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More than 8,000 Syrians cross the border into neighboring countries each day. Lebanon has the biggest urban refugee population in the region, and the highest number of unregistered Syrians. The U.N. says despite its best efforts, Syrian refugees in Lebanon can still expect to wait at least 4 months before receiving help.

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More than 8,000 Syrians cross the border into neighboring countries each day. Lebanon has the biggest urban refugee population in the region, and the highest number of unregistered Syrians. The U.N. says despite its best efforts, Syrian refugees in Lebanon can still expect to wait at least 4 months before receiving help.

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States' attempts to refuse to pay for seemingly minor emergency room visits can't easily distinguish between the cases that merit simple care and life-threatening problems, an analysis of emergency room data finds.

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At 7:02 a.m. ET, the sun crossed the celestial equator, marking the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. That news is little comfort to cities like Chicago, Buffalo or Minneapolis, which will see highs in the 20s today.

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Tom Clements was appointed by the Colorado governor in 2011, after he served for more than three decades in the Missouri Department of Corrections. Police have not apprehended a suspect.

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South Korean officials say they suspect that Pyongyang could be the source of the outage, which affected three broadcasters and two banks.

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The Federal Reserve will wrap up a two-day meeting in Washington today. Analysts and investors are looking for more clues about how the central bank plans to proceed when it comes its monetary policy.

Juli Niemann, analyst with Smith, Moore & Company, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain why the Federal Reserve is likely to continue with quantitative easing.

The Federal Reserve has been buying up securities to boost lending and spending for nearly five years now, injecting $1.6 trillion into the economy and probably $2 trillion when all is said and done. One of the potential problems with pumping so much money into the economy is of course inflation, but there are other risks. 

“One of the trickiest things right now is [that] companies have shifted a significant amount of their financing to the debt market away from the equity market” says Chris Low, chief economist with FTN Financial Group. 

With interest rates so low and so much liquidity available in the system -- all products of quantitative easing -- companies are borrowing more.

“That’s dangerous,” Low explains, because interest rates won’t stay low forever. “At some point, they’re going to have to pay higher rates to borrow and they will have significantly more exposure.”

That would be bad, but slowing the recovery by ending quantitative easing too soon could be worse. Many economists believe the Fed will let up on the quantitative easing at some point this year, but not just yet.

Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG, says even though the economy’s growing, there’s still plenty to keep the Federal Reserve concerned.

“If you look at the number of continuing claims for unemployment insurance -- therefore the number of people still unemployed -- that is still at an extraordinarily high level,” he says. 

In a speech on March 4, Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen elaborated on a number of other indicators the Federal has so far found to be unsatisfactory: The unemployment rate, payroll employment growth rate, the hiring rate, and the “quit rate” -- how readily people quit their jobs (people don’t quit if they are super worried about finding a new job).   

As interested as investors are in the Federal Reserve’s decision on quantitative easing, they will also be looking for some indication of a time table for easing out the easing. When quantitative easing stops, interest rates are expected to rise by “about a half percent” according to Chris Low of FTN, something people want to be able to anticipate. 

Also hello, remember Cyprus? Some economists say the prospect of more crisis in Europe is just another reason for the Federal Reserve to keep its foot on the gas pedal...at least for now. 

The Federal Reserve is finishing up a meeting today in Washington, to which many economists and investors are looking for signs of just how long the central bank intends to keep up its aggressive monetary easing.

Cyprus is in turmoil following the decision last night by its parliament to reject a bailout plan from the eurozone. The plan entailed a one-off tax of up to 10 percent on Cypriot bank accounts.

Should you bank at a credit union? Marketplace senior producer of personal finance Paddy Hirsch discusses the upsides and the downsides.

The company Bankrate.com is out this week with a new survey that finds more credit unions are offering perks to attract customers.

So should you bank at a credit union? Marketplace senior producer of personal finance Paddy Hirsch joins Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss the pros and the cons.

Elizabeth Colbert Busch will be the Democratic nominee, while Sanford heads to a runoff. Both are competing for a congressional seat left vacant when Tim Scott was appointed to the Senate.

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The Cypriot finance minister is in Moscow for meetings aimed at securing a Russian alternative to the bailout.

