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If you visited the Shanghai and Detroit auto shows in recent years, you could sense the auto world's center of gravity shifting from West to East.

Around the time of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, I covered a show in Detroit where GM was actually shedding brands. Displays for Saturn and Hummer, which GM tried and failed to sell to a Chinese company, were pushed to the side in Detroit's Cobo Center like leftovers at a yard sale.

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Politics has been especially gloomy lately, but NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving try their best to improve the mood in this week's podcast, offering analysis on the politicization of the Boston bombings, Max Baucus' potential successor and Senate primary battles in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Plus: Jeb Bush gets some 2016 advice.

The U.S. Congress — a body not exactly known for its swift feet — raced Friday to complete legislation to help travelers avoid delays at airports.

The House voted 361-41 to approve legislation that the Senate passed without objection late Thursday. The bill gives the Federal Aviation Administration more spending flexibility to cut its budget while avoiding furloughs of air traffic controllers.

President Obama plans to sign the legislation to help quickly end the disruptions tied to thin staffing of air traffic control towers.

Elected officials reacted with extraordinary speed to the growing industry and consumer anger over flight delays, especially in the Northeast. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association says it compiled FAA data showing that from Sunday through Wednesday of this week, air carriers experienced 8,804 flight delays, compared with 2,795 delays in the same Sunday-through-Wednesday period in April 2012.

Compounding Problems

It's never easy to precisely identify the cause of delays because often they result from some combination of weather, staffing levels and operational glitches. For example, delays caused by a thunderstorm can be exacerbated by a shortage of controllers to help get flights back on track after the storm ends. Exactly which of the resulting delays can be attributed to the storm alone or to the staffing levels can be a matter of debate.

But aviation experts say that without question, a big reason for the tripling in delays this week was the reduction in the number of on-duty controllers.

"Obviously, traffic patterns and weather patterns change day to day," said Doug Church, a spokesman for the controllers union. But the surge in delays reflects the reduction in controllers, he said.

"Not only is staffing causing delays in a large part, but also delays due to weather are worsened because of the [lack of] staffing," he said.

Church gave this example: At one point Thursday, O'Hare International Airport in Chicago was accepting 72 planes per hour, down from its normal 114, because of reduced staffing. But the airport was also operating under a cloud cover that prevented controllers from performing visual approaches to the airport.

He says that the delays increased because the control tower did not have enough staff to perform concurrent instrument-landing-system approaches.

Aviation consultant Michael Boyd, head of Boyd Group International, said that delays "absolutely" jumped because of the staffing levels and in fact "the delays were even worse than we know."

That's because flight delays cascade through the system, he said. For example, a flight may get held up in New York, and that delay gets attributed to the staffing troubles. But then that flight arrives late to its destination, causing delays at that airport, yet the subsequent delays won't get linked directly to the furloughs, Boyd said.

Airline Profits Threatened

All of that has left airline executives fuming because they already are struggling to keep their companies solvent, Boyd said. "They were worried they wouldn't make any money this year," he said.

The problem with delays began on Sunday when the FAA started decreasing the ranks of controllers to stay within the reduced budget that took effect March 1. That's the date when congressionally mandated, automatic spending cuts began kicking in under the so-called sequestration process.

The FAA said Congress left it with no choice but to furlough 47,000 workers for up to 11 unpaid days each between now and the fiscal year's end on Sept. 30. Those furloughs included nearly 15,000 flight controllers and other workers needed to keep flights moving on time.

With fewer controllers on duty, the FAA said it had to decrease the number of departures and landings, particularly during peak periods. Those "traffic management" changes led to thousands of flight delays, especially in regions with crowded airspace, like the New York City area.

Doubts Among Republicans

Many Republicans complained that the White House was having the FAA make cuts that inflicted the most pain on travelers to drum up opposition to budget cuts. For example, Republican Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said in a statement that the FAA had the power "to reduce costs elsewhere, such as contracts, travel, supplies, and consultants, or to apply furloughs in a manner that better protects the most critical air-traffic-control facilities."

Nicholas Calio, who heads the aviation industry trade group named Airlines For America, labeled the furloughs "unjust, unnecessary and completely irresponsible."

But FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a Senate committee earlier this month that the automatic spending cuts left the agency with no spending flexibility.

The new legislation allows the FAA to shift $253 million around among accounts to provide the spending flexibility to end the controller furloughs.

'A Temporary Band-Aid'

White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement that the legislation will help travelers, "but ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless across the board cuts."

The airlines cheered the congressional action. "The winners here are the customers who will be spared from lengthy and needless delays," Calio said.

But some Democrats objected, saying Congress should be ending the entire sequestration, not just giving the FAA a way to work around a portion of it. On the floor of the House, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said he opposed the bill. "We ought not to be mitigating the sequester's effect on just one segment, when children, the sick, our military and many other groups who will be impacted by this irresponsible policy are left unhelped."

NPR's Matt Stiles and Tamara Keith contributed to this report.

Since Egypt's revolution began, tensions among Egypt's Muslims and Christians have only increased. Earlier this month, it once again turned deadly. Tit-for-tat killings left three Muslims and at least six Christians dead.

That and other religious violence is prompting a public debate about religious identity in Egypt. One group of young Egyptians wants to remove religious labels from national ID cards.

'Where The Trouble Starts'

Aalam Wassef, one of those advocates, will gladly tell you he's a video artist, a musician and a publisher. When it comes to his religion, though, he says it's none of your business.

That's the motto of his new campaign, too. Wassef, along with two other Egyptians, is calling on others to cover up their religion on their national ID card and start identifying as human first. They're spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One of their videos plays images of a particularly bloody day for Christians last year, when the military — in power at the time — drove over Christian protesters, and state television called on "honorable" Muslims to come out and defend the troops from the Christians. Twenty-seven people were dead by the end of that day.

The lyrics sung to these images are just as chilling: "The racist republic of Egypt, the sectarian republic of Egypt. It's ingrained on your ID, and this is where the trouble starts."

"Egypt has a long history of sectarian violence and sectarian issues, which have always been covered up with this narrative of national unity," Wassef says. "And so it's a big lie, actually, because there's a lot of embedded discrimination in the society."

Institutionalized Differences

For decades in Egypt, Christians haven't had the same access to education and job opportunities. They are about 10 percent of Egypt's population and predominantly Coptic. They can't build churches without a presidential permit, and some Islamists have blamed them publicly for stirring violent protests against Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. A fiery ultra-orthodox preacher who supports the Muslim Brotherhood said this about Christians:

"I tell the church, yes, you are our brothers in this nation. But there are red lines. Our red line is the legitimacy of Dr. Morsi. Whoever sprays it with water, we will spray them with blood."

Clovers? Hearts? That's small fries, guys. It's time you met The Cat:

That 3-D creation is the work of Japanese latte artist Kazuki Yamamoto. The 26-year-old resident of Osaka creates ephemeral works of art in espresso and foam.

Dying on the job continues at a steady pace according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The fatal injury rate for American workers dropped slightly in 2011 — the most recent year with reported numbers — from 3.6 to 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

But 4,693 men, women and teenagers died at work. That's three more than the total number of lives lost on the job in 2010.

BLS says it's the third-lowest death toll since counting began in 1992. Worker safety groups find no comfort in the report, though. It comes as they and the Labor Department prepare to mark Workers Memorial Day on Sunday.

"These deaths were largely preventable," says Tom O'Connor, executive director of National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), an advocacy group formed by organized labor and workers safety advocates. "Simply by following proven safety practices and complying with [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, many of these more than 4,600 deaths could have been avoided."

COSH has just released its own report on workplace deaths, which focuses on specific industries and incidents.

O'Connor blames companies that "decry regulations and emphasize profits over safety."

The vast majority of deaths involve white men in private industry. Nearly 2,000 died in "transportation incidents," including traffic accidents. Close to 10 percent of the workers killed were victims of workplace homicides. Notoriously dangerous work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting took 566 lives — 24.9 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. The most deaths for any single industry were in construction, with 738. That was 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

The BLS report now lists fatalities among contractors and that's a first, according to a story by Jim Morris from the Center for Public Integrity. O'Connor told Morris that "the total death toll is far greater than what we see from a handful of catastrophic incidents. It seems that the public just sort of accepts that as a risk of going to work."

Workers Memorial Day events include the placement of empty and well-worn work boots to symbolize the lives lost at work, groups of spouses and children holding photos of loves ones, and readings of the names of victims.

Last week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that seeks tougher penalties for employers when willful and egregious behavior results in workers deaths. Senate Democrats introduced a similar measure last month.

"The fact remains that penalties for harming workers are often the cost of doing business for some employers," said Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "Congress needs to work together to increase these outdated penalties and give real teeth to the law so that workers and communities can remain safe while trying to make a living."

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., cited a recent NPR series, Buried in Grain, in announcing support for the Senate's version of PAWA.

"Whether working on a factory floor, on an oil rig, or in a grain bin, our workers and their families need to know that they will be safe and protected at the workplace," said Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

PAWA failed to gain enough support in Congress in the past in the face of industry opposition and congressional resistance to expanded government regulation.

Faced with sharp financial losses stemming from the Boston Marathon bombing attack and the days of forced closure that followed, businesses in the affected Copley Square area can apply for federal help, the Small Business Administration announced Friday.

