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For many people, paprikash means winter. After all, it's a dish fit for cold, gray days: A belly-warming mix of meat and spices, it's the perfect cure for the doldrums of late January.

For Merelyn Chalmers, though, the classic Hungarian casserole recalls someone far dearer: her mother, Yolanda. A survivor of Auschwitz, Yolanda had rebuilt her life in Perth, Australia, after the war. "My mum was Hungarian," Chalmers explains. "We ate paprikash probably five nights a week. This was something that she just threw together when I wasn't feeling well."

Merelyn and her mother both considered it a "nothing special" dish, one that was just thrown together in a pressure cooker. But when Merelyn moved to Sydney many years later, she was surprised to learn it was also a favorite among other daughters of Hungarian women. "We have quite a large Hungarian population, and they had all grown up on the same dish."

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You might think that retailers have to let you know right away if they get hacked and someone steals your account information.

But recent disclosures by Target and Neiman Marcus that their networks were hacked, and data about their consumers was stolen, have raised questions about how quickly merchants need to alert their customers.

In the case of Neiman Marcus, the company may have had evidence of a breach as far back as July. But the law is a bit murky on just how quickly companies need to let them know.

"This is much more complex than what you might think," says Peter Guffin, an attorney who specializes in privacy and data. He says there's a patchwork quilt of laws that make these disclosure rules complex.

"You've got 46 states, I believe, at last count who actually have their own notions of data breach notification," he says.

States vary in how much they require retailers to inform consumers about breaches. Some states say companies don't have to alert consumers unless there is a real "risk of harm." Guffin says the only place they tend to agree is that "most states want you to be notifying affected individuals as expeditiously as reasonably possible."

But consumer advocates point to a big exception to this rule that gives companies a lot of room.

"If there's a law enforcement investigation going on or if a disclosure about a data breach could impede a law enforcement investigation, then companies don't have to inform consumers of the breach immediately," says Jamie Court of the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.

Court says companies can use an ongoing investigation as a reason to delay when they fear it will have a negative impact on their bottom line. He suspects that Target and Neiman Marcus may have delayed notifying customers about recent security breaches.

"It happened during the Christmas buying season," Court says. "And we just can't be sure until law enforcement tells us when the companies knew about the breach and whether they delayed the information getting to the American people."

Several state attorneys general are investigating the breaches, and in many cases, they look into the timing of the disclosure as part of the overall investigation.

In emails, spokespeople for Neiman Marcus and Target say they are confident that they are meeting all legal notification requirements.

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One of the dangers of writing a book in this style is that the different little stand-alone sections are inevitably pitted against one another. Some work better than others. A sudden quote from Simone Weil, "Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer," seemed a little bewildering. And a questionnaire about sparrows, a page after the revelation that the couple had lost their baby, made me want to say: let's get back to our characters now.

But there were other times when I was more willing to be taken far afield, such as in a little story about the scientist Carl Sagan's infidelity. Because, in fact, infidelity comes into play in Dept. of Speculation. The husband strays, and the ensuing drama has a held-breath suspense to it.

And the novel is often really funny. Offill refers to the Internet meme of the cat saying, "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" And the payoff comes later, after men are flirting with the wife, who muses to herself, "I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?"

Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone's domestic life.

Several atrocious gang rapes have been reported in India over the past year or so, and the one this week in West Bengal has a particularly sinister twist.

An all-male village tribunal was allegedly upset that a 20-year old tribal woman had fallen in love with a man outside the community and it ordered that she be gang-raped as punishment.

The young woman is being treated in a hospital after telling authorities that she was sexually assaulted by 12 men earlier this week.

According to police, when her "unauthorized" relationship was discovered, the village council first imposed a fine on the young woman equivalent to hundreds of dollars.

But her family said they were too poor to pay and the council in the village of Subalpur, 110 miles north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, ordered her to be sexually assaulted.

"Go enjoy the girl and have fun," the head of the tribunal told villagers, according to the complaint filed by the woman's family.

The chief of the tribunal, identified as Balai Mardi in news reports, was arrested along with 12 other men and they appeared in court on Thursday.

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Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has less than 24 hours to agree to hold early elections and lift anti-protest laws or the tens of thousands of demonstrators who have been in the streets of Kiev for days will go "on the attack," a leader of the opposition says.

Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight boxer who is a leading voice among the protesters, issued that warning Wednesday evening. According to the BBC:

"Mr. Klitschko said [President Viktor Yanukovych] could end the stand-off 'without bloodshed' by calling early elections, but that 'tomorrow, if the president does not respond ... then we will go on the attack,' to roars of approval from the crowd."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Simon & Schuster will publish Cody Wilson's story of making guns from a 3-D printer, Negative Liberty: A Gun Printer's Guide to the Apocalypse. Wilson's organization Defense Distributed is famous for publishing designs for 3-D printable guns that anyone can download online. Wilson tells Forbes, "The whole point to me is to add to the hacker mythology and to have a very, very accurate and contentious portrayal of what we think about the current political situation, our attitude and political orientation, a lasting remark." He added, "It won't be a manifesto. But culturally, I hope to leave a couple of zingers ... a touchstone for the young, disaffected radical toward his own political and social development, that kind of thing."

Slate features a 1665 "bill of mortality," which lists the deaths in London over a particular week during the Great Plague. Causes of death include "Surfeit (87)," "Flux (2)," "Frighted (1)," "Sore-legge (1)," "Grief (1)" and "Griping in the Guts (1)."

Simon & Schuster has acquired a forthcoming book by the man behind the parody Twitter account @GSElevator, which claims to report gossip overheard in the elevator at Goldman Sachs. A recent tweet reads, "#1: Some chick asked me what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I'd wonder where the rest of my money went." The publisher bills the book, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, as "a humorous, insightful, and profoundly uncensored account of Wall Street, pulling back the curtain on a world that is both envied and loathed, yet never dull." The author, who is writing under the pseudonym J. T. Stone, told The New York Times by email, "My aim is to showcase and illuminate the true culture of Wall Street as I have experienced it, and write a book that is not only very funny and entertaining, but also, insightful and substantive."

At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg imagines a "Choose Your Own P.G. Wodehouse Adventure": "Your Uncle Fred is masquerading as a beloved Russian novelist in a dining car containing half of the most important members of your gentleman's club as well as your publisher, who currently has on his person a compromising letter that could end your literary career. What tie will you wear? If you will wear the striped tie, select A. If you will wear the quiet grey, select B."

Mary Miller speaks to The Rumpus about writing and her new book, The Last Days of California. She says, "A story works when there's momentum, life behind the words. Some stories have this and others don't, and it's difficult to say why this is. If all stories 'worked,' though, writing wouldn't be much of a challenge; it wouldn't be art."

Certainly that's what Carthage, Oates' latest novel, brings to mind. Here, as in many of her other works of fiction, we encounter an American family in torment, in a small town in the wilds of upstate New York, people from whose turmoil and suffering we can learn a great deal about our own households and our own hearts. The town is Carthage, the wilds are the Nautauga Forest Preserve — "three hundred thousand acres of mountainous, boulder-strewn and densely wooded wilderness ... remote, uninhabitable and unreachable except by the most intrepid hikers and mountain climbers." And the family is the Mayfields — Zeno, the husband (a former mayor of the town), wife Arlette, and daughters Juliet and Cressida, whom Oates describes as "like the daughters of a fairy-tale king." All of them are caught up in the narrative of a disappearing girl and Brett Kincaid, Juliet's fiance, the Iraq War veteran who has returned to Carthage wounded in body and soul.

When the younger Mayfield girl, Cressida — a slight, rather androgynous creature who dropped out of college and returned home — incongruously throws herself at the wounded Brett, whatever glue seemed to hold the family together melts in the heat of violence. The police find Brett unconscious in his blood-spattered vehicle in the local forest preserve, and Cressida goes missing. The authorities decide Cressida's been murdered — a crime to which dazed and wounded veteran Brett confesses — and a huge search ensues.

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The Spanish government nationalized the country's biggest mortgage lender, Bankia, but couldn't afford to rescue them all. So Europe stepped in, with about $56 billion in loans.

"The idea is to kind of stuff the banks full of cash, so that they can finally start taking the losses that they're sitting on," says Megan Greene, the chief economist at Maverick Intelligence in London.

She says that unlike Greece, where the government went broke, in Spain it was the banks. They needed loans from Europe to stay afloat, and cut their losses from the housing crash.

Banks Still Have Bad Debt

But Greene says the banks haven't dumped their bad debt — and they're hoping they might not have to.

