Now Playing

Loading streams...

Podcasts & RSS Feeds

News From NPRRSS
All ContentRSS
View all podcasts & RSS feeds

News From NPR

Pages

The Two-Way
7:39 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Tornado In Moore, Okla.: Friday's Developments

Credit Lucas Jackson / Reuters /Landov
Rita Green carried a plastic bin of items as she helped a family friend salvage things from a home Thursday in Moore, Okla.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 10:19 am

As the residents of Moore, Okla., and surrounding communities continue to recover from Monday's devastating tornado that killed at least 24 people and injured more than 375, we're keeping an eye on the news from there:

Read more
The Two-Way
7:32 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Book News: Judge's Comments Bruising To Apple's Price-Fixing Case

Credit Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
A person walks by an Apple Store on April 23, 2013 in San Francisco, California.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By editor

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

Read more
The Two-Way
7:03 am
Fri May 24, 2013

'White Flash And Cold Water' After Bridge Collapse In Wash.

Credit Dan Levine / EPA /LANDOV
The scene near Mount Vernon, Wash., on Thursday after part of an Interstate 5 bridge collapsed into the Skagit River.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 5:39 pm

(Most recent update: 5:35 p.m. ET.)

Miracle is the word that comes to Dan Sligh's mind after he and his wife, Sally, survived a plunge off a highway bridge in Washington state on Thursday evening.

Read more
Parallels
4:02 am
Fri May 24, 2013

China's Air Pollution: Is The Government Willing To Act?

Next imagePrevious image
Credit Ng Han Guan / AP
Skyscrapers are obscured by heavy haze in Beijing on Jan. 13. Air pollution remains a serious — sometimes overwhelming — problem, but researchers say environmental technology is available to solve it.
Credit Frank Langfitt/NPR
Environmental regulation can make a difference. In Shanghai, the government limits car ownership by auctioning off license plates each year at prices exceeding $14,000 apiece. Shanghai also benefits from its location on the water and winds coming off the East China Sea.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 11:55 am

Denise Mauzerall arrived in Beijing this year at a time that was both horrifying and illuminating. The capital was facing some of its worst pollution in recent memory, and Mauzerall, a Princeton environmental engineering professor, was passing through on her way to a university forum on the future of cities.

"I took the fast train from Beijing to Shanghai, and looking out the window for large sections of that trip, you couldn't see more than 20 feet," Mauzerall recalled.

To Mauzerall, the lesson was surprising and inescapable.

Read more
Planet Money
3:18 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Can This Man Bring Silicon Valley To Yangon?

Next imagePrevious image
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Educated in the U.S., Aung worked in Silicon Valley for a number of tech companies, including Google, before returning to Myanmar. Here he is at his office shortly after closing time. His employees keep to a tight schedule, starting early in the morning and leaving at 5:30 p.m. every day.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Aung gives one of his employees feedback during a monthly meeting. Giving regular feedback is one of the management techniques he brought from Silicon Valley to Myanmar. After the meeting, he hands his employees thick envelopes that contain their salaries in cash. Even though Nay eventually hopes to develop online and mobile payment services, most of his employees prefer to be paid in cash.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
One of Aung's employees holds up the receipt of a payment he is about to deliver to one of Aung's partner hotels. Even though Aung enables tourists to handle their travel bookings online, he still has to deliver cash to his partners by hand.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
One of the main challenges Aung faces in running an Internet startup in Myanmar is not having a consistent Internet connection. There are several Internet and electricity outages every day.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Nay Aung is the founder of Oway, a tech startup in Yangon, Myanmar. He used Taste Cafe as his unofficial office when he started his company — in part because it was one of the few places in Myanmar with a stable Internet connection.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 9:29 am

Like a proud father, Nay Aung opens up his MacBook Air to show me the Myanmar travel website he has built. But we wait 30 seconds for the site to load, and nothing happens.

"Today is a particularly bad day for Internet," he says. This is life in Myanmar today: Even an Internet entrepreneur can't always get online.

Read more

Pages