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During President Obama's State of the Union address this week, 14 members of the College Republicans at Ohio State University gathered in a meeting room at their student union on campus in Columbus, Ohio.

The president's speech, which they watched on a giant flat-screen TV, was punctuated with groans, rebuttal, criticisms and sarcasm from this young audience. These students worked hard, to no avail, to deliver the much prized battleground state of Ohio to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Not only did the GOP lose the state in last year's presidential election, but it also faces a big challenge when appealing to young voters.

In the past two presidential elections, voters under 30 have gone big for Obama. Young voters are much more likely than their elders to identify as Democrats, to have positive views of government and to favor same-sex marriage.

Time For Change?

NPR attended the students' viewing of the State of the Union address, opening up a conversation by asking if they think the Republican Party needs to change.

"I don't want us to panic," Drew Stroemple, a political science and economics major, said. "We do need serious changes in terms of the way we reach out to different demographics and in terms of the way we message.

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How did the Romanian horse meat wind up in the British spaghetti sauce? Follow its path, and you'll get a quick tutorial in the complexities of the global food trade.

Since horse meat first turned up in Irish burgers four weeks ago, the saga of horse masquerading as cow has become a pan-European scandal. Horse meat has turned up in beef tortellini in Germany; cottage pies sold at schools in Lancashire, England; and frozen lasagna in Norway, England and other countries.

Investigators seeking the source of the horseflesh say it may have come from two slaughterhouses in Romania, with perhaps a detour in Poland, before wending its way through at least six other European countries. Along the way, there were plenty of opportunities for it to have been mislabeled, repackaged or misrepresented.

Here's The Associated Press's tale of the trail:

"At least some of the horse meat originated at abattoirs in Romania, and was sent through a Cyprus-registered trader to a warehouse in the Netherlands. A French meat wholesaler, Spanghero, bought the meat from the trader, then resold it to the French frozen food processor Comigel. The resulting food was marketed in Britain and other countries under the Sweden-based Findus label as lasagna and other products containing ground beef."

"It's good to be home," President Obama said to a crowd, including uniformed high school students, at Chicago's Hyde Park Academy on Friday.

It was in that same neighborhood where the Obamas raised their children, but the topic of the president's visit was raising Chicago's children — and the nation's. The president returned to his hometown to address the scourge of gun violence that's plaguing the city and many other parts of the country.

Earlier in the day, the Obama presided over an awards ceremony at the White House. Six of the citations, read by a military aide, were for the principal and teachers killed in December at Sandy Hook elementary school.

"Some had been at Sandy Hook Elementary School for only weeks," the president said. "Others were preparing to retire after decades of service. All worked long past the school bell to give the children in their care a future worth their talents."

While the massacre at the school in Newtown, Conn. put the issue of gun violence back in the spotlight, the president has also tried to draw attention to the killings that don't make the headlines. He noted that Chicago had 443 firearm murders last year; 5 of the victims were 18 or younger.

"So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months," he said, "and that's precisely why the overwhelming majority of Americans are asking for some common-sense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun."

The White House is pushing for universal background checks and other measures. But speaking in the South Side neighborhood where a 15-year-old was shot to death just days after she marched in his inaugural parade, Obama seemed more focused on the social climate where that kind of violence has become a daily occurrence.

"When a child opens fire on another child, there's a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole," he said.

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The transformation is subtler in my favorite story, "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis." It's about a group of boys who, owing to the requirements of masculinity and a cruel culture, become predators. Their prey? The eponymous Eric Mutis, wearer of Hoops sneakers. "At school, we made a point of stealing Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair used to enrage me. The H logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I'm poor!"

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People around the world want the same thing from their doctors. First, do no harm. Second, take a look at this weird bump and tell me if I should get worried.

The job is basically the same in many countries around the world. But the pay is wildly different. The median salary for U.S. doctors is about $250,000 a year. In Western Europe, it's less than half that. In developing countries, the salaries are even lower.

