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There was bombshell news from the world of honey two weeks ago, and somehow we missed it. Two big honey packers, including one of the largest in the country — Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich. — admitted buying millions of dollars worth of honey that was falsely labeled.

The goal of this mislabeling, which has been long suspected in the honey industry, was to acquire cheap honey from China. Chinese honey is subject to steep "anti-dumping" duties that the U.S. imposed back in 2008, after U.S. honey producers complained that Chinese exporters were selling their honey at artificially low prices.

Chinese exporters, however, began sending their honey to middlemen in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, who then re-labeled it as local product and sent it on to the U.S.

In another tactic, Chinese exporters labeled containers of honey as something else, such as rice syrup.

Both companies face criminal charges, but they've struck a deal to avoid immediate prosecution. The companies are promising to play by the rules and to set up programs to ensure that all the honey they buy in the future comes from legitimate sources. Groeb Farms also replaced its senior management last summer.

"This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer, the actual user," that they were knowingly importing mislabeled honey, says Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, an industry consortium that has set up an auditing and testing system to guarantee the true origin of honey.

True Source Honey was formed in 2010. According to Wenger, True Source-certified honey now accounts for at least a quarter of U.S. honey consumption.

Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold Honey in Lancaster, Pa., which helped set up the program, wrote in an email to NPR that the recent indictments are "just another reason why we felt it was necessary to verify ethical sourcing of honey."

Times were different in 1996 when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, former President Bill Clinton writes in today's Washington Post.

"In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction," Clinton says. Supporters of the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, thought its passage would head off a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But now, Clinton says, he believes DOMA is "incompatible with our Constitution." As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the act's constitutionality, he is making the case that it discriminates against "same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia [but] are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples."

As NPR's Nina Totenberg has reported:

"The test case that the Supreme Court said it will review involves a New York couple, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, who had been together for 42 years prior to their marriage in 2007. When Spyer died, however, the federal government, acting under DOMA, required Windsor to pay $363,000 in estate taxes that she would not have owed if her spouse had been of the opposite sex. ...

"Windsor won in the lower courts. Indeed, in the past couple of years, 10 courts, with judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, have ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional."

About Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter is a professor of astrophysics UC Berkeley Physics Department in 2004. He is also an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which first announced the results indicating that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. In 1996, he received the American Astronomical Society's Henri Chretien Award. Perlmutter has also written popular articles for Sky and Telescope magazine and has appeared in recent Public Broadcasting System and BBC documentaries on astronomy and cosmology. Professor Perlmutter, who led one of two teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shares with two members of the rival team.

Facebook is redesigning its front page. The News Feed — which is what Facebook's roughly 1 billion users see when they log on to the site — will be rolling out a radical new look over the coming months.

The changes are meant to increase user engagement on the site, make it easier to navigate on mobile phones and provide even more highly targeted advertising.

But any big change also creates a precarious moment in the life of a social network.

Remember Friendster? It was the first social network to achieve large scale success. Founded in 2002 — before Facebook or MySpace — Friendster turned down a $30 million a buyout offer from Google back when that kind of money still turned heads.

At its peak, it had more than 100 million members. Then in 2009 it made some changes to its site, and suddenly Friendster collapsed.

"There was a point where it was really the most important social network," says David Garcia, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

He analyzed data from Friendster collected during its death throws and has come to some interesting conclusions about what makes an enormous online network vulnerable. In Friendster's case, it began with a specific trigger.

"There was a change in the user interface plus there was the alternative of Facebook," Garcia says.

Friendster's redesigned site was awkward to use, unfamiliar, and some dedicated users left. With each new defection, the site became less useful to the people who remained behind.

"If most of your friends have left the community, you will leave it too," Garcia says.

Every time a friend on your network leaves, a network become less valuable to you. Your calculus changes.

Garcia's autopsy here starts with a simple assumption: that when the costs associated with being on a social network begins to outweigh the benefits, you'll leave.

And what's true for Friendster in 2009, Garcia says, is probably still true for Facebook today.

I ask Ian Fisher, who I met at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., what would cause him to leave a social network, to cancel his account, delete his photos and abandon it?

"About two years ago, I canceled my Facebook account for about a year," Fisher says. "I did that because I was reading so many article about privacy concerns on Facebook, and I was spending so much of my time on there and realizing I was getting essentially nothing out of it that was good for me."

In 2010, changes in Facebook's privacy policies led lots of people to leave the network. Unlike Friendster, it didn't collapse.

It turns out, the vulnerability of a social networks to the kind of mass defection hinges on how people use the network.

If most people use it to keep in touch with just one or two friends, then when one of those friends leaves, you're' more likely to leave, too. But if you have 1,000 connections, the network is more resilient.

And in Ian Fisher's case, a few years after he left Facebook, he decided to come back: "Because there were people that I didn't know how to get a hold of, but there were my sort of peripheral acquaintances that I didn't get a chance to connect with quite as much."I am still trying to decide whether it's worth it or not. I'm not totally convinced that it is."

It is for now — maybe just to share pictures of his new baby.

But researchers say Facebook still needs to be cautious. When you are tweaking a social network, even one as big and successful as Facebook, you don't want to scare off too many people at one time — or you could create a cascading exodus that is difficult to stop.

And that may be why Facebook is rolling out its latest update very, very slowly.