National / International News

Alastair Cook faces a sleepless night after England's poor opening-day display against New Zealand, says Jonathan Agnew

A sixth Welsh local education authority falls foul of school inspector Estyn, and faces being put into special measures.

Vince Cable criticises ageism in modern-day politics, pointing out that Churchill and Gladstone served as prime minister in their 70s and 80s.

A publication named Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop is named as the winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year

It's going to be another long weekend in Cyprus. The country's leaders are putting the finishing touches on a new bailout plan today. Cyprus has until Monday to complete a deal and convince international lenders to keep pumping money into its ailing banking sector. Otherwise, the country risks economic collapse, which could force it to exit the euro.

The BBC's Steve Evans in Berlin joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss how Germany figures into all of this.

In his first speech on immigration as deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg is expected to call for a bail-like system of security bonds to tackle abuse of immigration visas.

A man arrested after allegedly running towards a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall is to appear before magistrates.

Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell, wants to take the company private. He put together a buyout deal with Silver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm. His goal is to restructure the company he started as a teenager.

“This is an organization that I think needs to be taken down to the studs, products need to be taken down to bare metal and re-imagined, so that it can remain competitive,” says Chris Silva, an industry analyst with the Altimeter group.

Dell has been its CEO for the last six years, as computing has moved from the personal computers that made the company famous to smart phones and tablets. He is making the case that the company he has led needs to move in a new direction, and Dell is the man to take it there.

According to Silva, “It’s a tricky situation.”

That seems especially true as some shareholders complain Dell’s bid of $13.65 a share undervalues the company.

Jayson Noland, an analyst with R.W. Baird, says he suspects this isn’t about money for Michael Dell, so much as it’s about pride.

“Ultimately, we expect to see this deal get done at or above the current offer price, with the current players," says Noland.

According to Noland, the company has been making progress. It has gotten into servers, storage and network software. Dell is worth something, he argues. After all, it’s created all this buzz.

Over the past couple  years, the Mississippi River has been beset by floods and droughts, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. This week a group of 11 mayors along the river launched a lobbying push to focus Washington’s attention on a system-wide plan to protect commerce and manage natural disasters along the waterway.  

Atop the group’s list of concerns is more funding for infrastructure like locks and dams to maintain navigation on the river.

A multibillion dollar water bill advancing through Congress makes no mention of the Mississippi River. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay thinks that’s crazy.

“This is about one of our biggest and most important economic assets in the entire nation, and that’s the Mississippi River," says Slay. "We have over 100 million tons of cargo that move past the [Gateway] Arch every year.”

Slay says many of the locks and dams on the river are upwards of 100 years old, needing as much as $60 billion in deferred maintenance.  

But not everyone is convinced action is needed. Don Sweeney,a transportation economist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says the locks and dams are working just fine, and are actually seeing fewer barges.

“On the Mississippi River, from its peak heydays in the 1990’s and late 1980’s, traffic is down some 30 to 40 percent," says Sweeney. "Rail has become much more competitive.”

The mayors plan to work closely with a newly-formed Mississippi River caucus in Congress to advance their goals.

Northern Ireland's World Cup qualifier against Russia is in doubt after heavy snowfall in Belfast.

In the natural gas fracking debate, you don't often get oil and gas companies in the same room with environmentalists, let alone joining the same club.

But in Pittsburgh, a new group has drillers voluntarily agreeing to a set of safety standards that outside auditors will police.

You know LEEDS, the stamp of approval for green buildings?

LEEDS for drillers and frackers is kind of the idea for the new Pittsburgh-area partnership of companies and environmental groups.

The Center for Sustainable Shale Development could go by the acronym kissed. And fracking needs some love from a skeptical public.

"The risks can be managed," says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. "But that doesn't mean they will be managed. It's going to take a big effort by local citizens, by the state regulators, and by the progressive members of industry."

An industrial industry. It's not just fracking -- sending water and chemicals down a well. It's pipelines, wastewater pits, trucks, odor.

"Well before you get to a fracking location you're likely to be able to smell it," says energy consultant Kent Moors, who also teaches at Duquesne University. "And it's not because of the gas because the gas is odorless. You're really going to be smelling diesel. The huge footprint to run all of that equipment is run on diesel fuel, and that diesel regularly leaks."

The group's new standards call for burning less diesel on wellpads, as well as safe drilling practices, controlling air pollution and taking care of drill fluids and wastewater.

Four companies have volunteered to comply, including Chevron. Regional head Bruce Niemeyer hopes the system wins over nervous western Pennsylvanians who recall the days of coalmining here.

"Many remember prior industrial activities," Niemeyer says, "and have some question in their mind: does this activity take them to a similar place? And understandably we don't want to see any regression."