"The big game that politicians and bank CEOs are playing is 'extend and pretend.' If we pretend that our banks are really healthy, then eventually all the assets underlying things on our balance sheets will regain value, and we won't actually have to take such big losses," she says.

"So that's the game everyone in Europe has been trying to play," she continues. "And you know, Spain might get away with it, just because sentiment in Europe generally has improved so much."

The Spanish government is paying lower rates to borrow money. There's confidence it can handle the interest on its debt. The economy is out of recession. And the International Monetary Fund has tripled its growth forecast for Spain this year.

Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates just bought a $150 million stake in a Spanish construction company, says economist Gayle Allard, at Madrid's IE Business School.

"Foreign capital has come in because Spain is now such a bargain. Because salaries have gone down, values have gone down — asset values," she says. "And the man in the street has borne the brunt of all of that."

And Allard, an American who's lived in Spain for decades, says the view from the street is far less rosy.

"The reality is that one in four people looking for a job can't find one. The young people are leaving the country. Spain has become a net exporter of persons again for the first time in decades. Salaries are down by, I think, 8 percent now," she says. "There's nothing pretty about the picture at home."

So while Spain celebrates the survival of its banking system, thanks to bailout loans from Europe — there's still work to be done on the overall economy.

The most striking statistic: youth unemployment is pushing 60 percent.

The bailout exit means Spanish banks won't tap any more European loans. But they will have to pay back what they've already borrowed, over the next 15 years.

After word went out that Jamaica's two-man bobsled team had qualified to compete in Sochi next month – but didn't have money to go to Russia – Internet donors have saved the day. Thousands of people contributed to online campaigns, including one held in Dogecoin, the peculiar digital currency.

The Jamaican team of driver Winston Watts and brakeman Marvin Dixon had hoped to raise $80,000. Donations blew past that amount, thanks to an outpouring of popular support and media attention – including an Associated Press article in which Watts said of the fundraising effort: "Right now, we're at zero."

That was on Saturday — just four days ago. By our tally of two online campaigns, the team has now more than $184,000. It seems that Watts, 46, was onto something when he spoke to the AP.

"I'm not a person who likes to quit," he said. "I put my heart into it and I know for a fact that people are going to help this team."

As the story spread, the International Olympic Committee reportedly said it would step in to pay the Jamaicans' travel costs. But the team has other expenses, such as equipment and training time – much of which has previously been paid for by Watts himself, according to reports.

The fan-favorite bobsledding squad first sped to fame in 1988, when its four-man team made their Winter Olympics debut – and then again in 1993, when the film Cool Runnings also popularized the team's slogan: "Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, its bobsled time!"

This year, the two-man team benefited from that enduring popularity, and from an Internet meme. Their campaign was funded in part by Dogecoin – the crypto-currency that's similar to Bitcoin but is based on the inexplicable yet irresistible "doge" meme, in which Shiba Inu, a cute Japanese dog breed, are shown in various settings, the photos embellished with words of praise and amazement – particularly "wow."

The Dogecoin effort produced around $30,000 for the bobsled team, after it was promoted in the currency's Reddit community page. (You can read more about the doge phenomenon at The Verge, which rounded up the details last month.)

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It is a myth that "poor countries are doomed to stay poor" and by the year 2035, "there will be almost no poor countries left in the world," Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates writes in his latest annual letter about the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conditions in the nations where the foundation works.

Gates sees a world where once-impoverished countries have already made tremendous progress and more will follow their lead.

Here's some of his thinking:

— "The global picture of poverty has been completely redrawn in my lifetime. Per-person incomes in Turkey and Chile are where the United States level was in 1960. Malaysia is nearly there, as is Gabon. And that no-man's-land between rich and poor countries has been filled in by China, India, Brazil, and others."

— "Since 1960, China's real income per person has gone up eightfold. India's has quadrupled, Brazil's has almost quintupled, and the small country of Botswana, with shrewd management of its mineral resources, has seen a thirty-fold increase. There is a class of nations in the middle that barely existed 50 years ago, and it includes more than half of the world's population."

— "So the easiest way to respond to the myth that poor countries are doomed to stay poor is to point to one fact: They haven't stayed poor. Many — though by no means all — of the countries we used to call poor now have thriving economies. And the percentage of very poor people has dropped by more than half since 1990."

— "That still leaves more than 1 billion people in extreme poverty, so it's not time to celebrate. But it is fair to say that the world has changed so much that the terms 'developing countries' and 'developed countries' have outlived their usefulness."