Through insurance and out of our own pockets, we pay for doctors' services, just like we pay for all other kinds of goods and services.And yet, with lots of other things we buy, we often turn to imports to save money.

"We should think of doctors the same way we think of shirts," says the economist Dean Baker. "If we can get doctors at a lower cost from elsewhere in the world then we could save enormous amounts of money."

The big difference, of course, is that a bad t-shirt won't kill you.

So, in the name of protecting patients, we put a lot of barriers up to make it harder for foreign doctors to work in the U.S. Even for fully qualified doctors practicing in countries very similar to ours, it can take years of extra training to get licensed to practice in the U.S.

Many U.S. states recognize Canadian medical schools, and have tried to streamline the process for Canadian doctors to work here. But it can be complicated. Every state has its own bureaucracy and license application and requirements.

A Canadian critical care doctor I talked to moved with his wife to California, where he planned to practice. After nine months of paperwork and bureaucracy, he gave up and went back to Canada.

For doctors from other parts of the world, the process is guaranteed to take even longer. Foreign-trained doctors — even those with advanced skills, who have been practicing medicine for years — are required to repeat years of the basic residency training that doctors go through right after medical school.

"The process may be seen as perhaps cumbersome to practicing physicians," says Dr, Humayan Chaudry, President of the Federation of State Medical Boards. "But... the goal at the end of the day is to protect the public."

Chaudry says there simply isn't a way to evaluate the quality of medical training in every country around the world. And clearly, he says, it doesn't deter doctors from coming. Chaudry says that 22 percent of all the licensed doctors in the United States went to medical school outside the country.

But, Dean Baker argues, there should be even more foreign-trained doctors than there already are. A lot of poor and rural areas in the U.S. don't have enough doctors. And foreign-trained physicians are much more likely to specialize in primary care and go to work in such places.

Baker says that rather than have professionals spend years redoing their training, the U.S. should try to make the process more simple and transparent. He says we should tell young, aspiring doctors:

Here's what you have to do. Here are the courses you have to take. Here's is the test you have to pass. If you pass those tests you get to come to the United States and be a doctor just like anyone who was trained in the United States.

So maybe the Great Recession really is over.

After more than five years of recession and painfully slow recovery, President Obama has sent a powerful signal that he thinks the U.S. economy is now in much better shape — good enough, at least, to provide workers with raises.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama called upon Congress to boost the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, up from the current $7.25. The wage would rise in steps, and after hitting the maximum in two years, would thereafter be indexed to inflation.

In the president's first term, the unemployment rate was very high, peaking at 10 percent in October 2009. And during those four years, Obama never seriously pushed Congress for legislation to force employers to pay more.

Tuesday night, he changed direction, saying in his State of the Union speech that he wants Congress to drive up wages for millions of workers by forcing up the benchmark minimum wage. Even though only a relatively small percentage of workers make $7.25 an hour, that pay level serves as a wage floor for all workers. When it moves higher, other wages ratchet up too.

In other words, if Congress were to boost the minimum hourly wage, then a person currently making $9 likely could move up to $10 or even $11 an hour as employers adjusted pay scales to higher levels to compete for the better low-wage workers.

'Honest Wages'

The White House says 15 million workers would benefit directly from a higher minimum wage, but many economists say that millions more would gain too after taking into account the ripple effect as the whole wage scale moves up.

"We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day's work with honest wages," Obama said. "But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year."

He said that's not enough money to keep a family above the poverty line. "Let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families."

The president's focus on the minimum wage came as something of a surprise, even to longtime supporters of a pay increase. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in an interview Wednesday morning that while she agrees with the president, "I didn't know he would bring it up."

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Comedian. Writer. Twitter sensation. Baratunde Thurston may be the most media-savvy provocateur around today. His latest bestselling book is How To Be Black, half tongue-in-cheek guidebook on such topics as "How to be the Black Friend" or "How to be the Next Black President," and half memoir about his life experiences with identity and race.

