necessary to make a decision,” Weatherford said.

Ben Wolf, a spokesman for Florida’s Department of Management Services, said as soon as the report was received, state officials notified Milliman that the study was incomplete. He said another study, this one costing $25,000, will be sent to the state explaining how much the current pension system will cost.

So far, at least, Senate President Don Gaetz hasn’t publicly matched Weatherford’s enthusiasm in reforming the retirement system for state workers, teachers and college and local government employees.

The Senate is preoccupied instead with reforming smaller pension systems that are run separately by local governments. Sen. Jeremy Ring, D-Margate, who chairs the Senate committee that is handling pension reform, said he doesn’t see a pressing need to reform the state pension plan.

“With municipal pensions, there’s a legitimate need for reform,” Ring said. “But the Florida Retirement System is a completely different discussion because it’s difficult to define the urgency. I don’t believe moving to a 401(k) system is a bad thing. The challenge, however, and it’s a big however, is that it could be a bad thing in terms of how much it could cost to close down.”

Ring said he’s received little guidance from Gaetz on the issue.

“And that’s because he wants to wait for all actuarial reports to come out,” Ring said. “Ultimately, he’ll have to get engaged and give us some direction.”

But with the confusion over the Milliman report, that would have to wait.

Gaetz’s spokeswoman, Katie Betta, said in an e-mail he was reviewing the study and couldn’t comment.

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Newtown massacre gunman wanted to exceed Norway shooter's death toll

The gunman who carried out the Newtown school massacre was inspired by violent video games — and was trying to outdo a Norwegian mass murderer who killed 77 people, it was reported today.

Adam Lanza believed he was in ghoulish competition with Anders Breivik, who carried out a bloodbath at two locations in July 2011, law enforcement sources told CBS News.

Breivik, a paranoid ultra nationalist, fatally shot 69 people at a summer camp after murdering eight others in downtown Oslo.

Lanza wanted to exceed Breivik’s death toll, according to investigators.

He chose the Sandy Hook (Conn.) Elementary School because it was the “easiest target” with the “largest cluster of people,” two officials who have been briefed about the investigation said.

Lanza saw his victims as characters in a shooting video game and the higher the death toll, the better his “score.”

Investigators said they had found evidence that Lanza was obsessed with Breivik, who posted a bizarre extremists manifesto the day of his attacks.

Sources told CBS that investigators have also uncovered a “trove” of video games from Lanza’s basement.

He is believed to have spent much of his free time in a basement play room, with the windows blacked out, engaged in a kind of target practice on video games.

It was not disclosed which games he played. But Breivik boasted that he trained for his rampage by playing a war-simulation game named “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.”

He said he developed “target acquisition” by practised his aim using a “holographic aiming device” on the game, which he believed was being used to train combat soldiers.

Norwegian prosecutors also said Breivik played “World of Warcraft” an astounding average of six hours and 50 minutes a day for four months while he was preparing his attacks.

The fate of the two mass murderers turned out differently.

Lanza, 20, killed himself after slaying 20 children and six adults before police closed in.

But Breivik surrendered to police and is being held in a Norwegian jail on a 21-year sentence, the longest allowed in his country.

In his manifesto and afterward Breivik said he was inspired by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages, al Qaeda, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, and Japanese “banzai” warriors.

He said he was motivated by fear of an Islamic takeover of Europe, a decline in Western values and the growth of Europe’s left-leaning political parties.

No manifesto or written explanation from Lanza of his rampage has been found.

Before his fatal spree he destroyed the hard drive on his computer, which may have kept some of the records of the games he played and who he played with.

But investigators are believed to be making progress in tracing Lanza’s on-line life.

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Open English expands across Latin America

Back in 2008, Open English, a company run from Miami that uses online courses to teach English in Latin America, had just a handful of students in Venezuela and three employees. Today the company has more than 50,000 students in 22 Latin American countries and some 2,000 employees.

To fund this meteoric expansion, the founders of Open English — Venezuelans Andrés Moreno and Wilmer Sarmiento and Moreno’s American wife, Nicolette — began with $700. Over the last six years, the partners have raised more than $55 million, mostly from private investment and venture capital firms.

