What's new

Google. Twitter. Facebook. Back before they got big, companies like these were just startup ideas, born in dorm rooms and run out of garages. Then came the venture capitalists: rich, older men ready to fund the brilliant ideas of younger, creative men.

But what if you are a woman with a startup idea? A new study says you might not do so well. It's been well-documented that businesses started by women receive very little venture capital money.

"Women-led businesses probably only receive between 5 and 10 percent of all the venture capital that's allocated to startups in their very earliest in their growth phases," says Fiona Murray, who researches business innovation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Murray partnered up with colleagues at Harvard Business School to find out why the funding gap existed.

There were a couple hypotheses: Perhaps women are just not asking for funding, or perhaps women's business ideas don't have as much growth potential. Or maybe venture capitalists are subconsciously biased against women. The study was designed to test that third hypothesis, that women get less funding because society thinks they are worse investments.

The study used real startup pitches from real companies. Each pitch was presented in four ways to observe the effects of gender and attractiveness. It would be given in a male voice, with a photo of an attractive and less attractive person of that sex; and it was also presented in a female voice, with pictures of two women of different levels of attractiveness.

All Tech Considered

Gender Disparities In Tech Flare Up Again: A Reading Guide

Editor's note: To hear our full interview with Jimmy Carter, tune into Weekend Edition on Sunday, March 23.

President Jimmy Carter has written more than two dozen books over the course of his career, about everything from the art of aging to how to achieve peace in the Middle East. All his writing is anchored by a deep-seated belief in the equality of all people.

In his new book, A Call To Action, Carter tackles a fundamental question of equality head-on: the subjugation of women in cultures around the world. Carter joins NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about the state of human trafficking and whether religion can be a conduit for lasting change around gender.

Republicans have a decent shot at taking control of the Senate in November, so President Obama could have as little as nine months left to shape the judiciary he will leave behind.

Senate Democrats positioned themselves to help with that endeavor when they eliminated the filibuster for most judicial nominees last November. But Republicans are still finding ways to slow things down.

When Senate Republicans lost their ability to filibuster judicial nominees, many claimed the federal bench would change forever. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted the White House would start naming ideological, left-leaning candidates to these lifetime appointments, just because it could.

"The political nature of who you pick changes because you're not going to have to accommodate anybody on the other side, so I think you'll see over time, the flavor of the judiciary change," Graham said.

But in the four months since, observers say that the Republican nightmare isn't exactly panning out. In fact, seven nominees have gotten confirmed this year without a single "no" vote from a Republican.

"Well, that tells you something. It tells you that, if they're getting confirmed by those numbers, these are not what I would describe as problematic nominations," said Michael Gerhardt, who teaches constitutional law at the University of North Carolina.

He says if you look at the nominees coming down the pipeline, you'll notice a trend: mostly moderate, centrist picks.

"Typically, President Obama's nominees are people that have what we'll call mixed records. And I don't mean anything critical by that — mixed by the sense that they aren't being ideological. They're deciding cases based on the facts, and they therefore tend to go one way or the other depending on those facts," he said.

Gerhardt says one reason the president may not be pushing overtly ideological candidates is that he is facing reality. Even without the filibuster, Republicans can still gum things up through what's called the blue slip system — senators can block judicial nominees from their home states. In fact, in a compromise with Georgia's two Republican senators, the White House is pushing a district court nominee many Democrats are slamming as too conservative.

Russ Wheeler of the Brookings Institution says there's another reason the president hasn't been making conspicuous ideological choices.

"I think he's less convinced than other people are that the route to social change lies principally through the judiciary — that instead, lasting social change must rely on legislative change," Wheeler said.

It's still early — and the White House may end up naming less moderate candidates in the months to come. But in the meantime, the profile of the judiciary has already changed under Obama. When he took office, 60 percent of the active judges on the appeals courts were Republican appointees. Now, that balance is 48 percent Republican and 52 percent Democratic. And Wheeler says if you look at the diversity of the bench, there's no question — Obama is shattering records.

"If present trends continue, he will have appointed more African-Americans than any other president, more Hispanics than any other president, more women than any other president and many more Asian-Americans," he said.

Add to that professional diversity. Nan Aron of Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, says Obama is putting different kinds of lawyers on the federal bench.

"I'm pleased to see that he's looking to put on the bench more public defenders, criminal justice lawyers, civil rights lawyers, public interest lawyers," Aron said.

But the clock is ticking down. There are currently 86 judicial vacancies. Even if Democrats retain control of the Senate, Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond Law School says there's no way Obama has the time to fill all the slots.

