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The investigation continues. The FBI and other agencies are appealing to the public for help. It's possible the key clue may be in a photo or video taken by a spectator.

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Rumors are swirling that Twitter is in talks with Viacom and NBC in the hopes of putting short video clips into tweets. For Twitter, such partnerships would be about selling advertising and getting people to spend more time in their Twitter feed.

Whether or not Tweet TV becomes a reality, the TV industry is changing fast -- and one of its pillars, bundling, may be about to fall.

"You've got to think of mainstream media as an old line army that's been marching along very, very well. They've been offering consumer exactly what they want to offer," says New York Times columnist David Carr, who adds that traditional media companies are being attacked from many fronts.

"It isn't any one thing, it's insurgents coming over the hill," he says.

Insurgents like Hopper, the controversial digital video recorder that fast forwards through ads so you don't have to. Of course, bundling helped pay for a lot of good content, and the ability of consumers to pick and choose what they want to watch more efficiently means a dip in profits. Then there are the new content creators, like Netflix, which has had success with its own version of the political thriller show "House of Cards".

"The weird thing about 'House of Cards' is because of big data, because of what they know about their consumers -- they know that you like David Fincher and I like Kevin Spacey -- they knew it would be a hit before it ever happened," Carr says.

Predicting the future and making TV cheaper -- add that to the promises of big data and the tech world.

Prank calls -- which in 2013 are all but rooted out with caller ID -- may get new life with a new app called Burner. The app allows users to create disposable phone numbers so that it's harder to track who’s calling you. The idea may sound familiar to fans of HBO's show The Wire, where criminals used burner cellphones to trip up police. But the software may have legitimate privacy uses as well.

Lindsey Turrentine is editor-in-chief of reviews for CNET joins Marketplace's Ben Johnson to explain the app and its purpose beyond pranks.

 

 

Computer glitches at home can be frustrating, but what about when they keep an entire airline company from taking off? That’s what happened yesterday, when American Airlines had to cancel over 400 flights and deal with massive delays because employees couldn't access its computerized reservation system, Sabre.

"Airline reservation systems tend to be very, very complex integrated networks," says Ken Colburn, CEO of Data Doctors, which helps companies recover data after a disaster or a system meltdown. "All it takes is one portion of the network to malfunction and it can really cause disruption across the system.

While American Airlines is nearing a merger with US Airways, the two companies haven't yet tried to combine their complicated reservation software and data. Colburn says finding problems within large systems can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. A hardware failure, a wonky piece of code, or that age-old classic: an honest mistake.

"It's entirely possible that it's just one of those really dumb human error things -- somebody tripped over a cord, somebody removed a file," he says. "Most of these systems are really looking for outside hackers or outside issues, and a lot of times it ends up being something really benign internally that just spun out of control."

American Airlines representatives said they would refund cancellations and waive fees for rescheduling.

A new study shows allowing unauthorized immigrants in Arizona to become legal citizens would improve their pay and working conditions.

The Morrison Institute Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University released the study Wednesday. It says the state's estimated 190,000 unauthorized workers would see a pay increase of 8 to 11 percent if they were granted citizenship. 

"They do better because they can compete for jobs that are available only to U.S. citizens. But more than that, becoming a citizen shows your commitment to America," says author Mike Slaven. 

Slaven says employers will invest in those committed workers. According to the study, a path to citizenship could mean up to $246 million a year in extra income for Arizona's low-wage immigrant workforce. This trend applies to the whole country, because "every state has people who fall into that category," Slaven says. 

Still, citizenship may not be a magic tonic. The UCLA Labor Center's Victor Narro points to 1986 — when a wave of three-million people were granted amnesty. He says that law had something very important missing from it. It did not guard against wage theft and workplace discrimination.

"We need to make sure that no matter what comes out of Congress, there has to be a commitment of resources to make sure worker protection laws are going to be enforced," Narro says.

Otherwise, he adds wages will stay low.

Springtime in Central China’s Hubei province is marked with bright yellow terraced fields of rapeseed blossoms -- life abounds. But inside a small home in the tiny village of Niuchong, death is near. 42-year-old Zhang Runxiang is curled up in the fetal position on her bed inside a bare concrete room, insulated from the sound of birds singing to each other outside. She’s suffering through the late stages of uterine cancer. Her mother sits beside her, caressing her pale white hand, sobbing. Zhang’s husband Zhou Yuansheng walks out of the room, shaking his head.

