What's new

MOKPO, South Korea (AP) — The captain of the ferry that sank off South Korea, leaving more than 300 missing or dead, was arrested Saturday on suspicion of negligence and abandoning people in need. Two crew members also were taken into custody, including a rookie third mate who a prosecutor said was steering in challenging waters unfamiliar to her when the accident occurred.

The number of confirmed dead rose to 32 when three bodies were found in the murky water near the ferry, said coast guard spokesman Kim Jae-in. Divers know at least some bodies remain inside the vessel, but they have been unable to get inside.

The ferry's captain, Lee Joon-seok, 68, was arrested along with one of the Sewol's three helmsmen and the 25-year-old third mate, prosecutors said.

"I am sorry to the people of South Korea for causing a disturbance and I bow my head in apology to the families of the victims," Lee told reporters Saturday morning as he left the Mokpo Branch of Gwangju District Court to be jailed. But he defended his much-criticized decision to wait about 30 minutes before ordering an evacuation.

"At the time, the current was very strong, the temperature of the ocean water was cold, and I thought that if people left the ferry without (proper) judgment, if they were not wearing a life jacket, and even if they were, they would drift away and face many other difficulties," Lee said. "The rescue boats had not arrived yet, nor were there any civilian fishing ships or other boats nearby at that time."

The Sewol sank off South Korea's southern coast Wednesday with 476 people aboard, most of them students on holiday from a single high school. About 270 people are still missing, and most are believed to be trapped inside the 6,852-ton vessel.

By the time the evacuation order was issued, the ship was listing at too steep an angle for many people to escape the tight hallways and stairs inside. Several survivors told The Associated Press that they never heard any evacuation order.

Divers fighting strong currents and rain have been unable to get inside the ferry. A civilian diver saw three bodies inside the ship Saturday but was unable to break the windows, said Kwon Yong-deok, a coast guard official. Hundreds of civilian, government and military divers were involved in the search Saturday.

Senior prosecutor Yang Jung-jin told reporters that the third mate was steering the ship Wednesday morning as it passed through an area with lots of islands clustered close together and fast currents. According to investigators, the accident came at a point where the ship had to make a turn. Prosecutor Park Jae-eok said investigators were looking at whether the third mate ordered a turn so sharp that it caused the vessel to list.

Yang said the third mate has six months of experience, and hadn't steered in the area before because another mate usually handles those duties. She took the wheel this time because heavy fog caused a departure delay, Yang said, adding that investigators do not know whether the ship was going faster than usual.

Helmsman Park Kyung-nam identified the third mate as Park Han-kyul. The helmsman who was arrested, 55-year-old Cho Joon-ki, spoke to reporters outside court and accepted some responsibility.

"There was a mistake on my part as well, but the steering had been turned much more than usual," Cho said.

Lee has four decades of experience at sea. He had been captaining ferries for 10 years by the time he was interviewed by the Jeju Today website in 2004, and said he had sailed on ocean freighters for 20 years before that.

But he was not the Sewol's main captain, and worked on the ship about 10 days a month, helmsman Oh Yong-seok said.

Lee was not on the bridge when the ship began to list. "I gave instructions on the route, then briefly went to the bedroom when it happened," he told reporters.

According to the court, Lee faces five charges, including negligence of duty and violation of maritime law, and the two other crew members each face three related charges.

Lee was required by law to be on the bridge helping his crew when the ferry passed through tough-to-navigate areas, said Yang, the senior prosecutor.

Yang said Lee also abandoned people in need of help and rescue, saying, "The captain escaped before the passengers." Video aired by Yonhap news agency showed Lee among the first people to reach the shore by rescue boat.

Yang said the two crew members arrested failed to reduce speed near the islands and failed to carry out necessary measures to save lives.

It's not clear why the two crew members made the sharp turn, Yang said. He said prosecutors would continue to look into whether something other than the turn could have made the ferry sink, but he added that there were no strong waves that could have knocked down the ferry at the time.

Prosecutors will have 10 days to decide whether to indict the captain and crew, but can request a 10-day extension from the court.

Also on Saturday, angry relatives of missing passengers expressed outrage at officials who were holding a briefing on the disaster in a gymnasium on Jindo island where hundreds of family members are waiting for word about their loved ones. A few dozen relatives surged toward the stage, hurling rapid-fire questions at the officials. One man tried to choke a coast guard lieutenant and punch a maritime policeman, but missed.

"I know this has been a very difficult situation," said Lee Jong-eui, a businessman whose 17-year-old nephew, Nam Hyun-chul, is among the missing. "But aren't people supposed to have faith in the government? The government should have hurried up and have done something, but they just wasted four days, which led to this point. I think this is more like a man-made disaster."

The briefing began with a family member presenting video footage shot by a diver using a head-mounted camera Friday night. The only sounds that could be heard in the gym were the diver's breathing as he gripped a rope with gloved hands and used a flashlight to illuminate the murky water. The diver could be seen pulling the rope as he advanced toward the sunken ship. Dust and sediment washed around in various directions, testifying to the rapid changes in sea current. Glimpses of the ferry could be seen — metal railings and a small window.

The Sewol had left the northwestern port of Incheon on Tuesday on an overnight journey to the holiday island of Jeju in the south with 323 students from Danwon High School in Ansan among its passengers. It capsized within hours of the crew making a distress call to the shore a little before 9 a.m. Wednesday.

A transcript of a ship-to-shore radio exchange shows that an official at the Jeju Vessel Traffic Services Center recommended evacuation just five minutes after the Sewol's distress call. But helmsman Oh told the AP that it took 30 minutes for the captain to give the evacuation order as the boat listed.

With only 174 known survivors and the chances of survival increasingly slim, it is shaping up to be one of South Korea's worst disasters, made all the more heartbreaking by the likely loss of so many young people, aged 16 or 17. The country's last major ferry disaster was in 1993, when 292 people were killed.

The last bit of the ferry that had been above water — the dark blue keel — disappeared below the surface Friday night. Navy divers attached underwater air bags to the ferry to prevent it from sinking deeper, the Defense Ministry said.

Three vessels with cranes arrived at the accident site to prepare to salvage the ferry, but they will not hoist the ship before getting approval from family members of those still believed inside because the lifting could endanger any survivors, said a coast guard officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

Coast guard official Ko Myung-seok said 176 ships and 28 planes were mobilized to search the area around the sunken ship Saturday, and that more than 650 divers were trying to search the interior of the ship. The coast guard also said a thin layer of oil was visible near the area where the ferry sank; about two dozen vessels were summoned to contain the spill.

___

Klug reported from Seoul. Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Jung-yoon Choi in Seoul and Gillian Wong in Jindo, South Korea, contributed to this report.

The signs came early that Abhina Aher was different.

Born a boy biologically and given the male name Abhijit, Aher grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of Mumbai, India. The son of a single mother who nurtured a love of dance, Aher would watch enthralled as she performed.

"I used to wear the clothes that my mother used to wear — her jewelry, her makeup," Aher, now 37, recalls. "That is something which used to extremely fascinate me."

Draped in a bright sari, gold earrings and painted nails, Aher is, by outward appearance, a female, preferring to be addressed as a woman.

She has undertaken a long and arduous journey, rejecting her biological sex and opting to become a hijra — a member of an ancient transgender community in India, popularly referred to as eunuchs.

i i

A development in Eastern Ukraine has set social media on fire and triggered outrage around the world.

In the city of Donetsk, someone distributed fliers ordering Jews to register with the separatists who have taken over government buildings.

Even though nobody in Ukraine believed the leaflet was real, the fliers hit a nerve.

