State and National News

Kimberly Lankford, personal finance writer for Kiplinger.com and Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, talks to David Greene about the shifting market for long-term-care insurance, and if it is still worth buying.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The Gold Bullion Development Corporation, a Montreal-based exploration company, will allow its shareholders to have their dividends paid in gold. Company President Frank Basa has been paid in gold for more than 20 years.

There is a battle underway on the presidential campaign trail over Michigan's economic recovery. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says President Obama is given too much credit for helping the domestic auto industry. President Obama has made the auto industry's turnaround a central point of his re-election campaign.

Even as the great, sad Junior Seau killed himself, more and more other old football players are joining in class action to sue the National Football League. They're claiming, generally, that while the NFL understood — for years — how vulnerable its players were to head injuries, the league did not sufficiently warn players about the danger of concussions.

Nor did the teams first do no harm — instead, allowing players to go back into games when they should have been kept out of the action.

When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can't.

It sounds like a typical American success story: A young boy becomes an academic standout, an Eagle Scout and high school valedictorian. Later, he attends college and then law school, all on full scholarships.

But Jose Godinez-Samperio's story is not typical. He's an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — and now he's fighting to be admitted to the Florida bar.

Godinez-Samperio was just 9 years old when he came to the U.S. with his parents. They entered the country legally, but overstayed their visas and settled in the Tampa area.

For the CEOs of companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, talk of cyberweapons and cyberwar could have been abstract. But at a classified security briefing in spring 2010, it suddenly became quite real.

"We can turn your computer into a brick," U.S. officials told the startled executives, according to a participant in the meeting.

Back before the conflagration that was World War II, some of Europe's great powers engaged in a surrogate struggle by arming the warring factions in the Spanish Civil War. It was a great way to test their latest weapons and tactics.

Here in our country and in our time, the role of Spain is being played by the state of Wisconsin, where a political civil war has raged for nearly 18 months — presaging the fierce national politics of this presidential year.

Watch Wisconsin over the next four weeks, and you will see where we are headed as a nation in the months ahead.

Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, tells us what she's been reading in a feature that Morning Edition likes to call "Word of Mouth." This month, Brown selects two recent pieces of news commentary and a memoir on political resistors.

A Son's Plea For A Dissident Father

The Milwaukee Mayor will face Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election. The AP projected that Tom Barrett won the Democratic primary when he had an almost 20-point lead with about 31 percent of the precincts reporting.

Walker became a national figure after he backed and signed legislation that severely limited the collective bargaining rights of public workers. The bill was passed amid major protests and Walker is now in the target of the nationwide labor movement.