Sandy Hausman

If you buy flowers at the grocery store, chances are they’ve come from Holland or California.  That’s a long way, and the blooms rarely last more than a week, but a Virginia company called Bloomaker has come up with a way to make flowers last longer, and their success could turn  this area into a national hub for flower production.

Joep Paternostre hails from Holland.  He’s a big man - over six feet tall and at least 200 pounds, and since childhood he’s seen the United States as the place to dream big.

Most Americans have heard of the Underground Railroad - a trail that allowed Southern slaves to escape to the North, but there were other escaped slaves who stayed in the South, living in a place their masters feared - Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp.

Archaeologists are now digging there - finding proof of sizable communities where defiant people found freedom. 

Environmentalists are calling on the federal government to investigate the language used by Virginia’s largest utility - Dominion Power. 

The company invites customers to support green power by paying an extra fee, but critics say one source of energy included in that program causes more air pollution than coal.  

Dominion’s Pittsylvania Power Station is the largest biomass plant in the East - burning 150 truckloads of wood each day.  The company has a smaller plant in Wise County and has switched three others from burning coal to biomass. Dan Genest speaks for Dominion. 

Virginia and three other states may soon be allowing gay marriage after a federal appeals court ruling in Richmond, but supporters of a ban are expected to ask for a Supreme Court hearing.

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says Virginia’s ban on same sex marriage denies gay couples equal protection under the law.  The decision also makes similar prohibitions in North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia unconstitutional, but at Equality Virginia, director James Parrish says those states probably won’t be issuing marriage licenses yet.

Fracking has produced a glut of oil and gas in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.  Energy companies are desperate to get those products to market, and utilities are anxious to make the switch from coal to clean-burning gas. 

There is, however, something standing in the way – people who want nothing to do with pipelines in their communities.  In Nelson County, three groups have already formed to fight a pipeline that would also pass through Buckingham, Dinwiddie and Brunswick counties en route to North Carolina.