"You have to have the recommendations from the senators. It takes three months to go through the White House and then you have to go to committee, have a hearing, have a committee vote, and a floor vote," Tobias said.

And Senate Republicans say they have no intention of speeding things up.

Leaders of high-tech companies, including Google and Facebook, descended on the White House Friday for a meeting with President Obama on the subject of privacy. The meeting itself was private. But aides say Obama wanted to hear from the CEOs about their concerns with the government's high-tech surveillance.

High-tech CEOs are not the obvious messengers to be delivering a privacy lecture to the government. After all, they make their money by scanning customers' emails and tracking their movements, all with the goal of serving up more targeted ads. Just a few years ago, Google's Eric Schmidt told an interviewer, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

But Marc Rotenberg, who directs the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the titans of Silicon Valley have suddenly gotten religion.

"The Internet leaders who might have said a few years ago that privacy is a thing of the past, today they're at the White House telling the president we need to find a way to protect privacy. And that's a remarkable turn of events," he said.

What changed, of course, is the revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of just how widespread the government's snooping has been, often with the help, knowingly or unknowingly, of those same high-tech companies.

"Mr. Snowden has done more to raise the level of public awareness about privacy issues than probably anyone else I can think of," Rotenberg said.

And that has the potential to hurt the companies' bottom lines. Since the Snowden leaks began last summer, public opinion towards government surveillance has steadily soured. Fifty-three percent of Americans now disapprove of the NSA's spying. Pollster Carroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center says this is the rare issue that unites Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats.

"It's really an area on which you do find common ground between conservatives and liberals. Consistently across these polls, liberals and conservatives are expressing the most concern about it whereas people in the middle of the electorate are somewhat less concerned," he said.

Disapproval of government surveillance is strongest among people under the age of 30. While this generation shows little reluctance to document their every movement on electronic devices, Doherty says they don't like the government looking over their shoulder.

"They are concerned about privacy. They really are. And this issue has clicked a bit with young people," he said.

The White House meeting comes one week before the administration has to make some decisions about how to reform its collection of bulk telephone data.

President Obama has promised to make some adjustments — particularly to the program under which the NSA has been stockpiling telephone records. The legal authorization for that program expires next week and Obama wants to replace it with something different, though he hasn't said what. Obama insists that government workers who carry out survillance do take privacy concerns seriously.

"They have kids on Facebook and Instagram, and they know, more than most of us, the vulnerabilities to privacy that exist in a world where transactions are recorded, and emails and text and messages are stored, and even our movements can increasingly be tracked through the GPS on our phones," he said.

Privacy advocate Rotenberg says Internet companies could reduce the temptation for government spying if they simply stopped storing years' worth of personal data about their customers.

So far though, the companies haven't been willing to take that step.

Republicans have a decent shot at taking control of the Senate in November, so President Obama could have as little as nine months left to shape the judiciary he will leave behind.

Senate Democrats positioned themselves to help with that endeavor when they eliminated the filibuster for most judicial nominees last November. But Republicans are still finding ways to slow things down.

When Senate Republicans lost their ability to filibuster judicial nominees, many claimed the federal bench would change forever. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted the White House would start naming ideological, left-leaning candidates to these lifetime appointments, just because it could.

"The political nature of who you pick changes because you're not going to have to accommodate anybody on the other side, so I think you'll see over time, the flavor of the judiciary change," Graham said.

But in the four months since, observers say that the Republican nightmare isn't exactly panning out. In fact, seven nominees have gotten confirmed this year without a single no vote from a Republican.

"Well that tells you something. It tells you that, if they're getting confirmed by those numbers, these are not what I would describe as problematic nominations," said Michael Gerhardt, who teaches constitutional law at the University of North Carolina.

He says if you look at the nominees coming down the pipeline, you'll notice a trend: mostly moderate, centrist picks.

"Typically, President Obama's nominees are people that have what we'll call mixed records. And I don't mean anything critical by that – mixed by the sense that, they aren't being ideological. They're deciding cases based on the facts, and they therefore tend to go one way or the other depending on those facts," he said.

Gerhardt says one reason the President may not be pushing overtly ideological candidates is because he's facing reality. Even without the filibuster, Republicans can still gum things up through what's called the blue slip system – senators can block judicial nominees from their home states. In fact, in a compromise with Georgia's two Republican senators, the White House is pushing a district court nominee many Democrats are slamming as too conservative.

