Cash-Strapped Cities Put The Squeeze On Nonprofits

Tovia Smith

From the nation’s founding, those doing the Lord’s work, healing the sick or educating the masses have been given a pass on paying taxes. The thinking has been: We owe them more than they owe us.

But in these hard financial times, that thinking is changing.

“I think we’ve reached a point where something needs to give here,” says Ron Rakow, Boston’s assessing commissioner.

Around the nation,...

SEC Requests More Money To Fight Fraud

NPR Staff

Last July, when President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, he promised greater oversight power to the agencies tasked with keeping watch over the nation’s financial markets.

“These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” he said.

Many of those protections were to come from the Securities and Exchange Commission in the form of new authority over...

The Mississippi: A River That Will Not Be Tamed

NPR Staff

In the summer of 1993, when many people in the Midwest were searching for higher ground, Isabel Wilkerson packed her bags and headed for the Mississippi River. She was there to cover the floods for The New York Times and would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting.

In one piece, she described the river as a “rowdy uncle who gives freely in good times and breaks the furniture in bad and pretends not to notice after the damage has been done....

Noise Pollution Hard On Heart As Well As Ears

Brent Baughman

According to a recent study, noise pollution could be costing lives. A World Health Organization report finds western Europeans lose years to death or disability from excessive sound. Though European countries have taken steps to turn the volume down, the U.S. backed off the effort decades ago.

Across an estimated population of 340 million people, at least one million years of healthy living are lost each year due to noise pollution in Western Europe...

Louisiana Floods Rural Area To Save Cities

Week In News: Domestic Oil Drilling

Mike Huckabee: 'All The Factors Say Go, But My Heart Says No'

Frank James

Scratch Mike Huckabee’s name from the list of potential Republican presidential nominees seeking to challenge President Obama.

The former Arkansas governor and present-day Fox News Channel host said on his show on that cable outlet that he won’t compete for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

Huckabee said he ruled out a run...

School Reunions? Nah, I've Got Facebook

Alex Schmidt

Facebook was created for college students to get in touch with each other. It has helped people stay in touch online so well, that it might be hurting attendance at real-world class reunions.

This means the excruciatingly awkward reunion scenes in movies — where the dorks and princesses get together to prove that either they’ve become cool or are still cool — don’t have to happen in real life.

Consider a scene from the 1997 film Romy and Michele’...

A Secret, Boxed-Up Bazaar Of Fantastical Things

Jon Kalish

In a desolate, industrial section of West Oakland, Calif., the first of 20 box trucks arrives before sundown. A couple of cargo trailers are parked on a street that is home to an abandoned cement factory.

When this Lost Horizon Night Market is in full swing, a bunch of sideshows and art environments will comprise what is essentially an open party for adults in a public place. Attorney Michael Burstein is the self-described cat-herder-in-chief for the San Francisco Night ...

For Half Moon Bay: One Step Forward, One Step Back

Jim Zarroli

Half a century ago, before the picturesque seaside town of Half Moon Bay, California decided to incorporate, residents had to call the county sheriff’s office to report crimes.

In fact, one big reason Half Moon Bay decided to incorporate was to have its own police force, says Mayor Naomi Patridge.

“It makes you a city, it really does,” she says.

So Patridge can’t help thinking the city took a big step...