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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.

Last year, a snapshot of a frowning feline went viral, emblazoned with captions like: Of all the nine lives I've lived, this is the worst. Within months, Grumpy Cat, that's her nom de plume, had a book deal. Now the feline face that launched a thousand memes has a movie in the works. So how does a cat make it into the pictures, turns out she has a great agent - the same one who represents another online star, Keyboard Cat.

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

A big redevelopment project is getting underway in the village of Clayton. The first pieces of equipment have been at work on the former Frink Snowplow Factory site in recent weeks. This represents the beginning of an aggressive construction schedule that aims to bring the Clayton Harbor Hotel to life by Memorial Day 2014.

Kristi Dippel, head of the Clayton Local Development Corporation, says it's gratifying to see all the planning on the project coming to fruition.

"After over 10 years that this has been in the making, and we finally have activity on site, it's definitely the talk on the street, it's the talk of the town. People are very excited to see something happening over there," she said.

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NPR's business news begins with Japan's wheat ban.

Japan has suspended wheat imports from the Pacific Northwest states. This comes after the U.S. Agricultural Department found genetically modified wheat growing on an Oregon farm - as we reported on this program yesterday. GMO wheat has not been approved for U.S. farming, and it's not clear how the wheat found its way onto the farm.

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This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

While there are many signs that the American economy is picking up steam, in much of the European Union, the opposite is true. Austerity programs aimed at reducing national debts have been blamed for crushing growth and sending unemployment in the eurozone nations to a record high of 12 percent.

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The state of Massachusetts is suing the Obama administration over fishing regulations. Ocean-going commercial fishermen say new limits on the amount of codfish they can catch will put them out of business.

Curt Nickisch reports from member station WBUR in Boston.

CURT NICKISCH, BYLINE: Generations of fishermen have hauled cod, halibut and flounder into the port of Gloucester, where today Joe Orlando runs a 65-foot trawler, the Padre Pio.

JOE ORLANDO: I've been fishing with this boat almost 38 years.

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In Chicago, one of the longest labor strikes in U.S. history has finally come to an end. Hospitality workers at the Congress Plaza Hotel have put down their picket signs after almost 10 years.

But as Susie An reports from member station WBEZ, getting back on the job may not be so easy now that the strike is done.

Brazil is a paradise for birds; the country has more than 1,700 species. Among them is the colorful toucan, a bird with an almost comically giant bill that can be half as long as its body. There are lots of different types of toucan — red-breasted, channel-billed, keel-billed, saffron toucanet — each with its own color-scheme and distinctive call.

If you're trying to grow a business in Nigeria and you want investors, you want Nigeria's economy to look as big as possible.

Bayo Puddicombe and Zubair Abubakar own a company called Pledge 51, which creates applications for Nigeria's low-tech cellphones. One of their most popular games lets players pretend to drive the notoriously wild buses crisscrossing the Nigerian city Lagos. It's called Danfo, after the buses.

When Congress voted on federal relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey earlier this year, five of the seven Oklahoma representatives and senators voted no. Rep. Tom Cole, one of the two who voted yes, warned that someday Oklahoma would be asking for help — and that day came last week after a massive tornado.

The storm ripped through the city of Moore, in Cole's home district, killing 24 people and destroying thousands of homes.

President Obama surrounded himself with college students at the White House on Friday and warned that the cost of student loans is about to go up.

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. Obama has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would let the cost of student loans go up and down with the market.

When it comes to reining in health care spending, it still seems like each hospital administrator thinks the guy at the other hospital should do it.

Hospitals are still racing to offer expensive new technology — even when it hasn't been proved to work better than cheaper approaches. Case in point: proton beam therapy, a high-tech radiation treatment for cancer.

When you pick up a cut of beef at the store, would you like to know that animal's life history? The technology to do this does exist — at least in Michigan, where the state requires all cattle to carry electronic ear tags. It's the only state that requires such tags.

Michigan's cattle-tracking system was forced on farmers because of a crisis. Fifteen years ago, cattle in part of the state started catching tuberculosis from wild deer.

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

When I recommend books to kids or grown-ups, I can almost always get them interested if I add "Oh, and after you read this book, you could go on a field trip to the museum/zoo/baseball stadium/library ... or just take a little road trip!" Spring 2013 has been a very good year for children's books that spark the imagination and make kids (and grownups) want to do a little more exploring.

Books like these can be the start of amazing adventures. Enjoy!

Mara Alpert is a librarian in the Children's Literature Department at the Los Angeles Public Library.

In 2004, Peter Obetz was in the middle of a divorce when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

"Food would get stuck down my throat, and it got worse and worse, so I met with my doctor. I had a tumor on my esophagus wall," says Peter, 48, during a visit to StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says many of his key agenda items are still in play in the legislature, even though he’s been spending most of his time lately promoting tax free business zones at some state college campuses.

