National News

With the death of a possible suspect in one notorious case, activists are weighing the FBI's efforts to tackle cases from the 1950s and '60s. Some are calling for a congressional hearing to see whether the FBI has done enough investigating.

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Atmospheric scientist Ira Leifer installed special air sensors on a camper, then drove from Florida to California, measuring methane levels all along the way. More than 6,000 readings later, he found some noticeable spikes, especially around petrochemical plants and urban areas like Los Angeles.

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Parliament had passed the legislation in April, but the main opposition party challenged its constitutionality. A ruling by the Constitutional Council on Friday paved the way for President Francois Hollande's official blessing.

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The Toronto Star says its reporters have seen a video that purportedly shows Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine.

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Of all the current Washington scandals, the one involving the IRS appears to have the most staying power. It rolls into one package an agency many love to hate, partisan suspicions and the American appetite for conspiracies.

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Authorities say one train derailed, colliding with a second train near Fairfield.

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British consular officials say they've gotten odd requests over the past year, ranging from help in getting Olympic tickets to checking the credentials of an online date.

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The new version of the DSM, the manual of psychiatric diagnoses, is already sparking criticism. But psychiatrists say it helps make sure they're all on the same page.

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Authorities are revisiting a triple murder in the Boston suburb of Waltham. One of the victims may have been a friend of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Tsarnaev would sometimes spar at the same mixed martial arts gym where the victim worked as an instructor.

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The apparent drowning death of British sailor Andrew Simpson has some questioning the safety of cutting-edge catamarans that are difficult for crews to control.

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President Obama's commencement speeches often seem more about the big-picture state of the union than do his State of the Union addresses, which read like to-do lists. And his assessment of where the country stands and where it's going has changed over the past four years.

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A long week of scandal has been tough on more than just the White House. President Obama's allies are struggling with how to respond to their first taste of really bad news within the administration.

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Gov. Pat Quinn has not said whether he will sign the bill after the state Senate approved the measure, which includes tough guidelines for who is eligible.

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 The IRS scandal is all over the news this week and as we head into the weekend, it's on our minds, too.

Later today, we'll talk to Weekly Wrappers the Guardian's Heidi Moore and the Wall Street Journal's Sudeep Reddy join us to talk over the week that was: the IRS scandal and the debt ceiling letter from Jack Lew, where he says The Treasury "will begin implementing the standard set of extraordinary measures."

Moore says the phrase alone is kind of special.

"You have to love the infinite disappointment in that phrase," she says.

Reddy says try as Republicans might, this isn't a winnng point for them.

"It means that there's very little economic policy that you're going to see discussed in Washington," he says. "You've got the sequester and your'e stuck with an incredibly dumb sequester for the rest of the year, we're stuck with fiscal policy that is working against the extraordinary policy. All that menas we're stuck with very slow growth."

On the good(?) news about the deficit, Heidi says all of the guessing games about the budget are just that: guesses.

"I think what this highlights is it's really difficult to actually know what the budget is doing," she says. "You se all these numbers and they look like science. They look like reality."

Alas, just guesses. She thinks it is good news, though.

"With only a few mild — yet annoying — cuts through the sequesters and through previous cuts to defense and so on, we've already seen the deficit shrink." 

Lastly, those three letters you could not escape this week. IRS. Can President Barack Obama really bounce back?

Reddy says the scandal is taking up precious airtime.

"There's only so much oxygen in this town and we're seeing it sucked up by ...scandal," he says. "We're facing facing a number of longer term issues that aren't going to be adresed because the political oxygen is being sucked up by those three letters (IRS)."

Get ready for the weekend with our #longreads

As always, our Wrappers have a few great articles for you to save for your weekend reading.