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Also: Vladimir Nabokov's classroom rules; Condoleezza Rice is writing a book; a photo essay featuring Shakespeare & Company.

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Cyprus is in turmoil following the decision last night by its parliament to reject a bailout plan from the eurozone. The plan entailed a one-off tax of up to 10 percent on Cypriot bank accounts. But should the rest of the world worry about what’s happening on a tiny island nation in the middle of the  Mediterranean?

Yes, perhaps. 

Here’s the worst case scenario: Cyprus continues to reject the bailout deal. Its banks go bust. The country is forced out of the eurozone. Hedge funds speculate on which euro country will be next to head for the exit. There are bank runs across the continent, and mayhem in global markets.

Some observers say that this possibility makes it all the more remarkable that the Europeans -- and the Germans in particular -- refuse to pump that little extra bit of cash into the small island economy.

“It’s just ridiculous that they wouldn’t. That they threaten bank runs across Europe,” says analyst Louise Cooper. “They threaten contagion, for €7 billion. It’s ridiculous but the reason they’ve done it is because it’s German election year.”

The German government fears that if they cut a special deal for Cyprus, much bigger euro countries like Spain and Italy will be lining up for extra assistance. And that would be exceedingly unpopular with German voters. 

So far financial markets are taking the Cypriot fiasco in stride. They seem to believe that Europe cannot afford to let  Cyprus sink, or that the Russians will ride to the rescue -- but that eerie calm in markets may not last. 

During a two-day tour, President Obama will deliver a speech to students and visit Ramallah in the West Bank. Obama isn't in the region with a great plan to restart peace talks, instead he's expected to simply try to connect with the Israeli people.

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Global software giant Oracle will release its earnings report today. In the past, the company has made its money selling traditional hardware and software to businesses and governments, including servers and database software. But experts say that while smaller startups are already staking their claim in the cloud space, Oracle is slow to follow.

Scott Pierce this year launched a cloud startup called 45000 Feet. He says one of the benefits in moving to the cloud is that a company pays only for what it needs.

"If you do only get 10 users, you're only going to pay for enough infrastructure to support those 10 users," Pierce says. "If you get 100,000, you're going to pay more but you're gonna have the ability to service those 100,000 users the way they expect to be serviced."

One mission of Pierce's company is to convince businesses that they don't need a big room full of servers, a concept that goes directly against Oracle's business model.

Krishnan Subramanian, a technology analyst, says when it comes to shifting to the cloud, Oracle is way behind its competitors, even old-timers like IBM.

"They are doing a catchup game right now and they have a long way to go before they can become a leader," Subramanian says.

Oracle declined to comment for this story.

Subramanian says for now, at least, the tech giant is bundling its cloud services so that customers also have to buy database software, which for Oracle, is still where the money is.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is in Beijing this morning wrapping up his two-day visit to China. It's his first foreign trip in his new role and the first high-level talks between the U.S. and China in six months.

Like treasury secretaries before him, Lew is urging China's leaders to allow its currency to appreciate. But a more important item on his agenda -- and a trickier one -- is intellectual property theft. Lew is confronting China's officials about allegations its military hacked top U.S. companies.

Marketplace China bureau chief Rob Schmitz joins Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain how Secretary Lew compares to his predecessors and why some expect him to be tougher on China.

When you send a text message or an email, should your Internet or phone company hang onto them in case the police ever want to take a look? That was the discussion on Capitol Hill yesterday, as lawmakers look into overhauling the federal law that covers when the authorities can get access to electronic communications and when they can't.

"We are not proposing that this information be turned over or reviewed in mass," says Richard Littlehale, assistant special agent in charge of technical services for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,  gave testimony in support of preserving messages. "We are simply trying to make sure that these messages are there if and when we identify a specific criminal offense."

Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, says some Internet and phone companies already store messages, while others don't. This is something he hopes will change.

"If some providers don't keep them at all, and I'm a bad guy, I want to use that provider," says Burns.

But Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union says forcing service providers to keep messages is like giving investigators round-the-clock surveillance capability.

"We always want police to solve crime, but we need a balance," says Calabrese. "Our founding fathers understood that the police would be better able to solve crimes if they could kick down anyone's door, but the fact is it's not the kind of society we want to live in."

