National News

The U.S is using and spewing less carbon these days. Chalk it up to better car mileage, energy efficiency, and the fracking boom. We burn more natural gas for electricity, and less dirty coal.

"However, that is still pretty much a U.S. phenomenon," says Markus Wrake with the International Energy Agency.

The IEA’s new report shows that globally, the carbon inside every unit of energy produced is virtually unchanged from 20 years ago. One reason: The natural gas revolution has yet to go global.

"Whereas we in the United States do see a lot of coal to gas switching, in fact in Europe we see a lot of the opposite," says Wrake.

Coal use in Europe has gone up lately, as well as emerging economies, like China and India.

"It’s safe to say that energy demand is growing fastest in the countries that can least afford renewables," says Kevin Book with Clear View Energy. "So what they are using primarily is coal."

The IEA says without more action, global temperatures are on track to rise at least two degrees Celsius.

 

Known for his succinct style on the air, the broadcaster was teamed with the exuberant Madden for years on CBS and Fox. He was also the voice of the Masters golf tournament and U.S. Open tennis. Summerall died Tuesday. He was 82.

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Bank of America said this morning that its profit quadrupled last quarter compared with a year ago, though that was below expectations. Toymaker Mattel also reported a quadrupling of profit last quarter, helped in part by cost cutting.

David Kelly, chief global strategist with JP Morgan Funds, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain what's got profits up.

Gold prices are down again this morning, after falling by more than 10 percent since Friday -- its biggest drop in 30 years. Oil prices are also lower.

But how do these drops in commodity prices affect your wallet?

Marketplace's Senior Producer of personal finance Paddy Hirsch joins Morning Report Host Jeremy Hobson to explain.

 

Also: Shakespeare's favorite month; Edith Wharton's birthplace is now a Starbucks; book cover designers on jacket art.

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Britain's biggest retailer, the supermarket Tesco, has announced its first drop in profit in 20 years -- and its U.S. business expansion may be partly to blame. Tesco, which owns the grocery store chain Fresh & Easy, has announced that it will close down its 199 locations and exit the U.S. market.

Marketplace's Stephen Beard in London joins Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain why the company struggled to make it in America.

The former British prime minister was remembered Wednesday at a funeral in London. Queen Elizabeth II was among those in attendance. Thatcher died last week. She was 87.

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Apple doesn’t report earnings until next week, but analysts aren’t expecting much of an announcement. The company is under pressure from competitors like Samsung, which starts shipping its new Galaxy S4 smartphone later this month. Apple hasn’t introduced a groundbreaking gadget in a long time.

Even Apple's music business is taking a hit -- from Amazon. The online retail giant snapped up 22 percent of the music download market in the last quarter of last year, according to the NPD Group’s annual music study.

“Amazon has for years had a great CD business,” says NPD Senior Vice President Russ Crupnick. As those same customers have adopted digital downloads, he says, “often times their loyalty to Amazon has stuck.” Loyalty to Apple is slipping. iTunes’ share fell to 63 percent, from 68 percent the year before.

Meanwhile, both Apple and Amazon have to worry about guys like Fletcher Price.

“I would say 99 percent of my music comes from Pandora One,” says the 24-year-old business analyst from Indianapolis, Ind.

Price pays $36 a year to stream music -- without actually owning any of it -- on Pandora. Or he borrows his fiancée’s Spotify account. That streaming service announced plans this week to expand into Asia and Latin America.

Still, Price says, sometimes you just have to own a song. His latest download:  “Gangnam Style” on iTunes. "Just because it was a fantastic song," he says.

NPD’s Crupnick says music streaming won’t dominate the music business any time soon.

“Consumers still want a variety of ways to engage with music,” he says.

Including some pretty low-tech ones. Crupnick says sales of physical, hold-in-your-hand CDs to teenagers were up about 20 percent last year.

  How do you buy or listen to music?

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the rate for Pandora One. The music service costs $36 per year. The text has been corrected.

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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