The British bank accused of using its New York branch to launder money from international transaction has agreed to pay New York's top banking regulator $340 million. Regulators said the bank schemed to hide more than 60,000 financial transactions totaling $250 billion for Iranian clients. The bank denied the charges. Audie Cornish talks with Jim Zarroli.
A worker on a newly constructed transmission tower near Buetzow, Germany, earlier this month. The German government plans to shut down nuclear power plants and is seeking to replace that production with power from renewable energy sources, especially wind turbines and solar parks. New power transmission lines will be needed.
Credit Eric Westervelt / NPR
Wind turbines near Ellhoeft, in northern Germany, close to the Danish border. The challenge for Germany's new energy plan is how to transmit power generated in the north to the population centers in the south.
Originally published on Thu August 16, 2012 11:07 am
After Japan's Fukushima disaster last year, Germany announced a groundbreaking energy plan: It would phase out all of its domestic nuclear power in a decade and make a transition to safer, carbon neutral energy.
The goal is to have solar, wind and other renewables account for nearly 40 percent of the energy for Europe's largest economy in a decade, and 80 percent by 2050.
Julie Delpy stars in 2 Days in New York, which she also directed, produced and co-wrote.
Credit Jojo Whilden / Magnolia Pictures
Delpy's own father, Albert Delpy, plays her character's father, who doesn't speak a word of English. This complicates things with her boyfriend, Mingus (Chris Rock).
Actress Julie Delpy first beguiled American audiences in 1995, playing the enigmatic French student in Richard Linklater's film Before Sunrise. Ever since, Delpy has enjoyed life on the Hollywood fringe, preferring indie projects where she can help shape her roles.
She co-wrote the Oscar-nominated script to Linklater's sequel, Before Sunset, and has also begun directing her own projects. For her latest, 2 Days in New York, she directed, produced and helped write the script.
Chicago DJ Mary Nisi is no stranger to the art of the playlist. As president of the wedding DJ company Toast & Jam, she builds them regularly for receptions of all kinds.
C.J. Moore stands where her front door used to be, before the Waldo Canyon Fire swept through the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in Colorado Springs, Colo. The fire destroyed more than 350 homes there.
Credit Kirk Siegler for NPR
Like many of her neighbors, Moore lost almost all of her belongings in the fire.
When the Waldo Canyon Fire roared over the hill behind the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in Colorado Springs, Colo., in June, nearly350 homes were destroyed. The blaze reduced this affluent neighborhood at the foot of the mountains to rubble.
C.J. Moore's home on Mirror Lake Court was among the casualties. The inferno was so hot, her stone driveway exploded. Only a few blackened trees sway eerily in the wind where her home used to stand.
Connecticut GOP Senate candidates Rep. Christopher Shays and Linda McMahon shake hands at a June 14 debate in Storrs. State Republicans vote Tuesday on which candidate will move on to the general election.
When Helen Gurley Brown took the reins at Cosmoin 1965, it was a foundering monthly known for fiction. She remained at the helm for more than 30 years. Here, Brown poses at her office in New York in September 1985.
Credit Marty Lederhandler / AP
Brown holds the last copy of Cosmo she edited, in January 1997.
Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, died Monday in New York at age 90.
If Cosmo was her biggest legacy, it was her 1962 best-seller, Sex and the Single Girl, that launched her to fame. She was 40, with a high-paying job in advertising and a recent marriage to Hollywood producer David Brown.
But she was writing for the single girls, not her privileged peers, says Jennifer Scanlon, author of a Brown biography called Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
D.W. Gibson is the author of Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy.
The bright white Heritage Park library opened up a mile from my house when I was 13, and the first thing I checked out was Roald Dahl's story collection Someone Like You. I should have known what I was in for because of that giant eyeball on the cover; but somehow I saw it as more of a temptation than a warning.
Boston's Debo Band takes inspiration from a golden era of popular music in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the late '60s and early '70s. During a brief period of cultural freedom in Ethiopia, funk and soul music fused spectacularly with local traditions. Debo Band's debut album both honors and updates the sound of "swinging Addis."
