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It's been a tough week for New Jersey Gov. and possible Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie.

One of his former allies pleaded guilty and two others were indicted for allegedly creating a traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge as political retribution.

Now, New Jersey's highest court is set to hear arguments over one of Christie's signature accomplishments: his pension reform deal.

Christie swaggered onto the national stage as a tough-talking Jersey guy who could get things done by working across the aisle with Democrats. Exhibit A: the pension reform law he signed during his first term as governor.

"How did we do it? Through leadership and compromise. ... Lead on the tough issues by telling your citizens the truth about the depth of our challenges," he said in 2011.

Back then, Christie promised to pay billions of dollars into the state's woefully underfunded pension system. While public sector unions agreed to cuts in benefits.

"This was his go-to watershed breakthrough issue," said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University.

"This what catapulted him to the national arena. Now, given that policy is a failure, it's really hard to reclaim that mantle."

In order for the pension deal to add up, the Christie administration optimistically projected that tax revenues would grow quickly. But the state's economy lagged, and the projections didn't pan out. Last year, Christie announced New Jersey would not make billions in payments as promised. So the state's public sector unions sued.

"We have been more than gracious and accommodating to work with the governor. And he hasn't kept up his end of the bargain," said Wendell Steinhauer, president of the New Jersey Education Association.

Lots of states have done a bad job of keeping up with their pension payments. But New Jersey is one of the worst. Its pension system is more than $80 billion in the red. Next year, pension and health benefits for public workers will add up to nearly a quarter of the state's budget. Gov. Christie mostly blames past governors for sticking him with this bill.

"I'm like the guy who showed up for dinner at dessert. And then everybody went to go to the bathroom. And never came back. And I got the check," he said earlier this year.

But that's not entirely accurate, says one former Republican governor of New Jersey, Christie Todd Whitman.

"Obviously, I'm gonna object to the fact that he blames it mostly on me," she told NPR. "Because it just isn't the case if you look at what we did. I mean, he's had what, six years now? You have to own it at some point."

Still, Whitman agrees with Christie that the state needs to get growing costs under control. And no one thinks that will be easy.

"It's not just the immediate hole," said Thomas Healey, who led the governor's bi-partisan pension commission, which continues to push for more cuts. "It's the size of the hole that keeps getting bigger and bigger that's problem."

For now, Christie's own lawyers will be arguing that the 2011 pension law he signed — that signature achievement of his first term — is actually unconstitutional. A trial court sided with the unions and told the governor to pay up. But the Christie administration appealed.

"That's where his presidential campaign makes a solution to the pension problem almost impossible," said Tom Moran, editorial page editor at the Newark Star-Ledger. He and Gov. Christie have clashed at times. But even Moran admits Christie inherited a mess.

"He jumped in front of a speeding train. And he's made it a tiny bit better," he said. "At the same time, he's poisoned the political atmosphere by making a big promise that he broke. So now it's harder to make a second deal, and that's clearly necessary."

Moran thinks Christie might have to agree to some new tax revenues — if only as a gesture of good faith to get the unions back to the negotiating table for more talks. But raising taxes would be political poison for Christie if he decides to run for the Republican presidential nomination.

The state Supreme Court will hear arguments in the pension lawsuit Wednesday. And the grand deal of 2011 looks more and more like ancient history.

The island of Puerto Rico is many things: a tropical paradise, a U.S. territory and an economic mess. After years of deficits, state-owned institutions in Puerto Rico owe investors some $73 billion. That's four times the debt that forced Detroit into bankruptcy two years ago. The bill is now due.

One of the most visible signs of the crisis is a tent city on the plaza in front of Puerto Rico's historic Capitol building in San Juan. For several weeks, a group of protesters have been camped out, with signs, rallies and music. They're opposing plans by Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla to raise taxes to help cover Puerto Rico's crippling debt.

Labor organizer Javier Lopez says, "We want fair reform. Those who have more should pay more, not the working poor."

For months now, the financial crisis has been front page news in Puerto Rico, and people are getting angrier.

Sergio Marxuach, an analyst with the Center for a New Economy in San Juan, says he gets asked about it all the time, on the street and even in his local pharmacy. Marxuach says the pharmacist asked him, " 'Do you think, should I move to Miami? I got this offer to work at a pharmacy in Miami.' I said, 'Well, I have no idea what your financial situation is. I can tell you what's going on in Puerto Rico.' But people are very worried."

For 25 years, Puerto Rico has been caught in a debilitating economic spiral. Decades of recession and slow economic growth forced a succession of governments to take out loans to cover budget deficits.