It all started at a Donetsk synagogue after evening prayers two nights ago, when a group of masked men in camouflage showed up. Everyone says they were very polite as they distributed a stack of leaflets. The fliers said local Jews must come to occupied buildings with a passport, family history, a list of possessions and a $50 registration fee — a huge sum in these parts.

According to the leaflet, the penalty for failing to register could be deportation, loss of citizenship and confiscation of assets.

i i

Mohammed Ali Isaac's hands shook as he showed his Kenyan ID to the police officers. They let him pass, but his cousins weren't so lucky. The two women had forgotten their IDs at home, and the police were threatening to load them into one of three large trucks they'd brought for the purpose.

Today's raid, with dozens of armed police officers in the middle of the day in the predominantly Somali neighborhood of Eastleigh in Nairobi, was timed for just after people streamed out of Friday prayers. It was the latest — and perhaps boldest — roundup in a series of police sweeps that have caught up thousands of undocumented refugees, immigrants and Kenyan citizens of Somali descent in recent weeks.

"I'm nervous," Mohammad Ali Isaac admitted. He was waiting with his cousins while they sent another relative back home to pick up the forgotten IDs. If his cousins were arrested, he said, it would be difficult to get them out without a bribe. And bribes, he added, were higher on Friday, when the police could threaten them with a whole weekend in the cell.

Parallels

In Kenya, Corruption Is Widely Seen, Rarely Punished

Unbridled industrialization with almost no environmental regulation has resulted in the toxic contamination of one-fifth of China's farmland, the Communist Party has acknowledged for the first time.

The report, issued by the ministries of Environmental Protection and Land and Resources, says 16.1 percent of the country's soil in general and 19.4 percent of its farmland is polluted with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic. It was based on a soil survey of more than 2.4 million square miles of land across China, spanning a period from April 2005 until December 2013. It excluded special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau.

In a dire assessment, the report declares: "The overall condition of the Chinese soil allows no optimism."

The Associated Press writes that the report was "previously deemed so sensitive [that] it was classified as a state secret." The official Xinhua news agency blames "irrigation by polluted water, the improper use of fertilizers and pesticides and the development of livestock breeding."

Xinhua says: "In breakdown, 11.2 percent of the country's surveyed land suffers slight pollution, while 1.1 percent is severely polluted." (Update at 12:06 p.m. ET. Earlier, we were citing numbers from The Guardian, but these figures from Chinese state media are being more widely cited.)

Most of the contaminated farm land is on the highly developed and industrialized east coast, but heavy metal pollution was especially bad in the country's southwest, according to The Guardian.

The newspaper says:

"In January, an agriculture official admitted that millions of hectares of farmland could be withdrawn from production because of severe pollution by heavy metals. And last December the vice minister of land and resources estimated that 3.3 million hectares of land is polluted, mostly in gain producing regions."

A development in Eastern Ukraine has set social media on fire and triggered outrage around the world.

In the city of Donetsk, someone distributed fliers ordering Jews to register with the separatists who have taken over government buildings.

Even though nobody in Ukraine believed the leaflet was real, the fliers hit a nerve.

It all started at a Donetsk synagogue after evening prayers two nights ago, when a group of masked men in camouflage showed up. Everyone says they were very polite as they distributed a stack of leaflets. The fliers said local Jews must come to occupied buildings with a passport, family history, a list of possessions and a $50 registration fee — a huge sum in these parts.

According to the leaflet, the penalty for failing to register could be deportation, loss of citizenship and confiscation of assets.

i i

Cowardice comes in many forms, but there's a special sense of shame reserved for captains who abandon ship.

South Korean authorities have arrested Capt. Lee Jun-Seok, who was one of the first to flee from the ferry as it sank on Wednesday.

"I can't lift my face before the passengers and family members of those missing," Lee told reporters.

The incident came two years after Francesco Schettino, the captain of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia, was charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship — charges he denies. The ship ran aground off the Italian coast in 2012, killing 32 people.

Has the old idea that captains should not abandon ship itself been abandoned?

"I'm kind of flummoxed that a master of a passenger ship anywhere in the world would not understand his obligation extends until that last person is safely off the ship," says Craig Allen, director of the Arctic Law & Policy Institute at the University of Washington.

The Victorian notion that a captain should actually go down with the ship has become archaic. But his or her responsibility extends to executing the evacuation plan that all passenger ships are required to have and practice.

"It comes from the tradition that the captain has ultimate responsibility and should put the care of others ahead of his own well-being in the discharge of his duties," says David Winkler, program director with the Naval Historical Foundation.

Women And Children First

In the middle of the 19th century, there were a number of incidents in which ships foundered and captains and their crews were either celebrated for leading the rescue or reviled for saving themselves while passengers drowned.

One of the most famous involved the HMS Birkenhead, which wrecked off the coast of South Africa in 1852 while transporting British troops to war.

"The captain called the men to attention," says William Fowler, a maritime historian at Northeastern University. "They were to stand at attention on the sinking ship until the women and children — their wives and children — were led off the boats."

The moment was immortalized by Rudyard Kipling as the "Birkenhead drill." Reinforced when Capt. Edward Smith went down with the Titanic, the notion that a captain must stay with his ship became part of folklore.

"A lot of this is candidly still more lore than law," says Miller Shealy, a maritime law professor at the Charleston School of Law.

A Breach Of Duty

In the U.S., case law indicates that a ship's master must be the last person to leave and make all reasonable efforts to save everyone and everything on it.

"It is not just unseemly for a captain to leave a ship," Shealy says. "In Anglo-American law, you would lose your license and make yourself liable."

After Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger crash-landed a flight in the Hudson River in 2009, he twice walked the plane to make sure no one was left onboard before leaving himself.

International standards for sea captains vary. Often, as in the case of Schettino, charges are brought based not on dereliction of maritime duty but for offenses that might pertain on land as well, such as negligence and manslaughter.

In 1991, Capt. Yiannis Avranas not only abandoned the Greek cruise ship Oceanos after it suffered an explosion off the coast of South Africa but cut ahead of an elderly passenger to be hoisted aloft by a helicopter.

"If the master is simply looking out for himself or herself, you've breached your duty both legally and morally, to your ship, your crew and your passengers," says Allen, the University of Washington law professor.

Part Of The Culture

In last year's Star Trek Into Darkness, the bad guy taunts Captain Kirk by saying, "No ship should go down without her captain."

The image of a captain staying with a sinking vessel has recurred again and again, in literature and real life. It remains so potent because of the almost mythic authority invested in ship captains, Allen suggests.

At sea, there's no question about who's in charge, so there's no doubt who is responsible for safety.

i i

In Bayonne, they take their ham very, very seriously.

This medieval fortress of a town is minutes from the French seaside ports of Barritz and St. Jean de Luz, and not far from Spain's St. Sebastian. It has reigned as a cultural and commercial center for a millennium, according to historian Mark Kurlansky in The Basque History of the World.

Its most famous item since the Middle Ages? The jambon de Bayonne. The town's celebrated ham even has its own festival on Easter weekend.

First, some background. Bayonne may be technically in France, but its people call themselves Basque and claim ancestry from four Spanish states and three French states. It is said, in this case, 4+3=1.

Above all, the Basque have a rich culinary tradition combining sea exploration, the spice trade and foods raised in the fertile valleys of the nearby Pyrenees. And since 1464, the Foire au jambon de Bayonne or Ham Fair, has celebrated this remarkable food.

i i

It could be another milestone in organic food's evolution from crunchy to commercial: Wal-Mart, the king of mass retailing, is promising to "drive down organic food prices" with a new line of organic food products. The new products will be at least 25 percent cheaper than organic food that's on Wal-Mart's shelves right now.

