National / International News

Police in the Indian capital Delhi arrest two men suspected of killing wealthy businessman and politician Deepak Bhardwaj.

Police have found a suspect device on the Crumlin Road in north Belfast during a search on Monday morning.

Also: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie disses V. S. Naipaul; a new biography of Derrida; and the best books coming out this week.

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The biggest cases of Scotland's smallest police force

The Russian government says it will not compensate Russian savers who have lost money in the Cyprus banking crisis.

Manchester anaesthetist, Dr Hilary Eason, has just returned from Australia as a flying doctor where she featured in the new BBC series Helicopter Heroes Down Under.

Eglinton and Dungiven police stations in County Londonderry will formally close on Monday.

The Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Matt Baggott, has said dissident republican groups are trying to outdo each other.

Google Nose lets you sniff "15M+ sentibytes" via your computer screen. Twttr is for those who only want to use consonants. YouTube closes until 2023 because it has enough videos already. Morning Edition profiles "Hootie and the Time Travelers." The foolishness has begun.

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A paradoxical phenomenon involving more melt water may explain the recent expansion of Antarctic sea ice, scientists tell Nature Geoscience journal.

A flea circus in Germany has been scrambling to replace its performers after the entire troupe was wiped out by the freezing weather.

A 44-year-old man dies in hospital after a diving accident in the Western Isles.

Pablo Migliore, the goalkeeper for Argentine football club San Lorenzo, is arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting a man accused of homicide.

The Supreme Court in India has rejected an attempt by the Swiss drug maker Novartis to patent an update to a cancer treatment called Gleevec -- spelled Glivec in some markets. The decision is expected to have a big impact on pharmaceutical companies and health organizations far outside the borders of India.

The BBC's Rahul Tandon joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss the global pharmaceutical market and the new patent ruling.

The first supercomputer to carry out 1,000 trillion calculations per second is switched off for good in the US state of New Mexico.

It's not easy to give away a roller coaster.

That is the lesson so far from an attempt to donate Florida’s largest wooden coaster to charity.

The Dania Beach Hurricane opened in 2000 and quickly became a South Florida icon, thanks to its auspicious location on the side of I-95. But the privately funded, stand-alone coaster fell victim to the Great Recession and a drop in ridership.

Since April 2011, the bankrupt Hurricane has sat abandoned. Now it needs to come down by the end of May to meet a development deadline.

Attorney Allyson Goodwin has been representing the Hurricane’s investors from the very beginning. She climbs more than 100 feet to the top of the coaster’s first hill.

"Oh my gosh," says Goodwin, “I hadn’t realized how high this is.”

She looks out over a jungle of lumber that’s been bleached and worn by the Florida weather.

“The idea that it’s coming down,” Goodwin says, “and it’s actually going to go rot somewhere, is just such a waste. It just -- it actually makes me sick to my stomach to think about it to be honest.”

So last November, Goodwin and the investors announced an effort to donate the Dania Beach Hurricane to charity.  The bolts, the lumber, the steel tracks, the cars -- everything.

The theory, according to Goodwin, is that with the right charity, the donation could be a “win-win-win-win.”

Goodwin’s investors would get the massive tax write-off. A generous construction company could donate to take the thing apart and also get a massive tax write-off. The abandoned coaster -- a monstrous beacon of failure -- would no longer be the most visible highway advertisement for the City of Dania Beach. And some lucky charity would wind up with tons of steel to scrap and hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber to use.

“In theory, yes,” says Perry Ecton, Executive Director for Habitat for Humanity of Broward County.

Habitat for Humanity seemed like one of the most obvious fits for the donation. They need wood. They have construction experience.

Ecton certainly considered the donation, but the problem was taking the coaster down: The vast majority of Habitat’s workers are community volunteers.

“I’m thinking of an OSHA safety crew coming through,” says Ecton, “and you’ve got your local school teacher or lawyer hanging with harnesses upside down. It scared me more than it was worth.”

As it turns out, sometimes you need to look the gift horse in the mouth. Strange donations are part and parcel to being a non-profit. Whether or not you take those donations is (sometimes literally) the million dollar question.

The Boston Foundation, for example, has been offered everything from a trove of coins to a share in a cruise ship.

“And most interestingly,” says Kate Guedj, vice president for philanthropic and donor services, “a pile of pottery.”

The Boston Foundation was given hundreds of pieces of pottery from Brother Thomas, whose work sells for thousands of dollars. 

It’s a great donation, but takes some thinking through: You need insurance, a gallery to sell the things and storage, long-term storage. By selling off everything at once, The Boston Foundation would have flooded the high-end pottery market. So to maximize the donation down the road, the foundation had to front the storage costs at the time.

“You have to be able to handle that and think long term,” says Guedj “and not need to convert the materials to cash right away to fund your operations.”

With the pottery and the cruise ship, if there’s a foundation that can handle a wooden roller coaster, it would be The Boston Foundation.  Right? 

“Uh, no,” says Guedj to the offer, "I don’t think so.  Thanks.”

At least 30 bodies have now been retrieved from a building which collapsed in Tanzania's Dar es Salaam on Friday.

India's Supreme Court on Monday rejected drug maker Novartis AG's attempt to patent a new version of a cancer drug. It's a landmark decision that health activists say ensures poor patients around the world will get continued access to cheap versions of lifesaving medicines.

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Connor Green, six, has beaten people three times his age in table tennis matches despite only playing for just over a year.

Amid the banking crisis in Cyprus, an online-only currency called Bitcoin is getting new attention. Some argue it could be used as a safe haven for people worried about having their deposits taxed in Cypriot banks. Evidence that people turned to Bitcoin amid the Cyprus mess is actually quite slim, although one company announced last week it wanted to create the first Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus.

And with the added attention comes increased scrutiny from regulators around the world. U.S. authorities have come out with some new guidelines, and that has rankled some Bitcoin advocates.

"It was very well designed, the technology makes it so that you don't need a central authority to check where transactions are going," says Adrianne Jeffries, who has been covering Bitcoin for The Verge.

But what exactly is Bitcoin?

• How big is the Bitcoin economy? By some calculations, the currency is actually a billion-dollar industry. On March 28, 2013, the peer-to-peer virtual currency's total value exceeded $1 billion. That amount surpasses the value of the entire currency stock of countries like Bhutan and Liberia.
• Where did Bitcoin come from? On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese mathematician, created Bitcoin because he wanted a currency "immune to the predations of bankers and politicians."
• How is the price of Bitcoin decided? In the early days of its existence, a small group of users who traded the currency on forums decided its price. Today, people can use real currencies (like the U.S. dollar) to buy the virtual currency on real-world exchanges. These exchanges decide Bitcoin's price based on what people are willing to pay. Mt. Gox is the largest of these exchanges. If you're interested in obtaining bitcoins, here's a site.

• Where can I use my Bitcoin? There are several sites that list places that accept the currency directly. One website that may be considering accepting the virtual currency: OKCupid. There's a website where you can hear Bitcoin transactions in real time through sound. University of California student Maximillian Laumeister created the "Listen to Bitcoin" website, which creates chime sounds for every transaction on the network.