The news comes as people continue to flock to Boylston Street, to pay their respects to victims of the April 15 attacks and to support stores and restaurants that were open for the first Saturday since the bombings and the ensuing manhunt.

"We're looking at millions of dollars in losses," Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association, tells The Boston Globe. "Some of it can be recouped by the passionate support we're receiving now. But there are some that, no matter what, won't be able to make it up."

The Small Business Administration plan would allow businesses to apply for long-term federal loans that come with low costs and an interest rate of 4 percent.

Today, Boylston Street's shops are open for business; the area reopened to pedestrians Wednesday.

As Rachel Gotbaum reports from Boston for our Newscast unit, one of the newly reopened stores is Marathon Sports. Its windows still showed signs of the attacks, but customers were there in force, manager Shane O'Hara tells Rachel.

"I've never opened up the door on a normal Saturday and had probably 15-20 people walk in, and also saying thank you," he said, his voice beginning to crack with emotion, "and giving me flowers and stuff."

Prior to the SBA announcement, some business owners in the Copley Square area had found themselves in the odd position of hoping the bombing attack would not be officially deemed an act of terrorism.

As WBUR's Curt Nickish reported Friday, that's because not all store owners have insurance policies that cover losses associated with a terrorist attack.

Rescue workers are still hoping to find survivors from the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that has killed more than 300 people and left hundreds missing.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of the missing have clashed with police, blaming authorities for the catastrophe at Rana Plaza in Savar, an industrial suburb of the capital, Dhaka.

"Some people are still alive under the rubble and we are hoping to rescue them," deputy fire services director Mizanur Rahman told Reuters.

The news agency quoted a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as saying that she had ordered the arrest of the owners of the building and of the five factories that occupied it.

According to Army spokesman Shahinur Islam, the death toll had reached 304 and H. T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister, said it could exceed 350, Reuters said.

Speaking to NPR, Anbarasan Ethirajan, a Bangladesh-based reporter for the BBC, says rescuers have been using "cranes, diggers and even bare hands."

The factory complex, which reportedly supplies major retailers in the United States and Europe, showed signs that something was wrong the day before the structure suddenly crashed to the ground. Ethirajan says workers had reported cracks in the walls and floor.

Survivors and officials told Ethirajan that when the owner of the building was informed, "he said 'no need to worry about the safety,' [that] they can go back to work on the next day."

One of the garment workers who survived the collapse told Ethirajan that they were told Tuesday "if they didn't go back to work, they might lose their wages."

But employees at a bank on the first floor did not report for work Wednesday because they feared for their safety, he said.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas are protesting over the collapse and poor safety standards, according to the AP.

Garment makers in the building include at least two that claim to supply Western retail outlets.

The Associated Press reports:

"Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them. Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production."

Sectarian tensions are fueling violence and protests in Iraq, where more than 170 people have been killed since Tuesday, when government forces clashed with Sunni Muslim protesters at a demonstration camp in Hawija, near Kirkuk.

That incident left at least 23 dead, outraged Iraq's Sunni minority, and stoked fears among some Iraqis that their country is heading for a new civil war. Several deadly attacks have been staged on Iraqi soldiers and police this week.

"Everybody has the feeling that Iraq is becoming a new Syria," Mosul businessman Talal Younis, 55, told the AP Wednesday. "We are heading into the unknown. ... I think that civil war is making a comeback."

On Friday, Sunni protesters in Anbar Province announced that they will form their own military force, to be called the Army of Pride and Dignity — named for Pride and Dignity Square, in Anbar's capital of Ramadi, Reuters reports.

In Ramadi Friday, journalist Omar al-Saleh of Al Jazeera was present for a sermon announcing the army's formation. He describes a religious leader asking a crowd of tens of thousands, "Do you agree to sacrifice yourselves and defending your honor?"

With violence showing no signs of abating, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for peace in a speech on Iraqi TV, after 10 Iraqi military and militia members were killed in two separate attacks Saturday.

"Sectarianism is evil, and the wind of sectarianism does not need a license to cross from a country to another, because if it begins in a place it will move to another place," Maliki said, in remarks widely interpreted as implying that he believes the latest troubles have their roots in Syria.

U.N. special representative to Iraq Martin Kobler, who has condemned the violence at Hawija, said Thursday that civilian and government leaders must work together to calm Iraq's fraying society.

"I call on the conscience of all religious and political leaders not to let anger win over peace," he said, "and to use their wisdom, because the country is at a crossroads."

The 2012 election was the most expensive in history, but there remain some gaping holes in our knowledge about who paid for what. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to add more transparency in future elections, but it won't happen without a fight.

The SEC proposal would require publicly traded companies to disclose all of their political contributions. And that would force companies to decide, in effect, if being linked to a candidate or partisan position is worth the impact political advocacy might have on its bottom line. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is vowing to fight the effort to tighten disclosure rules.

SuperPACs And 'Social Welfare' Groups

The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations to give unlimited contributions to superPACs, but relatively few public companies have done so, perhaps because political action committees must disclose their donors.

Watchdog groups think some public corporations have contributed to tax-exempt groups that fall under the 501(c) section of the tax code. These groups can engage in political activity — as long as they say their primary purpose is educational — and do not have to disclose their donors. Yet these "social welfare" groups include big political players, ranging from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to President Obama's Organizing for Action.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Crossroads GPS spent more than $70 million in 2012. Organizing for Action, which grew out of Obama's 2012 campaign, was formed after the election cycle. Its founders have pledged to refuse corporate contributions and disclose a list of donors.

Most corporations also belong to 501(c)(6) organizations, like trade associations and chambers of commerce, which can engage in political activity. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $35.7 million in 2012 — and it's now leading the charge against the SEC's petition. Altogether, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates these tax-exempt groups spent at least $300 million in the 2012 election cycle.

If the SEC does propose the new rule — an action it could take as early as next week — it would start a process that would include a comment period and public meetings. Enacting the rule also could spur legal action from opponents.

Voluntary Transparency

A study of the 2012 election cycle shows that many companies already are making at least some donations public, perhaps due to increased pressure from activists and shareholders.

The Center for Political Accountability has been tracking voluntary disclosure by corporations since 2003. For the past two years, the group has compiled a ranking called the CPA-Zicklin Index, which found that 58 percent of the top 200 companies in the S&P 500 voluntarily disclosed some information about their political spending, and 85 percent of companies studied over two years improved their scores for political disclosure and accountability.

Center for Political Accountability President Bruce Freed said that disclosure and accountability policies have become mainstream corporate governance practices. "When we did the index in 2011, we were really, frankly, quite surprised at the results — really pleasantly surprised — when we found that there were companies that were adopting disclosure and accountability policies without having been engaged by investors," Freed said. "They were doing it on their own."

However, the group also found that 59 percent of companies did not disclose any information about payments to trade associations, and 75 percent did not disclose any contributions to tax-exempt social welfare groups.

The Center for Responsive Politics has reported that some companies, including PepsiCo and Koch Industries, have lobbied against the SEC proposal during the first quarter of 2013. But Freed has found that other corporate representatives are frustrated by the varied patchwork of voluntary disclosures.

"I know from discussions with companies that there are a growing number of companies that will say privately, yes, we would like to see a rule because they see uniformity as in their self-interest," Freed said. "It means that companies would be operating on a level playing field here."

Kara Brandeisky is an intern on NPR's Washington Desk.

The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated Friday morning.

That's modest growth, and was below the 3.2 percent pace economists had expected to hear about. But growth was up substantially from fourth-quarter 2012, when the economy expanded at a scant 0.4 percent annual rate.

The agency will issue revised estimates of first-quarter growth in each of the next two months, so the figure could change. The agency initially reported, for example, that gross domestic product shrank at a 0.1 percent annual rate in fourth-quarter 2012. Then it said there was 0.1 percent growth. On its third swing at the figures, it came up with the 0.4 percent estimate. The figures shift as more information comes in.

We'll have more from the report and reactions to it as the morning continues.

Update at 8:55 a.m. ET. Not Much Real Change?

According to MarketWatch:

"The acceleration in growth in the early stages of the year stood in sharp contrast to the paltry 0.4% increase in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012. Yet the underlying strength of demand for U.S.-made goods and services was actually weaker in the first quarter. So-called real final sales rose just 1.5% — matching the smallest increase in two years.

"The softness in demand suggests little change in the overall pace of U.S. growth once unusual factors are stripped out. The economy has been expanding at about a 2% clip for the past two years."

Rescue workers are still hoping to find survivors from the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that has killed more than 300 people and left hundreds missing.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of the missing have clashed with police, blaming authorities for the catastrophe at Rana Plaza in Savar, an industrial suburb of the capital, Dhaka.

"Some people are still alive under the rubble and we are hoping to rescue them," deputy fire services director Mizanur Rahman told Reuters.

The news agency quoted a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as saying that she had ordered the arrest of the owners of the building and of the five factories that occupied it.

According to Army spokesman Shahinur Islam, the death toll had reached 304 and H. T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister, said it could exceed 350, Reuters said.

Speaking to NPR, Anbarasan Ethirajan, a Bangladesh-based reporter for the BBC, says rescuers have been using "cranes, diggers and even bare hands."

