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The weather is warming and vacation season approaching.

And, just as predictably, the price of gasoline is rising. It does that every spring as refineries switch to more expensive summer blends.

But this year, the seasonal price bump is getting an extra bounce. Gasoline is costing consumers about 5 percent more than last year at this time, even though oil supplies are abundant. Why?

Experts say U.S. retail prices are nudging higher in large part because Gulf Coast refineries are sending more gasoline to other countries.

"We think there's definitely an impact on gasoline prices, especially coming from the exports to Latin America," said John Galante, an analyst with Energy Security Analysis Inc., a consulting firm.

Parallels

U.S. Taps New Energy Sources, And Potential Geopolitical Clout

India's Bollywood film industry is known for romantic, over-the-top musicals that increasingly are reaching a world-wide audience. To highlight the international appeal, the industry holds its annual awards ceremony every year outside of India.

This year, Bollywood, its glittering stars and its legions of fans, have come to Tampa, Fla. It's the first time the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) Awards have ever been held in the U.S.

At nearly all of the events held this week in downtown Tampa, the soundtrack has been throbbing Indian pop. At an outdoor dance concert, several thousand people — mostly Indian-Americans — gathered at a park on Tampa's waterfront.

DJs provided the music and there were food vendors, families on blankets and even a flash mob courtesy of a couple of dozen young people breaking out into a choreographed dance routine.

In the past, these Bollywood awards have been held in international cities like Bangkok, Amsterdam and Singapore. Tampa, although on one of Florida's most beautiful bays and experienced with hosting large gatherings, isn't exactly an international capital.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn says one selling point for IIFA was how well the city did two years ago hosting the Republican National Convention.

"They wanted to introduce the Bollywood brand to the United States," Buckhorn says. "It had never been here before, so they picked a city where there's a big Indian-American community, with the biggest media market in the state of Florida. So it made sense for a lot of reasons, and one thing we know how to do is put on a big show."

But even the mayor concedes, Bollywood awards are nothing like a GOP convention.

"The Republican convention looked like me: a bunch of stuffy old white guys in suits," he says. "This is nothing but glitz and glam and lights and music and beautiful people."

Indian-Americans and some non-Indian fans have flocked to the Bollywood events this week. Tickets to Saturday night's awards spectacular at Tampa's baseball stadium go from a hundred dollars into the thousands. More than 20,000 people are expected, and IIFA estimates the worldwide TV audience in the hundreds of millions.

But there are also red carpet events this week, where fans can see their favorite stars up close. One of those stars is Anil Kapoor. He is well known even to Western audiences for his role in Slumdog Millionaire, emphatically not a Bollywood musical. Kapoor was everywhere in downtown Tampa this week; dancing, cutting ribbons and doing his best to charm fans and the media.

"Congratulations to all the people of Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay, we love you, you're the best," he said to excited fans.

To attract the stars of India's film industry to Tampa, it takes more than charm — it takes money. The city and IIFA got significant financial help from a local philanthropist, Kirwan Patel. Patel is a Tampa cardiologist who admits he's not a huge fan of Bollywood films, but he says he jumped at the chance to help bring a wellspring of Indian culture to his hometown.

"Culture and art is a great medium to cross barriers of race, religion [and] ethnicity," Patel says. "And I felt that this is a good way of promoting a cultural spirit of India and introducing it to the United States."

At all the Bollywood events this week, the cultural spirit of India was irrepressible.

The Marshall Islands, the Pacific chain where the U.S. carried out dozens of nuclear tests in the late 1940s and 1950s, has filed suit in the Hague against Washington and the governments of eight other countries it says have not lived up to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The Guardian says in the "unprecedented legal action" brought before the International Court of Justice on Thursday "the Republic of the Marshall Islands accuses the nuclear weapons states of a 'flagrant denial of human justice.' It argues it is justified in taking the action because of the harm it suffered as a result of the nuclear arms race."

Besides the U.S., the Marshall Islands is also suing Russia, China, France and the U.K., which have all signed the non-proliferation treaty, or NPT, as well as four other countries who have never signed — India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, which has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons.

In court documents, the Marshall Islands argues that the 1958 NPT, which did not come into force until 1970, amounts to a compact between nuclear haves and have-nots. Non-weapons states essentially agreed not to try to acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for weapons states moving toward disarmament, the Marshalls claims.

According to the Guardian:

"Although the size of the arsenals are sharply down from the height of the cold war, the Marshall Islands' legal case notes there remain more than 17,000 warheads in existence, 16,000 of them owned by Russia and the US – enough to destroy all life on the planet."

On the decision to shoot from above

Part of my want as a maker in creating these was to put myself in the position of the characters who were eating these meals. By shooting them from above, that was the closest I could come to a first-person perspective on the meal.

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