In the 1940s and '50s, Tadd Dameron worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Miles Davis to Artie Shaw, Count Basie to John Coltrane. Everything Dameron touched had one thing in common, says Paul Combs, author of Dameronia: The Life and Work of Tadd Dameron.
"A penchant for lyricism," Combs says. "Almost everything that he writes has a very lyrical grace to it."
Brooks explains that Baxter is a robot that learns, versus robots designed to do specific tasks, like ones that might be seen on an automotive production line.
Brooks says that as oil becomes more expensive and the cost of shipping products manufactured abroad increases, Baxter is the kind of tool that could help bring factory jobs back by increasing productivity on the production line.
As The Washington Post's Cecilia Kang notes, Baxter is one of a new generation of robots being deployed by U.S. companies:
"General Electric has developed spiderlike robots to climb and maintain tall wind turbines. Kiva Systems, a company bought by Amazon.com, has orange ottoman-shaped robots that sweep across warehouse floors, pull products off shelves and deliver them for packaging. Some hospitals have begun employing robots that can move room to room to dispense medicines to patients or deliver the advice of a doctor who is not on site."
As winter wanes into spring, flu season wanes, too. But while people get the flu when it's cold in the United States, in Senegal they're getting sick when it's hot.
It's a puzzle that's baffled scientists for decades. Now, they think they might be have an explanation, though it's not a straightforward one.
Places where humidity and temperature drop seasonally, like North America in the winter, have flu outbreaks then. But in the tropics, where the air stays hot all year long, flu season tends to peak with the heavy monsoon rains.
Over the years, scientists have come up with lots of theories as to why influenza outbreaks are so strongly tied to the calendar.
Maybe it's because people are inside more in cold weather, one theory holds, so the virus spreads more easily. Or maybe it's because people aren't out in the sun making Vitamin D, and their immune systems are weak. Or maybe it's because people travel for holidays at certain times of years, helping spread the virus. So far, not one of these theories has proved a winner.
To find out if weather is a factor, a group of scientists stitched together data from 78 different studies of flu outbreaks and climate. They found that in temperate zones, lower humidity and temperature mean flu. And it doesn't even have to be that cold — they set the threshold at about 70 degrees. So people in Tunisia and Texas get the flu when it's cooler, even though they're not shivering.
But in the tropics, the scene is more complicated. Humidity remains a driver, but rainfall enters the picture, too. In places like the Philippines and Vietnam with intense monsoon rains (averaging more than six inches a month), flu season peaks when it's hot and rainy.
And in subtropical lands like Senegal, the flu seems driven less by rainfall than by high humidity (that's absolute humidity, not related to temperature).
If you enjoy having a good argument, Friday's report on the labor market gives you plenty to chew over. Find a good debate partner and let's get started.
First, these are the facts: The Labor Department data showed February was a good period for job creation. During the short, cold month, employers added 236,000 jobs — far more than the 160,000 most economists had been predicting. And the unemployment rate fell from January's 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent — the lowest level since December 2008.
OK, we have our facts. Now let's start debating the five points that economists are mulling today.
1. Across-the-Board Cuts Haven't Hit — Yet
One Side: The White House noted the employment numbers were collected before Feb. 16. That was before Congress allowed dramatic, across-the-board budget cuts to launch on March 1 under the "sequester" process.
Liberals fear that as the federal spending cuts fully come into play this spring and summer, job growth will suffer. "Unfortunately, the heavy-handed budget cuts forced by the sequester threaten serious harm to our economy and to our nation's long-term unemployed workers, who are among the Americans who'll feel these stupid and senseless cuts most deeply," said Christine Owens, head of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers.
The Other Side: Conservatives say the sequester is reassuring businesses that this time, House Republicans will reign in federal debt and get government out of the way of the private sector.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, released a statement saying "our spending-driven deficit threatens our economy, and responsible spending cuts are needed."
2. High School Dropouts Are Doing Better
One Side: Finally, the unemployment rate for people without a diploma is dropping — down to 11.2 percent last month from January's 12 percent. In February 2012, that rate was 14.8 percent.
More About Jobs
The Two-Way
Pleasant Surprises: 236,000 Jobs Added; Jobless Rate Dips To 7.7 Percent
Here's the challenge: Build a rocket engine. Don't worry, you don't need much.
At the SXSW festival in Austin on Saturday, startup companies DIYRockets and Sunglass are launching a competition to create 3-D-printed rocket engines with open source (read: free) technology.
Sunglass co-founder Nitin Rao says they want to make space travel "less expensive, more global, more transparent."
DIYRockets is packing the space chops: The group wants to find ways to lower costs and expand the knowledge base of the space industry. Sunglass has the tools to help. It allows people around the world collaborate on 3-D design projects, without the need for expensive software. The work can be shared through a Web browser.
The designs will be judged by a panel of scientists and inventors from NASA, MIT, TED and others. Sunglass is giving out $10,000 in prizes, and 3-D printing company Shapeways.com will provide $500 to help create the top two designs.
The goal of all of this is not to actually build a rocket and send it to space — yet.
"We hope to showcase what people can do on the platform," says DIYRockets co-founder Darlene Damm.
As far as applying the relatively new tools to the space industry, Rao says, "There's enormous inspiration value." If people are literally building rockets, how hard could designing a chair be?
That's in the short term.
"Over the long term, we want to help people become involved in the [space] industry," Damm says. The talent is out there, she says: "There's so much untapped potential around the world."
As NASA hands the reins of space travel over to the private sector, the space industry is evolving. Retired astronaut John Grunsfeld told NPR in February that the change was natural: Private companies are building off knowledge that NASA has spent decades cultivating.
All Tech Considered
As 3-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise
There was bombshell news from the world of honey two weeks ago, and somehow we missed it. Two big honey packers, including one of the largest in the country — Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich. — admitted buying millions of dollars worth of honey that was falsely labeled.
The goal of this mislabeling, which has been long suspected in the honey industry, was to acquire cheap honey from China. Chinese honey is subject to steep "anti-dumping" duties that the U.S. imposed back in 2008, after U.S. honey producers complained that Chinese exporters were selling their honey at artificially low prices.
Chinese exporters, however, began sending their honey to middlemen in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, who then re-labeled it as local product and sent it on to the U.S.
In another tactic, Chinese exporters labeled containers of honey as something else, such as rice syrup.
Both companies face criminal charges, but they've struck a deal to avoid immediate prosecution. The companies are promising to play by the rules and to set up programs to ensure that all the honey they buy in the future comes from legitimate sources. Groeb Farms also replaced its senior management last summer.
"This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer, the actual user," that they were knowingly importing mislabeled honey, says Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, an industry consortium that has set up an auditing and testing system to guarantee the true origin of honey.
True Source Honey was formed in 2010. According to Wenger, True Source-certified honey now accounts for at least a quarter of U.S. honey consumption.
Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold Honey in Lancaster, Pa., which helped set up the program, wrote in an email to NPR that the recent indictments are "just another reason why we felt it was necessary to verify ethical sourcing of honey."
Times were different in 1996 when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, former President Bill Clinton writes in today's Washington Post.
