Focus on the big picture

PBS NewsHour

• 'The Information Diet': Should Americans Exercise More 'Conscious Consumption'?
  Clay Johnson, author of "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption", discusses with Hari Sreenivasan how abundant technology affects our health -- producing pulsing side effects such as "email apnea" or "reality dysmorphia." Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: Next, a different concept of health and nutrition in the age of digital technology. Hari Sreenivasan has our book conversation. HARI SREENIVASAN: Information has become so abundant and so cheap that, like food, many of us consume too much of it. And what we consume isn't always the best around. In "The Information Diet," author Clay Johnson lays out the case for conscious consumption. So, Clay, first, lay out what the problem is, and what are some signs that we are unconsciously consuming information? CLAY JOHNSON, author: Well, the problem is that we have this idea that it is the information's fault. So call it information overload. But that doesn't really make sense. It's sort of like saying we are suffering from obesity and therefore we're suffering from food overload. It's like blaming the chicken for our obesity problems. And there is one victim of our mass consumption of food. It is certainly the chicken who is giving its life so that we can eat. And I think the same thing is happening with information. We're suffering from information malnutrition or information overconsumption, not information overload. And it has all kinds of really physiological and psychological effects on us. Like, one thing that is discussed in "The Information Diet" is this concept of email apnea. When we get emails, our tendency is to hold our breath, is to take a deep breath or even to just take a really shallow breath. And that has all kinds of different effects on our autonomic nervous system and it can really affect your health. HARI SREENIVASAN: So each time we hear a tiny little ding that says there is an email in-box, something is physiologically happening to us? CLAY JOHNSON: Yes. HARI SREENIVASAN: And there's a neurochemical? What is it, dopamine? CLAY JOHNSON: Well, all kinds of neurotransmitters fire off. One thing I did in my book was I got a little device that checks my heart rate and my breath rate and hooked it up to myself for a day and asked my friends to send me text messages randomly, right, throughout the day. And I found that it would increase my heart rate by 15 percent whenever I heard my iPhone ding at me. And I'm totally -- you don't know my friends but I'm totally uncomfortable with having my friends being able to increase my heart rate like that. HARI SREENIVASAN: And you talk a little bit about the psychological and the social consequences, that we have a tendency to get trapped in our own bubbles and our filters sort of fail us. CLAY JOHNSON: Right. It's important to realize that no matter what crazy thought that enters your head, there's now a minor media outlet out there willing to tell you that you are right. And who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they are right? And so now, whenever we feel uncomfortable, we can sort of go on Google or go and turn on our television set and tune in to someone who is willing to affirm our beliefs. And we get trapped in the sort of reality dysmorphia, this idea that we can just view what it is that we want to see in the world without that actually being attached to reality. And that's really troubling for the electorate. HARI SREENIVASAN: So part of your book reads leak a how-to manual and you have got a credo there says, "Consume deliberately, take information over affirmation." How do we do that? CLAY JOHNSON: Well, the first thing is to sort of be really conscious about your information consumption. So I use a service called RescueTime.com. And what that does is it monitors me on my computer and takes note of what Web sites I look at. And then I look at that and just reflect. And I go, is this adding value to my life? Is this information that I'm consuming actional and relevant to me? I find that if you are looking at a lot of news that you find yourself nodding your head to a lot, then maybe it's time to, you know, insert some diversity into your information diet. The second thing is to go local, really pay attention to local news before the national and the global stuff. And by local, I don't just mean, you know, what is happening in your city. I mean what is happening in your neighborhood and what is happening in your house. I think it's vital for everyone to pay more attention to what is happening with their family than what is happening with Snooki. (LAUGHTER) CLAY JOHNSON: And I think the other thing to realize is that your clicks have consequences. Your information consumption habits are consequential not just to yourself, but to other people. When you're reading an article online, you're not just reading that article. You're voting for it. And you're telling an editor to write more stuff like that. And so whenever you are consuming information, you're actually affecting the information diet of someone else. HARI SREENIVASAN: Okay. And you also say go for source information, not packaged information, kind of keeping in the parallel with food. So there are reams of data that the government, for example, publishes. But I don't have the literacy to understand that. How do we get over that hurdle? CLAY JOHNSON: Well, I think one thing is that our definition of literacy is changing and that we have got to really understand that digital literacy is not just the future of sort of computers and technology. It's the function of -- it's the future of literacy itself, just as our definition of literacy has always changed throughout all of human history. And the second thing is, I think this getting closer to source material is tied very much to the local stuff. So if you can stay with a mostly local news diet, not entirely local news -- of course, it's important to get national and world news in your information diet. But if you start consuming a lot of local news first, then that's, of course, easier to get to, it's more easily verifiable. If a house burns down in your neighborhood, you can drive over and see that the house burned down. If there is local issues, local political issues happening, you can call your state representative and meet with them and talk to them about it, which is not something that you can do at the national and federal level. HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, the cover of your book looks like those nutrition labels that we see on food. Why is it that we know more about what goes in our stomachs than what goes in our minds? CLAY JOHNSON: Well, neuroscience is a lot harder. But there is a whole field of biology that is dedicated to the nutritional sciences. And I suspect that they don't have all the answers either. Keep in mind there were 900 diet books published the first half of this year -- or first half of last year. And so that means that we don't exactly knows what's going on in either field. But I would say that "The Information Diet" is really the first book of its kind that talks about these issues from a health problem, rather than from a sort of productivity problem. And the science isn't all there yet either. But we're going to get there. HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, the book is called "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption." Clay Johnson, thanks so much for joining us. CLAY JOHNSON: It was a pleasure.
• Shields and Brooks on Americans Elect Folding, Preakness Predictions
  In this week's Doubleheader, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks and NewsHour's Christina Bellantoni discuss the end of two campaigns. Watch Video In this week's Doubleheader, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the end of two campaigns. For our sport of politics section, we talked about Texas Rep. Ron Paul's strategic shift -- relaying from presidential primaries to amassing delegates . Will he get a speaking slot at the convention? Mark and David aren't so sure. Also up for debate: the Americans Elect effort calling it quits . In our politics of sport section, David showed us his iPhone shot of commencement ceremonies at Yankee Stadium, but confessed he stayed true to form and wore his Mets cap. We also took turns predicting the outcome of this weekend's Preakness Stakes race in Baltimore. The Doubleheader is on hiatus next week, but tune in June 1 so we can see if Mark and I were right to bet on Daddy Nose Best. Katelyn Polantz shot and edited this video. Please subscribe to the Morning Line and follow Christina on Twitter .
• In Trayvon Martin's Case Documents, 'No Obvious Slam Dunk'
  Prosecutors released this week more than 200 pages of photos, eyewitness accounts and investigative reports in the case of Trayvon Martin's killing in Florida. The Washington Post's Sari Horwitz tells Margaret Warner that the documents bolster neither the prosecution nor the defense's case. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: Now, an update on the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida. His death sparked a national debate on stand your ground laws. Yesterday, prosecutors released more than 200 pages of photos, eyewitness accounts, investigative reports and the autopsy stemming from that February night when neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot an unarmed teen. The documents are accessible online. Last month, a special prosecutor appointed by Florida's governor charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. His trial isn't expected to begin until next year. Here to help us sort through the documents and their potential impact on the defense and the prosecution is Sari Horwitz, justice reporter for The Washington Post. And, Sari, thank you for joining us. So big picture here, this is really a treasure trove of documents and tapes. How much does it flesh out what happened that night? SARI HORWITZ, The Washington Post: Well, it's interesting, Margaret. There are a lot of new details in this voluminous amount of materials that -- of course we love these open record laws in Florida, which is how we were able to get this, by filing a Freedom of Information Act. And we were able to get these 200 documents and video and audio and crime scene reports. And there are a lot of new details. For example, we saw the ballistics report that shows us exactly where Trayvon Martin was shot, the left part of his chest. We find out where the bullet went, through his heart, through his lung. It never left his body. We found out that there was close contact, that it was shot at very close range. It was like a contact shot. There were a lot of details in the medical reports that show us that this was sort of an intimate hand-to-hand struggle. There was -- from DNA, we can see Trayvon's blood on George Zimmerman's shirt, George Zimmerman's blood on Trayvon's sweatshirt, blood under Trayvon's fingernails, all kinds of material that shows us that this was a real struggle and a fight. And there were - there's video and there's photos that show that George Zimmerman was, indeed, injured. There are lacerations to the back of his head. He had a bloody nose. And Trayvon, we know from the autopsy report, has an injury on one of his fingers. So lots of new details in the reports. But I would add that there is no obvious smoking gun, no obvious slam-dunk document that completely bolstered George Zimmerman's account that he was shooting Trayvon in self-defense or that bolsters the state's account for charging George Zimmerman with second-degree murder. MARGARET WARNER: So then there were also a lot of eyewitness accounts, that is, the eyewitness accounts that the police and the investigators took. What did those add up to? Did that help bring clarity to what happened between the two of them? SARI HORWITZ: You know, Margaret, as in many of these criminal cases, eyewitnesses see different things, they hear different things. So in this case, you have one man that says he saw a black man on top of a white man, beating him up. And he describes the white man, what he's wearing, a red jacket, which would be George Zimmerman. But then you have a woman who is standing in her house and looks out her window and hears, she says, a boy screaming, so, you know, two different accounts. One person saw one man chasing another, so different accounts. It was dark, it was raining. The other thing you have is a 911 recording that recorded the screams outside. A woman called during the fight and you get the screams on tape. Trayvon's mother says that is definitely Trayvon screaming for his life. George Zimmerman's parents say, no, that's absolutely George Zimmerman. The state prosecutor, special prosecutor Angela Corey, brought in the FBI. They did an analysis which was inconclusive. They said the tape isn't good enough for them to make a, to have come to a conclusion. So what this leaves us with, it really sums up the case, is a lot of uncertainty. It shows the difficulty in bringing closure and certainty to this very highly charged case. MARGARET WARNER: And so, finally, briefly, what happens next in this highly charged case? Is there a hearing coming up? What's next? SARI HORWITZ: There is. George Zimmerman, as everyone knows, has pled not guilty to the second-degree murder charges. And he's in hiding. He's out on bail. The next hearing is scheduled for August 8. George Zimmerman's lawyer, Mark O'Mara, has the option over the next couple of months to ask for what is called a stand your ground hearing, where he goes before a judge and says, my client shot Mr. Martin in self-defense under Florida's stand your ground laws, which allow someone who fears for his life to use deadly force. If he convinces a judge of this, there would be a ruling from the judge and there could be no trial. If the judge is not persuaded, then we would go on to a trial phase, which could be another year. MARGARET WARNER: And is he -- has he been arraigned? SARI HORWITZ: There was an arraignment hearing, yes. The hearing coming up in August is - Aug. 8 -- is for planning purposes, really, a scheduling hearing. MARGARET WARNER: Well, a lot more to develop. Sari Horwitz, thank you so much. SARI HORWITZ: Thank you, Margaret.
