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Last year when New Orleans' main paper, The Times-Picayune laid off dozens of newspaper employees and cut its circulation to three times a week, residents were shocked.

Sharron Morrow and her friends had bonded over the morning paper at a local coffee shop for the past 20 years.

"I've stopped my subscription, and I mourn the paper almost every day," she says.

Shifting Media Players

Newspaper circulation has been rapidly declining all over the country. Advertising revenue has plummeted while online revenue has been making small gains. The The Times-Picayune re-branded itself as The Times-Picayune NOLA.com, representative of its new Web-centered focus.

Multimillionaire John Georges was one of the local movers and shakers furious at the Times-Picayune's changes. He tried to buy the company, but the New York-based owners refused to sell it, so Georges decided to start his own daily paper.

He bought The Advocate, a daily paper based 80 miles away in Baton Rouge, and launched a New Orleans edition.

"We fought the Battle of New Orleans once before; some think we are going to fight it again in the newspaper," he says.

To lead the charge, Georges hired Dan Shea, a managing editor laid off from The Times-Picayune during cutbacks. In the weeks since his hiring, a slew of prize-winning reporters have jumped from The Times-Picayune to The Advocate. Shea says subscriptions in New Orleans are growing.

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China's infamous bureaucracy has bedeviled people for ages, but in recent years, daily life in some major Chinese cities has become far more efficient.

For instance, when I worked in Beijing in the 1990s, many reporters had drivers. It wasn't because they didn't drive, but because they needed someone to deal with China's crippling bureaucracy.

I had a man named Old Zhao, who would drive around for days to pay our office bills at various government utility offices. Zhao would sit in line for hours, often only to be abused by functionaries.

I left China in 2002 and returned two years ago to work as NPR's correspondent in Shanghai. These days, I just walk across the street with my bills and pay them at a 24-hour convenience store. It takes about three minutes and the clerks are unfailingly polite.

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The makers of Smithfield Ham, an icon on America's culinary scene for decades, are selling the publicly traded company to China's Shuanghui International Holdings Limited for about $4.72 billion in cash. The deal also includes an exchange of debt.

The purchase values Smithfield Foods at $7.1 billion — a figure that would make the purchase "the largest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company," according to Bloomberg News.

In addition to Smithfield, the company's brands include Armour, Eckrich, Gwaltney, Kretschmar, and others. The company's roots stretch back to 1936, when the Luter family opened a packing plant in Virginia.

Terms of the purchase value Smithfield's stock at $34 a share — a premium of more than 30 percent over the company's closing share price yesterday. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the sale, says the company's shares rose sharply before the markets opened Wednesday.

The deal will require approval from U.S. regulators before it is final.

"This is a great transaction for all Smithfield stakeholders, as well as for American farmers and U.S. agriculture," Smithfield president and CEO Larry Pope said. "We have established Smithfield as the world's leading and most trusted vertically integrated pork processor and hog producer, and are excited that Shuanghui recognizes our best-in-class operations, our outstanding food safety practices and our 46,000 hard-working and dedicated employees."

Shuanghui International is the majority owner of Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. — "China's largest meat processing enterprise and China's largest publicly traded meat products company as measured by market capitalization," according to a news release.

"China is the world's biggest producer and consumer of pork and the third-largest market for U.S. pork," Reuters reports. "In recent months, a series of food safety scandals have dented consumer confidence."

Smithfield's headquarters will remain in Virginia, according to a press release announcing the deal this morning. The companies also said that Shuangui will not close any Smithfield facilities, and will leave all employee agreements — and the existing management team — in place.

The purchase would further solidify an economic relationship between China and Virginia that has been growing. The state has sent several trade missions to Asia in recent years, helping China become what Gov. Bob McDonnell calls "far and away our largest trading partner," as member station WAMU recently reported.

McDonnell made that comment earlier this month, when he announced Virginia's $638 million of agricultural exports to China in 2012. Pork and poultry placed third on the list of the state's exports; the top spot was taken by soybeans.

Members of Congress are back in their home states this week for a Memorial Day recess. It's a chance to talk with constituents about what could become the year's biggest legislative story: the push on Capitol Hill to fix what Democrats and Republicans alike agree is a broken immigration system.

A bill proposed by the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators, to revamp the nation's immigration rules passed out of committee last week and will soon be brought before the Democratic-led Senate. Less clear, though, is where the issue is headed in the GOP-controlled House.

A Senate Truce

The Senate chamber lately has become an even more partisan battlefield than usual, with verbal fights breaking out daily over stalled presidential nominations and a budget stuck in limbo. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is threatening to rewrite the Senate's filibuster rules to break the logjam.

That would infuriate the Republican minority and possibly doom any chance of bipartisan cooperation. But Reid says he's putting all that off until the Senate finishes the immigration overhaul — the one thing Democrats and Republicans do seem able to work on together.

"I'm going to do nothing to interfere with immigration," Reid says. "It is important for our country, and I admire the bipartisan nature of what happened with the Gang of Eight. It's exemplary of what we should do around here on everything."

But fierce opponents of the immigration bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants are preparing a series of poison-pill amendments. Leading that effort is Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose amendments almost all failed in committee.

"I think they would have a considerably better chance of passing on the floor than in the Judiciary Committee," Sessions says.

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