"In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction," Clinton says. Supporters of the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, thought its passage would head off a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
But now, Clinton says, he believes DOMA is "incompatible with our Constitution." As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the act's constitutionality, he is making the case that it discriminates against "same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia [but] are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples."
As NPR's Nina Totenberg has reported:
"The test case that the Supreme Court said it will review involves a New York couple, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, who had been together for 42 years prior to their marriage in 2007. When Spyer died, however, the federal government, acting under DOMA, required Windsor to pay $363,000 in estate taxes that she would not have owed if her spouse had been of the opposite sex. ...
"Windsor won in the lower courts. Indeed, in the past couple of years, 10 courts, with judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, have ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional."
About Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter is a professor of astrophysics UC Berkeley Physics Department in 2004. He is also an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which first announced the results indicating that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. In 1996, he received the American Astronomical Society's Henri Chretien Award. Perlmutter has also written popular articles for Sky and Telescope magazine and has appeared in recent Public Broadcasting System and BBC documentaries on astronomy and cosmology. Professor Perlmutter, who led one of two teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shares with two members of the rival team.
Facebook is redesigning its front page. The News Feed — which is what Facebook's roughly 1 billion users see when they log on to the site — will be rolling out a radical new look over the coming months.
The changes are meant to increase user engagement on the site, make it easier to navigate on mobile phones and provide even more highly targeted advertising.
But any big change also creates a precarious moment in the life of a social network.
Remember Friendster? It was the first social network to achieve large scale success. Founded in 2002 — before Facebook or MySpace — Friendster turned down a $30 million a buyout offer from Google back when that kind of money still turned heads.
At its peak, it had more than 100 million members. Then in 2009 it made some changes to its site, and suddenly Friendster collapsed.
"There was a point where it was really the most important social network," says David Garcia, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
He analyzed data from Friendster collected during its death throws and has come to some interesting conclusions about what makes an enormous online network vulnerable. In Friendster's case, it began with a specific trigger.
"There was a change in the user interface plus there was the alternative of Facebook," Garcia says.
Friendster's redesigned site was awkward to use, unfamiliar, and some dedicated users left. With each new defection, the site became less useful to the people who remained behind.
"If most of your friends have left the community, you will leave it too," Garcia says.
Every time a friend on your network leaves, a network become less valuable to you. Your calculus changes.
Garcia's autopsy here starts with a simple assumption: that when the costs associated with being on a social network begins to outweigh the benefits, you'll leave.
And what's true for Friendster in 2009, Garcia says, is probably still true for Facebook today.
I ask Ian Fisher, who I met at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., what would cause him to leave a social network, to cancel his account, delete his photos and abandon it?
"About two years ago, I canceled my Facebook account for about a year," Fisher says. "I did that because I was reading so many article about privacy concerns on Facebook, and I was spending so much of my time on there and realizing I was getting essentially nothing out of it that was good for me."
In 2010, changes in Facebook's privacy policies led lots of people to leave the network. Unlike Friendster, it didn't collapse.
It turns out, the vulnerability of a social networks to the kind of mass defection hinges on how people use the network.
If most people use it to keep in touch with just one or two friends, then when one of those friends leaves, you're' more likely to leave, too. But if you have 1,000 connections, the network is more resilient.
And in Ian Fisher's case, a few years after he left Facebook, he decided to come back: "Because there were people that I didn't know how to get a hold of, but there were my sort of peripheral acquaintances that I didn't get a chance to connect with quite as much."I am still trying to decide whether it's worth it or not. I'm not totally convinced that it is."
It is for now — maybe just to share pictures of his new baby.
But researchers say Facebook still needs to be cautious. When you are tweaking a social network, even one as big and successful as Facebook, you don't want to scare off too many people at one time — or you could create a cascading exodus that is difficult to stop.
And that may be why Facebook is rolling out its latest update very, very slowly.
Caught between the gritty political realities of needing cash and being linked to a political leader who has repeatedly denounced money's influence in Washington while raising record sums, former campaign aides to President Obama appeared to side with the money.
That had opened officials now heading Organizing for Action — which was formed from the Obama for America campaign committee to promote the president's second-term agenda — to charges of hypocrisy.
Criticism for their refusal to swear off taking cash from corporations, lobbyists and overseas donors may have had the intended effect: On Thursday, the new OFA announced it wouldn't take such boodle.
But if the former Obama campaign officials running OFA have decided to be the change they wish to see in the world (or at least to look like it), some government watchdog groups aren't buying it.
The Sunlight Foundation's Lisa Rosenberg wrote a blog post titled "OFA — A Dark Money Group by Any Other Name," and called the group "a tiger that can't change its stripes."
She was responding to Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager who now runs OFA, who notified those on the organization's blast email list:
"Organizing for Action's mission is to put power back into the hands of the American people. That's why we won't accept a single dollar from corporations, PACs, foreign donors or lobbyists. This is your movement, not theirs."
Rising consumer demand for local foods has changed the job description for ranchers like Doniga Markegard.
Markegard, co-owner of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in San Gregorio, Calif., loves working with cattle, but she's not fond of the hours of phone calls and emails it can take to sell directly to a customer.
"What I want to be doing is the part I love — working with the animals and raising my kids on the ranch," says Markegard. "But I also need to be marketing our product, going to markets and talking with customers. There are a lot of administrative aspects to running a small family ranch, and they are time-consuming."
Now a San Francisco startup is looking to act as the middleman, handling the logistics of gathering and delivering local goods to consumers' doorsteps so small farmers like Markegard don't have to.
Good Eggs began a year ago as a place where local food producers could sell their foods directly to consumers online, says CEO Rob Spiro. But producers needed more.
"We kept hearing the same thing from the producers," Spiro tells The Salt. " 'This is great,' they told us, 'but as I become more successful, I'm becoming a full-time distributor.' "
So Spiro and his business partners decided to step in. "What we need is a last-mile delivery system for our producers," says Spiro.
The problem is that whether you live in San Francisco or Des Moines, Dallas or Wichita, the modern food system is based on economies of scale: To keep food inexpensive and delivered predictably, regardless of the season, you need mass production and the mass movement of goods from large-scale farm to national distributor to superstore.
But similar networks for moving locally produced foods to market are sorely lacking, according to a 2010 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service.
To that end, Good Eggs acquired three trucks and a warehouse and, as of last Thursday, it will now deliver fresh local fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood and prepared foods right to consumers' doors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It plans to create a similar food hub in Brooklyn this spring.
The Good Eggs system works like this: Consumers order from a wide variety of locally made, artisanal products online — from baby food to cheese, oranges to muffins. Items are then baked or harvested fresh to order and sent to the Good Eggs' warehouse, where each individual order is put together manually.
The idea is to keep costs down by using an Amazon warehouse model of efficient distribution — except nothing is stored there. The warehouse is used instead for aggregating goods on delivery days. By bringing all the products together in one location and distributing them together, Good Eggs hopes to relieve producers of the logistical headache of direct sales, while earning them higher profit margins than they get from grocery stores.
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China's citizens do not report as much as $2.34 trillion of what they make every year, hiding "gray income" that would represent nearly 20 percent of the country's GDP, Chinese economics scholar Wang Xiaolu says, in a report from the news site Global Voices.