Heidi Moore picks:

• On Wall Street, racial and ethnic identity used to be parsed as much as financial ability: for years, there were the firms known for employing established white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and firms known for grabbing up-and-coming Jewish financiers. Times have changed and now there's a new ethnic group establishing itself: highly educated Indian-Americans. My former WSJ colleague Anita Raghavan, takes a look at Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director, and others in what she called the "Indian-American elite" in her new book, a really fascinating excerpt of which is running in the New York Times this weekend. It's a close look at how power is wielded on Wall Street. 
• I normally don't go in for "special issues" of magazines because they end up being too precious, but Fast Company has done something really nice with its Most Creative People in Business issue. It's a genuinely instructive, sometimes inspiring tour of how people grow and maintain their creativity even when their jobs start to become about routine. You don't have to be an artiste in a Parisian palette to use creativity; it's a quality that makes anyone happier, even if you only use it in the kitchen, in decorating your home, or in improving your golf game. The American spirit is one of innovation, and in this world when we can control nearly anything from our smartphones, we often forget that we all have it in us to think of something new. 
• This absolutely charming story on the loss of the American apostrophe speaks for itself. It's fabulous and worth it for the "Apostrophe Protection Society" alone. 

Sudeep Reddy points you to:

• "The modern history of swearing: Where all the dirtiest words come from" is Salon's excerpt of a book, "Holy Sh*t," that has few asterisks beyond the title. 
• Colleges and inequality: How strained finances of American universities are widening the class divide, from The Atlantic.
• A broad review of the implications of 3-D printing on manufacturing and intellectual property from Bloomberg.

Proposals for chemical plants to use "inherently safer" design practices have been blocked by industry executives and their allies in Congress, despite deadly accidents and the risk of a potential terrorist attack that could harm an entire community or city.

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Proposals for chemical plants to use "inherently safer" design practices have been blocked by industry executives and their allies in Congress, despite deadly accidents and the risk of a potential terrorist attack that could harm an entire community or city.

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The political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation wants GOP leaders to set aside legislation like the farm bill that might turn attention away from questions about the IRS and Benghazi.

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Today, Bloomberg -- the financial-information company, not the New York mayor who founded it -- appointed former IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano to oversee an independent review of privacy and data practices.

Bloomberg has been scrambling since it acknowledged last week that its reporters snooped on bankers through Bloomberg Terminals, which feed financial data and are used for trading. Turns out, Bloomberg reporters could see what see what clients were doing on those terminals.

Bloomberg may be known publically for its news service, but the terminals keep the company in business. Banks and companies lease more than 300,000 Bloomberg terminals, each of which costs about $20,000 a year. Goldman Sachs alone has some 5,000 of them.

"When you go to a big trading floor, you’re looking at half an acre of Bloomberg terminals," says Max Wolff, a senior analyst at Greencrest Capital.

Wolff says it's not just the terminals. Between its news service, magazines, data service and other branches of its business, Bloomberg is woven in to the fabric of the finance industry.

"Bloomberg is omnipresent on Wall Street," he says. "Almost everyone in the financial business has some interaction with some part of Bloomberg on a regular basis."

That omnipresence is part of why this breach of trust is so serious, says Ken Doctor, media analyst for Outsell. Bloomberg terminals account for around 85 percent of Bloomberg's revenue.

"It's the center of the business," he says. "It raises that question of: ‘Is that terminal as secure as we thought?’”

Big banks are asking that very question. Bloomberg has been doing damage control with dozens of clients. J.P. Morgan Chase has asked Bloomberg to see logs of its reporters' activities on the terminals, and Citigroup reportedly banned some of its traders from using Bloomberg’s chat service.  

"This could just be a blip,” says Doctor, “but it will be a blip that’s going to be remembered for a long time."

For big banks and smaller firms alike.

"I'm a nerdy guy. Sometimes I have four different Bloomberg Terminals on at once," says Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Group, a money management firm, and author of several books.

Leeb says he loves the Bloomberg terminal and doesn’t plan to drop it but, but this incident is upsetting.

"I’m just uncomfortable with people knowing I’m interested in how the Chinese currency is behaving. Why should anyone else have the right to know that?” he says. “I might go to other internet sites than Bloomberg for information."

Bloomberg has restricted reporters’ access in the terminals. In a statement today, the company said nothing is more important than its clients' trust and that it's doing everything it can to make sure the issue is addressed.