• Shields, Brooks on Campaign Ads, JPMorgan Losses, Debt Ceiling Debate
  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the week's top political news including a recent Obama campaign video that tries to debunk Mitt Romney's job creation claims, JPMorgan Chase losses and the expected renewal of the debt ceiling debate. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: And now to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Welcome back. A few things bubbling under the surface of the campaign this week. I want to start with one, which was the focus on Mitt Romney and his experience at Bain Capital. Ads come out, competing narratives of that experience . Mark, why the focus on that? MARK SHIELDS: Well, you're Barack Obama, and the economy is the dominant issue, economy and jobs, and Mitt Romney has better scores on the economy than you do. So you have to try and discredit or disqualify him on his economy credentials. And the irony is you have got two candidates in this race, both of whom are running away that from their signal legislative achievements of their career, health care. (LAUGHTER) MARK SHIELDS: So, what you have got is Romney wants to talk about he's a turnaround specialist. And what -- the Obama campaign is saying, well, wait a minute, this isn't all about creating jobs. It's about creating profit. Sometimes creating profit means losing jobs. JEFFREY BROWN: So they focused on this Kansas City steel company. MARK SHIELDS: They want to establish that this wasn't just an economic -- without some pain and without some price. JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see in the focus on Bain Capital? DAVID BROOKS: It was pretty similar to the ads Ted Kennedy ran against Romney where they got the unemployed people and said this guy's a vampire, he destroyed our company. I personally think the ads are 80 percent unfair. This was a company. . . JEFFREY BROWN: The Obama ad. DAVID BROOKS: The Obama ad against the Bain activity and this steel company are mostly unfair. This was a company that was on the way down. They had no other buyer. Bain comes in, buys the money -- buys the company, puts in $100 million. They hang to it for eight years, so it is not like they are just dumping it, and then the thing ends up folding anyway. And so I think it was a legitimate business transition, an attempt to make a success. The 20 percent that's accurate is that they did load it with a bunch of debt. And Bain -- even though the company went down, Bain did okay. And so that part, they are right about. But it gets into a larger argument about creative destruction, that we have had this. . . JEFFREY BROWN: And what capitalism is, right? DAVID BROOKS: Really a ruthless pruning on the part -- especially pats of the economy that are globally competitive, manufacturing, high-tech. And it's involved tremendous productivity gains, but also tremendous layoffs. And so it's perfectly legitimate for to us have a debate about that, in part, I think because Mitt Romney and a lot of Republicans see that churning as the model for the whole economy. And so that's a legitimate thing to talk about. JEFFREY BROWN: That a big debate about what capitalism is, right, but how does it work politically? MARK SHIELDS: But it is one that Mitt Romney has chosen not to make. Mitt Romney has sold us about Staples, a success. He helped this company. And Sports Authority and the jobs, 100,000 jobs. If you are going to say I have created 100,000 jobs , I mean, the people who got hurt were the workers. I mean, the officers didn't. The officers of the company didn't. And Bain didn't. So, I mean, this reflects a value. I mean, is it going to be decisive? No. But if you are the president of the United States and the economy is the top issue, and you are running behind, you better make sure that the guy on the other side doesn't appear as a just totally faultless tribune of this position. JEFFREY BROWN: Now, speaking of the nature of capitalism, another thing we learned this week is JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank, loses at least $2 billion and now it's probably more like $5 billion, right? Brings up all the focus on did the banks not learn a thing from the financial crisis and did regulation do anything and is more needed? DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think regulation is more needed. I think parts of regulation are more needed, but not to regulate failure. Companies are allowed to fail. People are allowed to be stupid. And they lost $2 billion or $5 billion. That's being stupid. They pay the price, the head of the investment strategy out. And that's the way capitalism is supposed to work. That's how you chase in companies. Where we have a public interest -- the idea of getting regulators involved and telling them, no, you can't make that hedge, you can't make that bet, you can't make that investment, that seems to me a recipe for disaster. Where we do have a public interest is making sure when people are stupid, they don't bring down the whole system. And so making sure the capital requirements are high enough, that seems to me perfectly legitimate. But regulating within companies, and what bets they can do and hedges and upping the regulation in that sense seems to me completely wrong. JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see, Mark? MARK SHIELDS: I disagree. I mean once you've got these banks that are insured by the public, as they are, and the Volcker rule, which is very straightforward, endorsed by five secretaries of the treasury, which says with these deposits, you can't get into speculative enterprises, and expect that you are going to be bailed out. And I think there's an overwhelming public interest here. You know, I think Barney Frank had some legitimacy today by saying they're complaining about the cost of applying and complying with the Dodd-Frank law, the banks are, saying it's $400 million or $600 million, and they're talking about losing 10 times as much. And so I think there is a public interest. I stand in awe of the fact that none of these guys has walked into the bar of justice and what happened to this country, what they did to this country? JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you say there is a public interest. Is there public interest in this? Does it play as a political matter when something like this happens? DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think it's part of the big debate we're in the middle of. And Joe Biden, the vice president, gave a speech where he talked about finance capitalism. He emphasized we have got to get back to making things. And so it was the good capitalism where the guy is out with a hammer, and the bad capitalism, these cowboys running around with credit default swaps. JEFFREY BROWN: I was with Secretary Geithner yesterday in a Baltimore factory , and that was the emphasis, making things. MARK SHIELDS: Manufacturing. JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. DAVID BROOKS: And so I guess we're going to have this debate. I think it is a completely bogus distinction. JEFFREY BROWN: Why? DAVID BROOKS: How do factories get capital? They get them through the capital markets. Now, I'm not crazy with al the derivatives and credit default swaps. I'm certainly not crazy about the way people are compensated on Wall Street. But having the best capital market in the world is why we have a successful manufacturing sector. And the idea of separating the two seems to me economically illiterate. I understand politically why you want to do it, the wholesome guy with the hammer vs. those rich Wall Street guys. But it seems to me economically illiterate. Nonetheless, it's part of the big debate we're having about modern capitalism, which is a service sector. We have a service economy. This is the other problem with the Obama strategy. They talk about manufacturing. We have a strong manufacturing sector. It happens to be 10 percent of employment. We are a service economy, and we have to have a strategy for a service economy. MARK SHIELDS: I come back to the belief that we have to make something in this country. And are finally starting to make something. And I think that is important. In answer to your question, Jeffrey, about is it -- does it have political saliency, there is no question that President Obama's message about fairness, about playing by the same rules, about everybody having a fair shot plays far better as a message in these times and situations like this than does Mitt Romney's, which is sort of a back to the future, we need less regulation, less government, smaller involvement. And I think, in that sense, the advantage goes to Obama and the Democrats. JEFFREY BROWN: Okay, another event this week is the beginning bubbling up, dare I say it, of the debt ceiling debate again, the debate that got kicked down the road, right, last year. Was this, David, posturing or is there a real possibility of debating it during the campaign? DAVID BROOKS: Well, it was posturing. This is Boehner saying he was drawing a line in the sand, saying, no new tax, we're going to demand real spending cuts. But I think was really more mobilizing the base. What happens, as everybody probably knows, is after the election in December, they have what we call Taxmageddon, where all these tax cuts, that all ends, a lot of spending sequestration starts. We really have a bunch of things all happening at once. And it is a potential for a complete catastrophe because the whole system goes kablooey. And we are going to have to fix these things, deal with all these incredibly complicated issues at once. And the Republicans are saying, we are going to do fundamental tax reform. I happen to think they are right. Last time, it took two or three years. How are we going to do it in a couple of weeks? JEFFREY BROWN: Right. DAVID BROOKS: And so I think what they are going to end up doing is kicking the can down the road. JEFFREY BROWN: Again. DAVID BROOKS: Again. And then we will see how the election turns out. But right now, everybody is posturing to say this is what we stand for. We stand are for spending cuts, or, in the Democrats' case, we stand for keeping the middle-class tax cuts, but not the rich. JEFFREY BROWN: What do you think this was all about this week, raising it. . . MARK SHIELDS: I think it was all about Republican politics and I think it was incredibly stupid. John Boehner is a savvy politician, an able politician. I think Republicans are looking at election results. They see a Lugar go down in Indiana to Mourdock. They see Orrin Hatch, who has recreated himself as a new conservative in the contemporary mold, barely holding on. Deb Fischer upsets the Republicans and the conservative establishment in the Nebraska primary with Sarah Palin's endorsement. So they're looking over their shoulder. This is what got the Republicans in the problem they're in. Last August, and that deal, they've never recovered from it, as a negative. Interesting. David had a piece which you pointed out that in the contraception argument with health care, that the Democrats' support for President Obama had fallen by eight points. The bishops, Catholic bishops have become the Republicans' new best friend. So by raising this issue, the Paul Ryan budget, which cuts aid to the disabled, which cuts aid to immigrants' children, which cuts aid to the elderly, and to the -- those victims of abuse, the Catholic bishops came out and said, this violates the moral code. This is a violation of our belief in common ground and common good. And so they are alienating the Catholic bishops. I mean, it makes no sense, other than politically within the Republican Party. DAVID BROOKS: I do agree with that. The message plays within the Republican Party, 28 percent of the country. It doesn't play outside. And in places like California, where -- I mean Pennsylvania, where you have a lot of Catholics, they are really enjeoparding whatever little chance they had. JEFFREY BROWN: All right, just a couple minutes here, and I want to get to the last story. It's sort of a non-story story, right ? This is the group of Republican political operatives. And they propose an ad, an ad campaign, right, that would tie President Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as almost happened four years ago. And then it quickly gets disavowed, right, by Mitt Romney and others. What was that about? Does it tell us anything about the campaign? MARK SHIELDS: It tells us first of all about greed. I mean, this was a greedy proposal. It has no political saliency to it. The issue of Rev. Wright was litigated in 2008. President Obama gave the most popular and perhaps the most persuasive speech of his career in rebuttal to it. And in the past four years, people have seen him go to St. John's Church and other places and so forth. So in that sense, it is playing only to the conspiracy nuts and those who are convinced that he is either from Mars or Venus or Kenya. So it really made no sense. It particularly made no sense when Mr. Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, who was going to spend $10 million against President Obama while he is asking the people of Chicago to refinance the refurbishing the Wrigley Field, the home of the Cubs. This is a guy who just slit his own throat by doing this. DAVID BROOKS: And the campaigns are losing control of their message with all these different facts. MARK SHIELDS: Absolutely. DAVID BROOKS: And Romney, you can see how strongly he reacted. And Mark hinted at what is driving this. The consultants get paid by the amount of ads that are taken out by these rich guys. And so they have an incentive to try to pump it up in ridiculous ways, and this was an example of that. JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think we are going to see a lot more of that? DAVID BROOKS: I think it's going to be one of the stories of the campaign. JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Mark Shields, David Brooks, thanks, as always. MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.
• USAID Administrator: Food Security a 'Grand' But 'Achievable' Goal
  President Obama outlined Friday a private-public partnership to work on global poverty issues ahead of the Group of Eight summit in Camp David this weekend. Ray Suarez and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah discuss the initiative to lift millions out of poverty and hunger through farming partnerships. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: And we turn to a new plan to help hunger in sub-Saharan Africa. Suarez has that story. RAY SUAREZ: Food security, getting enough food to the world's poorest people, is on the agenda this weekend as President Obama meets with other world leaders at the G8 summit in Camp David. Across the African continent, food shortages drive instability, refugee flows, and armed conflict in places like Somalia, Kenya, Darfur, South Sudan and Ethiopia, among others. Today, President Obama outlined a private-public partnership to work on global poverty issues and discussed plans to include four African leaders at the G8 summit. The president called lifting millions out of poverty and hunger through farming a moral obligation for both governments and businesses. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Government cannot and shouldn't do this alone. This has to be all hands on deck. RAY SUAREZ: The head of this country's foreign aid agency, Dr. Rajiv Shah, unveiled the Agency for International Development's program to bring U.S. agribusiness and Africans together to improve food productivity. I talked with USAID Administrator Dr. Shah this afternoon. Dr. Shah, welcome back to the program. DR. RAJIV SHAH, administrator, United States Agency for International Development: Thank you. Thanks, Ray, for having me. RAY SUAREZ: We have already briefly described the overall project and its objectives. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about how we're going to accomplish that very grand goal, lifting 50 million people out of poverty in 10 years. DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, it's actually -- it's a grand goal, but it's an achievable goal. And we're going to accomplish it by bringing significant public sector investment, maintaining the commitments that President Obama and others have made over the last few years to reinvest in African agriculture and African agricultural institutions. And we're going to achieve that goal by bringing a whole host of exciting new partners to the table, private companies in Africa that are providing seeds to small-scale farmers, companies from India or Europe that have something to offer, improving small-scale agriculture in Africa, and American firms, firms we would recognize easily that are now committing themselves to make real businesslike investments for the purpose of making sure that a smallholder farmer, often a women, in sub-Saharan Africa can produce enough food to feed herself, feed her family, go to market, extract more value from market and move her whole community out of poverty. RAY SUAREZ: Right now, Africa is dealing with creeping deserts, less reliable rain, hotter and dryer climates. Are you sort of pushing a rock uphill with a project that leans so heavily on agriculture? DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, there's another part of this that is downhill, pushing the rock downhill. And that is that Africa has 60 percent of the world's remaining unused arable land. And in a world that needs to produce enough food, double food production in order to feed nine billion people by 2040, that land has got to come into production. Africa has some of the lowest yields on the planet, crop by crop. And we know and we have seen in western Kenya you can double or triple yields relatively quickly using all local solution solutions. And then what happens is millions of people don't need food aid during a famine or a drought. So this is a solvable problem. And there is as much of a downhill story as there is an uphill one. RAY SUAREZ: The Saudis and the Chinese seem to be well aware of the agricultural potential of Africa. Aren't they buying up a lot of land to produce food for their own people? DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, they are. That's why today, and what's happening in so novel in terms of making sure that we have private sector companies involved in making investments to improve African agriculture and poverty outcomes, but also that those companies are agreeing to make investments under some common principles of transparency and responsibility. Let's shine sunlight on what's happening so that everyone can see transparently where are the investments going? Who are they benefiting? How are they making sure that a young girl growing up in a rural household is getting access to nutrition so she can go to school and move on with her life in a productive way? And there is a lot of investment going in, but unfortunately not enough of it falls under these principles of transparency. And through this new initiative, more than 45 companies are making more than $3 billion of investment commitments and doing so under these principles of transparency and responsibility for the first time. RAY SUAREZ: You are going to roll out in Ghana, Tanzania and Ethiopia. There are more than four dozen countries in Africa. How did they get to the front of the line? Were there things they had to do first to be ready? DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, absolutely. We talked to hundreds of private sector partners. And we found that until countries really, seriously reformed access to land tenure for a small-scale farmer, so that women farmers can actually have title to their land and go to a bank and get a loan, or until they reformed the way they regulate their seed sector, so that small seed companies can start selling improved crop varieties to farmers and help them overcome drought or pest or disease, those are the types of reforms that are required for these companies to make investments. And we have started in those countries that are most eager to make those reforms. And they have come to Washington with real commitments. They have actually come with reform commitments, where there are dates set on when those reforms will take effect over the next 18 months. RAY SUAREZ: I want to look a little closer at Ethiopia, because unlike Ghana and Tanzania, the Democracy Index run by the Economist Intelligence Unit rates it as an authoritarian regime, rates it 118th among the 167 countries on the Earth in terms of freedom and transparency in government. It had a tough time getting born, modern Ethiopia. And there are human rights charges against the president. Why are they getting the pilot program? DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, you know, every year, the world rushes in with hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid to save and help Ethiopians who are hungry. And during last year's drought, that number went to more than $1 billion. And the reality is, you know, we just absolutely have to keep pushing for more transparency, more open governance, for democracy to take root, because we know that democracy and development go hand-in-hand. But we also have to make sure that we are insisting upon improved policies so that companies can invest, so that farmers can produce more food, and so that we can banish this image of starving Ethiopian children that, you know, does, in fact, call upon our moral values and forces us to react. By doing the work this way, we will help Ethiopia feed itself. We will help those children over time move out of poverty, and we're engaging in a deep and meaningful dialogue to promote democracy, as we do in so many other parts of the world. RAY SUAREZ: When you look at Africa, millions of people are working really hard every day to feed themselves, but there's so much to be done. There's bad roads for shipping crops regionally, bad facilities for holding on to food so it doesn't spoil by the time somebody gets a chance to eat it, bad ship facilities for getting cash crops, things that can be sold internationally, out of the country. Ethiopia doesn't even have a seaport anymore. How do you figure out what to do first? DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, this is a great question, because the reality is we need a lot of these things to happen simultaneously in order to unlock the value and potential of African agriculture, so it can feed itself and feed the world. And the reality is, that's happening. Now we have an Ethiopian commodity exchange that is helping to create a market alongside DuPont that today is making a commitment to invest real resources to reach 50,000 small-scale Ethiopian farmers with improved seed varieties that can help them and soil mapping data and other things that can help them improve their production. In southern Tanzania, we are seeing Yara, a fertilizer company, invest in redoing the port, the African Development Bank invest in building road infrastructure, partners like USAID investing in helping farmers upgrade their skills, and companies like Tanseed, a small Tanzanian seed company, committing $11 million to help get improved seed varieties to small-scale farmers, and to do it in often small packets, because if you are farming half an acre of land or an acre of land, you don't feed a big bag of seed. You need a small packet. And little innovations like that can go a long way at transforming the face of hunger and poverty. RAY SUAREZ: Dr. Shah, thanks for talking to us. DR. RAJIV SHAH: Thank you.
• News Wrap: Greece Uncertainty, Austerity Top Agenda at G-8 Summit
  In other news Friday, leaders of some of the world's largest economies began gathering at Camp David in Maryland for the G-8 summit. Also, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested Greece hold a referendum on staying in the eurozone, according to a spokesman for Greece's caretaker government. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio KWAME HOLMAN: Facebook's coming out did little to help Wall Street as a whole. The Dow Jones industrial average lost another 73 points to close at 12,369. The Nasdaq fell nearly 35 points to close at 2,778. For the week, the Dow lost 3.5 percent; the Nasdaq fell more than 5 percent. Leaders of the world's largest economies began gathering at Camp David in Maryland today for the Group of 8 summit. Dignitaries were met at Dulles Airport outside Washington before heading to the presidential retreat and the G-8 gathering. Uncertainty over Greece, the euro system, and austerity measures topped the agenda. Before leaving the White House, President Obama called for more emphasis on economic growth. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And we're looking forward to a fruitful discussion later this evening and tomorrow with the other G8 leaders about how we can manage a responsible approach to fiscal consolidation that is coupled with a strong growth agenda. KWAME HOLMAN: The G8 summit winds up tomorrow night. From there, most of the leaders will head to Chicago for a larger NATO summit. The political crisis in Greece took a new turn today. A spokesman for the caretaker government reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested Greece hold a referendum on staying in the euro system when it holds new elections in June. The German government later denied it, but Greek leaders complained of outside interference. Merkel has insisted on austerity measures in Greece as the price of a European bailout. In Syria, government troops stepped in again to break up mass Friday protests. Security forces fired tear gas and live ammunition in Aleppo to disperse thousands of people. There were similar rallies in other cities. Meanwhile, the military stepped up its shelling of Rastan. Thick plumes of smoke could be seen rising above that town in central Syria. In Damascus, the Norwegian commander of a U.N. observer mission urged both sides to stop the bloodshed. MAJ. GEN. ROBERT MOOD, head of U.N. Mission to Syria: No volume of observers can achieve a progressive drop and a permanent end to the violence if the commitment to give dialogue a chance is not genuine from all internal and external actors. KWAME HOLMAN: The U.N. estimated in March that more than 9,000 people have died in the Syrian uprising. Hundreds more have been killed since then. In Afghanistan, NATO announced two service members were killed in the eastern part of the country. That put this year's toll at 154. At least 100 of those were Americans. Meanwhile, the new French president stuck by his campaign pledge to withdraw French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Francois Hollande met with President Obama in Washington. He indicated some of the 3,300 French troops in Afghanistan might remain, but not in combat roles. The House passed a defense budget today worth $642 billion, defying a veto threat from President Obama. By adding $8 billion in spending, the bill violates the deficit-cutting deal the president and congressional Republicans agreed to last summer. Lawmakers also supported the administration's ability to detain terror suspects indefinitely without charge. That includes Americans captured on U.S. soil. Those are some of the day's major stories.