The factory complex, which reportedly supplies major retailers in the United States and Europe, showed signs that something was wrong the day before the structure suddenly crashed to the ground. Ethirajan says workers had reported cracks in the walls and floor.

Survivors and officials told Ethirajan that when the owner of the building was informed, "he said 'no need to worry about the safety,' [that] they can go back to work on the next day."

One of the garment workers who survived the collapse told Ethirajan that they were told Tuesday "if they didn't go back to work, they might lose their wages."

But employees at a bank on the first floor did not report for work Wednesday because they feared for their safety, he said.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas are protesting over the collapse and poor safety standards, according to the AP.

Garment makers in the building include at least two that claim to supply Western retail outlets.

The Associated Press reports:

"Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them. Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production."

The Tribune Co., emerging from bankruptcy and looking to reshape itself, is now considering the sale of all its newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and five other regional newspapers. It's still very early in the sale process; although the newspaper unit has been valued at $623 million, significant debts are also attached, and Tribune has signaled that it reserves the right not to sell if there isn't a worthy bid.

Possible buyers of those papers include David and Charles Koch, billionaire brothers from Kansas. The Koch brothers' vast holdings include huge investments in energy, manufacturing and commodities, but they're known these days for their politics.

Matt Welch is the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine. David Koch sits on its parent foundation, though Welch says he thinks they've never met. "Charles and David Koch have been for the last 40, 40-plus years the most significant backers of libertarian-based organizations and philanthropies in the country," Welch says. "It's not even close. It is Charles and David Koch 100, everybody else 2."

David Koch — the younger one, at 72 — ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party's ticket in 1980. More recently, the Koch brothers raised millions to elect Tea Party candidates and other Republicans, and raised even more for ads opposing President Obama's re-election last year. As a result, they have become a target of liberals like Rachel Maddow, who said on her MSNBC show: "You really can't get away from the Koch brothers. They're becoming way too ubiquitous. Their names pop up in every scummy scandal, one after another."

Whether one thinks Maddow was being fair or not, the Koch brothers are dogged by their strong political identity. Welch says that identity could be a handicap in the Tribune newsrooms. In a former life, he was an assistant editorial pages editor at the Los Angeles Times, the largest Tribune paper. He says the Kochs would face a challenge: "It would be such a culture clash, inevitably, between them and the newsroom there that it would be kind of open conflict there for a long time," Welch says. "I would have a hard time imagining how they calm that down in a productive way."

Two people with close ties to Tribune confirm the brothers' fancy has now turned to the company's newspapers, which can be obtained for far less money than they would have cost a decade ago. James O'Shea became editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times after a long career at the Chicago Tribune, where he rose to become managing editor. He is also author of The Deal from Hell, a book about real estate mogul Sam Zell's disastrous $8.2 billion acquisition of the Tribune Co. Zell loaded the company with roughly $13 billion of debt, and ultimately landed it in bankruptcy during the recession.

O'Shea says readers and even some journalists in those cities, burnt out after years of ownership tumult, newsroom strife and bankruptcy, may prove open to a bid by the Koch brothers. "I think with the Koch brothers, people will probably look at it and say, 'Well, OK. Here are people with a lot of money, and maybe they'll invest in the place,' " O'Shea says. " 'And maybe they'll have ideas about how we diversify our revenue base and get away from this heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on advertising.' "

Yet O'Shea says journalists at Tribune papers initially said much the same about Zell. And O'Shea says he wonders whether the Kochs really view the papers as a financial investment — or a political one. "I don't think anybody's going to object too much if the Koch brothers buy the Chicago Tribune and [have] a libertarian, right-wing editorial page," O'Shea says.

Changes to the editorial page might not spark objections, but O'Shea and other journalists question how the brothers would treat news coverage. The Koch brothers set up the site Kochfacts.com to take on press coverage they don't like, and several reporters told NPR they had felt the sting of coordinated campaigns to harass them. Take David Sassoon, the publisher of Inside Climate News, a small, not-for-profit news outfit that just won a Pulitzer Prize. A few years ago, it published a series of pieces on the possible winners and losers were the Keystone XL pipeline to be built from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.

"We wrote a story saying [the Koch brothers are] positioned to be winners if the pipeline is built, because it will lead to higher prices for tar sands and a boom in general that will lift all boats," says Sassoon.

The Kochs pressured the Reuters news agency to stop distributing articles from Sassoon's site, though they identified no specific mistakes to correct. The brothers took out ads against Sassoon on Facebook and Google, too. "They used my photograph in these ads," Sassoon says. "They used my name in these ads. And really came after us in a way that I have really never experienced before."

A spokeswoman for the Kochs, Missy Cohlmia, says they "respect the independence" of the Tribune papers, though she did not confirm the brothers' interest in buying them.

The Koch brothers are not the only magnates with an eye on the Tribune's publications. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is particularly interested in the L.A. Times, and his executives are exploring the implications of making a bid. Federal regulations bar cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market, and News Corp. already owns two TV stations in Los Angeles. That's a challenge, but not an impossible one: The company has previously obtained waivers to exempt their stations and newspapers in New York City from those same cross-ownership regulations.

Meanwhile, Doug Manchester and Aaron Kushner, the new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Orange County Register, respectively, have also expressed an interest in acquiring the L.A. Times. So has the Los Angeles billionaire and developer Eli Broad, a political liberal who has been a major benefactor in Southern California. And billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has snatched up many smaller newspapers, has indicated he is intrigued by the prospect of buying Tribune's Allentown, Pa., Morning Call.

But the Kochs may have an advantage in making a bid: They could easily afford to acquire the entire newspaper division, even given the accompanying debts, estimated at more than $1 billion. Tribune's current owners would prefer to sell the papers as a single unit. And while other potential suitors have stronger ties to journalism, money might speak louder than experience. The Tribune Co.'s primary current owners are two investment funds and a bank; none has any emotional investment in these historic newspaper titles being held by people with a journalistic background.

If the Koch brothers were to buy the Tribune papers and put their stamp on the editorial pages, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented. Several papers in the Tribune family have histories of conservative-leaning political engagement. Perhaps most notably, before 1960, the family that owned the L.A. Times propelled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to office. Reason magazine's Matt Welch asks, why shouldn't the Kochs? "I mean, the L.A. Times were the Republican kingmakers of California — and therefore at least of the country — for nearly a century," Welch says. "It's incredible, that history."

Tribune is to send out formal documents to potential buyers next month.

Dying on the job continues at a steady pace according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The fatal injury rate for American workers dropped slightly in 2011 — the most recent year with reported numbers — from 3.6 to 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

But 4,693 men, women and teenagers died at work. That's three more than the total number of lives lost on the job in 2010.

BLS says it's the third-lowest death toll since counting began in 1992. Worker safety groups find no comfort in the report, though. It comes as they and the Labor Department prepare to mark Workers Memorial Day on Sunday.

"These deaths were largely preventable," says Tom O'Connor, executive director of National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), an advocacy group formed by organized labor and workers safety advocates. "Simply by following proven safety practices and complying with [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, many of these more than 4,600 deaths could have been avoided."

COSH has just released its own report on workplace deaths, which focuses on specific industries and incidents.

O'Connor blames companies that "decry regulations and emphasize profits over safety."

The vast majority of deaths involve white men in private industry. Nearly 2,000 died in "transportation incidents," including traffic accidents. Close to 10 percent of the workers killed were victims of workplace homicides. Notoriously dangerous work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting took 566 lives — 24.9 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. The most deaths for any single industry were in construction, with 738. That was 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

The BLS report now lists fatalities among contractors and that's a first, according to a story by Jim Morris from the Center for Public Integrity. O'Connor told Morris that "the total death toll is far greater than what we see from a handful of catastrophic incidents. It seems that the public just sort of accepts that as a risk of going to work."

Workers Memorial Day events include the placement of empty and well-worn work boots to symbolize the lives lost at work, groups of spouses and children holding photos of loves ones, and readings of the names of victims.

Last week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that seeks tougher penalties for employers when willful and egregious behavior results in workers deaths. Senate Democrats introduced a similar measure last month.

"The fact remains that penalties for harming workers are often the cost of doing business for some employers," said Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "Congress needs to work together to increase these outdated penalties and give real teeth to the law so that workers and communities can remain safe while trying to make a living."

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., cited a recent NPR series, Buried in Grain, in announcing support for the Senate's version of PAWA.

"Whether working on a factory floor, on an oil rig, or in a grain bin, our workers and their families need to know that they will be safe and protected at the workplace," said Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

PAWA failed to gain enough support in Congress in the past in the face of industry opposition and congressional resistance to expanded government regulation.

President Obama has been hosting a series of visitors from the Middle East, and all of them have been urging the U.S. to get more involved in Syria.

They have included the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, whose country has been arming rebel forces in Syria. Obama wants to see such aid go to moderates — but that requires more cooperation with partners like Qatar. Problem is, they don't always see eye to eye.

Qatar was already an important U.S. partner in the region when the Arab uprisings began, and the small, wealthy Gulf nation saw a new opportunity to gain influence when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, says Tamara Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

"One of the consequences of the fall of Mubarak is that the U.S. lost in a way its central diplomatic partner in the Arab world," Wittes says. "In many ways, the Qataris stepped up to play that role, in the Arab League, for example, on Libya and then on Syria."

