National / International News

The first time my neighbors asked me to take care of their chickens while they went away for the weekend, the temperature dropped into the single digits overnight. The hens didn’t freeze like I feared, but by morning their hanging water dispenser was an airborne ice cube. 

My attempt to thaw the thing out and refill it was comical. An hour and a few frostbitten fingers later, I got two eggs out of the ordeal and ate the freshest omelet I’ve ever had.

I love connecting with my food as much as the next urban locavore, and fresh eggs really do taste better, but I might not be cut out for four-season chicken farming. Turns out there's another option: renting.

That’s right… there’s such a thing as Rent-A-Chicken. (This is the company's actual name.)

“It’s very popular but you have people going into it who’ve never done it,” Suitor says.  “If you plant a radish and the radish doesn’t make it, that’s fine, but you don’t want to be doing that with a baby chicken.  We deliver, set up the coop and answer everything you ever wanted to know about chickens.” 

The website BackyardChickens.com has more than 185,000 members (up from 25,000 in 2009) and its owner, Rob Ludlow, points to the growing preference for eggs from chickens that were raised humanely. 

“When you collect eggs from your backyard flock, you know exactly how they were treated, fed, and cared for,” he says.

Ludlow adds that raising chickens lets also people take part in the local food movement on a relatively low budget.  Rent-A-Chicken charges $250 for a pair of hens, their food, and a traveling coop that renters keep from early spring through Labor Day. 

Suitor has kept chickens all her life.  She got the idea to rent them when Traverse City officials approved an ordinance allowing residents to raise chickens and she heard that some friends paid $2,000.00 for an Amish-built coop.

“We knew that people would be willing to pay for it, but would it fit their lifestyle,” Suitor says. “I think there’s a mindset of, ‘I’d love to have my own farm, raise my own food and be au naturale,’ but it’s hard for people to get that dream. We make it possible to be a micro-farmer for six months.”

Suitor says chickens have a lot of personality, so most renters fall in love with them. If they can’t bear to give the birds back, she’ll sell them for $20 each, coop not included.

BBC football expert Mark Lawrenson takes on Ashes hero Steve Harmison

A fresh inquest into the deaths of the 96 Hillsborough victims will take place in early 2014, a coroner confirms.

You think clovers and hearts are impressive? Wait till you get a load of these Japanese latte drawings. A culture that values the beauty of the ephemeral has brought us a new level of art in foam.

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Along with immigration, another issue Washington will be taking up soon is the federal budget. Republicans want to reduce the deficit by cutting spending, and they want to shrink the government by cutting tax rates. But it doesn't always work out that way, as the thirtieth President, Calvin Coolidge found out.

No politician ever wanted to shrink government more than Calvin Coolidge. Silent Cal, the quiet Vermonter, was so parsimonious he even saved syllables by using short words. When Coolidge became vice president in 1921, he was appalled to find tax rates as high as 58 percent. "Legalized Larceny," he crowed. And federal debt after World War I was so large it made Coolidge cringe. So when Coolidge became president following the death of Warren Harding in 1923, he decided to curb these excesses.
    
Coolidge and his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, studied the tax code and found the government wasn't getting the revenue it was expecting -- even with such high tax rates.

Maybe there were lessons for taxes in railroads. Railroad men set their freight rates to charge "what the traffic would bear." The thinking was if you cut the freight rate, you get more traffic, and more revenue. Coolidge persuaded Congress to lower the top tax rate to 25 percent. And congratulated himself that he was on track to pay down the national debt. Debt obsessed, Coolidge was the president who fired the White House housekeeper because she spent too much on pork -- literally.

 The tax experiment worked. In fact, too well. With lower tax rates, more money than expected flowed in. But to Coolidge's horror Congress didn't want to use the cash to reduce the debt. The other politicians of his day just wanted to spend. On farm supports. On veterans. On disaster infrastructure.

Coolidge worried that later presidents and lawmakers might also manipulate tax rates to get extra money.
 He left office in a dark mood. He guessed what would come. The legacy of the ultimate small-government president was a tax tool so powerful that it made big government inevitable.

