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The tide may have turned on the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

Last week, only 99 cases were reported. That's the lowest weekly count since June.

Cases have plummeted in the two countries hit hardest by Ebola, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In December, Sierra Leone was reporting more than 500 cases a week. It tallied only 65 last week.

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The epidemic has moved into a new phase, WHO said. The focus has shifted to "ending the epidemic" instead of simply slowing it down. That means concentrating on finding sick people and ensuring they don't spread the virus, instead of building new treatment centers and diagnostic labs.

But getting down to zero cases is still a long way off, Dr. Peter Salama, of UNICEF, said at a press conference Wednesday.

"It is too early to declare a success or a deadline for success," he said. "During the course of this outbreak, we have repeatedly under-estimated this pathogen," he added.

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Back in April, reported cases plummeted to zero in Guinea for almost a month. Health officials thought the outbreak might be over. They started relaxing. Then the virus came roaring back.

"The key issue that made us fail in the early stages [of this outbreak] ... is we thought we were on top of this," WHO's Ian Norton told Goats and Soda in October.

Guinea recorded only 30 cases last week. But that was actually an increase over the week before, when it had only 20 cases. The virus continues to spread to new regions in Guinea, including parts along the Senegal border.

There's also another logistical problem brewing across West Africa: rain. The wet season begins in April and May. Many parts flood, and some roads wash away.

It will take much longer to get health workers and aid to rural areas during the wet season. So if the epidemic isn't under control by spring, it could last another, WHO said, instead of possibly months.

To date, there have been more than 22,000 reported Ebola cases in West Africa, with nearly 8,800 deaths.

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At Fieldale Farms in Gainesville, Ga., workers cut up chicken breasts and feed the parts into machines. The pieces are then marinated, breaded and eventually sold to restaurants.

The work here can be physically demanding. Not a lot of people want to do it — even though the average wage here is $16 per hour plus benefits.

Tom Hensley, the company president, says Fieldale Farms hires just about anyone who can pass a drug test.

"We hire 100 people a week. Because we have 100 people who quit every week, out of 5,000 employees," he says. "We're constantly short."

President Obama's executive actions on immigration, announced in November, will allow an estimated 4 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally to stay in the country indefinitely.

But without congressional action, many of the long-term problems in the immigration system — including work shortages like that at Fieldale Farms —remain unaddressed.

And the shortage at the Fieldale plant has gotten worse. For a long time, a large majority of the workforce came from Latin America, mostly Mexico. Hensley always checked their documents, though he concedes some of those might have been forged.

Whatever their status, he says, the Latinos he hired were good employees with a strong work ethic and a low absentee rate.

"They were outstanding," he says. "If you asked for overtime, everybody raised their hand. They couldn't wait to come to work. Because they appreciated having a job."

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Today, only about one-third of the workers here are from Latin America. In 2011, Georgia passed one of the strictest anti-illegal immigration bills in the country. Before that, the county became part of a federal program that designated local police to help find undocumented workers.

Arturo Corso, a local activist and lawyer, says Latino residents were stopped for minor offenses. Those who didn't have the right papers risked being taken to jail and deported.

"You had immigration agents partnering up with deputies at these roadblocks," Corso says. "Even if they stopped a taxi, they would ask the people riding in the back seat of the taxi, "Show me your social security card.' "

The program was modified in recent years, so the risk of deportation has dropped significantly. But Hall County retains a bad reputation among Hispanic immigrants — even those in the U.S. legally.

Maria, who didn't want her last name used, came to Georgia years ago from Mexico without papers. She has legal status today and owns a store, but she says she wouldn't advise other immigrants to come here. "Because if they come here and they don't have papers, they're running a huge risk," she says through an interpreter.

No one in county government wanted to talk about the climate for immigrants. Republican Congressman Doug Collins grew up in Gainesville and says local and state laws have probably discouraged some immigrants from coming to Georgia. He concedes that's a problem for employers.

"We do need a short-term guest worker program — where they come in, they do the job and they're able to go back home — so that there [are] sufficient employees for this kind of work that right now they're struggling to find," Collins says.

But he says such a program needs to be part of a comprehensive immigration bill that also secures the borders — and in the current political climate, that's hard to achieve.

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Fieldale Farms president Tom Hensley says he'd like to hire more immigrant workers. The president's executive actions on immigration, he says, won't help businesses like his address labor shortages over the long term. Jim Zarroli/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jim Zarroli/NPR

Fieldale Farms president Tom Hensley says he'd like to hire more immigrant workers. The president's executive actions on immigration, he says, won't help businesses like his address labor shortages over the long term.

Jim Zarroli/NPR

Meanwhile, companies such as Fieldale Farms struggle to find workers. Tom Hensley says that as Latino immigrants have left, he has to hire more native-born Americans, who tend to be older.

"So we've had to hire middle-aged Americans who have not been used to working in an industrial facility and they have difficulty keeping up with the machines. So it's not the same labor force that we had 10 years ago," Hensley says.

As for President Obama's executive order, Hensley sees it as a kind of Band-Aid solution. It allows a lot of undocumented workers to remain in the country, but it could easily be reversed by the next president.

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A study released this week supports previous reporting that income growth in America has been lopsided ever since the economy began to bounce back from the recent recession.