Impression Of Qatar 'Taking Sides'

This was a time when the U.S. wanted others to take the lead. But there were risks in that approach, says Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of the center's Gulf and Energy Policy Program.

Enlarge image i

Dying on the job continues at a steady pace according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The fatal injury rate for American workers dropped slightly in 2011 — the most recent year with reported numbers — from 3.6 to 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

But 4,693 men, women and teenagers died at work. That's three more than the total number of lives lost on the job in 2010.

BLS says it's the third-lowest death toll since counting began in 1992. Worker safety groups find no comfort in the report, though. It comes as they and the Labor Department prepare to mark Workers Memorial Day on Sunday.

"These deaths were largely preventable," says Tom O'Connor, executive director of National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), an advocacy group formed by organized labor and workers safety advocates. "Simply by following proven safety practices and complying with [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, many of these more than 4,600 deaths could have been avoided."

COSH has just released its own report on workplace deaths, which focuses on specific industries and incidents.

O'Connor blames companies that "decry regulations and emphasize profits over safety."

The vast majority of deaths involve white men in private industry. Nearly 2,000 died in "transportation incidents," including traffic accidents. Close to 10 percent of the workers killed were victims of workplace homicides. Notoriously dangerous work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting took 566 lives — 24.9 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. The most deaths for any single industry were in construction, with 738. That was 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

The BLS report now lists fatalities among contractors and that's a first, according to a story by Jim Morris from the Center for Public Integrity. O'Connor told Morris that "the total death toll is far greater than what we see from a handful of catastrophic incidents. It seems that the public just sort of accepts that as a risk of going to work."

Workers Memorial Day events include the placement of empty and well-worn work boots to symbolize the lives lost at work, groups of spouses and children holding photos of loves ones, and readings of the names of victims.

Last week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that seeks tougher penalties for employers when willful and egregious behavior results in workers deaths. Senate Democrats introduced a similar measure last month.

"The fact remains that penalties for harming workers are often the cost of doing business for some employers," said Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "Congress needs to work together to increase these outdated penalties and give real teeth to the law so that workers and communities can remain safe while trying to make a living."

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., cited a recent NPR series, Buried in Grain, in announcing support for the Senate's version of PAWA.

"Whether working on a factory floor, on an oil rig, or in a grain bin, our workers and their families need to know that they will be safe and protected at the workplace," said Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

PAWA failed to gain enough support in Congress in the past in the face of industry opposition and congressional resistance to expanded government regulation.

South Korea has ordered the withdrawal of its workers from a jointly run industrial zone in North Korea, in a further sign of how relations have gone from bad to worse between the two countries in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang blocked access to the Kaesong zone, which is located just inside North Korea and was established in 2002 as a symbol of rapprochement between the rival neighbors. In the past, even as tensions flared, Kaesong – and important source of hard currency for the North and cheap labor for the South — had kept operating.

On Friday, however, Seoul's Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said that the approximately 175 South Korean workers still in the zone after the North's blockade would be coming home after Pyongyang this week declined to resume bilateral talks.

"Because our nationals remaining in the Kaesong industrial zone are experiencing greater difficulties due to the North's unjust actions, the government has come to the unavoidable decision to bring back all remaining personnel in order to protect their safety," Ryoo said.

"North Korea must guarantee the safe return of our personnel and fully protect the assets of the companies with investment in Kaesong," he added without giving a timeframe for the withdrawal.

About 120 South Korean companies set up shop in the complex, which employed 53,000 North Koreans, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The endeavor was meant to be a "mutually beneficial arrangement," providing South Korean companies with cheap northern labor and North Koreans with much needed income. North Korea earned about $80 million from the complex last year, which produced $470 million worth of goods.

The Monitor reported earlier this month that five days after Kaesong was closed to new workers from the South, that it was already the longest interruption of "in-and-out traffic" at the complex since it opened. The state-run Korean Central News Agency said at the time that South Korea was "trying to 'turn the zone [Kaesong] into a hotbed of war'."

Rescue workers are still hoping to find survivors from the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that has killed nearly 300 people and left hundreds missing.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of the missing have clashed with police, blaming authorities for the catastrophe at Rana Plaza in Savar, an industrial suburb of the capital, Dhaka.

Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing rescue operations, told The Associated Press that the death toll at the building that collapsed Wednesday had reached 290, and that 2,200 people have been rescued. The AP says the garment manufacturers' group said the factories in the building employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were inside when it collapsed.

Speaking to NPR, Anbarasan Ethirajan, a Bangladesh-based reporter for the BBC, says rescuers have been using "cranes, diggers and even bare hands."

The factory complex, which reportedly supplies major retailers in the United States and Europe, showed signs that something was wrong the day before the structure suddenly crashed to the ground. Ethirajan says workers had reported cracks in the walls and floor.

Survivors and officials told Ethirajan that when the owner of the building was informed, "he said 'no need to worry about the safety,' [that] they can go back to work on the next day."

One of the garment workers who survived the collapse told Ethirajan that they were told Tuesday "if they didn't go back to work, they might lose their wages."

But employees at a bank on the first floor did not report for work Wednesday because they feared for their safety, he said.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas are protesting over the collapse and poor safety standards, according to the AP.

Garment makers in the building include at least two that claim to supply Western retail outlets.

The AP reports:

"Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them. Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production."

The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated Friday morning.

That's modest growth, and was below the 3.2 percent pace economists had expected to hear about. But growth was up substantially from fourth-quarter 2012, when the economy expanded at a scant 0.4 percent annual rate.

The agency will issue revised estimates of first-quarter growth in each of the next two months, so the figure could change. The agency initially reported, for example, that gross domestic product shrank at a 0.1 percent annual rate in fourth-quarter 2012. Then it said there was 0.1 percent growth. On its third swing at the figures, it came up with the 0.4 percent estimate. The figures shift as more information comes in.

We'll have more from the report and reactions to it as the morning continues.

Update at 8:55 a.m. ET. Not Much Real Change?

According to MarketWatch:

"The acceleration in growth in the early stages of the year stood in sharp contrast to the paltry 0.4% increase in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012. Yet the underlying strength of demand for U.S.-made goods and services was actually weaker in the first quarter. So-called real final sales rose just 1.5% — matching the smallest increase in two years.

"The softness in demand suggests little change in the overall pace of U.S. growth once unusual factors are stripped out. The economy has been expanding at about a 2% clip for the past two years."

Wolfe, Cockrell and the rest of the team got a couple of Nexus smartphones from Amazon. They added extras, like plus-sized batteries and a powerful transmitter. They put it all in a metal case about the size of a Kleenex box. But the phones were still ordinary smartphones; they still had games on them. "We played around with Angry Birds on the ground," Wolfe says.

The PhoneSats hitched a ride on the very first flight of a commercial rocket called Antares, which NASA hopes will soon be resupplying the International Space Station.

"Within the first orbit after being released from the launch vehicle, we started receiving signals," Cockrell says. The signals from the satellites, which are named "Alexander," "Graham" and "Bell," are actually picked up by ham radio operators all over the world, who send them to the team at NASA Ames. The team is now in the process of using the small data packets to piece together photos taken by the different PhoneSats' cameras.

The achievement could mark big changes in the satellite business. Peter Platzer, CEO of NanoSatisfi, a startup company that's about to launch a small satellite into space using money raised on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, sees a world in which satellites aren't owned solely by powerful corporations and governments.

“ I think whenever you create this flexible platform that you let people program and decide what their own use is, it becomes really, really hard to predict where the combined genius of mankind will lead that platform.

Consumer advocates call them "debt" traps. The banks that offer them call them direct-deposit advances and describe them as available funds for short-term emergencies.

But the cash advances have many of the negative characteristics of payday loans. And on Thursday, U.S. bank regulators took a step toward protecting consumers from the risks they pose. The regulators proposed standards for "deposit-advance products."

Annette Smith, 69, lives in Rocklin, Calif., and knows firsthand how risky direct-deposit advances are. She got one in December 2007 from her local Wells Fargo bank. She had intended to get a small loan to repair her truck.

"And so I asked in the lobby, you know, my banker, 'Could I possibly make a small loan.' And he said, 'We don't make any loans below $5,000,' " Smith says.

But he told her she could get a $500 advance that will be automatically paid off when her next direct-deposit came in. So Smith says she went home, got on the bank's website, clicked around and automatically had $500 in her account.

The loan had to be paid back in full when her next Social Security check was deposited. So, on the third of the month, when her Social Security check came in for a little over $1,200, the bank took back the $500, plus a $50 fee. That left her with just $700 to pay her rent, her phone and food bills. She just couldn't make it stretch.

"You just don't make it through. And so you have to borrow again, and again and again," Smith says.

'Significant Concerns'

Andrea Luquetta, a consumer advocate, says Smith has taken a new $500 advance almost every month since December 2007.

"And in that time, Wells [Fargo] has given her 62 direct-deposit advances and made $2,952.50 in fees, just by transferring to her $500 one day, taking it out of her Social Security check when it comes, and then giving it back to her because she can't afford to make ends meet in the next month," Luquetta explains.

Luquetta works with the California Reinvestment Coalition, which promotes equitable access to financial services for low- and moderate-income people.

Wells Fargo declined to comment on Annette Smith's situation or on the standards for direct-deposit loans proposed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency.