• Post IPO, What Are Facebook's Challenges Now?
  The public sale of Facebook shares on Friday didn't soar as some had expected. Margaret Warner talks to Arvind Bhatia of Sterne Agee and Rob Cox of Reuters' Breakingviews about what Facebook needs to do to keep its audience and advertisers. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: Facebook made its debut as a publicly traded company today, but investors didn't like the stock as much as many had expected. Traders also reported some technical problems with orders to buy and sell the stock. Still, it was a big day, as the initial public offering became the third largest on record. The widely anticipated stock offering finally got under way when Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from his company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. MARK ZUCKERBERG, founder, Facebook: In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You have done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of. And I cant wait to see what you guys all do going forward. (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) MARGARET WARNER: Shares in the social networking giant opened at $38. And in the first 30 seconds of trading alone, 82 million shares traded hands. But after hitting a high of $45, the stock ended up gaining just 23 cents over its opening price. That meant the company raised more than $16 billion from the IPO. MAN: It's Facebook. MAN: Facebook. MAN: Facebook. MAN: Facebook. WOMAN: Facebook. MARGARET WARNER: The event was heavily hyped for days, and today, it generated buzz on the street and on the air. WOMAN: This is expected to be huge. This IPO has hit the mainstream, as Cramer had mentioned, with kids even wanting to put in orders, and you can see that excitement here in Times Square. MARGARET WARNER: All this was a far cry from 2004, when Facebook was born in Zuckerberg's college dorm room at Harvard. ACTOR: People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? MARGARET WARNER: Zuckerberg's story, and the site's explosive growth, was dramatized in the 2010 Oscar-winning film "The Social Network." Two years later, the company has 900 million users worldwide and counting. After today, it's now valued at more than $100 billion, and Zuckerberg still will control about 60 percent of the voting shares. But he insisted today that going public will not change Facebook at its core. MARK ZUCKERBERG: Right now, this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here's the thing. Our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. MARGARET WARNER: Still, as Facebook enters the next phase of its life, some are asking if it can live up to the value the market put on it today. About 80 percent of its revenue currently comes from advertising. Yet just this week, General Motors canceled its $10 million ad budget for the site. The automaker said the ads weren't selling cars. Facebook also faces the challenge of adapting its advertising model to the growing mobile device market. For a closer look at all this, we turn to two people who have been tracking the company and today's developments. Arvind Bhatia is managing director and an equity manner with Sterne Agee Financial Services, a brokerage firm. And Rob Cox is U.S. editor of Reuters' Breakingviews, a financial news website. Welcome, gentlemen, to you both. Rob Cox, beginning with you, so what did you make of today's IPO? Did it fail to live up to the hype? ROB COX, Reuters Breakingviews: You know, it was the best and the worst of American capitalism writ large. I mean, you had $100 billion company go public at which none of the people who went public with it today actually made any money. If you bought the stock, you didn't make any money, right? But a hundred billion dollars of value was created. It had all of the hype. It had all of the sort of excitement that we have in capitalism. And remember, it's an incredible creation, 900 million people connected around the world. It's brought joy, tears, laughter, annoyances, all those things. But at the same time, it was sort of the ultimate deal of the 0.1 percent, the thousand or so people without got in before it went public and it had $100 billion valuation. It's extraordinary. MARGARET WARNER: Arvind Bhatia, What would you add to that, the best and the worst? Do you think it is a disappointment to the investors? ARVIND BHATIA, Sterne Agee Financial Services: Well, clearly, I think people are expecting a bigger increase in the stock price after the first day. Normally in things like this, investors expect 10, 15 percent increases day one. So, that didn't happen. But I want to put that in context a little bit. Keep if mind that over the last few weeks, the underwriters, which are the people who brought, helped the company come public, they were raising the price, the offering price of this deal. So that also caused some of the upside that we would have expected today to kind of go away. But I agree with Rob. Overall, I would still consider this as a big success for an eight-year-old company started in one person's dorm, again, a symbol of American capitalism, no doubt. MARGARET WARNER: And so, Rob Cox, as you said, this is more than $100 billion. Do Facebook's revenues -- I think that's something like a hundred times last year's earnings. Do Facebook's potential revenues justify that value? ROB COX: Well, look, nobody can take numbers -- and, I mean, there are tons of analysts who have come out and sort of reverse-engineered an argument for supporting the stock, so you can say we know it is $100 billion. Let's figure out a way to actually make a bold case for this. Let's look at the numbers. We can say it is going to be a slice of the advertising market and therefore it will look like this. It should have the kind of information that people will pay a ton of money for. It can be like a credit rating agency. There's a million ways to kind of try to come up with a number, a numerical valuation for this company. But at the end of the day, what people are betting on is that 28-year-old hoodie-clad kid, Mark Zuckerberg, coming up with a way to take the 900 million people that he's got connected, and all of the information that they have willingly given to him and find a way to make it work. And I think there's just -- a lot of people are talking about faith-book, right? There is faith in Mark Zuckerberg's ability to do that. And I think that is really the only way that people can justify paying $38 to $45 a share or anything for the next couple of years for this stock. MARGARET WARNER: So, Arvind Bhatia, this is really predicated on faith in the future? ARVIND BHATIA: It is. But I think there is history behind this. Eight years ago when Facebook was just starting, you had a company called Google go public. And at that point, they were disrupting the billions of dollars of advertising market. Currently, that is a $600 billion market, by the way. And they did that with search. And today that's happening with social. So I think people have something to look at as history and point to where things can go. Clearly, what Rob is saying, you know, about the number of people there on Facebook today, 900 million people, that we think will be a billion-and-a-half people. And that excludes China, where there is another half a billion people on the Internet today. You could assume some percentage of that people would come on Facebook if they are able to get in that country. MARGARET WARNER: Go ahead, but so what are Facebook's challenges in trying to live up to that? In other words, what do they have to do that they haven't done now? ARVIND BHATIA: Well, the biggest task, I think they have to first continue to make sure that the user experience, you know, is really strong, people want to come back and get value, they want to spend 15, 20 minutes a day. That, they have to continue. Then from there on, the number-one task there for Mark Zuckerberg is to keep that audience. Then Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, her job is to convert that audience into money. And the way they would do that is to continue to target the ads that advertisers put on Facebook in a very meaningful way, that, you know, the returns that advertisers get become bigger and bigger. So those are two things they have to do in the near and longer term. MARGARET WARNER: So, Rob Cox, back to you on the advertising. First of all, you had GM pull its advertising budget, upcoming one. What are the challenges for Facebook to grow this advertising and also on the mobile devices? ROB COX: Yes, I mean, I think those are the two, the big questions. And clearly -- certainly the mobile advertising issue was one that Facebook itself highlighted in the prospectus of the IPO as a potential risk factor. But looking at GM's decision, or to come out public and say that it was reducing its Facebook advertising is quite interesting, because it tells you that they don't feel that they're getting a satisfactory experience or results from that advertising, which means to Arvind's point that they need to go back, Facebook and Sheryl Sandberg, and they need to figure out, well, what can we do with user experience to make it more effective? And that is a very delicate balance, because as we al remember with MySpace, or as a few people might remember, actually, with MySpace, was the more intrusive the experience is, the less good the experience will be for the users and they will walk away. So it's quite a difficult balance. And at the same time, we're just talking that is really about the computer experience, you know. When we talk about things like mobile, it's a whole different game. And we are all moving much, much more aggressively than I think anyone would have thought a couple of years ago into using mobile devices to access Facebook and all other manner of websites and information. And there's no clear way to make and monetize that experience for advertisers. So these are, you know, twofold pincer movement that Facebook is going to have to face. MARGARET WARNER: And, Arvind, can you explain briefly though why is the Facebook model hard to apply to a mobile, a handheld mobile? ARVIND BHATIA: Well, think of it as, you know, the real estate on a mobile phone is very limited. So the opportunity is to show a lot of ads, therefore, is limited. But at the same time I think what we are forgetting is that mobile is another way that we are accessing Facebook or other websites. What Facebook's goal is to keep their website sticky. In other words, they want to you keep coming back, whichever way you want to access it. So I think that people will supplement their use of Facebook through mobile. It's not going to be either/or. And as long as that is happening, over time, I think Facebook and other companies will find a better and better way to show us ads that are relevant. They just started doing that in March. So the revenue they're getting from mobile today is zero. And so I would look at that as, yes, a near-term risk in terms of the transition, but long-term a huge opportunity that is untapped. About half a billion people are accessing Facebook through their mobile phones. And mobile phones are getting smarter. So that's how they will get better at it over time. MARGARET WARNER: All right, well, I have to leave it there. Arvind Bhatia and Rob Cox, thanks, both. ROB COX: Thank you. ARVIND BHATIA: Thank you.
• The Rise of Facebook
  Founded in 2005, Facebook's social network has changed our relationships with friends, family and co-workers, created a new playground for politics, and altered the rules for media, culture and advertising. This timeline chronicles the evolution of the social media giant. Founded in 2005, Facebook's social network has changed our relationships with friends, family and co-workers, created a new playground for politics, and altered the rules for media, culture and advertising. This timeline chronicles the evolution of the social media giant.
• Conversation: Kristen Dupard, 2012 Poetry Out Loud National Champion
  Jeffrey Brown talks to Kristen Dupard, the 2012 Poetry Out Loud National Champion. Kristen Dupard of Ridgeland, Miss., performs at the 2012 Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. Photo by James Kegley. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being one of the judges for the national finals of "Poetry Out Loud," a competition for high schools students from around the country who study, memorize and recite poems. It all begins in the schools and then on up to the state and, finally, the national levels. According to the sponsors, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation -- both, by the way, funders of the NewsHour's arts and poetry coverage -- some 365,000 students took part. The winner at the end of it all was 18-year-old high school senior Kristen Dupard from Ridgeland, Miss., who received a $20,000 award. I spoke to her earlier today by phone:
• Chronic Absenteeism -- Not a 'Casual Decision'
  There's an assumption that in order to do well in school, you have to be in school. But new data suggests that 5 to 7.5 million students, especially from low-income areas, are missing more than one month of school a year. While attendance remains somewhat consistent between third and fifth grade, chronic absenteeism climbs in middle school and peaks by the twelfth grade. (Courtesy Get Schooled/The Johns Hopkins University) There's an assumption that in order to do well in school, you have to be in school. But new data suggests that 5 to 7.5 million students, especially from low-income areas, are missing more than one month of school a year. The new report by the Johns Hopkins University's School of Education finds that on average, 10 to 15 percent of students in America are chronically absent from school. Currently, only six states across the country are measuring chronic absenteeism - Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island -- and each are doing it in different ways. Across Maryland's 58 elementary schools alone, more than 50 students missed more than one month of school and 250 students missed more than a month in 61 high schools during the 2010 to 2011 school year. Missing school isn't a "casual decision," reminds Marie Groark, the executive of the Get Schooled Foundation, which co-sponsored the report. For many students, going to school comes down to a tradeoff: attend class or take care of responsibilities at home. Inconsistent living situations due to homelessness, foster care, inability to pay rent or home foreclosures, also contribute to sporadic attendance. Students, especially young girls, are often obligated to care for younger siblings during school hours. "What often happens to young people is when they start missing school...first it can become a habit," Groark said. "You miss one day, two days and it's something that seems to start to spiral. Then you come back to school and you find yourself unable to keep up with the work." Interactive: Chart how chronic absenteeism adds up on Get Schooled's calculator Fixing the problem can be difficult, especially when the extent of chronic absenteeism is not well documented, if at all. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10% of school in a year, is not a statistic schools are required to report. Instead, schools watch daily attendance or truancy, which is necessary for federal accountability under No Child Left Behind. The problem, however, is daily attendance doesn't capture the whole picture: daily attendance measures how many total students are in school on a given day, whereas chronic absenteeism measures how many of the same students attend school across many days. In other words, "a school can have average daily attendance of 90 percent and still have 40 percent of its students chronically absent, because on different days, different students make up that 90 percent." Consequences of chronic absenteeism (Courtesy Get Schooled/The Johns Hopkins University) "The issue is understanding the scope of the problem and understanding the consequence. For policymakers, the call to action is doing a better job of monitoring the problem and parents must do a better job of getting their kids to school every day," Groark said. American Graduate is a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help local communities across America find solutions to address the dropout crisis. Follow @newshouramgrad
• Baby's Tumor Means Surgery Before Birth
  As a 7-month old fetus, Cami Santee's life was threatened by a large tumor growing from her lower body. To remove it, doctors had to operate before she was born, cutting away the growth while she still lay half inside her mother's womb. Editor's Note: As the nation marks National Women's Health Week, PBS NewsHour will share the stories of three women -- and their doctors -- who refused to allow a cancer diagnosis interfere with a successful pregnancy. These are their stories of hope, perseverance and, ultimately, success. Once a week, 2-1/2-year-old Cami Santee practices her walking in her grandfather's Bentleyville, Pa., carpet store, where there's lots of room for the tiny medical walker she needs for support. Before Cami was born, a huge tumor began growing from her lower body and injured her hips and internal organs. To save her life, doctors had to operate on Cami en utero, half her body still inside a special incision in her mother Tami Dobrinski's womb. Talking about it usually makes Dobrinski cry, but she says it's not because it makes her sad. "It's OK. It's a happy story," she said. "I never thought she wouldn't be here." Cami's tumor, called a sacrococcygeal teratoma, is just one example of an uncommon category of tumors and cancerous growths that can occur in unborn children -- a teratoma like hers occurs in only one in 35,000 infants. According to Cami's surgeon, Dr. Timothy Crombleholme, doctors don't fully understand what causes teratomas like hers to spontaneously form on fetuses. However, it may have something to do with their location. "We think that many of these tumors derive from stem cells," said Crombleholme. Fetuses have a concentration of stem cells on their hindquarters called Hensen's Node, which on a very small percentage of fetuses can evolve into a tumor like Cami's. "But we don't know why they occur in only some babies, or why some grow more than others," said Crombleholme, who is now surgeon-in-chief of the Colorado Institute for Maternal and Fetal Health. Once a fetus develops a tumor, it can grow very rapidly -- something else that doctors don't fully understand. "It's very likely that there's something about the fetal milieu that supports these tumors," said Crombleholme. Dobrinski and Cami's father Chad Santee found out about the tumor shortly after her first ultrasound. "We had the ultrasound. I got to listen to the baby's heartbeat, and we left. And like an hour later they called and said we needed to go to the hospital right away," said Dobrinski. Because of the large size of Cami's teratoma, Dobrinski's Pittsburgh doctors immediately advised her to terminate the pregnancy. The doctors were concerned because Cami's tumor was highly vascular, meaning that a great deal of the baby's blood was passing through the tumor. According to Dr. Bill Polzin, co-director of the Fetal Care Center of Cincinnati, such tumors are very delicate. "By the end of gestation, the tumor is like wet tissue paper: You can blow on it and it will rupture," Polzin said. If Cami's tumor ruptured under the stress of birth, it would put the baby in extreme danger. According to Crombleholme, a seven-month-old fetus might have a total blood supply equal to about a cup and a half of liquid. "If a person loses 20 percent of their blood supply, they can go into shock," said Crombleholme. "Two tablespoons of blood loss is a significant danger to these babies," Polzin said. "They can exsanguinate [bleed out] in under two minutes." However, despite the urging of the doctors, Dobrinski said that she never thought about terminating the pregnancy. "Even though they said that, I just never had a terrible feeling," she said. "We felt that if she was going to be here, she would make it," Santee said. Frustrated with their local doctors, Dobrinski, Santee and their families started researching treatments for Cami's condition. Eventually the couple connected with the Fetal Care Center of Cincinnati, where they met Crombleholme. Crombleholme said that hospitals that don't specialize in fetal care are not always familiar with all the possible treatments for rare conditions like Cami's. His solution -- one that is commonly used for large, highly vascular teratomas -- was to remove the tumor while she was still in the womb. According to Polzin, operations such as this are only done when the situation is dire because of the danger to both child and mother. Dobrinski faced the dangers of general anesthesia, infection and possible internal bleeding during the surgery, along with a more unique complication called mirror syndrome, which occurs when a fetus goes into heart failure during surgery. For reasons that doctors don't fully understand, this can cause the mother's body to respond by also going into heart failure, a potentially fatal situation. Though Crombleholme warned Dobrinski of the dangers, she said that she never thought of not going through with the surgery. "It just wasn't in my head not to do it," Dobrinski said. "I didn't think of it like that." When Cami was still two months away from full term, Crombleholme performed a procedure called ex utero intrapartum treatment, or EXIT. With Dobrinski heavily sedated, Crombleholme reached through a small hole cut into her uterus and pulled Cami's legs, lower body and the dangling tumor out of the womb. He left Cami's upper body inside the womb with the umbilical cord attached to help keep the infant alive. He then delicately cut away the tumor. Once the operation was finished, he completed Cami's delivery without any complications. "I love that guy," Dobrinski said of Crombleholme. Though the tumor removal was a success, it left its mark on Cami. Hip dysplasia keeps her from walking normally, and because of the way the tumor affected the growth of her kidneys and bladder, she needs a catheter every three hours. However, Cami's father said there's no sign of developmental delays and that he's confident that Cami will walk one day, though she may need leg braces to do so. "She's a genius in my mind," said Santee. Dobrinski said that during a recent physical therapy session, Cami's therapist took his hands off her leg braces. Cami stood for 46 seconds before she noticed no one was holding her up and fell down. "That's a new record," Dobrinski said. Photos courtesy of Tami Dobrinski. Sacrococcygeal teratoma illustration by artist Holly R. Fischer. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.