Yet we've heard this before. Back in 2006, Wal-Mart made a similar announcement, asking some of its big suppliers to deliver organic versions of popular food items like mac-and-cheese. A Wal-Mart executive said at the time that it hoped these organic products would cost only 10 percent more than the conventional alternative.

Wal-Mart has, in fact, become a big player in organic food, with some remarkable cost-cutting successes. At the new Wal-Mart just a few blocks from NPR's headquarters, I found some organic grape tomatoes on sale for exactly the same price as conventional ones. Organic "spring mix" salad was just 9 percent more expensive than the conventional package.

Outside the fresh produce section, though, organic products were hard to find, and those I did spy were significantly more expensive. Organic diced tomatoes were 44 percent higher. The premium for a half-gallon of organic milk was a whopping 85 percent.

Now Wal-Mart is bringing in a new company, WildOats, to deliver a whole range of additional organic products, from pasta sauce to cookies, and do it more cheaply.

I asked the CEO of WildOats, Tom Casey, how he plans to do it. His answer, in a nutshell: Bigger can be better.

The production and distribution of organic food is still highly fragmented, Casey says. Wal-Mart can change that, delivering organic products in through its "world-class distribution system" and giving manufacturers of, say, pasta sauce a chance to operate on a larger, more efficient scale.

Charles Benbrook, a long-time proponent of organic agriculture who's now with the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, thinks that this plan is realistic. Most organic producers have to use other companies' processing facilities, which also handle conventional food, Benbrook wrote in an e-mail. "This requires them to shut down, clean out the lines, segregate both incoming and outgoing product, and this all costs money," writes Benbrook.

According to Benbrook, larger production — to supply larger customers — will allow organic food processors to run "100 percent organic all the time" and will cut costs by 20 to 30 percent. This has already happened with packaged salad greens, which is why consumers don't pay very much extra for those organic products.

Benbrook does have one warning: Large scale can't be achieved overnight. It takes at least three years for farmers to get their land certified as organic, for instance. "There will be hell to pay if Wal-Mart turns mostly to imports, and they know it."

If Wal-Mart sticks with this effort and creates an organic supply chain that's as efficient as the conventional one, the company could help answer an unresolved question about organic food: How much of the organic price tag is because of small-scale production, and how much is inherent in the rules that govern organic production, such as the prohibition on synthetic pesticides, and industrial fertilizer?

Benbrook thinks Wal-Mart's experiment will show that organic farmers, if given an honest chance to compete, will out-produce their conventional neighbors, and that organic prices will come down.

Others disagree. Todd J. Kluger, vice president of marketing for Lundberg Family Farms, told Rodale News in an interview that Wal-Mart's goal of producing food 25 percent more cheaply is "fantasy. There isn't much you can do to cut the cost of organic ingredients," Kluger said.

In the same interview, Mark Kastel, an organic activist who co-founded the Cornucopia Institute, suggested that Wal-Mart's cost-cutting drive could undermine the ethical values of organic farming. "One of the reasons people are willing to pay more is that they think they're supporting a different ethic, a different animal husbandry model, and that family farmers are being fairly compensated," Kastel says.

According to Kastel, organic buyers will shy away from the kind of large-scale supply chain that Wal-Mart and WildOats envision. "We want to know where our food comes from, how it's produced, and what the story behind the label is," he told Rodale News.

Tom Casey, CEO of WildOats, says that the company has not yet decided whether it will disclose where it is buying its food. (That's pretty typical for supermarket brands.) "We want to be respectful of our suppliers," he told The Salt.

When Regitze Visby, a tourist visiting San Francisco from Denmark, Googled accommodations for her trip and saw she could stay at one of the famed "painted ladies" on Alamo Square through Airbnb, she took it.

At $135 a night, "it was a good deal," she says.

But does she know if she's paying a transient occupancy tax, or a hotel tax? "I have no idea," she says.

Visby would know if she were staying in a hotel. It's 14 percent per room. Places like Airbnb's that are like hotels usually don't bother with it, even though they should.

Property manager Emily Benkert — whose short-term rental business, Guesthop, has grown from 5 to 50 listings since October — says while she's aware of the hotel room tax, she's not planning on paying it until she has to.

"I personally have decided to wait until the city was actually enforcing it, and Airbnb was collecting it," she says.

More From NPR

All Tech Considered

What's Mine Is Yours (For A Price) In The Sharing Economy

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

The instantly recognizable man with the immaculate white moustache was a novelist, but he was also a journalist, a political agitator and a celebrity with a reach unlike any writer since Mark Twain. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died Thursday at the age of 87, presidents, authors, actors and pop stars made public statements. Colombia, his native country, declared three days of mourning. Marquez often said that he disliked his fame, but he used it to promote political and social change, using, for example, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982 as a platform to talk about the "oppression, plundering and abandonment" of Latin America. He called for a "new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth." That same year, he told The New York Times that "the problems of our societies are mainly political. And the commitment of a writer is with the reality of all of society, not just with a small part of it. If not, he is as bad as the politicians who disregard a large part of our reality."

Romanian poet Nina Cassian died this week in New York City, where she has lived in exile since secret police under the Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu found her poems mocking the regime. She was 89. "She had always been fragile, one way or another — yet it was hard to think of her as anything short of immortal," her friend the documentary maker Mona Nicoara told The Associated Press. Cassian's poem "The Orchestra," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1990, ends with these lines:

"The orchestra is still. The score is blank.

Cold as a slide rule the brasses, strings, and flute.

Sonorous love, when will you return?

The orchestra is mute."

Next week, President Obama is going to Asia, where he'll talk up a proposed deal to increase U.S. trade with that region.

If he succeeds, he could open up huge new markets for U.S. farmers and manufactures, strengthen U.S. influence in Asia and set a path to greater prosperity.

At least, that's what the White House says.

Critics say that cheery outlook is all wrong. They believe the Trans-Pacific Partnership would lead to environmental harm, more expensive prescription drugs and a less open Internet. Worst of all, the deal would have a "devastating impact" on U.S. jobs, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., says.

Everyone agrees on this: The TPP would be a big deal.

Such a trade pact would pull together the United States, Japan, Australia and nine other countries whose collective gross domestic product accounts for 40 percent of all the goods and services produced in the world. The deal would influence geopolitics, the economy and the future of global trade.

The Government Shutdown

Obama's Absence At Asia Summit Seen Hurting U.S. Trade

Cristina Pea was born in 1984 with HIV. Her father died from AIDS, and her mother is still living with HIV. Cristina was told she had HIV when she was 9, but she and her family kept it a secret from her schoolmates and friends.

In high school, she started dating Chris Ondaatje. One day, Chris decided to tell Cristina that he was in love with her.

That's when Cristina sat him down for a revelation of her own.

"I remember sitting on your living room floor, and I could tell something was wrong," Chris tells Cristina on a visit to StoryCorps in San Francisco. "You started off telling me your dad had passed away of AIDS, and I thought to myself, 'Ah, that's the big secret.' But then you kept going. And you said your mom was HIV-positive. And then you told me that you were born HIV-positive."

"I remember saying to you, 'I'm OK if you don't want to keep dating me,' " Cristina replies. "And you could have reacted any way. You could have gotten up. You could have called me horrible names. You could have ran out. But you said, 'Babe, I'll pick you up for a date tomorrow.' You gave me a big squeeze, and that meant so much to me."

"We really learned how to communicate with each other," Chris says. "It's definitely forced us into having to grow up faster than we probably would have otherwise. I struggled with telling my parents about it. And my dad, he was pretty upset. He tried to talk me out of dating you."

"I remember I'd walk into your house and he'd get up and leave, without saying anything to me," Cristina recalls. "That was the first time I had ever realized that I was actually a threat to someone."

