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state department s canceling the policies of 125,000 homeowners in florida. the company started sending out cancellation notices this week. the cancellations will be effective august 1st. that s halfway through the 2010 hurricane season. state farm says it s the direct result of its failure to win a 47% rate increase from state regulators. state farm is florida s largest home insurer. and a school of sharks were seen swimming off the coast of palm beach, florida, just this morning. and it is just a day after a rare shark attack that left a man dead. look at this video coming in. a lifeguard says the victim was a kiteboard surfer who was near stuart, florida, when he was found surrounded by several sharks. the lifeguard was able to paddle out to the victim and pulled the man onto his board, but 38-year-old stephen schafer died later at the hospital of multiple shark bites. george burris is with the florida museum of natural
photographs there or not is conjectural at this point. but more than likely, it wasn t involving those species but rather a larger species of sharks. what do you make of the report from the lifeguard who tried to save stephen schafer, that there were sharks all around attacking this man and that he was able to pull him, even though there were sharks, multiple ones, after the victim here? that wasn t the report that he said. what the report was was that he observed sharks around the victim. he did not say multiple sharks were attacking the victim. there s a big distinction there. anytime there s a disturbance in the water, anytime there s blood in the water, sharks will be attracted. that doesn t mean more than a single individual was involved. all right. george, thank you very much for your time. we re going to be talking more about this attack and the sharks that are spotted around that area. thank you very much, george burgess, florida museum of natural history. we ve got som
history. he s also the director of the florida program for shark research. thank you for joining us, george, on the phone. thank you. glad to be with you. so, obviously, we are talking about the rarity of something like this happening. but we re still seeing these schools of sharks. why so many in this area this time of the year? well, this time of year the aggregations of sharks occur in southeast florida with regularity. in fact, we can basically set our calendar to it. they aggregate as the water temperatures begin to get warm from south to north. those sharks begin to disperse northward, eventually by summertime moving some of the species as far north as new england. so we normally see big aggregations of sharks here. there s not normally a huge upswing in activity relative to shark/human interactions associated with them, but, of course, in this particular case, we have had a fatal attack, whether it s involving the species that you see in your
the allegations they were trying to smuggle those children out of the country for illegal adoptions. and we want to also bring you up to date on this controversy over the r word. and specifically the way white house chief of staff rahm emanuel used the word, quote, retarded to describe liberal activists during a meeting on health care reform. well, the word got out about the way the word was used by emanuel. and advocates for the disabled were outraged. sarah palin, whose son high school down syndrome, called for emanuel to resign. emanuel met with shriver, the chairman of the special olympics, and apologized. we have more on what s happening here. and ken, you ve got people saying now has this turned into what is a heart issue for people with disabilities and their families? has it now turned to business as usual, something that s been politicized in the beltway with sarah palin and rahm emanuel? yeah, absolutely. i mean, this is clearly something that the republican