• History's Romance: Why Politics Past Beats Politics Present
  Is it just my imagination, or have politics and politicians grown smaller?I've been flirting with this conclusion after diving into two enjoyable presidential history books by night while covering 2012 politics by day. Is it just my imagination, or have politics and politicians grown smaller? I've been flirting with this conclusion after diving into two enjoyable presidential history books by night while covering 2012 politics by day. The books, Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power" and "The President's Club" by Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs, take us inside the West Wing in a way screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's fictional White House never could. Caro, in the fourth of what is scheduled to be a five-volume retelling of the operatic life and times of Lyndon B. Johnson, guides us through assassinations, missile crises and doomed wars -- all while peeling back the layers on one of America's most complicated presidents. Duffy and Gibbs spread their story over decades, providing us with a rare look into the tiny club of men who know what it's like to hold nuclear codes and wear the Air Force One flight jacket. Each book challenges our assumptions of what it takes to be president. These men are statesmen, but they are also -- without a doubt -- skilled and consummate political operators. Johnson, as Caro tells it, was never more depressed than when he was a power-deprived vice president, never more insecure than when he was a powerful president on the brink of war. Gibbs and Duffy describe how presidential membership has its unique privileges. Every president from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama recognized that it would be essential to rely on the only other men who had occupied the Oval Office -- even if they distrusted the politics or personality of those predecessors. Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman's bad blood faded only in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when the men and their wives met for a drink at Washington's Blair House after the somber funeral. In the end, the presidency is the loneliest and craziest job on earth, and once the oath is taken, it is sealed in quiet return visits, public photo-ops and anguished phone calls. It is all very dramatic. But when I set aside these books and turned to my day job in recent weeks, this is what I saw: Senate aspirants who denounce bipartisanship. Campaign advertising that cast candidates in the worst, most sinister light. Endless debates about cultural hot buttons that most voters say don't matter to them. $50 million in super PAC spending that will pollute swing state airwaves for 26 more weeks. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps it is the veil of history that makes the challenges that confronted Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Richard Nixon seem so much more consequential than what we are seeing now. I'm fairly sure that reporters of the time did not, for example, appreciate the full scope of the enmity between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. "You hate to use words as a historian like hatred," Caro told me on the PBS NewsHour . "But hatred isn't too strong a word to describe the relationship between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They hated each other." Even the reporters who covered the rise of a charismatic California actor could not have known the full extent of the dance he and fellow Californian Nixon executed as they both clawed toward the presidency. "Nixon clearly did not think Reagan was in his league," former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan told Gibbs and Duffy. Yet, there is a pretty good argument to be made that things were not so dramatic then and not so puny now. Caro, Duffy and Gibbs had the advantage of looking at their subjects through that most wonderful detritus of hindsight, presidential libraries and the work of dozens of other historians who have previously excavated the lives of our most powerful leaders. For history's sake, I await the books that tell me the real arguments underway now. I'm not sure I could bear it if it turns out this period of history really was about hockey moms, birther debates and debt-ceiling standoffs. Over to you, historians. Gwen's Take is cross-posted with the website of Washington Week , which airs Friday night on many PBS stations. Check your local listings.
• Why Not Raise Taxes Instead of Interest Rates to Reduce the Deficit?
  A viewer writes in, asking when inflation comes around, why not raise taxes instead of interest rates, which could be used to reduce/eliminate the deficit, which would help the economy so you could raise taxes even more in what appears to be a positive feedback loop? Image by Spark Studio via Getty Images. Paul Solman answers questions from the NewsHour audience on business and economic news here on his Making Sen$e page. Here is Friday's query: Name: Phil Webb Question: When the economy starts to get better and inflation starts to raise its ugly head, the usual cure is to raise interest rates to take money out of the economy and cool things off. Why not raise taxes instead, which could be used to reduce/eliminate the deficit, which would help the economy so you could raise taxes even more in what appears to be a positive feedback loop? Paul Solman: Why not indeed? Follow @paulsolman
• The Daily Frame
  Women dressed as white egrets perform the Shirasagi-no-mai (the egret's dance) as they enter the grounds of Senso-ji Temple during the Sanja Matsuri in Tokyo on Friday. The procession takes place on the first of three days of the Sanja festival, which is held annually in May. Click to enlarge. Women dressed as egrets perform the Shirasagi-no-mai (the egret's dance) as they enter the grounds of Senso-ji Temple during the Sanja Matsuri in Tokyo on Friday. The procession takes place on the first of three days of the Sanja festival, which is held annually in May. Photo by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images.
• In New Ad, Romney Previews Agenda for First Day in Office
  So, what would a Mitt Romney presidency be like? His campaign is giving voters a preview of what the Republican just might do on January 20, 2013, outlining a positive message in Romney's first television ad of the general election, a spot featuring upbeat music and three key promises. Floridians listen to Mitt Romney speak during a campaign stop Wednesday in St. Petersburg. Photo by Edward Linsmier/Getty Images. So, what would a Mitt Romney presidency be like? His campaign is giving voters a preview of what the Republican just might do on January 20, 2013, outlining a positive message in Romney's first television ad of the general election, a spot featuring upbeat music and three key promises. A narrator pledges that on "Day One," Romney would: approve the Keystone pipeline, introduce tax cuts and begin the process of doing away with President Obama's health care reform law. "That's what a Romney presidency will be like," says the narrator. Watch it here or below. Politico reported Thursday that the Romney campaign's first ad buy would be in four battleground states: Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. The campaign did not disclose the size of the buy, but it also released a version of the ad in Spanish, a signal that Romney wants the push to be widely seen and offers another reminder that both sides are targeting Latino voters. It ends with the presumptive nominee declaring, "Soy Mitt Romney y apruebo este mensaje." GEITHNER TALKS TO THE NEWSHOUR Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner traveled outside the Beltway on Thursday, taking the president's economic agenda on the road by promoting small business growth in Baltimore. Geithner visited Marlin Steel Wire, which manufactures products like baskets and shelving, employs roughly 30 workers, and exports to 36 countries. Geithner's trip was intended to highlight one item on President Obama's "to-do list" of economic proposals for Congress: a new-hire tax credit that would allow companies like Marlin to create more jobs. Geithner gamely sported a pair of stylish safety goggles for a tour of the facility's workspaces and machines (the most impressive of which uses lasers to cut sheet metal), Tiffany Mullon reports, before sitting down with Jeffrey Brown for an exclusive, wide-ranging interview on the economy. After noting that the Obama administration is "trying to get Congress to do some more things to help the economy," Geithner told Jeff he didn't understand the renewed debate over raising the national debt ceiling. "Look at how much damage it caused the country last August, " he said. "I mean, it was terribly damaging for the country. And the idea you can govern effectively at this time in American history -- you know, we're fighting wars. We've got a major financial crisis in Europe. We have all of these challenges for the rest of the country with political politicians threatening to default if we don't adopt a partisan political agenda. It's deeply irresponsible. There's no basis for it." Watch the full interview here or below. Watch Video GAY MARRIAGE ATTITUDES SHIFT IN N.C. Alex Bruns reports that Mr. Obama's personal support for gay marriage may have shifted the opinions of some black voters in North Carolina. A new poll of Tarheel State voters by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling showed a 7 percent increase in the number of African-Americans who support the legality of gay marriage since the last PPP survey was conducted in the state May 6. The shift comes after the president's announcement, which came just after North Carolina approved a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Another interesting shift highlighted in the poll is among African-American voters who say there should be no "legal recognition of a gay couple's relationship." The earlier poll showed that 51 percent agreed with the statement, while the new poll found only 39 percent agreed. Overall, a strong majority (58 percent) of North Carolina voters still think gay marriage should be illegal. In related news, a PPP survey of Iowa voters found them "moving more and more in support of gay marriage to the point where they're now almost evenly divided on the issue." That poll showed 44 percent of voters think it should be legal, while 45 percent believe it should be illegal, a six-point shift from PPP's last Iowa poll on the issue in October. Gay marriage is legal in the Hawkeye State. DUELING GRADUATIONS Katelyn Polantz tracked the two big commencement speeches in Virginia last week, checking in with graduates and parents about Romney's and Michelle Obama's addresses at Liberty University and Virginia Tech, respectively. She found it was hard to miss the political overtones, but many in the crowds were more interested in celebrating graduation than in the presidential race. Watch Katelyn's report here or below. Watch Video DAILY DOWNLOAD In our regular look at how the campaign is playing out online, Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn of daily-download.com examined how the Jeremiah Wright ad proposal fizzled out in a matter of hours. ( Don't miss Terence's post on the evolution of the story.) Kurtz notes how the dustup and subsequent walk-back "reminds you of how quickly these things happen now." "That document in the old days would have simply been described to viewers, listeners, readers. And now you can read it for yourself if you have the stomach for it. But there it was," he said. Watch the segment here or below. Watch Video The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty and Rosalind Helderman have an interesting look at how the New York Times story about the potential Wright campaign threw Romney off message when he wanted to be talking about the debt. And Talking Points Memo has a profile of Joe Ricketts, the wealthy donor who commissioned the proposals. 2012 LINE ITEMS Americans Elect has thrown in the towel. Romney reached a 50 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup survey. The Romney campaign released a new web video Thursday highlighting more average Americans hurt by the the president's economic policies. Former Minnesota governor and presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty talked Thursday with Andrea Mitchell, sounding a bit like he was auditioning attack lines against Vice President Joe Biden. "I think we get Joe Biden and Barack Obama very well. Vice President Biden hasn't been in the private sector since Gerald Ford was president. He has spent his entire adult life in government," Pawlenty said. "This is going to be a debate about the economy and to look to Joe Biden for that, somebody who has never not been in government, basically a professional bureaucrat, give me a break. I come from a blue collar background. I understand what jobs mean and Joe Biden doesn't have a clue." When Mitchell pressed him about the veepstakes, Pawlenty gave a more forceful response than many on the so-called short list: "I'll do whatever I can do to help him. He's going to have a lot of great people to pick from." The Hill has more on Romney's vice presidential vetting process. CNN reports that a gay donor to Romney has decided to pull his support for the presumptive GOP nominee and support the president. The reason: Romney's stance on same-sex marriage. The Obama campaign crafted a map attacking Romney's economic philosophy state-by-state. See it here. TOP TWEETS Surprised by the downfall of Americans Elect? NJ's @ bethreinhard called it *last* September bit.ly/JRuvjP — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) May 18, 2012 Justice Stephen Breyer was the victim of a burglary, his second this year. njour.nl/JBLmYU — National Journal (@nationaljournal) May 18, 2012 Jeff Brown talks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on tonight's @ NewsHour . twitter.com/tiffanymullon/... — Tiffany Mullon (@tiffanymullon) May 17, 2012 Romney plane is the former McCain plane, flight attendant says. — Emily Friedman (@EmilyABC) May 17, 2012 Romney just accepted a check from woman in the audience. "Anybody Else?" he askswith a laugh. "Happens to me every day," he says. — Maeve Reston(@MaeveReston) May 17, 2012 OUTSIDE THE LINES The NewsHour led Thursday's show with the nation's demographic shifts. Watch that report here. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Jason Stein and Patrick Marley look at how the recent jobs report in Wisconsin is driving the recall contest between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has $25 million in the bank. Some of that money is going to help Democrats with the Wisconsin recall effort. The National Republican Congressional Committee announced its new favorite House hopefuls. A PPP poll found both House races in New Hampshire, the always-swing state, tied. Al Gore has a new girlfriend. Republicans prevented Washington, D.C.'s non-voting Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton from testifying on a plan to prevent late-term abortions in the city. A survey from the right-leaning Rasmussen Reports found the Republicans' new Nebraska Senate nominee Deb Fischer leading Democrat Bob Kerrey, a former senator, 56 percent to 38 percent. Just in time for an upcoming summer of overheated partisan regulatory rhetoric, the Senate confirmed two appointees to the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve. Jay Powell and Jerome Stein fill the Fed Board for the first time since 2006. NewsHour coordinating producer Linda Scott writes that on Wednesday, the House passed the Republican version of the Violence Against Women act by a vote of 222 to 205, with 23 Republicans defecting and six Democrats supporting the bill. The measure has drawn a veto threat from the White House, but before it even reaches that point the House and Senate must resolve the significant differences between the two versions. The Senate bill expands the 1994 law that grants American Indians authority to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on tribal lands and also offer protections to previously unspecified victims of domestic abuse, including immigrants and gays. The House version takes a narrower view, saying that language may be unconstitutional and omitted protections for those groups. ON THE TRAIL All events are listed in Eastern Time. President Obama addresses the Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security in Washington at 10:15 a.m., meets with new French President Francois Hollande at the White House at 11 a.m. and travels to Camp David for the start of the G-8 Summit. Vice President Biden attends a campaign event in Wilmington, Del., at 12:30 p.m. Mitt Romney holds an event in Hillsborough, N.H., at 1:30 p.m. Ron Paul addresses the Minnesota State GOP Convention in St. Cloud at 7 p.m. All future events can be found on our Political Calendar : For more political coverage, visit our politics page . Sign up here to receive the Morning Line in your inbox every morning. Questions or comments? Email Christina Bellantoni at cbellantoni-at-newshour-dot-org. Follow the politics team on Twitter : @cbellantoni , @burlij , @elizsummers , @kpolantz , @indiefilmfan and @tiffanymullon .
