National / International News

If Pyongyang is the source of a cyberattack against South Korea's computer networks, it wouldn't be the first time.

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The chancellor halves his economic growth forecast - but announces measures to help businesses, homebuyers, drivers and beer drinkers.

A drink-driver is jailed after running from the scene of a crash, leaving his fiancee who was found dead in the wreckage.

How the chancellor was constrained by circumstances

A poll finds the central elements of the federal health law remain popular across partly lines. But the law as a whole is still polarizing and confusing to many Americans, the results suggest.

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Some of the most powerful U.S. rocket engines ever built have been raised from the depths off Florida. The Apollo-era motors are to be restored and put on display. Meanwhile, NASA has pulled unused copies of the same engine out of storage and fired them up as part of its program to build new heavy lift rockets.

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A TV advertisement promoting condom use in Kenya has been withdrawn following an outcry by religious leaders, a health official says.

The Fed is staying the course with its $85 billion monthly bond-buying stimulus. Chairman Ben Bernanke is also expected to answer questions about the banking crisis in Cyprus.

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The US state of Colorado tightens its gun laws, limiting the size of ammunition magazines and expanding background checks for gun buyers.

Straw bale houses - where twigs, branches and straw bales are covered in clay to form the walls of a solid modern home - are enjoying a resurgence in western Ukraine as prospective home owners look to get the best deal for the money.

A Canadian man is hoping to be the first person to sell his house for virtual currency Bitcoins.

A rat may have caused this week's power outage at Japan's tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, says the company which runs it.

A man is arrested after £113,000 went missing from a secure storage area at Warwickshire Police's former headquarters.

The US is working for a swift transfer of a Congolese war crimes suspect from its embassy in Rwanda to the ICC, a senior US official for Africa says.

Barack Obama says Israel has "no greater friend" than the US, as he makes his first visit to the country as president.

The BBC is facing another strike by its journalists and other staff that could potentially have a significant impact on the corporation's output.

BBC Weather's John Hammond on why it feels like it's still winter

The fashion retailer Nieman Marcus had a little run in with the Federal Trade Commission this week. It was one of three companies involved in a settlement over fake fur. It turns out that some Burberry coats they had advertised as faux fur were actually real fur. They were made from an East Asian animal called a raccoon dog.

A raccoon dog is not quite a raccoon and not quite a dog. What it definitely is not, is synthetic, which means it cannot be sold as fake fur.

Humane Society attorney Ralph Henry says the society tested coats in a lab and notified the FTC, when they discoverd that the coats were made from the animal's fur.

"The retailers have agreed to be bound by FTC orders," says Matt Wilshire, a staff attorney for the FTC.

The settlement signed by Nieman Marcus and two other retailers, DrJays.com and Eminent, does not force the retailers to pay any financial penalties. But they are required to accurately label all fur products. And says Wilshire, "if they violate the order on the future they may be subject to penalties."

Part of the problem, according to retail analyst Marshal Cohen, is that manufacturers have gotten really good at making fake fur. "It used to be that when you touched it or got close to it, you could tell that it wasn't real."

As more people shy away from wearing real fur for ethical reason, the demand for this new high quality fake fur is growing. But Cohen says, "there are just not a lot of companies that are producing the faux fur itself."

This has opened up opportunities for other sources of faux fur, like raccoon dog, which according to the law is faux faux fur and should be labeled as such.

The FTC would not comment on where the raccoon dog came from.

It's March Madness time -- and we thought we’d run our own bracket with the top seeded teams.  

Being Marketplace, we set out to crown the team with the best state economy, and not the best basketball skills.

Marketplace’s Adriene Hill has the call with help from ESPN’s Rece Davis.

Listen to the audio above to hear the story.

At the same, we also ran the brackets using a few other economic indicators.

Print out the brackets below if you'd like to fill out your guess using data from the U.S. Census or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, instead of by using superstition, mascots, or, you know, actual basketball stats:

In the unemployment matchup -- the final four includes South Dakota State and Wisconsin.

The Badgers may feel like they could make it in the actual tournament; South Dakota is probably more of a long shot.

Also, of note, because the unemployment rate in Omaha, Neb., and in Columbia, Mo., are the same -- Creighton and Missouri are a toss-up. You get to pick who you want to advance to the championship game. But both lose to the juggernaut Jackrabbits of South Dakota State University. Print out the unemployment bracket.

On the other hand, if the N.C.A.A. champion was determined by median household income of the surrounding area, St. Mary's College, in Moraga, Calif., would be victorious. The East Bay area suburb has the highest household income statistics.

The high earners in some posh university towns, like Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley, Calif., allowed those brainier schools to advance further than expected. 

And Villanova advanced deep in the tournament -- but that is because the household income of nearby King of Prussia, Penn., helped bump them on. Print out the bracket by median household income.

The United States has officially been out of Iraq for about 15 months. But there are still thousands of American soldiers stationed in the country today, ten years after the first full day of war. All those people, along with thousands of reconstruction projects and programs that we left behind.

The cost of those projects totaled about $60 billion -- that's a bill footed by the American taxpayer. And that money wasn't exactly well-spent, says Stuart Bowen, the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

"The United States must act to improve, to reform its approach to stabilization and reconstruction operations," he said. "And we are not well organized, well structured to carry them out, to plan them, for that matter, or to oversee them."

Bowen says one crucial lesson learned was, "don't carry out large infrastructure rebuilding programs until sufficient security is established." He said that for the first five years of reconstruction, much of the rebuilding in Iraq used cash to fund it -- something that contributed to the fraud and waste associated with the program. In addition, Bowen critiques the initial contracts to rebuild, calling them a virtual "open checkbook."

Still, Bowen is optimistic about the future. He's confident Congress is listening to his reports even as other issues, like the sequester, demand their attention. And he says it's important the United States gets better at rebuilding nations like Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There's no doubt that we are going to again face substantial stabilization and reconstruction operations in our future, perhaps in the near future, perhaps in Syria," he says.