"I said, 'Look, here's this piece of paper. I get tested every six months. We're safe. I love this girl. I want to be with her,' " Chris says. "All I wanted was acceptance. It was a few years of being really distant with my mom and my dad, and really only in the last five or six years have we started to mend those issues. And we have a great relationship now. Their biggest concern is when we're going to get married and start having grandkids for them."

Cristina and Chris are both 29 now, and have been together for 13 years.

"You know, when I found out I was HIV-positive at 9, I had no idea what my future looked like," Cristina tells Chris. "And now, as an adult, obviously still HIV-positive, but I have a future, and I have a future with you. And we've built that. And you've made me feel so beautiful and loved. And I didn't think I could have that."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon.

Latin American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, died Thursday. He was 87. Garcia Marquez, the master of a style known as magic realism, was and remains Latin America's best-known writer.

His novels were filled with miraculous and enchanting events and characters; love and madness; wars, politics, dreams and death. And everything he had written, Garcia Marquez once said, he knew or heard before he was 8 years old.

A Writer Shaped By His Beginnings

Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in the Colombian coast town of Aracataca, which experienced a boom after a U.S. fruit company arrived. In a 1984 interview with NPR, he said his writing was forever shaped by the grandparents who raised him as a young child:

"There was a real dichotomy in me because, on one hand ... there was the world of my grandfather; a world of stark reality, of civil wars he told me about, since he had been a colonel in the last civil war. And then, on the other hand, there was the world of my grandmother, which was full of fantasy, completely outside of reality."

President Obama says that enrollment under the Affordable Care Act has reached 8 million after a two-week extension on sign ups on the original March 31 deadline.

"This thing is working," he told reporters at a White House briefing on Thursday.

The president said that 35 percent of those signing up through the federal government's website were under the age of 35. The need for younger, healthier, individuals to enroll in the program is considered vital to the success of Obamacare.

The latest figures represent a turnaround from the disastrous debut of the HealthCare.gov website last year.

The president said it was "well past time" for Republicans to quit trying to repeal the program, something he said they have voted on "some 50 times."

Republicans "still can't bring themselves to admit" that the program is working, he said.

The GOP was going through the "stages of grief" relating to their failure to stop the law. "Anger and denial. They haven't reached acceptance yet," he said.

Obama said that although it was likely that insurance premiums would continue to increase, as they did before the program was in place, "we're expecting premiums to be 50 percent lower than originally thought."

"The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] now says the Affordable Care Act will be cheaper than originally thought," he said.

Josh Gibbs normally wouldn't leave his apartment in Northeast Washington, D.C., pick up a loaded pizza from a restaurant in Chinatown, bike to a complete stranger's apartment, drop off the pizza and leave without any cash exchanging hands. But last week, he did just that. And truth be told, he kind of loved it.

"It's exciting. It's just fun," he says. "When the app goes off, when it beeps, I get this little adrenaline rush. I can make some money. It's like a game."

The app he's referring to is Postmates, a service that allows users in five cities — D.C., New York, San Francisco, Seattle and, as of last month, Chicago — to order any item, from any store or restaurant, any time of day, and receive it within an hour. The couriers are everyday people like Gibbs, who's a full-time teacher, and all the money is transferred through a smartphone app, no physical cash involved. Think of it as the Uber of home delivery.

Gibbs, 23, is an avid biker, and he had toyed with the idea of making some extra money as a courier before. But he didn't know where to start.

Along came Postmates, which made the job seem not only appealing but also accessible. Gibbs started working for the startup three days after he applied.

"It's something I can do on the side. I can work during the dinner rush; I can work after the school year," he says. "I'm on my bike anyway."

A Low Barrier To Entry

Postmates is part of a burgeoning cohort of tech-savvy on-demand delivery services. In D.C., there's Urban Delivery; in San Francisco, Shyp; in Chicago and Manhattan, eBay-owned Shutl; also in Manhattan, UberRUSH, which entered the game just last week.

It's also part of a larger phenomenon that MIT researcher Denise Cheng calls the peer economy — "platforms that allow people to monetize skills and assets that they already have," she says. This includes Uber, TaskRabbit, Airbnb and Etsy, among some of the larger players.

All Tech Considered

How The Sharing Economy Is Changing The Places We Work

As Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers from Ukraine, Russia and the European Union were gathering Thursday in Geneva to see if they can find a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin was publicly acknowledging for the first time that his military played a part in Crimea's breakaway from the rest of Ukraine.

Putin, who in the past had insisted Russian forces did not enter Crimea before people in that region voted last month to join the Russian Federation, said Thursday on Russian national TV that "Crimean self-defense forces were of course backed by Russian servicemen," Russia's RT.com reports.

RT.com writes that Putin "acknowledged that Russian troops were present in Crimea before the referendum and argued that was necessary to let Crimeans make the choice on the future of the region."

Also Thursday, "Putin accused Ukraine's leaders ... of committing a 'grave crime' by using the army to quell unrest in the east of the country, and did not rule out sending in Russian troops," Reuters reports. But, the wire service adds:

"Putin tempered withering criticism of the Ukrainian leadership with more conciliatory comments about the possibility of a compromise to resolve the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

"While recalling that parliament had granted him the right to use military force in Ukraine, the Kremlin chief said: 'I really hope that I do not have to exercise this right and that we are able to solve all today's pressing issues via political and diplomatic means.' "

Married couples in America co-own 3.7 million small businesses, according to the Census Bureau, and the arrangement can be fruitful when both marriage and business are going well. But what happens when it doesn't? Most of the time, when the love dies, the business relationship ends, too.

But that's not always the case.

Take Rhonda Sanderson and her ex-husband. They divorced the way many do, fighting over money and various other things. But then a few years later, after she suffered a bad injury, Sanderson found herself inviting him back into her life — as a business partner at her Chicago public relations firm.

"We actually knew that we were not suited to each other at all in any other way, but the fact is that he has this brilliant marketing mind, and all we ever talked about on dates were business ideas," Sanderson says.

While their marriage did not succeed, their business certainly did. Over the years, they raised their child and their business together. Her ex is in her will. And, according to Sanderson, their relationship has never been better.

"We don't get along very well in certain ways, but we still love each other as people, there's no question," she says.

Making It Work

Kit Johnson of Capella University has studied couples who've stayed in business after a divorce. "It's sort of been a prevailing belief that divorce is a real business killer," she says.

Johnson says that is true in the vast majority of casesbut some "copreneurs," as they're sometimes known, are able to make sharp distinctions between their personal and their professional lives. Johnson and a co-researcher followed nine couples whose business relationship remained intact even under some grim emotional circumstances.

"One of the reasons for ending the marriage was infidelity, which for many people is ... a deal breaker in a relationship, but they had this ability to compartmentalize," Johnson says.

She says one kind of trust can be broken without necessarily affecting trust about money, clients or skills. And in some instances, where ex-spouses rely on the business for income, there may be no good alternative.

"What we found was that, yes, the business can survive. As a matter of fact, it can even thrive," Johnson says.

That is, of course, the exception, not the rule. In many cases, a divorce can lead to a forced sale of the business. And sometimes, when a family business is involved, the drama gets multiplied.

“ If there's going to be, down the road, a girlfriend or a new wife, how awkward and difficult would that be, especially if the new spouse doesn't want the old spouse around?

Spring has crept up to the foothills of the Himalayas and, in Islamabad, Pakistan's purpose-built capital, the air is full of the scent of roses and the yelling of birds.

Yet, even in this most stately of South Asian cities, it is impossible to escape the realities of an unstable nation that has yet to figure out how to meet some of the basic needs of its 200 million or so citizens.