Congress is looking to update a law passed in 1986 that of course predates both texting and the Internet. But it’s not without its anachronisms. For example, it gives much more privacy protection to email that sits on your hard drive compared to email that's stored remotely on the so-called cloud.

One of President Obama’s big applause lines in his State of the Union address last month was when he said this: “Over the next year, another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan. This draw-down will continue, and by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.”

That means tens of thousands of soldiers will leave active duty for active job-hunting over the next several years. But it won’t be easy, as an annual report on veteran employment will confirm when it’s released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today.

Unemployment among veterans aged 25 to 34 stood at 9.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. For non-veterans in the same age group, unemployment was only 7.6 percent. Veterans 18-to-24-years-old face an unemployment rate of nearly 25 percent right now.

BLS economist James Walker says young vets face some unique challenges in an economy in which jobs are hard to find for everyone, and youth unemployment is already high.

“Gulf War II-era vets, recent veterans—a large proportion are high school graduates," says Walker, "or they have some college or associate’s degree." But, he adds, while they've been training and fighting, their civilian counterparts have been finishing BA's, getting job experience, moving up the career ladder.

Walker thinks most Gulf War II-era veterans will eventually catch up to the rest of the population, just like their elders did after serving in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. In fact, older veterans, decades after deployment, have slightly lower unemployment rates than the general population.

But Ted Daywalt, president of VetJobs.com, a VFW-sponsored job site for veterans and employers (and himself a Navy veteran), says some young veterans face a challenge that their predecessors didn’t. He says their employment and advancement opportunities are being stymied by repeated lengthy deployments in the National Guard and Army Reserve.

Daywalt offers a hypothetical example: “So you’ve got a National Guard soldier who just came back from fighting in Afghanistan for 18 months. He comes home, he’s been on the job for perhaps 60 days, and then all of a sudden there’s a (range) fire and he needs to leave again for 30 days. Employers can’t run their businesses that way.”

Daywalt points out that employment discrimination is illegal under the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-Employment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA). Employers have to keep a Reservist’s or Guard member’s job open for them until they return from deployment. But Daywalt says employers have multiple ways to get around the law, and many still prefer to hire job-seekers who won’t be called away multiple times on short notice.

BLS economist James Walker points out one more challenge facing veterans who are now leaving active duty and entering the job market: Shrinking employment opportunities in the federal government due to budget cuts and the sequester.

Walker says approximately 14 percent of recent vets work for federal, state and local government, compared to just 2 percent of the same age cohort in the general population. That’s in part because of government programs that encourage hiring of veterans, including those with service-related disabilities. Approximately one quarter of Gulf War II-era vets report some level of disability from their recent service. Walker says as federal hiring slows down, Iraq and Afghan war veterans will be among the first to feel the squeeze.

Indians love weddings, and Indian weddings need a lot of bling. In fact the giving of gold jewellery is a big part of the event. To get an idea of just how big a deal it is, I went to a wedding in Calcutta. I was trying to find out how people could get so much gold together.

Guest Sourbee Kampani thinks preparation is everything.

"For my daughter we have started from the minute she was born. I think it is very important. At weddings we have to give some amount of gold. Gold is a must," says Kampani.

Her fellow wedding guest Shubra Agarwal agrees.

"Gold is a woman's best friend," Agarwal says, "and it belongs to that woman and nobody can take it from her".

Bride-to-be Tania Sadhu also didn't see anything wrong with India's golden obsession.

"You cannot think of a wedding without some kind of yellow bling around. Gold is a status symbol," Sadhu says.

However, the government doesn't share Sadhu's enthusiasm. India is the world's largest importer of gold. Every year the country brings in more than 900 million tonnes. The government is worried that people are spending too much money on the imported precious metal. Huge amounts of cash are flowing out of the country. So in response, they've raised the import taxes on gold. But will it work?

Watching the Calcutta wedding with me was business analyst Mudar Patherya. He wasn't exactly hopeful. 

"Do you actually believe here in India people will give each other equity shares when they get married. What will you hang round your necks. A certificate?" Patherya asks.

But weddings are just getting bigger and bigger, and so people are buying more and more gold. The Indian government may have to raise taxes again, but it appears that it will make little difference to people here.

In the world's largest democracy, the only thing that glitters is gold.