Wang, of Beijing's National Economic Research Institute, told an audience last week (page is in Chinese) that the figure means the gap between rich and poor Chinese is wider than is commonly believed.
Speaking at the Chinese Museum of Finance, Wang renewed an argument he made in an attention-grabbing study of China's income gap in 2010. That work, which relied partly on informal surveying of Chinese wage-earners, drew criticism from the official National Bureau of Statistics. It also sparked a government push to bring "gray income" into the daylight — an effort that met with little success.
China's non-reported income is believed to have many origins, from bribes for corrupt officials and under-the-table deals between merchants to monetary gifts bestowed upon doctors and nurses.
As we recently reported, the pervasive covering-up of revenue made efforts to list China's richest citizens difficult, with the magazine Hurun Report concluding that "valuing the wealth of China's richest is as much an art as it is a science."
A swarm of locusts that has devastated crops in Egypt made its way into neighboring Israel this week. And with Passover just around the corner, many news outlets couldn't resist noting the shades of the biblical tale of Exodus, when the insects were one of 10 plagues that descended upon pharaoh and his people.
But while Israeli farmers now fret over what the insects might do to their fields, others in Israel have proposed a culinary approach to the infestation: Why not eat the buggers up?
It's a tidy approach to a looming environmental catastrophe, but there's just one catch: The rabbis don't agree on whether the critters are kosher.
Among the chief promoters of locust cuisine is Israeli celebrity chef Moshe Basson, who appeared on a morning news program Wednesday to offer advice on whipping up concoctions with the insects.
"They taste something between sunflower seeds and baby shrimps; they actually don't taste like much," Basson told the U.K.'s The Guardian. "I like them, but they're desired not because they are delicious but because they are rare."
Basson is known for his biblically inspired dishes. A few years ago, his restaurant The Eucalyptus served up fried locusts as dessert in a well-publicized dinner aimed at reviving ancient local kosher food traditions.
Others have also chimed in to promote the palate experimentation for Passover: "As the only kosher insect, they are perfect for the hostess who hasn't yet decided on an interesting appetizer for the Passover Seder meal," Allison Kaplan Sommer writes in Haaretz.
Recipe ideas for dishes like honey-spiced locusts soon popped up on blogs. And in an op-ed for The Times of Israel, Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who studies the intersection of Judaism and the animal world, offered an ecologically minded argument:
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Rising consumer demand for local foods has changed the job description for ranchers like Doniga Markegard.
Markegard, co-owner of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in San Gregorio, Calif., loves working with cattle, but she's not fond of the hours of phone calls and emails it can take to sell directly to a customer.
"What I want to be doing is the part I love — working with the animals and raising my kids on the ranch," says Markegard. "But I also need to be marketing our product, going to markets and talking with customers. There are a lot of administrative aspects to running a small family ranch, and they are time consuming."
Now a San Francisco startup is looking to act as the middleman, handling the logistics of gathering and delivering local goods to consumers' doorsteps so small farmers like Markegard don't have to.
Good Eggs began a year ago as a place where local food producers could sell their foods directly to consumers online, says CEO Rob Spiro. But producers needed more.
"We kept hearing the same thing from the producers," Spiro tells The Salt. "'This is great,' they told us, 'but as I become more successful, I'm becoming a full-time distributor.' "
So Spiro and his business partners decided to step in. "What we need is a last-mile delivery system for our producers," says Spiro.
The problem is that whether you live in San Francisco or Des Moines, Dallas or Wichita, the modern food system is based on economies of scale: To keep food inexpensive and delivered predictably, regardless of the season, you need mass production and the mass movement of goods from large-scale farm to national distributor to superstore.
But similar networks for moving locally produced foods to market are sorely lacking, according to a 2010 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service.
To that end, Good Eggs acquired three trucks and a warehouse and, as of last Thursday, it will now deliver fresh local fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood and prepared foods right to consumers' doors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It plans to create a similar food hub in Brooklyn this spring.
The Good Eggs system works like this: Consumers order from a wide variety of locally made, artisanal products online — from baby food to cheese, oranges to muffins. Items are then baked or harvested fresh to order and sent to the Good Eggs' warehouse, where each individual order is put together manually.
The idea is to keep costs down by using an Amazon warehouse model of efficient distribution — except nothing is stored there. The warehouse is used instead for aggregating goods on delivery days. By bringing all the products together in one location and distributing them together, Good Eggs hopes to relieve producers of the logistical headache of direct sales, while earning them higher profit margins than they get from grocery stores.
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It wasn't the fish heads poking out of the Stargazy Pie that stopped more than a few of our readers cold. It was the eyeballs.
"Not a lot of food nowadays has eyes; what's up with that?" one reader asked in commenting on a recent Salt post that featured a photo of the historic dish, which involves whole fish (eyes and all) poking out of a pie.
Turns out, quite a lot of cuisine features eyeballs. But there's no question that in many cultures, eating eyes is a food taboo.
I first ran afoul of this when I cooked up ukha, a famous Russian fish soup, for a group of friends. The fish heads make for a beautiful clear broth, and my husband, who grew up in Kamchatka, wanted to make sure those big old heads swam in his bowl.
Alas, when the bowls were laid out, the one with fish eyes staring balefully upward landed in front of the most fastidious eater in the room. He has never dined at my house again.
So I called James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and asked why eyes creep people out.
"Eyes represent faces," he said, "and it's through the face that we learn to recognize and empathize with others. So it's not entirely surprising that we find eyeballs disconcerting."
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"There is no such thing as humane meat." This conclusion was drawn by Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA, in an opinion piece published last week in The Huffington Post.
Newkirk's point of view is not new (Farm Sanctuary's Bruce Friedrich has called humane meat "a contradiction in terms"). Still, it's a position that sounds extreme to many people.
Now a challenge: stop here, go back to Newkirk's post, and (if you haven't already) read the whole thing. Suspend any desire to argue back emotionally. Just read and think.
OK. How did you do? Did you make it through to the end — calmly?
Newkirk, herself, isn't always calm. Some of the rhetoric is incendiary ("animal slavery") or overgeneralized (people who stop eating animals "truly won't miss a thing except ill health"). I can tell you that I, for one, am occasionally overwhelmed by cravings for chicken pot pie!
More seriously, Newkirk aims her manifesto at the horrors of factory farming. Yet she sweeps up in her absolutist's net a lot of good people, including those who make their living on small farms.
On some small farms, chickens, pigs and other animals live largely in the fresh air, surrounded by the "family and friends" that Newkirk mentions in her piece. Yes, most of them are then slaughtered for the table. But isn't there humane practice on these farms, including the method of slaughter?
I asked Newkirk why she didn't distinguish between factory farms and small farms. On Monday, she told me in an email message that yes, "small farms are much better," but continued:
Invariably they are still inhumane at some level. Even on the smallest of farms (I grew up on one for some years) there will be mistreatment with animals seen as commodities, separation from others, frightening transport, the smells of slaughter before them, and definitely some horrible procedures, such as castration without even a painkiller.
Every year, the South By Southwest music, film and interactive festival gets larger, and navigating the blur of panels, parties and shows gets more daunting. The girth of it all is enough to keep many SXSW old-timers away from Austin this year.