Islamabad long ago adjusted to attacks by Islamist militants by setting up roadblocks and turning its government buildings, five-star hotels, villas and diplomatic enclaves into modern-day fortresses, wrapped in razor wire and blast barriers, and monitored by a multitude of security cameras and armed guards.

But the more recent blot on the life of the city is much more mundane: it comprises long lines of angry and frustrated motorists, parked along the edge of Islamabad's tree-lined avenues, waiting for hours to refuel their vehicles.

For "long" — read huge. Some of these lines stretch well over a mile. Drivers say it sometimes takes four hours to reach the gas station.

A Cheaper, Cleaner Alternative

The problem is caused by a major shortage of CNG, or compressed natural gas. Pakistan has millions of cars equipped to run on CNG, more — say officials — than anywhere else in the world.

These vehicles include the small and battered yellow Suzuki taxi driven by Abdul Majid. Majid's taxi is about midway in a line for a distant gas station; he says he's already been waiting for an hour and a half.

He is so bored and fed up with spending half his life in a queue that he's talking about giving up the taxi trade altogether and finding something else. He might be forced to. He says his meager daily take-home pay of about $10 has dropped by half. Like many cars here, his taxi actually can also run on gasoline — but that's three times more expensive, and would eliminate his tiny profit margin. Thus, the huge lines.

With a family of six to feed, Majid says he's struggling: "For (the last) three days, I have no bread at home."

Pakistan's government started encouraging people to use CNG about 10 years ago. It wanted to cut the country's hefty bill for imported oil, and use Pakistan's domestic gas reserves instead. CNG has the added benefit of being cleaner and cheaper than regular gasoline. At first, the plan was a huge success.

Then, the problems began.

A Solar Solution For The People

As industry and the public competed for energy amid massive and unrelenting power outages, demand for natural gas soared. A court ruled CNG retailers were making excessive profits and ordered a cap on prices, causing hundreds of CNG suppliers to close down. Separatist insurgents in Pakistan's Baluchistan province — where a lot of the gas comes from — regularly bombed the pipelines. CNG began to look like a bad idea.

i i

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ordered Tuesday to spend at least four hours a week for the next year doing community service at a center for the elderly, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast Desk.

As she says, the ruling comes more than eight months after Berlusconi was convicted "for masterminding a complex tax fraud at his TV network." While Berlusconi was given a four-year prison sentence, that was later commuted to one-year and then to either home arrest or community service.

Italy's ANSA news service says it has been told by "sources close to the 77-year-old billionaire that he would be assigned to a center run by the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia Catholic foundation at Cesano Boscone, near Milan." Agence France-Presse says that's a "church-run center for disabled and elderly people with 2,000 patients."

In addition to the community service, Berlusconi can't travel freely for the next year, Sylvia reports. He can leave Italy's Lombardy region only "for restricted trips to Rome from Tuesdays to Thursdays," she says. That could limit his ability to campaign for his Forza Italia party before next month's European Parliament elections.

The tax fraud case is by no means Berlusconi's only legal challenge. As the BBC reminds readers:

"Last year he was convicted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and abusing his powers, which brought him a lifetime ban from public office. He was expelled from the Italian Senate.

"He is appealing against the underage sex conviction, in a trial known as the 'Ruby' case.

"He is also on trial for allegedly bribing a center-left senator to switch sides."

Some investors avoid paying taxes in a move called round-tripping — sending money offshore, then investing it in U.S. stocks or bonds. A study estimates it costs the U.S. billions in lost revenues.

Recently, MIT professor Michelle Hanlon and two colleagues set out to find out all they could about round-tripping.

"I think it's a big problem in the U.S. tax system that individuals can evade taxes and that they try to do so offshore," Hanlon says. "So we just felt like it was a big policy issue actually to try to get a handle on how much this occurs and whether we could track this down with data."

Round-tripping occurs when American citizens open bank accounts in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. They funnel money into the accounts and then use it to buy stocks and bonds back in the U.S., which is why it's called round-tripping.

"A U.S. individual would pretend essentially to be a foreign investor," Hanlon says. "So they would set up, say, a bank account or a shell corporation offshore and from that offshore location they would invest back in the U.S."

Normally, she says, American citizens who invest in the United States are supposed to pay taxes on any profits they make. "But if they pretend they're foreign and don't report that they're U.S. [residents] and don't report that income then it's very hard for the tax authorities to catch them," Hanlon says.

For a long time it's been nearly impossible to quantify round-tripping. E.J. Fagan of Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, says a lot of countries refuse to tell the Internal Revenue Service anything about their U.S. customers.

"Very often a lot of these jurisdictions — places like, for example, Mauritius or the British Virgin Islands — they make the Cayman Islands look open and transparent. So, very often it's hard to know where the assets are," Fagan says.

But, a study in the Journal of Finance, Hanlon and her co-authors, Edward Maydew of the University of North Carolina and Jacob Thornock of the University of Washington, took a look at how much money has come into the country from places such as the Cayman Islands since 1984. The flow of money into the U.S. has always been erratic and it can be affected by a lot of different factors. But the researchers decided to look at what happened to the flow when the U.S. tax rate went up.

Related NPR Stories

Your Money

Havens Are Turning Hellish For Tax Avoiders

President Obama, like many wealthy Americans, is paying more of his income to the IRS.

The White House released the president's tax return last week. It shows he and the first lady paid $98,169 in taxes for 2013 on income of $481,098. That's an effective tax rate of 20.4 percent.

In 2012, the Obamas paid just 18.4 percent of their income in taxes. The tax bite was bigger in 2013 because of the president's own policies, including a higher income tax rate for top earners, limits on tax breaks for the wealthy, and two new taxes on the rich that help to finance the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

The top income tax rate — for individuals making more than $400,000 or couples making more than $450,000 — climbed to 39.6 percent as part of the fiscal cliff deal the president struck with Republicans last year.

People making more than $250,000 (or $300,000 for couples) also see a gradual decrease in tax deductions and the personal tax exemption as their incomes climb. Finally, the Obamacare taxes add an extra 3.8 percent levy on investment income and a 0.9 percent levy on ordinary income for individuals making more than $200,000 or couples making more $250,000.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that with these changes, the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers will now pay 27 percent of all federal taxes, while collecting about 15 percent of pretax income.

Citizens for Tax Justice — a group that advocates for a more progressive federal tax code — prefers a different measure that includes state and local taxes as well. Under that measure, the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 1 percent, 23.7 percent, is not much different from their share of overall income.

While Obama's effective tax rate rose last year, his income shrank, mostly because of declining book sales. His adjusted gross income in 2013 was nearly $128,000 lower than the year before. The first family is entitled to a tax refund this year of more than $19,000. The Obamas asked to have that money applied to their 2014 tax bill.

Newt 2012, the presidential campaign vehicle for Newt Gingrich last time around, couldn't bag the Republican nomination for him.

And now, the former House speaker's committee still owes $4.7 million from the attempt.

The campaign tells the Federal Election Commission that its debt on April 1, 2014, was just $14,507 less than the amount owed on May 31, 2012 — the month Gingrich officially suspended his White House bid.

The most prominent Gingrich benefactor, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is gone without a trace. He showered millions on a pro-Gingrich superPAC during the GOP primaries and gave the maximum to Newt 2012. But since the campaign, Gingrich hasn't seen money from any Adelson allies.

Now Adelson himself is auditioning prospects for the 2016 Republican contest.

Topping the list of Gingrich campaign creditors is Moby Dick Airways, a charter company that's owed $977,322. The candidate was famous for his taste in charter planes. For Moby Dick, his charter of choice, the old debt has hardly been dented.

