Morning Edition

Rajat Gupta was one of the wealthiest and most successful men in America and an icon of the Indian-American community. Today, he faces two years in prison for insider trading, convicted of passing corporate secrets to his billionaire friend and Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.

Gupta was already a wealthy man; what was the motive for his crime? In The Billionaire's Apprentice:The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund, journalist Anita Raghavan tries to answer that question.

Aside from the occasional ferry down from England, the old Spanish port city of Santander doesn't get too many foreign visitors. So imagine the locals' surprise when delegations from Google, Microsoft and the Japanese government all landed there recently, to literally walk the streets.

Every day in hospitals all over America, thousands of patients die of infections that used to be curable. But the antibiotics used to treat them aren't working anymore.

It's called drug resistance, and it's largely a consequence of antibiotics overuse. The more germs are exposed to antibiotics, the faster they mutate to evade being vanquished.

You might think African-Americans might be more pessimistic about their lives. The housing crisis decimated pockets of black wealth. The black unemployment rate has been nearly double the national average for several years.

But according to findings from our survey of more than 1,000 African-Americans, you'd be wrong.

The deaths Friday of veteran storm chaser Tim Samaras, his son Paul and their friend Carl Young when a tornado near El Reno, Okla., pummeled their vehicle has raised some questions:

-- Why do storm chasers do what they do?

-- Do the benefits outweigh the dangers?

Karen and Colin Rodger already had two sets of boys. When Mom got pregnant this time, the thought of more twins crossed her mind, but a doctor said the odds were 500,000 to 1. Now she's given birth to twin girls, and the family tells the Daily Mirror it's shopping for a van.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

Yankees fan Bernando LaPallo was born the same year as his team. And Saturday, more than a century after attending his first game, LaPallo was at the New Yankee Stadium for what he called: the greatest day of my life. He shook hands with shortstop Derek Jeter. But 93 years earlier, LaPallo shook hands with Babe Ruth who called him my youngest admirer. LaPallo is now 111 years old.

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

Little is known about the men who have led North Korea. But one person with great insights into Kim Jong Il and his successor Kim Jong Un is a Japanese sushi chef. He provided Kim Jong Il both sushi and loyalty for many years. Renee Montagne talks to novelist Adam Johnson about his encounter with the chef, which he writes about in the latest issue of GQ magazine.

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And Apple faces off with the Justice Department beginning today in a federal court over a price-fixing dispute. Last year, the government accused Apple of conspiring with five major publishing companies to raise prices on electronic books.

NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne.

We're going to get a glimpse from the frontlines of the civil war in Syria now. That war is expected to become the focus of peace negotiations in the coming weeks. The U.S. is pressing for those talks after brutal fighting, fighting that's begun to spread to neighboring countries.

The Saturday morning fog was burning off above the part of Santa Monica's beach known as the Inkwell. It's the stretch of sand to which black Southern Californians were relegated by de facto segregation until the 1960s.

Men, women and children walked across the sand in wet suits, carrying surfboards. They're part of the Black Surfers Collective, which aims to get more people of color involved in surfing.

They had gathered to honor pioneer Nick Gabaldon, a legendary surfer who is remembered as the area's first documented board man of African-American and Mexican heritage.

In the three years since his arrest, Bradley Manning, the slight Army private first class with close-cropped blond hair and thick military glasses, has become less of a character than a cause.

"Bradley Manning is a very polarizing figure. People either think that he is a hero or they think he's a traitor," says Elizabeth Goitein, who co-directs the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "I actually think that he's somewhere in between."

Thanks to gold-standard tuberculosis treatment and prevention programs, cases of TB in the United States have declined every year for the past two decades — to the lowest level ever.

But TB's course through the Williams family in Boston shows that no nation can afford to relax its efforts to find, treat and prevent TB. It's just too sneaky and stubborn an adversary.

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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.

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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. A 13-year-old from Queens won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last night. He correctly spelled a Yiddish word of German origin meaning dumpling.

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ARVIND MAHANKALI: Knaidel. K-N-A-I-D-E-L. Knaidel.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You are correct.

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.

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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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Now let's go to Texas for another follow-up - where Motorola Mobility's new smartphone, Moto X, is set to become the first smartphone ever assembled in the U.S.

As Lauren Silverman of member station KERA reports, the Google-owned company has already begun hiring for its new plant in Fort Worth.

LAURA SILVERMAN, BYLINE: There are more than 130 million smartphones in the U.S. But none of them say assembled in the USA. When Motorola debuts its Moto X this summer, it will be the first.

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.