Most Recent Posts

Russia's worsening economy is having an impact far beyond its borders — even affecting Alpine ski resorts where Russians once flocked.

For the past decade, they've come in large numbers to ski the fabled Alpine slopes around Mont Blanc. But the drop in the ruble is now keeping them away. And that's having an effect on the wintertime economy in the region.

In the cozy and chic village of Megeve in southeastern France, horse-drawn carriages jingle through the snowy streets. People gather around a steaming cauldron of mulled wine in the town's central plaza. And the boutiques are lit up and full of shoppers.

Megeve's mayor, Catherine Jullien, looks over the scene from her upstairs office in the town hall. Jullien says Russians make up just 10 percent of Megeve's winter tourists, but they play a key role.

"They're an extremely important clientele because they come right on the tail of Christmas and New Year, because of their later Orthodox celebrations," she says. "They spend big and allow the resort to prolong the holiday season well into the month of January."

Jullien says the plunging ruble has hit middle class Russian families especially hard, and many haven't returned this year.

Frederic Vepierre is the manager of Le Fer a Cheval, one of Megeve's most exclusive, 5-star hotels.

"We began to worry way last spring when we saw what was going on in Ukraine and the standoff between Russia and the West. And then we heard all kinds of rumors, like [Russian] President Vladimir Putin wasn't going to let people leave with their money," Vepierre says. "We're all worried."

i

Horse-drawn carriages wait for clients on Dec. 19, 2012, in Megeve. Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP/Getty Images

Horse-drawn carriages wait for clients on Dec. 19, 2012, in Megeve.

Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP/Getty Images

Towns and resorts throughout the Alps are being affected by the ruble's collapse, which has cast a pall over Russian tourism across Europe. The French resort of Courchevel is perhaps the biggest mecca for Russian skiers in the region. Tourism bureau director Adeline Roux says they won't know the real impact until the season is over, but the signs are not good.

Right now, luxury chalets are still available, which is unprecedented, Roux says. As well, Russian tourists usually come back to the region in March, which she fears will not happen this year.

For now, you can still hear Russian on the slopes, and drifting through the crisp, Alpine air.

Muscovite Natalia Resiska is having a smoke before taking the ski lift. She says her group was lucky – they booked and paid for their trip six months ago. Resiska says Russians love skiing in the Alps.

"First, it's not so far from Russia. And second, it's very comfortable here," the 29-year-old says. "Good slopes, good food, you know, very nice, nice atmosphere, and so on."

I ask them if they've felt any hostility over the Ukraine conflict and the standoff between the West and Russia.

"No," says 55-year-old Liliyana Asyanava, another Muscovite in the group. "It's all just a political game."

Their companion Sergei Gouchev says Putin and Obama should just sit down and talk and drink some vodka together.

But there'll be no vodka for this group. They plan to enjoy their aprs ski the French way, with oysters and champagne.

russian economy

Russia

France

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.

Shots - Health News

No, Seriously, How Contagious Is Ebola?

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.

Goats and Soda

Ebola In The Air: What Science Says About How The Virus Spreads

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.

West Africa

ebola

Infectious Disease

Global Health

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."

Immigration Policy May Mean Better Jobs, But Impact On Labor Unclear

Business

Obama's Immigration Moves Do Little To Help Businesses, Groups Say

Politics

In Southwest, New Immigration Policies Bring Frustration From All Sides

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.

i

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.

executive action

immigration, illegal immigration, immigration reform, undocumented immigrants

labor

undocumented workers

undocumented worker

Immigration

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.