The second-biggest creditor: Gingrich himself, owed $649,118 for travel expenses. From there, it's the usual rundown of vendors left in the dust of presidential politics: consultants — strategic, media and otherwise — plus pollsters, direct-mail houses, Web specialists, and lots of travel agents.

Companies that stage events are thick on the list; they're especially vulnerable as presidential campaigns roar into town and out again.

It's equally static on the other side of the ledger, only with much smaller totals. Since Jan. 1, 2013, Newt 2012 has logged just $6,715 in contributions, plus $347,031 from a direct mail consultant that rents the campaign mailing lists. Exactly one congressman, Pete Sessions of Texas, has financially remembered Gingrich, a former speaker of the House.

Taylor Swindle, treasury director for Newt 2012, said the campaign is "being persistent" and continuing to "chip away at the debt."

The Ken Burns documentary The Address, premiering on most PBS stations Tuesday night, opens at the Greenwood School in Vermont, where students are being introduced to a longstanding tradition: studying the Gettysburg Address until they can recite it from memory in front of a large audience of students, staff and parents. If they succeed, they receive a special commemorative coin that is only given for this achievement. A first, second and third prize will be awarded — one for middle school, one for high school — for these performances.

The scene almost pleads for a disclaimer: this is not so easily within the skill set of lots of kids. Memorization of a 272-word speech, not to mention a public performance of it, challenges some kids a lot more than others.

And then we learn that the Greenwood School is specifically for boys between 6th and 12th grade who have a variety of learning issues and different diagnoses: dyslexia, dysgraphia (issues with translating thoughts to paper), challenges with executive functioning, and ADHD among them. The Gettysburg competition at Greenwood, in other words, is specifically for some of the kids you might expect to find it the most challenging.

For the next hour and a half, Burns follows some of these boys as they struggle and battle and work under the guidance of a variety of professionals — teachers, language specialists, speech pathologists, therapists — to build the concentration and discipline that it takes to learn the address, to commit it to memory, and to deliver it clearly and well. To some of these kids, who various faculty members tell us have been made to feel stupid or inadequate at other schools, the idea of public speaking based on memorization feels almost ridiculous, but they set it as their goal, and they work, and they get a ton of support.

In many ways, it's a film about how many pieces have to move in sync for these kids to do this very, very hard thing that doesn't come easily to them. One has an occupational therapist who has him engage in physical exercise right before he starts studying the address, because otherwise, he's too hyper to concentrate. A therapist tells one kid that he doesn't have to do it if he doesn't want to, but he shouldn't not do it just because it's hard.

A speech pathologist pronounces and re-pronounces the word "free." And when she sees one yawn out of young Geo, she asks him whether he's getting enough sleep. He admits he isn't. She asks him why. They talk about how he can sleep better. Elsewhere, there's a sort of therapist/mediator who helps the kids build their ability to get along with people, not to act out, to build better relationships. There is support for kids who are good at music, great at woodworking, even handy with a yo-yo, in part because it gives them confidence.

Greenwood boasts on its web site a ratio better than two to one between students and teachers, and indeed, most of the time, during this particular segment of the boys' education, you see a staff member working with only one or two students at a time. This is what it takes, the film suggests, to take these boys who have, in some cases, major learning and speech issues and get them to the point where they can stand up at a fancy party and recite the Gettysburg address from memory — which, when it happens, is stunning to watch.

And that's where it begins to also feel like a film about money. Greenwood's tuition for next year for day students is $53,475. For boarding students, it's $68,890. That's roughly what Harvard costs, and that doesn't include some of the individual and specialized services the school offers. It doesn't include fees for books and incidentals.

You get the impression watching the film that for the families who have their kids at Greenwood, it's well worth it to them: this is what it costs to get a 2:1 ratio. This is what it costs for the education of your child to be essentially half of a full-time job for a hypothetical hybrid person who has all the skills of all the staff members there.

But it's impossible not to see in your mind all the kids who you don't see in the film. Most of these kids — not all, but most — are white. While the school says it provides some financial assistance, these are all kids whose parents managed to look at a school that costs more than $50,000 a year to attend as a day student and not immediately write it off as vastly beyond their resources. These boys are among the luckiest of the luckiest of the luckiest kids, in some respects, to have so many people concentrating attention and care on them.

There's nothing wrong with being lucky, nor is this the only kind of lucky a kid can be, nor is there only luck at work: many of these families, even if they have a lot of money, are undoubtedly making huge sacrifices to make this education possible. Even seven years of education at Greenwood costs less than many second homes probably do, so there are choices being made, not just money dropping from a plane. Furthermore, plenty of kids in public school are being adored and loved and pushed and treasured by their parents and teachers. This is not the only way to learn the Gettysburg Address, by any means. (You might watch this film alongside Brooklyn Castle, about a similarly intensive chess program at a public school — a program that's constantly in danger of being cut.)

But these boys seem to blossom under the concentrated attention of a team of trained people whose only job is helping them blossom. There are kids who respond, specifically, to this program. The chilling part of the film is to think about how many kids would benefit from, but don't get, this kind of attention. They don't have a speech pathologist who can sit with them and say "Free. Free. Free." They don't have somebody who can spot them yawning and say, "Hmm, are you getting enough sleep?"

It's a really wonderful story about these particular kids, not really at all about the Gettysburg Address. But it's also a sobering picture of the kinds of resources that a lot of kids simply don't have.

Colorado Democrat Mark Udall's bid for a second term has become the most unexpectedly competitive U.S. Senate race in the nation this year – but not for the expected reasons.

Yes, Udall, 63, like other vulnerable Democrats, is already being pummeled by big-money conservative groups for his support of President Obama's health care legislation.

And, yes, even with a last name that carries historic weight in the American West, the low-key senator has been hobbled by incumbency at a time of historic dissatisfaction with Congress, and with party leader Obama's approval rating well south of 50 percent.

Udall's fortunes, however, appear much more lashed to a pair of developments back home:

—Recent and at-times virulent voter backlash against the political agenda – from stricter gun laws to civil unions — pursued by progressives who, with Democrat John Hickenlooper already in the governor's office, took full control of the state legislature two years ago.

—The emergence of a strong Republican candidate, Congressman Cory Gardner, 39, whose decision to run forced from the field Tea Party favorite Ken Buck, the party's losing 2010 Senate candidate. Buck opted instead to run for Gardner's House seat.

Gardner's late February announcement for the seat was hailed by state Republicans as a "game-changer," one that Rob Witwer, who served in the state legislature with Gardner, says could help his party post up better against a superior Democratic voter data and get-out-the-vote infrastructure.

"The conservative infrastructure has not yet matched that of the progressives here, but it's getting there," says Witwer, who documented in a revealing book with reporter Adam Schrager how Democrats by 2008 came to dominate Colorado politics.

(A key Democratic player in the effort that upended the rock-solid Republican control of the state was multi-millionaire Jared Polis, elected to Udall's congressional seat in 2008.)

The scant public polling that exists suggest the race, crucial to whether Democrats retain control of the Senate come fall, is a toss-up; the political race analysts at the Cook Political Report and the Rothenberg Political Report still have the race leaning in Udall's favor.

Democrats nationwide are continuing to struggle for a narrative to motivate voters to get to the polls in this coming mid-term election — that poses a challenge for Udall, in a state where his fellow Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet barely eked out a victory over Buck in 2010.

And that was before state Democrats, by almost all accounts, overreached in a state that Obama twice won, but which is still decidedly divided.

"Last year was an incredibly aggressive liberal year here," says non-partisan Colorado pollster Floyd Cirulli. "Civil unions. Gun control. Environmental legislation. Labor legislation."