— "Don't let anyone tell you that Africa is worse off today than it was 50 years ago. Income per person has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa over that time, and quite a bit in a few countries. After plummeting during the debt crisis of the 1980s, it has climbed by two thirds since 1998, to nearly $2,200 from just over $1,300. Today, more and more countries are turning toward strong sustained development, and more will follow. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa."

— "The bottom line: Poor countries are not doomed to stay poor. Some of the so-called developing nations have already developed. Many more are on their way. The nations that are still finding their way are not trying to do something unprecedented. They have good examples to learn from."

When Gates concludes that "by 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world," he adds this explanation:

"Specifically, I mean that by 2035, almost no country will be as poor as any of the 35 countries that the World Bank classifies as low-income today, even after adjusting for inflation."

Bobby Foster Jr. can often be found reading the paper on a wooden bench outside Murry's grocery store on the corner of Sixth and H streets NE in Washington, D.C.

"The sun shines over here this time of day," says Foster, a retired cook. "It's always good when the sun shines."

Murry's has been an anchor in this neighborhood for decades — during the crack wars of the 1980s and the urban blight that followed, when most other businesses packed up and left. Foster has been somewhat of an anchor, too. He's lived here for 54 years.

But now, this neighborhood and hundreds like it across the country are changing. Every other shop is a new restaurant, high-end salon or bar.

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In 1895, legislators in New York state decided to improve working conditions in what at the time could be a deadly profession: baking bread.

"Bakeries are actually extremely dangerous places to work," says Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis. "Because flour is such a fine particulate, if it gets to hang in the air it can catch fire and the whole room can go up in a sheet of flame."

New York passed a law called the Bakeshop Act. It didn't set a minimum wage — the minimum wage didn't exist yet in the U.S. — but it limited working hours and required that bakeries be kept clean.

The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. Bakers and their employers had the right to make any agreements they wanted about work hours, the court found. The Bakeshop Act, according to the court, interfered with individuals' right to enter into a contract.

The ruling suggested there was no way the Supreme Court of the time would allow anything like a minimum wage.

Several decades later, Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. To fight the Depression, he wanted to put money in people's pockets. "If all employers will work together to shorten hours and raise wages, we can put people back to work," he said.

Roosevelt wanted businesses to do this voluntarily. To that end, the administration created the National Industrial Recovery Act, which Congress passed in 1933.

Businesses that agreed to shorten hours and raise wages could hang special signs in their windows that showed a blue eagle logo and the words "doing our part."

Perhaps more powerful than the sign were the perks that went along with agreeing to offer higher wages: Participating businesses were allowed to form cartels and set prices. (At the time, the country was suffering from deflation, with prices and wages plunging.)

But the blue eagle was no match for nine men in robes: The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law.

After Roosevelt was re-elected by a landslide in 1936, he tried to pack the court — to pass a law that would let him appoint additional justices. That effort failed.

But one of the court justices switched sides, and in 1937 the court upheld the right of Washington state to have a minimum wage.

The next year, FDR pushed through Congress the Fair Labor Standards Act, which contained a kind of minimal minimum wage.

The act, "applying to products in interstate, ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over the hours of labor," Roosevelt said at the time.

Rauchway says it was more of a political victory than an intellectual one. And the nation is still divided over it today.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in an Illinois case that could drive a stake through the heart of public employee unions.

At issue are two questions: whether states may recognize a union to represent health care workers who care for disabled adults in their homes instead of in state institutions; and whether non-union members must pay for negotiating a contract they benefit from.

To understand why a growing number of states actually want to recognize unions to represent home health care workers, listen to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan:

"The home services program has about 28,000 home care aides, and these people are working in homes all over the state. There isn't a centralized workplace, and the goal for the state is creating and retaining a professional group of home care aides to meet the needs of what is an ever increasing population of older people with disabilities."

Prior to the state recognizing the union in Illinois, turnover was huge, leaving large gaps in coverage for disabled adults. In the 10 years since unionization, however, wages have nearly doubled, from $7 to $13 an hour; training and supervision has increased, as well as standardization of qualifications, and workers now have health insurance.

It's no surprise then that retention has greatly increased. What may surprise many is that this arrangement is cheaper, with savings of $632 million, according to the state.