The unemployment rate in France rose again last month for the 23rd time in a row, reaching a fresh high with 3.2 million people seeking work, official data shows.

Six in 10 Americans say they fear tumbling from the middle class in the next few years, according to a newly released poll.

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After large cracks were discovered on Tuesday at the Rana Plaza factory complex in Sava, Bangladesh, managers at a bank on the first floor kept their employees out.

Managers in the garment factories on the upper floors ordered their employees to stay. The building collapsed the next day, killing at least 230 people.

“It’s worth thinking about the psychology that would cause factory managers and owners to send workers back into a building that has developed an obvious structural flaw,” says Scott Nova with the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights monitoring organization.

He says large apparel companies have multiple contractors in a place like Bangladesh. Each of those contractors hires sub contractors, and then sometimes sub-sub-contractors -- all of them competing against one another. Nova argues apparel retailers use this structure to lower both price, and accountability.

“That inevitably results in an impossible squeeze on the factories actually producing the products,” Nova says, “that guarantees factories will cut costs by operating unsafely, but without Walmart’s or Gap’s or H&M’s finger prints actually having to be on it.”

Jan Hammond, professor of manufacturing at Harvard Business School, says retailers must contract with many different factories in a place like Bangladesh in order to meet demand.

And that distance may offer smaller, private label retailers a place to hide from the responsibility of knowing exactly what’s going on on the factory floor of a subcontractor several levels down the supply chain.

“Its not as clear to me whether its intentional or not, to not know,” says Hammond of such companies.

“I’ll never forget the time a retail CEO said to me that he didn’t allow a certain plant to subcontract,” recalls Hammond. She asked how much of his garments he sourced from that plant, and when Hammond had the opportunity to visit that location, she says “it was clear to me that this plant could never create the volume that this particular individual said was being produced there.”

Larger companies like Walmart are more brand sensitive, says John Roberts, professor emeritus of economics, strategic management, and international business at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

“I see no proof,” he says, that these companies are willfully turning a blind eye to poor management practices at the bottom. “The big labels based in the U.S. are in fact very concerned about the situation,” he says, because of negative publicity.

Walmart has started auditing factories that produce for them. After a deadly factory fire in November of last year -- also in Bangladesh -- Walmart announced it would permanently ban any supplier found to be subcontracting to unauthorized factories.

Bill Chandler, vice president of global corporate affairs with Gap Inc., says his company has programs in place to help improve factory working conditions, including a fire and building safety action plan for factories where the Gap does business.

Companies differ in the extent to which they audit factories, and it takes vigilance to have well trained auditors make their presence felt over time. As the most recent building collapse shows, there continue to be tragic outcomes.

“Truly I don’t think this is rocket science,” says Harvard Business School’s Hammond, “you just have to say what your standards are.”

There need to be clear policies on when you can subcontract, when you can’t, and what vendor qualifications should be when you do subcontract, she says.

Hammond points out the garment industry has helped develop many countries, including Britain and the United States, but “there’s a little too much pressure” on the system in developing countries right now. Wringing every last cent out of suppliers has a price, she says.

Ultimately, the pressure driving the cut throat competition for cheaper clothing comes from one place.

“American consumers want to buy clothes for low cost,” says Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, Companies -- even big ones like Walmart or Target “are just rats in a maze. We are the maze.”

Consumer loans fuel sales of everything from homes to autos to appliances. Then, there are guns.

Many gun buyers prefer to pay cash. But for those who can’t, there’s a finance industry to help out. Some of the big names have pulled out of the politically sensitive market, most recently General Electric’s finance arm. Yes, if you couldn’t afford the gun you wanted, GE might have loaned you the money.

So how easy is it to get a gun loan, and who uses them?

Say you’re in the market for a gun. First of all, how much does the typical handgun or rifle cost? Larry Hyatt is owner of the Hyatt gun shop in Charlotte, N.C.

“There’s some a lot less and some a lot more but I would say the average (firearm) is $500,” he says.

Hyatt sells guns, and a lot of Americans are buying. Last year, $6 billion of firearms and ammunition were sold at retail -- up almost $2 billion from the year before.

