National / International News

Chancellor George Osborne stands isolated after European Union finance ministers vow to press on with proposals to curb bankers' bonuses.

Early March is when Yosemite National Park officials would normally be gearing up for the busy tourist season. Instead, they're figuring out how to cut $1.5 million from their budget because of the recent sequestration that forced across-the-board cuts. The National Park Service must now cut $134 million from sites around the country.

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Early March is when Yosemite National Park officials would normally be gearing up for the busy tourist season. Instead, they're figuring out how to cut $1.5 million from their budget because of the recent sequestration that forced across-the-board cuts. The National Park Service must now cut $134 million from sites around the country.

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The FBI is investigating a pilot's report of a small unmanned drone aeroplane in the skies near a major New York City airport.

A Soviet soldier who went missing in Afghanistan nearly 33 years ago is found living with Afghans in the western province of Herat.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has died at the age of 58, according to AP reports. Besides his geopolitical influence, Chavez's legacy will be an economic one -- the socialist strongman fused his ideas and his country's oil money to refashion the country, for better or worse.

Chavez economics starts with Chavez ideology. He took office in 1999, pledging to fight corruption and share the wealth.

"People tend to vote with their pocketbooks, even here," said business publisher and consultant Robert Bottome in Caracas, back in January*. "And so Chavez was offering a change. He was going to get the economy growing again. Throw the bastards out. He has tremendous personal appeal."

Early on in his administration, Chavez took control of the biggest piece of his country's economy: oil.

Foreign companies like ExxonMobil and Conoco Phillips operated there. But Bottome says Chavez was unsatisfied with the royalty payment negotiated in a contract. So he doubled it.

"And then he doubled it again," Bottome said. "He didn't like the tax scale. And then finally he said he didn't like my partners. So he told them from now on instead of being majority owners and operators, you can be minority partner if you like. And I am going to run the show. "

Speaking of show, Chavez hosted his own talk show every Sunday. As in him talking.

"He once fired all the top management of the national oil company" during the show, said former Venezuelan trade minister Moises Naim, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "In other instances of his show, he would nationalize a bank or the electricity company."

What you and I consider independent economic data is hard to come by in Venezuela.

But there's no question Chavez spent money on the poor -- on health care, appliances, subsidized gas. And he drove out lots of foreign companies and private-sector investors.

Pomona College historian Miguel Tinker Salas said Venezuela's now a hybrid economy -- part socialist, part consumption capitalist.

"You can have on the one hand a discourse about socialism, but the malls are full," Tinker Salas said in January. "Venezuela is the highest consumer of scotch whiskey per capita in the world."

Chavez also sent money to neighboring countries, often in the form of cheap energy.

Some were friends of the ideological revolution, like Cuba. Others were marriages of political convenience.

"So if there are votes in organizations that come up about Venezuela," said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., "those countries are more likely to be influenced if get good deal on oil to vote with Venezuela as opposed to against Venezuela."

It's been a potent fusion of power, ideology, and economic leverage, says Shifter.

Which raises the question: is this how every strongman economy tends to work?

"I don't think it necessarily has to go this way," Shifter said. "You have Evo Morales who is a close ally of Hugo Chavez. But the Bolivian economy is much better managed than the Venezuelan economy."

Today, Venezuela faces double-digit inflation, billions in debt, and remains highly dependent on the oil sector. When energy prices fall, the economy goes with it.

And yet the socialist experiment continues.

Why? Oil money to bankroll it, said Moises Naim at Carnegie.

"That allows you to experiment, and provides you a cushion to cover your mistakes," Naim said. "The 'oil curse' allows for sustained bad ideas to linger over time."

On his show late last year, Chavez picked a successor.

"I don't think there's any going back," said Tinker Salas. "Venezuela has changed. People who have been in power are not going to retreat into the margins any more. Venezuela will not change, whether Chavez is there or not."

*UPDATED: This article is an updated version of a story on Hugo Chavez that ran on Marketplace in January.

The White House was responding to an online petition signed by more than 114,000 people. The administration said Americans should also be able to unlock tablets.

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Federal health officials warned that a dangerous group of superbugs has become increasingly common in hospitals throughout the past decade. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the bacteria are resistant to virtually all antibiotics, including the ones doctors use as a last-ditch option.

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Four Army bases are to close as part of a shake-up to accommodate thousands of troops returning from Germany.

Los Angeles voters dribble into polling stations in a city election promising the city's most sweeping leadership change in more than a decade.

Malt is an essential component of beer, but most comes from a handful of industrial processors that pool grains from across the U.S. and Canada. Now, a small but growing number of craft malt houses are malting grains from small regional farmers, enabling microbreweries to offer truly local beers.

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Neil Lennon believes Celtic are capable of victory against Juventus in the second leg of the Champions League last 16

"In the interest of stopping the Korean conflict, with its great toil of suffering and bloodshed," all sides agreed to the ceasefire. They also agreed to work on a "peaceful settlement of the Korean question." That work remains unfinished.