"What we have been doing is basically borrowing to survive today," Marxuach says. "Unfortunately, our debt levels have gotten to a point where the rating agencies have downgraded our credit to below investment grade."

With a junk status rating, Puerto Rico is trying to negotiate a new bond sale with Wall Street investors. At the same time, the island's troubled energy company, PREPA, is desperately trying to stave off default.

As president of the Government Development Bank, Melba Acosta-Febo is Puerto Rico's point person on its economic crisis. For months, she's shuttled between the island, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

The Two-Way

White House Says There Are No Plans To Bail Out Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico: A Disenchanted Island

Puerto Rico's Battered Economy: The Greece Of The Caribbean?

Puerto Rico: A Disenchanted Island

One-Way Tickets To Florida: Puerto Ricans Escape Island Woes

Nearly 20 Wall Street bankers filed out of her office in San Juan just before her interview with NPR. They'd just finished grilling Acosta-Febo for more than an hour, but she was unruffled.

"In these meetings," she says, "most of the questions are very similar questions. I mean, about all issues — liquidity, finances."

Acosta-Febo says the Padilla administration inherited the huge debt and the troubled economy. But after years of mismanagement and borrowing, there aren't any easy solutions.

To deal with its debt, Puerto Rico passed a law that would allow troubled agencies like the state-owned power company to seek bankruptcy protection. A federal judge struck down the law, though, ruling it violated the federal Bankruptcy Code.

The commonwealth is appealing that decision. It's also pushing for a law in Congress to amend the Bankruptcy Code to include Puerto Rico.

But in the meantime, the island needs to find money to pay its creditors. And that means raising taxes.

But in Puerto Rico, raising taxes is one thing — collecting them is another. Tax evasion is rampant. A recent study by consultant KPMG reported that Puerto Rico collects just 56 percent of the sales tax that's due.

Economist Sergio Marxuach says, "You could see doctors here who charge you on a cash basis only. We're talking people who went to Harvard Med, Johns Hopkins, you know. And would have this sign that said: No Checks, No Credit Cards, No ATM Cards. Just Cash."

To combat tax evasion, Puerto Rico recently passed a law requiring merchants to take some other payment in addition to cash. The Padilla administration also wants to adopt a value-added tax, a consumption tax that would be more difficult to evade.

Government Development Bank head Melba Acosta-Febo concedes that small businesses are likely to take the biggest hit from the new tax. But that's only fair, she says.

"Many of those people don't report the whole revenues or overreport expenses," she says. "So now suddenly, because they're paying consumption, they're paying more. But that's part of what we're doing to curtail tax evasion and to bring more money to the system."

i

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla (right) delivers his budget plan for Puerto Rico's upcoming fiscal year at the Capitol in San Juan on April 30. Legislators rejected his call to raise taxes as way to compensate for the island's rampant tax evasion. Ricardo Arduengo/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Ricardo Arduengo/AP

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla (right) delivers his budget plan for Puerto Rico's upcoming fiscal year at the Capitol in San Juan on April 30. Legislators rejected his call to raise taxes as way to compensate for the island's rampant tax evasion.

Ricardo Arduengo/AP

Even some within Gov. Padilla's own party are skeptical about raising taxes to pay down the debt. Puerto Rico's House recently voted down his tax plan. San Juan Sen. Ramn Luis Nieves says he believes in the end, the commonwealth may simply be unable to pay its $73 billion debt in full.

"At some point," Nieves says, "we will have to decide either to pay for the debt service, or pay for our schools and hospitals, health care and social services for the poor. I don't want to reach that point."

But without enough money to pay its debts and with bankruptcy currently not an option, ultimately it may not be Puerto Rico, but bondholders on Wall Street who will decide the island's future.

Puerto Rico

financial overhaul

financial crisis

The self-declared Islamic State is taking credit for a thwarted attack on a Muhammad drawing contest in Garland, Texas.

According to SITE, a company that monitors jihadist groups, ISIS took credit for the attack in the latest edition its al-Bayan news bulletin. The group identified the two suspects as "two soldiers from the soldiers of the Caliphate."

The AP reports that the Sunni extremist group goes on to warn the United States that more attacks are coming. The wire service adds:

"The statement did not provide details and it was unclear whether the group was opportunistically claiming the attack as its own. It was the first time the Islamic State, which frequently calls for attacks against the West, had claimed responsibility for one in the United States."

Police say two men who have been named as Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi came out of a car firing assault rifles on Sunday.

One officer fired back and killed the men. As we reported, Simpson had been in trouble with the law in the past. In 2011, he was convicted of lying to the FBI, which was investigating a planned trip to fight in Somalia.

