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In 2011, Lariat Alhassan had a business in Abuja, Nigeria. Larclux Paint was the name. She sold house paint. And industrial paint. Textured paint. Paint that fills in cracks in your walls. It was a paint company. But a really small one.

“The employee I had was just me. I was the production manager. I was the marketer. I was delivery person. I was everything,” says Alhassan, laughing. “Except the security.”

That was the company. A woman in her late 20s and a security guard watching over a factory space she rented to make the paint.

Customers liked her paint. They would try it out, and say “This seems great. I’d like to place a big order. We’ll come to your office to sign the papers,” she recalls. And that is when things would get awkward.

“I kept telling them, no, no, no. You call me and whenever you want, I’ll be there. I will just be there,” she says.

She didn’t have an office. Just her car. At this point the clients would often just back out. She couldn’t afford an office without more clients. She couldn’t get more clients without an office. She felt trapped. Stuck.

That was back in 2011. And then one day, she was at home listening to some music on the radio, when these ads came on. It seemed as if the radio was talking right to her, she recalled. It was for some sort of program to help small businesses.

“It may be small today but it won’t be after You Win! the youth enterprise and innovation competition,” said one ad. (You can hear it in the episode of Planet Money.)

The government was having a nationwide contest to give out US$58 million to young Nigerians trying to start or grow a small business,no experience necessary. Almost no strings attached. Just go to the website and sign up, said the ad.

Alhassan thought it was too good to be true.

“I just wanted to make sure I was safe and I wasn’t going to be conned” she said.

But it was no scam. The government really was giving away millions of dollars. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, was the finance minister for Nigeria at the time. Her team set up the program. It was part of a massive nationwide plan to boost youth employment. About half of the young people didn’t have jobs, according to the World Bank.

“Everyone wants to run something, start their own business. Be their own boss,” says Iweala. “But the entrepreneurs often operate in an informal way. A lot of them are young people. And they want to expand their businesses but don’t know how.”

This is a problem around the world: How to get a small business to become a medium-size business that can become a big business. Because if you can figure out how to do that … you can make a dent in all kinds of other problems: unemployment, poverty. You name it. But in the developing world, small businesses rarely take off like that.

One problem is just money. In someplace like the United States, if you have a two-person paint company and need to rent out office space or warehouse space, you can just take out a small business loan.

In the developing world, in places like Nigeria, it is very hard to get that kind of loan. When a whole business is just a person with a trunk full of supplies, it is hard for lenders, like a bank or the government, to tell the good businesses from the bad ones. It is risky making those kinds of loans. So d small businesspeople can’t get loans.

The idea that Iweala and her team came up with to boost employment took all of this into account. It was a massive business contest the likes of which nobody in Nigeria had seen before. The amount of money they wanted to give away per person — roughly $50,000 — was out-of-this-world high. About 25 or 30 times the average annual income for a Nigerian at the time.

Iweala shopped the idea around the Nigerian government. People had all sorts of questions. How is the government going to decide which people to give the money to? And how will they make sure people don’t divert the funds to some other use?

Iweala and her team’s solution was to ask the entrants to submit a business plan: a few sheets of paper with an idea, maybe a chart or two, a budget. The government would read them all, pick the best ones and hand out the money.

Not everyone in the government was convinced that could work. Iweala remembers her colleagues saying things like, “These people have never written business plans.”It’s one thing if you say you’re going to invite 40 people, 50. But we’re talking [about] thousands.”

But Goodluck Jonathan, the president of Nigeria at the time, liked the idea right away. He gave it the greenlight.

There were still problems to confront. How do you pull something like this off in Nigeria — a country where trust in government is notoriously low.

People outside the government, the people who would to apply to the contest, also needed convincing. “They said, ‘Oh we’ve had so many government programs,’ and ‘It starts with promises and at the end of the day it’s never implemented,’ “says Iweala.

Then there was the worry that people running the contest would just give the money to friends and family. “That was the even bigger skepticism,” says Iweala.

So Iweala’s team had to make sure it was really clear how winners were getting picked … and who was doing the picking. For the initial review of applications they lined up graders from a local business school. And all the names of the applicants were removed before grading.

About 24,000 people applied to the contest, which was also supported by other federal ministries, the World Bank, the U.K.’s Department for International Development and Nigeria’s private sector.

