National / International News

Also: shameless book blurbs; new plays from Ayad Ahktar; and a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone draws a record price at auction.

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David Cameron is to urge EU leaders to back action against "aggressive" tax avoidance but business warns politicians against moralising on the issue.

Twenty-four hours of news photoss: 22 May

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen says a suicide in Notre-Dame Cathedral was "political", in a remark condemned by the ruling party.

Officials think they've found all the survivors, and victims, of the massive tornado that devastated the community of Moore. The official death toll stands at 24. More than 230 people are said to have been injured.

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A motorist's tweet boasting about hitting a cyclist created uproar when it went viral. What does it reveal about the battle on the UK's roads?

German business software company SAP has announced an effort to actively recruit and hire people with autism. The move comes after a successful pilot project in India in which SAP hired computer programmers who have autism, a developmental disorder that, among other things, can impair a person's ability to interact with others.

SAP, which says it wants autistic employees to make up 1 percent of its global workforce by 2020, is hoping other companies follow its lead.

"Only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st Century," said SAP executive Luisa Delgado.

The BBC's technology reporter Mark Gregory joins Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio to discuss.

David Cameron tells grassroots Tories he feels "one of them" in a fresh attempt to quell unrest about his leadership.

At least 10 people die and 70 are wounded in four days of Syria-linked sectarian violence in Lebanon's, Tripoli.

How one former prisoner turned his life around

Executives with the country’s largest public power utility meet with the Obama Administration this week, after learning their agency might be up for sale.

President Obama floated the idea of selling the Tennessee Valley Authority in his budget, released last month. He started receiving pushback almost immediately.

“I think there’s somebody with a green eyeshade down there at the Office of Management and Budget who just thinks it’s a cool idea to talk about selling the Tennessee Valley Authority,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, said in a recent hearing. “We don’t appreciate that approach.”

TVA originated during the Great Depression. It built hydroelectric dams, then coal and nuclear plants. The utility serves seven states and was conceived as a way to develop an impoverished region. It is fully self-supported through electric rates, and it has national security roles as the country’s sole source for tritium, needed in developing nuclear weapons.

There’s no firm plan to sell TVA, only for a “strategic review” that could result in privatization. But the very idea has done some damage, according to the agency.

The value of TVA’s bonds has dropped sharply. There’s doubt that the sale price would even cover TVA’s $25 billion of debt, and traders fear TVA may not be viable as a private company.

Sen. Alexander has been quizzing Energy Department officials anytime they appear before his committees. During a hearing last week, he asked the acting Energy secretary, Daniel Poneman, if he was consulted about the potential TVA sale.

Poneman admitted that he was not, but said, “the one thing that I do know is that any decision rolling forward that would consider what to do with the TVA would, of course, involve consultation with the Department of Energy.”

TVA officials have said the current business model is a good one, but they’re taking the idea of a potential sale seriously. They’ve committed to cooperating with the White House in good faith.

“I mean, I assume they were serious since they put it in the administration’s budget," says TVA senior vice president of policy Joe Hoagland.

TVA is celebrating its 80th birthday this week. The meetings in Washington may give a clue as to how many birthdays the utility has left.

England and Birmingham's Rachel Unitt will miss the rest of the season and Euro 2013 with a serious knee injury.

Venezuela's National Assembly backs plans to import 39 million rolls of toilet paper, in an effort to relieve a chronic shortage.

Action sequel Fast & Furious 6 races ahead of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby in this week's UK and Ireland box office chart.

Wales has seen 60% of its wildlife species decline over the last five decades, with one in 10 now endangered, warns a report.

The government borrowed slightly less than first thought in the 2012-13 financial year, the latest official figures suggest.

Crusaders win the right to legally challenge the £25m funding of a redevelopment project for Windsor Park.

Plans for the world's largest commercial wave farm off the Western Isles move forward after minister give full consent for the project.

Vitamin C can kill multidrug-resistant TB in the lab, scientists reveal.

The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index is out. The ACSI* measures how customers feel about a range of companies that provide goods and services around the country. This month's survey put one industry in an unfortunate spot when it comes to customer satisfaction: Internet service providers.

Susan Crawford, at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, joins Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson to discuss the results and why ISPs are falling behind.

*Correction: An earlier version of this story contained a typo of ACSI. The text has been corrected.