No one is forced to join the union, but non-union members — and there are three in this case — do have to pay the costs of negotiating and administering the contract. Under long-established labor law, when a majority of workers approve a union, those who do not join cannot be forced to pay for political activities of the union. But if the union is accepted by the state, as it was in Illinois, non-members still have to pay their fair share of the expenses of negotiating a contract. That's to prevent them from free-riding on the dues of members.

For some workers, however, any fee is too much.

"They just don't want to deal with this organization whatsoever," says their lawyer, William Messenger of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

Or, as Pam Harris, who cares for her son at home, puts it: "I object to my home being a union workplace."

Harris, however, is part of a separate and much smaller group of workers, most of whom care for family members at home, who voted down union representation. So her only claim in this case is that she fears there will be another vote someday.

Those who care for the bulk of the disabled are quite different. Not only did they approve union representation, most care for people who are not relatives.

Those opposing any fair-share fee have several claims. First, they say the state is not their employer, because under this program, the individual patients, known as customers, hire and fire their own aides. The state replies that the program was designed that way because these workers would be in people's private homes. But the aides are trained and supervised by the state, equipped with supplies by the state and paid twice a month by the state, and the state can fire them.

The second claim by the objectors is their view of the union as little more than a lobbying group. "Wages paid to government employees should be deemed a matter of public concern," Messenger says.

Does that mean public employees simply can't have a union because they are dealing with the government, and the government, per se, involves political issues? "Yes, to a large degree. Yes," Messenger says.

In other words, Messenger views bargaining for wages and health care as a political act. "I reject the notion that the [Service Employees International Union] somehow got higher reimbursement rates for them," he says. "Illinois could raise the reimbursement rates unilaterally."

"[There are only] three people who are complaining here," counters lawyer Paul Smith, who will argue on behalf of the state and the union in the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

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If you've ever shopped at Whole Foods, you've probably noticed that some of the foods it sells claim all kinds of health and environmental virtues. From its lengthy list of unacceptable ingredients for food to its strict rules for how seafood is caught and meat is raised, the company sets a pretty high bar for what is permitted on its coveted shelves.

Now, Whole Foods is dictating what kind of fertilizer the farmers that grow its produce can use. Specifically, the company recently confirmed that the produce rating system it's launching in September will prohibit produce farmed using sludge.

Sludge? This doesn't exactly sound like something you'd want near your food. Also known as biosolids, it's a type of fertilizer made from treated municipal waste and derived, in part, from poop. And though many farmers gladly accept sludge to enrich their soil, it's a product with a pretty big PR problem.

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The Canadian company that is the main equipment and technology suppliers for bike-sharing systems across the U.S. has filed for bankruptcy.

Public Bike System Co., (PBSC) which owns the widely used BIXI bike-sharing system, announced the bankruptcy Monday, citing almost $50 million in debt, as first reported by the Montreal Gazette. Its bikes and technology are used in 16 areas around the world, including major cities such as Chicago, New York, London, Montreal, and Washington, D.C.

After the bankruptcy was announced, Alta, a company that operates several BIXI bike-share systems in the U.S., said in a statement that its customers won't have their service interrupted. Alta says it plans to expand current systems and launch new ones this year.

PBSC's bankruptcy doesn't jeopardize bike-sharing, says Elly Blue, author of Bikenomics, a book analyzing the economics of cycling.

"I don't see this as being a very big bump in the road for bike share," Blue says. "I just see this as a chance for cities to learn — we can't run our transportation systems like a business, it doesn't really work that way because then we run the risk of not serving the people that need to be served."

PBSC attributes the bankruptcy partly to cities that have not paid it, including around $5.1 million from New York and Chicago. It is also in a lawsuit with the company that makes its bike-share analysis software.

The bankruptcy doesn't surprise John Pucher, who studies bicycling as a professor of urban planning at Rutgers University and who recently published a book about the cycling boom in cities.

"Looking at the operating data of the cost and revenues of the [bike-sharing] systems that I've seen, they vary from one system to another, but I'm just not convinced overall that it's a profitable venture," Pucher says. "It's not a big money maker the way they've set it up."

He points out that although some systems have come close to breaking even, whatever money the bike-sharing systems get from customers will not cover the cost of installing the system and getting bikes in the first place.

The fees can almost cover the operating cost — the money needed to repair bikes, move them around to meet demand and hire staff — but the systems need sponsors. Citibank paid for the system in New York City, the advertising company JCDecaux paid for the system in Paris, and City of Minneapolis provided start-up funding to the system there.

