National News

The company plans to expand work at transmission plants.

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Want to be a better surgeon? Get your game face on. A study finds that surgical residents who played video games for an hour a day performed better at simulated keyhole surgeries than colleagues who refrained.

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Barely a week after a major report outlining likely Chinese hacking on American companies, Beijing officials say the U.S. is doing the same thing.

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The United States  expends a lot of energy trying to keep illicit stuff from entering this country: guns, drugs, even illegal immigrants. But Peter Andreas points out that smuggling and piracy were a financial foundation of colonial American society.

Andreas is a political scientist at Brown University, and has a new book out called "Smuggler Nation." He says that, before the Revolution, smuggling was de rigeur.

"You were ripping off the Crown. You could be considered kind of a patriotic smuggler," Andreas says.

That all changed once the U.S. became an independent nation. The newly formed government needed revenue.

"One of the founding pillars was in fact the [United States] Customs Service," says Andreas. "It was really important to re-socialize merchants to a stop smuggling, and it was very hard to do. These people had grown up smuggling, celebrated smuggling, and suddenly it was unpatriotic to smuggle."

Andreas says that smuggling and illicit trade still make up a significant portion of the modern economy, and they always will.  But but it's impossible to calculate exactly how much. "Anyone who tells you differently is lying."

But Andreas says not to freak out, and he discourages "alarmist, hyperbolic rhetoric to suggest that somehow we're dealing with an unprecedented fundamentally, new threat to the country and the world."

The Illinois-based Titan tire company was weighing the purchase of an ailing factory in France. But in a leaked letter, Titan's CEO said the deal was off because the workers were unproductive and the unions "crazy." A war of words has ensued.

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The Illinois-based Titan tire company was weighing the purchase of an ailing factory in France. But in a leaked letter, Titan's CEO said the deal was off because the workers were unproductive and the unions "crazy." A war of words has ensued.

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The U.S. firm Titan Tires was weighing the purchase of an ailing factory in France. But in a leaked letter, Titan's CEO said the deal was off because the workers were unproductive, the unions 'crazy.' A war of words has ensued.

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The threat of broad, sweeping federal budget cuts points out just how dependent a lot of things are on the federal government.

Including our dinner choices.

Sequestration could leave America's meat inspectors sitting on their couches at home, not inspecting meat. Between March and September, inspectors may need to take as many as 15 days off without pay.

Here's USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack at the Agriculture Outlook Forum last week: "The only way we can absorb a cut of this magnitude is by impacting the people who work in the Food Safety area of USDA."

Meat inspections aren't optional. So fewer meat inspectors means less meat and poultry and eggs, and maybe fewer jobs. The USDA estimates, all told, the sequestration could cost the industry $10 billion.

It'll also cost meat-eaters. Mark Dopp, with the American Meat Institute, says, "It could cause some prices to go up. On a particular day, you might not find at your grocery store the product that you wanted."

The bean and tofu lobbies are probably ecstatic. But don't get too worked up... not just yet.

"It's unimaginable to me that we can't find a better solution to the issue of sequestration than that," says John Anderson, deputy chief economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation. "I think that the means to deal with this in less disruptive ways are surely at hand or could be brought to hand fairly quickly."

Over the next 12 months, 34,000 U.S. soldiers are scheduled to return home from Afghanistan, and many of them presumably will be looking to get back into the civilian work force.

But they’re likely to have some competition from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who’ve already returned.

A new report out from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago says veterans of those wars have a higher unemployment rate than those who never served and even higher than older veterans.

Take, for example, 35-year-old Stephen D’Allessio, who spent almost eight years in the Marines as a combat photographer. When he got out, he headed off to college and earned a degree in history from Columbia.

But since then, he hasn’t been able to find full-time, permanent work. His most recent gig -- a temporary job with FEMA -- is about to wrap up.

“After getting a degree at an Ivy League institution, and having served my country honorably, I just thought there’d be something better out there,” D’Allessio says. “And I just kept trying at it. But two years later, when I’m delivering flowers in a hooptie van, it gets disappointing.”

It’s not that his phone isn’t ringing -- it is. But it’s what happens during the interview process that frustrates D’Allessio.

“Being a Marine Corp. veteran, I think has a certain stigma," he says. "Whether people realize it or not, what they’re thinking is: ‘Well, gee, I don’t know if I want to hire this guy, because I’m kind of scared of him.’”

