Helicopter crashes into Florida home, starting fire

(GNN) - A helicopter crashed into a home in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday, sparking a fire that sent smoke billowing over the area, emergency officials said.

Orlando fire officials said they could not confirm injuries to the pilot or whether there were any passengers, and it was unclear if anyone was inside the home at the time of the crash.

The helicopter went down around 2:15 p.m., igniting a ground fire that was contained within minutes by firefighters, fire officials said.

Wreckage of the helicopter littered the residential street not far from downtown, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

"It blew up, and part of the rotor landed in a neighbor's backyard and knocked down a fence, three houses away," Ben Brown told the newspaper.

Aerial photos showed large plumes of smoke streaming from the crash site.

(Reuters)(Reporting by Victoria Cavaliere; Editing by Frank McGurty, Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler)

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Obama joins millions in U.S. college basketball madness

(GNN) - March Madness gripped the White House and lots of other workplaces on Wednesday as President Barack Obama joined an estimated 60 million Americans scrambling to make their predictions for the annual tournament to crown a collegiate basketball champion.

Obama, appearing on the ESPN cable network to pick winners round by round, selected undefeated Kentucky to beat Villanova in the April 6 finals of the NCAA Tournament that begins in earnest on Thursday.

Despite being a self-proclaimed basketball junkie, history is not on Obama's side. He has correctly picked only one champion since he began making his tournament selections public in 2009.

"I think Kentucky is going to take it," Obama told a Cleveland audience later in the day. "But, you know, I haven’t won since my first year in office. ... So I wouldn’t necessarily take my bracket and copy it, although I suspect I’m not the only person picking Kentucky."

The commander-in-chief leads legions in slacking off for "March Madness."

"We live in an age of distractions. There are many things that our employers have to fight in the workplace today but there's nothing that compares to the unique event that is March Madness," said Andy Challenger, vice president of business development at global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

U.S. companies will lose an estimated $1.9 billion in wages to employees being unproductive during work hours, he said, between researching, filling out brackets, organizing pools and watching games.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed 23 percent of Americans will fill out at least one bracket and of those, nearly 40 percent will bet more than $10.

In terms of Las Vegas betting, the NCAA tournament rivals the NFL's Super Bowl, which attracted $116 million in wagers for the New England Patriots' victory over the Seattle Seahawks in February.

"Whoever coined the phrase 'March Madness' got it correct," said Jay Kornegay, vice president of race and sports operations at the Westgate Las Vegas (Nevada) SuperBook.

Kornegay said unlike the Super Bowl, which attracts men and women equally in Las Vegas, NCAA Tournament bettors are "99 percent guys, period."

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, selected the University of Virginia to win. He drew some criticism on social media, with skeptics noting that Virginia is a darkhorse but the school is located in a state Bush likely needs to reach the Oval Office like his brother and father.

(Reuters)(Editing by Mary Milliken and Will Dunham)

'Excessive' rubbing of engine blades caused F-35 failure: Pentagon

(GNN) - The engine failure that has grounded the entire fleet of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets was caused by "excessive" rubbing of fan blades in the plane's Pratt & Whitney engine, but does not appear to be a fundamental design flaw, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer said on Sunday.

Defense Undersecretary Frank Kendall told reporters on Sunday there was still a chance that the grounding order could be lifted in time for the F-35 to make its international debut at the Farnborough air show.

Organizers of the show confirmed that the F-35 would not appear on Monday, but said it could still arrive and fly later in the week.

The United States' newest combat jet had already been pulled out of a British military show last week, after the entire fleet was grounded following a massive engine failure on a U.S. Air Force F-35 at a Florida air force base on June 23.

Kendall said the grounding had halted testing but he did not view the incident as a "fundamental setback" for the $400 billion program, the Pentagon's biggest, which still has about 40 percent of developmental testing to complete.

He said the engine had suffered two issues involving fan blades in the past few years, but they appeared unrelated and not systemic to the airplane.

"None of those things that have happened, including this recent one as far as I know, suggests that we have a fundamentally flawed design," Kendall said.

He said detailed inspections of engines on the fleet of 97 F-35s already built had not shown signs of the kind of excessive rubbing founded on the engine that broke apart, although there were signs of milder rubbing in several other engines.

Kendall said the evidence being compiled did not point to a systemic issue, but the analysis was still going on. In this case, engineers found evidence of significant rubbing by the fan blades against a cowl.

"We’re not noticing it throughout the fleet," he said. "The design allows for a limited degree of rubbing, but it was enough in this case to cause a structural reaction that ultimately led to failure."

Bennett Croswell, president of Pratt & Whitney's military engine business, declined comment on any details about the engine failure and what caused it.