Russ Wheeler of the Brookings Institution says there's another reason the president hasn't been making conspicuous ideological choices.

"I think he's less convinced than other people are that the route to social change lies principally through the judiciary – that instead, lasting social change must rely on legislative change," Wheeler said.

It's still early — and the White House may end up naming less moderate candidates in the months to come. But in the meantime, the profile of the judiciary has already changed under Obama. When he took office, 60 percent of the active judges on the appeals courts were Republican appointees. Now, that balance is 48 percent Republican and 52 percent Democratic. And Wheeler says if you look at the diversity of the bench, there's no question — Obama is shattering records.

"If present trends continue, he will have appointed more African-Americans than any other president, more Hispanics than any other president, more women than any other president and many more Asian-Americans," he said.

And add to that, professional diversity. Nan Aron of Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, says Obama is putting different kinds of lawyers on the federal bench.

"I'm pleased to see that he's looking to put on the bench more public defenders, criminal justice lawyers, civil rights lawyers, public interest lawyers," Aron said.

But the clock is ticking down. There are currently 86 judicial vacancies. Even if Democrats retain control of the Senate, Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond Law School says there's no way Obama has the time to fill all the slots.

"You have to have the recommendations from the senators. It takes three months to go through the White House and then you have to go to committee, have a hearing, have a committee vote, and a floor vote," Tobias said.

And Senate Republicans say they have no intention of speeding things up.

Divergent

Director: Neil Burger

Genre: Action, drama, sci-fi

Running time: 139 minutes

Rated PG-13; brutal but largely bloodless violence

With Shailene Woodley, Theo James and Kate Winslet.

Say this to yourself: "I'd like a grande skim Oprah."

Let it roll off your tongue. Let it echo in your head. Let it burn itself into your brain. Really feel it.

On Wednesday, Starbucks announced that, in partnership with Oprah Winfrey, it had developed Oprah Chai Tea, which will be available either as regular tea or as a chai latte. When will it be here? "In time for Mother's Day."

Now me, I like a chai latte. I order them regularly. I even make chai at home — it's why I own a big bag of fennel seeds. (The secret is a lot of black peppercorns, lightly smushed, but that's a personal thing.)

But I am trying to imagine a universe in which I would walk into Starbucks, go up to the counter, and say, "Yes, I'd like a grande skim Oprah." I can't imagine it. Cannot. I cannot picture myself not laughing. I cannot picture the person at the counter yelling, "grande skim Oprah," and the barista confirming "grande skim Oprah," and myself paying for it, and waiting around until the barista slides it across the counter and says, "Grande skim Oprah for Linda," without also imagining that all of us are laughing hysterically and now I can never go back to that Starbucks for fear that they'll say, "Hey, want another OPRAH?"

At the very least, I'd have to use a fake name.

It's not personal to Oprah. I would feel equally stupid asking for a venti Clooney, or a tall Ryan Gosling. Ordering at Starbucks is already not the best thing for your dignity, as it has a way of making you feel like an arbitrary dictator yelling out instructions for your own amusement. "An extra shot! Lightly cooled! Half-caf! SUSPEND WITHIN IT ONE PEPPER FLAKE!"

That's not to even mention that tea has its own ordering issues, given the dangers of combining the name of a person with the word "bag" or "bags."

I'm envisioning a sort of shadow economy where, if you were actually comfortable ordering the Oprah, you could hang around outside Starbucks until some dude came up to you and said, "Pssst. I need you to do something for me. You can keep the change."

Because the real danger is: What if the Oprah is delicious? What if the Oprah is so good that chai drinkers want to convert? If the Oprah chai is extra-wonderful, that will instantly displace "convincing the world he doesn't exist" as the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, because faced with a choice between depriving myself of a delicious chai latte and walking into a store and ordering an Oprah, I have no idea what I would do.

Ukraine's plans to withdraw its troops from Crimea, which as we reported were announced Wednesday, have apparently been complicated by the issue of whether they will be allowed to take their weapons and other equipment with them.

NPR's Gregory Warner reports from the Crimean capital of Simferopol that the 25,000 or so Ukrainian troops in the region had not been given orders to leave by their commanders as of midafternoon local time on Thursday. Ukrainian authorities want their troops to bring their weapons, vehicles and other equipment with them. But the Crimean local defense forces and Russian commanders on the ground are reportedly raising objections.

Meanwhile, there's word from The Moscow Times that "a Ukrainian officer, detained after pro-Russian forces stormed a naval base in Crimea, was released Thursday after Russia asked the regional authorities to let him go."

