Podcasts & RSS Feeds

All ContentRSS
View all podcasts & RSS feeds

NPR News

Pages

Business
4:34 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Insurers Picked For Calif. Health Exchange

Share
E-mail
Comments

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 7:01 am

In a key test of the federal health law's ability to draw competitive bids from health insurance companies, California has unveiled plans and prices that will be available next year to millions of residents shopping for individual coverage on its new insurance marketplace.

Around the Nation
4:14 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Wash. State Bridge Collapses, 3 People Injured

Share
E-mail
Comments

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 7:01 am

The collapse sent people and vehicles into the water Thursday night. Authorities say there were no fatalities. The bridge, about an hour north of Seattle, lost its northernmost span — taking out all lanes in both directions.

Middle East
4:14 am
Fri May 24, 2013

Iranian Council Declares Ex-President Rafsanjani Unfit To Run Again

Share
E-mail
Comments

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 7:01 am

The Iranian presidential election is just weeks away, and voters are faced with a very narrow range of pro-regime candidates to choose from. All the high-profile or independent candidates have been eliminated by the Guardian Council. One man considered unfit to run has already held the post of president.

Parallels
3:11 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 Ng Han Guan / AP
A woman wears a mask as she stands near a giant display depicting blue skies during a day of heavy pollution on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 6.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri May 24, 2013 7:40 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 both surprising and inescapable.

Read more
Planet Money
2:18 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 8:29 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