The Chicago Fed report finds long deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt the job prospects for new veterans, whether because of worries over post traumatic stress, or concerns their skills won’t translate to the civilian workforce.

And those perceptions might also be holding back officers who’ve spent most of their lives in the military, like Col. Mark Gardner.  In June he'll become just “Mark” after having served his maximum 30 years in the Army.

“The realization that I had to move on, to do something in the commercial world, was a little daunting, actually,” he says.

Gardner started the job hunt two years ago with a resume that read like a dictionary of Army terms. His background in the Army’s logistics put him on par with an upper-level manager, but those aren’t the jobs generally posted on the web.

So when someone suggested he network to drum up leads, “I said, ‘Well, how in the heck do I network? I don’t know anything about networking.’”

Gardner tried to bone up wherever he could. When a big company had a hiring fair geared toward veterans, he’d show up. But he often found hiring managers equated him with the image of veterans they had burned in their minds -- the image of a kid on the front lines with a gun.

Eventually, he found a good job in logistics management.

But this preconceived idea of what a veteran ‘is,’ or how one ‘acts,’ that’s hard to overcome, says Kurt Ronn. He’s president of HRWorks, a nationwide recruitment firm whose business is heavily involved in military transition hiring.

“This stereotype of this unthinking, sort of robotic person -- I’m not exactly sure where it comes from. But it’s still out there, because we still hear it,” says Ronn. “This is one of the most intelligent workforces that you can have.”

Ronn says HR managers who are on the fence should just hire a veteran -- even just one. See what it’s like.

And Marine veteran Stephen D’Alessio would be glad if someone took that chance on him.

“I’m married now. I’d like to have some stability for my wife. I’d like to start a family. I’m kind of waiting for that permanent gig where somebody hires me and I can do that,” he says. “That’s really my one wish.”

Gun violence devastates many predominantly African-American neighborhoods in places across the country. But some faith leaders feel that legal access to guns is part of the solution, not the problem. Host Michel Martin speaks with Reverend Kenn Blanchard about why he wants his congregation to have wider access to guns.

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South Africa is still reeling from the recent deaths of two women: Reeva Steenkamp, shot by her sports hero boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, and Anene Booysens, who was brutally raped and murdered at 17. Host Michel Martin talks to independent researcher Lisa Vetten about what the cases may say about violence against women in South Africa.

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For the first time, Kenya recently aired presidential debates, ahead of its election. But despite the wide audience, many people doubt the country can get through the election without violence. Host Michel Martin catches up with journalist and debate moderator Uduak Amimo.

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Yet again, a small number of Republicans joined the Democratic majority to pass a Senate bill, provoking handwringing from Conservative members.

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The horse meat scandal might be playing out in Europe, but China is the biggest producer in the global market for horseflesh, a new infographic reveals.

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Bruce Reynolds hid out in Mexico and Canada before returning to England in 1968, where he was promptly arrested and sentenced to 25 years in jail.

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No rational person would try to cut nearly all government spending by a fixed amount, regardless of the individual merit of any given program. That's kind of the point.

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The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is making it easier for more nontraditional students to become doctors. Applicants don't have to have taken the standard admissions test or a full slate of premed classes to be considered. The school's leadership hopes the move will foster greater diversity.

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Perhaps the crooks feared being grilled or stuck under some hot lights. Whatever, they've returned the 7-foot-tall spicy sprinter who entertains fans during Milwaukee Brewers games.

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The U.S. is now just a day away from the sequester -- the $85 billion in across-the-board federal spending cuts that came out of the debt ceiling debacle of 2011. While it’s tough to find an economist that thinks the cuts are smart policy, the sequester is unlikely to be averted before tonight's midnight deadline. U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss the sequester and its likely impact on the economy.

J.C. Penney had another tough quarter. Sales were down 28 percent -- more than half a billion dollars. What's got the retailer down?

And Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe said today that he wants to bring some of the country's nuclear plants back online. That reverses a decision to phase out nuclear energy following the Fukushima disaster. In his speech to parliament, Abe said Japan cited the need for energy security. The country, which does not have its own energy resources, must import large volumes of natural gas, oil and other fossil fuels from around the world in the absence of nuclear program.

The veteran Washington Post reporter says a White House aide threatened him over a story about President Obama's role in sequestration.

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