Ukraine, as Bloomberg News reports, "plans to reinforce its eastern border with Russia and withdraw troops from Crimea, ceding control of the Black Sea peninsula as tensions remained high over Russian moves to annex the breakaway region."

As the crisis in Ukraine has developed over recent weeks, we've tracked developments. Here's a recap:

Crimea has been the focus of attention as the ripple effects of the protests that led to last month's ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych have spread.

Summing up the history and importance of Crimea to Russia and Ukraine isn't possible in just a few sentences, of course. The Parallels blog, though, has published several posts that contain considerable context:

— Crimea: 3 Things To Know About Ukraine's Latest Hot Spot

— Crimea: A Gift To Ukraine Becomes A Political Flash Point

— Why Ukraine Is Such A Big Deal For Russia

Shortly after Yanukovych was deposed and fled Ukraine, Russia moved to take control of Crimea by sending thousands of troops there to secure strategic locations. Along with "local defense forces," those soldiers surrounded Ukrainian military facilities.

This week, after Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty to annex the region. The U.S. and European Union have objected, calling that action a violation of international law. Putin says he is supporting Crimeans' right to "self-determination."

We've recapped what set off months of protest in Kiev and ultimately led to Yanukovych's dismissal by his nation's parliament last month this way:

"The protests were sparked in part by the president's rejection of a pending trade treaty with the European Union and his embrace of more aid from Russia. Protesters were also drawn into the streets to demonstrate against government corruption."

It was after Yanukovych left Kiev and headed for the Russian border that troops moved to take control of strategic locations in Crimea.

The international drug trade goes in two directions: Narcotics go north and money goes south. All the drug profits made on the streets of U.S. cities like Chicago and Atlanta and Dallas are funneled down to ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border where they're smuggled back into Mexico. In 2012, one federal agency alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seized $411 million in cash hidden in vehicles, mostly heading south.

Once the bundles of U.S. banknotes are delivered to the cartel, the money flows in many directions. Growers, warehousers, smugglers, assassins and corrupt police and politicians must be paid. Mostly, the dollars have to be laundered. Dirty money has to somehow be injected into the legal economy.

The prosperous city of Culiacn, on Mexico's northern Pacific coast, is a good place to see how U.S. drug dollars are spent in Mexico. This is home to the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful and richest drug cartel in the world. Its leader, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was arrested last month after 13 years on the run, but few analysts in Mexico believe his capture will cripple the mafia he created.

Dollars Into Pesos

The U.S. State Department reported in 2013 that Mexican drug mafias send to Mexico between $19 and $29 billion a year from proceeds of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines sold in the United States.

Explore This Series

Borderland: Dispatches From The U.S.-Mexico Boundary

Russian officials were quick to mock the limited economic sanctions on Moscow announced by the U.S. and Europe this week. In response to Russia's annexation of Crimea, Western leaders have frozen the assets of a handful of government officials and also barred them from getting visas to travel to the West.

"So what if I can't get a visa to the United States?" one Russian official said. "I didn't want to go there anyway." And as for having their assets frozen, Moscow has already barred government officials from having money invested overseas, says William Pomerantz of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Will Economic Sanctions Impact Russia?

Russian officials were quick to mock the limited economic sanctions on Moscow announced by the U.S. and Europe this week. In response to Russia's annexation of Crimea, Western leaders have frozen the assets of a handful of government officials and also barred them from getting visas to travel to the West.

"So what if I can't get a visa to the United States?" one Russian official said. "I didn't want to go there anyway." And as for having their assets frozen, Moscow has already barred government officials from having money invested overseas, says William Pomerantz of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Will Economic Sanctions Impact Russia?

It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster: Villains bent on chaos set their sights on a food company — an easy target — with plans to lace its products with a chemical or pathogen. The hero finds out in time to save the day.

Sound far-fetched? Not according to U.S. regulators who have been pondering such scenarios.

Under new proposed rules from the Food and Drug Administration, food processors and manufacturers – both domestic and companies abroad that ship food to the U.S. – would need to take steps to mitigate a potential terrorist attack.

Few documented incidents of malicious food contamination exist, though, which raises the question: Is food terrorism fact or fiction?

In the wake of Sept. 11, the U.S. government spent years, and billions of dollars, fortifying various industries against possible terrorist attacks. And since then, the United States has seen its fair share of terrorist attacks, including the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

While the food system has remained relatively untouched, "we've certainly studied it since 9/11 to assess what the potential impacts might be," says Don Kraemer, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "And they can be catastrophic," he says.