Marillyn Hewson, chief executive of Lockheed Martin, said it was disappointing that the jet had not flown in Britain thus far, but the company stood ready to support the jet if flights were allowed to resume.

She said military officials from other countries were supportive of the process now under way.

"People who understand the nature of development take this in stride as normal discoveries in development," Hewson said.

(Reuters - AIP)(Additional reporting by Mark Potter; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Amateur explorers claim to find lost Army fort in Florida Everglades

(GNN) - A team of amateur explorers say they found the site of a lost U.S. Army fort buried deep in the Everglades that once served as a restocking post for troops during a series of guerilla-like battles with Seminole Indians.

Nestled into the dense, waterlogged swamps 60 miles (100 km)from the coast, Fort Harrell, built in 1837, was one of nearly a dozen forts across Florida used in the early and mid-19th century.

“It was a critical fort during that period of time, which was the costliest war that the U.S. had been involved in, Indian-wise,” said Shawn Beightol, a Miami public school chemistry teacher who learned of it in a book more than a decade ago.

Beightol, a longtime Everglades explorer who has kayaked across the wetland, found a trio of maps from the 1850s and began talking to local park rangers and fisherman in hopes of finding the 170-year-old site.

This spring Beightol and a group of explorers that included Tony Pernas of the National Park Service and Chris Harris, a computer engineer, began overlaying old maps with global positioning satellite coordinates.

Throughout the spring and summer they, along with others, launched five trips into the Everglades, spending more than 100 hours searching sites that seemed to match descriptions of the fort’s location.

On July 26 the trio set out looking for one site on a 1940’s aerial map and found post holes in the damp ground and limestone that may have supported a wall, Beightol said. About 100 yards (91 meters) away buried in the mud they found a weathered 20-foot (6-meter) Cypress log carved into a long beam.

“We couldn’t prove what it is, but it’s clearly something very old,” he added.

They took the find to the National Park Service and Robert Carr, a south Florida archaeologist who has excavated and studied 2,000-year-old Tequesta Indian sites found in the heart of downtown Miami.

“We have to begin the scientific examination of the site to see whether the post holes were man-made, and whether there are any artifacts,” Carr said.

If it is authentic, Beightol said he would like to see the site memorialized and linked to kayak and bike routes connected to the two-lane highway that runs out of Miami and across the wetland.

“I want the public to be aware of what they have. It’s right within reach,” he said.

(Reuters - AIP)(Editing by David Adams and Lisa Shumaker)

Florida may soon overtake New York as third most-populous state

Florida is less than 100,000 newcomers away from surpassing New York as the third most populous state in the nation, a milestone demographers say could be reached as early as 2014, according to newly released data.

The U.S. Census bureau on Monday released its state-by-state population estimates for 2013 as of July 1. The population of New York - 19,651,127 - exceeded Florida's 19,552,860 total residents by only 98,267, according to the data.

"The actual ranking is of little consequence. What's more important are the underlying trends, namely that Florida has been growing substantially faster than New York for many decades," said Stanley Smith, program director for the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

The total U.S. population as of 2013 was estimated at 316,128,839, an increase of more than 7 million people since the 2010 census.

The 2013 population of California, the nation's largest state, was estimated at 38,332,521. Texas, the No. 2 state by population, was at 26,448,193.

Florida has New York to thank in part for its growth, as New Yorkers account for the state's single largest group of new residents from within the United States, Smith said.

And despite conventional wisdom, Smith said adults in the prime of their careers, not retirees, are driving most of Florida's population growth. Many of the new residents come for jobs, and not only those in the state's low-skilled, low-paying tourism and service sectors.

"Medical services, biotechnology, financial services, these are higher paying jobs and those have also been growing in Florida," Smith said.

In terms of percentage growth, Florida has ranked as one of the fastest growing states in the nation for more than 100 years, Smith said. In raw numbers, Florida achieved its current No. 4 ranking in the 1980s when Smith said it leaped from 7th place over several Midwestern states, he said.

The percentage of retirement-aged residents has remained stable in Florida for the past two decades at about 17 percent of the population, but Smith projects that cohort will grow to more than 21 percent by 2020 as more baby boomers move south.

Foreign immigrants, particularly Hispanics who now account for about 22 percent of Florida's population, are becoming an increasingly important factor in state's growth, he said.

Once in the state's borders, Smith said the largest number of newcomers head for the most populous counties, such as Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough and Orange counties. But smaller rural counties are experiencing the highest growth rates.

Sumter County, one hour west of Orlando and home to the sprawling retirement community called The Villages, has been Florida's fastest growing county since 2000, Smith said.(GNN)(Reuters)(GNN INT)

(Reporting by Barbara Liston. Editing by Jane Sutton and Andre Grenon)