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Ben Bernanke hands over the reins at the Federal Reserve to Janet Yellen on Friday. The Fed's vice chair will be the first woman ever to lead the nation's central bank. It's a position many view as the second most powerful in the country.

The world of central banking is largely a man's world. But Yellen has been undeterred by such barriers since she was in high school in Brooklyn. Charlie Saydah, a former classmate, says she was probably the smartest kid in the class. Yellen was "clearly smart, and she was smart among a lot of smart kids," he says.

But she couldn't attend Stuyvesant, the competitive public school for Brooklyn's best and brightest.

"She didn't go because, you know, she was a girl," Saydah says. And back then, in the early 1960s, Stuyvesant only admitted boys. Saydah, a retired journalist, said that meant girls dominated the regular public schools, like Fort Hamilton High in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.

Saydah says he graduated 26th out of that class. "Everyone ahead of me was a girl," he says.

Janet Yellen graduated first.

"I would have expected her to not only succeed but excel in anything she did," Saydah says.

Economy

Bernanke's Fed Legacy: A Tenure Full Of Tough Decisions

People in China rang in the Year of the Horse overnight with the traditional barrage of fireworks, but Lunar New Year's celebrations in some cities were quieter than usual. After severe pollution choked much of eastern China last year, many people swore off the ancient tradition so they could protect their lungs and the environment.

Shanghai resident Shen Bingling used to celebrate by wheeling a luggage cart full of fireworks onto a street and joining the neighbors in igniting a frenzy of pyrotechnics. Chunks of burned paper would rain down and the air would fill with clouds that smelled of sulfur. Shen, who works as a doorman in a downtown apartment building, says he wouldn't dream of doing something like that today.

"According to our Chinese people's tradition, to have good fortune you should set off fireworks," says Shen, 55, who wore a red scarf in honor of the Lunar New Year. "But for the sake of the air now, you shouldn't."

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A classified document that's among the many secrets revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden "shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free Internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal," CBC News reports.

The Canadian broadcaster has posted a "redacted PDF" about what Communications Security Establishment Canada, that nation's NSA, did during a two-week long test.

The CBC says the document indicates that "the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travelers' wireless devices by [an unidentified] airport's free Wi-Fi system" over a two-week period in May 2012.

"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travelers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi 'hot spots' in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports," the CBC adds.

The Canadian spy agency tells the CBC that it is "mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And in order to fulfill that key foreign intelligence role for the country, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata. ... No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used."

That explanation is similar to those provided by U.S. officials about the NSA's electronic surveillance programs — basically, that the NSA collects huge amounts of information (metadata) about phone calls and other electronic communications, but does not probe their contents or target those of U.S. citizens.

Canadian cyber-security expert Ronald Deibert tells CBC News, however, that "I can't see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law."

President Obama has said that "critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards," the NSA's surveillance programs "could be used to yield more information about our private lives." But while he has said the NSA should no longer hold on to the massive amounts of data it has been collecting, the president has also said that the information still needs to be gathered and stored — by tech and telephone companies — in case it later needs to be analyzed.

Panama says it will release most of the crew of a North Korean ship that was seized six months ago after it was found carrying Soviet-era jet planes and weapons from Cuba in violation of U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang.

Panama says it will release 32 crew members, but that the captain and two others will remain in custody to face charges of trafficking.

The container ship, the Chong Chon Gang, was stopped on the Atlantic side of the Canal in July. Officials said its cargo – which reportedly included 25 containers of military hardware, including two Cold War-era MiG-21 fighter aircraft, air defense systems, missiles and command-and-control vehicles – had endangered Panama's internal security.

The weapons were found in the ship's hold stored under hundreds of bags of sugar.

Havana had said at the time that it was sending the "obsolete" defensive weapons to North Korea to be repaired, a view echoed by North Korea's state-run Central News Agency.

But a U.N. team sent to investigate issued a preliminary reporting saying the shipment violated sanctions imposed over North Korea's nuclear program, which bans weapons exports and the import of all but small arms, the BBC says.

The BBC says that earlier this month, the ship's owners agreed to pay $670,000 to have it released, sans the cargo.

The captain and the two other crew members face a possible 12-year sentence in Panama if convicted on charges of arms trafficking.