The FDA rules focus on weak links in food processing and manufacturing in an attempt to ferret out where the vulnerabilities exist.

The rules mostly apply to facilities in charge of bulk storage or handling of liquids for human consumption – think dairy plants where milk is stored in big vats. Another area of concern? Facilities like large, industrial bakeries where lots of ingredients are mixed together.

"A lot of food processing manufacturers don't practice rigid biosecurity," says Peter Chalk, a terrorism analyst with the RAND Corporation, a policy think tank.

Many food companies fail to take even the most basic precaution, he says. Owners don't padlock warehouses or engage in sufficient surveillance. Or they hire a lot of transient workers without performing background checks.

"So actually, introducing a contaminant — salmonella, botulism, mercury — into the food chain would not be particularly difficult," Chalk says.

The weak links, though, haven't really been tested. The last big bioterror attack in the U.S. happened in 1984 in The Dalles, Ore. That's when members of a cult infected salad bars with salmonella; more than 700 people were sickened. Since then, the American food system has grappled more with unintentional outbreaks, like the listeria-laden cantaloupe that killed 33 people in 2011.

Would the FDA's proposed rules keep us safe? Chalk says the vulnerabilities go well beyond what's covered in the proposal.

Producers could be at risk as well, he says. It would be relatively easy to deal a devastating blow to the country's livestock industry with a virus in a vial. An act of agroterrorism like that keeps some food experts up at night.

If a terrorist wanted to deal a devastating economic blow to the U.S., all it would take is a calculated release of foot-and-mouth disease on the nation's livestock. Unintentional outbreaks in Europe and South America have haunted economies there, as trade is shut down and whole herds are culled to quarantine the disease.

The impact of a deliberate outbreak in the U.S. could be huge. One risk assessment from the Department of Homeland Security found that if a pathogen like foot-and-mouth disease were let loose among Great Plains ranchers, total damages could exceed $50 billion. Exports and trade could be cut off, and consumer demand would likely take a huge hit.

When U.S. troops raided an al-Qaida storehouse in Afghanistan in 2002, they found documents detailing ways to attack American agriculture in order to deal a blow to the U.S. economy. Still, no attack has materialized in the 12 years since.

"Agriculture is critical infrastructure in a country," says Keith Roehr, Colorado's state veterinarian. "How would we eradicate the disease? We don't know. ... We know there would be steps we would take. Do we know exactly what these would be? No, we don't."

Yet few livestock owners consider their operations targets of terrorism, Roehr says. And that mindset could leave them vulnerable.

Experts suspect that the bigger reason the U.S. has avoided a large-scale attack on food and farms is that an attack like that doesn't carry the same weight as a suicide bombing or mass shooting.

"It lacks a visible point for the media to latch onto, [except for] the possible images of burning cows," Chalk says. "Really, it doesn't have the same blood lust appeal of carrying out a suicide attack in a shopping mall."

Still, it's a risk that government regulators want the food industry to consider more seriously, in case what seems like a grisly fiction turns into reality.

A version of this post first appeared on the Harvest Public Media website.

A year-long review of the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner," which experienced problems such as fuel leaks and a battery fire, has concluded that the plane is safe.

The Federal Aviation Administration reported Wednesday that a review team believes "the aircraft was soundly designed, met its intended safety level, and that the manufacturer and the FAA had effective processes in place to identify and correct issues that emerged before and after certification."

Reuters recaps the jet's recent history and the reason it was given extra scrutiny:

"The review was initiated after a battery fire occurred aboard a 787 in January 2013 at Boston's Logan International Airport. The fire and another battery incident in Japan prompted regulators to ground the plane for 3 1/2 months last year. The plane has also suffered a series of mishaps with brakes, fuel lines, electrical panels, hydraulics, and other systems."

Gone are the days of waiting for angry letters.

Social media allows the NFL, NASCAR and other pro sports leagues to hear from fans in real time. And that feedback has become so important, leagues have built what are essentially social media command centers to monitor trends and engage directly with fans.

Sports

It's Winner-Take-All In NASCAR's New Chase

The Obama administration said 5 million Americans have now signed up for health insurance through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act, the president signature legislation.

As we reported, the Congressional Budget Office had projected 6 million Americans would sign up for health care by the end of March, the deadline for open enrollment. The pace for sign-ups has quickened, but The Los Angeles Times reports that may not be enough to get to the White House's original target of 7 million. The paper adds:

"If the pace continues, the Obama administration may come close to registering 6 million sign-ups in the first year that Americans are able to get guaranteed health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

"That would still fall short of the goal of 7 million that administration officials had hoped to reach before the botched rollout of the new law last fall.