Controversy has dogged the new DSM-5, what people like to call "the psychiatrist's bible," and it won’t even be officially released until this weekend.

Really, the book is a manual clinicians use to diagnose and classify people with mental illness.

While it sounds pretty dry, there’s a whole lotta drama around this book.

The federal government has questioned its value...some practitioners are boycotting it and there are charges that it’s not ready for prime time.  

Before I say anything more about the DSM-5, here are a couple of facts about the DSM IV.

It's 19 years old and it still brings in about$4-5 million a year.

“It appears to meet a need for many, many people,” says Dr. James Scully who is CEO and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association – which publishes the manual.

And he says with 150,000 pre-orders the DSM-5 is a hot seller.

“We may do a second printing more quickly than we originally thought,” says Scully.

At $199 dollars for the hardcover, $149 for paperback — that’s more than $20 million in sales right there.

It cost the APA $25 million to produce the book. The DSM is so popular because it’s widely considered the book for doctors to define and diagnose mental illness in the United States.

“The DSM franchise has become enormously profitable publishing enterprise,” says Dr. Allen Frances who chaired the team that created the DSM-IV.

Frances is now a DSM critic with a book of his own, ‘Saving Normal.’

He’s concerned the latest manual includes new diagnosis that will drive up healthcare costs.  

Frances also charges that financial pressures – like dwindling membership - are forcing the APA to treat the DSM like a cash cow, not a public trust.

“I don’t think they are doing it for their own personal gain. But I think the association placed a lot of pressure working on DSM 5 to get it out before its time,” he says.   

Scully says the APA stands by its book.

“If we were doing this just to make money, we would do it more often than every 19 years,” says Scully.

Some doctors are boycotting the book. Others just don’t see a need to buy it.

Sandra Steingard is the medical director at a community mental health center in Burlington, Vermont.

“My advice to the agency is I don’t think that’s where our resources are best served,” says Steingard.

The APA doesn’t have much reason to worry right now.

The DSM-5 has been on Amazon’s Top 100 best seller list for more than a month. Today, it’s number 8.

On Saturday, it’ll  be a year ago since Facebook had its IPO.

When it came out the gate, it was valued at about $100 billion dollars making it one of the most highly valued IPOs of all time. The only problem was, it wasn’t making much money. And that had  a lot of investors concerned.

So how’s it doing now?

Let’s start with the co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his famous “hoodie.” Michael Pachter is an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Before the IPO, he told Bloomberg that, “Mark and his signature hoodie, I mean he’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much... and I think that’s a mark of immaturity.”

What does he think today?

“I’m pretty confident that getting married changed him, as it does all of us. The guy just grew up overnight,” Pachter said.

Zuckerberg got married soon after the IPO.

“Since that day, every single time he’s spoken in public he’s talked about monetization. And he talks about better monetizing mobile,” Pachter said.  

That bring us to Wall Street’s changing attitude toward Facebook. At the IPO Facebook didn’t really have a mobile money-making plan, said Clark Fredricksen, a researcher at e-Marketer.

“Last year Facebook went from zero mobile-ad revenues to leading the mobile display ad market by the end of 2012,” he said. Fredrickson expects that by the end of this year, the social network will have about 30 percent of the mobile display-ad market, ahead of Google.

But not everything has worked. In the past year, Facebook introduced lots of products that haven’t really taken off. There’s “gifts,” which allows you to buy stuff for you friends and Home, an app that turns an Android into a Facebook phone Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester, said Facebook’s success in mobile has bought it some time.

“They clearly want to maintain their status as a nimble company willing to try new things and experiment,” Reiss-Davis said.

So what do the users think? There’s still a lot of talk about how Facebook has to be careful not to be too salesy or it might lose users.

Erica Terry-Derrick has  been on Facebook for about five years now. She knows Facebook is using her data to sell ads but she’s used to it.  

“I just think it’s part and parcel of the world we live in right now,” she said. She adds that it’s just like TV only not as loud.