Their formula for success? The founders rejected traditional English teaching methods in physical classrooms and developed a system that allows students to tune into live classes every hour of the day from their computers at home, in the office or at school, and learn from native English-speaking teachers who may be based anywhere. Courses stress practical conversations online and the company guarantees fluency after a one-year course, offering six additional months free if students fail to become fluent.

“We wanted to change the way people learn English,” said Andrés Moreno, the 30-year-old co-founder and CEO, who halted his training as a mechanical engineer and worked full-time at developing the company with his partners. “And we want students to achieve fluency. Traditionally, students have to drive to an English academy, waste time in traffic, and try to learn from a teacher who is not an native English speaker in a class with 20 students.”

Using the Internet, Open English offers classes usually with two or three students and a teacher, interactive videos, other learning aids and personal attention from coaches who phone students regularly to see how they are progressing.

Courses cost an average of $750 per year and students can opt for monthly payments. This is about one-fifth to one-third of what traditional schools charge for small classes or individual instructors, Andrés noted.

“We work at building confidence with our students and encourage them to practice speaking English as much as possible during classes,” said Nicolette Moreno, co-founder and chief product officer, who met Andrés in Venezuela while she was working there on a service project. “Students are taught to actively participate in conversations like a job interview, traveling and talking on a conference call,” said Nicolette, who previously lived in Los Angles, worked with non-profits to create environmentally friendly products and fight poverty in emerging markets, and was head equity trader at an asset management firm. “Students need to speak English in our classes, even though it is sometimes difficult. They learn through immersion.”

Open English has successfully tapped into an enormous, underserved market. Millions of people in Latin America want to learn English to advance in their jobs, work at multinational companies, travel or work overseas and understand the popular music, movies and TV shows they constantly hear in English. Many of them take English courses at public and private schools and learn little if any useful conversational English. While students at private schools for the upper middle class and wealthy often learn foreign languages extremely well from native English-speaking teachers, most people can’t afford these schools or courses designed for one or two students.

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Key West Lotto ticket wins $17 million jackpot

A Lotto ticket sold in Key West was the only one to match all six numbers in Saturday night’s drawing, and is worth $17 million, the Florida Lottery said Sunday.

Saturday’s numbers were 8, 21, 26, 27, 30 and 40. The winning ticket was sold at the Publix supermarket at 3316 N. Roosevelt Blvd. The jackpot for the next drawing, on Wednesday, will ratchet back down to $2 million.

In the multistate Powerball game, no one matched all six numbers: 15, 16, 46, 50, 58 and the Powerball, 29. The jackpot for Wednesday’s drawing will grow to $70 million.

Three Fantasy 5 tickets matched the five numbers drawn Saturday night: 11, 26, 33, 34 and 46. They were sold in Jupiter, Riverview and Altamonte Springs. Each of the winners will receive $94,037.57.

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A Good Day to Die Hard Bruce Willis Takes Over Box Office

Audiences agreed that it was a good weekend to die hard, as the fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise opened strong.

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A Good Day to Die Hard is expected to pull in $28.2 million over the four-day holiday, beating out last weekend's winner, Identity Thief ($27.6 million), and Safe Haven ($25.4 million.

This weekend is on pace to be the biggest international opening in the history of the 25-year-old Die Hard franchise, as it held the top box office spot in many of the 63 markets where it's been released.

Escape from Planet Earth had a harder time getting off the ground, garnering $20.5 million. Warm Bodies dropped to fifth place with $10.9 million.

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7 hurt when cab crashes into food cart crowd

Seven people were injured on West 34 Street and Eleventh Avenue when a cabbie plowed into a vehicle, jumped a curb and hit a small crowd of people near a food cart on the sidewalk, cops and witnesses said.

A witness said the cabby was stopped behind another vehicle in the eastbound lane at a light on 34th Street at around 5 p.m. when he suddenly “took off," Hanna Ramzey,25, a vendor, said.

"The cab first hit the car then the vendors, three customers and people on the corner,” he said.

"He [one vendor named Maged] was injured in his head and leg. And had blood from his nose. One man, his leg was twisted the wrong way. One woman was bleeding from the back of her head,” Ramzey added.

All the victims were taken to Bellevue Hospital with minor injuries, cops said.