But the interactive part of SXSW is still an important place for many startups and industry illuminati. It is, after all, the tech fest where Twitter first "blew up" in 2007, Foursquare got a huge launchpad in 2009 and hoards of emerging entrepreneurs and technologies compete for new eyes.
This year's agenda is heavy on space exploration, wearable electronics, hardware like 3-D printers and the new work-life balance questions spawned by our ever-growing reliance on technology. Can we have it all, with the help of robots?
SXSW: Live From Austin
There's a kind of rice growing in some test plots in the Philippines that's unlike any rice ever seen before. It's yellow. Its backers call it "golden rice." It's been genetically modified so that it contains beta-carotene, the source of vitamin A.
Millions of people in Asia and Africa don't get enough of this vital nutrient, so this rice has become the symbol of an idea: that genetically engineered crops can be a tool to improve the lives of the poor.
It's a statement that rouses emotions and sets off fierce arguments. There's a raging, global debate about such crops.
But before we get to that debate, and the role that golden rice plays in it, let's travel back in time to golden rice's origins.
It began with a conversation in 1984.
The science of biotechnology was in its infancy at this point. There were no genetically engineered crops yet. Scientists were just figuring out how to find genes and move them between different organisms.
Some people at the Rockefeller Foundation thought that these techniques might be useful for giving farmers in poor countries a bigger harvest.
So they set up a meeting at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), in the Philippines, to talk about this.
Gary Toenniessen, who was in charge of the foundation's biotechnology program at the time, says that a lot of people at this meeting were very skeptical about biotechnology. They were plant breeders, masters of the traditional way to improve crops.
One evening, after the formal sessions, "a group of these breeders were sitting around at the guesthouse at IRRI, having a beer or two," says Toenniessen. After listening to their skepticism for a while, Toenniessen spoke up. If this technology did actually pan out, he said, and you could put any gene you wanted into rice, which one would you pick? "What's your favorite gene?"
They went around the room. Breeders talked about genes for resisting disease or surviving droughts.
They came to a breeder named Peter Jennings, a legendary figure in these circles. He'd created perhaps the most famous variety of rice in history, called IR 8, which launched the so-called Green Revolution in rice-growing countries of Asia in the 1960s.
"Yellow endosperm," said Jennings. (The endosperm of a grain of rice or wheat is the main part that's eaten.)
"That kind of took everybody by surprise. It certainly took me by surprise. So I said, 'Why?' " Toenniessen recalls.
Jennings explained that the color yellow signals the presence of beta-carotene — the source of vitamin A. Yellow kinds of corn or sorghum exist naturally, and for years, Jennings said, he had been looking for similar varieties of rice. Regular white rice doesn't provide this vital nutrient, and it's a big problem.
"When children are weaned, they're often weaned on a rice gruel. And if they don't get any beta-carotene or vitamin A during that period, they can be harmed for the rest of their lives," says Toenniessen.
Toenniessen was persuaded, and the Rockefeller Foundation started a program aimed at creating, through technology, what Jennings had not been able to find in nature.
A global network of scientists at nonprofit research institutes started working on the problem.
The first real breakthrough came in 1999. Scientists in Switzerland inserted two genes into rice that switched on production of beta-carotene. A few years later, other researchers created an even better version.
A single bowl of this new golden rice can supply 60 percent of a child's daily requirement of vitamin A.
"It's a great product. And it's beautiful! It looks just like saffron rice," says Toenniessen, who's now a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation.
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Some sloppy coding on an update to Microsoft's Windows 7 two years ago has cost the computer giant a $731 million fine to the European Commission.
Microsoft said Wednesday it would not contest the fine, imposed for what the commission said was the company's abuse of its market dominance to stifle competitors' Web browsers.
It all started in 2009, when Microsoft agreed to pay an 860 million euro fine to the commission and to give Windows users in Europe the option to choose browsers such as Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox, instead of having its own Internet Explorer automatically installed.
But some 15 million Windows 7 installations in Europe failed to include the fix and forced users to install Internet Explorer. Microsoft admitted the failure last year.
Microsoft says when it released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in February 2011, sloppy coding and testing of the new code meant it failed to trigger the alternate browser option when the system first booted up. The company says it was unaware of the problem until regulators brought it to its attention months later.
"We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it," a Microsoft spokesman said.
Speaking in Brussels at a news conference Wednesday, the EC's top competition regulator, Joaquin Almunia, said that the fine reflected the size of the violation and the length of time it went on for, according to The Associated Press:
"Almunia said it was also intended to make an example of Microsoft and deter other companies from doing same thing. In theory, the commission could have fined Microsoft up to 10 percent of its global annual sales during the period the violation took place.
" 'A failure to comply is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly,' Almunia said."
A Portland, Ore., resident was arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. The FBI alleges that Reaz Qadir Khan, 48, gave money and advice to a man involved in a deadly 2009 suicide bomb attack on the headquarters of Pakistan's intelligence service in Lahore.
The attack resulted in an estimated 30 deaths and 300 injuries. Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen, could face a maximum sentence of life in prison if he is found guilty. FBI agents arrested him at his home Tuesday morning.
Here's how Oregon Public Broadcasting's Kristian Foden-Vencil explains the FBI's case:
"They're saying he allegedly conspired with a man named Ali Jaleel and others. Jaleel died while participating in the Pakistan suicide attack."
"The U.S. Department of Justice says that between December 2005 and June 2009, Khan used email and intermediaries to give Jaleel and his family money and advice."
"They say Khan used coded language to help Jaleel travel undetected from the Maldives, where Jaleel lived, to Pakistan."
"And they also say Khan gave Jaleel money to attend a training camp to prepare for the attack."
Budget-cutting from the government sequester that began March 1 could affect U.S. exports and imports, including what we eat.
Customs and Border Protection officers regulate trade at the nation's 329 ports of entry, in harbors, airports and on land.
One by one, drivers approach booths with Customs and Border Protection officers at the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, Ariz. More winter produce enters here than at any other place in the U.S. Semis filled with tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers headed to grocery stores around the country.
"What goes on here is affecting people over the entire nation," says Lance Klump, chief CBP officer at the port.
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The stock market's long climb from its recession bottom has some people concerned it may be a bubble about to burst — a bubble artificially pumped up by the Federal Reserve's easy money policy. That's led to calls — even from within the Fed — for an end to the central bank's extraordinary efforts to keep interest rates low.
Even as the Dow Jones industrial average was reaching its nominal record Tuesday, Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, continued his criticism of the central bank's massive intervention, calling it unhealthy. Another regional Fed president, Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, told a gathering of Pennsylvania businessmen that the Fed's easy money policy could cause financial instability and inflation. Plosser said it's time for Fed policymakers to begin winding down their efforts to lower interest rates.
Causing A Stock Bubble?
Randall Kroszner, a former Fed policymaker and now a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, says as the economy heals, the debate over Fed policy is healthy.
"The fundamentals are starting to come back and I think there's a legitimate debate on whether more needs to be done," Kroszner said.
But is the Fed's low-interest-rate policy causing a bubble in the stock market? After all, there are still lots of things wrong with the economy. It's still growing very sluggishly — not fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which remains very high.
