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Dozens Killed In Massive Tornado Near Oklahoma City

May 20, 2013 — Helicopter images of Moore, Oklahoma show tracts of devastated neighborhoods.

The Low-Tech Way Guns Get Traced

May 20, 2013 — There is one place in the country where a law enforcement agency can trace a gun found at a crime scene back to a buyer: the ATF's National Tracing Center in West Virginia. But the tracing process is usually tedious, involving multiple phone calls and searching, by hand, through paper records.

Pope Francis Puts The Poor Front And Center

May 20, 2013 — Shunning the formalities of his office and focusing on poverty, Pope Francis is drawing a sharp contrast between his 2-month-old papacy and those of his predecessors.

Turnabout Is Fair Play: Senators Have Many Questions For IRS

May 20, 2013 — The IRS gave some conservative groups extra, improper scrutiny. Now there's a bipartisan request for the IRS to answer dozens of questions. Read the queries and demands for information from the top Democrat and top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Mel Brooks: 'I'm An EGOT; I Don't Need Any More'

May 20, 2013 — The screenwriter, producer, director and actor, whose name has become synonymous with American comedy, talks about his penchant for spoofs and his decades-long friendship with Carl Reiner. Brooks, who is among a handful of people who've won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, is the subject of a new documentary on PBS.

Paula Gomez Backup (Sarah Varney?)

Texas Medicaid Debate Complicated By Politics And Poverty

by Sarah Varney

May 21, 2013 (Morning Edition / Kaiser Health News) — In Texas, it may be politically unwise to cross the governor, but some politicians and advocates in the poor Rio Grande Valley are starting to speak out in support of expanding Medicaid. Governor Perry opposes all parts of Obamacare.

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Paula Gomez is the executive director of the Brownsville Community Health Center

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When the sun rises over the Rio Grande Valley, the cries of the urracas - black birds - perched on the tops of palm trees swell to a noisy, unavoidable cacophony. That is also the strategy, it could be said, that local officials, health care providers and frustrated Valley residents are trying to use to convince Governor Rick Perry and state Republican lawmakers to set aside their opposition and expand Medicaid, a key provision of the federal health law.

The Rio Grande Valley has a load of troubles: high unemployment, low paying jobs, warring Mexican cartels, a meager tax base and legions of people without health insurance. While many of those woes seem incurable, expanding Medicaid to the region's uninsured is to Paula Gomez, who runs several local health clinics, a no-brainer.

"I think if we're not ready, if Texas doesn't buy in in the next three months, shame on us," she says.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation - one in four Texans has no health coverage - and the rate in the Rio Grande Valley is even higher. Medicaid is closed to anyone earning more than $196 a month, leaving many working adults ineligible and without coverage.

Under the health law, the federal government would pay the entire cost of the expansion for the first three years, then 90-percent in subsequent years. As it stands, Texas would have to spend about $1 billion a year over the next three years, say Democrats, to receive $27 billion in federal matching funds.

But Governor Perry says Texas can ill afford to expand Medicaid, and he doesn't trust that federal government will pay its promised share. At a press conference last month, he blasted Obamacare's Medicaid provisions:

"Seems to me an appropriate April Fool's Day event, makes it perfect to discuss something as foolish as Medicaid expansion, and to remind everyone that Texas will not be held hostage by the Obama Administration's attempt to force us into the fool's errand of adding more than a million Texans to a broken system."

For now, uninsured patients in the Rio Grande Valley pay what they can for basic medical care, but specialty care - to follow up on a lump in the breast for example - is almost always out of reach without some type of insurance, including Medicaid, according to Dr. Henry Imperial, the Brownsville Community Health Center's medical director: "Once you diagnose a cancer, then what? How are you going to give me chemotherapy or surgery or radiation therapy?"

Hospitals in Texas end up with millions in unpaid bills and the counties, by state law, have to provide basic medical care to destitute residents. That's led a number of counties in the Rio Grande Valley — and elsewhere — to pass resolutions supporting the Medicaid expansion.

For local Republicans, that mild act of defiance against a powerful governor - who is opposed to every provision in the federal health law — can seem like political suicide. It's not something they're eager to draw attention to.

The county's top elected official, Republican Carlos Cascos says "It's contrary to what the [GOP] leadership in Austin is recommending but we thought it was important enough to take a position."

