National News

The nation's last coal-fired ferry has been traversing Lake Michigan from the town of Ludington, Mich., since 1953. An EPA permit allowing the Badger to dump several tons of coal ash into the lake daily is now under review, which could mean big changes for the small town's culture and economy.

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Horse meat may strike horror in Great Britain. But in Kazakhstan, horseflesh isn't just acceptable, it's a traditional treat. Visitors can eat spicy horse meat sausage and drink fermented mare's milk — the same fare that fueled Genghis Khan's marauding army as it swept across the steppe.

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A competition to encourage entrepreneurs to design health apps came up with a wide range of possibilities. One app audits medical bills for errors and savings. Another helps find prices for services, such as dental exams, for people without insurance coverage.

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More than 2 feet of snow hit the high plains this week, snarling travel and all but shutting down some cities. Despite those hassles, for farmers and ranchers, the snow brings some urgently needed moisture to their drought-stricken fields and pastures.

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There are more than 1,400 billionaires in the world right now, according to two sources — one in the U.S., and one in China. But the tallies by Forbes and Hurun Report differ on key points, including whether there are now more billionaires in Asia than anywhere else.

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Internet networks control more and more of our environment every day. And many of these things can be hacked. That's because over the past decade, the Internet and the mobile phone network have been layered on top of all kinds of technologies that weren't built with security in mind.

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This presidential election is the first since the disputed one of 2007 that prompted widespread tribal violence. Today,gunmen stormed a polling place in Garissa killing 19.

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Here's a fairy tale with a very unhappy ending. Jack the Giant Slayer -- you know the movie based loosely on Jack and the Giant Beanstalk -- earned about 28 million at the box office this weekend. A disaster considering Warner Brothers reportedly dropped more than $200 million to make it.

A big chunk of that went into special effects. This weekend, Disney takes up the cause with its own special effects wonder "Oz the Great and Powerful." The New York Times reported today that Oz is tipping the balance sheet at $325 million. What can possiblly cost that much?

The trailer promises an eye-poping, 21st Century Oz -- thanks to the wonders of CGI or computer generated imagery. And that comes with a hefty price tag, says Jason E. Squire, a professor of film at University of Southern California.

"There are two major costs to movies, there’s budget and there’s marketing," Squire said. He adds that Disney is probably spending about $125 million for marketing.

As for the rest of the $200 million dollars?

"For a high tech movie like this it basically comes down to CGI," he said. 

Despite  such flops like “Jack the Giant Slayer” and “John Carter” --  a sci-fi movie that was also chock of CGI but that ended up costing Disney about $200 million bukcs  --  studios continue to make huge investments in special effect, CGI and 3D in movies, said Porter Bibb, who's with Media Tech Capital Partners.

"It seems to be the only way that the target movie goers -- 18 to 24 -- will pay to come to see  a movie in a theater," Bibb said. The group makes up 80 percent of the theater going audience.

But with super-high-definition TVs and movies online competing with their attention, studios believe the only way they'll pay for a movie ticket is if it offers more special effects. 

"I'm not sure I buy into that theory," said media analyst Hal Vogel. ""Because the box office, in terms of admissions, has been sluggish now for ten years. " And he says no matter how much money the studios spend on CGI and special effects, tickets sales -- at least in the U.S. -- haven’t kept pace.

The provision restricted the commercial speech of the day laborers, the court ruled. Arizona argued that part of the law was passed to mitigate traffic hazards.

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Fire ant stings are a painful fact of life in the South. Sometimes the stings can cause fatal allergic reactions. Yet many people who know they're allergic aren't getting allergy shots that could protect them.

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In his new book, ‘Follow the Money’, author Steve Boggan followed a $10 bill around the U.S. for 30 days.

“What, I wondered, would I find out if I were to set off from the geographical centre of the continental US and follow a $10 bill for 30 days and 30 nights? Was it possible?,” he says in a story about the project in The Guardian.

He watched as the money was exchanged in transaction after transaction, and learned a whole lot about the U.S. economy in the process.

“What I had to do, before each person spent the money, they’d tell me what they were going to do, and I’d go up to the next recipient and say, “Look, this guy or this woman is about to spend this $10 bill, I’ve been following that bill and I’d like to carry on following, will you cooperate,” Boggan says.

