Anti-American protests continued throughout the Muslim world today, sparked by a video that insults the Prophet Mohammad. Host Michel Martin looks at the heated debate about freedom of speech, Islam and American values with Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
After an investigation that lasted two years, the House Ethics Committee has cleared Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of charges that she tried to influence regulators when a bank that her husband owns stock in went looking for a federal bailout in 2008.
Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, acting chairman of the ethics panel, announced the decision this morning.
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 10:36 am
Before we go slow, let's go fast, so fast you can't go any faster. That would be light in a vacuum, traveling at 670 million miles per hour ...
Light, of course, can slow down. When light passes through water, it loses speed. A diamond is an even better speed bump. It can slow a beam of light by 40 percent.
But moving on, you and I are going pretty fast right now, though we don't notice. The planet we're on is zipping around the sun at 66,000-plus miles per hour ...
Originally published on Mon September 24, 2012 10:25 am
September can't end soon enough for Mitt Romney, as a leaked video — and some disappointing poll numbers in swing states — add to his woes. Republicans, trying to win a Senate majority, get some surprise encouragement in Connecticut.
But new polling in Virginia is problematic, and news out of Indiana and Wisconsin brings cheers to Democrats.
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 9:51 am
It's a "now familiar global ritual," as The Associated Press says: Apple fans are lining up today at stores "from Sydney to Paris to pick up the tech juggernaut's latest iPhone."
In March, Stacey Kargman-Kaye (left) and her partner, Sharon Gorenstein, with sons Asher, 13, and Ezra, 8, gathered at the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis to witness the signing of a law recognizing same-sex marriage. On Nov. 6, Maryland voters will decide whether to overturn the new law.
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 12:22 pm
If you didn't get your fill of the debate about the best ways to evaluate and compensate teachers from the strike in Chicago, you can now tune in to hear similar arguments in Idaho.
Voters there are going to decide the fate of three different state laws that would phase out tenure, offer financial incentives to top-performing teachers and strip teachers of collective bargaining rights.
All of these laws are being challenged by what are known as popular referendums: when citizens challenge laws that have already been passed by the legislature and signed by the governor.
"A sculpture like this can take a master carver years to produce. Front and center are the popular Taoist gods Shou, Lu and Fu — symbols of long life, money, and luck. 'We hope — no, we insist — we can continue to protect these skills,' says Wang Shan, secretary-general of the China Arts and Crafts Association."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"Some of the last big tuskers gather in Tsavo, Kenya. A single large tusk sold on the local black market can bring $6,000, enough to support an unskilled Kenyan worker for 10 years."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"The largest ivory crucifix in the Philippines hangs in a museum in Manila. The body of Christ, 30 inches long, is carved from a single tusk. The piece dates to the early 1600s, when Spanish galleons began bringing Asian ivory craftsmanship to Spain and the New World."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"Bodies are what remain in Cameroon's Bouba Ndjidah National Park after one of the largest mass elephant slaughters in decades. Armed with grenades and AK-47s, poachers killed more than 300."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"A worker in China's largest ivory-carving factory finishes a piece symbolizing prosperity. China legally bought 73 tons of ivory from Africa in 2008; since then, poaching and smuggling have both soared."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"Smugglers failed to get this contraband past Kenya's law enforcement, but the animals are still gone. Small tusks indicate that young elephants were poached."
Credit Brent Stirton / National Geographic
"A sculpture like this can take a master carver years to produce. Front and center are the popular Taoist gods Shou, Lu and Fu -- symbols of long life, money and luck. 'We hope -- no, we insist -- we can continue to protect these skills,' says Wang Shan, secretary-general of the China Arts and Crafts Association."
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 9:21 pm
My immediate response to the intricate carvings in these photos is awe — maybe even admiration. I can't believe they are made by hand from one solid piece of material. With such detail and complexity, I can see why they would be coveted and sold at a high price.
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 12:21 pm
Fundraising reports filed last night by the presidential campaigns show President Obama with a slight advantage in fundraising last month, while Republican Mitt Romney has the edge by some other measures.
Each candidate is raising money for his own campaign committee, plus his national party committee and a joint fundraising committee or two.