Alan Blinder, whose book After the Music Stopped deals with the financial crisis and the Fed's extraordinary intervention, doesn't think there's a stock bubble. But, Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Fed, says the central bank's low-rate policy has pushed the market higher.
"Stock prices are supposed to depend on earnings and interest rates, and the Fed has made interest rates very low," Blinder said. "But the other part of it is earnings are very high. You may have noticed that the share of national income accounted for by corporate profits has recently hit all-time highs."
Nudging Investors To Take Risks
Blinder says with company profits soaring it's hard to make a case that their share prices are too high and there's a bubble developing in stocks. And, he says, higher stock prices fit in with the Fed's growth strategy: "To gently nudge — or maybe not so gently nudge — people into taking a little risk instead of putting all their money in Treasury bills and under the mattress."
There are also worries that there's a bubble developing in corporate bonds, and it's true investors have driven corporate bond prices very high. But Blinder says it's hard to consider that a bubble because it's obvious why it's occurred. The Fed's policies have driven rates so low on government bonds that investors are chasing the higher yields on corporate bonds. But, Blinder says, they know the Fed's extreme policy won't last forever.
Related NPR Stories
Planet Money
The Dow Isn't Really At A Record High (And It Wouldn't Matter If It Were)
More than three decades ago, Soviet soldier Bakhretdin Khakimov went missing in Afghanistan after he was wounded in battle with Afghan mujahedeen forces.
His whereabouts remained unknown until two weeks ago, when he was tracked down by a team from Warriors-International Affairs Committee, a Moscow-based non-profit that looks for Soviet MIAs in Afghanistan.
Now a widower, he goes by Sheikh Abdullah and works as a traditional healer in Shindand District of Herat province in western Afghanistan.
As a soldier in a motorized rifle unit, Khakimov had "received a heavy wound to the head in the course of a battle in Shandand district in September 1980 when he was picked up by local residents," the organization said in a statement posted on its website.
Rather than return to his unit, Khakimov decided to stay, changing his name, converting to Islam and eventually marrying an Afghan woman.
"He now leads a semi-nomadic life with the people who sheltered him," the organization says.
Alexander Lavrentyev, the organization's head, told a news conference on Monday that after he was wounded, Khakimov, an ethnic Uzbek from Samarkand, was nursed back to health by a local faith healer, who taught him the trade.
"He was just happy he survived," Lavrentyev was quoted as saying by Russia's RIA news agency.
RIA describes him now as an "an elderly-looking, impoverished widower with a wispy beard".
When he was found, he had no I.D., but was able to identify other Soviet soldiers, which helped confirm his own identity.
"'He could understand Russian a little bit, but spoke it poorly, although he remembers his Uzbek language,' according to the organization's statement. 'The effects of his wounds were clearly manifested: His hand trembles and there is a visible tic in his shoulder.'"
It wasn't the fish heads poking out of the Stargazy Pie that stopped more than a few of our readers cold. It was the eyeballs.
"Not a lot of food nowadays has eyes; what's up with that?" one reader asked in commenting on a recent Salt post that featured a photo of the historic dish, which involves whole fish (eyes and all) poking out of a pie.
Turns out, quite a lot of cuisine features eyeballs. But there's no question that in many cultures, eating eyes is a food taboo.
I first ran afoul of this when I cooked up ukha, a famous Russian fish soup, for a group of friends. The fish heads make for a beautiful clear broth, and my husband, who grew up in Kamchatka, wanted to make sure those big old heads swam in his bowl.
Alas, when the bowls were laid out, the one with fish eyes staring balefully upward landed in front of the most fastidious eater in the room. He has never dined at my house again.
So I called James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and asked why eyes creep people out.
"Eyes represent faces," he said, "and it's through the face that we learn to recognize and empathize with others. So it's not entirely surprising that we find eyeballs disconcerting."
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There were 198,000 jobs added to private employers' payrolls in February, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report — a privately produced snapshot of the employment picture that's sometimes a signal of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics will say when it releases its data from the same month.
ADP didn't only report there was solid, if not spectacular, growth last month. It also revised up its estimate of the growth in January. It now says private employers added 215,000 jobs that month — 23,000 more than previously though.
In the ADP report, Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi says that "the job market remains sturdy in the face of significant fiscal headwinds. Businesses are adding to payrolls more strongly at the start of 2013 with gains across all industries and business sizes. Tax increases and government spending cuts don't appear to be affecting the job market."
The BLS data on February's employment and unemployment figures are due Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. In its last report, BLS said the nation's unemployment rate edged up to 7.9 percent in January from 7.8 percent a month before, and that there were 157,000 jobs added to public and private payrolls in the first month of the year. According to Reuters, economists expect to hear that there were 160,000 jobs added to payrolls last month and that the jobless rate stayed at 7.9 percent.
March means spring break is just around the corner, and for New Mexico it means mild temperatures and fresh snow — perfect conditions for visiting area ski resorts.
A growing number of resorts are now offering programs that cater to vacationers with disabilities, and resort owners say it has proved to be a boost for business.
At a Taos Ski Valley chairlift, Barbara and Philip Logan prepare their son, Tilghman, for his first day of ski lessons.
The Logans traveled from New York City to Taos, N.M., for a winter vacation, and Tilghman can't wait to begin his ski lesson.
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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Chris Sprouse, the illustrator slated to work with author Orson Scott Card on an upcoming issue of DC Comics' "Adventures of Superman," has dropped out of the project because of controversy over Card's views on gay marriage. Card has said in the past that homosexuality is "deviant behavior" and that same-sex marriage could lead to the end of civilization. In a statement, Sprouse said, "The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that's something I wasn't comfortable with." The project will be put on hold.
A 9-year-old Australian boy saved himself and two friends from sinking into quicksand after reading a kids' travel book called Not-for-Parents: How to Be a World Explorer: Your All-Terrain Manual, which he got for Christmas. The Lonely Planet guidebook written by Joel Levy also includes tips about fighting bears, building igloos and climbing volcanoes.
The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson on the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez: "[Chavez] acknowledged that he had come to [socialism] late, long after most of the world had abandoned it, but said that it had clicked for him after he had read Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Miserables."
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush caused a stir this week with his shifting stances on immigration. Bush's new book, Immigration Wars, came out Tuesday, and in it, he writes that "those who violated the laws can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship." But in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe the same day, Bush said his views had changed and that "we wrote this book last year, not this year."
"Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!" Schroder author Amity Gaige on literary influences, in an interview with The Millions.
House Speaker John Boehner held a press conference the day after the November election.
"The American people have spoken," he said. "They've re-elected president Obama. And they've again re-elected a Republican majority in the House of Representatives."
But last Thursday, when the House of Representatives passed the Violence Against Women Act, it did it without a majority of Republicans. Only 87 voted for the bill; 138 voted against it. The rest of the yes votes came from Democrats. The speaker brought a bill to the floor knowing it didn't have the support of the majority of his caucus, which upset conservatives such as Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas.
"Many people in conference expressed their concern publicly and privately about that," he said. "So why would the Republican House pass a Democrat priority bill? I don't know. It was set up to pass that way. We weren't given advance notice it came out. And it's a real concern."