• Remembering the 'Queen of Disco' Donna Summer
  Singer Donna Summer became known as the "Queen of Disco," defining the genre with her sultry vocals and pulsing rhythms. She used to say she grew up listening to rock 'n' roll and was raised on gospel music. But it was her dance hits that won her Grammys. Summers died Thursday at age 63. Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, the last dance. We remember singer Donna Summer. Donna Summer used to say she grew listening to rock 'n' roll, but she came to be known as the queen of disco, helping to define the genre with her sultry vocals and pulsing rhythms. She was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston in 1948, and first sang gospel music, becoming a soloist in her choir as a young child. DONNA SUMMER, musician: I found the answer was the first song that I sang when I started signing solo in church. You know, I was only 8. I opened my mouth and this -- this voice just shot out of me. It shocked me and it shocked everybody in the room. And I started crying. And everyone in the room started crying. JEFFREY BROWN: Summer broke onto the disco scene in 1975 with her first hit, "Love to Love You Baby." It was an instant classic, a sensuous and danceable anthem for the times. As disco dominated the rest of the decade, Summer followed up with "I Feel Love," "Last Dance," and a string of other hits. In 1978, she appeared in the disco film "Thank God It's Friday," which won a best song Oscar for "Last Dance." Even as disco faded, Summer's popularity survived, and she transitioned to develop a pop rock sound vibe with "Hot Stuff" in 1979. And that led to one of her biggest hits, "She Works Hard for the Money," released in 1983, playing up women's rights. In all, Donna Summer scored 19 number-one dance hits, the final one in 2008. And she won five Grammys, spanning the dance, rock, R&B and inspirational categories. In later years, she lived in Naples, Fla., where she died of cancer this morning. Within hours, fans were gathering at the singer's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. MAN: I always thought she was just on the edge, you know, pushing it out, the envelope. God bless her. MAN: It's really sad news to hear that she's gone. So it's a really day for everyone. She made some really great music. JEFFREY BROWN: Donna Summer was 63 years old.
• Combating Hardship in Rural Thailand
  From Thailand, special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on one social entrepreneur's efforts to combat hardships and instill a new way of thinking in the rural regions of the relatively prosperous country. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: Next tonight, narrowing the gap between urban and rural dwellers that exists even in a relatively prosperous country such as Thailand. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on one social entrepreneur's project in that Southeast Asian nation. A version of this segment aired on the PBS program "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly." FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It looks more like a theme park than a school. And it's not just its location in one of Thailand's most impoverished regions that's unusual. Buildings are made of bamboo, including a geodesic dome, just one way Mechai Viravaidya getting people to think differently. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA, Thailand: Well, just to show that you can do things people don't normally think can be done, such as getting underprivileged kids to be at the top of the scale of many, many things, of being good, being decent. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The Mechai Pattana School is the cornerstone of an idea to attack rural poverty and stereotypes and to instill a new kind of learning. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: This is our sex education wheel. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The "Wheel of Fortune" game teaches about various sexually transmitted diseases. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Green is a safe color, of course. Aha! Oh, aha! HIV, oh boy, you just missed that. And they have a good laugh, and then because HIV is explained up there. . . FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai has long relied on good laughs to explain HIV and sex education in this conservative Southeast Asian nation. Born to physician parents, his mother from Scotland, his father from a prominent Thai family, Mechai was trained as an economist. But he became a TV personality who spearheaded family planning campaigns in the '70s and, two decades later, condom use to prevent HIV. I first interviewed him in 1998. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: We said, look, one must not be embarrassed by the condom. It's just from a rubber tree, like a tennis ball. If you're embarrassed by a condom, you must be more embarrassed by the tennis ball. There's more rubber in it. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is credited with bringing down Thailand's soaring HIV infection rate and its high birth rate, work that won him numerous international awards, including the $1 million dollar Gates Foundation Prize for Global Health. Dr. Malcolm Potts, former head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, says it changed the future of Thailand. DR. MALCOLM POTTS, former head, International Planned Parenthood Federation: In 1960, Thailand and the Philippines had about the same population, about 60 million people, 50 million people. Today, the Philippines has 94 million people, and there's a lot of poverty. Thailand has 1.8 children per family. It's got about 68 million people, and it's making progress. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Potts was an early collaborator with Mechai. He says population stability was an economic stepping stone. DR. MALCOLM POTTS: I think it's a seamless evolution. Mechai, at least in the past, used to talk about fertility-led development. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand, now considered a middle-income country, faces a different crisis that Mechai is attacking: a growing economic gap between its rural and urban areas that forces young people to leave the farms to find work. On a beach resort once owned by Mechai's family -- it's now run by a non-profit group he founded -- is a garden of so-called intensive agriculture. He wants to develop appropriate sustainable technology to increase incomes in farm families. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: This is the new style condom. This is the poverty eradication condom. (LAUGHTER) FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The unusual metaphor aside, he says these recycled bags of potting soil can grow produce, in this case cantaloupes, with a minimum of water and space and maximum profit. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: You'd grow it four times a year, so that's 34,000 baht. That's just under a thousand dollars for this much space, nearly as good as marijuana. Might be even better. Don't have to share with the police, either. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: All joking aside, he says other Thai staples, mushrooms, limes, poultry and hydroponic produce, can easily be grown in rural enterprises, like those he's helped set up in Buriram Province, about four hours from Bangkok. He's worked here for two decades, introducing his crop ideas. Earlier in his career, he helped bring factories to the region. They now operate independently. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: You have a factory in the middle of nowhere here. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This shoe factory was started with international grants. It now provides work for 140 to 200 people, producing mostly for the multinational Bata shoe company. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: We helped, from Canadian money again, to provide a loan for them to establish a factory building, and then helped to get Bata to come in, rented the machinery and then bought the machinery, and they've been on their own for about 15 years. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: A short distance away are buildings once used to train people to raise livestock. Now they are factories, making brassieres in this building, ice skates in the next. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: How could you imagine an old chicken pen and an old pig pen making this stuff, or brassieres? FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Was it really a tough sell at first? MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Oh, yes, took seven visits. They did it out of pity at first. And then they realized that it worked. And when the first -- when we bring someone new down, they can't quite fathom it, how can it be done, because they have been so used to the perception that you do everything like this in Bangkok, in the city. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The factories provide livable, if not lucrative, wages and social benefits. But to truly transform rural communities, Mechai says will take new approaches to education. And that's where the bamboo school comes in. It is now 3 years old, serving grades seven through 10. Funds to build it came from profits from his resort, the Gates prize money, and corporate donations. Longer term, the school is developing its own vegetable farm, a key part of its business strategy. So when this is up and running and flourishing, the cantaloupes and the limes will be paying the teacher salaries here? MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Yes. Amongst other things, really, yes. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The motto here is, the more you give, the more you get. Aside from academics, every student and family face strict work requirements. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: The parents do community service, and the kids do community service, and for every lunch time or meal time you have to do one hour's community service, so that payment is in providing help to other people, plus their school fees. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As part of their service, these students were preparing lesson plans to teach younger children in a nearby government school. It's part of their training in leadership and critical thinking, and a departure from the rote learning standard in most Thai public schools. RUTHAICHANOK JUNPENG, student (through translator): The teachers are here to teach us, but they're also like friends, like an older friend that you can go to for advice, not just about what you're learning. PIMPAKAIN SIRI, student (through translator): My parents are rice farmers, and I expect my future to be quite different, because I want to become a doctor, and I believe I can do that. I've learned new ways to help my parents, who are used to doing agriculture the traditional ways. And I can help raise their income. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And because students at Mechai's school regularly volunteer, they feel connected to their rural communities, says teacher Nantina Saninchai. She predicts two-thirds of them will create or find jobs here. NANTINA SANINCHAI, teacher (through translator): So a number will stay here. They have computers, et cetera, similar to what they would in the city. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ideas from Mechai's school are catching on with various backyard enterprises. On weekends in the village of Banong Takem, children collect litter in exchange for spending time online at a community center or in a toy and book library. Parents prepare food and hand out treats. The village chief, Chamleung Panrin, says one reason this community thrives is that parents are around for their children. CHAMLEUNG PANRIN, village chief (through translator): Eight years ago, migration was rampant. Everybody would leave, and you only had children being brought up by the grandparents. Now it has very greatly improved. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: The only road out of poverty is through business enterprise, and this is what we're doing. Teach them, train them, lend them the money, not give them the money, and the business skills, but probably very, very important to go with it too is community empowerment. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And you need to start it young? MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Yes. Yes, start them young. When you start learning how to give when you're young, when you get older it's second nature. Just like stealing. Start young and you keep on stealing forever. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai says he won't mind if more people steal this self-help model of building community and nation. MARGARET WARNER: Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at Saint Mary's University in Minnesota.
• Campaigns Push Messages on YouTube to Save Money, Target Voters
  As part of an ongoing series on how candidates use social media this election season, Ray Suarez and journalists Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz of Daily-Download.com discuss how President Obama and Mitt Romney use YouTube to bypass the "gatekeepers," or mainstream media, and get constituents to watch their campaign videos. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: And to the presidential race. Reports of a proposed attack ad campaign lit up the Internet today. We go to Ray Suarez with our regular Daily Download segment. RAY SUAREZ: And we turn to our regular look at the campaign as it plays out in social media and on the Web. For that, we're joined by two journalists from the Web site Daily-Download.com -- that's with a hyphen. Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor chief and formerly with USA Today Live and Gannett Broadcasting. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources." And, Howie, a story that was burning up the digital pathways fizzled election this afternoon when billionaire Joe Ricketts, who had promised to run a multimillion-dollar ad campaign attaching President Obama to his old pastor Jeremiah Wright fizzled. He couldn't pull the trigger on the campaign. HOWARD KURTZ: This unfolded in the classic old media way, Ray, The New York Times obtaining a detailed copy of this plan to make Jeremiah Wright an issue, as he had been in 2008. But it was just after 6:00 in the morning that David Axelrod, the Obama senior adviser, went on Twitter and posted his reaction. It was stunning. "Will Mitt stand up, as John McCain did, or allow the purveyors of slime to operate on his behalf?" And that speeded everything up, almost at a hyper-speed pace. RAY SUAREZ: Along with the raw story, Lauren, we had the entire media strategy right there to be read from beginning to end online as well. LAUREN ASHBURN: It was a 54-page professionally bound color photograph document that laid out exactly what the plan would be. And by this afternoon, we had a statement from Joe Ricketts that said, this is not a campaign that I'm going to endorse and -- or run. And it went back and forth on Twitter with those remarks, and then the author of The New York Times piece coming out and saying don't forget, though, on page 26 of this 54-page document, it says, "With your preliminary approval at the New York meeting, here's this report." HOWARD KURTZ: I do have to note that although this was leaked by somebody who was opposed to this and clearly was trying to sink it, the Times did note -- The Times interviewed the head of this super PAC, this pro-Romney super PAC, who didn't reject it out of hand, said it was being actively considered. Of course, now the pressure got so great that not only did Joe Ricketts say, I reject any such approaches to politics, but Mitt Romney in an interview with a conservative online publication didn't waste any time in saying that he would repudiate this, even though technically he has no control over it. LAUREN ASHBURN: But what's so interesting this is that Joe Ricketts didn't have to spend a dime. I mean, he has all the publicity he wants. He's bringing back Jeremiah Wright, tying him to Obama, bringing up a 2008 story. If you remember , in 2008, President Obama -- or president would-be, right -- Obama said at the time, I am outraged at all of the comments that Jeremiah Wright had made. And so it's bringing it all back, all back from that campaign four years ago. But no one paid a penny. RAY SUAREZ: And it reminds you of how quickly these things happen now. That document in the old days would have simply been described to viewers, listeners, readers. And now you can read it for yourself if you have the stomach for it. But there it was. LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, that's true. And I think people become more engaged when they have the actual document themselves. It used to be that only the gatekeepers had the document. Now it's placed on Twitter, on Facebook, on The New York Times website. Everybody can take a look at it and starts all of these -- this commenting. HOWARD KURTZ: That's the point. Everybody can not only take a look at it. Everybody can go on Twitter, on Facebook, any other social media site and weigh in. And that undoubtedly helped convince the Romney campaign it didn't even want to wait one news cycle before knocking this thing down. RAY SUAREZ: Both campaigns have been active online this week. What have you got for us? LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, we're talking about video. In terms of video, it seems like the Obama campaign is still trouncing the Romney campaign. As you have said many times, Romney didn't have the resources to put into Web videos and Web ads. He was busy fighting in the states. . . HOWARD KURTZ: Trying to win the nomination. LAUREN ASHBURN: . . . trying to do it. But take a look at this graphic that we have put together here on YouTube Politics, shows that the Obama campaign videos -- this is in millions -- the people who watched as of last week, President Obama's videos, 185 million views, and Mitt Romney's, 6.8 million. That's a pretty, pretty stark contrast. HOWARD KURTZ: And the latest Obama Web video, which we will talk about in just a moment, also has a companion Web site, if you can put that up. LAUREN ASHBURN: Yes. Here it is. HOWARD KURTZ: And so the Obama campaign creates this RomneyEconomics.com with all kinds of information about Romney's tenure when he was the head of Bain Capital, and that company was a takeover company. It was buying steel plants in this case and other places. Sometimes, jobs are created. Other times, jobs were lost. Guess which one the Obama campaign is focusing on? LAUREN ASHBURN: Right. HOWARD KURTZ: The steel plant in Kansas City where people's jobs were lost. LAUREN ASHBURN: Right. And we were -- if you look here, you can see the play button. They also put the videos on this Romney Economics Web site to make it very easy for people to see both the two-minute version and the six-minute longer version, where very heartfelt pleas by people who worked here, saying, if Bain hadn't come in, if Romney hadn't been here, we would still have jobs and we wouldn't have lost our pensions. HOWARD KURTZ: Could we see an excerpt of that? LAUREN ASHBURN: Oh. Why don't we go to the videotape? (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: I think we can. MAN: It was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us. MAN: It was like watching an old friend bleed to death. MITT ROMNEY (R): As I look around at the millions of Americans without work, it breaks my heart. RAY SUAREZ: Now, let's remember that if you had to buy the national time to show this to 185 million people, that would be expensive. This is cheap. HOWARD KURTZ: The Obama campaign told me it has put this -- a version of this ad on the evening news in five states. That's a drop in the bucket. It didn't cost them very much. Putting it on the Web, driving it out through social media, creating the website is a very inexpensive and effective way of trying to bring back something that's been an issue dogging Romney since he ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994. And that's the record of Bain Capital and where some people whose firms were taken over went bankrupt, lost their pension plans, in some cases lost their health care and lost their jobs. LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, in talking to Ed Gillespie today, who is an adviser, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, his point in all of this is to bring it back to President Obama's record of the last three-and-a-half years, saying this has nothing to do with what Mitt Romney did or didn't do in his time at Bain Capital. What we need to focus on -- we meaning the Romney campaign -- is how the president has done in the last three-and-a-half years and the 23 million people who have gone out of work. HOWARD KURTZ: Either out of work or are looking for work or have dropped out of the work force. LAUREN ASHBURN: Lost their jobs. RAY SUAREZ: Now, it's early yet with that big bulge for Obama video views. But the Romney campaign also is trying to describe the president's record economically and using film in the same way. LAUREN ASHBURN: Right. And we do have a clip of that to show you. NARRATOR: Millions of Americans are struggling under the Obama economy. Here are a few of their stories. MAN: When the economy went bad, a month after my divorce, I lost my job, I lost my house. RAY SUAREZ: Now, can you get tougher online than you can in a commercial in broadcast environment? HOWARD KURTZ: I think so because you don't have to have the candidate coming out and saying, I approve this message. But what's really fascinating to me, Lauren, is the way in which both of these campaigns are trying to tap into the anger and the frustrations of the pain of the economy, except Romney wants to do it on the economy of the last three years, blaming it on Barack Obama. The Obama campaign wants to say, you're running as a businessman. Here's what you did when you ran Bain Capital, focusing on a very different era. LAUREN ASHBURN: I think what's interesting about the videos that we're seeing -- and coincidentally -- or, incidentally, rather, on Mother's Day both of them did Mother's Day videos honoring Ann Romney, honoring Michelle Obama. Same reaction, though. President Obama has the video down. He has the people who -- watching videos captivated by his videos. Mitt Romney isn't there yet. He's making the effort to create these very well-produced documentary-style videos. He's starting to get -- the campaign is starting to get the hang of it, but it just hasn't. . . HOWARD KURTZ: Are you saying he seems less personal? LAUREN ASHBURN: No, I'm just saying it hasn't caught on. The videos coming out of the Romney campaign haven't really grabbed hold of the followers. RAY SUAREZ: Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz of the Daily Download, good to see you both. HOWARD KURTZ: Same here. LAUREN ASHBURN: Thank you.