For the second round, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers was brought in to do part of the scoring. And the British Plymouth Business School did quality assurance. The applicants knew all of these checks and balances were in place, which upped their trust.

But that still left the hard question, how to score it Who were the best candidates to get the money? Was it the very best, or would that be wasted money because those people might succeed anyway and not need the money? And how could you tell the difference between the 1,200th and the 1,201st candidate in any meaningful way?

This is where they reached out to a researcher at the World Bank. “I typically come in when people have an idea and they want to know if it will work,” says David McKenzie.

At this point, in mid-2011, Iweala wanted to launch the program in two months. McKenzie met with a few team members in in the cafe of the J building at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. to hash out ways to grade the entrants and measure the results.

One idea was to just rank every entry and pick the best. From his research, McKenzie suggested a different course of action: Pick the winners somewhat randomly Sure you can look at the business plans and pick out the very best. And the very worst. Those are usually obvious. But after you have the outliers, he argued, just make it luck of the draw. It’ll save a lot of trouble.

Plus if you do it randomly, you can measure the impact of winning by looking at the control group of non-winners, says McKenzie.

That was the plan.

They gave the contest the name: the YouWiN! Competition. And in late 2011, they started getting the word out. With ads, lots and lots of ads – in print, on TV and on the radio.

And that’s how Alhassan, the paint seller, came to hear an ad for YouWiN! coming out of her bedside radio that day.

“Lots of people did not believe it,” she says. But after hearing it a second and a third time, she said to herself: “Lariat, why don’t you pick up this opportunity? Try. Try, and see if it will work out for you.”

She took out her old laptop, plugged in her modem and went online and applied. A little while later she was one of the 6,000 invited to the next round. Where everyone would write their business plans.

The government provided some help. The applicants were invited to four day trainings held around the country. When Alhassan describes it, she said it felt like thousands of people packing into something like a concert hall. There were all kinds of applicants: A baker without enough machinery. A chicken farmer thinking of expanding to catfish and snails. Someone trying to start a computer school. Musicians. Dentists. People will all kinds of business plans.

“Boy it was intense. From morning to evening,” says Alhassan. But they did get lunch. “And breakfast,” she says, laughing.

Then she was asked to take what she just learned and write up a formal business plan. This was the real test. The real competition.

She sent it in and went home to wait. A little while later she got an email. Congratulations, it said.

“I felt I couldn’t even control my emotions. I started jumping on my bed,” she says. “My sister said what is wrong with you, have you won the lottery? I said yes. Yes. Yes.”

Alhassan got 10 million Naira, for her business — equivalent to $65,000.

She brought on marketers. Salespeople. She bought them a car to get around, to get the word out. She got a truck for deliveries so it wasn’t all out of her own trunk anymore. And she rented a proper office and a showroom. She decorated it with furniture she could be proud of.

“I can confidently say [to customers] now, ‘Please come to my office. You can come here. What time? I’ll be ready for you. I’ll be waiting for you,” she says.

Well, you might look at this and say, of course she was able to do this. She was given $65,000 — and it wasn’t even a loan.

The real question is how her business does down the road — and all the other businesses as well, from the dentists to the chicken farmer who wants to expand into catfish. Was it worth it for the government? Did it create jobs?

The World Bank analyzed the YouWiN! Competition impact over three years and published a report a few months ago.

The report looked at the 1,200 winners of the contest and found they had created 7,000 jobs, real jobs that stuck around three years later. The competition cost $60 million to run. So that means each job cost about $8,500 to create, a way cheaper investment than any other program studied in the report.

Chris Blattman, an economist at Columbia University who researches poverty and global development, thinks the results are pretty remarkable.

“I remember reading it [and] my eyes [kept] kind of popping out of my head,” he says. The thing that stood out to him most was that the winners, as a group, seemed to use the money pretty well. They didn’t waste it. He says it was easier than expected to find small businesses that could use a big pile of cash to grow. Maybe way more people are constrained by not having enough capital than we think.

Nigeria has had two more rounds of the YouWiN! Competition. The latest round had more than 100,000 applicants and 1,500 winners.

As good as the first round was, 7,000 new jobs is still a small number in a country of 170 million people. It’s clearly not going to solve the problem of unemployment.

But Blattman says, these results are extremely promising. So promising he wrote a euphoric blog post in October with the title: “Is This The Most Effective Development Program In History?”