Hastert Rule
The Violence Against Women Act, a disaster-relief bill for victims of Hurricane Sandy and the "fiscal cliff" deal — all three violated what's known as the Hastert rule: For a bill to be brought up for a vote in the House, it has to have the support of the majority of the majority.
"The 'majority of the majority rule' was more of a guideline for speakers in how to keep their jobs," says John Feehery, who was a spokesman for former Speaker Dennis Hastert, for whom the rule is named.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, mostly followed this rule. Boehner did, too, until recently. Feehery says Boehner made a cold, hard calculation and decided that letting these bills pass was best for the party.
"You know, it's not an easy decision because you don't want to alienate a majority of your majority," says Feehery, now the president of QGA Public Affairs. "I mean that's just kind of common sense. But there are also times where the majority of the majority may not like pieces of legislation but they are fine letting it go because they know it is better for them to allow things to pass."
Fears Of A Primary Challenge
New York Republican Rep. Peter King puts it this way.
"Sometimes you have to do what you have to do," he says. "It happened with the fiscal cliff. It happened with Sandy."
Why this happens isn't obvious just looking at the numbers. There are 232 Republicans in the house; 217 votes are needed to pass a bill. But a lot of Republicans don't vote the way leadership wants them to.
Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says these members are afraid of getting hit with a primary challenge.
"The good of the Republican Party as a whole is not something that necessarily resonates with a lot of individual members whose constituents back home don't feel the same way," he says.
As a result, Ornstein says bills that can pass the Senate and be signed by the president often don't have the support of the majority of the majority in the House. Recently, rather than stopping these bills, Boehner brought them to the floor, knowing conservatives would vote no.
"They'll come urge me to vote their way, but they've never insisted I compromise my principles," says Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, who was elected as part of the Tea Party wave. "And that's something I respect the speaker for."
A New Rule?
But that goodwill has its limits, Ornstein says.
"There are only so many times you can do this without damaging your standing as speaker," he says. "And doing things that basically bring votes from more of the other side than your own erodes your authority after a while."
When asked whether the Violence Against Women Act vote was part of a trend, Boehner's answer seemed to be aimed at reassuring his occasionally restive conference.
"We tried everything we could to find, to get the differences in our conference resolved. And the fact is they couldn't resolve their differences," he said. "It was time to deal with this issue and we did. But it's not a practice that I would expect to continue long term."
Maybe there's a new rule. The Boehner rule would be more pragmatic: something like only voting on bills that have the support of the majority of the majority, when possible.
But don't let the vampire distract you from a more central character in The Accursed: M.W. van Dyck II of Eaglestone Manor, a historian so passionate about the "Crosswicks Curse" and its victims that he can't always distinguish the narrative forest from the trees. With van Dyck, Oates slips from pastiche to parody, for he is a cartoon of a historian, one drawn along bumbling, antiquarian lines. As a result, readers are treated to seemingly irrelevant plot detours and labyrinthine discussions of family trees, real estate transactions and arcane source materials. In one chapter, the dismayed historian cannot help enumerating all that he has had to leave out of his account. In another, van Dyck contemplates the work of the historian (which he sees as the recording, assembling and interpretation of facts), and laments its failure to help him understand what really happened in his hometown of Princeton back in 1905.
One of the reasons our fictional historian remains mystified is that he fails to appreciate what Oates and so many other writers before her have discovered: Vampires and other supernatural beings are useful monsters to think with. These otherworldly creatures illuminate the darkest corners of the human mind and spirit, put flesh and bones on our nightmares, and encourage us to explore issues of difference and deviance. Running like a black thread throughout the many stories in The Accursed are disturbing accounts of racial violence, class warfare, religious prejudice and misogyny. Oates' real monsters are not the rulers of the Bog Kingdom or even the mesmerizing Wallachian count (whom the reader cannot help but compare to Dracula), but the members of Princeton's beau monde, who preach from their pulpits and judge without compassion. The curse that afflicts the town did not begin with the abduction of a young bride on her wedding day, but with the secrets these monsters keep.
“ Vampires and other supernatural beings are useful monsters to think with.
Update at 4:09 p.m. ET. A New Record:
The Dow Industrials finished in record territory today. Gaining 89 points, it closed at 14,253.77, its highest level since Oct. 9,2007.
That is, the Dow has recovered all the losses it suffered during the Great Recession.
"It really does represent an achievement that we have climbed out of this crater," Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago's BMO Private Bank, told The Wall Street Journal.
Before you take too much joy out of this, we'll point you to our friends at the Planet Money blog.
Jacob Goldstein writes that if you adjust for inflation, this isn't really a record "in any meaningful sense."
"It would need to rise another 10 percent or so to hit an all time high in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) terms," Jacob writes.
Our Original Post Continues:
The number to keep an eye on today:
14,264.53.
^DJI data by YCharts
Update at 4:09 p.m. ET. A New Record:
The Dow Industrials finished in record territory today. Gaining 89 points, it closed at 14,253.77, its highest level since Oct. 9,2007.
That is, the Dow has recovered all the losses it suffered during the Great Recession.
"It really does represent an achievement that we have climbed out of this crater," Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago's BMO Private Bank, told The Wall Street Journal.
Before you take too much joy out of this, we'll point you to our friends at the Planet Money blog.
Jacob Goldstein writes that if you adjust for inflation, this isn't really a record "in any meaningful sense."
"It would need to rise another 10 percent or so to hit an all time high in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) terms," Jacob writes.
Our Original Post Continues:
The number to keep an eye on today:
14,264.53.
^DJI data by YCharts
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has been battling cancer for months, is in a "very delicate" condition, with breathing difficulties and a severe respiratory infection, a government statement says.
The statement, read out Monday by Minister of Communications Ernesto Villegas, spells out the 58-year-old socialist leader's decline since his December surgery in Cuba for an unspecified cancer in the pelvic area:
"From today, there has been deterioration in his respiratory performance, related to the immunodeficiency of his current clinical condition. At present he is suffering from a new and serious respiratory infection.
"The president has been receiving intense chemotherapy, as well as other complementary treatments, with the dosage according to the development of his clinical state.
"His general state of health continues to be very delicate.
"The president is taking refuge in Christ and in life, conscious of the difficulties that he is facing and strictly following the program designed by his medical team."
The cost of college can range from $60,000 for a state university to four times as much at some private colleges. The total student debt in the U.S. now tops credit card debt. So a lot of people are asking: Is college really worth it?
There are several famous and staggeringly successful college dropouts, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. You may not end up with fat wallets like them, but Dale Stephens says you can find a different education path.
Stephens, founder of UnCollege.org and author of a new book, Hacking Your Education, challenges people to learn differently, away from a school campus.
"When you think about education as an investment, you have to think about what the return is going to be," Stephens tells NPR's Renee Montagne.
Stephens points to an alternative self-education system by taking responsibility for learning on your own and using networking to your advantage. He also says school just isn't for everyone.
"I left school because I didn't feel like school was an environment that left me free to learn," says Stephens, who dropped out of college.
His book explores why and how to ditch the cost of tuition and find a personal educational system.
Hunger strikes are often used in India as a method of protest — but try being on one for 12 years.
