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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is now being held at a federal facility outside Boston where he can be treated for his injuries. Some victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, and their families, had been upset that he was in the same hospital as people who had been injured by the blasts.

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Japan has given the green light to Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. Japans two biggest airlines, Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, may resume flying the aircraft, which has been grounded since January. 

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson from Tokyo with the latest.

Today being Arbor Day, we thought we would look into the economic value of trees. There are, of course, lots of things you can do with lumber, but what is the value of a living tree? It turns out to be surprisingly high.

Take the Ficus tree outside our office window. It’s about two stories tall, and it’s worth $152 a year, according to a calculation made by software called i-Tree.

“There are three main parts to the calculation,” says Dave Nowak with the U.S. Forest Service. He is one of the creators of i-Tree, which arrived at that $152 value by accounting for the Ficus tree's carbon absorption, how it shades our  building, lowering energy costs, and how it affects the water table by reducing stream flows and improving water quality.

John McNeil is the manager of forestry for the town of Oakville in Ontario, Canada, one of many local governments that use i-Tree.

“We used it to quantify the form function and value of Oakville’s urban forest,” McNeil says.

The value of Oakville’s trees is $2.5 million each year. The city of Pittsburgh recently used i-Tree and determined that every dollar the city invests in tree planting generates $3 in economic benefits.

The mayor of Newark New Jersey, Cory Booker, believes social media is a powerful way to solve the problems of a city like his. If a resident has a problem, Booker says tweet it, and he'll read it.

But a new study by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project shows that social media and the Internet are not helping much to get poorer people engaged in civic life.

"The wealthy, the well-educated are more likely to be proactive than people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale," says Pew's Aaron Smith. "One hope for the Internet and specifically for social networking spaces, is that the openness and low barriers to entry might help change that trend."

The study was conducted during the presidential campaign last summer. The survey also shows that civic engagement online can lead to civic engagement in the real world.

 

To see the full results from Pew, click here.

 

When you think of stress centers around the country, New York City or Washington D.C. may come to mind. But according to a new poll from Gallup, the people of West Virginia, Rhode Island and Kentucky are the most stressed.

Over the course of 2012, Gallup asked over 350,000 people across the country to answer the question, "Did you feel stressed during a lot of the day yesterday?" 47 percent of West Virgina residents said yes. That's compared to Hawaii -- the least stressed state in the survey -- where only 32 percent reported feeling stressed.

The top 10 most stressed states:

1. West Virginia, 47.1%
2. Rhode Island, 46.3%
3. Kentucky, 44.8%
4. Utah, 44.6%
5. Massachusetts, 43.4%
6. New Hampshire, Connecticut 43.0%
8. Ohio, 42.8%
9. Oregon, 42.6%
10. Indiana, 42.5%

The top 10 least stressed states:

1. Hawaii, 32.1%
2. Louisiana, 37.6%
3. Mississippi, 37.9%
4. Iowa, 38.1%
5. Wyoming, Texas, 38.6%
7. South Carolina, Nebraska, 38.7%
9. Maryland 38.8%
10. Florida, Delware, North Carolina 38.8%

To see the full results, click here.

 

 

The iPhone is like the Golden Gate Bridge: It hogs attention, but the Bay Bridge to and from Oakland gets used more often. So what's the Bay Bridge in this analogy? The Samsung Galaxy. The latest version, the S4, is just now going on sale in the U.S., and in the last year, Galaxys have been outselling iPhones.

Reviewers, such as CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt, like the phone’s responsiveness and high resolution screen. And for people coming to an Android phone for the first time, there is an "easy" mode.

"Some people come to Android for their first smartphone, they are like, 'look, I want a really good camera, the high end specs really appeal to me, but this Android thing is crazy'," Dolcourt says. "So there is this setting that will simplify everything down, give you three homescreens, make all the icons and text bigger, and basically make it easier to use and get to know."

But consumer products also come with other baggage. Samsung is now admitting that some of the tin in its smartphones is mined on an Indonesian island that has used child labor. The Guardian newspaper and the environmental group Friends of the Earth investigated conditions on Bangka Islandand brought the child labor issue to Samsung's attention. In a letter, Samsung is telling customers that while it doesn't have a direct relationship with its tin suppliers, some of the material does come from the region. It's promising a thorough investigation.

All phones have tin, mostly the solder on circuit boards. It's possible tin mined with child labor is in other brands of phone as well.

If you were looking to buy a smartphone, what kind would you get?

For the average person walking down the street, a tax expenditure is piece of meaningless jargon. But it gets used in a lot in budget debates, and if you know what the word means, those debates can get a lot more interesting -- and revealing. 

So here's a crash course. Tax expenditure literally means, "government spending, through the tax code." Which is weird because usually we think of taxing and spending as opposites. 

But Congress has written into the tax code a bunch of credits and deductions and exemptions for certain groups -- all kinds of groups: people with kids, people who have college savings accounts for their kids, people who don't earn a lot, people who’ve earned enough to own a home. 