According to multiple reports, Soofi was Simpson's roommate.

CNN reports:

"U.S. authorities have said they are investigating whether Sunday's shooting has any link to international terrorism. But there are clues that one of the gunmen was an ISIS sympathizer.

"Moments before the attack, Simpson posted an ominous tweet with the hashtag #texasattack: 'May Allah accept us as mujahideen.' The tweet also said he and his fellow attacker had pledged allegiance to 'Amirul Mu'mineen,' which means 'he leader of the faithful.' CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said that likely refers to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

"And earlier, Simpson had asked his readers on Twitter to follow an ISIS propagandist. After the shooting, the propagandist tweeted: 'Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.'"

Garland, Texas

Prophet Muhammad

Two months into my first pregnancy, I suffered a miscarriage and needed to seek medical care.

Although a miscarriage is difficult for any woman to experience, I had access to the best care. My physician was excellent, I trusted her judgment, and the imaging equipment, laboratory facilities and clinical care were all first-rate.

That's not surprising — except that I was then living in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, the capital city of one of India's poorest states.

In 2012, as a freshly-minted pediatrician, I left my home in D.C. to manage a newborn health project aimed at strengthening essential newborn care practices like breastfeeding and infection detection in rural Uttar Pradesh.

In Lucknow, a city of more than 2 million, the gap between rich and poor was a fact of life. For a foreigner like me, who grew up in the United States, it was my first real-life immersion into A Tale of Two Cities.

I could see the disparity on a regular basis. My husband and I lived in a beautiful flat with marble floors, air-conditioning, a lush garden. The lovely woman who cleaned our house, Asha, proudly had us over for chai, showing us her 7 by 7 foot space, a single mat on the floor, no plumbing, shared with her daughter and two young grandchildren — and she was relatively better off than most of the poor in Uttar Pradesh.

The state-of-the-art medical care I received was most certainly not the norm in Lucknow. Thousands of women deliver their babies at home, and care in public hospitals does not always offer significant advantage.

One day, I walked with one of my interns to a public hospital where we were working on a research study. The hospital, which served some of the city's poorest, was just a few miles from where I had received care myself. As we made our way to the pediatrics ward to collect data, we caught a glimpse of a fly-covered corpse of an elderly, frail man, lying to the side of the hospital entrance. Just inside the door were dozens of patients, filling every last space, waiting in the stifling heat to be seen. Some were acutely ill, gasping for breath, or in excruciating pain. Nurses circulated, trying to care for the sickest, but they struggled to keep up. It was a difficult sight; I did my best to stay collected while comforting my young intern, keeping her propped up and hydrated as she grew dizzy and faint.

After a year in India, I moved back to Washington, D.C., where I now work as a newborn technical adviser at Save the Children for the Saving Newborn Lives program. Our goal is to help professionals and ministries of health in Africa and Asia reduce newborn death rates.

Every year, Save the Children releases its State of the World's Mothers Report, highlighting the best and worst places in the world to be a mother. This year, we took a closer look at the disparity between rich and poor children in cities. I thought of my time in India.

That's where the report found the largest gaps between rich and poor. The poorest children in cities across India are three times as likely as the wealthiest children to die before their fifth birthday. In India nearly 300,000 babies die the day they are born — more than any other country in the world, accounting for nearly a third of all newborn deaths worldwide.

And we found that 50,000 mothers die each year in India as a result of birth complications, versus 1,200 in the United States. But the poor bear the greatest burden not only in the developing world but in the U.S. as well. In my hometown of Washington, D.C., the infant death rate in 2012 in the city's poorest section was 14.9 per 1000 live births, more than ten times higher than in the city's wealthiest section.

My personal experiences in India breathe a sense of humanity into the numbers. I don't want to see any mother or child receive inadequate care by virtue of the country they live in, their postal code or the amount of money they can claim to their name.

I am expecting a baby in the coming month. I have some of the worries and anxieties any woman faces with the arrival of a new baby, but losing my own life or the life of my baby is not a fear that occupies my mind. I hope that in the years to come, in India, Washington, D.C., and around the world, all mothers-to-be can feel that same sense of peace.

At a rural newborn care training during my days in Uttar Pradesh, I watched from the corner of my eye as an infant crawled away from his mother and tried to put a rock in his mouth. Both his mom and I lunged toward him, pulling the rock away, gesturing no, then turned to each other and laughed. Kids will be kids, no matter where they live in the world.

Bina Valsangkar is a pediatrician who works with Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives program.

newborns

maternal health

India