The Two-Way

If You're Hiding It From Your Wife, That Payday Loan's 'Gotta Be Bad News'

Is there any reason to be a professional public hero anymore when you can be a professional public dummy?

Let's back up. Specifically, let's back up to the summer of 2012, when swimmer Ryan Lochte won five Olympic medals to bring his lifetime total to 11. Prior to that time, Lochte had endorsement deals and was already making millions of dollars from them, but as Forbes explained, he wanted to use the Olympics to get out of Michael Phelps' shadow. His agent salivated about what would follow if he "[blew] Michael Phelps out of the water." And while he didn't do that, he did beat Phelps in their first head-to-head competition, in which Phelps didn't medal, and he did go on to achieve the "household name" status he (and his people) apparently wanted.

Fast forward to this week, when E! debuted the half-hour reality show What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, which trades on the joke (beginning with its very title) that nobody in their right mind would follow Ryan Lochte's advice about anything.

It is a show that presents Lochte as a professional public dummy. The way he looks on this show is sort of the way the embarrassing Facebook pictures from someone's past would look if they all got together and came to life in the present. His mouth is saying "Jeah!", but his eyes are saying, "Whuh?"

Now, do not misunderstand: that doesn't make Ryan Lochte an actual dummy. It may make him incredibly savvy. Professional public dummies are not necessarily dummies in fact, any more than professional public heroes — let's say Lance Armstrong, for instance — are heroes in fact. Let's posit several things: Lochte loves his family, he's incredibly dedicated to swimming, he doesn't seem to be hurting anyone, and he seems to be happy and healthy.

Thanks, mom.

On the day her son George's presidential library is being dedicated in Dallas, former first lady Barbara Bush has told NBC's Today show that "we've had enough Bushes" when it comes to seeing the presidency.

She was asked about the possibility of another son, former GOP Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, running for the White House, in 2016.

Today adds that:

"She still called her son [Jeb] 'by far the best-qualified man,' but went on to say she thought there were many worthy candidates."

Imagine having to deliver a tribute for someone you've openly excoriated for years.

That was essentially the task President Obama had before him Thursday in his speech at the dedication ceremony for former President George W. Bush's Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas.

Obama has used the 43rd president as a foil for more than a decade: from the anti-Iraq War speech he gave in Chicago in 2002 as a state senator; to his 2008 presidential campaign, in which he argued the GOP presidential nominee would extend Bush's controversial policies; to four years later, when he warned that another nominee would return the nation to the Bush era.

And many of Obama's supporters, who agreed with his negative interpretation of Bush's presidency, would have it no other way.

So there Obama was Thursday, forced by the demands of the occasion to utter words both respectful to his predecessor yet true to his many past criticisms of same. Not the easiest task, but that's what speechwriters are for.

Obama confronted the difficulty by suggesting that, like all presidents, Bush made missteps. The president didn't get specific.

Obama included the mention of "mistakes" in a section of his speech in which he expressed sympathy with Bush:

"The first thing I found in that desk the day I took office was a letter from George, and one that demonstrated his compassion and generosity. For he knew that I would come to learn what he had learned — that being president, above all, is a humbling job. There are moments where you make mistakes. There are times where you wish you could turn back the clock. And what I know is true about President Bush, and I hope my successor will say about me, is that we love this country and we do our best."

Clovers? Hearts? That's small fries, guys. It's time you met The Cat:

Yamamoto's art makes you regret the need to consume the canvas.

Yamamoto has made a name for himself on Twitter, where more than 82,000 followers receive daily tweets with images of his latest creations. But he's hardly the only latte artist to emerge from Japan.

Tough economic times and growing poverty in much of Europe are reviving a humble tradition that began some one hundred years ago in the Italian city of Naples. It's called caff sospeso — "suspended coffee": A customer pays in advance for a person who cannot afford a cup of coffee.

The Neapolitian writer Luciano de Crescenzo used the tradition as the title of one of his books, Caff sospeso: saggezza quotidiana in piccoli sorsi ("Suspended coffee, daily wisdom in small sips").

"It was a beautiful custom," he recalls. "When a person who had a break of good luck entered a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee, he didn't pay just for one, but for two cups, allowing someone less fortunate who entered later to have a cup of coffee for free."

The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the caf and asked, "is there anything suspended?" the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee ... for free.

It's an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn't show off, and the recipient doesn't have to show gratitude.

The writer says the tradition is part of the city's philosophy of life. "In other words, it was a cup of coffee," de Crescenzo says, "offered to the rest of humankind." It was a time, he adds, when there were more customers who were poor than those who were well-off.

It's fitting that the tradition started in Naples, a city that prides itself on having the best coffee in Italy. And in a country where the first coffee house in Europe opened in 1683 (in Venice), that is no small claim.

Before the likes of Gaggia and Cimbali started producing the modern commercial espresso machines, Italians made coffee at home on the stovetop with a coffee maker known as a Napoletana.

Naples and coffee are inseparable, but the caff sospeso tradition waned as Italy entered the boom years of post-war reconstruction and La Dolce Vita. For decades, the custom was confined mainly to the Christmas season.

Now, it's made a comeback. Two years ago, with the eurozone crisis already raging, unemployment rising and small businesses closing on a daily basis, more and more Italians could no longer afford the national beverage — an espresso or a cappuccino. (According to the International Coffee Organization, which represents 44 coffee exporting countries, Italian per capita annual consumption of coffee has dropped to 5.6 kilograms, the lowest level in the last six years.)

Then someone remembered the old Neapolitan custom. So several non-governmental organizations got together and — with the support of Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris –Dec.10 was formally declared "Suspended Coffee Day."

The practice is now spreading to other crisis-ravaged parts of Europe.

In Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest country, where several desperate people have set themselves on fire in recent months, more than 150 cafes have joined an initiative modeled on the Neapolitan "suspended coffee" tradition.

In crisis-wracked Spain, a young man from Barcelona, Gonzalo Sapina, in a few short weeks started a network called Cafes Pendientes ("pending coffees") and promoted the initiative among numerous coffee shops.

In France, several cafs now carry the logo "caf en attente" ("waiting coffee").

And there is even a site that lists establishments that have joined the "suspended coffee" initiative — the countries range from the U.K. and Ireland and Hungary to Australia and Canada.

The prepaid cup of coffee has become a symbol of grass-roots social solidarity at a time of mounting poverty in what, until recently, were affluent Western societies.

But now, back to Naples, where coffee is not a luxury but is considered, more or less, a basic human right.

And the variety is vast: You can order an espresso "ristretto" ("tightened", i.e. stronger); or an espresso "macchiato" ("stained", i.e. with a little milk); or an espresso "corretto" ("corrected", i.e. with a shot of grappa, cognac or sambuca).

There's only one iron-clad rule: Cappuccino — which takes its name from the white and beige colors of the Capuchin friars' habits — is exclusively a breakfast beverage, and must never, never be consumed after 11 a.m. (OK, let's say noon).

The U.S. Senate may vote this week on the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would allow states to collect sales tax from more online retailers. And as the political and retail landscape has shifted from the last time around, the Senate is expected to approve the measure.

The proposal to require online sellers to collect out-of-state sales tax has been kicked around for many years. For a decade, Amazon was a fierce opponent.

And Amazon had U.S. Supreme Court precedent on its side. In 1992 — years before online retail took off — the high court said that out-of-state businesses do not need to collect and remit sales tax where they do not have a physical presence.

But much has changed.

For one thing, empty state and local government coffers have politicians hunting for new tax revenue.

And in retail, the old lines that divide online sellers from brick-and-mortar shops have blurred. Just about every shop, no matter its size, has an online presence.

Conversely, Amazon itself has built a network of distribution centers around the country, meaning it has a physical presence in many states and must therefore collect sales tax.

'Omnichannel' Shopping

The industry calls this convergence between online and offline sellers "omnichannel" shopping.

Michael Kercheval, CEO of the International Council of Shopping Centers and a member of a coalition supporting the new tax bill, says this change has transformed the cast of who supports this new tax.

More From NPR

Planet Money

Most People Are Supposed To Pay This Tax. Almost Nobody Actually Pays It.

General Motors has been the American car company in China. Even when GM was in bankruptcy, the Chinese continued to view Buick as a high-status, luxury brand.

But now Ford, an also-ran in the market for years, is making a push to change all that. Last year, Ford's sales were up more than 30 percent in China, and the Ford Focus was the best-selling car in both the world and China.

Li Ning, a 32-year-old from Shanghai, bought a Focus a couple of years back and loves it.

"The biggest impression is it's easy to drive," said Li, as he strolled around Shanghai's sprawling auto show this week. "I like the cars that look muscular and that have some sense of American style."

Wearing glasses, a gray hoodie and jeans, Li scoured Ford's exhibit of 23 models, snapping pictures along the way. Li now has a 19-month-old child, and he's looking to trade up to an SUV.

"When it comes to car safety, I have more confidence in Ford than other brands," he said.

Stylish Image Boosts Sales

In China's hypercompetitive market — where there is little brand loyalty — developing new customers and keeping old ones like Li is critical. To that end, Ford plans to launch 10 new vehicles in China and open five new factories here by 2015.

"I think they're doing very well," says Yang Jian, managing editor of Automotive News China, a newsletter that is part of the Detroit-based Automotive News. "The volumes are growing so fast, and I think the brand perception is getting better."