But Pucher says this doesn't mean the bike-share system doesn't work. In fact, it's booming.

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President Obama plans to meet this spring with Pope Francis.

On Tuesday, a White House spokesman announced the president will visit the Vatican as part of European trip in March. The president is said to be looking forward to talking with the pope about their "shared commitment to fighting poverty" and income inequality.

The meeting will be the two men's first face-to-face encounter, but Obama has carefully followed the pope's progress since Francis took charge of the Catholic Church ten months ago. As Obama told MSNBC in an interview last month, he likes what he's seen.

"I think Pope Francis is showing himself to be just an extraordinary thoughtful and soulful messenger of peace and justice," Obama said.

The president is particularly taken with the way this pope has stressed economic fairness, passing up many of the luxurious trappings of his own office while reaching out to the poor. Obama quoted the pope during a speech last month on income inequality.

"How could it be," he wrote, "that it's not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

John Green, an expert on politics and religion at the University of Akron, says Obama is likely to be more simpatico with Francis than he was with Pope Benedict, whom Obama met with in 2009.

"This president and this pope seem to be very much on the same page when it comes to elevating that issue to the top of the agenda," Green says.

The Catholic Church still has serious differences with Obama on issues such as abortion and the administration's controversial requirement that most health insurance policies include free birth control. Green says while those doctrinal differences haven't gone away under Pope Francis, they have taken a back seat.

"This pope has chosen to de-emphasize, at least here early in his papacy, the emphasis on the social issues and to focus more on economic issues," he says.

Obama has also promised to make shared economic growth his number one focus during his last three years in office.

Of course, it's possible Pope Francis will use their March meeting to confront the president on issues where they disagree, much as Pope John Paul did with President Bush over the Iraq war.

Whatever the two men discuss, Green says, it's unlikely to sway many voters back home, where American Catholics rarely take political marching orders from the pope. Still, for a president trying to add some symbolic shine to his own tarnished agenda, Green says visiting a popular pope is a pretty good place to start.

American kids have a problem with obesity, according to the most recent studies. In fact, the closest thing we have to good news about childhood obesity is that kids are not gaining weight as rapidly as they were some years ago.

Researchers may have identified one surprising new factor in why kids are overeating.

Compared with kids who use cash in school cafeterias, kids who use debit cards seem to make more unhealthful eating choices, finds Brian Wansink, a behavioral economist at Cornell University.

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President Lyndon B. Johnson went to eastern Kentucky in 1964 to promote his War on Poverty. But when he did, he opened a wound that remains raw today. People in the region say they're tired of always being depicted as poor, so when NPR's Pam Fessler went to Appalachia to report on how the War on Poverty is going, she was warned that people would be reluctant to talk. Instead, she got an earful.

Lee Mueller has lived in Martin County, Ky., for much of his life, and he covered President Johnson's visit there as a young reporter. He says every few years since, more reporters have arrived.

"We became kind of the poster child for the war on poverty, and any time somebody wanted to do a story about poor people, we were the first stop," Mueller says.

That's meant some unwelcome attention over the years. News reports of kids struggling to survive among jobless, drug-addicted adults. Trailer homes, surrounded by trash.

Now here I was, another in a long line of unwelcome journalists. Michelle Harless, a high school guidance counselor, had one request when I interviewed her.

"I just ask when you portray us, please don't portray us as ignorant hill folk, I guess," Harless said. "Because we are educated. We're poor, but we're educated, and everyone's pretty proud. It's not a desolate place where no hope can be found."

And indeed the county has lots going for it: well-paved roads, cheerful schools, beautiful mountains — albeit some have been strip-mined. And yes, there are trailers surrounded by trash, but also tidy suburban homes.

Even so, more than a third of the residents here are poor.

But poverty is also in the eye of the beholder. For some, it's just the way life is, like for Normie Slone, who's 79 years old. She spends her days caring for her two severely disabled adult children: Sissy, 58, who lies on a recliner in the family's cramped living room, chewing on a rubber toy; and Bobby, 55, who sits in a wheelchair nearby.

She says he can't get up and do anything on his own. Like lots of poor people, Slone has strung together her own safety net, with some help from the government, but also from charities, family and friends. She says at least life is better than it used to be.