"How many people have actually paid for the health insurance plans they have selected remains uncertain.

"Administration officials have not released data on payments. Unofficial estimates from insurance companies and some state-run marketplaces suggest that as many as 20% of consumers in some markets have yet to pay their premiums, although some of those may not yet have been billed."

If you think craft beer is seemingly everywhere these days, there's good reason. From bars and restaurants to grocery store aisles, the selection of locally made, often quirkily named brews has grown at an exponential rate – and it looks set to keep on growing.

Craft beer sales jumped 20 percent last year and now make up nearly 8 percent of all beer sales in America, according to new numbers from the Brewers Association, an industry trade group.

"With this stellar year, craft has now averaged 10.9 percent growth over the last decade," said Bart Watson, staff economist at the association. "Beer drinkers are excited about what small and independent brewers are offering, and that is evidenced by the rising production and sales of the craft segment."

And craft breweries are quickly multiplying, too: There were 2,768 of them operating in the United States last year, up from around 2,300 in 2012, according to the association. (A history of craft brewing on the group's site points out that there were only eight craft breweries in the U.S. in 1980 and 537 in 1994.)

i i

Many plans sold on the health insurance marketplaces offer a tradeoff: lower premiums in exchange for limited choices of doctors and hospitals. But consumers who opt for these plans with the idea that they'll go out of network when necessary may be taking a big financial risk.

The health law generally limits how much consumers can be required to pay out of pocket for medical care (not including premiums). In 2014, the limit for an individual plan is $6,350 and for a family plan, $12,700.

But those limits apply only to care provided by doctors and hospitals in a plan's approved network. There may be a separate out-of-pocket maximum for services provided out of the network in marketplace plans, or no cap at all, says Margaret Nowak, research director at Breakaway Policy Strategies, a research and consulting firm.

Shots - Health News

Can A Doctor Really Demand An Extra $75 Upfront?

If you want to get an earful about paying for college, listen to parents from states where tuition and fees have skyrocketed in the last five years. In Arizona, for example, parents have seen a 77 percent increase in costs. In Georgia, it's 75 percent, and in Washington state, 70 percent.

Even in Oklahoma, where tuition increases have been among the lowest in the nation, parents are dismayed. In Stillwater, Okla., Jeffery Corbett's daughter is attending community college. Corbett, a fundraiser for a nonprofit, says a high school diploma just won't get you very far. And he knows; he doesn't have a college degree.

"I think about it all the time, because I realize what it has limited me, by not having that piece of paper," he says.

Balancing College Dreams With The Reality Of Finances

One year ago, a frank Republican Party assessment of why it came up short in the 2012 presidential election included a stark recommendation.

Embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform, the post-mortem authors urged, or get used to a party whose appeal "will continue to shrink to its core constituents only."

That bold assertion was decidedly offstage Monday, as the party orchestrated a full-on media effort to mark advances it says it's made as a result of recommendations contained in the 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus pointed to successes over the past 12 months including improved data collection, new state-level staffers more involved in minority communities, and a re-jiggering of the presidential primary, debate and convention schedules — calendar changes designed to condense the season and not leave the eventual nominee so battered.

The party has already moved the start of its primary season to February, its convention to late June or early July, and is working to limit the number of candidate debates.

Glenn McCall, a committee member from South Carolina and one of five co-authors of the 2013 "autopsy," said that the party had heard the message that "we were not showing up."

McCall, who is African American, said that he has seen "solid progress, and comprehensive progress" in terms of party field workers going to "communities where we've never gone before."

Sally Bradshaw, a Florida committee member and a report co-author, said some of the progress the party has made on the digital and data front helped Republican candidate David Jolly win a Florida special election last week for a vacant congressional seat.

The victory over Democrat Alex Sink, Bradshaw said, was in part due to a new canvassing app developed the national committee that provided voter log lists and other data fed directly to the RNC.

But it was clear during an RNC-arranged media call that party leaders wanted to avoid an issue that has pitted electorally pragmatic GOP members against a right flank that has blocked immigration reform in the U.S. House — especially at a time when the Democratic Party is struggling for a mid-term issue, and faces losing control of the Senate this fall.

"We obviously recommended that Republicans support immigration reform," said Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi and one of the report co-authors. "We'll continue to encourage people along those lines."

