National News

Children who got warts were more likely to have school classmates and relatives with warts. But going swimming, using public showers and going barefoot had little effect on whether a kid had warts or not.

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The U.S. Supreme Court grappled with a tough First Amendment issue on Monday that pits congressional priorities against free speech rights. At issue: what speech limitations may be placed on private groups that receive federal grant money to fight HIV/AIDS abroad.

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On the day of the Boston Marathon, people heard the news about bombs exploding from their radio or their TV or the Internet. Some people in Boston got the news from giant digital billboards suddenly converted into giant public message boards. But the very same day that Boston billboards lit up with messages, 77 digital billboards in Los Angeles went dark, after a judge ruled that they were in violation of the law.

Opponents of digital billboards say they distract drivers. People who live near them complain that their thousands of LED bulbs shine into their homes at night. Billboard companies like Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor argue they don't distract drivers and they provide a valuable public service.

The digital billboards around Boston displayed messages that said, "Two explosions at marathon finish." Meanwhile 3,000 miles across the country in Los Angeles, Dennis Hathaway noticed that the digital billboard near his house wasn't working.

"I walk my dog every morning and I walk by that billboard at seven in the morning and it was dark," says Hathaway.

He wasn't surprised that the billboard had been shut off. In fact, he was quite happy about it. He's the president of a nonprofit called Ban Billboard Blight, which has been fighting to have many of the city's digital billboards removed.

"The billboards themselves went up without any notice to surrounding property owners," Hathaway says. "They shined in peoples windows. They were in intersections where there was a lot of pedestrian and motor traffic."

Ban Billboard Blight isn't opposed to digital billboards. The organization believes they should be confined to commercial and industrial areas and not be allowed to shine in residential neighborhoods.

This same battle is being waged between outdoor advertising companies and the public in cities across the country. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel recently proposed a plan approve 30 digital billboards, which he says will bring in $15 million a year to the city. Durham, N.C., banned all digital billboards, and in New Jersey, a judge recently struck down a digital billboard ban.

"The federal government as represented by the Federal Highway Administration put out guidance in 2007," says Ken Klein with the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

Ultimately, the Highway Administration left it up to states to decide how to regulate digital billboards. But it did make recommendations. The signs should not be placed in areas that would compromise public safety, they shouldn't be unreasonably bright and each image should be displayed for 8 seconds.

"So the attraction of that advertiser is the speed, the flexibility the ability to change the message as often as necessary," Klein says.

Those are the same attributes that make billboards useful tools for law enforcement. Since 2007, the FBI has had a partnership with digital billboard company Clear Channel that allows them to post Amber Alerts. And as they did during Thursday's manhunt display photos of the Boston Bombing suspects.

The FBI says that digital billboards have led to the apprehension of 51 fugitives in those six years, a number that Outdoor ad companies will likely cite as they continue to lobby local governments.

A.J. Clemente's career at KFYR was over before it started. It leads us to ask: What's your best — in a bad, or good way — first-day story?

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Governors and mayors become the faces of communities coping with events such as natural disasters or mass killings. They have to offer the impression that someone is in charge, despite what may be scant preparation and while dealing with heartbreak themselves.

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The days of tax-free online shopping could be coming to an end. The Senate is debating a bill that would give states the authority to collect taxes on all Internet sales. The bill pits two web titans against each other: Amazon supports it; eBay does not.

eBay has taken the lead against the Internet sales tax legislation. Over the weekend, it sent an email out to its merchants.  Trying to rally them against the bill. Right now, the Senate bill exempts online businesses with less than $1 million a year in sales outside of their home states. eBay wants to expand the exemption to $10 million. eBay vice president Tod Cohen has spearheaded the online tax fight.

He says, “We are committed to working for small businesses and not just have the giant retailers like Amazon use their size advantage against small guys."

Small guys like Chris Chapman. He owns snowsportdeals.com, an online business that sells used skis and snowboards on eBay and Amazon. Cohen has just over $1 million in sales every year. He says if he had to charge taxes for all 50 states, he’d have to hire someone just to handle taxes. In his dozen years in business, he says the tax debate is one of his biggest challenges.

“Of all the things for 12 years, this one scares me more than anything," he explains. "Because this could be crushing.”

Chapman says, by supporting the online taxation bill, Amazon is trying to crush him. Amazon wouldn’t talk to me for this story, but I did talk with Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. She says Amazon is supporting the Senate bill because it’s going to be hit with sales taxes anyway. Online retailers have to pay the taxes if they have a physical presence in a state. And Mulpuru says, Amazon is thinking about a major warehouse expansion, as part of a same day delivery plan.

She says, “How do you get to same-day delivery? Well you get to same-day delivery when you have a whole bunch of warehouses all over the U.S.”

Mulpuru says Amazon may also be planning to build actual stores someday -- which would definitely be collecting sales tax.

When Twitter first went live, some people wondered if anyone would want to communicate in 140 characters or less. We all know how that worked out.

A half a billion users later, Twitter’s got a new challenge for us: Try to tell a joke in under six seconds.