Every Friday, protesters in Kafr Nabl, a small town in northwest Syria, take to the streets with posters offering their witty and sarcastic take on the state of the uprising. The town is attracting young Syrians from all over the country who are calling for a secular, democratic state.

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On Monday, President Obama announced the nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Burwell is currently the head of the Wal-Mart Foundation and would need to be confirmed by the Senate before she gets to work.

However, she has worked in the OMB before -- under President Bill Clinton.

That experience means Burwell knows roughly what the job will entail, though, if confirmed, she’ll take the reins of the OMB office at time when the budget is the subject partisan war.

“I just can’t imagine taking over as director of OMB at a more difficult time,” says Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She also worked in the OMB under President Clinton.

Sawhill says the job will now involve a great deal of budget cutting without much possibility to soften those blows.

“You have no candy to give out,” she explains. “There’s no way to sweeten any of your requests. It’s going to be all pain all the time.”

Even under more normal economic and political conditions, the budget director post is a demanding one.

“You have to have a lot of skills,” says Jim Miller, the budget director under President Ronald Reagan. “You have to be a geek of sorts, you have to be an accountant of sorts, an economist [of sorts], but you also have to be an operator.”

Political savvy is important to get things done in Washington, says Miller, especially with the sequestration in full swing.

In effect, the OMB director serves as the gatekeeper to the president -- and much of the country’s purse-strings. Therefore, if confirmed, Burwell will be one powerful woman.

“If I’m a federal agency, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture or Energy, I can’t even ask for a certain budget without passing my request first through the White House Office of Management and Budget,” says Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government and the director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.

Yet, the complicated political climate may also be an opportunity for Burwell.

“This is also a time to shine,” says Jeffrey Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University. “So yes, it’s high stress, but it’s there’s a risk-reward that could make the new OMB director a star.”

On Monday, President Obama announced the nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Burwell is currently the head of the Wal-Mart Foundation and would need to be confirmed by the Senate before she gets to work.

However, she has worked in the OMB before -- under President Bill Clinton.

That experience means Burwell knows roughly what the job will entail, though, if confirmed, she’ll take the reins of the OMB office at time when the budget is the subject partisan war.

“I just can’t imagine taking over as director of OMB at a more difficult time,” says Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She also worked in the OMB under President Clinton.

Sawhill says the job will now involve a great deal of budget cutting without much possibility to soften those blows.

“You have no candy to give out,” she explains. “There’s no way to sweeten any of your requests. It’s going to be all pain all the time.”

Even under more normal economic and political conditions, the budget director post is a demanding one.

“You have to have a lot of skills,” says Jim Miller, the budget director under President Ronald Reagan. “You have to be a geek of sorts, you have to be an accountant of sorts, an economist [of sorts], but you also have to be an operator.”

Political savvy is important to get things done in Washington, says Miller, especially with the sequestration in full swing.

In effect, the OMB director serves as the gatekeeper to the president -- and much of the country’s purse-strings. Therefore, if confirmed, Burwell will be one powerful woman.

“If I’m a federal agency, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture or Energy, I can’t even ask for a certain budget without passing my request first through the White House Office of Management and Budget,” says Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government and the director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.

Yet, the complicated political climate may also be an opportunity for Burwell.

“This is also a time to shine,” says Jeffrey Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University. “So yes, it’s high stress, but it’s there’s a risk-reward that could make the new OMB director a star.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that as the across-the-board cuts take shape, TSA will have to leave vacancies open and cut overtime.

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The State Department's latest environmental impact report says building the Keystone XL pipeline would have no additional impact on climate change, because that oil will simply flow by train instead. Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations says oil companies would prefer to send oil from the Canadian tar sands to refineries by pipeline because it's cheaper. Pipelines cost about $5 per barrel of crude.

"But if it turns out they need to spend $20 a barrel to move it by rail, they're going to do that instead of leaving this $100 a barrel oil in the ground," he says.

Since railroads already carry tar sands oil, and plan to carry much more, it does not matter if the Keystone XL pipeline gets built, from a climate change perspective. That's what the new State Department report says: that the tar sands oil is going to get transported and burned, and its greenhouse gases will go into the air, no matter what. But Anthony Swift with the Natural Resources Defense Council says canceling the pipeline buys more time.

