Morning Edition

Renee Montagne talks with aviation reporter Stephen Trimble about airplane technology and black boxes.

New York Sea Grant, SUNY Oswego's Office of Business and Community Relations and several other Oswego County groups are launching a survey pilot program to better understand the area's recreation and tourism industry.

Later this month, about 600 businesses in the county will be asked questions about their businesses and future plans.

Chena Tucker with SUNY Oswego says the Business Retention and Expansion Program will help the county figure out what business owners worry about most, like minimum wage laws and finding grant opportunities.

The sushi is so small customers might need tweezers rather than chopsticks to eat it. That's because the sushi is made with a single grain of rice. It started out as a joke but customers loved it.

After losing the bet, he had to change his name to one just shy of the 100-character limit for new names in New Zealand. The incident came to light recently because his passport expired.

Is the rift with Russia over Ukraine impeding U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the war in Syria and curb Iran's nuclear ambitions? Renee Montagne talks to Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center.

For what President Obama and Vladimir Putin think of each other, David Greene talks to Angela Stent. Her new book, The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.

State Senate Republicans say they will break a long-standing tradition of boycotting the election of new Regents. They now say they will attend a joint legislative session, and that many will vote “no” over dissatisfaction with the Common Core.  

It’s uncertain whether all four of the incumbent Regents members will be re-elected.  

This legislative session in Florida, one of the Republican authors of the "stand your ground" law is teaming with a Democratic leader on a bill to make some significant changes to the law.

Thanks to a newly improved smartphone app and device, pet owners can check in on their furry friends. Through the app, you can not only see your pet, but talk to it through a speaker as well.

The new year got off to a rough start for the airlines. The four largest airlines canceled more than 74,000 flights in January and February. Delta said poor weather cost it $90 million in revenue.

America used to have a robust college education system for prison inmates. It was seen as a way to rehabilitate men and women behind bars by helping them go straight when they got out.

Those taxpayer-funded college classes were defunded in the 1990s. But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to bring them back in the state, prompting a fierce new debate over higher education in state prisons.

Before he became famous — and infamous — for calling on black power for black people, Stokely Carmichael was better known as a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. The tall, handsome philosophy major from Howard University spent summers in the South, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, to get African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi registered to vote in the face of tremendous, often violent resistance from segregationists.

On Wednesday, both houses of the legislature are due to release their one-house budget proposals, which they will then use to negotiate a final spending plan with Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in an interview with PBS's New York Now and public radio stations, says Assembly Democrats are not yet on board with part of Cuomo’s plan to cut the estate tax.

Rep. Dan Maffei (D-Syracuse) awarded a World War II veteran the Purple Heart on Saturday. Staff Sergeant Richard Faulkner turned down the award 70 years ago, but recently had a change of heart.

When 89-year-old Richard Faulkner was 18, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as a ball turret gunner. In March of 1944, he was wounded after parachuting out of an airplane that crashed in France. Faulkner says it was the scariest time of his life, he spent 29 days behind enemy lines. He was awarded the Purple Heart, but he turned it down.  

Gov. Andrew Cuomo led a group of lawmakers on a day-long visit to the Adirondack Park yesterday.

The Adirondack Winter Challenge is part of his administration's $60 million effort, launched last year, to boost upstate tourism. The event was also designed to build support in Albany for state-run tourism sites that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year to operate.

The day’s big photo op comes with Andrew Cuomo climbing on a sleek snowmobile, surrounded by snowy woods under a brilliant blue sky.

"Want to find which is the fastest," he says.

Budget negotiations are expected to get serious at the state Capitol this week, with the spending plan due at the end of the month.

The Senate and Assembly are due to put out their one house budget resolutions Wednesday, the first step toward reaching a final deal with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

There are a number of unresolved issues, including how to pay for and structure a plan to provide universal pre-kindergarten to New York’s four-year-olds, and a multi-step plan proposed by Cuomo to freeze property taxes has faced skepticism.   

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Sicily has joined the space-age.

Amateur scientists have launched the Sicilian Space Program with a homemade spacecraft, a helium balloon, and at the tip of the tiny vessel: a cannollo put the cherry on top.

Well, given the extreme conditions, the clay cannollo, still, cameras filmed the classic cream filled pastry soaring into the stratosphere, capturing a sweet view of the sunrise. One small step for pastry.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene.