So what you see depends on what you look at.
In cash on hand, the overall Romney organization finished August with more than $168 million — that's $43 million more than the overall Obama organization.
And the space agency has put together a timetable for Endeavour's flybys that will give folks from San Francisco to Southern California a chance to see the shuttle aboard the jumbo jet that's carrying it to L.A.
January 2011: Boys in the Andar district of Afghanistan gathered to collect candy from passing U.S. Army soldiers. Now, there are reports from that area of locals rising up against the Taliban.
As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta notes that the last of the 33,000 so-called surge troops who were added to the U.S. force in Afghanistan last year have now left the country, there's this interesting news:
Originally published on Fri September 21, 2012 10:45 am
(Check below for updates.)
Tens of thousands of people are protesting in all of Pakistan's major cities today, NPR's Jackie Northam reports from Islamabad, as those who oppose U.S. policy in the region continue to use outrage over an anti-Islam video to whip up anti-American sentiment.
There are also reports of new protests in other Muslim nations, including Bangladesh and Malaysia.
Canadian performing artist Fan Yang set a Guinness record for number of people enclosed in a soap bubble. Yang burst the previous record by getting 181 people — arms at their sides — to resist the urge to poke the bubble as it slowly rose around them.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been busy after a tape emerged of him telling wealthy donors that nearly half of Americans see themselves as victims dependent on the federal government. Now he's trying to make those remarks part of a broader argument: What is the proper role of government and who should pay for it?
Credit Kris Connor / Getty Images for Dish Network
Since leaving Fox News in 2011, Glenn Beck has found his way back to TV. His Internet television network, The Blaze TV, is now available to subscribers of the Dish Network.
By the time Glenn Beck left the Fox News Channel in June 2011, both sides seemed ready, even eager, to part ways. Beck announced he would move on to bigger and grander ventures with his own production company, Mercury Radio Arts, but some media critics, such as Variety's Brian Lowry, shrugged then and since.
We were curious how hard it would be to set up an offshore company, so this summer we bought two. We at Planet Money are now the proud owners of "Unbelizable Inc." in Belize and "Delawho? LLC" in Delaware. The whole process was quick and easy.
At least that's how it seemed at first — until we got an email from David Buckley, a tax lawyer at Rogin Nassau, telling us we had just walked into an IRS sinkhole.
Buckley described it as "a minefield of U.S. tax obligations," and he said he was worried about me. (The companies are in my name.)
A Swedish medical team has transplanted uteruses from two women in their 50s to their daughters. Meanwhile, Shots has learned that an Indiana group is recruiting women willing to undergo womb transplants in this country.
"We could go ahead tomorrow if we found the perfect candidate," Dr. Giuseppe Del Priore told Shots.
Berlin's lampposts bristle with fliers and notices, and Berliners read them avidly. For one resident, the lamps were a natural place to turn when she lost a beloved shoe.
Credit Philip Reeves / NPR
Becke's notice told of a "horrible accident." Still no sign of the missing shoe, but the Berlin-based model is optimistic.
You won't see it on TV or in the newspaper, but I know about it. So do my neighbors.
That's because there's a lamppost on our street, festooned with a note that reads, "A HORRIBLE ACCIDENT HAS HAPPENED." And naturally, once you see a note like that, you have to find out more.
As it turns out, the note was written by 29-year-old Maira Becke. But before I reveal her calamity, I must first explain the significance of lamp posts here in Berlin.
For those of you who feel you've had quite enough of the political ads airing every night on your TV screens, well, get ready for another sort of deluge.
In the coming weeks, candidates will bombard your mailboxes with ads. It may seem old-fashioned, but the consultants who devise direct-mail campaigns have become sophisticated about knowing whom to reach and what to say.
"It's almost because of the changing media landscape that direct mail remains relevant," says Anil Mammen, who runs a small direct-mail shop in Washington, D.C.
When Tierra Jackson was in high school, she was struggling. She kept getting yelled at for being late to school.