Like a lot of gun shops, Hyatt’s store offered credit for customers that needed it. But when the financial crisis hit, credit quickly disappeared.

“The company that was doing ours quit doing it. They would not do guns any more,” explains Hyatt.

He says his loan company was owned by AIG. Now, Hyatt offers layaway for his customers instead. But he says most opt to use cash or plastic, and he’s grateful to the credit card industry for filling the credit gap.

“Thank goodness the credit card industry came to the rescue. That’s gun financing. It’s just through the normal credit cards not a separate company.”

But when it comes to guns, even consumers who can’t qualify for a credit card can still get credit. Randy Frazier, owner of gunfinancing.com, offers loans to consumers whose scores aren’t perfect and don’t have $2,000 in cash for a rifle.

“What we’re after is the guy who’s trying to buy a gun that he can’t afford to pay cash for,” he says. Frazier notes his website’s customers are typically between 21 and 32 years old. “They’re not perfect credit, but they’re not poor credit, they’re right in the middle.”

Frazier says if you are going to finance your gun, expect to pay about 18 percent in interest.

The NFL draft starts tonight and will last for the next three days. Only a small number of players will be drafted and the ones that are picked will be the ones on stage, grinning ear to ear, wearing their new team hat.

It’s a process that pales in comparison to what it took to get that moment. Before his gig at ESPN, Andrew Brandt was an agent. He says the months leading up to it are filled with “painstaking work with thousands of man hours and thousands of dollars going into that process." Players hoping to be drafted pick an agent “within days if not hours from their last football game.” And after that, the agents take a big gamble on the right player, “they're right to pre-combine training and agents now pick up all those costs."

The paycheck at the end of that journey isn’t guaranteed.

"There's 250 players that are getting picked and if you're drafted, the lowest seventh round pick is probably getting about a $45- to $50,000 bonus so the maximum an agent can charge is 3 percent so now you're talking about $150 or something like that." And he says that’s "after putting in maybe $5-, $10-, maybe $20,000 of training expenses into these guys."

This year, one draft-hopeful, Matt Elam from Florida, is going without an agent. Brandt says there are pros and cons.

"For the actual negotiation, there's very little an agent can do now for rookie contracts. What the agent will say is that the pre-combine training, the after-combine training, the run up to the draft, the intel, the experience, the clout, the names, the connections with general managers, owners, personnel scouts -- all those things are part of a fee even though the actual fee is based on a negotiation."

He says a player would definitely need an agent for a second contract, which is usually complex.

During his time as an agent, Brandt had his ups and downs. He remembers losing Ricky Williams, "he wanted something a football agent couldn't give him -- access to the entertainment industry."

But also the glory of giving Matthew Hasselbeck his shot. Hasselbeck wasn’t invited to the combine -- so Brandt set one up for him.

"And he went on to be one of the better quarter backs in the league and he still is."So that's one of the things you love as an agent. To see a guy come out of nowhere and really blossom."

Whoever succeeds Sir Dave Richards as Premier League chairman needs to have a flair for diplomacy, says David Bond.

Problems at a Canadian factory have caused a shortage of tuberculosis tests in the U.S. Some hospitals and health departments around the country are deferring routing TB testing as a result.

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Trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni is banned from racing for eight years after a doping scandal which has engulfed the Godolphin stable.

Sunil Tripathi had nothing to with the Boston bombings. He'd actually been missing for a month. But a New York Post front page led to wild speculation on the Web, and for a day or so, he was being called a suspect by some on social media.

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The UN Security Council unanimously approves a resolution to create a UN peacekeeping force for Mali to take over from withdrawing French troops.

The mother of the Boston marathon bombings suspect says she regrets that the family emigrated to the US, more than 10 years ago.

Doctors' leaders have said the government is promoting an "overly simplistic and inaccurate" picture of the current pressures facing hospital A&E departments.

The Northern Health Trust is to close all nine residential homes in its area in the long term.

At least 10 policemen and 30 gunmen die in clashes in Mosul as anti-government protests continue in Iraq's Sunni-dominated areas.

Researchers believe they have designed a new type of LED streetlamp which would radically reduce the amount of light pollution spilled into the sky.