State Representative Eddie Lucio III, a Democrat from Brownsville, faces daunting odds in trying to persuade the conservative Republicans who control the legislature to buck Governor Perry and approve a bill to expand Medicaid in Texas.

Lucio says he's not sure what effect, if any, the resolutions by county officials, including Republicans like Carlos Cascos, are having. There is ample pessimism here in Brownsville that lawmakers 350 miles away in Austin will ever understand life in the Valley.

But since there is no hard deadline for when Texas or any other state has to sign up for the Medicaid expansion, health clinic director Paula Gomez is pressing on. She says she still remembers fighting the state to get drinkable water in the Rio Grande Valley, and she'll patiently fight this war too.

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Worker Charles Lee sorts through clothes at Mac Recycling near Baltimore. Textile recycling is a huge international business, and a small facility like Mac ships about 80 tons of clothes each week to buyers around the world. (NPR)

The Global Afterlife Of Your Donated Clothes

by Jackie Northam

May 21, 2013 (Morning Edition / Kaiser Health News) — The deadly collapse of a textile factory in Bangladesh has heightened awareness about cheap clothes. Many Americans have become used to inexpensive clothing, but the garments are also discarded at a remarkable rate: Billions of pounds of clothing are recycled each year; nearly half is exported.

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Bales of used clothing are seen at Mac Recycling near Baltimore. Textile recycling is a huge international business, and a small facility like Mac ships about 80 tons of clothes each week to buyers around the world.

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Jackie Northam

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On a bright and warm Saturday morning, there's a steady flow of people dropping off donations at Martha's Table, a charity in downtown Washington, D.C. A mountain of plastic and paper bags stuffed with used dresses, scarves, skirts and footwear expands in one corner of the room. Volunteers sort and put clothes on hangers. They'll go on sale next door, the proceeds of which will help the needy in the area.

It's a scene played out across the U.S.: people donating their old clothes, whether through collection bins or through large charities, to help others.

Melissa Vanouse donates clothes a couple times a year.

"I think it all pretty much stays local, that's kind of the idea," she says.

But it doesn't. Martha's Table, like other charities, only has so much room and can only keep clothes for so long. At some point, charities call in a textile recycling company.

Varied Uses

About 80 percent of the donations are carted away by textile recyclers, says Jackie King, the executive director of Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles, a trade association for textile recyclers. She says that means about 3.8 billion pounds of clothing that is donated each year is recycled.

"Thirty percent of the materials are made into wiping cloths that are used in commercial and industrial use," she says.

About 20 percent of the donated clothes and textiles are converted into fibers that are then made into a variety of other products, including carpet padding, insulation for autos as well as homes, and pillow stuffing.

King says nearly half the donated clothes - about 45 percent - is exported.

A forklift shuttles large pallets stacked with bins of donated clothes at Mac Recycling on the outskirts of Baltimore. A large section of the warehouse is packed with colorful 800-pound bales of clothing ready to ship out.

Robert Goode, the owner of Mac Recycling, says textile recycling is a huge international industry. He says his small warehouse alone ships about 80 tons of clothes each week to buyers throughout the world, including Central America, South America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

"Pretty much you can pick any country and there's a market for these items," he says.

'Competitive Business'

Goode says when the shipment arrives overseas, a wholesaler will break down the bales and send the clothes into different markets. At each step along the way in this process, someone makes money from the donated clothes.

"It is an extremely competitive business ... items are bought and sold by the pound and you can literally make or lose a deal over half a cent a pound, quarter of a cent a pound," Goode says.

He says the business has changed dramatically over the years. Customers in foreign markets are now setting up their own operations in the U.S., cutting out a middleman. King, SMART's executive director, says textile recyclers are still finding strong demand for used clothing. But she says selling cheap garments, like those made in Bangladesh, is becoming increasingly difficult.

"I think one of the problems when they're trying to sell the clothing abroad is the distinction between what's good quality used clothing versus clothing that has maybe not been manufactured to the highest standards," she says.

King says ultimately she hopes that more clothes — of good quality — are donated every year. Her organization, SMART, says 85 percent of all the clothing sold each year ends up in landfill.

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Apple's 'Complex Web' Helped It Avoid Taxes, Panel Finds

by Krishnadev Calamur

May 20, 2013 (Kaiser Health News) — The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said the tech giant claimed that three key offshore companies were not tax residents of either Ireland or the U.S. One of those subsidiaries paid no taxes for the past five years while it reported income totaling $30 billion.