What most of her teachers and administrators didn't know was the reason for her tardiness: Jackson was homeless. Her mother was in and out of prison. She and her brother were living with her aunt and cousins. All seven of them shared a single room in one of Chicago's homeless shelters, a long bus ride from her school.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour landed in the Mojave Desert today. In truth, tomorrow will be the spectacular day, when it flies across the California coast, and across the landmarks of San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it will find its new, permanent home at the California Science Center.
Still, the retired shuttle had a poignant day today, taking off from Houston, flying low through Austin and making a special flyover in Tucson, Arizona in honor of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, whose husband Mark Kelly was in command during its last mission in May 2011.
Cuban-Americans know a thing or two about what can happen when a government seizes wealth and redistributes it, as Fidel Castro's regime did five decades ago in Cuba.
So Mitt Romney had an especially receptive audience Wednesday night at a rally of Cuban-Americans in Miami, when he launched his campaign's latest line of attack on President Obama.
"He said some years ago something which we're hearing about today on the Internet," Romney told the crowd. "He said that he believes in redistribution."
According to a Senate investigations subcommittee, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other multinational corporations took advantage of an ambiguous U.S. tax code to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.
Originally published on Thu September 20, 2012 5:46 pm
President Obama may have the overwhelming support of Latino voters in his race against Republican Mitt Romney, but that didn't get him a free pass during his appearance Thursday at Univision's presidential candidate forum.
Obama faced repeated tough questions from the hosts of the forum on the Spanish-language channel, and from some in the audience, for his failure to deliver on his promise as a candidate in 2008 to push comprehensive immigration reform during his first year in the White House.
U.S. officials and Libyan militiamen met to discuss the deteriorating security in Benghazi just two days before the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Stevens is shown here at the consulate in June.
Originally published on Thu September 20, 2012 5:15 pm
Two days before the deadly Sept. 11 attack on Americans in Libya, three U.S. officials met pro-government militias working to provide security in the city of Benghazi.
In that meeting, which included the American economic and political counselors, Mohammed el Gharabi, a leader of a prominent militia, says he warned the Americans that the security situation in Benghazi was deteriorating.
Assassinations are becoming rampant; no one is safe, including militiamen like himself, he says he told the Americans.
Egyptians destroy an American flag pulled down from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Sept. 11, during a protest over the film that insulted the Prophet Muhammad.
The protests and violence aimed at U.S. interests in the Middle East have set off a domestic debate about what the U.S. could or should do to relate to new political movements in the region. The Obama administration says it will continue to engage the region. The campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, says the U.S. needs to do more to lead.
But there are others who say that both parties have it wrong, and that U.S. policies from both Republican and Democratic administrations have failed.
From teenagers strumming guitars in their bedrooms to big studio executives in Hollywood, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to make money from online videos. The video-sharing site Vimeo has just added to their site a feature with a time-tested history in the real world — a virtual tip jar.
Electric-bass player Brian Compton has been a musician for 20 years. He plays with a three-piece band on a San Francisco street corner and hopes for tips from afternoon commuters. He estimates that less than 1 percent of passersby actually leave a tip.
The artificial cave built for bats in Tennessee has a human entrance below and a bat entrance above. In the summer, any fungus left by the bats over the winter will be cleaned up.
Credit Jonathan Mays, Wildlife Biologist / Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife
A little brown bat with white-nose syndrome in Maine in 2011.
A man-made bat cave in Tennessee is looking for tenants. An hour northwest of Nashville, the artificial cave is built to give thousands of bats a haven from a devastating infection called white-nose syndrome.
Millions of bats in the Northeast have died from the infection since it first showed up a few years ago. The culprit is an invasive fungus that grows in caves. When bats hibernate inside, they wake up with faces covered in white fuzz and often wind up starving or freezing to death.
Surgeons transplant a kidney in 8-year-old Sarah Dickman at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta in 2008. The proposed changes in the transplant list attempt to maximize kidney life in young patients.
There's some big news out today about one of the most sensitive issues in medicine: Who's next in line for a transplant?
The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, a nonprofit in charge of distributing organs, wants to revamp the system for distributing the most sought-after organ — kidneys — for the first time in 25 years.