"It just poured out," he said. "It certainly hurt the governor, and it hurt the overall Democratic brand here that had been shaped by Hickenlooper, [who was] a moderate, business type."

Udall, and Bennet, both became identified, fairly or not, says Cirulli, with being part of an "aggressive liberal party, even though both are mainstream, center-left guys."

The response came quickly. Eleven rural counties had ballot initiatives last fall to secede from the state; five were approved. Voters in a recall election in September ousted two Democratic legislators who voted to strengthen gun control measures in a state where two of the nation's worst mass shootings – Aurora and Columbine — have occurred; a third legislator facing a potential recall resigned.

Colorado voters also rejected a billion-dollar school-funding ballot initiative heavily supported by Hickenlooper, teachers' unions as well as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Witwer says he views the defeat of the education initiative, and its accompanying tax increase, as perhaps the most significant measure of voter backlash.

"It went down, by a lot," he says. "It was a large vote against a tax increase, and, at the same time, conservatives were sweeping onto school boards."

"It was a significant indication of a changing tide in Colorado," he says.

Cirulli, the pollster, predicts that voter turnout this fall will be about 30 percent less than it was two years ago when Obama won the state, and Democrats took over the legislature. Republicans are more united behind Gardner, who is a capable fundraiser, and whose personality, like that of Udall's, has most frequently been described as "affable."

He's not at war with Republican Party leadership in Washington, and has discarded some of his more controversial positions – including one that would give "personhood" status to a fertilized human egg.

Gardner's campaign reported raising $1.4 million in the first three months of the year – most after his announcement.

Udall, who had about $4.7 million on hand at the end of last year, reported raising an additional $2 million-plus this year through March.

A strong supporter of environmental laws, Udall has also burnished his profile in recent years as one of Capitol Hill's most persistent critics of the National Security Agency's data collection practices.

"He's a strong incumbent," Witwer says, "and he's not prone to saying offensive things or making grand mistakes. His family name is well-known out west.

"His vulnerably has more to do with the national Democratic brand, and, more importantly, his association with some things that are very unpopular in Colorado," he says.

[Ahoy, there be New Girl spoilers ahead, through the most recently aired episode, "Mars Landing."]

A few weeks ago, New Girl neared the end of its third season the way it began it: by admitting that it doesn't know what it's doing.

In "Mars Landing," the last episode that aired before the show returns Tuesday night, weirdo roommate couple Nick and Jess put together a toy for the infant son of Jess's friend Sadie (a literally phoned-in June Diane Raphael) while hung over, and they broke up in the process. Twice, maybe. They still loved each other, they admitted, but their plans for the future, and the future of their hypothetical children, were too incompatible to overcome. Nick is from Mars (or will be, one day, once the migration starts in earnest), Jess is from Earth.

So New Girl split them up.

That's not the problem. The problem is that it came pretty much out of nowhere, which suggests that it actually came out of desperation and story panic. Oh, there have been countless breakup fake-outs aplenty all season, but like last episode's not-an-imaginary-story, they were all predicated on conflicts that the writers seem to be inventing whole-hog from week to week. (Something that New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether has essentially admitted.)

None of Nick and Jess' dustups or relationship panics arose naturally out of anything that had been established between them. Nick and Jess were never headed for a breakup. The show simply broke them up through a spontaneous and contrived conflict, and it was hard to watch without the gnawing suspicion that it was because nobody behind the scenes knew what to do with them as a couple anymore.

That problem isn't limited to Nick and Jess. In fact, there were warnings that this would be New Girl's m.o. at least as far back as the end of the first season, when the bizarre, antagonistic and still oddly heartwarming courtship of Schmidt and Cece suddenly crashed because ... something something White Fang. And rather than let that development be, the show immediately began second-guessing itself at the start of the next season, when a regretful Schmidt plotted to undermine Cece's boyfriends and sabotage her wedding.

There are plenty of other examples of New Girl storylines that seemed to spring out of, or follow a track built on, nothing beyond a desire on the part of the show to Make Something Happen. It happened with Jess and Sam. Winston and Shelby. Winston and Daisy. Just Winston in general, really. Not one of them found a dynamic that was allowed to simply play out without what felt like constant external fiddling. Instead, they flailed to find traction and then just sort of gave up with a shrug.

In a way, the problems of New Girl are reminiscent of (some of) the (many) problems of Heroes, the superhero show that made a splashy arrival in 2006. Creator Tim Kring was great with origin stories; that's essentially what the entire first season of the show was. Unfortunately, Kring had no idea what to do after that, so for season two, he simply kept on inventing more and more supers to throw into the mix until it was hard to care anymore. We'd already spent an entire season watching a dozen characters' journeys of discovery and were now keen to see what they did with that information. But Kring wasn't interested in that. He just wanted to write more origin stories.

Meriwether seems to feel the same way about writing Big Relationship Changes that Kring did about creating superheroes. We saw Nick and Jess panic about becoming a couple, and then become a couple, and then panic about various crises that could have ended their coupledom, and then stop being a couple. And in that time, one thing we almost never saw was Nick and Jess actually being a couple.

It's not because there wasn't any narrative juice in a Nick/Jess pairing. Their relationship could have been the story of Jess gradually dragging Nick in the direction of becoming a put-together human being. It could have been the story of the tension between a bright-eyed optimist and a schlumpy underachiever. It was neither, because the writers don't seem interested in picking a lane and seeing where it leads. Instead, they constantly fidget from one to another, always at the last second and always with almost immediate regret at not having made a different choice.

New Girl can still be fairly reliably funny. The Coach/Schmidt battle-threat scene in "Mars Landing" was a gem, especially Max Greenfield's delivery of the line, "Once again, Schmidt has found himself in a position where he is INFURIATED!" It's a show with these great, weird comic actors playing these great, weird characters with these great, weird relationships. But time after time, the show demonstrates that it doesn't have the slightest idea how to use any of them.

The book is full of these small horrors, like her description of the air in the shearing shed as "thick like soup, flies bloating about in it." That "bloating" perches grotesquely at the intersection of "bloated" and "floating," calling up rot, drowned things.

Larger horrors, too, prowl the edges of the narrative, and are revealed gradually and often obliquely — Jake's life as a prostitute, her effective enslavement on the remote farm of an old man who may or may not have murdered his wife. Jake's betrayal, again and again, by the people in her life, and the heinous, unforgivable sin she committed as a teenager that turned her into a person without a home.

A Sheep Killer Is On The Loose In 'All the Birds, Singing'

Haiti has struggled to rebuild since a devastating earthquake more than four years ago. Most of the population lives on less than $2 a day and there are few open jobs for the millions of unemployed.

But there's a bright spot: The Western Hemisphere's poorest country is getting into the high-tech race thanks to Surtab, a Port-au-Prince-based company that makes Android tablets.

"Last month we [produced] 2,500. This month, as soon as we get components, we're now going to have a run rate of about 3,000-3,500," says Maarten Boute, Surtab's CEO. "So we're gradually ramping up."

Before the tablet business, the Belgian-born and Kenyan-raised Boute headed up Haiti's largest mobile company, Digicel. He says the combination of a booming population and the country's decent 3G network make Haiti a prime market.

"It wouldn't make sense in the smaller Caribbean islands, where your local market is not that big and where your diaspora is not that big either. One of our key next growth factors is that we'll start exporting from Haiti, fulfilled ... directly in Haiti ... to the diaspora," Boute says. "A lot of demand has come from there because people want to show that 'Hey, Haiti can do this.' "

All Tech Considered

How One App Might Be A Step Toward Internet Everywhere

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR's longtime China correspondent, says the country's government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim's forthcoming book, The People's Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying.

i i

Haiti has struggled to rebuild since a devastating earthquake more than four years ago. Most of the population lives on less than $2 a day and there are few open jobs for the millions of unemployed.

