Chuck used to sell marijuana in California. But the legalization of medical marijuana in the state meant he was suddenly competing against hundreds of marijuana dispensaries. So he moved to New York, where marijuana is still 100 percent illegal. Since making the move, he says, he's quadrupled his income. (For the record: His name isn't really Chuck.)
Two Oregon counties have reportedly rejected property tax increases that would have funded law enforcement and public safety services. The counties once received federal timber subsidies, but those days are over — and now they're scrambling to pay for essential services.
Swedish firemen extinguish a burning car Tuesday after youths rioted for a third night in a row in the suburbs of Stockholm. The unrest began after police said they shot dead a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in an immigrant neighborhood.
Sweden is one of the wealthiest, most stable and smoothly running countries in the world.
Which would explain why the country's 9.5 million residents may be shocked by the events of the past few days.
For the past three nights, hundreds of youths have been rampaging through parts of the capital, Stockholm, torching cars, setting fires, and throwing rocks at police and fire trucks.
A male sergeant at West Point has been accused of secretly videotaping at least a dozen female cadets, sometimes when they were showering, The New York Times reports.
Gen. John F. Campbell, the army's vice chief of staff, tells the Times that "once notified of the violation, a full investigation was launched, followed by swift action to correct the problem."
Fungi (cyan) surround a human hair within the skin. A study in the journal Nature shows the population of fungi on human skin is more diverse that previously thought.
Credit Alex Valm, Ph.D.
Bacteria (magenta) and fungi (cyan) on a human hair (yellow).
Scientists have completed an unusual survey: a census of the fungi that inhabit different places on our skin. It's part of a big scientific push to better understand the microbes that live in and on our bodies.
"This is the first study of our fungi, which are yeast and other molds that live on the human body," says Julie Segre, of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the survey.
The video for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's newly released song starts by re-creating the conditions of his captivity during the 81 days he was held in police detention in 2011, and later dissolves into a dystopian nightmare.
Credit Louisa Lim / NPR
Ai monitors the reaction to his new song on Twitter on Wednesday, the day the song was released.
Now we'd like to turn to a story that more than five months later is still painful. In the aftermath of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School last December, the Newtown, Connecticut community had many tough decisions to make. One of them was just what should happen to the elementary school where 26 people were killed.
Former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus helped shape the first draft of "talking points" about the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks, according to emails released by the White House and analyzed by The Washington Post.
Former CIA Director David Petraeus is under renewed scrutiny over the role he played in creating the discredited "talking points" about the attack that killed four Americans last year in Benghazi, Libya. The Washington Post has a front-page story Wednesday that suggests Petraeus sought to shape the resulting memo to favor his agency.
Debris litters a park adjacent to a neighborhood that was destroyed by Monday's tornado in Moore.
Credit Rick Wilking / Reuters/Landov
Volunteers form a chain as they retrieve clothing and other household items at a home destroyed by a tornado, across the street from Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on Wednesday.
Credit Adrees Latif / Reuters/Landov
A resident walks past a fallen roof after salvaging belongings from her home in Moore. The National Weather Service said Monday's tornado produced winds in excess of 200 mph, making it a top-of-the-scale EF5.
Credit Adrees Latif / Reuters/Landov
A sign reads "God Bless Moore" as workers make repairs to Warren Theatre after the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore was devastated by a tornado. The massive tornado on Monday afternoon flattened entire blocks of the town, killed at least 24 people and injured about 240.
Credit Rick Wilking / Reuters/Landov
Jon Booth carries debris from his mother's tornado-destroyed home across the street from Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore.
Credit Ed Zurga / EPA/Landov
Pastor Roger Murphy unloads a truck full of goods donated by Caliber Collison of Fort Worth, Texas at OKC Faith Church in Oklahoma City. The goods will be delivered to Feed the Children to be distribute to help the Moore, Oklahoma tornado victims.
Credit Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images
Electric company employees work to restore power in a tornado devastated neighborhood on in Moore. As rescue efforts in Oklahoma wound down, residents turned to the daunting task of rebuilding a US heartland community shattered by a vast tornado that killed at least 24 people.
Credit Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images
Tornado victim Todd (who only gave one name) looks through a pile of clothing at a road side relief camp in Moore. The twister, two miles across, flattened block after block of homes as it struck mid-afternoon on Monday, hurling cars through the air, downing power lines and setting off localized fires in a 45-minute rampage.
Credit Charlie Riedel / AP
Susan Kates salvages items from a friend's tornado-ravaged home on Wednesday in Moore, Okla. Cleanup continues two days after a huge tornado roared through the Oklahoma City suburb, flattening a wide swath of homes and businesses.
Credit Rick Wilking / Reuters/Landov
Volunteers form a chain as they retrieve clothing and other household items at a home destroyed by a tornado, across the street from Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on Wednesday.
The powerful tornado flattened entire blocks in the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore. Early Wednesday, the death toll remained at 24, with scores more people injured and displaced.
As Moore, Oklahoma continues to recover after this week's deadly tornado, survivors of the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado are marking the second anniversary of that disaster today. Host Michel Martin discusses Joplin's recovery, and what lessons it might hold for Oklahoma, with Joplin Mayor Melodee Colbert Kean and school superintendent C.J. Huff.
I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Today, as you would expect, we are continuing to follow events in Moore, Oklahoma, where residents are recovering from the impact of a deadly tornado. We decided to call on leaders from Joplin, Missouri. Two years ago today that town was also hit. So we thought this would be a good time to check in on Joplin's recovery and see if there are any lessons Joplin residents can offer their neighbors.