“My wife was diagnosed with cancer three years ago after they started digging underneath our home,” recalls Zhou. “She got it from the drinking water. It changed color and it developed a thick layer of sediment from all the mining.”

Economy at the expense of the environment

Like many other villagers here who have lost loved ones to cancer in recent years, Zhou blames his wife’s condition on Dasheng Chemical, the village’s phosphate mining operation and fertilizer factory that began operations nearly a decade ago.

“Now many people here have cancer,” says Zhou, shaking his head, “all kinds of cancer.”

Stories like this have become more common as China begins to come to terms with three decades of historic economic growth that has left much of the nation’s countryside –the source of China’s massive food supply -- contaminated with toxic chemicals. It’s also left Chinese people suffering from an 80 percent increase in cancer rates from 30 years ago, at the start of the country’s economic reforms.

“Our existing economic growth model –the relentless pursuit of GDP growth- is built on sacrificing the environment,” says Zeng Xiangbin, a Wuhan-based environmental lawyer. “There is simply no pollution site that I visit where I don’t feel heartbroken.”

Zeng has made a career out of defending farmers who live in China’s so-called “cancer villages” against local industry and government officials. On this day, he’s in Niuchong village to assess the damage from Dasheng Chemical’s mining and fertilizer production operation. A one thousand foot-high pile of ash looms above a river valley, blending in with the mountains that surround the village. Each day, Dasheng Chemical’s dump trucks unload more ash onto the hill, dumping piles of phosphogypsum, an industrial byproduct of phosphate fertilizer that contains cancer-causing chemicals like arsenic, chromium-6, and cadmium. Factories have dumped 300 million tons of phosphogypsum in villages like Niuchong all over the country. China produces nearly half of the world’s phosphate fertilizer, exporting nearly a fifth of it to other countries.

In 2009, Chinese journalist Deng Fei published a map highlighting a number of China's 'cancer villages.' Stella Xie translated this version of the map.

View China's Cancer Vilages in a larger map

It takes a village

Niuchong Villager Yao Chengying, a straight-talking pig farmer in her 50s, says the runoff from the mountain of phosphogypsum combined with the emissions from Dasheng’s fertilizer factory have poisoned the village’s crops. “All the crops just died,” says Yao. “The watermelons were inedible. Even the pigs wouldn’t eat them.”

Yao’s piglets were born with deformed bodies as her other pigs slowly died off. She tried to fall back on her rice crop, but as the pollution became worse, more regional purchasers avoided the region, labelling rice from Niuchong village as poisonous. And that’s when farmers in Niuchong realized the battle for safer food in China started with them.

“Ever since 2010, we’ve assembled a group of farmers to protest at the Dasheng factory gates on a weekly basis,” says Yao. Farmers have even made several trips to Beijing to petition to the central government authorities. Facing pressure from the provincial government, Dasheng chemical reimbursed the first two farming families to complain about lost livestock and crops. And then more farmers protested.

“The local government quickly became scared,” says Yao, “so police arrested the two residents -- my husband included -- who’ve managed to get reimbursed by the company as a warning to the other farmers who were protesting.”

Yao’s husband Wei Kaizu and villager Yu Dinghai were arrested by police six months ago, charged with blackmailing Dasheng Chemical. Yao says the two men were framed by the local government, which owns a stake in Dasheng Chemical and was doing the company a favor.

Neither Dasheng Chemical nor officials from the city of Zhongxiang, which carried out the arrest, agreed to an interview with Marketplace. The trial of the two men is was originally scheduled for April 9th. It’s been postponsed until the end of April.

Village chief: "I'm ashamed."

Meanwhile, the village chief of Niuchong has been busy mediating the near-constant struggle between his villagers, Dasheng Chemical, and government officials in Zhongxiang, the city that has jurisdiction over the village.

“As the head of the village, I’m ashamed that I can’t do more to help get villagers access to cleaner water,” says Li Jun, “They have every right to complain about it. I’ve appealed many times to my superiors in the city government, but since it’s going to cost a lot to install new water lines here, they’ve put the village on a waiting list.”

In the past year, city officials have sent Li to Beijing multiple times to intercept local villagers who made it to Beijing to file official complaints against local officials.

“My villagers made it to Beijing three times last year,” recalls Li, “I was finally removed from my previous party secretary role because of my failure to rein them in.”

But Li’s got other things to worry about. His father is one of dozens in Niuchong village who are dying of cancer.