Thurston joins Ask Me Another host Ophira Eisenberg to explain how a little Twitter hashtag — #howblackareyou — sparked the conversation that would result in his writing of How To Be Black, and the potent connection he's discovered between freedom, politics and comedy. Plus, one lucky winner receives both the "albino" edition of Thurston's book and The Black Card, a most exclusive and coveted prize presented by Thurston himself.

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If you look back at the 2012 campaign as an unrelenting gusher spewing TV ads of anger and negativity, the Wesleyan Media Project is here to confirm your every grim memory.

The word used by Erika Franklin Fowler, of Wesleyan University in Connecticut: "Pulverizing."

"Not only did we see record, pulverizing amounts of advertising on the air, but we saw it concentrated, so heavily concentrated, into just a small number of markets," Fowler told me in an interview. She's a co-director of the Wesleyan project, along with Travis Ridout of Washington State University and Michael Franz of Bowdoin College.

Overall, she says, their research tallied up more than 3 million broadcast and national cable ads in 2012 – and that doesn't include the 2011 run of Republican primary ads and issue ads.

The total tab for 2012: about $1.92 billion. Compared to 2008, the previous presidential year, ad volume was up 33 percent. Ad spending skyrocketed 81 percent. Some reasons for that disparity:

The big-spending superpacs and 501c4 social welfare groups couldn't qualify for candidates-only ad rates. The Romney campaign was notably inefficient in its ad buying strategy; Romney and the outside groups supporting him wound up spending more money for fewer spots than Obama. And TV stations in battleground states know how to price their airtime.

But the presidential ad spectacle was missed by two-thirds of the country. For better or worse.

Fowler says the record numbers of ads "were crammed into just a few key battleground markets. If you were in one of those markets, you were getting inundated from May right up through election day, whereas if you were outside of those markets, you didn't really see very many presidential ads, if [any] at all."

Of the nation's 210 media markets, Fowler says just 71 drew more than 1,000 ads over the months of the presidential general-election contest.

The Wesleyan project started covering the ad wars in January 2012. Its data came from Kantar Media/CMAG, a firm that tracks the markets, costs and content of ads.

The 2012 wrap-up appears in two scholarly papers published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research on Contemporary Politics – parked, sadly, behind an expensive firewall. But Fowler blogged a summary for the Knight Foundation, which helped underwrite the project.

Fowler, Ridout and Franz documented different ad-buying strategies by the Obama and Romney campaigns. Romney favored a traditional approach, heavy on the 6 o'clock news and prime time. The Obama ad buyers went for niche cable buys and non-news programs. Fowler says they liked reality and talk shows.

Among the other highlights: Three-quarters of the presidential ads between May and November appealed to anger. But you already knew that. Super pacs and other outside groups ran 60 percent of the ads in the Republican primary.

That's four times more than in past presidential primaries. And whatever else the Democratic and Republican party committees did last year, they were left behind in the ad wars. They spent something more than $300 million on ads to help candidates. Outside groups spent more than $1 billion.

Like the rest of us who watch these things, Fowler wonders how interest groups will adjust their strategies. It's hard to overlook the millions of TV ad dollars that the pro-Republican groups sent swirling down the drain.

Judy Van der Veer is an American author (1912-1982) who wrote books that are too little remembered now. In her works of fiction and non-fiction, Van der Veer beautifully brings alive small California worlds close to nature.

The novel November Grass (1940) tells of a 23-year-old woman (called "the girl") who lives on a ranch in the valleys east of San Diego. Surrounded by animals, she observes the small details of their lives. She notices the cow who labors in pain, then turns to greet her calf "with all love in her eyes."

This is no cute-animal story, however. The girl fattens calves then takes them from their mothers for sale; this the girl both accepts as necessary and as a weight on her heart. Out walking the hills, she finds signs of death:

Skulls of cattle, eyes no longer empty, but filled with grass. ...