After a slow start in China, Yang says, Ford is now developing an image as a trendy, stylish car for young people like Li.

Despite Ford's recent gains, though, the company still has a long way to go.
Ford is No. 12 in auto sales in China, with about 3 percent of the market, according to LMC Automotive, a U.K.-based market forecasting firm.

Enlarge image i

General Motors has been the American car company in China. Even when GM was in bankruptcy, the Chinese continued to view Buick as a high-status, luxury brand.

But now Ford, an also-ran in the market for years, is making a push to change all that. Last year, Ford's sales were up more than 30 percent in China, and the Ford Focus was the best-selling car in both the world and China.

Li Ning, a 32-year-old from Shanghai, bought a Focus a couple of years back and loves it.

"The biggest impression is it's easy to drive," said Li, as he strolled around Shanghai's sprawling auto show this week. "I like the cars that look muscular and that have some sense of American style."

Wearing glasses, a gray hoodie and jeans, Li scoured Ford's exhibit of 23 models, snapping pictures along the way. Li now has a 19-month-old child, and he's looking to trade up to an SUV.

"When it comes to car safety, I have more confidence in Ford than other brands," he said.

Stylish Image Boosts Sales

In China's hypercompetitive market — where there is little brand loyalty — developing new customers and keeping old ones like Li is critical. To that end, Ford plans to launch 10 new vehicles in China and open five new factories here by 2015.

"I think they're doing very well," says Yang Jian, managing editor of Automotive News China, a newsletter that is part of the Detroit-based Automotive News. "The volumes are growing so fast, and I think the brand perception is getting better."

After a slow start in China, Yang says, Ford is now developing an image as a trendy, stylish car for young people like Li.

Despite Ford's recent gains, though, the company still has a long way to go.
Ford is No. 12 in auto sales in China, with about 3 percent of the market, according to LMC Automotive, a U.K.-based market forecasting firm.

Enlarge image i

I spoke yesterday with Dan Sichel, a Wellesley economist and a Lady Gaga fan. Both of these facts are relevant for this story.

The U.S. government is about to tweak the way it measures the economy, and some of the biggest changes will affect the entertainment industry.

Under the current system, Sichel told me, Lady Gaga's sales of concert tickets, online songs and CDs all count toward gross domestic product. But the value of the time she spends in the studio working on new songs isn't counted. That's about to change.

"It's quite analogous to a factory investing in a new machine," Sichel says.

Under the new rules, Lady Gaga sitting in front of her laptop, staring at the sky, thinking up new songs will count as investment, which is part of GDP. A similar change is coming for movies.

Money companies spend on research and development will also be added to GDP.

Why haven't these things counted before? The accounting rules for GDP were written in a simpler time, when most companies produced physical things. But over time, the economy has increasingly shifted toward producing intangible goods.

In all, the tweaks will add an estimated 3 percent to the size of the U.S. economy. Historical GDP numbers will also be adjusted, so the charts won't show any big jump. And for most people, the important thing to pay attention to is not the absolute size of GDP, but the change over time: How much is the economy growing?

The U.S. Senate may vote this week on the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would allow states to collect sales tax from more online retailers. And as the political and retail landscape has shifted from the last time around, the Senate is expected to approve the measure.

The proposal to require online sellers to collect out-of-state sales tax has been kicked around for many years. For a decade, Amazon was a fierce opponent.

And Amazon had U.S. Supreme Court precedent on its side. In 1992 — years before online retail took off — the high court said that out-of-state businesses do not need to collect and remit sales tax where they do not have a physical presence.

But much has changed.

For one thing, empty state and local government coffers have politicians hunting for new tax revenue.

And in retail, the old lines that divide online sellers from brick-and-mortar shops have blurred. Just about every shop, no matter its size, has an online presence.

Conversely, Amazon itself has built a network of distribution centers around the country, meaning it has a physical presence in many states and must therefore collect sales tax.

'Omnichannel' Shopping

The industry calls this convergence between online and offline sellers "omnichannel" shopping.

Michael Kercheval, CEO of the International Council of Shopping Centers and a member of a coalition supporting the new tax bill, says this change has transformed the cast of who supports this new tax.

More From NPR

Planet Money

Most People Are Supposed To Pay This Tax. Almost Nobody Actually Pays It.

Black and Latino homebuyers pay more for housing than whites and Asians, according to a study released this week by Duke University. The price difference is about 3.5 percent.

That may not sound like a lot. But Patrick Bayer, a Duke economics professor who led the study, says when you do the math, that percentage can translate to about $5,000 or $10,000 per housing sale.

"If you buy several houses over the course of your lifetime, those are real major differences in home equity or housing wealth," Bayer explains.

The study, which is currently a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at home sales from 1990 to 2008 in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Bayer's research concluded that racial prejudice by home sellers did not influence the price difference overall. In fact, according to the working paper, "the average price premium paid by black and Hispanic buyers is about the same regardless of the race of the seller."

But one factor may be inexperience among black and Latino homebuyers, who are more likely to be purchasing their first homes. Bayer also notes that real estate agents often offer a more limited menu of housing options to minority homebuyers, who may feel pressure to pay more when they do find the right fit.

"God doesn't play dice."

I'm sure the reader has heard this famous saying from Einstein in a 1926 letter to fellow physicist Max Born. Perhaps not so clear to most people is what God and what dice Einstein was referring to. His worries reflect a deep concern about how far our explanations of Nature can go. They speak to the heart of what science is, an issue that remains contentious to this day.

Einstein was referring to quantum physics, the physics that describes the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles — like electrons and the Higgs boson. The "dice" relate to probabilities, the fact that in the quantum world the cozy determinism of our classical worldview goes down the drain.

In our everyday life objects follow well-behaved histories from point A to point B. In the realm of the very small this determinism fails completely. We can, at most, compute probabilities that a particle will be at this or that point in space (within the accuracy of the measuring device). Even more bizarre, before we detect a particle we can't even tell if it exists. All we have is potentiality.

In an extreme interpretation, we can say that the act of detection "creates" the particle. But if that's the case, what about bigger objects? Aren't they made of atoms, which are quantum objects? Does a mountain only exist when we look at it? Surely, that's kind of ridiculous. Mount Everest is there whether we look at it or not. But how can you tell? Do we know that Mount Everest is out there when we are not looking, or do we infer that from common sense?

To Einstein, this loss of predictive determinism couldn't be the last word in our description of Nature. Another theory, deeper and broader, should be able to explain the paradoxes of the quantum world. Was he right?

A lot has happened in eight decades. Experiments have tried again and again to find flaws in traditional quantum mechanics, perhaps opening a window into an alternative theory. All to no avail: it really looks as if quantum mechanics is here to stay. Nature is inherently uncertain and we have to come to terms with it.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, stating that we can't know both position and velocity of a particle with arbitrary accuracy, is more than an obstacle to knowledge; it's the way Nature operates. God does seem to play dice, and the tremendous successes of quantum physics are a testament to our ability to make sense of a very bizarre state of affairs.

Einstein's sentence in his letter to Born is actually different from the snippet above:

Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.

The National Transportation Safety Board wants to know how a problem with the design of batteries that led to a fire aboard a Boeing's 787 'Dreamliner' slipped through the extensive certification process for the new passenger aircraft.

In the first day of a public hearing on Tuesday, the NTSB questioned officials from Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration, Japanese battery maker GS Yuasa Corp. and electrical system maker Thales of France. The safety agency wants to find out what was known about overheating problems with lithium-ion batteries prior to two failures aboard 787s in January, one of which led to a fire on the ground that took an hour to put out.

"We are here to understand why the 787 experienced unexpected battery failures following a design program led by one of the world's leading manufacturers and a certification process that is well respected throughout the international aviation community," NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said during the first of two days of hearings.

"We are looking for lessons learned, not just for the design and certification of the failed battery but also for knowledge that can be applied to emerging technologies going forward," she said.

As The Los Angeles Times reports:

"Much of the testing was left to Boeing and its battery suppliers. They determined that the likelihood of smoke or fire from a 787 battery would occur fewer than once in every 10 million flight hours. But there already have been two crucial battery events on the 787 fleet with fewer than 52,000 flight hours."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A 95-year-old woman donated nine letters that J.D. Salinger wrote her in the early 1940s to the Morgan Library & Museum. One of the letters, obtained by The New York Times, reads, "Let's have no more talk of my New Yorker piece. God and [New Yorker founder] Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script." Others are flirtatious — after asking her to send him a picture, Salinger wrote, "Sneaky girl. You're pretty."

Somehow, even a guided tour of George Saunders' desktop icons is interesting and charming. For The Guardian, Ben Johncock interviews the Tenth of December author about technology: "Through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity."

John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, plans to retire in October, having overseen the addition of some "60,000 new words and meanings," according to Publisher's Lunch. Simpson told Time magazine that "Each word is a different sort of poem. The smaller entries are like Shakespearean sonnets — the larger ones, more like Joyce's Ulysses." Michael Proffitt, the editorial project director, will take over as chief editor.

