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These days, many people wear their vegetarianism as a badge of honor — even if it's only before 6 p.m, as food writer Mark Bittman advocates. (Actually, he wants us to go part-time vegan.) There's even a World Vegetarian Day, which happens to be today, FYI.

But more than 100 years ago, when Hitl, the world's oldest continually operating vegetarian restaurant, opened its doors in Zurich, it was an entirely different story.

"The first several years, people entered Hiltl through the backdoor," says Peter Vauthier, the head of Hiltl guest relations.

The Swiss, you see, have long been a pretty meat-loving bunch. "If you didn't eat meat, it meant you had no money," he says. Vegetarianism, in other words, was kind of a badge of shame.

The gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is growing, according to an analysis of IRS figures by an international group of university economists, and it hasn't been so wide since 1928.

The incomes of the very wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased by 31.4 percent from 2009 to 2012. By contrast, the bottom 99 percent saw their earnings in the same period go up by just 0.4 percent. In 2012, the top 1 percent collected 19.3 percent of all household income and the top 10 percent took home a record 48.2 percent of total earnings, The Associated Press reports.

The result, according to the analysis by economists from the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University, who looked at 1913 onward, is the broadest income gap between super-rich and everyone else since just before the Great Depression.

The AP says:

"The top 1 percent of American households had pretax income above $394,000 last year. The top 10 percent had income exceeding $114,000.

"The income figures include wages, pension payments, dividends and capital gains from the sale of stocks and other assets. They do not include so-called transfer payments from government programs such as unemployment benefits and Social Security.

"The gap between rich and poor narrowed after World War II as unions negotiated better pay and benefits and as the government enacted a minimum wage and other policies to help the poor and middle class.

"The top 1 percent's share of income bottomed out at 7.7 percent in 1973 and has risen steadily since the early 1980s, according to the analysis."

One of the strictest gun laws in the nation went into effect in Maryland on Tuesday. The new law bans assault rifles and high capacity magazines, and makes Maryland one of only six states that requires handgun purchasers to get fingerprinted and take gun safety courses.

Gun owners in the state aren't happy, and in recent weeks, they've been flocking to snap up firearms. On Monday, outside Fred's Sporting Goods in Waldorf, there was a huge crowd and a countdown sign advertising: "1 day left."

The law is just a lot of "bureaucratic nonsense," says gun owner Leslie Cates. "I want to be able to own and have what I like and what I want, and I don't feel like the government should be able to tell me what I can and can't have and how I have to get it."

Gary Gilroy, also shopping at Fred's, says the new law infringes on his rights. "I think it's unconstitutional," he says. "It's against the Second Amendment."

A Surge Of Registrations

Joe Herbert, the store owner, says he was ready for the onslaught of customers ahead of the deadline. "I got full staff for the last week and a half ... working overtime," he says.

And, he says, he can't keep his shelves stocked. In recent weeks he's done about five times his usual sales.

It's been like this all over the state. Sgt. Marc Black, a spokesperson with the Maryland State Police, the organization responsible for processing background checks, says the office has been "working 21 hours a day, seven days a week."

As of September 20, he says, "we're looking at 106,000 applications."

That's more than double the number for all of 2011 and represents an unprecedented surge in gun purchases, he says.

The rush on firearms started after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., when President Obama started pushing Congress to tighten federal gun laws. That didn't happen, but in Maryland, lawmakers got behind state legislation.

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A team of chemical weapons experts has arrived in Syria, where they will begin the long and complicated task of destroying the country's chemical weapons arsenal. Under a plan endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, the weapons are to be destroyed by next June.

Syria is wracked by a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and forced more than 2 million others to flee the country, according to recent U.N. figures.

The experts from the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are expected to meet with Syria's foreign minister later today, the AP reports.

The OPCW team enters Syria one day after a U.N. inspections team departed. Led by Ake Sellstrom, that team had earlier concluded that poisonous sarin gas had been used in Syria in an Aug. 21 attack that left hundreds dead — a report that prompted a U.S.-Russia agreement to rid Syria of the weapons.

The U.N. team had returned to Syria for about a week to examine claims of at least six other chemical weapons attacks in Syria, spanning from March to August. It is due to present its final report on those incidents later this month.

As NPR's Parallels blog has reported, "dismantling a chemical weapons program is a laborious process."