"We're not starving," she says, laughing. "We're not starving to death."

Many people here say they're rich in things that aren't included in any official measure of poverty. Things like family and faith. So they're understandably a bit bitter about how they're often seen from the outside.

Owen Wright of the Christian Appalachian Project, one of the non-profits that helps Slone, says that outside perception can hurt the self-esteem of the people who live in Appalachia.

"We're probably one of the last few groups that it's still politically correct to make fun of," Wright says. "It's still OK to tell, you know, hillbilly, redneck jokes."

"Once that's been drilled into them for so long, it's easy for them to start believing that themselves," he says.

It only holds them back. Mueller says it wasn't always like that, especially before President Johnson came, with the national media in tow.

"We knew the region was poor, but there wasn't a stigma to it — to us," he says. In part, he says, that's because there weren't any rich people around to show them otherwise. People didn't think of themselves as poor.

"And we were surprised when we went someplace and found out that other people thought we were," Mueller adds.

But that was a long time ago. Today, the stigma is very real and for some people, almost as bad as the poverty itself.

In 1895, legislators in New York state decided to improve working conditions in what at the time could be a deadly profession: baking bread.

"Bakeries are actually extremely dangerous places to work," says Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis. "Because flour is such a fine particulate, if it gets to hang in the air it can catch fire and the whole room can go up in a sheet of flame."

New York passed a law called the Bakeshop Act. It didn't set a minimum wage — the minimum wage didn't exist yet in the U.S. — but it limited working hours and required that bakeries be kept clean.

The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. Bakers and their employers had the right to make any agreements they wanted about work hours, the court found. The Bakeshop Act, according to the court, interfered with individuals' right to enter into a contract.

The ruling suggested there was no way the Supreme Court of the time would allow anything like a minimum wage.

Several decades later, Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. To fight the Depression, he wanted to put money in people's pockets. "If all employers will work together to shorten hours and raise wages, we can put people back to work," he said.

Roosevelt wanted businesses to do this voluntarily. To that end, the administration created the National Industrial Recovery Act, which Congress passed in 1933.

Businesses that agreed to shorten hours and raise wages could hang special signs in their windows that showed a blue eagle logo and the words "doing our part."

Perhaps more powerful than the sign were the perks that went along with agreeing to offer higher wages: Participating businesses were allowed to form cartels and set prices. (At the time, the country was suffering from deflation, with prices and wages plunging.)

But the blue eagle was no match for nine men in robes: The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law.

After Roosevelt was re-elected by a landslide in 1936, he tried to pack the court — to pass a law that would let him appoint additional justices. That effort failed.

But one of the court justices switched sides, and in 1937 the court upheld the right of Washington state to have a minimum wage.

The next year, FDR pushed through Congress the Fair Labor Standards Act, which contained a kind of minimal minimum wage.

The act, "applying to products in interstate, ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over the hours of labor," Roosevelt said at the time.

Rauchway says it was more of a political victory than an intellectual one. And the nation is still divided over it today.

Just 1 percent of the world's population controls nearly half of the planet's wealth, according to a new study published by Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.

The study says this tiny slice of humanity controls $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion people.

Other key findings in the report:

— The world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 50 percent of humanity.

— 70 percent of the world's people live in a country where income inequality has increased in the past three decades.

— In the U.S., where the gap between rich and poor has grown at a faster rate than any other developed country, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-recession growth (since 2009), while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.

"Oxfam is concerned that, left unchecked, the effects are potentially immutable, and will lead to 'opportunity capture' — in which the lowest tax rates, the best education, and the best healthcare are claimed by the children of the rich," the relief agency writes. "This creates dynamic and mutually reinforcing cycles of advantage that are transmitted across generations."

In other words, Oxfam says that if trends continue, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

"[People] are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.

The World Economic Forum is scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, beginning Jan. 22.

The Oxfam report largely mirrors findings of several other studies in recent years that have documented growing income inequality in the U.S. and across the globe.

In September, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by 31.4 percent over the period 2009 to 2012, while the other 99 percent experienced just 0.4 percent growth. Last month, the Pew Research Center published a study that found income inequality in the U.S. was at its highest since 1928, the year before the start of the Great Depression.

The government of Syrian President Bashar Assad conducted "systematic torture and killing" of those detained in the country's bloody civil war. That's according to a report by three former war crimes prosecutors who examined thousands of photographs of dead prisoners that they say were smuggled out by a Syrian defector. The revelation comes a day before Syrian peace talks are set to begin in Switzerland.