At the home of Zhou Yuansheng, family from throughout the region crowd around the bed of his wife, who is in her final days of battling cancer. His 20 year-old son has just arrived from Southern China.

“Before she became sick, we made enough money to ensure that our son would finish high school and go onto university,” says Zhou. “But we’ve spent so much on her chemotherapy treatment, my son had to drop out of high school to earn more money at a factory.”

Two days later, Zhou’s wife Zhang Runxiang died at the age of 42, the latest villager in Niuchong to succumb to cancer.

Correction: Due to a translation error, the original article misstated the type of cancer Zhang Runxiang suffered from. She died from uterine cancer. The text has been corrected.

Oakland, Calif., was a hub of African-American life on the West Coast. Today, it's one of the most diverse cities in the country. How has that shift affected its culture?

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Psychologists have used the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other tragedies to track the arc of recovery from incidents like the marathon bombing. Such tragedies make many people think about their own vulnerability.

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Scientists say they have few weapons to wield against the poison-spined lionfish, which is gobbling up reef fish in the Bahamas and other habitats.

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Scientists say they have few weapons to wield against the poison-spined lionfish, which is gobbling up reef fish in the Bahamas and other habitats.

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There's more buzz than usual this year around baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who made his major league debut on April 15, 1947. But commentator Frank Deford says there isn't enough buzz in college athletics to help shape the Robinsons of the future.

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Christopher Knight, whose 27 years of living in near-total isolation in Maine made him an object of fascination after he was arrested for stealing food and supplies, appeared by video for a court hearing Tuesday, when a Kennebec County judge set his bail at $25,000 cash.

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President Obama has been the anti-George W. Bush when it comes to labeling perpetrators of violent acts "terrorists." On Tuesday, he called the Boston Marathon bombing "terrorism," but his stance has long been that his predecessor used the term too loosely. Some say Obama is too cautious.

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Sen. Harry Reid said the envelope was sent to the office of Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi. The envelope was found at a processing plant away from the Capitol.

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Even very poor countries, like Ethiopia and Nepal, are making rapid progress against malnutrition in babies and young kids. A report from UNICEF finds that while stunting in kids worldwide is prevalent, it has dropped by a third in the past two decades.

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With no fanfare, Congress moved to undo large parts of the popular law known as the STOCK Act, and President Obama has signed the watered-down measure into law. Insider trading is still illegal, but disclosures of large stock trades by staffers will be harder to get than under the original law.

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The airline says a glitch in its computerized reservation system caused planes to be grounded for two hours.

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The hill of chemical waste beside Farmer Wu Shuliang’s rice paddy began to take shape in the 1990s.

“It was yellow and green and it smelled terrible," says Wu, standing on the edge of his rice paddy in rural Yunnan, in China's southwest. The waste was from a factory next door, a byproduct from making chemicals used for tanning leather.

Each day for 20 years, workers dumped more of it, making the hill bigger and bigger. Last year, an estimated 300 million pounds of chemical sludge towered over Wu’s land and the river below.

"Whenever it rained, our rice paddy and the river would suddenly turn bright yellow," Wu says. "Much of my rice died. It killed everything in its path."

Around the time the hill began to form, Wu and his wife had two sons. The two boys grew up bathing in the river that turned yellow when it rained, they breathed the dust that blew off of the hill on windy days, and the oldest son, Wu Wenyong, spent much of his childhood working the rice paddies in the hill’s shadow.

When he was 14, Wu Wenyong began having health problems. He couldn’t stop coughing, he had difficulty breathing, and his chest hurt.

"We heard on the local news that this hill might be harmful to our health, so we took our son to the hospital and asked the doctor whether it had anything to do with his health problems," remembers Wu's mother Qi Xianying. "The doctor didn’t say anything. He just shook his head."

This was in 2011.

At the time, the environmental NGO Greenpeace had traveled to Wu’s village here in rural Yunnan province to test the water in the rice paddies and wells surrounding the hill. The samples were high in Chromium-6, a known carcinogen. One water sample from Wu’s land showed the level of Chromium-6 was 240 times higher than what China and the U.S. allows in their drinking water.

“I would say that’s startlingly high," says U.C. Davis researcher Peter Green, who studies chromium’s impact on water. “Although some people can detoxify some amount of it, the amounts mentioned are very, very high and to me it’s not plausible that that could be detoxified by anyone.”

Wu Wenyong was in eighth grade when he was diagnosed with two types of cancer: leukemia and thymoma.

The doctor handed over the diagnosis report to the 14-year-old. Neither his father nor his mother can read.