Critics say they already see regression. Several pollution lawsuits are underway.

It's hard to measure if industry has a community's goodwill. But if it does, Fred Krupp at Environmental Defense Fund argues the product of drilling and fracking -- natural gas -- has upsides.

"There are environmental benefits of using gas over coal," Krupp says. "in terms of cleaner air, less particulates, less sulfur and nitrogen coming out of power plants."

Natural gas spews fewer greenhouse gases than coal, and makes cheap American energy and petrochemicals.

The question is whether third-party certifying will help give industry the public trust to drill and frack long-term.

Could electronic wallets become as common as cellphones? Paypal and Google sure hope so. The two companies see a future where you walk into a store and simply use your smartphone to pay. But competition is growing. Now MasterCard says it will start charging a controversial fee to some e-wallet companies that want to run MasterCard transactions. But the card company isn't stopping there. They are also developing an e-wallet of their own.

Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer for Mastercard, joins Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to discuss MasterCard's strategy for staying relevant in the mobile age.

Remember the Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper? When it comes to retirement, these days, more Americans are acting like grasshoppers than ants.  According to a new report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute just shy of 60 percent of retirees say they have less than $25,000 saved. And only about half of us have even taken the time to crunch the numbers on what we'll need to live on after we retire. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Times are tough, and people are struggling just to get by. But some causes are more complex.

Douglas Rushkoff has a theory. He argues that when you're living in a very urgent present, swimming in a flood of tweets and status updates and a 24/7 news cycle, the future can lose priority. Rushkoff writes about the implications of this in his new book, "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now."  

What does Rushkoff mean by "present shock?"

"Present shock is really the human reaction to living in a world that's always on and kind of pinging you from everywhere. I guess on a deeper level, it's about living in a world kind of without history and without a future -- where everything is happening in the present tense. So how do you run your life or your business or anything about you when you don't really have a temporal landscape in which to do it," says Rushkoff.

Rushkoff says the American retirement paradigm is based on an Industrial Age idea of doing stuff now for a future reward. But our essential relationship and experience with time has changed, as well as our beliefs about the future. He uses investing as an example.

"On the one hand, investors don't invest any more anyway," says Rushkoff. "They are investing in the trade. They're trying to make money off the transaction itself in real time. God forbid we start thinking about the company that's supposed to be underlying the stock."

Rushkoff says people don't really do things for the consequences any more. He says everything happens in the moment for its own sake -- something that's both frightening in the short term on one hand, but very real on the other hand.

"Our financial choices have always been predicated on some psycho-behavioral flaws, if we want to pick on people," says Rushkoff. "But the difference now is that banks and investment firms and credit card companies have entire divisions of highly paid psychologists trying to help them figure out how to exploit these irrational tendencies. That's the part that's really, kind of not fair. When you have the very industries that are being entrusted with our future that are looking for ways to make money off our bad choices. That's really why it doesn't work so well any more."

The BBC commissions its first original dramas specifically for its catch-up service iPlayer.

Here's an update on what are commonly known as drones -- or what some call "unmanned aerial vehicles".

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been looking into the use of drones in America and how they might affect privacy. The federal government is working on new rules that could expand permits for drones in the coming years.

"There really aren't a lot of laws in place that explain what's allowed with drones in terms of safety and privacy," says Ben Popper, who has been covering this story for the online tech news site The Verge. "So there has been a rush by states and cities to pass legislation often aimed at their own government employees and law enforcement."

Popper says while cities and states can't ban drones -- that power lies with the FAA -- they can restrict their own employees from using them.

To hear more about what institutions and businesses are using drones, click on the audio player above.

Tell us: While "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle" is the accepted term, you may have noticed it's not gender-neutral. If you have a better suggestion, let us know in a comment below.

Xi Jinping arrives in Russia on the first stop of his maiden overseas tour as president of China, with a visit to Africa to follow.

A round-up of school closures in Northern Ireland as a result of the snow.

A stunning display of nature's diversity

Remember the Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper? These days, when it comes to retirement, more Americans are acting like grasshoppers than ants. According to a new report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, just shy of 60 percent of retirees say they have less than $25,0000 saved. And only about half of us have even taken the time to figure out what we'll need to live on after we retire.

If older Americans are finding it hard to save, when they're staring retirement in the face, think how much harder it must be for millennials. Retirement seems so far away to them, for one thing -- and then there's the struggling economy, stagnant wages and heaping student debt.

Recently some of our colleagues at Youth Radio got together to share what they're expecting from life after work. Click play on the audio player to hear what they have to say.

Why is Nigel Farage visiting Canada, asks James Landale