A comprehensive immigration overall bill approved last summer by the Senate has stalled in the GOP-controlled House.

The recurring theme of the Monday's call was to focus on what's happening in the states, rather than on federal immigration legislation. "We're not dictating how policy, how that question is handled on the Hill," said McCall.

"We recommended it and see it as something of importance to the party," he said, but McCall noted it's out of the RNC's purview to pursue action on the Hill.

Priebus ordered the so-called autopsy report after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney attracted only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and young voters and women helped propel President Obama to a second term.

The resulting assessment was seen by some as a clear-eyed examination of a party at risk of being overrun by demographic and generational changes. But many Tea Party and social conservatives were infuriated by what they, at the time, characterized as an effort by the GOP establishment to control the issues and dialogue.

Those criticisms remain, particularly around legislation that would overhaul the nation's immigration system, including establishing a path to citizenship – anathema to the more conservative wing of the party.

"There are many ways to do it," said Bradshaw. The RNC, she said, is not trying to "proscribe or limit" ways to do it.

She and others pointed to immigration-related efforts in states such as Florida where Republican Gov. Rick Scott, in a tough re-election year, has proposed allowing "qualified Florida students," regardless of their immigration status, to pay in-state college tuition rates.

The National Conference of State Legislatures in its 2013 immigration report noted a spike of the number immigration-related legislation introduced by states to 253, from 111 in 2012. Many bills sought to extend in-state tuition to children brought to the U.S. by undocumented parents, and to issue drivers licenses to undocumented workers.

Court challenges of hard line immigration enforcement legislation of the type Arizona passed in 2010, the NCSL reported, have discouraged states from passing such bills, which "largely disappeared" in 2013.

Still, a year after the intra-party assessment, the GOP has focused its immediate strategy not on Hispanics and immigration, but on President Obama, and his health care legislation. (Obama, himself under fire from Hispanic leaders for his administration's aggressive deportation policies, last week sought to placate critics and announced a review of immigration enforcement policies.)

Monday's press call came a day after Priebus referred to the health care law as "complete poison," and as the party launched what it characterized as a six-figure cable and digital ad buy targeting minorities and young voters in 14 states with contested 2014 Senate races.

Attorneys general from 28 states are urging drugstores and large retailers to stop selling tobacco products. In letters sent to Kroger, Wal-Mart, and other store chains, the officials ask companies to follow the example of pharmacy chain CVS, which announced last month that it's ending tobacco sales.

The bipartisan group of officials sent signed letters to leaders of five of the country's biggest retailers whose stores include pharmacies: Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Safeway, and Kroger. They warned that selling tobacco in the stores "normalizes" the products, potentially undermining anti-smoking campaigns.

NPR's Joel Rose reports for our Newscast unit:.

"The letters argue that it is contradictory for pharmacies and drugstores that offer health care services to also sell 'dangerous and devastating tobacco products.'
"New York's Eric Schneiderman and Ohio's Mike DeWine led the bipartisan group, which also includes attorneys general from Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois.
"The letters do not explicitly mention the possibility of legal action if stores decline to ban tobacco products. They simply urge the companies to follow the lead of drugstore chain CVS, which is voluntarily removing tobacco from its stores."

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

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the 94-year-old poet and founder of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, sold his travel journals to the W.W. Norton imprint Liveright. Ferlinghetti, best known for his collection A Coney Island of the Mind, was associated with the Beat movement in San Francisco and put on trial for obscenity after publishing Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl. He was acquitted. The travel journals, titled Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013), are expected to be published in September 2015.

Walter Dean Myers, the author of the fantastic YA novel Monster, reacts to a study that found that only 93 of the 3,200 children's books published in 2013 were about black people. He writes in a New York Times op-ed, "Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? ... Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?" The study, an annual look at children's books by and about people of color, was conducted by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

J.K. Rowling has published the "History of the Quidditch World Cup" on Pottermore, her website dedicated to the world of Harry Potter [registration required ]. It traces the history of the airborne sport from its founding in the Middle Ages to modern times. She writes, "The rulebook concerning both on- and off-pitch magic is alleged to stretch to nineteen volumes and to include such rules as 'no dragon is to be introduced into the stadium for any purpose including, but not limited to, team mascot, coach or cup warmer' and 'modification of any part of the referee's body, whether or not he or she has requested such modification, will lead to a lifetime ban from the tournament and possibly imprisonment."