The ivory whiteness of these bones made her think that death treated them better than it did the buried bones of men who had owned the cattle. ... Here at least the bones were free of the flesh that kept them from wind and sun. But the poor bones of man were ever in darkness. She wished that her own bones, when she was done using them, could rest cleanly in the sunshine.

Sometimes the debate between atheism and religion can be enlightening, showing us how both of these different approaches dive deeply into the currents of human experience. Sometimes, however, it can be deeply depressing, devolving into hard lines and acrimony. As an atheist, I often find myself exasperated with what I call "strident atheism."

People in this vein seem intent on ignoring the long narrative of human spiritual endeavor. They often reduce it to histories of ignorance and intolerance. Believers in strident atheism convince themselves that it's OK to ignore the scholarship on the long and ancient history of human spiritual endeavor. And that brings me to my Valentine.

Karen Armstrong, I love you.

I love Karen Armstrong for the breadth of her writing. From the history of the three great monotheistic religions to nuanced accounts of Buddhism and Hinduism to an incisive account of myth and its role in the evolution of human culture, her curiosity emerges as a kind of infectious fire. Armstrong burns to understand all forms of aspiration to the sacred, seeing it as a fundamental human need. Its this overarching perspective that makes her the perfect guide to spirituality for the novice, open-minded atheist.

Many strident atheists dismiss the domains of spiritual endeavor without digging deeper. In their ranks, you will often find folks who have never read William James, Rudolf Otto, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade or Wendy Doniger. Failing to explore these domains is like rejecting all of physics after spending 20 minutes in an intro class. Religion is more than fundamentalism and what Karen Armstrong provides is an engaged account of the long view, the long history of humanity's sometimes stumbling, sometimes horrific, sometimes transcendent attempt to engage with this persistent sense that there is more to life than day-to-day survival.

Armstrong has been criticized for shallowness and for skipping over the subtleties that formal scholarship would reveal. I am sure some of that criticism is true. I can see that she is, indeed, often painting in broad strokes. But like a good science writer, she is opening doors into the history of ideas and experience that we can all follow.

There is another reason I, a scientist, love Karen Armstrong. All of her writings are illuminated by a deep and resonant compassion. As a scientist I am always interested in universals, things that are always true. Armstrong, who founded the wonderful Charter for Compassion, is interested in the same thing when it comes to human behavior as an expression of spiritual longing. Compassion, she tells us, must always come first, must always be the first concern of a religious life. I am not religious but I could not agree more.

Thank you Ms. Armstrong. Will you be my Valentine?

Except for the harsh music of "sluttish" and "rutted" raking across that comma, these lines, which sharply describe but still lack a reason for their sharpness, could have come from one of any number of skillfully written books of midcentury American poetry that are now forgotten.

But in a poem written the same year as "Point Shirley," something begins to happen that points the way toward the poet Plath would become, and the excruciatingly intense gaze that Plath has been honing begins to become not just the poems' tool, but their subject. In "The Eye-mote," Plath's speaker "stood looking / At a field of horses," their

Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
While chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark ...

American Airlines and US Airways on Thursday announced they plan to merge to create the country's largest airline, with a route network stretching from coast to coast, and covering large swaths of Latin America, Europe, Canada, the Caribbean and Africa.

The merger would knit together American's parent company, Fort Worth, Texas-based AMR Corp., and Tempe, Ariz.-based US Airways Group Inc. to form a new company worth about $11 billion. The combined carrier — with more than 6,700 daily flights to 336 destinations in 56 countries — would leapfrog over its competitors in terms of passenger traffic, and would retain the name and logo of American.

Here are answers to common questions about the merger:

Why are airlines always pushing for mergers?

Airlines have a very, very hard time making profits. US Airways endured a couple of round trips to bankruptcy court, and American is still trying to pull out of a bankruptcy filed in 2011.

Web Resources

American/US Airways Merger Site