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In the middle of Shanghai, there’s a secret neighborhood.

It's the size of a city block, and it's surrounded by a 10-foot wall. Inside is a field of weeds where stray cats prowl through the charred corpses of old homes. It’s a strange scene -- particularly here, in the middle of Shanghai’s old French Concession, which has some of the most expensive real estate in China. But for the past decade, this lot has sat here, undeveloped and oblivious to the most rapid economic boom in modern history going on all around it.

But there are people here. And they’re aware. Kang Chenggeng sneaks past a police officer guarding the only entrance to this neighborhood to show what’s left of his home. "My home," he says, his voice muffled by a cold gust of wind.

A decade ago, this was a quiet alleyway neighborhood called Maggie Lane. Officials from the Shanghai district of Xuhui had plans to sell the land to a developer to build a luxury condominium complex. Maggie Lane residents say Xuhui officials tricked them into leaving their neighborhood, telling them their homes were of historical importance, the government would rebuild them, and afterwards, residents could move back.

Xuhui government officials refused interview requests from Marketplace.

Kang says as Maggie Lane’s residents started to leave, they discovered officials had lied to them. The government changed the legal designation for the land, changed the resettlement terms, and suddenly they weren’t able to return to their homes. If they wanted new housing elsewhere, they’d have to forfeit much of their resettlement compensation for it. Kang and a dozen others stayed put. "The demolition crew cut my water and gas, and they took my front door off the hinges," remembers Kang. "I wouldn’t leave. Then they broke my windows and poured buckets of raw sewage into my home. I still didn’t leave. Then, when it was raining hard, they used an excavator to smash my roof in. Everything got wet, so I left." 

Kang’s been homeless ever since. Sometimes he comes back here to check on his old home. He looks through the hole in the roof that’s still there. Sunlight shines through it onto broken glass, piles of bricks and splintered lumber.

From the shattered window of Kang’s old kitchen, you can see what’s left of the home of Zhu Shuikang and his wife Li Xingzhi. According to Chinese court documents, on the night of January 9th, 2005, two employees of the developer set fire to the couple’s home to try to get them to leave. Another neighbor, Chen Zhongdao, remembers that night. "The fire alarm went off, but we didn’t go outside to see what was going on because we were scared of getting beat up by the developer’s thugs," recalls Chen.

Zhu Shuikang was an elderly man who had fought and survived the Korean War as a Chinese soldier decades ago, but he was no match for the developer.

He and his wife burned to death in their bed.

Months later, two employees of the developer were given reprieved death sentences, another got life in prison, and the Xuhui government built a wall around the neighborhood, letting it sit as unfinished business for future leaders to take care of. "I believe the new leadership will take a tougher stand on these illegal takings," says Li Ping, an attorney in Beijing for the property rights group Landessa.

He says tackling illegal land seizures will be a priority for incoming president Xi Jinping. Li’s confident China’s new leaders are ready to increase compensation and give fair resettlement packages to people like the residents of Maggie Lane. He says local governments have taken land from 40 million people in China, and the pace hasn’t slowed down. It’s beginning to threaten social stability, he says. "According to current pace of land expropriation, they will add three million people every year," says Li. "If compensation is not adequate, you basically add three more million dissidents each and every year."

The challenge, says Li, will be to give local governments more legal options to make money. As it stands, local governments hand over most of their tax revenue to the central government, so taking land from residents and selling it to developers is an irresistible temptation.

Chen Zhongdao still lives inside his half demolished home. He says every year or two, Xuhui officials send a demolition crew to try and force them off the land. "I’ve told the men in the crews that if they try to take me from my home, I’ll strap a gas canister to myself and we’ll all die together," says Chen.  "I’ve told them: I’m 60 years old, you guys are only 40. You have your lives ahead of you. I’m not afraid to die."

So far, the Xuhui government hasn’t tested Chen’s threat. Instead officials have allowed Chen and his neighbors to stay here, living in their partially demolished homes. Officials paid off the developer, losing money for the district, and then re-designated Maggie Lane as land for public use, yet a wall remains around it.

A few weeks ago, the district sent a crew to install new gas lines for Chen and his neighbors. He doesn’t know what to make of this, but he’s optimistic that change is afoot, China’s new leadership may help people like him, and maybe someday his house will again feel like home.

First Minister Carwyn Jones says he will personally decide whether to "call in" controversial proposals on specialist NHS care for sick babies in north Wales.

Three people are held over the acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet's artistic director, including a senior dancer suspected of masterminding the plot.

A man is convicted of beating his heavily pregnant ex-fiancee and their unborn baby to death.

Venezuela's vice president also hinted that the United States was behind President Hugo Chávez's cancer. He said that despite its ailing leader, the revolution is "ready to act in coordination" against attempts to destabilize the country.

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A two-year-old girl dies after being struck by a 4x4 vehicle in Portlethen in Aberdeenshire.

A brothel worker who battered the "madam" to death with a Chinese dragon ornament after she sacked him for being "sullen" is jailed for life.