ArmaLite is a weapons manufacturer in Illinois and they're facing an unlikely opponent. His name is Dario Franceschini, he's Italy's culture minister and he's upset about an image from ArmLite's "Work of Art" ad campaign. It shows Michelangelo's David cradling an assault rifle. Franceschini says the ad "offends and infringes on the law."

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The National Football League has been confronting questions about head injuries and the danger of concussions among its players. But football is a contact sport beginning at a much younger age, and many states are implementing - or at least considering new policies - to protect student athletes from head injuries.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

From Syria to Afghanistan, to Russia and Ukraine, the United States finds itself confronting some major foreign policy challenges. There are old rivalries and new one testing the limits of the United States.

NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam regularly joins us to talk about matters related to individual and organizational behavior, but today, he's found some new research that's relevant to the way we think about foreign conflicts and he's in our studios. Shankar, welcome back.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

It was pretty clear that the recent bout of winter weather that many of us have seen was going to have an effect on job growth in February. The question was how much. And it turns out less than expected. That's the message from the government's monthly employment report that's out today. It found that U.S. employers added 175,000 jobs to their payrolls last month. As NPR's John Ydstie reports, it's more than expected.

After a year of lobbying her colleagues, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's bill to change how the Pentagon handles sexual assault cases was rejected by the Senate.

Gillibrand isn't looking at her legislation's defeat as a failure, just a temporary setback in her effort to remove sexual assault cases from the military chain of command. Although 55 senators supported it, that wasn't enough to overcome a bipartisan filibuster.

Gillibrand says her work isn’t over.

There’s growing unease over Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax freeze plan.

One hundred local government officials have signed a letter opposing the plan, including Syracuse Mayor and state Democratic Party Co-Chairwoman Stephanie Miner, and there are signs that the legislature may modify what critics have called an overly complex proposal when the Senate and Assembly release their one house state budgets.

Environmental groups won a court injunction last year against the village of Painted Post, preventing them from continuing water shipments for fracking operations in Pennsylvania.

The case was brought before the State Supreme Appellate Division Court in Rochester recently, with officials from the town in Steuben County vying for a different outcome.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene. A family business in Chicago folded this week because of the Fed. It was a mother father daughter shoplifting ring that went from Maryland to Texas. The family stole millions of dollars worth of retail - Legos, electronics, bags of coffee. They auctioned the items on eBay, making more than four million bucks over the past decade. The tool of their trade - clothing. The family's matriarch had a special black dress outfitted with compartments to stuff stolen goods.

Environmental activists said there needs to be more emphasis on renewable energy and less on fossil fuels at a hearing on the New York Draft Energy Plan in Syracuse Thursday.  

The New York State Energy plan is a comprehensive economy-wide, multi-year plan put together by the state energy planning board. It’s meant to showcase Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s energy policy.  

Keith Schue, an engineer from Otsego County, said the plan doesn’t have the pieces in place to reach the state’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions a full 80 percent by the year 2050.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Linda Wertheimer.

Spring has not yet sprung but high schoolers are thinking ahead to prom. A Florida teen enlisted the a cappella group Straight No Chaser for his video invite to Megan.

STRAIGHT NO CHASER: (Singing) Let it go. Let it go...

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Megan, will you go to prom with me?

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WERTHEIMER: He showed the video in class. It's on YouTube. Megan said yes. Heaven knows he tried.

It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Senior U.S. officials were warned of imminent Russian military action in Crimea about a week before the troop movements that have sparked a major international crisis over Ukraine, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency tells NPR.

Taking a water bottle to the gym or drinking a certain amount of water each day may seem like good choices.  But do they provide health benefits? This week on WRVO's health and wellness show "Take Care," hosts Lorraine Rapp and Linda Lowen speak with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Goldfarb explains what his research has shown about why water is so important to the body but how you may not need as much of it as you think.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The recent bout of winter weather that many of us have felt has hit the U.S. economy. Winter storms cooled job growth in February. The only question is by how much. Economists, investors and job seekers are looking to today's employment report from the government for an answer. NPR's John Ydstie says their predictions have been dampened by the weather too.

JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: John Sylvia is the top economist for Wells Fargo. His forecast for job growth in February has been pounded down by the weather.