The New York Times was heavily criticized for running two reviews of Nathaniel Rich's book Odds Against Tomorrow, in addition to a travel essay by the author and a profile of him and his brother in the month of January. Rich happens to be the son of former Times chief theater critic and op-ed columnist Frank Rich. Margaret Sullivan, the Times' Public Editor, wrote in a post that the "hat trick" was accidental. (Charges of partiality at the paper might also be countered by the biting review of Times journalist Brian Stelter's book on morning television, Top of the Morning: "Brian Stelter's book on the nefarious network morning show wars ends up being like a breakfast made not quite to order.")

Duly noted, although as a woman of only middling bravery, I myself was not scared by Maya's story, mostly because I didn't believe a word of it. It's not that the sequence of events isn't reasonable for a girl on a downward spiral — spurred by the death from cancer of her beloved grandfather — but that the voice is so implausible. The hyper-articulate present-tense Maya who is prone to old-fashioned language (she notes the "lapidary" phrasing of her scuzzy Vegas boss) is completely at odds with the passive victim in the flashbacks. Maya may be a lively character, but she never feels remotely real.

Daniel, who conveniently happens to have just finished a psychiatric residency in Seattle, tells her she has abandonment issues (right before he licks her "like candy"). He might not have needed a degree to come up with this theory; when Maya was just a few days old, her mother, a Danish air hostess, dropped Maya off with Nini and Popo, and renounced her parental rights. Maya's father, a pilot, visited regularly but mostly left the parenting to his saintly stepfather and firebrand mother. Nini, the book's most vivid character, is somewhat distracted by her activism among the Berkeley do-gooders, but Popo, a dreamy African-American astronomer who oozes Morgan Freeman-style fabulousness from every pore, was always there for Maya, until his untimely demise.

In terms of the outrageous and/or harrowing circumstances she puts her heroine in, Allende could almost be borrowing from the wild adventures on drug-themed cable series like Breaking Bad or Weeds, but without the sense of irony. Maya's recovery from drug addict to chatty, affectionate teen may be just another magical-realist miracle for the famed author of The House of the Spirits. Some of the character's incongruity likely stems from the fact that this is the first time Allende has tried writing in a youthful, contemporary voice.

“ Maya may be a lively character, but she never feels remotely real.

Following the Republican Party's losses in the 2012 elections, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what the party should do to improve its electoral fortunes.

More From The Debate

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, an influential red-state Democrat who helped craft Obamacare but bucked his party last week in voting against expanded background checks for gun sales, will retire in 2014, he announced Tuesday.

The chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, Baucus was expected to face a potentially tough race for a seventh term after four decades on Capitol Hill. He becomes the sixth Senate Democrat to announce his retirement, as Republicans look for an opportunity to retake Senate control in the midterm elections.

"Deciding not to run for re-election was an extremely difficult decision," Baucus said in a statement. "After thinking long and hard, I decided I want to focus the next year and a half on serving Montana unconstrained by the demands of a campaign."

The Washington Post had first reported the retirement, citing sources, and said that former Gov. Brian Schweitzer could seek the Democratic nomination.

Baucus was one of only four Democrats to vote against the bipartisan gun bill last week. All are from states that backed Republican Mitt Romney for president, and Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas face re-election next year. The fourth Democrat to vote against the measure, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, is in her first term.

While Montana voted overwhemingly for Romney, it has a history of electing Democrats to statewide seats. Schweitzer, a popular former two-term governor, would likely be a formidable opponent for any Republican. He told the Great Falls Tribune on Tuesday that he would not rule out running.

The state's other senator, Democrat Jon Tester, won re-election last year, and Democrats have won three straight governor's races.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement:

"As Montana's Senior Senator and Chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus has shaped and guided legislation and policy affecting every American, and his service has been a benefit to all Montanans. He has been an invaluable leader in our caucus, and he will be sorely missed. Democrats have had a great deal of electoral success in Montana over the last decade, and I am confident that will continue."

People in Boston can speak for themselves. And do. Loudly, bluntly and often with humor that bites.

It's a city that speaks with both its own broad, homebrew, local accent — although no one really pahks thea cah in Havahd Yahd — and dialects from around the world. It is home to some of America's oldest founding families, and fathers, mothers and children who have just arrived from Jamaica, Ireland, Bangladesh and Ghana.

There are people in Boston who dress in pinstripes and tweeds, and tattoos and spiked hair. Sometimes, they are even the same person.

It has a history of hard racial attitudes and professed liberal politics, lots of Nobel laureates and, historically, more than a few ignoble pols. It's the city of splendidly posh museums and tightly-packed neighborhoods, where people know how to batten down doors against storms, get snow off the streets and keep going.

You could see a big streak of Boston when Mayor Tom Menino stood up to speak at this week's prayer service. He had just signed himself out of the hospital where he was recovering after surgery. The mayor still had a hospital bracelet strapped around his wrist. He had hospital machines that kept him going, cloaked by a sheet on his lap and he was steered to the podium by his son, a Boston police officer, who had been at the finish line of the marathon.

But the mayor of Boston insisted on getting out of his seat to stand at the podium and tell his city in a hoarse, husky voice that crackled like the wheels of one of Boston's T trains when he said, "We are one Boston."

This week's assault and tragedies in Boston could have caused scrambling, fright and panic. Instead, they revealed character. People ran unflinchingly into smoke, fire and blood. They worked through weariness, opened their arms and gave of their hearts.

Friday night, I got an email from my friend Gordon. He works in a restaurant and opened the doors so people from the race could stumble in for shelter and comfort. Friends who run a family bakery nearby came in crying.

"It will be some time before my anger subsides," Gordon said. The restaurant, which is usually bright and loud with laughter, has been quiet and somber. "Boston's characteristic cocky humor is taking a backseat," he said, but adds, "I was struck by the calm, serious resolve not to be intimidated. Boston is a tough, smart, proud town. We know what's important ... Bostonians refuse to lose our trust for one another."

And when police arrested the 19-year-old suspect Friday night, Boston ended a week that opened with a vicious crime of violence with an act of justice.

Monday kicks off US VegWeek 2013, a campaign by Compassion Over Killing that invites people to go vegetarian for a week "to explore a wide variety of meat-free foods and discover the many benefits of vegetarian eating—for our health, the planet, and animals."

VegWeek got its start in 2009, with Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin (D) committing to a week of meat-free dining. This year dozens of other legislators and community leaders are following suit, with representatives from Arizona, Texas, and California, among others, making 7-day VegPledges to go veggie from April 22-28.

Sen. Raskin's week-long pledge has stretched to years, a move that he describes as aligning his morals with his menu. But achieving this alignment is a struggle for many omnivores. On the one hand, they don't enjoy harming animals. But on the other, they do enjoy the taste of meat. These inconsistent beliefs lead to what psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian call a meat paradox: "people simultaneously dislike hurting animals and like eating meat."

One response to this paradox is that of Sen. Raskin: change your menu to match your morals by embracing a vegetarian or vegan diet. [Full disclosure: I'm also vegetarian.] But another response is to change your moral or factual beliefs in a way that renders meat eating less problematic. If you believe that cows are essentially mindless, for example, then eating them and supporting factory farming might not be quite so objectionable. Right?

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that people do adapt their morals to their menu, whether or not they realize they're doing so. In a 2010 study by Loughnan, Haslam and Bastian, for example, meat-eating university students were randomly assigned to consume either beef jerky or cashew nuts. In a subsequent task — presented as unrelated — participants indicated which of 27 animals (snails, cows, gorillas, etc.) they felt "morally obligated to show concern for."

The researchers reasoned that eating beef jerky would force participants to confront the meat paradox head on, leading to greater cognitive dissonance and the denial of moral status to non-human animals. That's precisely what they found. The beef-eaters identified an average of 13.5 of the 27 animals as worthy of moral concern; the cashew-eaters came in at a significantly higher 17.3.

Additional research has found that people ascribe a more impoverished mental life to cows and to sheep when they're told that they will later be eating beef or lamb. The same is true when people learn that particular cows and sheep will "be taken to an abattoir, killed, butchered, and sent to supermarkets as meat products for humans."

Researchers have also found that animals categorized as food are ascribed reduced capacity to suffer, whether or not humans are responsible for the killing. And that's not all. Another study reports that omnivores are less likely than vegetarians to attribute emotions like love, hope, and melancholy to (edible) pigs, but not to dogs.

Two of the leaders in this field of research, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian, were kind enough to correspond with me by e-mail about their findings. Haslam explained how this work emerged from more general questions about human judgments and social groups:

My colleagues and I had been pursuing a line of research on dehumanization and were thinking about different groups that might be denied human qualities. We realized that this process of denial might occur with non-human targets. You couldn't say that a non-human animal had been "dehumanized", of course, but you could say that it had been distanced from humanity by a process that's directly analogous to dehumanization: denying that animal emotions, thoughts, and moral worth. Sure enough, we found that people were especially likely to deny human-like qualities to animals that they eat, and that they deny animals these qualities especially when they contemplate eating them or are in the process of eating them. This pattern is just what you see in the dehumanization of social groups: we view some other people as less than human and do this especially when we aggress against them.

While sales of existing homes dipped in March because of a tighter inventory, sales of newly built homes rose 1.5 percent from February and were up a whopping 18.5 percent from March 2012, the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development say.

According to Bloomberg News, the March sales results for new homes caps "the best quarter for the industry since 2008." They're also "more evidence the housing recovery will be sustained."