Twitter’s teaming up with one of the biggest brands in comedy to launch an online comedy festival. As if it’s not hard enough to be funny when you’ve got a whole stand-up routine, next week Comedy Central’s comedians will spend five days telling jokes in tweets and super-short videos made with Twitter’s new Vine app.

“Thankfully I’m not the one who has to make the jokes,” says Walter Levitt, executive vice president of marketing for Comedy Central.

Twitter really has over last couple of years become terrific social platform for comedians and for comedy, and it just seemed like an absolute logical place for us to try something new and innovative,” Levitt says.

For Twitter, it’s not about making media, but giving partners a place to put theirs, and attracting the built-in fan base. The company bought Vine last fall and just launched a music discovery app.

“Twitter has rolled out a strategy of expanding beyond 140 characters,” says Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for BTIG Research. “High-quality content from brands like Comedy Central is a great way to introduce new people who’ve not tried Twitter to use it.”

From a cost perspective, the content will come cheap for both Twitter and Comedy Central.

“Compared to producing a full television show, Comedy Central doesn’t have to invest that much resources in it, in order to see, will this work,” says media analyst Zachary Reiss Davis with Forrester Research.

So will six-second comedy fly with the fans? That’s one job we’re happy to leave to the pros.
How funny can you be in six seconds? You're about to find out.

Next week, comedians will post video snippets of routines using Vine, Twitter's six-second video maker, as well as tweets using the hashtag #ComedyFest.

Of course, crafting funny videos on Vine -- just as with tweeting -- is no easy task. There's a level of creativity involved. We've gathered five Vine videos to show you just how fun six seconds can really be.

Anyone who can pretend to fly on a broom gets an A+ for creativity:       It's like a six-second story:       Anyone craving caffeine can understand this video:       Capturing the mundane. How many people walk through a plane everyday?        This one made us laugh:      
Have a favorite belly-laugh inducing tweet or video? Share it with us in the comments.

Brazil's largest city is more about business than art. But a new crop of creators — who work in media as different as crochet, graffiti and poetry — is trying to change that by sprucing up public spaces.

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Brazil's largest city is more about business than art. But a new crop of creators — who work in media as different as crochet, graffiti and poetry — is trying to change that by sprucing up public spaces.

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The U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force -- REF for short -- is a little-known agency making big changes in how soldiers fight. It was created after an officer saw a video of soldiers trying to clear an Afghan cave with a rope and grappling hook -- why not robots, he wondered? That was 10 years ago, and since then REF has become an innovator in many fields, including energy.

The great military book is from early China, “The Art of War.”

There is no art of soldiering... you heavy up, go for a walk, look for trouble for a few hours. Or days. Watch a YouTube video of a patrol in Afghanistan.

“The average weight on a soldier's back is somewhere around 104 pounds.”

That’s Col. Pete Newell, U.S. Army. Soldiering doesn't change. Technology does.

“Twenty-seven of it is batteries,” Newell said.

Col. Newell is the director of the Rapid Equipping Force -- REF -- a think tank, hardware store, tech lab for combat soldiers. A perfect solution to a soldier problem -- a Humvee redesigned against IEDs, for instance -- might take years. REF tries to find pretty good answers that already exist, or are about to exist.

“What we'll describe is find the first, best, fastest solution we can,” Newell said

Here's an example, something REF helped develop to answer a soldier problem with, again, IEDs. And if you wonder what all the batteries are for, well...

“It's called the Thor III,” Newell said.

Thor. It sounds heavy.

“The piece of equipment itself weighs 25 pounds,” Newell said. “Over a three-day patrol, a platoon of 28 soldiers will have three of these systems because of the bands that they operate at.”

Thor is a jammer, a signal jammer. Everybody adapts technology, including the people trying to kill us. A favorite tactic... a hidden bomb with a cell-phone trigger. Wait for the soldiers to get close, call the number... boom. If you're going out on patrol for three days, you want a Thor III, batteries included. If Thor is working, the bomb triggers will not.

“The battery total for that 72 hours is 238 pounds,” Newell said. “So 238 pounds distributed across 28 bodies, on top of the weight for the system and the weight of all the other stuff they're carrying.”

Col. Newell is a former brigade commander, awarded a Silver Star and a unit commendation for leadership at Fallujah, the biggest fight in Iraq. He knows soldiering, but when he took over REF three years ago, he didn't think about energy.

“I would tell you that I really did not see that as a major task for the Rapid Equipping Force,” he said.

But... combat outposts, remote battlefield camps for 30 to 100 soldiers, use a lot of fuel. The convoys to supply them are magnets for bombs, snipers -- they’re the Army's single greatest vulnerability in Afghanistan: Energy. It's also true for a single soldier -- heavied up, and walking patrol.

The Thor III is a REF solution. Too heavy, too power-hungry, though it works right now with existing tech, until they design something better. Still, in January, at REF headquarters at Fort Belvoir outside Washington, the colonel was more excited by something else.

“These are solar recharging blankets and you probably seen them before,” he said. “So this is a 10-watt blanket, and it's about two feet by three feet, the size of a poster.”