“We didn’t understand what was going on, but as my son read the diagnosis, he seemed to understand how severe his cancer was," says Qi Xianying through tears. "I felt so guilty and so sad, but he had the strength to smile. He told me ‘Mom, don’t cry. I won’t be around to help farm the land anymore, but dad will help you. It’ll be all right.’”

Qi and her husband borrowed thousands of dollars from family and sold all of their cattle and sheep — everything they owned — to pay for Wu’s chemotherapy.

"It didn’t work. He would wake up with foam all over his mouth and he couldn’t settle down," says Qi, sobbing. "He was in so much pain. He finally asked me to open the window. He said ‘Just let me jump, mom.’”

On Feb. 16, 2012, Wu Wenyong died in his hospital bed. He was 15.

“There are a lot of sad stories of pollution victims all over China," says Ma Tianjie, who works for Greenpeace China.

In a recent trip to Xinglong, the village where the Wu family lives, Ma found at least 30 other villagers among 500 who had been diagnosed with cancer. Even the government has started referring to these places as cancer villages.

In 2009, Chinese journalist Deng Fei published a map highlighting a number of China's 'cancer villages.' Stella Xie translated this version of the map.

View China's Cancer Vilages in a larger map

Significant implications

Officials are worried, because villages like these supply China with its food.

"I think the implications are significant," Ma says. "A lot of these heavy metals will be accumulated in food crops grown near the pollution site."

Five years ago, a soil survey taken from rice in three of China’s largest agricultural provinces shocked Chinese consumers.

Sixty percent of the rice samples showed excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal that causes bone and kidney damage. At the time, Chinese scientists openly discussed the widespread contamination of China’s food supply. But these days, they’re not talking. Several scientists declined interviews with Marketplace. That’s because late last year, China’s communist party declared national soil surveys ‘state secrets.’

Revealing China’s ‘state secrets’ can send you to prison.

American scientist Peter Green says in the case of Chromium-6, which polluted the soil in Xinglong Village, it’s undoubtedly been absorbed by the rice grown there.

"Rice, like all plants, takes up water from its roots," Green says,  "and Chromium-6 — hexavalent chromium — is very soluble in water, and will get into the plants. And that’s unfortunate, because it can get into the food chain and be eaten by humans or perhaps other animals.”

Back in Xinglong village, the 300-million-pound hill of Chromium-6 waste is now gone. The company that created it, LuLiang Peace Technology, removed the waste a few months ago. But farmer Wu Shuliang says his well water is still contaminated. I ask him to show me.

brightcove.createExperiences();
Wu grabs a 10-foot long stick and dips it down into the well.

When he pulls it up, the end of the stick is covered with a thick, mustard-yellow chemical sludge.

Marketplace contacted LuLiang Peace Technology,  and the factory manager, Mr. Qian, spoke to us. After we told him we were a news organization, he hung up and didn’t answer any more calls. The local government also ignored Marketplace’s repeated requests for interviews.

Farmers Qi Xianyi and Wu Shuliang still grow rice in the yellow contaminated water they pump from their well. Their family doesn’t dare eat it.

Instead, they sell it to others.

"We don’t have a choice," says Qi. "We lost all our money paying the medical bills for our son. Now he’s dead, and we’re broke. We know the rice is dangerous. We sell it to vendors from other provinces in China who travel here to purchase it."

And those vendors sell this contaminated rice throughout China. The situation seems hopeless, but lately there have been encouraging developments.

A week ago, a top official of China’s Ministry of the Environment said the soil survey currently deemed ‘a state secret’ will soon be released to the public.

A local judge has also agreed to review the case of Luliang Peace Technology’s contamination of Xinglong Village. If the judge rules against the factory, millions of dollars would be set aside for villagers like the Wu family who have lost loved ones.
But Qi says the ruling may come too late for her family. Her father-in-law is dying. And her 12-year-old son has recently developed a chronic cough that sounds like his brother's before he got cancer.

The problem is, Qi says, her family has so much debt from treating her first son’s cancer that now they can’t afford to bring their remaining son to the doctor for help.

Some gun rights supporters point out that only a tiny fraction of people caught trying to buy a gun illegally are ever prosecuted. They say the government should focus on enforcing current law, not expanding background checks. But gun control supporters say that argument misses the point.

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Hospitals can make more money when surgery leads to complication that need to be fixed. Critics say the current payment system rewards hospitals for bad care and fails to provide incentives that would benefit patients.

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