But there's a bright spot: The Western Hemisphere's poorest country is getting into the high-tech race thanks to Surtab, a Port-au-Prince-based company that makes Android tablets.

"Last month we [produced] 2,500. This month, as soon as we get components, we're now going to have a run rate of about 3,000-3,500," says Maarten Boute, Surtab's CEO. "So we're gradually ramping up."

Before the tablet business, the Belgian-born and Kenyan-raised Boute headed up Haiti's largest mobile company, Digicel. He says the combination of a booming population and the country's decent 3G network make Haiti a prime market.

"It wouldn't make sense in the smaller Caribbean islands, where your local market is not that big and where your diaspora is not that big either. One of our key next growth factors is that we'll start exporting from Haiti, fulfilled ... directly in Haiti ... to the diaspora," Boute says. "A lot of demand has come from there because people want to show that 'Hey, Haiti can do this.' "

All Tech Considered

How One App Might Be A Step Toward Internet Everywhere

The Library, a new play at New York's Public Theater, tackles an uncomfortable contemporary topic head on: it looks at the aftermath of a school shooting and peers into the shattered lives of the survivors, and the stories they tell. The play is written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, who've collaborated on three films; most recently, the thriller, Side Effects.

And even before the play begins, Soderbergh and Burns make the audience uneasy. When you enter the theater, a young woman in a hospital gown lies center stage on what could be a table or a bed or a slab in the morgue, Burns says. "People start having to invent a story, you know, which is: is she alive? Is she not alive? And so they're already, before we've said anything, experiencing what the play is about, which is, you know, you start assembling facts and truths into stories that support your belief set and allow you to keep going."

Once the play starts, the audience discovers that the young woman onstage is a high school sophomore named Caitlin Gabriel, and, although she's survived a violent massacre, one of the other survivors has gone on TV and accused her of telling the gunman where several victims were hiding. 17-year-old film actress Chle Grace Moretz is making her stage debut as Caitlin. "Caitlin ... wakes up out of her induced coma, basically, and she finds out right then and there that not only is her best friend that she was laying beside dead, but that she's now being accused of being an accomplice to the murder of six children and one faculty member," Moretz says.

Related NPR Content

Around the Nation

For Sandy Hook Killer's Father, Tragedy Outweighs Love For His Son

On Day 38, the latest developments in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 come from the surface of the Indian Ocean and more than 2 miles beneath on the sea floor.

— Search Goes Below. "Underwater vehicle Bluefin-21 deployed to find plane's wreckage." (The Sydney Morning Herald)

"Searchers are about to send an 'autonomous underwater vehicle' four kilometers underwater to look for the wreckage of flight MH370 on the sea floor," the Morning Herald writes. That vehicle will start mapping the sea floor in the area, about 1,400 miles northwest of Perth, Australia. It's there that "pings," which might have been coming from the jet's black boxes, were detected a week or so ago.

The Bluefin is a U.S. Navy autonomous underwater vehicle that is on loan to the multinational search effort. It's hoped that if wreckage from Flight 370 is lying on the sea floor, the Bluefin's mapping will spot it.

— Oil Slick To Be Analyzed. "Investigators have collected samples from an oil slick discovered in the search area." (Los Angeles Times)

"Searchers will work to send the oil slick sample, collected Sunday evening, to a laboratory on shore for analysis," the Times reports. According to retired Australian air chief marshal Angus Houston: "We don't think it's from the ships."

Background

The jet, with 239 passengers and crew on board, was about one hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early morning hours of March 8 (local time) when it was last heard from. Flight 370 was headed north over the Gulf of Thailand as it approached Vietnamese airspace.

Investigators believe the plane turned west, flew back over the Malay Peninsula, then out over the Indian Ocean before turning south toward Australia. They're basing those conclusions largely on data collected by a satellite system that received some information from the aircraft. The critical question — why did it turn? — remains unanswered.

An automated pot-selling machine was unveiled at an event held at an Avon, Colo., restaurant Saturday, promising a potential new era of selling marijuana and pot-infused snacks from vending machines directly to customers.

Its creators say the machine, called the ZaZZZ, uses biometrics to verify a customer's age. The machine is climate-controlled to keep its product fresh.

You may be picturing a vending machine on a sidewalk, ready to dispense pot brownies to anyone with correct change. That's not quite what backers of the machine have in mind. For now, at least, the ZaZZZ is aimed for use only by medical marijuana patients. And it'll be in licensed stores, where it will serve a purpose like that of an automated checkout line at a grocery, they say.

Check out the official unveiling today @MontanasAvon! Thanks Liz for the pics ^_^ #zazzz pic.twitter.com/rp5FXAdtvG

— Herbal Elements (@HerbalColorado) April 12, 2014

As far as looks go, Washington turned in a dazzling performance as host city for this past week's meetings at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Cherry blossoms peaked, tulips popped, and the air carried the sweet fragrance of hyacinths.

But politics-wise, Washington let down its global guests. They came begging Congress to approve a package of IMF reforms, but are leaving Sunday with nothing.

"We are all very disappointed by the ongoing failure to bring these reforms to conclusion," Australia's Treasurer Joe Hockey told reporters.

The week-long meetings of finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world conclude on Sunday. The global leaders have taken every opportunity to express their frustrations with the U.S. failure to ratify the 2010 agreement to reform the IMF.

On Saturday, they suggested the IMF would turn to other options if Congress doesn't act by year's end. Without going into specifics, Sinapore's finance minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that figuring out a way to enact IMF reforms without Congress' approval would be possible, though less desirable.

Such a move, coming early in 2015, would reduce American influence in the global economy, he said. That outcome would cause a "a disruption in the multilateral system" and leave the world less safe, he added. Given that outlook, he said he still believes Congress will act before year's end.

More than 130 of the 188 member countries already have approved the proposed changes. But the United States is the IMF's most powerful member, and its sign-off is needed to move forward. The reforms would give a bigger voice to emerging markets, such as China and Brazil.

President Obama vigorously supports the adjustments. At the IMF gathering, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew called the IMF "indispensable" and said the administration "will continue to work with Congress to get legislation passed this year."

But Republicans have blocked implementation because they are worried the changes would reduce U.S. influence at the IMF, and object to helping pay for the changes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of implementation at roughly $315 million.

"Many Americans question the wisdom of supporting the IMF and other multilateral financial institutions that take their hard-earned dollars and use them to bail out other countries," House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling said in December during a hearing.

In their official communiqu, global finance ministers said they were "deeply disappointed" by congressional inaction.

The IMF's purpose is to lend money and provide guidance to promote global economic growth. In fact, it has set the ambitious goal of increasing the global economy by $2 trillion over the next five years.

At Saturday's press briefing, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde expressed optimism about growth, noting that even in very depressed countries such as Greece, economists are seeing signs of life. "My hope is that confidence is coming back," she said.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the IMF has loaned billions to troubled countries, such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland, to help stabilize those government and markets.

Now the IMF is playing a crucial role again as it puts the finishing touches on a bailout package worth up to $18 billion to help Ukraine. Lagarde said the deal should be completed by the end of April.

Work on the package was being done even as tensions were rising between Ukraine and Russia. On Sunday, a Ukraine's interim government reported one security officer killed in a clash in the eastern city of Slovyansk.

Russia has alienated itself from Western countries by annexing Ukraine's Crimean peninsula. In addition, it is raising natural gas prices for Ukrainians and saying it wants Kiev to make good on billions in unpaid gas bills.