"One of the first steps to addressing climate change is to stop making things worse," he says. "Keystone XL clearly would make things worse. More tar sands would be produced more quickly."

Not giving the U.S. a chance to cut back on oil consumption. Jeffery Elliott follows rail transport at Oliver Wyman, and says no one can predict how much oil will move by rail in the next few years. Both industries -- oil and rail -- are changing drastically day by day because of all the new development of tar sands and shale oil.

"It's hard enough to see your hand in front of your face, much less the horizon," he says.

Elliott says tar sands oil is so thick that it can be easier to put it in a rail car than dilute it to flow through a pipeline. So rail business for oil is bound to keep growing no matter what happens with Keystone XL.

One of the things you've heard President Obama say a lot these days is that the wealthy aren't paying their fair share of taxes. Republicans, of course, disagree. A new analysis by the Tax Policy Center says that the tax bills of the wealthy are as high as they've been since 1979. So who were the one percenters in 1979?

Let's imagine that it's 1979 and you are a one percenter. You're driving down the coast in your Lamborghini, Donna Summer's hit "Bad Girls" is blasting out of your state-of-the-art tape deck and you are making $220,000 in 2010 dollars.

According to Steven Kaplan, who was a bright-eyed 19-year old at Harvard in '79, that put you right at the cutoff of the top one percent of the income distribution.

Today Kaplan is a professor at Chicago Booth. He says at that time most top earners worked as executives and managers at companies like General Motors and Exxon. 16 percent worked in the medical profession, 7 percent were lawyers and 8 percent worked in finance.

Fast forward to today and for the most part these percentages haven't changed much. What has changed significantly is the rate at which the incomes of the top one percent have grown compared to the rest of the country -- especially for those in finance.

"Financial professionals in the top one percent in 2005 were getting about 3.5 times as much of the nation's income as they were back in 1979," says Jon Bakija at Williams College. He's one of the authors of the paper, "Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data."

According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, tax rates for the wealthy have actually gone down since 1979. "Federal taxes were about 35 percent of income for people in the top one percent of the income distribution in 1979," says Bakija.

In 2009 -- the last year data is available, the effective rate was around 29 percent. That was before January's increase in the top rate.

One of the things you've heard President Obama say a lot these days is that the wealthy aren't paying their fair share of taxes. Republicans, of course, disagree. A new analysis by the Tax Policy Center says that the tax bills of the wealthy are as high as they've been since 1979. So who were the one percenters in 1979?

Let's imagine that it's 1979 and you are a one percenter. You're driving down the coast in your Lamborghini, Donna Summer's hit "Bad Girls" is blasting out of your state-of-the-art tape deck and you are making $220,000 in 2010 dollars.

According to Steven Kaplan, who was a bright-eyed 19-year old at Harvard in '79, that put you right at the cutoff of the top one percent of the income distribution.

Today Kaplan is a professor at Chicago Booth. He says at that time most top earners worked as executives and managers at companies like General Motors and Exxon. 16 percent worked in the medical profession, 7 percent were lawyers and 8 percent worked in finance.

Fast forward to today and for the most part these percentages haven't changed much. What has changed significantly is the rate at which the incomes of the top one percent have grown compared to the rest of the country -- especially for those in finance.

"Financial professionals in the top one percent in 2005 were getting about 3.5 times as much of the nation's income as they were back in 1979," says Jon Bakija at Williams College. He's one of the authors of the paper, "Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data."

According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, tax rates for the wealthy have actually gone down since 1979. "Federal taxes were about 35 percent of income for people in the top one percent of the income distribution in 1979," says Bakija.

In 2009 -- the last year data is available, the effective rate was around 29 percent. That was before January's increase in the top rate.

The retirement home's executive director offers condolences to the family of an 87-year-old woman who died, but says the nurse on duty was just following policy.

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The rodents have been a big problem in Iran's capital for years. Efforts to poison them may have run their course. So, according to local reports, sniper teams have been deployed. Some of their targets are quite large — weighing about 11 pounds.

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