Cuomo held his sixth event in a week to highlight a plan to create tax free business zones at public and private colleges, as well as on some state owned properties. But he insists he’s still actively pursuing his other end of session priorities -- including public financing of political campaigns, a women’s equality act, the siting of three upstate casinos, and a board to help distressed upstate cities.

Hundreds gathered at the state Capitol to rally for public financing of political campaigns. The measure remains in limbo in the state Senate and Gov. Andrew Cuomo faces questions on whether he’s working hard enough for the proposal to pass.

They came in buses from all over New York to give state lawmakers their message -- big money is corrupting politics. They say the state should adopt New York City’s public campaign finance system, which allows candidates to match every dollar they collect in small donations with seven dollars of government funds.

It was January 2012 when Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer stood in front of an empty building at the old General Electric site in Liverpool and said California-based chip maker APIC Corp. landing a Navy contract and then opening up a fabricator in the building was “all but a done deal."

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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne, reporting there is no heaven on Earth, at least according to eBay. Seller Ari Mandel, formerly Orthodox Jewish, figured he'd done lot of good deeds and never worshipped false gods, so he would be a shoe-in for heaven. His offer on eBay reached $100,000 before the auction was shut down for violating eBay's policy against selling intangible things. This is MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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A television news crew in Maine was reporting a story about a man who had gone missing. Seventy-three-year-old Robert McDonough suffers from dementia and had not been seen for more than 14 hours. As the TV reporter prepared to go live, standing outside McDonough's home, an elderly man wandered into the camera shot. The reporter said hello, then did a double take. Robert McDonough had returned home, safe and sound, just in time for the newscast.

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You know what they say about the early bird? Well, a new species is vying for that title. Scientists have long-regarded an ancient creature, known as the Archaeopteryx, as the earliest bird known to science. But a discovery made in China could change that, according to a study published in Nature magazine. Scientists have found evidence of a feathered, chicken-sized species that's 10 million years older. It's called Aurornis xui, and it lived about 160 million years ago.

The Chicago Blackhawks were on the verge of elimination from the National Hockey League playoffs. But in overtime Wednesday night, they came back to beat the Detroit Red Wings 2-1 in Game 7 of their second-round playoff series.

Amazon asked subscribers of its video-streaming service to do the jobs usually left to focus groups and executives. The company released 14 pilot TV shows, then looked at customer reviews and view counts. Amazon announced five pilots have been approved for a full season.

The agency that has helped victims of HIV/AIDS for the past 30 years in central New York will soon be taking on a new responsibility. AIDS Community Resources will be a foot soldier in a revamped Medicaid system in New York state.

In the next month or so, ARC will begin offering case management services for Medicaid eligible individuals who don't necessarily have AIDS, but who have any chronic health issue.

It'll mean a name change for AIDS Community Resources, but more importantly, Executive Director Michael Crinnen says it will allow the agency do what it does best -- coordinate care for sufferers of a chronic disease, and hopefully keeping them out of the emergency room.

There were questions Wednesday if U.S. regulators will approve the takeover of Smithfield Foods Inc., the company that sells all-American hams, hot dogs and bacon, by China's Shuanghui International.

A farmer in Oregon has found some genetically engineered wheat growing on his land. It's an unwelcome surprise, because this type of wheat has never been approved for commercial planting.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it's investigating, trying to find out how this wheat got there. The USDA says there's no risk to public health, but wheat exporters are worried about how their customers in Asia and Europe will react.

Luis Bedoya is baby-faced and skinny.

And he looks ever the boy when he puts on an industrial-sized apron, thick gloves and a metal helmet - the tools of an apprentice welder at the Don Bosco center in this city in southern Colombia.

It's a big complex, complete with classrooms, basketball courts, a dormitory and work rooms. It's home to boys and girls, as well as very young adults, who defected from the FARC rebels or were captured by the Colombian army.

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NPR's business news begins with a meaty Chinese investment in the U.S.

A Chinese meat producer plans to buy the U.S. meat company Smithfield for $4.7 billion dollars. Smithfield is the world's largest pork producers, and by some estimates, if this deal is approved by regulators, it would be the biggest takeover of a U.S. company by a Chinese company.

Onondaga County residents who want to get a pistol permit, are still seeing waits of more than 14 months to get an initial interview needed to get that permit.  But, county officials are expediting the purchase of a computer program that should move things along.

It'll be about a month before new software replaces the index cards Onondaga County Sheriff's deputies now use to process pistol permits, and start to make a dent in the wait for a permit hearing. County Legislator Kevin Holmquist says one of the reasons it took so long to award a contract for the software, was the state's new gun control law, called the NY SAFE Act.

A new community resource room, filled with 18 computers, is up and running as part of Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement program in Syracuse.  Much of it involves literacy, key for refugees as they take steps to become a citizens of the United State.

Arnie Poltenson from Manlius is helping teach English to a refugee with limited knowledge of the English language, who has come to the new community resource room at the Catholic Youth Organization building on Syracuse's Northside.