NPR News

Most people like trees — right up until a storm like last Friday's mid-Atlantic "derecho" knocks one into their car. So when is a tree merely nice to look at and when does it become a hazard? Robert Siegel talks to Tchukki Andersen, a staff arborist at the Tree Care Industry Association, about how homeowners can safely care for their trees.

States are banding together to try to combat prescription drug abuse. Doctors in many states check a database before prescribing medication. But there's no way for doctors who live on the border to check neighboring states. Now there's a move to change that.

In the week since the Supreme Court upheld almost all of President Obama's health care law, some of the biggest action has been on the Medicaid front, where the administration definitely lost.

Until last week, the Affordable Care Act was expected to drive an expansion of Medicaid to the tune of about 17 million more people being covered over the next 10 years.

The Affordable Care Act, as written, would have required states to provide Medicaid coverage to adults, whether they have children or not, with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

"The Shard," a $700 million office building in London set to open today in a blaze of laser-light, joins The Gherkin and The Wobbly Bridge in a long list of irreverent nicknames given by the British over the years to various buildings, structures and towns.

It's no longer Meat Week here on The Salt (we are deep into Pie Week, in case you haven't noticed). But that doesn't mean we can't flag a good meat story when we see one.

Lucero — bright star in Spanish — has been creating quality punk-inflected country since the late '90s. Hailing from Memphis, frontman Ben Nichols gives the act a gruff Southern twang with both his voice and his guitar. Since the release of 2001's eponymous debut, Lucero has recorded five more studio albums and plays an impressive 200 shows a year in the U.S. and Canada.

Central banks in Europe and China have lowered interest rates in hopes of propping up the shaky global economy.

In Europe, where the weaker EU economies seem to be balancing precariously on the precipice of default, the European Central Bank announced it would reduce its benchmark interest rates to 0.75 percent from 1 percent to spur borrowing and stimulate the euro zone economies.

Ben Mezrich is the author of Sex on the Moon.

Around the time I turned 12, I figured out exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an alcoholic.

I didn't actually know what it meant to be an alcoholic, but I knew that one day, I would drink copious amounts and dash around the streets of Paris, preferably in the company of bullfighters, bankrupts, impotent newspaper correspondents, and morbidly depressed, exotically beautiful divorcees.

Al-Jazeera is getting attention for its reports that traces of polonium-210 have been found on items, including clothing, belonging to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

By now, a couple of generations of moviegoers are familiar with the disembodied voice in a cornfield that leads Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) to risk all for a baseball diamond. Web developer Pascal Rettig is not in as precarious a position as that fictional farmer, yet he has challenged himself by constructing a social stadium of sorts.

Faulty warning systems and pilot error are to blame for the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 that killed all 228 people aboard, a report released by French air accident investigators says.

The final report from the BEA, France's equivalent of the U.S. NTSB, largely confirmed results of a preliminary investigation released last year, but it offered more details and recommendations.