Nick Richardson considers the strange poetry of "Lorem Ipsum," the Latin-ish word jumble used as a placeholding text: "Bits of it have surprising power: the desperate insistence on loving and pursuing sorrow, for instance, that is cheated out of its justification — an incomplete object that has been either fished for, or wished for."

Nigella Lawson on why she became a cookbook writer: "I loved food, and felt strongly that cooking (rather like child-rearing, with which I was also much taken up at the time) should not be the preserve of the expert, but restored to its place in the home. I am not a chef, nor even a trained cook, but as I feel I must remind people all too often: if you needed a professional qualification to cook, human beings would have fallen out of the evolutionary loop a long time ago."

Malaysian officials are asking more than a dozen nations to help find the jetliner that went missing last weekend. The search area for the Boeing 777 was widely expanded Saturday; investigators are now looking for potential motives among the plane's crew and passengers to disrupt the flight.

The new call for help comes after ships and planes spent days looking for signs of the plane in the South China Sea. New radar and satellite data has led investigators to conclude the plane took a westerly turn from that area, likely after someone intentionally disabled its transponders and other equipment.

The new data shows that the plane flew for more than six and a half hours after it ceased communicating with air traffic control.

"The search was already a highly complex, multinational effort. It has now become even more difficult," Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Sunday, discussing the status of the search for the Malaysia Airlines flight that had been scheduled to travel from Kuala Lampur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Officials now believe "the plane may have either flown northwest towards Central Asia or southwest towards the southern Indian Ocean," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing.

"From focusing on shallow seas, we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans," Hussein said. He added that Malaysia is asking those countries for satellite and radar data that might show signs of the plane's flight path.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"Officials in government and industry have regarded the southern corridor into the Indian Ocean as the more likely path of the 777, but haven't ruled out the northern arc.

"The track from northern Thailand to Kazakhstan crosses some of the most heavily militarized airspace in the world, including western China. According to [an] industry official, many of those nations "would have MiGs up in the sky before you even knew it" to intercept any unidentified flying object."

A semi-naked woman in a sequined Carnival costume. A veiled woman with only her eyes showing in a niqab. Two stereotypes of two vastly different regions — Latin America and the Middle East.

On the surface, these two images couldn't be more diametrically opposed. What could the two have in common, right? What a woman wears — or what she doesn't wear in Brazil's case — is often interpreted as a sign of her emancipation. The veil for many is a symbol of female oppression, the right to wear a bikini one of liberation.

As a woman and a foreigner who lived in Baghdad and Cairo and worked throughout the Middle East for years, I always felt the need to dress modestly and respectfully. Frankly, my recent move back to Latin America was initially a relief. Brazil is the land where less is more — and it was wonderful to put on whatever I wanted.

But underneath the sartorial differences, the Middle East and Latin America's most famously immodest country both impose their own burdens on women with the way they are treated and perceived.

On a recent balmy afternoon, I was sitting at a seafront kiosk watching Brazil's carnival coverage on the biggest broadcaster here, GLOBO. Suddenly, a naked woman pops onto the screen during a commercial break. She is wearing nothing. Literally nothing except a smile and some body glitter. Called the "globelleza," she is the symbol of GLOBO's festival coverage and she appears at every commercial break.

Later programming showed a contest where women from various Samba schools — all of them black — were judged on their dancing and appearance by a panel that was all white. They all had their measurements read out for the crowd. But when one woman said she was a studying at one of Brazil's premier petrochemical departments to eventually work in the oil and gas industry, the male judge smirked in surprise.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

Photos Reveal Harsh Detail Of Brazil's History With Slavery

Residents of Crimea have begun voting Sunday on the contentious question of whether to split from Ukraine and join Russia.

Although Western governments consider the vote illegitimate, the referendum is widely expected to pass. Crimea's parliament has already voted to seek annexation by Russia.

NPR's Gregory Warner reports that pro-Ukrainian activists inside Crimea have called for a boycott of the election, saying it was called prematurely and without debate.

But the Crimean peninsula is predominantly ethnic Russian, and residents say they fear being oppressed by the interim Ukrainian government that took over when President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February. Yanukovych fled to Russia after months of protest and bloodshed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will respect the voters' decision. The U.S. and EU have warned that annexation would prompted more economic sanctions against Russia.

Russia voted on Saturday against a UN resolution condemning Sunday's vote, the only Security Council member to do so.

Russian troops have taken control of government buildings and military bases in Crimea since Yanukovych fled. On Saturday, Russian troops made what was apparently their first foray outside Crimea, crossing the border to take over a natural gas plant that serves the region.