It’s the biggest company you’ve probably never heard of, and today, according to Governor Bobby Jindal, CenturyLink is hiring. Up until this year, CenturyLink was CenturyTel, a company of about 6,000 employees based in a sleepy corner of Northeast Louisiana. Last year, CenturyTel announced they were buying Kansas-based Embarq., a company three times the size of CenturyTel. The new combined company has 20,000 employees/workers. CenturyLink is now the fourth largest communications company in the country. Not bad for a little telephone company that started in someone’s living room back in the ’30s.

Governor Bobby Jindal announced today that CenturyLink has agreed to stay in Monroe through 2019 and will add 350 jobs. The announcement couldn’t come at a better time for the region. Unemployment in the region hovers around 10%, well above the state average. and traditionally, this has been one of the poorest parts of the country. Almost everyone I talked with today mentioned how devastating it would have been if CenturyLink were to have relocated. It’ll be interesting to see how the company grows from here. Walk around CenturyLink headquarters and it feels more like a family business than a future Fortune 500 company. Employees greet each other like they’re at church and call out to one another by first name. They all turned out for the governor’s announcement in the atrium and then celebrated with a lunch of turkey and all the fixings. It may be just a tiny blip of good news in a sea of bad economy stories, but it’s happening in a place where they can really use it.

By FNC Reporter Orlando Salinas

A couple of weeks back i burned off a day at Cleveland elementary school in Tampa Florida…

I was there to learn about something called the “renaissance program”… The idea is to pay “the best teachers” bonuses of 5 to 10% to teach students at some of Hillsborough counties poorest and worst performing schools.

I watched these kids … Watched their teachers … Listened to the principal talk up the program and  I gotta tell you — I liked what I heard and liked what I saw.

A patient teacher and kids who reminded me — of me! The 5th grade boys were full of wiggling energy — and the girls were paying more attention — don’t they always?!

I remember having a really hard time in elementary school… Math had always been my arch enemy– and I had a math teacher who Told me that I was nothing “but a stupid little boy”.

That stuck with me — and the other week as I sat there in Mrs. Emily Fagan’s classroom at Cleveland Elementary …  I found myself thinking ‘how wonderful it would have been to have had someone teaching me like Mrs. Fagan. A teacher who it seemed — loved teaching!

The kids there at Cleveland may not come from wealthy families, but their families love them enough to push for this “renaissance program”. And the teachers who are part of it, I don’t think they do it for the money, I think they do it cause they want their kids to have a fair shot at a better future.

And that starts by growing a thriving “mental garden” — a renaissance if u will

By FNC Reporter Steve Brown

It isn’t often I’m required to shower … twice … to get an interview.

Last week … we traveled to Country View Family Farms in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania. It is a large pig-breeding operation. It is also the latest target of Mercy for Animals.

The animal welfare group (which openly urges the public to switch to a vegan diet) got one of its ‘investigators’ hired at the farm earlier this year. The investigator was only identified as “he” … and Mercy for Animals says this man was employed at the farm for three months.

What the ‘investigator’ got … was video of some unsavory practices at the farm:

- piglets picked-up by their ears and tossed

- shots of piglets castrated and tails removed without anesthesia (there are none with FDA approval)

- piglets stampeded into a narrow corridor

- adult pigs being repeatedly tattooed by workers using sticks with metal prongs dipped in ink

- vaccination of piglets (including one where the animal had a mask drawn on it with a marker intended to show which piglets had been vaccinated)

- pregnant sows in gestation ‘crates’…which while providing opportunities to monitor feed and care gives the animal little room to move

- the euthanizing of an adult pig with a bolt-gun which required repeated ‘shots’ to finish the job

- piglets still alive after being placed in bins charged with CO to euthanize those which were too small or injured

When producer Marla Cichowski contacted Country View and told them about the video and asked for an interview to explain … they had one request. They wanted me to tour the farm. Because of bio-security measures (to make sure I didn’t transport any disease in or out) I had to do what every employee there does daily.  I was required to shower before going into the facility … and shower coming back out.

During the tour in company coveralls, bump-cap, socks,  underwear and boots … I saw none of the objectionable things in the video.  (Exception, the gestation crates where pregnant sows are held and monitored. I had discovered before arrival they ARE standard in pig breeding farms). The veterinarian, Dr. Jessica Clark answered all my questions about how and why things were done at the pig-breeding facility.

I learned quite a bit unfortunately, Country View would not allow us to bring in a camera so we could show how the place operated. After the one-hour tour of some 2,500 sows and many more piglets, I returned to the showers got back into my civilian clothes and got on with the interview.

By FNC Reporter David Lee Miller

If you are reading this online you know at least something about the Internet. Chances are however, you don’t know the Internet is running out of addresses.

I don’t mean domain names like Fox News.Com Internet address are the numerical designations assigned to each Web site. They operate invisibly behind-the-scenes. After all, computers don’t understand English. They speak numbers.

The address shortage could end Internet expansion. No new Web sites for schools, businesses and the government. Forget the hope of one day connecting your toaster oven to the Net.

When the current system called IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) was created decades ago no one could imagine the explosive growth of the Internet. In addition to computers, nowadays phones, cars, and even household appliances are connected to the web or soon will be.

The computer scientist nicknamed the father of the Internet, Vint Cerf,  said when he helped create the current address system decades ago, he never imagined it’s 4.3 billion addresses would not be sufficient.   If someone made the suggestion a larger system was needed, Cerf said he would have thought they were “out of their gourd.”

Cerf is now advocating a new address system called IPv6. According to the experts who administer the Internet the number of potential address is a number so large it is hard to fathom. To put the expansion in perspective, if the current system is a golf ball, the experts say, the new one is almost the size of the sun.

As Cerf might explain, in order to imagine a number this big, it helps to be out of your gourd.

If you’ve been curious about whether the world comes to an end in 2012, or wondering if now is the time to seriously get closer to God …  please be assured that as far as any expert I’ve talked with …  the world will still be around pretty much as it is today in 2013. (That doesn’t mean, you shouldn’t cozy up to the big guy!)

Here’s the lowdown.

Fact: the ancient Mayans were great mathematicians and astronomers, obsessed with time. They created these long-count calendars of five cycles, totaling around 26,000 years. At the end of every cycle they predicted that some sort of major event would happen. What that event would be they didn’t know. The last cycle ends on December 21, 2012.

Director Roland Emmerich took that fact and created the worse-case scenario, for a big budget, $260 million, Hollywood disaster flick. It’s the disaster flick to end all disaster flicks.

Fact: Most Religions have End-Times prophecies. Most are preceded by some sort of series of cataclysmic events. None of the prophecies gives a time frame.

But that hasn’t stopped anyone from guessing.

People throughout history have looked on all our wars, natural disasters and general mayhem, as signs that the world is coming to an end. But yet, here we are.

There’s one prediction we can be assured of: With hundreds of books written about 2012 and the Mayan calendar, “2012″ the movie will likely bring good fortune to many a folk.