National / International News

British number one Andy Murray suffers a 58-minute defeat to Stanislas Wawrinka as he is swept aside 6-1 6-2 in Monte Carlo.

A new way to explore the BP Deepwater Horizon story in video

Hillsborough justice campaigner Anne Williams, whose son Kevin was killed in the 1989 football tragedy, dies at the age of 60.

The first minister calls on the Better Together campaign to return the £500,000 donation it received from businessman Ian Taylor.

More than a million schoolchildren could be susceptible to measles due to the MMR vaccine scare, warn child health doctors in the UK.

Ever wonder how the government calculates inflation? Meet George Minichiello. He's searching through the meat aisle of a Brooklyn grocery store.

"Here it is," Minichiello announces, "pork roast. And the pork roast today is $3.99, I'm sorry, $3.49 per pound. Same as last month."

Next he looks for bacon, but can't find the price. He heads over to the cashier and gets the price from her.

"Okay," he notes, "the pound of bacon is priced differently. Last month it was on sale for $3.99, today it's the regular price of $6.99."

Minichiello's an economic assistant for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). He's out at different types of stores four days a week.

The BLS has hundreds of people like George. They go out to their local stores and write down the prices of certain items. The bureau then uses the prices to calculate inflation. It's quite a process.

"I have pharmacies, service organizations like dentists, opticians, grocery stores, large department stores, small bodegas," Minichiello says.  "You know, I almost hate to shop after doing this all day."

But at up MIT in Boston, Alberto Cavallo's found another method for gathering inflation data. Using the Internet.

"Okay," he says, pulling up a list on his computer screen. "So on April 8th, the Coca Cola Cherry Coke is $1.99. The caffeine free Pepsi soda is $1.69."

Back in 2007, Cavallo started collecting costs of online goods. He has a computer program that scans websites' HTML codes, and scrapes out all the prices.

"In the U.S.," he explains, "the estimates of inflation we were able to obtain with online data do in fact match very well the ones produced by the statistical offices in the country."

He gets the same inflation numbers using online methods as the BLS does sending out people like Minichiello to stores.

Cavallo's method evolved into The Billion Prices Project. The project now grabs about a half a million prices a day. And while the government bureau comes out with monthly inflation numbers, the Billion Prices Project gives the inflation rate daily. Using a lot fewer employees.

The BLS has taken notice. Michael Horrigan heads the office there in charge of inflation numbers. Lately, his bureau has started looking to Cavallo and the Billion Prices Project for guidance.

"We really wanted to learn what sort of what the process was, what the methodology was," Horrigan says. "But it also introduced us into the world of webscraping."

He sees online price gathering as a promising way the bureau can cut down there data collection costs.

"You know," he continues, "this is a day and age where we're trying to figure out ways in which we can deal with the current budget situation."

Both Horrigan and Cavallo say it's too soon for the bureau to only rely on web prices. The actual costs of things like services and real estate are still tough to gather online. But, Horrigan says the government agency will slowly be using more of the Billion Prices Project's methods.

And Alberto Cavallo at MIT? He's already thinking about the next index he'd like to re-imagine with big data: the gross domestic product.

An African company recovers a rare blue diamond, thought to be worth $10m (£6.5m), from its mine in South Africa.

Labour says Theresa May has abandoned plans to reintroduce migration exit checks by 2015, amid confusion over the government's e-borders programme.

A fertilizer plant exploded near Waco, Texas, Wednesday night. Officials report between five and 15 people were killed, and more than 160 wounded.

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Home Secretary Theresa May says she is "deeply frustrated" at continued legal obstacles to the deportation of radical Islamic cleric Abu Qatada.

Hundreds of people gathered at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston's South End, about a mile from the bombing site, for an interfaith memorial service Thursday.

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Gun control advocates are regrouping after the Senate's failure to pass new gun regulations on Wednesday. Host Michel Martin talks about the political news of the week with analysts Maria Teresa Kumar, Lenny McAllister and NPR's senior Washington editor, Ron Elving.

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The chairman of the circuit which will host this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix believes the event is "absolutely" safe.

Chad's leader describes CAR as a "wound in the heart of central Africa" as regional leaders discuss the situation in the country where rebels seized control last month.

Alcohol has bolstered many writing sessions throughout history — not just as a drink but as an ink. For most of the last millennia, writers, artists and kings alike relied on an ink that commonly included wine. Now some people are trying to bring this tradition back.

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A tree dating back to the year 802, reputed to be the oldest and largest oaks in the UK, is felled by strong winds.

When volunteer firefighters in the city of West, Texas, about 20 miles north of Waco, arrived to battle a fire at a fertilizer plant, they encountered a disaster in the making. Steve Inskeep and David Greene have more details on the explosion that followed Wednesday night.

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Pyongyang insists that sanctions be lifted and the U.S. and South Korea end joint military exercises.

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A push to make narcotic painkillers harder to abuse means that generic versions of OxyContin won't be allowed. But drugs that are more resistant to abuse are expensive and can still be addictive.

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IMF chief Christine Lagarde is summoned to appear in court in May over an inquiry into alleged abuse of authority when finance minister.