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The first of four current or former BP employees charged with crimes related to the 2010 Gulf oil spill has been found guilty of obstructing justice because he deleted text messages from his cellphone that contained information about the worst offshore spill in the nation's history.

NPR's Debbie Elliott tells our Newscast Desk that a federal jury in New Orleans convicted 52-year-old Kurt Mix on Wednesday.

Mix, she says, was involved in BP's failed attempt to stop the out-of-control well after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 rig workers. In one of the deleted messages, Mix estimated a much higher rate of oil flow than BP had publicly acknowledged.

The jury acquitted Mix on a second, similar count. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

As The Associated Press writes, prosecutors argued that Mix "was trying to destroy evidence when he deleted hundreds of text messages to and from a supervisor and a BP contractor. Mix's indictment also accused him of deleting two voicemails from the same two people."

The wire service adds that "Mix's lawyers said their client didn't hide anything. He preserved other records containing the same information contained in the deleted messages, they told jurors."

Mix left BP in 2011.

Talk about a fall:

"Prices of virtual currency bitcoin fell 20% Wednesday and are now down more than 50% from their record high hit two weeks ago amid worries that China is moving to block the purchase and use of the currency by its citizens," The Wall Street Journal writes.

Bitcoin's big slide began two weeks ago, as we reported, when Chinese authorities told banks there that they couldn't trade in the currency. Officials were worried, NPR's Frank Langfitt reported, about a lack of control over bitcoins that "makes it easier to launder money and finance terrorism."

Wednesday, MarketWatch writes, "BTC China, the biggest bitcoin exchange in that country," announced it has "temporarily stopped" accepting yuan deposits into bitcoin accounts. The news followed reports that "the People's Bank of China had a meeting on Monday with about 10 major third-party payment processors and ordered them to stop working with bitcoin exchanges."

The result: "On Wednesday, bitcoin prices fell another 20 percent to $550.02, down more than 50% from its high of $1,147.25 two weeks ago," the Journal says.

And according to MarketWatch, "some in the Twittersphere [are] reading the last rites for the virtual currency that has captured the world's attention."

At Slate, economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias writes about why so many Chinese have been eager to use bitcoin: "The ability of Yuan-rich savers to turn their money into dollars or other foreign currency is sharply circumscribed. ... By using a Bitcoin exchange as an intermediary, a Chinese person could sell Yuan and a non-Chinese person could buy them."

But, he concludes, "as of this morning it looks like party is over."

Two decades ago, the strongest critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement were members of labor unions. They warned that the trade deal would mean the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico and lower wages for U.S. workers.

Today, 20 years since NAFTA's passage, unions feel as strongly as ever that the deal was a bad idea.

Back in 1993, the labor movement was mobilized against the creation of a massive free-trade zone including the U.S., Canada and Mexico. There were union-backed protests around the U.S. — at the Capitol in Washington and especially in the industrial Midwest and in big manufacturing states.

That fall in Lansing, Mich., Ruben Burks of the United Auto Workers addressed a big crowd. "Do we care about our jobs?" he said to cheers. "Do we care about our brothers and sisters in Mexico and Canada? Brothers and sisters, we're going to stop this NAFTA — you're darn right we are."

Except they didn't. President Clinton was in his first year in the White House, having been elected with help from traditional Democrats — including union members. But he disagreed with labor on NAFTA.

Unions predicted disaster for U.S. workers: a flood of high-wage American factory jobs moving to Mexico. In a radio address that fall, Clinton spoke to that worry.

"Well, if we don't pass NAFTA, that could still be true. The lower wages and the lower cost of production will still be there," he said. "But if we do pass it, it means dramatically increased sales of American products made right here in America."

So during the NAFTA debate, labor unions squared off against a Democratic president. That wasn't necessarily a rare thing, but Harley Shaiken, a labor analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the reach of the controversy made it unusual.

"Trade debates from World War II up to NAFTA tended to be rather sedate. Important issues, but left to the experts," Shaiken says. But NAFTA, he says, "put the debate onto Main Street, into union halls, into community groups as well as into Congress."

And since NAFTA, trade has regularly been a contentious topic, prompting debate and protests. "Globalization" has become a term both praised and scorned.

More NPR Coverage On NAFTA

20 Years Of NAFTA

Economists Toast 20 Years Of NAFTA; Critics Sit Out The Party

Doctors talking up drugs to other doctors has been quite lucrative for pharmaceutical companies — and the physicians who moonlight as their salesmen.

Drugmakers learned long ago that deputized doctors were effective pitchmen. A doctor paid by a company to give a dinner speech or to chat over lunch with colleagues can go a long way toward changing their prescribing habits.

But now drug giant GlaxoSmithKline says it's going to stop paying doctors to speak about drugs or diseases to people with the power to write prescriptions or influence those who do. Doctors will still be able to earn money from Glaxo through research collaborations and consulting agreements.

The company will also stop paying sales reps based on sales targets. Historically, Glaxo and other companies have tied reps' compensation to changes in the prescriptions written by doctors they call on.

The changes "are designed to bring greater clarity and confidence that whenever we talk to a doctor, nurse or other prescriber, it is patients' interests that always come first," Glaxo CEO Andrew Witty said in a statement.

Glaxo says the new approach will be implemented in all the countries it operates in by early 2016.

Some of the changes, such as the shift in sales rep pay, got rolling in the U.S. a few years ago. In 2011, Deirdre Connelly, Glaxo's U.S. president, talked about decoupling rep pay from prescriptions in a speech that acknowledged that "our industry lost its way."

Why is Glaxo making these changes now? Well, the company has been rocked by allegations of ethical missteps and worse. There's been a bribery investigation in China. And last year, a settlement of alleged health care fraud involving the marketing of some drugs in the U.S. The settlement included a restrictive corporate integrity agreement with the federal government.

Shots - Health News

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