That's how long it's been since Irom Sharmila last ate on her own. She is protesting an Indian law that suspends human rights guarantees in conflict-ridden parts of the country. The government is force-feeding her through a tube. And on Monday, Sharmila was charged with attempted suicide.
First, some background: Sharmila is protesting the Armed Forces Special Forces Act, an Indian law that gives special powers to the country's military in restive regions. The law is in force in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as across the country's northeast, the scene for decades of several separatist movements. Sharmila is from Manipur, one of these northeastern states. Here's how The Associated Press describes the law:
"Under the law, in effect in Indian-ruled Kashmir and parts of the country's northeast, troops have the right to shoot to kill suspected rebels without fear of possible prosecution and to arrest suspected militants without a warrant. It also gives police wide-ranging powers of search and seizure."
There are more than 1,400 billionaires in the world right now, according to two sources — one in the U.S., and one in China. But the tallies by Forbes and Hurun Report differ on key points, including whether there are now more billionaires in Asia than anywhere else.
Forbes says its list of billionaires, released Monday, "now boasts 1,426 names, with an aggregate net worth of $5.4 trillion, up from $4.6 trillion." Shanghai's Hurun Report, which compiled its first global list this year after long tracking China's wealthy, says it found 1,453 billionaires, with $5.5 trillion in combined worth.
Those numbers aren't far from each other, especially considering recent volatile economic conditions in global markets. And they show that the amount of money held by fewer than 1,500 people — let's split the difference, and call it $5.45 trillion — would earn them a spot as the world's fourth-largest GDP, if we were the type of people who conflate producing wealth with holding onto it.
Both of the lists are topped by Carlos Slim Helu and his family, of Mexico. And they agree that the U.S. has more billionaires than any other country.
But a key difference between the lists arises when Hurun Report states, "Asia was home to the highest number of billionaires this year with most of them operating in real estate sector."
Forbes says the entire Asia-Pacific region has 386 billionaires, while the Hurun list says Asia has 559 of them — not including the 17 who are in Oceania.
So, why the disparity? It could certainly come down to fluctuations in individuals' net worth — Forbes cites Brazil's Eike Batista, "whose fortune dropped by $19.4 billion, or equivalent to about $50 million a day," in 2012.
The differences might also reflect the difficulty of tallying the wealth of people whose holdings are often spread across continents and industries. And not all of them want to advertise their wealth — particularly in China, which Hurun Report says has 317 billionaires.
As The Vancouver Sun reported yesterday, China's wealthy use many means to smuggle their money overseas, hoping to insulate themselves from both the tax office and political shifts.
Citing Global Financial Integrity's estimate that $602.9 billion fled China in 2011, The Sun's Zoe McKnight writes that the methods ranged from using "underground banks" to putting suitcases full of cash on airplanes.
"For every billionaire that Hurun Report has found," the magazine company's chairman Rupert Hoogewerf says, "I estimate we have missed at least two, meaning that today there are probably 4000... billionaires in the world."
The magazine concluded that "valuing the wealth of China's richest is as much an art as it is a science."
Rats have been a problem for many years in Tehran. As the BBC reported in 2000, officials back then launched a poison control program that they hoped would kill many of the estimated 25 million rats in the city.
Well, now there are reports that the poison isn't working that well and that the rat population still outnumbers the Iranian capital's humans. So, as The Times of London and Abu Dhabi's The National report, sniper squads have been deployed.
The National says:
"Ten teams of sharpshooters armed with rifles equipped with infra-red sights have bagged more than 2,000 of the brutish rodents in recent weeks, city officials told state media. That's a drop in the ocean: Iran's rat population easily outnumbers the sprawling capital's 12 million inhabitants. The city council is now boosting the number of sniper squads to 40, officials said.
" 'It's become a 24/7 war,' a grim-faced Mohammad Hadi Heydarzadeh, the head of Tehran municipality's environmental agency, declared on state television last month."
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II was just seen leaving London's King Edward VII hospital, where she had been admitted over the weekend to be treated for symptoms of gastroenteritis.
As NPR's Philip Reeves reported earlier, her stay in the hospital was said by Buckingham Palace to be "a precautionary measure. It was so that doctors could better monitor the 86-year-old monarch. She first became ill last week, forcing her to call off a trip to Wales Friday. Her engagements for the coming week are now postponed or cancelled."
Sky News says the queen is reportedly in good spirits.
In a small public-TV studio before an invitation-only audience of 30 people, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder made his case Friday for taking control of Detroit's finances away from the city's elected officials.
The state's signature city is grappling with a declining population, a dwindling tax base and decades of mismanagement — including corruption so pervasive at times that former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is currently on trial for federal racketeering charges.
That's left Detroit with a budget deficit of more than $300 million, and the city is unable to stem the flow of red ink.
“ I think that things will definitely get worse before they get any better. There's so much debt. I think that an emergency manager really wouldn't do much right now."
Friday's deadline for President Obama to issue a sequestration order is neither the beginning nor the end of this year's budget battles in Washington. Here are five key moments to watch over the next seven months, and what's at stake in each:
March 1
Sequestration of $85 billion from projected spending for the current fiscal year (which expires Sept. 30) begins no later than 11:59 p.m. It will cut 13 percent of defense spending — uniformed personnel costs are exempted — and 9 percent of domestic discretionary spending, including 2 percent of Medicare spending (which would come out of payments to providers, not reductions in coverage). Medicaid and Social Security are not subject to sequestration, nor are food stamps.
March 27
The continuing resolution (CR) by which the federal government is being funded expires March 27. If a new CR is not approved by Congress before then, there could be a government shutdown at that point. House Republicans are expected next week to propose a CR that would cover the remainder of the fiscal year (through Sept. 30) that would reflect the spending reductions forced by sequestration. Senate Democrats prefer not to bake the sequestration into a funding resolution in order to leave some flexibility to change or rescind the forced cuts. The prevailing sentiment in both parties is that it's in nobody's interest to have a government shutdown. Congress is scheduled to begin a two-week spring recess March 22, so lawmakers have exactly three weeks to agree on a new CR, or face losing some of their break trying to eke out a deal averting a shutdown.
April 1
Federal employees can only be furloughed with 30 days' notice, and notices cannot be sent until sequestration is in effect, so there can be no employee furloughs before April 1. Agencies are expected to wait until Monday, March 4, to send out notices.
Mid-Summer
The statutory debt ceiling has been suspended by Congress through mid-May, meaning the Treasury Department can accrue additional debt until then without violating any legal limit. So all the stopgap measures Treasury has at its disposal to stave off default once the debt limit has been reached are still available, and thus will likely make it unnecessary to raise the debt limit until mid-summer. That's when we could see another showdown.
October 1
The beginning of fiscal year 2014 could prove another crisis point. There's little agreement about how sequestration should be dealt with in next year's budget, so passing appropriations bills may prove difficult. By law — the August 2011 Budget Control Act — sequestration is to continue every year for the next eight years, paring around $85 billion each year off projected spending levels.
Detroit is broke. On Friday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announced the state will take over the city's finances.
"It is time to say, we need to start moving upward with the city of Detroit," he said.
But the question on many people's minds is whether state intervention will be enough — and whether the more ominous and painful scenario of municipal bankruptcy can be avoided.