It folds neatly, it weighs 12 ounces, it comes in camo. Its 10 watts of power is enough to charge two smartphones in an hour.

“Nine months ago, this was the best thing I could find on the market for being developed,” Newell said.

Then he put aside the poster-size charger and showed me what looked like a camo napkin.

“This is a 10-watt solar blanket,” Newell said. “This weighs 3.8 ounces. So, within nine months we went from what we thought was really, really, really good to a 28 percent efficient solar cell and reduced the size down to a third of what it was before.

REF just bought two kilowatts of these cells for $2 million -- $100 per watt. That is way too expensive for normal use. But it's a tenth what the cells would have cost a year ago, and in another two years, the Silicon Valley company that makes them, Alta Devices, hopes to have the cost down to $10 a watt. Meanwhile, soldiers are going to be using these... and if they come to trust the mats, maybe some of those 27 pounds of batteries can stay back at base.

For all the technological wonders, REF's social tech impressed me most.

The fuel-eating Combat Outposts I mentioned earlier, REF is proto-typing a radical redesign. They put one up at a gunnery range by Fort Bliss, Texas, and got two dozen soldiers to live in it for two weeks.

Then REF hired a leading Silicon Valley marketing firm, IDEO, to run a three-day exercise to try to understand what the soldiers had learned, what they would change. It's the kind of thing very big tech firms do -- because it works. REF thinks of the soldier as the customer.

Among changes the soldiers suggested -- an emergency intercom system. REF is working on it.

REF directors, Col. Newell and those before him, spend a lot of time with high-tech firms and venture capitalists, and at the best engineering and business schools, trying to understand how to be very, very agile.

“Stop trying to solve the problem,” Newell said. “Spend your time trying to understand what it is you're supposed to be doing. The problem will eventually solve itself.

Col. Newell leaves his post at REF this week -- he's retiring from the Army. The Department of Defense has just decided to change REF's status from interesting experiment to permanent agency. We'll see how that works.

But I was in the Army long ago, and even at Fort Bliss for a while -- and it wasn't this smart.

Amazon spent years trying to avoid charging sales tax. Now, the company supports a bill that would require it.

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The game, if you want to call it that, involves trying to quickly swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon without the benefit of anything to wash it down. It's practically impossible. Coughing, gagging and choking are typical reactions.

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Every Monday, one Marketplace staff member offers their favorite stories from the past week. Here's some of the journalism that caught my attention this past week.

• This piece by Sabri Ben-Achour on supercomputers was just plain cool -- well-written and full of fresh information.

• Rob Schmitz gave us a complete web package on the toxic harvests in China -- check out all the pictures and video he captured on the field.

• This interview with a parking lawyer in New York City really brought to life this story on the parking culture in the city. A great idea from our senior editor Betsy Streisand.

• Peter O'Dowd went above and beyond on this web exclusive. He got the guy who bought a pair of Google Glasses -- and the story of what happened next.

• We got an interview with a bakery owner in San Francisco who accepts bitcoins as payment -- oh so very San Francisco, and a lovely listen!

• Krissy Clark got an early in with the guys whose job it was to sift through video evidence -- and updated her online piece as the Boston story developed.

• And this web-only piece on Dove's new controversial and viral ad got a lot of talk here and on the Internet. A great story written quickly and smartly by Nancy Marshall Genzer.

It's been a week since the Boston Marathon bombing, and people are still wondering why they happened. Media sources have suggested possible motivations, like the suspects turning to radical Islam. Host Michel Martin gets perspective on how young Muslims are reacting to this case, and how Islamic extremists are spotted. She hears from AbdelRahman Murphy, a youth director at a Tennessee mosque; and Mohamed Elibiary, who works with radicalized Muslim youth.

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The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were ethnically Chechen. The central Asian region of Chechnya has a troubled history. It has also seen some of that region's most notorious terrorist incidents in recent memory. Host Michel Martin learns more from Alexey Malashenko of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Social media played a large role in the investigation and reporting of the Boston Marathon bombing case. It also provided many hateful, racist comments online. But what does the reaction to it all signal about greater society? Host Michel Martin talks about that with Michael Skolnik, editor-in-chief of GlobalGrind.com, and with Rey Junco of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

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Impact from the furloughs has been neither extreme nor widespread, with busy airports in Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles reporting no or few delays as of early Monday afternoon. New York's three big airports experienced delays, but the longest holdups were blamed on high winds and maintenance work.

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The Kentucky senator says he's "considering" a 2016 run for the White House. Backers tout the built-in support and money networks established during 2008 and 2012 presidential runs by his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul. But others view the dad's libertarian legacy as a decidedly mixed bag.

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More than 180 people reportedly have died following Saturday's strong temblor in Sichuan province. Aftershocks and landslides are making difficult to get to the villages and other places that were hit hard.

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The housing sector has been one of the economy's bright spots, and economists expect that to continue. But they also say that until new-home construction catches up, the supply of homes for sale will remain tight.

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