• Geithner: Again With the Debt-Limit Debate? 'I Don't Understand it'
  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Jeffrey Brown during a factory tour Thursday in Baltimore that he couldn't understand why the debate over the federal debt limit is back again. They also discussed how regional Federal Reserve bank boards are established and how President Obama will campaign about jobs and the economy. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to our newsmaker interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, now the longest-serving member of President Obama's economic team. I met up with him this morning in Baltimore as the secretary visited local businesspeople and companies. In a company like this, what lessons do you take from it? SECRETARY OF TREASURY TIMOTHY GEITHNER: They're growing. They're hiring. They're investing. They're bringing a lot of innovation and technology to improve productivity. JEFFREY BROWN: Secretary Geithner was talking about Marlin Steel Wire, a small Baltimore company where he took a tour this morning. For Geithner, this is a model for the kind of growth he and the president want to see, a growing American company that actually makes things, a manufacturer of wire baskets that employs 30 workers and now exports to some 36 countries around the world. This is a small number of jobs. This is not going to bring back the millions that we. . . TIMOTHY GEITHNER: No, but there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country like this. These guys are making things. They're making things you can feel. And they illustrate one of the strengths of the recovery so far, which is manufacturing doing pretty well, you know, getting stronger all the time, partly because of export growth and partly because America is becoming such -- so much more competitive. So it's a good example that, if invest in people and training, and you invest in innovation, you can be very competitive, even in a world that's much more competitive than it used to be. JEFFREY BROWN: The visit was also a part of an ongoing effort to get out of Washington to promote the administration's economic agenda. And there are some success stories to point to, but there's also much that make's Geithner's pitch a tough sell, sluggish overall job and economic growth, new turmoil in Europe, J.P. Morgan's spectacular trading losses that put a renewed focus on Wall Street banks, and now in Washington the flare-up once again of a fight over the federal debt limit, with Republican House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama jousting over spending and tax policies, raising the specter of a fiscal crisis by the end of the year. JEFFREY BROWN: Here we are again this week where the debt-limit question has bubbled up. Do you see -- TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Can you believe it? JEFFREY BROWN: Can you believe it? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I can't. I can't. I don't understand it. I don't understand it. JEFFREY BROWN: You can't because, you can't understand because -- TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Because look at how much damage it caused the country last August. I mean, it was terribly damaging for the country. And the idea you can govern effectively at this time in American history -- you know, we're fighting wars. We've got a major financial crisis in Europe. We have all of these challenges for the rest of the country with political politicians threatening to default if we don't adopt a partisan political agenda. It's deeply irresponsible. There's no basis for it. And for those who argue you need to threaten default to induce politicians to act, I mean, I would remind people that at the end of this year we have a very powerful incentive in these automatic spending cuts then the Bush tax cuts. That's a pretty powerful incentive to get these sides, these both sides to come together and agree on some long-term fiscal reforms. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: Amidst a political campaign, do you think we're heading for another, yet another impasse? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Completely avoidable, completely avoidable, needs to be avoided. What we should do is make sure that we bring people together after the election and agree on a set of reforms that put our deficit on a glide path to a more sustainable level, and make sure they're phased in gradually so they don't hurt the economy. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: Another subject. This week, we learned that JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, lost $2-plus billion . Today we learn it's probably at least $3 billion. People who have worried about the banks, the financial crisis, think the banks have not learned their lessons. They think the regulations that were tried have not kicked in enough; the banks have fought those off. What lessons do you learn from this? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Yeah, this is a pretty significant risk-management failure. And it makes a very powerful case for the importance of financial reform -- tough, effective financial reforms. But -- JEFFREY BROWN: More than we have already? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: We're going to make sure they're tough enough to make sure. And what's the test of reform? The test of reform is not do we prevent banks from making mistakes, do we prevent banks from taking risk or from losing money - because that's going to happen. Our job is to make sure that when they make those mistakes, they don't cause broader damage to the economy again. And these reforms are very effective. And part of the reason why even this large a mistake is going to have no broad impact on the economy is because we were so forceful early on in forcing these banks to hold much more capital against risk. So the fact that this is a manageable loss is a testament to the strength of reform. But it's also a very powerful argument not to weaken these reforms and to make sure that the rules we still are shaping are tough and effective in protecting the economy from these mistakes. JEFFREY BROWN: But many who want more point exactly to the lobbying power of the banks to weaken not kick in some of the things the Volcker rule. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Actually, the lobbying effort is very forceful. It's formidable. They're putting a lot of money into it, and they've got a lot of political support from the president's opponents. But it's having no impact so far on our ability to write tough rules reforms. And we're going to make sure it doesn't. And so those people who are concerned, as they should be, that this effort to weaken reforms not succeed can feel a little more comfortable today, I think, because again, this failure in risk management is a pretty powerful case for reform. And I think you've even already seen some Republicans start to pull back from their very visible efforts to start to repeal elements of this, of these reforms. And my, our hope is of course, is that their -- they take some lessons from this failure and they remember all the damage the crisis caused the economy and they join us in strengthening reforms, not weakening them. JEFFREY BROWN: But many people point to you as the person in the administration who's been most resistant to even stronger measures. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: That's ridiculous. There's no evidence for that. I have been incredibly supportive, and the president's been very tough in trying to make sure these reforms are tough and strong. And we're going to continue with that. And again. JEFFREY BROWN: Limiting the size of banks and the too-big-to-fail argument -- do you worry about that? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Oh, absolutely. But again, people don't understand this, but the Dodd-Frank Act -- those reforms put the toughest limits in place on the size of banks in our country, much tougher than exist anywhere around the world. And our banks have much more capital, have less leverage, are taking less risk today than they did in the decade before the crisis. And we're going to be stronger as an economy for it. And one good test of that is how well are we absorbing the significant stress we're seeing from Europe or these failures in the system? And the U.S. economy now -- credit, bank credit is expanding again, in part because of the strength of these reforms. JEFFREY BROWN: One more question on this. This also sheds some light -- you focus again on the seeming coziness between Wall Street and Washington. Elizabeth Warren, who helped set up the Consumer Protection Agency for the administration, now running for the Senate in Massachusetts -- she said that Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan, should not be sitting on the board of the New York Fed, that that just - it isn't right, because they help regulate those banks. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: That's not a new observation, not a new concern. It's been made by many people over the last several years. JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think it's right? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I think it is true. And I think it's a problem that that - the structure of the Fed, established 90 years ago, and it's true for Federal Reserve banks across the country, creates that basic perception. And I think that's something worth trying to change. But the American people should understand that although the Fed was set up that way, those banks and the members of the board play no role in supervision. They have no role in the writing of the rules, and they play no role in decisions the Fed makes about how to respond to a financial crisis. Their role is a much more limited role, and the role is to help provide a perspective on what's happening in the economy as a whole. But I agree with you that the, that perception is a problem. And it's worth trying to figure out how to fix that. JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think Jamie Dimon should be off the board? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, that's a question he'll have to make and the Fed will have to make. But again, on the basic point, which is it is very important, particularly given the damage caused by the crisis, that our system of oversight and safeguards and the enforcement authorities have not just the resources they need, but they are perceived to be above any political influence and have the independence and the ability to make sure these reforms are tough and effective so we protect the American people, again, from a crisis like this. And we're going to, we're going to do that. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: The last jobs number --115,000 jobs created -- disappointing number. The last GDP suggests a slowing of the economy. You have repeatedly said you see the economy growing, healing. But do these numbers suggest otherwise? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, I think the economy is still gradually getting stronger. I mean, we have a long way to go, a lot of challenges ahead. But I think most measures of the economy we can all look at and see every day -- suggests again, a gradual, continued strengthening. But we face some risk and some uncertainty from Europe now. JEFFREY BROWN: But are you sure about that? Because most people don't seem to see that. I see a new poll by the Quinnipiac group, a survey; it said more than two-thirds of Americans believe that we're still in a recession; more than 40 percent think that they're financially worse off than they were four years ago. They don't seem to see the improvement. What do you? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, it's still, it is still a very tough economy, absolutely. And again, think of what the country was through in the crisis, and you're still seeing a huge amount of damage leftover from the crisis. And that had, you know, deep, lasting scars on the basic confidence of Americans. But everything we can see and feel in the economy supports this picture of gradual, continued strengthening. You know, the economy's been growing now for more than two and a half years. There's more than 4.2 million Americans back to work in the private sector. Those are two good concrete examples of it. But if you look across the country today, even here where we are today, you can see evidence of companies expanding, hiring people, innovating, exports, and that's all encouraging. What we need to do is do more of that. And that's going to require, again, you know, trying to get Congress to do some more things to help the economy. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, I'm wondering if this is frustrating for you. I went back and looked at an interview you did with Jim Lehrer for our program two years ago. Very similar situation, even some of the same language about scars, about how long it takes, about seeing some signs of progress but not enough. And here you are two years later still saying the same thing. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Absolutely. JEFFREY BROWN: Is that frustrating? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: No, I think that was the reality we faced. Again, remember, the things that caused this crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, were a long time in the making, and they were going to take a long time to work through. I mean, I'll just give you a couple examples. You know, people borrowed too much relative income and needed to bring that debt-to-income to a more reasonable level. There was a huge amount of increased risk in the financial sector leveraged in the financial sector, that had to come down. America really bought - built and bought too many houses. Those things take time to work through. There's no quick path to that. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: You've been at this, though, for three-plus years. When you look back, are there, are there, are there mistakes you think you might have made or things you wish you could have done differently vis-à-vis economic growth policy? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: You know, as you know, I have a lot of experience in financial crises around the world, watched them over a long period of time. And I am very confident that the actions the president took helped take - and he was building on some of the initial steps my predecessor took - were remarkably effective and critically important in getting growth starting again. Remember, when he took office, the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 9 percent a year, the worst financial shock since the Great Depression. And within six months, the economy was growing again. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: And here we are, of course, again, in another campaign. So you think he's got a record on jobs and the economy that he can proudly run on. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Absolutely. And again, if you look at -- look at how we're doing relative to any other major country in the world today. Look at how we managed our crisis relative to what, not just how the U.S. managed in the past or how Japan did, but look at Europe today, and if you look at any measure that we can point to of economic strength, they provide overwhelming support for the choices he made early on. And remember, those were tough - very tough choices, put out the financial fires, get growth started. He did it with almost no help from his opponents, deep political costs, and those things made us -- make us stronger today. Now again, we've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of work to do still. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, speaking of Europe, every time it seems as though it's -- there's a new deal, or it's solved , and then it flares up again. I saw an interview you did April 25, not long ago. You said Europe is doing a better job of managing their crisis. Then we have a couple of elections, and things suddenly look bad again. And today you have British Prime Minister Cameron worrying about huge risks for everyone. Now it's his turn. How worried are you about the dangers? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: You know, this is the thing about politics and elections. But Europe does have better tools for managing the crisis now. And you're seeing a very welcome and encouraging debate now in Europe with these elections about how to get a better balance between growth and austerity, how to make sure they're doing things to help get these countries growing again, and that's very important. And even Chancellor Merkel yesterday said on behalf of Germany, they want to keep Greece in the euro area, and they want to help make that possible. So I think obviously they recognize they're going to have to do more, and it's still a very challenging period for Europe. And the president, as you know, is meeting with the leaders of Europe, parts of Europe, this weekend; he'll have a chance to talk about that with them. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 JEFFREY BROWN: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, thanks for talking to us. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Good to see you.