Adding Up The Debt
Just how far gone is Detroit? Eric Lupher, director of local affairs for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, sums it up like this:
U.S.
Michigan Officials Take Control Of Detroit's Empty Wallet
There are few things in life more joyful than discovering a giant oil or natural gas field in Texas. You're suddenly rich beyond your wildest dreams. When the scope and size of the natural gas reservoir in the Barnett Shale in North Texas first became apparent, there were predictions that the find would last 100 years.
Well, that was over the top. But University of Texas geology professor Scott Tinker, who designed and authored a new study of the Barnett Shale, says there's still a lot of gas down there, even after a decade of drilling.
"Turns out, what we learned is that there's a lot of good rock left to drill," Tinker says. "And there's quite a bit of natural gas to be produced in the better areas of the reservoir."
Tinker and his team, who examined more than 15,000 gas wells drilled over the past 10 years, found the Barnett Shale is currently producing an astonishing 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas every year. Tinker doesn't believe this rate will increase, but he believes the reservoir will last another 25 years.
"It probably is reaching its plateau of production, which is about 10 percent of U.S. demand," Tinker says. "So in that total production, where you've produced around 13 trillion cubic feet so far ... we still see another 25 or 30 more trillion cubic feet of gas throughout the life of that field."
Some Wells Still Coming Up Dry
With the amazing leaps in imaging technology these days, you wouldn't think thousands of wells drilled in the Barnett come up dry — like the oil wildcatters in the 1930s, '40s and '50s in East and West Texas.
But Tinker says you would be wrong.
Business
U.S. Has A Natural Gas Problem: Too Much Of It
Tax day is looming and taxpayers are scrambling to gather receipts, W-2 forms and other documents. For many, gone are the days of paper ledger books and calculators, now that there's software to figure out how much they owe.
Tobie Stanger, a senior editor at Consumer Reports, tells NPR's Renee Montagne that when — sometimes free — online programs and smartphone apps are available, they're worth a try. "People should take advantage of it and not be afraid to try doing it yourself because you could save yourself $200 [to] $600," she says.
Stanger says Consumer Reports hasn't tested every software program and app out there, but many of them make tax preparation easier and more efficient.
Consumer Reports lists these few things to look for when preparing taxes online:
Investigate what documents the website supports.
Make sure the site can handle your state taxes.
Check out the complaints the site may have.
Don't get sucked into floating pop-ups.
Think about the cost.
Here are edited highlights of the interview with Stanger:
On available digital tools
If you expect to have an adjusted gross income of $57,000 or less, the easiest thing to do is use the IRS website — they have a section called Free File. You can prepare and file your federal income taxes for free with one of 15 companies that have signed up with Free File. If you think you're going to have an adjusted gross income that's greater than that, you can use the search engine, type in tax preparation and a number of names should come up. One that everybody might know is TurboTax. H&R Block has its own online version, and TaxAct is a good one because everybody can file their federal return for free.
On the best and most helpful software
There are charitable deduction trackers like ItsDeductible. It works with TurboTax but you can also use it online even if you don't use TurboTax. If you have receipts throughout the year there's something called Shoeboxed. You actually send the company your receipts and they scan the documents for you and upload it. Then, you can then download it to your tax software or use it however you want.
On online identity theft
[Tax software developers] say they use bank-level security encryption. If you're comfortable with online banking, you can be comfortable filing your taxes online. If you find that you have trouble getting your refund because the IRS tells you somebody else took it, you should definitely contact the IRS right away.
On smartphone apps
There are apps to file 1040EZ — which is a very simple form — through TurboTax or H&R Block At Home. You photograph your W-2 form with your smartphone and it will import your information directly into your 1040EZ; it goes into your return and then you're able to file it directly from your smartphone or you can go online and do it.
Black and Klemski quickly learned to get over any scruples about wearing trousers to work. "You'd be climbing all over these pipes, and testing the welds in them," Black says, so skirts were impractical. "Then they had a mass spectrometer there, and you had to watch the dials go off, and you weren't supposed to say that word either. And the crazy thing is, I didn't ask. I mean, I didn't know where those pipes were going, I didn't know what was going through them ... I just knew that I had to find the leak and mark it."
She never asked what was in the pipes, "because they told me not to," Black says. "I'd come from a Catholic school where I minded the nuns, and from a family, did what my parents told me ... so then I did what the boss told me!"
Klemski and Black say the secrecy surrounding Oak Ridge didn't make them nervous. "But see, we didn't have all these things that you all have now," Black says. "We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have TVs. If we wanted to know the news, we went to the movies and we watched the newsreel, so it didn't bother me ... and if somebody was to ask you, 'what are you making out there in Oak Ridge,' you'd say '79 cents an hour,'" she laughs.
They only learned that they'd been processing uranium when the news of the Hiroshima bombing broke. "That was the first we heard," Klemski says. "At that time, the Knoxville News-Sentinel came out and it was five cents a copy, but that day, when the bomb was dropped, it was a dollar," Black adds.
"At first, we were really excited," she continues. "We thought, oh, we've done something to help win the war. It wasn't till after we saw the devastation — you know, we didn't like that, but we were glad that we had a part in bringing the war to an end." Klemski chimes in: "I certainly was happy that I was here, and that I was part of the war effort too."
That was the overriding sentiment at Oak Ridge, says author Kiernan. "This world that they were in, the world of early 1945, was not a world that knew what nuclear winter was, it was not a world that knew what a fallout shelter was," she says. "All they knew was the war, and the day the bomb dropped, all they knew was, this new superbomb has dropped, and it looks like the tide is turning for us."
"I was really upset, you know, about all the devastation, but there was nothing I could do about it," Klemski says. "They asked us to stay on, and they were going to do research on, you know, something to see if they could help do something for peacetime," Black adds. "And we thought that would be the end of all wars."
Read an excerpt of The Girls of Atomic City
Kenyans go to the polls to pick a new president Monday. The last election, in 2007, was followed by weeks of tribal violence in some cases orchestrated by politicians themselves. This time around, one of the presidential candidates is accused of war crimes and many are accused of land grabbing and corruption.
The XYZ Show, Kenya's version of The Daily Show, is making it all a laughing matter. The TV show uses puppets to poke relentless fun of Kenyan politicians. While fueled by the public's frustration, the show is also an example of the free speech the citizens have not always had.
In the mock XYZ Show presidential debate in February, which aired the night before the real presidential debate in Kenya, the puppet moderator asked pointed factual questions. The moderator prods the character of presidential candidate Raila Odinga about the doubling of interest rates during his time as prime minister.
But the puppet politicians never answer the questions asked. They just give speeches.
"I think you should not ask what Raila has done as prime minister of this country," the Odinga puppet replies. "But rather ask yourself what you will do for Raila when he becomes the president of this republic!"
Jon Stewart once described the writers' room at The Daily Show as "a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset."
In the writers' room of The XYZ Show, there is a lot more frustration than humor. The week of the presidential debate, producer Julian Macharia spent a few minutes ripping the real event.
"The questions from the public, for pete's sake, 'What will you do for our teachers?' I felt like saying, what? How about ask, 'What happened to the last three promises?' " he says.
Head writer Lily Wanjiku says the greed is "out of control."