The report, first obtained by CNN and The Guardian, says the bodies in the photographs "showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing." (A warning to readers: The photographs in the report are of a graphic nature).

The defector, codenamed "Caesar," who reportedly smuggled the pictures out of Syria also photographed the bodies when he worked for the Syrian military police, the report says. It adds:

"Having carefully interviewed 'Caesar' and evaluated his evidence in light of the exhibits available to it, the inquiry team found him, for its part, to be a truthful and credible witness. He revealed no signs of being 'sensational'; nor did he seem partisan. Although he was a supporter of those who opposed the present regime, the inquiry team is satisfied that he gave an honest account of his experiences.

"If he wished to exaggerate his evidence it would have been very easy for him to say that he had actually witnessed executions. In fact, he made it quite plain that he never witnessed a single execution. There were many other reasons which drove the inquiry team to its conclusion that his evidence was reliable and could safely be acted upon in any subsequent judicial proceedings."

Travelers at Wellington Airport in New Zealand may have felt a bit like Bilbo Baggins on a quest through Middle Earth when a giant eagle descended from the ceiling during a strong 6.3-magnitude quake that shook North Island on Monday.

The eagle, a sculpture actually, was one of two giant birds used to promote The Hobbit films, which were shot in New Zealand. The bird was shaken off its perch in the terminal and crashed to the floor.

No one was seriously hurt at the airport or anywhere else on the island, where damage from the earthquake was reportedly minimal.

Even so, the temblor was strong enough to shake a lot of people up -– and some of it was caught on video. The New Zealand Herald has a couple of clips, the first of a young girl who appears to be filming herself when the earthquake starts (warning: there's some mild profanity), and another of a greyhound dog race that goes on despite the intense shaking.

Just 1 percent of the world's population controls nearly half of the planet's wealth, according to a new study published by Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.

The study says this tiny slice of humanity controls $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion people.

Other key findings in the report:

— The world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 50 percent of humanity.

— 70 percent of the world's people live in a country where income inequality has increased in the past three decades.

— In the U.S., where the gap between rich and poor has grown at a faster rate than any other developed country, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-recession growth (since 2009), while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.

"Oxfam is concerned that, left unchecked, the effects are potentially immutable, and will lead to 'opportunity capture' — in which the lowest tax rates, the best education, and the best healthcare are claimed by the children of the rich," the relief agency writes. "This creates dynamic and mutually reinforcing cycles of advantage that are transmitted across generations."

In other words, Oxfam says that if trends continue, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

"[People] are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.

The World Economic Forum is scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, beginning Jan. 22.

The Oxfam report largely mirrors findings of several other studies in recent years that have documented growing income inequality in the U.S. and across the globe.

In September, a University of California, Berkeley, study found that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by 31.4 percent over the period 2009-2012, while the other 99 percent experienced just 0.4 percent growth. Last month, the Pew Research Center published a study that found income inequality in the U.S. was at its highest since 1928, the year before the start of the Great Depression.

Just 1 percent of the world's population controls nearly half of the planet's wealth, according to a new study published by Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.

The study says this tiny slice of humanity controls $110 trillion, or 65 times the total wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion people.

Other key findings in the report:

— The world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 50 percent of humanity.

— 70 percent of the world's people live in a country where income inequality has increased in the past three decades.

— In the U.S., where the gap between rich and poor has grown at a faster rate than any other developed country, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-recession growth (since 2009), while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.

"Oxfam is concerned that, left unchecked, the effects are potentially immutable, and will lead to 'opportunity capture' — in which the lowest tax rates, the best education, and the best healthcare are claimed by the children of the rich," the relief agency writes. "This creates dynamic and mutually reinforcing cycles of advantage that are transmitted across generations."

In other words, Oxfam says that if trends continue, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

"[People] are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.

The World Economic Forum is scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, beginning Jan. 22.

The Oxfam report largely mirrors findings of several other studies in recent years that have documented growing income inequality in the U.S. and across the globe.

In September, a University of California, Berkeley, study found that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by 31.4 percent over the period 2009-2012, while the other 99 percent experienced just 0.4 percent growth. Last month, the Pew Research Center published a study that found income inequality in the U.S. was at its highest since 1928, the year before the start of the Great Depression.