• News Wrap: Future of Eurozone Uncertain as Greek Credit Rating Drops
  In other news Thursday, questions kept coming about the future of the eurozone. By all accounts, money was flowing out of Greece where far-left leaders are agitating to break a bailout agreement and end austerity measures. Also, a fight over solar panels flared into the open between the U.S. and China. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio KWAME HOLMAN: The trading losses at JPMorgan Chase are getting worse. A report in today's New York Times said they have surged at least 50 percent in recent days. Bank chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon had originally estimated the losses at $2 billion over the last six weeks. With the additional losses, the total is now at least $3 billion. Still, analysts say the bank's overall health is strong. The questions kept coming today about the future of the eurozone. By all accounts, money was flowing out of Greece, where far-left leaders are agitating to break a bail-out agreement and end austerity measures. Meanwhile, the prime minister of Britain warned against letting the 17- nation eurozone break up. We have a report from Alex Forrest of Independent Television News. ALEX FORREST: It's not quite time to time hit the panic button yet. But today in Manchester, David Cameron admitted these are perilous economic times, and with the Greek crisis overshadowing everything, the prime minister laid out again the stark choice facing eurozone leaders. DAVID CAMERON, British prime minister: The eurozone is at a crossroads. It either has to make up or it is looking at a potential breakup. Either Europe has a committed, stable, successful eurozone, with an effective firewall, well-capitalized or regulated banks, or we are in uncharted territory, which carries huge risks for everybody. QUESTION: Given what you have said, do you think now that the eurozone is doomed to fail? DAVID CAMERON: We have to be clear that it's in our interests for there to be a working eurozone and a working euro. I think what's damaging is the uncertainty of there not being the right clarity about what needs to be done. ALEX FORREST: But the left-wing leader who could hold the key to Greek power in next month's election says austerity leads only one way. ALEXIS TSIPRAS, Syriza Party leader: Everybody now understands that with this policy we are going directly to the hell, and we want to change this way. ALEX FORREST: He will certainly get some sympathy from the new French president, who met with his cabinet today. But even socialist Francois Hollande must be wondering how the eurozone will get out of this mess. KWAME HOLMAN: The trouble was compounded by rumors of a run on a newly nationalized bank in Spain. All of that helped drive stocks down across Europe, adding to losses over the past two weeks. Wall Street had a rough day, too. Fears about Greece were compounded by disappointing reports on manufacturing and estimates of future growth. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 156 points to close at 12,442, its 11 decline in 12 days. The Nasdaq fell 60 points to close at 2,813. For the first time, Facebook stock will be traded publicly tomorrow. Its opening price was set late today at $38 a share. A fight over solar panels flared into the open today between the U.S. and China. The Commerce Department ruled Chinese companies are dumping solar products in the U.S. at cheap prices subsidized by the Chinese government. The ruling called for import tariffs averaging 31 percent. Several American firms sought the ruling, but most warned it could lead to a trade war. Republican Mitt Romney has begun to narrow his fund-raising gap with President Obama. New figures today showed Romney's campaign, along with the Republican National Committee, brought in just more than $40 million in April. President Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised $43.6 million in the same period. The totals do not include hundreds of millions of dollars collected by so-called super political action committees. President Obama nominated a new ambassador to Myanmar today, the first in 22 years. Derek Mitchell currently serves as special envoy to Myanmar, also known as Burma. His nomination today was the latest sign of fast-thawing relations with the Southeast Asian country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted Myanmar's foreign minister today, and welcomed his government's reforms, after years of military rule. SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: This is a moment for us to recognize that the progress which has occurred in the last year towards democratization and national reconciliation is irreversible, as the minister said to me. The United States wants to do everything we can to be sure that is the reality. KWAME HOLMAN: The U.S. also is easing restrictions on trade and investment in Myanmar. Government troops in Yemen made new advances today toward a key al-Qaida stronghold in the south. The expected assault on Zinjibar is part of a larger offensive, aiming to uproot militants who've taken control in parts of the region. Also today, Yemeni officials reported three militants were killed and two wounded in a missile strike by a U.S. drone aircraft. In the Netherlands, an international tribunal suspended the war crimes trial of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army commander, a day after it began. The judges said prosecutors made significant errors in failing to disclose evidence to the defense. Mladic faces 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes tied to the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s. Prosecutors in Florida have released evidence showing Trayvon Martin had marijuana in his urine and blood when he was killed. That finding comes from the autopsy on the teenager. He was shot to death in February by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder, but claims he acted in self-defense. Prosecutors also released a photo today taken after the confrontation showing Zimmerman with a bloody nose. Those are some of the day's major stories.
• Minority Babies' New Majority an 'Echo' of Immigration Waves
  White babies account for fewer than half of newborns in the United States -- just 49.6 percent of last year's births, according to new Census data released Thursday. Margaret Warner discusses the tipping point and its implications with the Brookings Institution's William Frey and New York University's Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Watch Video | Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: For the first time ever, white babies account for fewer than half of newborns in the United States. New census data released today showed that on July 1 of last year, just 49.6 percent of babies 1-year-old or younger were of white European ancestry; 50.4 percent were minority. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority, accounting for 26 percent of all births. African-Americans made up 15 percent, while nearly 5 percent were Asian. The remainder were American Indian, mixed race or other groups. The nation as a whole is still 62 percent white. But minorities make up the majority in four states, Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas, plus the District of Columbia. We explore this tipping point and its implications with William Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, professor of globalization and education at New York University. He's done extensive research on immigrant families and their children. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you both for being with us. Professor, beginning with you, what jumps out at you when you see these numbers? What's most notable here? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO, New York University: Well, what's most notable is that our country is a country where immigration is history and it is a country as we see today where immigration is destiny. It's a part of our history, and it is fundamentally the story of the remaking of our promise as an economy, as a society, as a democracy. MARGARET WARNER: And, Mr. Frey, help us understand the numbers a little bit better. First of all, to what degree is this based on also an increase in self-identification? WILLIAM FREY, Brookings Institution: Well, to some degree it is. But to a large degree, it's real. If we look at the demographic structure of the United States, our white population is getting older over time, which means a smaller share of white women are in their childbearing years, and at the same time we have a bigger increase in the minority women in those childbearing years. MARGARET WARNER: And I want to get more into the reasons what's driving this. But where is it most concentrated, that is the majority of births now being minority rather than white? In fact, I think we have a map that you helped us prepare -- or you helped prepare from 2010. WILLIAM FREY: Yes, they're heavily concentrated in the Southwest, in the Southeast and in big metropolitan areas, as well as some places that have large Native American populations. You can see in the map there's speckles of them up there in North and South Dakota and elsewhere. So it's not uniform across the country by any means. And in some places, we have had majority minority births for quite a while. MARGARET WARNER: So, Professor Suarez-Orozco, what do you think is driving this? How much of it is immigration? How much of it is higher birthrate, as Mr. Frey was saying? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Well, the 2000 story, when the census -- when the data came out was really the story of immigration. And I think now, 12 years later, we see the echo of that very large wave really two generations in the making is changing the structure of our future moving forward. The story today is a story of the second generation. It's the story of the U.S.-born children of immigrants and it's a story that represents a turning point. There are a lot of good news hidden behind these numbers. Babies of Hispanic and Asian origin, for example, and for Caribbean as well, tend to be healthier than comparable samples of non-Hispanic white babies. So it's a turning point. There are important opportunities here. There are also huge challenges moving forward. MARGARET WARNER: And, Bill Frey, how much of this also when we see these numbers, this shift, is due to the -- you flicked at this earlier -- the aging of the white population and how much of the white population is in prime childbearing years vs. non-white? WILLIAM FREY: Well, a much smaller share of the white population is in their childbearing years. But I can give you one statistic. And that's between 2000 and 2010, there was an absolute net decline in white children in the United States. MARGARET WARNER: And absolute net decline. WILLIAM FREY: That is, more white children were moving beyond age 18 than were coming in at the bottom. And what that tells us is all of these minority children are essential, really essential to the growth of our younger population. MARGARET WARNER: Now, do you think if this -- say all immigration stopped tomorrow just for the purpose of argument. Would this trend nonetheless continue? In other words, the differing birth rates, would that mean that this is inexorable to some degree? WILLIAM FREY: Yes, and the fact is, I mean it's true Hispanic birth rates are somewhat higher than the general population. But the fact that they're applied to a younger population makes those number of births higher. And that population is already here. If we stopped immigration tomorrow, it may affect the size of that Hispanic population 10 or 15 years from now, but in the next several years we're still going to have all of these new minority births, as I say, who should be welcome given this fact that our white population is getting older. MARGARET WARNER: So, Professor, what are the implications of this, say, for education, when you look at the different levels right now, certainly, of academic achievement and schooling between whites and certainly blacks or Latinos? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Well, that's, I think, the biggest challenge. So while there are optimistic contours to these numbers, there are also a number of issues that we really need to pause and rethink. I think first is the matter of are we as a society going to be able to transfer the skills, the competencies, the sensibilities to this new generation of Americans to thrive in the 21st century economy and society, an economy and society that is very, very different from what our education system in a way evolved to deal with? And that's where we're falling behind. We're not teaching kids -- the kids, our new kids, immigrant-origin kids, kids of color. We need the skills they're going to need to thrive as citizens, as workers, as members of the American family. MARGARET WARNER: And do you see, Bill Frey, this, what you've described as kind of a racial generation? So what are the implications here for getting the wealthier part of the population, the older population to pay for this schooling, for example? WILLIAM FREY: Yeah, I think this is a key challenge. And I agree with the professor that the big challenge is making sure we have resources for these young people to be able to get the kind of education they deserve and that the country deserves them to have, because they are going to be helping to make our economy much more prosperous. But the real issue is that for people over age 50, it's actually blacks are the biggest minority group, and it's a fairly small part of that population. It's a largely white older population. These are not their kids and they're not their grandchildren. And sometimes there's some resistance to having tax money paid for people who they feel are not quite part of their community. And I think this is the political challenge for our political leaders, for our community leaders, for our religious leaders, to send this message to the older part of the population that your future Social Security, that your future health care, that the productivity of this country depends vitally on the ability for these young people to get good educations and be productive in the labor force. MARGARET WARNER: And what about, Professor, the implications for American culture, when we already see our culture changing, but where do you think this is headed? MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Well, I think American culture has been immensely plastic and elastic and able to metabolize wave after wave of new arrivals. I think if you take a -- if you look at the gold standard of integration, if you look at the movement towards English language, if you look at the ability of the new immigrant groups to connect with the labor market, and if you look out-marriage patterns, I would say these three are the key, fundamental measures of how the culture is metabolizing new arrivals. I think that our data show very, very much a positive story, a story where, unlike our peer countries in Europe that are also dealing with large-scale immigration, immigrants to the U.S. are learning English fast, they're connecting with the labor market, and they're marrying outside their group over time and across generations at a very, very large rate. So American culture has been extremely flexible and able to make its own, whether it's food, music, dance, dress, immigrant contributions that are metabolized and remade, and they become mainstream and part of mainstream American culture. MARGARET WARNER: Well, Professor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, and William Frey, thank you both. MARCELO SUAREZ-OROZCO: Thank you.
• Politics Dons a Cap and Gown
  The NewsHour logged 600 miles last weekend to witness dueling graduation speeches from first lady Michelle Obama and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Watch Video Video shot and edited by Katelyn Polantz The NewsHour logged 600 miles last weekend to witness dueling graduation speeches from first lady Michelle Obama and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Both chose to speak at schools in Virginia, a key swing state this year . About 30,000 people attended each of the ceremonies. We wanted to size up the political talking points pumped into the speeches, and ask what graduates and their parents had hoped to hear. How crucial are these speeches in an election year when every word matters? It's not surprising we found a divide in the speakers' approaches and in audience members' responses. Romney spoke at Liberty University, while Mrs. Obama spoke at Virginia Tech, the state land-grant university that also welcomed Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., to commencement. What we couldn't show on camera were the many parents and graduates at Virginia Tech, in particular, who wished to avoid talking about politics that day. Instead, they said, they'd prefer to focus on the celebration. That seems to be how the ceremonies played out nationally, too. Few national media covered Virginia Tech's commencement, and the Democrats' words found little play across the Internet. Romney's speech lit up Christian conservatives and political commentators as a defining moment of his 2012 campaign. You can watch Romney's full speech at Liberty here: The following Monday, President Barack Obama addressed graduates at Barnard College in New York City, and took a different tone altogether. You can watch that below.
• Exclusive | Geithner: 'I Don't Understand' Why Debt Ceiling Debate Is Back
  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown during a factory tour Thursday that he couldn't understand why the debate over the federal debt limit is back again. U.S. Treasury Secretary speaks with the PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown Thursday at Marlin Steel Wire Products, a factory in Baltimore Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown during a factory tour Thursday that he couldn't understand why the debate over the federal debt limit is back again. The visit to Marlin Steel Wire Products , a Baltimore manufacturer of wire baskets that employs 30 workers and exports to some 36 countries around the world, was part of an ongoing effort to get out of Washington to promote the administration's economic agenda. Geithner made those comments during a wide-ranging interview about the economy that touched on sluggish overall job and economic growth, new turmoil in Europe , JPMorgan's spectacular trading losses that have put a renewed focus on Wall Street regulation plus a new flare-up in Washington over the federal debt limit . Here are three excerpts of their discussion. First, the renewed debate over the federal debt limit: Watch Video JEFFREY BROWN: Here we are again this week where the debt limit question has bubbled up . Do you see -- TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Can you believe it? JEFFREY BROWN: Can you believe it? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I can't. I can't. I don't understand it. I don't understand it. JEFFREY BROWN: You can't because, you can't understand because -- TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Because look at how much damage it caused the country last August. I mean, it was terribly damaging for the country. And the idea you can govern effectively at this time in American history -- you know, we're fighting wars. We've got a major financial crisis in Europe. We have all of these challenges for the rest of the country with political politicians threatening to default if we don't adopt a partisan political agenda. It's deeply irresponsible. There's no basis for it. The secretary also discussed a "perception problem" with CEOs of major banks serving on the board of the New York Federal Reserve: Watch Video JEFFREY BROWN: Elizabeth Warren, who helped set up the Consumer Protection Agency for the administration, now running for the Senate in Massachusetts - she said that Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan, should not be sitting on the board of the New York Fed, that that just - it isn't right, because they help regulate those banks.] TIMOTHY GEITHNER: That's not a new observation, not a new concern. It's been made by many people over the last several years. JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think it's right? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I think it is true. And I think it's a problem that that - the structure of the Fed, established 90 years ago, and it's true for Federal Reserve banks across the country, creates that basic perception. And I think that's something worth trying to change. But the American people should understand that although the Fed was set up that way, those banks and the members of the board play no role in supervision. They have no role in the writing of the rules, and they play no role in decisions the Fed makes about how to respond to a financial crisis. Their role is a much more limited role, and the role is to help provide a perspective on what's happening in the economy as a whole. But I agree with you that the, that perception is a problem. And it's worth trying to figure out how to fix that. JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think Jamie Dimon should be off the board? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Well, that's a question he'll have to make and the Fed will have to make. But again, on the basic point, which is it is very important, particularly given the damage caused by the crisis, that our system of oversight and safeguards and the enforcement authorities have not just the resources they need, but they are perceived to be above any political influence and have the independence and the ability to make sure these reforms are tough and effective so we protect the American people, again, from a crisis like this. And we're going to, we're going to do that. The two also discussed how President Obama's economic record will play out on the campaign trail this year: Watch Video JEFFREY BROWN: So you think he's got a record on jobs and the economy that he can proudly run on? TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Absolutely. And again, if you look at -- look at how we're doing relative to any other major country in the world today. Look at how we managed our crisis relative to what, not just how the U.S. managed in the past or how Japan did, but look at Europe today, and if you look at any measure that we can point to of economic strength, they provide overwhelming support for the choices he made early on. And remember, those were tough - very tough choices, put out the financial fires, get growth started. He did it with almost no help from his opponents, deep political costs, and those things made us -- make us stronger today. Tune in to Thursday's NewsHour broadcast for the full interview.