Police sources said the yellow-cab driver is in police custody and charges were pending.

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Small business lending rebounds in South Florida

For years, Pablo Oliveira dreamed of buying a property to house his high-end linen and furniture rental company, Nuage Designs, which has created settings for such glamorous events as the weddings of Carrie Underwood and Chelsea Clinton.

A few months ago, that dream came true, when Oliveira purchased a warehouse across the street from his current Miami location. He is now renovating the loft-like space with the help of a $2.1 million, 25-year small business loan.

“It allows me to own my own space as opposed to renting, and that will decrease my costs for infrastructure and allow me to build equity with time,” said Oliveira, who secured a U.S. Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan from Wells Fargo.

For small businesses like Oliveira’s, a loan can be the critical key to growing a business, as well as the kindling to ignite an operation.

Take Harold Scott’s fledgling Great Scott Security, which manufactures window guards in Hollywood that can open quickly in case of need.

When he was 13, Scott’s stepfather perished in a Georgia house fire because he couldn’t escape through heavy window bars. Scott made it his mission to fix the problem.

“I promised myself I would dedicate all my time to working on a solution,” said Scott, 60.

Now retired from a 23-year career in the U.S. Justice Department, Scott recently secured a $7,500 microloan from Partners for Self Employment. He used it to buy a computer and pay for marketing and other business expenses for his quick-release window guards, which have met national, state and Miami-Dade County fire safety codes.

During the depths of the recession, business owners often griped that gaining access to capital was their biggest hurdle. Saddled with bad loans, many banks were wary of making new ones. At the same time, both the value of collateral and the creditworthiness of many borrowers tumbled.

Now, at last, banks are starting to open their pocketbooks again, experts say, though lending is still not on par with pre-recession levels.

“There is no question that small business borrowing declined as a result of the recession and has yet to recover to pre-crisis levels,” said Richard Brown, chief economist for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., via email. “According to the Federal Reserve, total loans to noncorporate businesses and farms stood at just under $3.8 trillion in September, which remains below the peak of about $4.1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

Signs of Growth

In South Florida, more businesses are applying for loans and getting approvals from banks, according to lenders, officials at government agencies and leaders of organizations that help small business owners secure loans.

“Lenders are expressing a greater interest than they have in the past few years in terms of meeting the needs of the small business community,” said Marjorie Weber, Miami-Dade Chapter Chair of SCORE, which helps business owners put loan packages together and refers them to bankers.

Loan figures are indeed rising. During the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2012, SBA-guaranteed loans were up in both Miami-Dade and Broward counties, according to the SBA. In fiscal 2012, 449 loans were approved in Miami-Dade, totaling $213.3 million, up from 426 loans for $154.4 million in 2011. In Broward, 262 loans for $91.4 million were approved in fiscal 2012, compared to 257 loans for $102.4 million in 2011.

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Parents decry closing of two Broward schools for special-needs kids

If you ask parents why they value Broward’s Wingate Oaks Educational Center — and why they’re so furious about its imminent closure — the answer often boils down to trust.

The school for medically fragile children is a place where students might need help going to the restroom, and parents trust the teachers and staff to respect their child’s dignity. David Martinez’s 7-year-old daughter, Anabelle, must eat lunch through a feeding tube, and it took time for Martinez to let Wingate Oaks’ nursing staff handle that delicate procedure.

“It’s not right, it’s not right,” Martinez says about the school’s closing. “On the backs of our children, they want to save money.”

Broward’s school district has defended its plan to close Wingate Oaks, along with another special-needs school, Sunset Learning Center. Both Fort Lauderdale schools are set to shut down at the end of the school year. The district calls it a move toward operational efficiency, as both centers are at well under 50 percent capacity — combined, they serve fewer than 200 students. The district says that students who are relocated to the county’s remaining four centers that focus on kids with special needs will benefit from expanded programming. Any savings realized from the closures will be reinvested in the classroom, Superintendent Robert Runcie said.

“I recognize that people don’t like change, but they also need to have an open mind about this,” Runcie said. “This is going to provide better outcomes for their students.”

Parents at the schools remain angry — one group in a growing chorus of special-needs families who are upset with the school district.