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, examined federal tax data, state-by-state, and found the national trend of lopsided growth persists. The center's report is titled The Increasingly Unequal States Of America.

The research was led by Estelle Sommeiller, a socio-economist at the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales in France, and Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Penn. Price told NPR that since 1979, "in almost every state, there's been more growth in income for the top one percent, than for the bottom 99 percent [of Americans]."

And while the last few years have seen the U.S. recovering from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, economist Justin Wolfers writes in The New York Times that, setting aside capital gains "which are largely enjoyed by the rich, it remains the case that nearly all the fruits of that recovery have gone to the rich."

There are some exceptions. In West Virginia, incomes of the top one percent actually fell, while the rest of the population's grew. Incomes rose both for the top one percent and for the rest of the population in Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, New Mexico, Kentucky, Alaska and Hawaii.

North Dakota 99 percent's income lags amid energy boom

Mark Price highlighted North Dakota as an extreme example. The income of the bottom 99 percent has grown by 21 percent since 2000. That's because they've been riding an energy boom which has created millionaires. "At the same time," Price said, "the top one percent in North Dakota's income grew by 103 percent. You still see the national pattern, which is that most of the growth is going to that tiny fraction of folks."

Not all states have benefited in the same way from the energy boom. Pennsylvania has also been exploring its energy resources, but its unemployment has been in line with the national average.

"The numbers here are much worse," said Price. "The bottom 99 percent have actually lost ground, and the top one percent have seen growth of about 28 percent." That, Price explained, is in part because the oil and gas industry doesn't typically employ as many people as, say, the health industry. But it's also because Pennsylvania has over 17 times the population of North Dakota, and a far more diverse economy, so it's harder to make a dent in a recession.

A Morgan Stanley poll of over 300 millionaires found that most of them list the "increasing income gap between poor and wealthy Americans" as a top concern.

And while 2015 is expected to bring more growth in income for all sectors, Price said his concern is that the results are going to continue looking a lot like North Dakota: most of the gains will go to people at the top.

The ouster of Bryan Stockton from his CEO perch at Mattel this week came as the toy maker's best-known brands like Barbie stagnate and it loses business to Web-based games.

Stockton himself said last year that Mattel lacked an innovative culture and blamed it in part on something specific: bad meetings. That's a common and persistent corporate ailment.

Scott Ryan-Hart is a cartographer for the Ohio Department of Transportation, where a typical meeting can last more than two hours.

"I would be needed for 15 minutes in the middle of it," Ryan-Hart says. "So I have an hour before and an hour after that I'm still kind of sequestered in this meeting and I can't get out of it."

This annoyed Ryan-Hart, until about a year ago, when he took up superhero doodling during meetings, which he tweeted under the hashtag "#Meetingfromhell." His boss wasn't a fan.

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Scott Ryan-Hart made this superhero doodle during one of his extensive work meetings. Scott Ryan-Hart hide caption

itoggle caption Scott Ryan-Hart

Scott Ryan-Hart made this superhero doodle during one of his extensive work meetings.

Scott Ryan-Hart

"He was not super happy with it," Ryan-Hart says.

Then again, his colleagues have their own vices.

"I'm usually sketching ... the person next to me is doing email, someone else is reading reports that they have to get done," he says.

This behavior, says Steven Rogelberg, should sound alarms to the meeting leader. Rogelberg teaches industrial/organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

"You're basically getting tremendous amounts of feedback. You're getting feedback that you're running a really bad meeting," Rogelberg says.

The average American office worker spends more than nine hours of every week preparing for, or attending, project update meetings, according to a the results of a survey released last week by the software firm Clarizen and Harris Polls. That's up nearly 14 percent from the last survey four years ago.

Experts say poorly run meetings grind away at employee engagement, and make companies less reactive by bogging decisions down in human red tape. Some companies, including Mattel, try to create limits around the size, duration or frequency of meetings.

But meetings often last longer than they need to, Rogelberg says, because managers don't understand Parkinson's Law. This is the idea, backed up by research, that tasks take as long as the time allotted. You budget two hours, it takes two hours.

But, "given the same agenda," Rosenberg says, "they give the group half as much time ... and lo and behold, when they're given half as much time at the onset, they finish in half as much time! And the quality of the meeting is just as good."

Al Pittampalli is an author and an expert on "meeting culture." He says at their best, meetings are the lifeblood of an organization.

"They're the place where we make the most important decisions, express the most important messages, the most important communications on the most important matters of the day," he says.

But as a consultant, Pittampalli sees meeting culture run amok.

He sees "not just marathon meetings, but meetings that are done to prepare for meetings, and meetings that are done to prepare for meetings to prepare for meetings. It is a waste of time — it's what I call a weapon of mass interruption."

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"One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility," Pittampalli says.

He says meetings alleviate the anxiety of making tough calls by delaying decisions, instead of making them.

Bad meetings also recur because, in many cases, the people leading them don't know how to run a good one.

There's a lack of self-awareness among meeting leaders. The vast majority self-report that they believe they're conducting meetings well, while the vast majority of participants disagree. Yet Pittampalli says no one speaks up.

"Nobody is willing to give feedback to their boss," he says.

And so, the endless meetings go on, and on, and on.

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