• In 'First Position,' Ballet Behind the Curtain
  In the ballet world, the Youth American Grand Prix can make or break a young dancer's career. In "First Position," director Bess Kargman follows seven aspiring ballet dancers between the ages of 10 and 17 as they prepare for and compete in the annual New York City event. Watch Video In the ballet world, the Youth American Grand Prix can make or break a young dancer's career. In "First Position," director Bess Kargman follows seven aspiring ballet dancers between the ages of 10 and 17 as they prepare for and compete in the annual New York City event. Kargman and her team were granted exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to the 2010 YAGP, a competition that awards top dancers with scholarships and contracts to the world's top ballet companies and training schools. "For some of these young dancers, earning a scholarship or a job contract can be the difference between making it as a dancer or relinquishing a dream," Kargman said. As the film opened in theaters across the nation, Kargman spoke to us via phone about her documentary film debut, which breaks down ballet stereotypes and captures the physical and emotional challenges facing dancers who want to succeed. (Video above.) Watch the official trailer for "First Position":
• Chemotherapy During Pregnancy: Yes, It's Possible
  Minnie Narth could recite everything she'd heard she wasn't supposed to have while pregnant. But as she entered her third trimester, her body was in desperate need of something she would never have predicted: intensive cancer treatment. View Slide Show Editor's Note: As the nation marks National Women's Health Week, PBS NewsHour will share the stories of three women -- and their doctors -- who refused to allow a cancer diagnosis interfere with a successful pregnancy. These are their stories of hope, perseverance and, ultimately, success. No sushi. No caffeine. No alcohol. No Ibuprofen. Minnie Narth could recite everything she'd heard she wasn't supposed to have while pregnant. But as she entered her third trimester, her body was in desperate need of something she would never have predicted: chemotherapy. Narth had just learned she had cancer. Stage-4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, to be precise, and her doctors informed her that thousands of women carry their children to term each year while receiving intensive chemotherapy treatment. As many as one in 1,000 women are being diagnosed with malignant cancer during pregnancy each year, according to Dr. Natali Aziz at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. One in 6,000 develop lymphoma alone. Those numbers are on the rise as women continue having children later in life. But so too are the treatment options. When Aziz broke the cancer news to Narth and her husband Paul, she advised them -- with a high level of confidence -- that continuing the pregnancy would be possible. "Just 10 to 20 years ago, that would have been much more difficult," Aziz said. "And though it's more common these days, the end result is always amazing amidst a very frightening diagnosis. Minnie was able to celebrate one of the most amazing joys of her life -- the birth of her son." Read more about the Narths' story in the slide show above.
• When Cancer & Pregnancy Collide
  No sushi. No caffeine. No alcohol. No Ibuprofin. Minnie Narth could recite everything she'd heard she wasn't supposed to have while pregnant. But as she entered her third trimester, her body was in desperate need of something she would never have predicted: Chemotherapy. This is her story. No sushi. No caffeine. No alcohol. No Ibuprofin. Minnie Narth could recite everything she'd heard she wasn't supposed to have while pregnant. But as she entered her third trimester, her body was in desperate need of something she would never have predicted: Chemotherapy. This is her story. Minnie Narth never expected her son's baptismal picture to turn out quite like this -- with a hospital garden as a backdrop and a bandana covering her head. Yet here she was with her husband, Paul Narth, and newborn, Kieron, trying to count blessings between rounds of cancer treatment. Blessing No. 1: Minnie's oncology team seemed hopeful she would eventually make a complete recovery. No. 2: Despite the lymphoma, Minnie -- at 37 -- finally had the family she always wanted. And No. 3, perhaps the biggest blessing of all: Tests showed Kieron was completely healthy despite the rounds of chemotherapy his mother received while he was still in the womb. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH August has always been a lucky time of year for Minnie and Paul. August 2006: The month they met. August 2008: The month they married. August 2009: The month their son was born. "I always wanted to have kids, and I was scared as I got older that I wouldn't be able to," Minnie said. Meeting her husband was an unexpected surprise. Pregnancy at 37 "was a gift." PHOTO: MARCEL AND MAHER SIEGLE PHOTOGRAPHY For the first five months, pregnancy "was a ball -- smooth sailing," Minnie said. Then she noticed something odd growing in her vagina, followed by bleeding, and eventually, a rushed trip to Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. The diagnosis was grim: stage-4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. An MRI scan showed tumors in Minnie's vagina, breast and ovaries. She was stunned. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH Compared with the risks of delivering Kieron prematurely at 26 weeks, chemotherapy looked like a safe bet. "This was lymphoma -- we knew it would be responsive to chemotherapy, and we also knew this treatment is overall well-tolerated by the fetus," said Dr. Natali Aziz, an obstetrician and member of the maternal-fetal medicine team at Packard Children's Hospital. If administered during the first trimester -- when the baby's organs are still extremely fragile -- most chemotherapy drugs can lead to spontaneous miscarriage or cause major health issues, including heart, brain, limb and palate deformities. But during the second and third trimesters, there are certain drugs that don't seem to have an impact on a developing fetus. "Most of the toxins are metabolized by the mother, and some molecules are very large and just don't cross the placenta," said Dr. Ranjana Advani, Minnie's oncologist. "So the baby is protected." PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH "Sometimes I would find myself crying, but I would pick myself up and just pray and sing," Minnie said. "I was singing to him -- to my son. I was singing lullabies, and I was singing the song from 'Sweeney Todd': 'Nothing's going to harm you / not while I'm around.' I was singing that all the time." PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH Even in the second and third trimesters, the chemotherapy agents coursing through Minnie's system could have caused growth restriction, low birth weight, spontaneous preterm labor or bone marrow suppression. And because one of the agents, doxorubicin, is associated with cardiomyopathy, or heart muscle disease, Aziz kept a close eye on Kieron's heart. But frequent ultrasounds and non-stress tests continued to show that everything was coming along just fine. The mass in Minnie's breast started to dissolve 24 hours after treatment began. And by the time she was 37 weeks pregnant, the ovarian and vaginal tumor was almost completely gone, too. In the end -- against the odds -- a vaginal birth was possible. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH At the very moment everyone wanted to celebrate newborn Kieron's clean bill of health, Minnie began breaking out in low-grade fevers. Paul once again rushed her back to the emergency room, where she could now undergo a whole-body CT scan -- something that was impossible during the pregnancy due to the high radiation levels. "And that's when basically she lit up like a Christmas tree," Paul said. "They realized that the cancer was a lot worse than they thought, and actually it had spread to her brain." For weeks, Minnie's body was rocked by increased doses of systematic chemotherapy. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH When the chemo failed to clear the brain cancer, too, the doctors had just one weapon left: 13 days of low-dose, full-brain radiation. Minnie and Paul were told to "hope for the best but prepare for the worst." Minnie doesn't remember much of it, except for one feeling. "There was no way I was going to give up my child. There was no way I was going to give up seeing him grow up into a man, dancing at his wedding. There was no way. He's the only one I can have. He's my gift," she said. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH By Christmas 2009, the cancer was gone. Chances that it would return hovered around 95 percent, the doctors said. To lower them, Minnie would need to undergo a stem-cell transplant -- a process that involved removing her own stem cells, thoroughly "scrubbing" her system with chemotherapy agents to clear the lymphoma and then reinjecting the stem cells. A year later when the Christmas decorations came out, "the cancer was completely gone," Minnie said. And it remains so today. PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH Every six months, Minnie receives a CT scan to make sure her health is on track. So far, so good. She may not remember many of Kieron's first moments -- she can scarcely remember the details of the baptismal ceremony in the hospital garden -- but Minnie is still counting her blessings. "It's been a journey. And I'm happy that I'm healthy and raising my son and being a good wife and being still alive," she said. "If it ever comes back again, I will continue to fight." PHOTO: MINNIE AND PAUL NARTH
• Running for President: Chronicling Almost 200 Years of Propaganda
  Published by the Library of Congress, "Presidential Campaign Posters" is a visual anthology of election season artwork -- images that capture the public sentiment, issues and prevailing design trends of a given campaign era. View Slide Show Published by the Library of Congress, "Presidential Campaign Posters" is a visual anthology of election season artwork -- images that capture the public sentiment, issues and prevailing design trends of a given campaign era. The book showcases images from every election since President Andrew Jackson in 1828. Many of the images that come from before the 1900s are formulaic etchings of candidate head-shots paired with flowery slogans. They slowly give way to posters that resemble political cartoons -- minimalist posters laden with Helvetica text and psychedelic caricatures designed to appeal to the young voters of the 1960s. Then, of course, there's President Obama's "Hope" poster, drawn up by Shepard Fairey in 2008, that doesn't even feature the then-candidate's name. In our accompanying slideshow, preview a sample 13 of the posters featured in the book.
• Conservative Group Rejects Ad Proposal Tying Obama to Wright
  A proposed $10 million TV ad campaign linking President Obama to his controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, right, will reportedly not make it to the small screen. A proposed $10 million TV ad campaign linking President Obama to his controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, right, will reportedly not make it to the small screen. The Associated Press reported Thursday that a conservative group tied to TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts would not implement the proposed campaign, which was first detailed by the New York Times. A group of Republican strategists had pushed the effort, titled "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: the Ricketts Plan to End His Spending For Good." The blueprint included clips of the Wright's incendiary sermons, which first came to light during the 2008 campaign. Brian Baker, president of the Ending Spending Action Fund, released a statement Thursday on behalf of Ricketts : Not only was this plan merely a proposal -- one of several submitted to the Ending Spending Action Fund by third-party vendors -- but it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take. Mr. Ricketts intends to work hard to help elect a President this fall who shares his commitment to economic responsibility, but his efforts are and will continue to be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally. When word of the campaign first broke Thursday morning, it resulted in immediate backlash from supporters of the president. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina issued a statement accusing presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney of "reacting tepidly" to the story. "The blueprint for a hate-filled, divisive campaign of character assassination speaks for itself. It also reflects how far the party has drifted in four short years since John McCain rejected these very tactics," Messina said. "Once again, Governor Romney has fallen short of the standard that John McCain set, reacting tepidly in a moment that required moral leadership in standing up to the very extreme wing of his own party." For its part, the Romney campaign initially responded with a statement encouraging people to focus on jobs and the economy. Romney himself weighed in later in an interview with the conservative Townhall website . "I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they've described," Romney declared. "I would like to see this campaign focus on the economy, on getting people back to work, on seeing rising incomes and growing prosperity -- particularly for those in the middle class of America." Still, the former Massachusetts governor charged that Republicans weren't the only ones launching negative attacks, saying: "I think what we've seen so far from the Obama campaign is a campaign of character assassination. I hope that isn't the course of this campaign."
• Florida Journalism Program Gives Students Reason to Stay in School
  Student Leon Tomlinson joined Journeys in Journalism in third grade and said that the program was one of the main reasons he now excels in the classroom. On Wednesday's NewsHour we introduced you to De'Qonton Davis, an eighth grader from St. Petersburg, Fla. Watch Video Davis and his classmates at John Hopkins Middle School examined how violence affects students' ability to learn. They produced a video as part of a communication magnet program -- known as Journeys in Journalism -- in the Pinellas County School District. The end result was a striking and honest look at the problems inside their school. It was produced in conjunction with the NewsHour's Student Reporting Labs project and in partnership with local PBS station WEDU in Tampa, Fla. Watch Video Over the course of reporting this story, the NewsHour also met many other students going through the Journeys in Journalism (K-12) program, including Leon Tomlinson, a photographer and junior at Lakewood High School. View Slide Show Tomlinson joined Journeys in Journalism in third grade and said that the program was one of the main reasons he now excels in the classroom. "I didn't like school when I was growing up," Tomlinson said. "And then when I got into journalism I really just loved coming to school to get to use a camera." Both Tomlinson and Davis have interned in the photography department at the Tampa Bay Times, which is a sponsor and provides logistical support for the program. Davis hopes President Obama sees his report on violence in his school someday. And Tomlinson said he plans to go to college, where he hopes to play soccer and hone his skills as a photojournalist. "I see myself playing [Major League Soccer] and then having a side job as a freelance photographer for like ... the New York Times or some place like that." View all of the American Graduate reports.
• Aren't We All Better Off if Fannie, Freddie Forgive and Forget?
  Paul Solman often answers your questions on economic news. Thursday's query: Wouldn't investors and Freddie Mac be better off if mortgage principals were reduced, rather than leaving foreclosed homes to rot? Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington, D.C. Photo by Flickr user futureatlas.com via a Creative Commons license. Paul Solman answers questions from the NewsHour audience on business and economic news here on his Making Sen$e page. Here is Thursday's query: Name: Barbara Seijas Question: Wouldn't the pools of investors and Freddie Mac be better off if the principal of mortgages were reduced, rather than leaving foreclosed homes left to rot? Paul Solman: This question came over the transom long ago. Recently, there was some news to justify an answer to it. As Annie Lowrey reported on April 10 in the New York Times: The overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Tuesday opened the door to forgiving some mortgage debt of homeowners who owe more than their houses are worth, as the Obama administration has recently urged. The acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Edward J. DeMarco, said that in some circumstances it might make economic sense for the government-run companies to reduce borrowers' mortgages, taking a hit to modify the loan but also making it less likely that a homeowner will default. But in his speech at the Brookings Institution, Mr. DeMarco described as limited the benefits from principal reduction, saying it would hardly be a magic bullet for struggling homeowners and noting that it might carry significant costs for taxpayers. His comments left doubt about whether he would change his long-held stance against principal reduction. "This is not about some huge difference-making program that will rescue the housing market," he said. "It is a debate about which tools, at the margin, better balance two goals: maximizing assistance to several hundred thousand homeowners while minimizing further cost to all other homeowners and taxpayers." In a new analysis cited by Mr. DeMarco, the F.H.F.A. found that reducing mortgage principal for about 691,000 eligible underwater homeowners would reduce Fannie and Freddie's losses by about $1.7 billion, compared with doing another form of loan modification. But the Treasury Department would pay out $3.8 billion in incentives for the principal reductions, meaning a $2.1 billion net loss for the taxpayer. Now emailer Barbara Seijas might point out to regulator DeMarco that the net loss for the taxpayer will be a lot more than $2.1 billion if houses are left to rot, as some likely will be without principal reduction. DeMarco might even concede the point, but he would surely add that principal reduction is a slippery slope. If you get a break on your principal, why shouldn't I? Are we really prepared to reward bad decisions (taking out a loan you can no longer afford) at the expense of those of us who only borrowed as much as we could repay? Would large-scale principal reduction create a "moral hazard" problem that encouraged profligate borrowing (and lending) by holding out the prospect of future principal reductions during downturns? On the other hand, wouldn't all Americans be better off if houses weren't rotting? See our story on Cleveland for this side of the argument. Watch: Raze the Roof: Cleveland Levels Vacant Homes to Revive Neighborhoods Watch Video This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown - NewsHour's blog of news and insight. Follow @paulsolman