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

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

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

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

Time For Change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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