Luke Tanner, 7, gets vaccinated for measles at a clinic near Swansea, Wales, in April. Wales is at the center of a measles outbreak that has been linked to one death.
Great Britain is in the midst of a measles epidemic, one that public health officials say is the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children after a safety scare that was later proved to be fraudulent.
More than 1,200 people have come down with measles so far this year, following nearly 2,000 cases in 2012. Many of the cases have been in Wales.
In the nearly impenetrable language that comes with his job, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that even though the economy is doing better, the central bank needs to keep giving it a boost.
This illustration from 1846 shows a starving boy and girl raking the ground for potatoes during the Irish Potato Famine, which began in the 1840s.
Credit Marco Thines/Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Plant pathologists sequenced the genome of 19th century potato specimens like this one from London's Kew Gardens herbarium, collected during the height of the Irish famine in 1847.
Credit Wikimedia Commons
The funguslike organism Phytophthora infestans causes potato leaves to decay and tubers to rot.
An international group of plant pathologists has solved a historical mystery behind Ireland's Great Famine.
Sure, scientists have known for a while that a funguslike organism called Phytophthora infestans was responsible for the potato blight that plagued Ireland starting in the 1840s. But there are many different strains of the pathogen that cause the disease, and scientists have finally discovered the one that triggered the Great Famine.
Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner as she was sworn in at a hearing held Wednesday by the House Committee On Oversight & Government Reform.
The future of parking has been showcased in Fort Lauderdale, Fla, this week at the International Parking Institute's annual conference. The conversation has been about helping drivers get in and out of spaces as conveniently as possible.
The Boy Scouts of America votes in Texas this week on whether to change its century old membership policy. The proposal is to open up the scouts to allow gay youth to join and continue to ban on adults who are gay. About 1,400 voting members will decide.
David Greene talks to Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin about the cleanup and recovery efforts in her state after Monday's tornado that devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore.
In Orlando, Fla., early Wednesday "an FBI agent was involved in a deadly shooting connected to the Boston Marathon bombing case," NBC News is reporting. A man who was being questioned by the agent is dead. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston and Carrie Johnson have also confirmed the news.
Just how firm the man's alleged connection to the marathon case is, though, remains unclear.
The next mayor of Los Angeles will be City Councilman Eric Garcetti.
In a race in which the two top contenders were both Democrats, the 42-year-old Garcetti has opened a 7- to 8-percentage-point lead over City Controller Wendy Greuel as Tuesday's votes are being counted.
On 'Morning Edition': David Schaper reports from Moore, Okla.
(Most recent update: 2:15 p.m. ET.)
The news Wednesday from Moore, Okla., much of which was destroyed by a massive tornado Monday, begins with word that officials doubt they will find any more survivors or bodies under the hundreds of homes, businesses and other buildings that were leveled.
Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. A drummer in Baltimore pulled off the interstate yesterday, out of gas. So he pulled his drum kit out of the trunk and sat up on the shoulder and played along with traffic. When a state trooper pulled up, drummer boy explained he was just biding his time until help arrived, practicing his chops. He got away without a ticket and with the gift of gas from the highway department. Rock on. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
At her desk in the study of her Philadelphia townhouse in 1967, Pearl Buck looks at a bound volume of the magazine Asia from 1925 that contained her first published work.
Well, our wings have been clipped by some listeners. Yesterday, we told you about how some scientists in Canada saw their research crops destroyed by geese. We used the term Canadian geese. Listeners like Frank Cohen said we got that wrong.
FRANK COHEN: They're not Canadian geese. They're Canada geese because they don't hold passports, as far as I know, and it's not a nationality. It's a species name
Here's some news for travelers. If you can't afford or don't want to pay the price for a hotel room, maybe you've used the cheap lodging site Airbnb. If so, you have to take New York City off your list. The popular website has suffered a major setback in court. A judge in New York ruled that an Airbnb user in Manhattan violated local laws when he rented a room to an out-of-towner.
Apple was criticized in a Senate committee hearing Tuesday for using complex accounting to minimize the corporate taxes it pays. One key piece of the company's tax strategy: It funnels lots of its profits through subsidiaries in Ireland.
Offering low corporate tax rates has been a fundamental part of Ireland's economic strategy for decades — a way to get foreign companies to set up operations in the country.
A worker chips away at Jerusalem stone, likely destined for a building facade somewhere in the world. Stone and marble is a big business in Palestinian towns near Bethlehem. Quarries are in Israeli-controlled areas, and access can be a challenge.
Credit Emily Harris/NPR
Rami El-Zogheir (right), general manager of Hebron's Golf & Horse Footwear, says he's ready to expand into other Arab markets. All he needs, he says, are assurances that the political situation will at least stay the same, if not improve.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry heads back to Israel and the West Bank on Thursday for more talks on restarting peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. When he was there last month, he walked away with at least one agreement — to improve the West Bank economy. Here's how he put it as he left Israel:
It's exactly the sort of futuristic thinking you'd expect from Google and NASA: Late last week, the organizations announced a partnership to build a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center.
If you have a savings account you probably already know this: Your money there is losing value to inflation. Yields are so low that returns are not even keeping up with the cost of living.
I've been watching some of my own savings dwindle. And that prompted me to take up a challenge: I'm taking $5,000 from personal savings and putting it to work. I'm not a financial whiz, pundit or any kind of guru.