And in the eyes of many budget wonks, all those tax credits and deductions and exemptions aren’t much different than the spending the government does on social programs like Medicare or Food Stamps.

Take that tax deduction home owners get on their mortgages.

“We could have a housing policy in the United States where everyone got a check every month to help them pay their mortgage,” says Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell. “But instead we channel it through the tax code and we simply allow people to pay less,” she says.

From an accounting perspective, it's the same thing, Mettler argues.

“And like any social policy, it's targeted to particular groups of people that we think of as deserving. It's for some broader public good. We think it's good to have home owners in the United states,” she says.    

According to Mettler’s calculations, today the government "spends" more than $1 trillion a year on tax expenditures.  That's more than we spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined, and way more than on food stamps.

But before you casually weave the phrase "tax expenditure" in to your next dinner party, Richard Burkhauser, an economist also at Cornell, has a warning. He calls the phrase “a very slippery concept.”

Burkhauser has a problem with the idea that by giving someone a break on their taxes, the government is somehow spending money. He says, that implies that money belonged to the government, when it works the other way around.

“People who've earned money in the marketplace have earned it. It’s their money,” he says. “And we collectively decide how much of our money, we are going to give to the government.”

Whether you call them tax breaks, or tax expenditures, Burkhauser and Mettler agree that just like other parts of the safety net, these things transfer money from one group to another. But unlike other parts of the safety net, the money often flows from poorer Americans, to richer ones.

Show us your safety net: How did you get by when times got tough? And when times were good, what helped you get to that point? Click here to share your answer.

The Internet is powered by vast banks of computers which chew up energy. That's a big cost for the people who run these servers -- and the earth, depending on how all the electricity is generated.

Aaron Rallo, CEO of TSO Logic which has been working on this issue, says the key is adjusting how many servers are powered up based on demand.

"We're seeing 50-60 percent savings," Rallo says. "We build out all the server infrastructure to support holiday shopping, and then in March, all of those servers stay on. The opportunity to save there is just massive."

It's a bit like turning off two of the three burners on a barbecue, if all you are doing is grilling up a single patty.

"We don't always turn [the servers] off," Rallo says. "In some cases we can just reduce the power draw of a machine or hibernate a machine."

Another company that has come up with ways to make servers much more energy efficient is Joyent. It's Chief Technology Officer, Jason Hoffman, thinks server demands are going to get so high on our digital systems -- given all the computer chips going into computers, tablets, cars, household appliances and more -- that some grand new leap in innovation is going to have to take place.

To hear Hoffman's thoughts on evovling our digital systems and capacity, click on the audio player above.

Never mind the big-budget NASA satellites. A team of young engineers has tricked out a few off-the-shelf cellphones and sent them to space. The smartphones are already above us, sending images and data back to ham radio operators on Earth.

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Candy makers and sugar farmers have been fighting for years in Congress. The sugar farmers are winning.

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The World Health Organization released a six-year plan to wipe out the few remaining pockets of polio and ensure the virus doesn't come back. With less than 20 polio cases so far this year, the world is closer than ever before to eradicating polio.

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Today's commercial coffee production is based on only a tiny slice of the genetic varieties that have grown since prehistoric times. And that's a problem, because it leaves the world's coffee supply vulnerable to shocks like climate change, or the leaf rust currently ravaging Latin American coffee farms.

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Herman Blake and his six siblings struggled so much during the '40s that one brother decided to drop out of school and help support the family. A friend of the family stepped in and made sure that didn't happen, despite her own meager means. That sacrifice taught the Blake children the value of an education.

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After years of not understanding coffee, Jerry Seinfeld says he's finally discovered the delight of meeting someone over a cup. "You have coffee and for some reason it makes you talk a lot," he says.

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The furloughs have been blamed for widespread delays at the nation's airports. The vote late Thursday was unanimous. The House could vote on the measure Friday.

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Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres said Timothy Hallet Tracy was paying right-wing youth to hold violent protests in the aftermath of the elections narrowly won by Nicolas Maduro, the late Hugo Chavez's chosen successor. Tracy's family says he was making a documentary.

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Imagine having to deliver a tribute for someone you've openly excoriated for years. That was essentially the task President Obama had before him in his speech at the dedication ceremony for former President George W. Bush's presidential library in Dallas.

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Regulators are warning some of the nation's largest banks to stop offering loans that are hard to distinguish from those given out by storefront payday lenders. The banks have been offering high-interest-rate, short-term loans to customers with direct deposit as an advance on their paychecks.

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Some housing experts say the city's zoning code has discouraged the building of affordable housing by requiring that all apartments be at least 400 square feet. The city is interested in finding ways to rewrite the rules. An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York looks at ways to fix the city's housing shortage.

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Most of the 14 killed in the April 17 explosion were first responders trying to put out the fire and save lives.

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