In recent weeks, a whole other group of infuriated parents (unaffected by the two school closures) have trekked down to Broward School Board meetings to criticize the system as flawed. They accuse district staff of having a combative attitude with parents, forcing parents to go to court for reasonable requests, and pushing disabled students off the academic path to a traditional diploma.

Parents’ verbal exchanges with School Board members have at times turned nasty — one parent recently turned her back on board members while she spoke to them to symbolize how the district had turned its back on her daughter.

Unhappy parents have formed a special-needs task force to plot strategy. There’s been talk of filing a class-action lawsuit.

“People react when they’re not heard,” said Broward parent Rhonda Ward, who is part of that task force.

Ideally, decisions regarding special-needs children — how difficult their courses should be and what support services and therapies they should receive — are made by a cooperative team that includes parents, teachers, school psychologists and other district staff. In many cases, everyone successfully works together to create an individualized education plan for a disabled child. A well-thought-out plan will allow the child to reach his or her full academic potential, while avoiding unrealistic expectations that doom the student to repeated failures and disappointment.

The problem is, parents and school staff may not agree on what goals are realistic, and those differences of opinion can easily end up in court. For example, a parent who is unhappy with the district’s evaluation of her child can request the hiring of an outside independent evaluator — at taxpayers’ expense. The district then has two options: Pay the outside expert, or take the matter to a state administrative judge in a “due process” hearing, and argue that an outside second opinion isn’t needed.

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Hugh Grant is a Dad Again

Hugh Grant confirmed Saturday that he is a dad again.

PICS: Celebs and Their Cute Kids

The 52-year-old British actor tweeted, "In answer to some journos. Am thrilled my daughter now has a brother. Adore them both to an uncool degree. They have a fab mum."

Hugh and actress Tinglan Hong welcomed a daughter named Tabitha in 2011. No word yet on what Tabitha's little brother is named.

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Hugh told The Guardian in 2012 of being a dad, "I like my daughter very much. Fantastic. Has she changed my life? I'm not sure. Not yet. Not massively, no. But I'm absolutely thrilled to have had her, I really am. And I feel a better person."

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Upstate fire department's squirrel hunt fundraiser draws ire

HOLLEY — A weekend squirrel-shooting contest in upstate New York is a sell-out, with all 1,000 tickets spoken for, organizers said, despite a push by animal rights groups and others to cancel the event.

The 7th annual "Hazzard County Squirrel Slam" will raise money for the volunteer Holley Fire Department, the event sponsor.

Prizes ranging from $50 to $200 will be given out Saturday for the largest squirrel shot and the heaviest group of five squirrels. Five rifles and shotguns are to be raffled off, according to a flier on the western New York fire department's website.

Critics have sought to stop the event through online petitions and protests, calling the event cruel and a bad example for children. The contest targeting red and gray squirrels is open to anyone over age 12 with a hunting license.

"Declaring someone a winner for killing the most animals influences children and the wider community to believe that wildlife is unimportant and killing for a monetary prize is meritorious," Brian Shapiro, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote in a letter to Holley Fire Chief Pete Hendrickson.

Supporters say hunting is just part of life upstate, including in the largely rural village of 1,800 people on the Erie Canal.

"This is a community of hunters and they're going to hunt anyways. Why not hold a fundraiser that will reach our community," the event's chairwoman, Tina Reed, told the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester. She said the event has grown each year: This year, 1,000 tickets were made available after it sold out of 200 tickets last year.

Participants must abide by New York's hunting regulations, hunting only where it is permitted and killing no more than six squirrels in a single day. Shooting will be followed by a weigh-in, then a dinner.

State Sen. Tony Avella, a Queens Democrat, called the contest insane during an Albany news conference with the group Friends of Animals earlier this week. The group planned to protest outside the Holley Fire House on Saturday afternoon.

Avella's upstate colleague, Sen. George Maziarz, a Democrat who represents Holley, defended the fundraiser, saying hunting, fishing and shooting sports are part of the region's lifestyle.

"It's like a fishing derby but it's squirrels, not fish," Maziarz spokesman Adam Tabelski said Friday.

Neither the fire department nor members of its board of directors returned telephone and email messages from The Associated Press.

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