Bloomberg adds that:

"A dearth of existing properties is encouraging builders to undertake new projects that will keep fueling the economy. Mortgage rates close to record lows, higher home values and rising household formation are helping lay the groundwork for increased buyer traffic in 2013."

On Earth Day 2013, I'd like to draw your notice to a fantastic essay by Andrea Wulf in The New York Times Book Review. Wulf explains how information recorded by Henry David Thoreau in his famous treatise Walden is now informing modern climate-change research.

Environment

Understanding Climate Change, With Help From Thoreau

I'm going to out myself. I listen to the "oldies" station on my daily commute to and from NPR West in my banged-up ride, tailpipe barely hanging on. The station's tag-line is "back in the day hits," and my favorite feature is inappropriate relationship advice from a Mexican drag queen who goes by Kay Sedia (as in, quesadilla). The station's call letters are KDAY and it cuts in and out during my commute because its FM signal is weak. So I switch from listening intently to important news and information on my local NPR affiliate to rapping wildly to Snoop Dogg's hits from the 90s, "AINT NOTHIN' BUT A G THANG BABY! TWO LOC'D OUT G'S SO WE CRAZY!" The station plays Warren G, Dre, Tupac and just about anything with a Nate Dogg hook.

Yes, this is the oldies station of my generation. For now.

The company that owns KDAY, Magic Broadcasting, this month agreed to sell the station to RBC Communications for $19.5 million. RBC is 80 percent owned by Anthony Yuen — a Chinese-American investor — and the rest by Phoenix Satellite Television, a company based in the British Virgin Islands that operates six TV channels in China.

Right now there's a 25 percent cap on foreign ownership of radio and television stations (that might explain RBC's 80/20 split). Just last week, the National Association of Media Brokers — a business group that specializes in the sale of radio and TV stations — asked the Federal Communications Commission to ease its rules on foreign ownership. The group says American investors don't have access to enough capital to buy stations.

KDAY ranks 28th in LA's very competitive media market, so it's not like it's raking in the advertising revenue. Magic Broadcasting tried to sell the station for $35 million a couple of years ago, but the transfer never happened.

The National Association of Broadcasters, another industry group, also wants foreign companies to get in on the radio and television game. They say it helps broadcasters that serve ethnic minorities acquire sources of funding from their home countries especially in markets like Los Angeles, where KDAY is based, with large Mexican, Korean and Chinese populations.

Radio industry experts, like Lance Venta (I spoke with him over the phone about the sale) say if the FCC approves the deal, KDAY will, most likely, switch from Snoop D O Double G to Chinese-language programming and he said that could happen as early as this summer.

Downside: no more solo sing-alongs to "Summertime In the LBC" on the way to work.

Upside: Mandarin-language immersion?

Airline passengers and industry analysts are watching airports for flight delays Monday, the first full day of furloughs for nearly 15,000 flight controllers and other Federal Aviation Administration workers. The furloughs are tied to the "sequestration" budget cuts that were enacted this year. We'll be keeping an eye on possible delays today, and updating this post with new information.

As of 11:45 a.m. Monday, the FAA's U.S. flight-tracking map showed delays of more than an hour at New York's LaGuardia, due to high volume and winds. The FlightAware site reported delays of more than an hour for some inbound flights at John F. Kennedy International Airport, due to runway work. Most other large airports were deemed free of trouble, with some experiencing slight delays.

"The cuts required by the sequester have forced us to slash contract expenses and furlough 47,000 of our employees," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a Senate committee Thursday. He predicted that the agency's handling of air traffic operations would be less efficient, and that there would be less time for safety inspections of new aircraft.

Any delays that stem from the FAA furloughs are expected to be the most extreme at the nation's busiest airports, especially those that routinely handle international flights. The FAA recommends getting to the airport two hours before a domestic flight, and three hours before an international trip.

If significant delays develop, airlines say they plan to reroute flights and use shuttle buses to get passengers to their destinations or connecting flights.

The FAA's furlough plan has drawn criticism from members of Congress, who accuse the agency of mismanaging the budget cuts and hyping their impact.

"Given that the FAA's budget increased more than 100 percent over the last 15 years, finding five percent in savings shouldn't need to significantly impact our nation's aviation operations," said Rep. Bill Shuster, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Airlines, unhappy that the furloughs might cause them to experience cascading delays — and to endure frustrated customers' ire — have created a website to help the public complain to the FAA.

The FAA furloughs, which require employees to stay home from work without pay for one or two days per pay period, are expected to continue until the financial year ends on Sept. 31. The agency says that on any given day, as much as 10 percent of its employees will be off work.

The Global Business Travel Association, which bills itself as the voice of the business travel industry, sent a letter to the FAA's Huerta Monday, saying that its nearly 6,000 members "are very much alarmed by the list of airports and the expected delays. With Hartsfield-Jackson expected to see maximum delays of 210 minutes and Chicago O'Hare close behind, the impacted airports is a veritable hit list on the business travel industry."

A White House report puts it bluntly: "Today, younger women are more likely to graduate from college than are men and are more likely to hold a graduate school degree."

For the past decade more American women than men have earned undergraduate and Master's degrees; and in the past three years, they've outpaced men at the doctoral level, too.

Indeed, women's gains in education have outpaced men's over the past 40 years. Yet in the workforce women are not reaching the heights of their chose industries. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, has brought national attention to the bleak numbers: In the U.S., women hold only 14 percent of the top corporate jobs, Sandberg writes, and that number has not changed in a decade.

More From NPR

The Changing Lives Of Women

An Exploration Of The Changing Lives Of Women

A White House report puts it bluntly: "Today, younger women are more likely to graduate from college than are men and are more likely to hold a graduate school degree."

For the past decade more American women than men have earned undergraduate and Master's degrees; and in the past three years, they've outpaced men at the doctoral level, too.

Indeed, women's gains in education have outpaced men's over the past 40 years. Yet in the workforce women are not reaching the heights of their chose industries. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, has brought national attention to the bleak numbers: In the U.S., women hold only 14 percent of the top corporate jobs, Sandberg writes, and that number has not changed in a decade.

More From NPR

The Changing Lives Of Women

An Exploration Of The Changing Lives Of Women

Many revolutions begin with the sound of explosions and marching boots.

Now, another revolution is shaking up the world, and it's moving forward to the beep of alarm clocks and the clack of heels heading out.

Legions of women around the world are leaving their homes to join the paid labor force. Worldwide, 4 in 10 paid workers are female; in the coming decade, an estimated 1 billion more women will enter the formal workforce, pushing up economic growth.

That's among the most powerful trends shaping our world. As female wage earners gain greater autonomy, they are making decisions that are reshaping personal lives as well as economic trends.

Kaleena Porter, a 26-year-old graphic designer in Washington, D.C., is among those creating a new narrative. Recently, she bought her own home — a move single women rarely made a generation ago. In 1981, about 1 in 10 homes was purchased by a single woman. Now it's 1 in 5 — about twice the rate of single men.

"A lot of things that I never thought I would do — and say I would never do — and then all of a sudden, here I am owning a house, and having a dog, and being grown up," Porter says. "It feels good, actually."

And the changes are taking hold during girls' formative years. In the United States, for example, young women are outstripping their male peers in earning college degrees and pursuing graduate education.

That pattern is repeating itself throughout the developed world. In the wealthier countries that work together in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 6 in 10 undergraduate degrees are conferred upon women.

That educational edge hasn't yet translated into full equal stature or pay, but the tide is turning at the top levels of industry in many countries and at the entry level almost everywhere.

"Ten years ago, agriculture was the main employer for women," the U.N.'s International Labour Office says in a recent report. Things have changed quickly. "The services sector now provides the majority of female jobs."

Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin says future historians probably will look back on this era as one with very uneven progress for women.

"In Korea and Japan — in the blink of an eye — you went from women having very little college education to a lot," she says. Yet in some countries, girls get almost no formal education. Last year in Pakistan, a Taliban terrorist shot teenager Malala Yousafzai for promoting education for girls.

Because some feminists had hoped for more universal progress, "many people would say this is a stalled revolution, but it seems less so to me," says Goldin, who adds that, as a historian, "I take a long-term view." And she sees women's gains picking up steam in the 21st century as new technologies provide greater access to information and jobs.

In coming weeks, NPR reporters will look at gains secured and challenges remaining for women. Our series "The Changing Lives of Women" will offer many stories and interviews from around the world, including:

How nearly one-quarter of American women out-earn their husbands — and how this is reshaping family dynamics.

Why unmarried women have became the largest group of American homebuyers, after families, and how they are doing it.

How generous maternal leave policies in Germany are having an unexpected impact on women in business.

How an imbalanced birthrate in China is giving women unprecedented leverage when it comes to choosing a spouse — and affecting China's savings rate.

The Lady Mechanic Academy in Nigeria, where young women are training for careers as auto mechanics.

In Mexico, long culturally conservative, the growing number of single mothers is causing the Mexican government to address their needs as single parents.

The lagging presence of women in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math. We'll meet an educator who has dramatically increased the number of female computer grads on her campus.

How childless American women are navigating aging — in group housing.

And we ask a surprisingly obvious question: What do women do on TV? The answer may surprise you.

The series also will involve conversations with women in positions of economic and political power.

NPR reporter Jennifer Ludden contributed to this story.