But is it?

He stresses the question mark at the end of the title. It may not really be the best in history, he says, but he’s quick to add: “It’s probably the best I’ve seen so far. In history, it’s the best one we’ve measured.”

That’s something, considering that in so many cases of job creation programs, nobody measures the results at all.

Big thanks to Jeff Mosenkis at the Institute for Poverty Action for all the help behind the scenes on this story.

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Young people want meals that are quick — and also fresh and healthful and interesting.

But can they get all of that for less than five bucks?

Three weeks ago, Youth Radio and NPR asked you to send in pictures of the best meals you can purchase for five bucks or less.

Based on the submissions to the #5dollarchallenge, we’re happy to report that a Lincoln can indeed buy quite a lot of deliciousness.

Check out Youth Radio’s interactive map for some of your favorite meals from every region of the U.S.

While we applaud those of you who sent in photos of meals you prepared at home with ingredients that cost less than $5, for this map, we chose pre-made meals you can pick up on the fly.

These weren’t necessarily healthful meals, though lots of you sent in cheap vegetarian options — which isn’t surprising. I’m vegetarian, and whether I’m buying a burrito or a burger, I usually end up paying less than my meat-eating friends.

But people sent in plenty of meaty submissions as well. Alongside all that meat, we also got a lot of burgers, burritos and pizza, which means: bread, bread, bread! Especially since gluten-free meals are a huge trend right now, it was interesting to see so many carb-heavy options.

On the lighter side, many prepared salads came from grocery stores. This illustrates the “groceraunt” trend — more supermarkets are offering meals we typically expect from sit-down eateries.

There were a handful of breakfast options, consisting of the usual suspects: eggs, bacon and toast.

Some of the most appetizing-looking submissions were foods with origins outside the U.S.: tacos, tikka masala, sushi, fried rice and bahn mi sandwiches. These were some of the heartiest meals available at reduced costs.

However, very few submissions included a beverage. Five bucks can buy a range of food, but this tight budget may leave some of you thirsty. (Of course, tap water is often free.)

Thanks to all who participated in the #5dollarchallenge! And let us know if we left any of your favorite cheap meals off the map on Twitter — tag @youthradio and @NPRFood.

Kasey Saeturn is a reporter with Youth Radio, which produced this story as part of its series Fast Food Scramble with NPR’s Sonari Glinton.

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The message from Google’s developers’ conference is clear: The company is prepared to take on competitors as well as regulators.

CEO Sundar Pichai and his team were flexing. Big time.

Through a litany of product announcements at the so-called I/O annual conference in Mountain View, Calif. — messaging apps, a personal virtual assistant and a voice-controlled speaker that connects you with it — the company basically said:

We can do chatbots better than Facebook. We can be smarter at home than Amazon Echo. Our personal assistant gets trained on Google search, which is more widely used than Microsoft’s Bing. We’ve got you covered on privacy; just like Apple, our new messaging service is getting end-to-end encryption.

Google has been under scrutiny from regulators in Europe who say its position is too dominant and criticize Google for pulling consumers into bundles of its products.

Well, it looks like Google won’t stop bundling anytime soon. The personal assistant, which will work through multiple devices, is an effort to deepen the relationship with customers.

“We want users to have an ongoing two-way dialogue with Google,” Pichai said about the personal assistant. “We think of this as building each user their own individual Google.”

Already 20 percent of queries on Google’s mobile app and Android phones are voice queries — people saying “OK Google” to summon an older assistant called Google Now.

The company’s been working for years to listen better — get what you say when you’re in a noisy place, speaking slang like a human and not a robot, working to complete tasks. The assistant is being integrated into a new chatbot app Allo that helps you make dinner reservations or buy movie tickets.

Google is also releasing a new device called Google Home to help you manage your domestic life. The company wants Home — which looks kind of like a white plastic salt shaker — to have a place at your dinner table and be the all-knowing, helpful extended family you never had.

“It draws on 17 years of innovation in organizing the world’s information to answer questions which are difficult for other assistants to handle,” said Vice President Mario Queiroz.

Emphasis on other. Google leaders acknowledge: Amazon did it first, with the popular Echo. But they contend their device is smarter — and it can operate in a network — taking commands to shut off the lights in one bedroom while playing Spotify in another.

Google did not announce a release date.

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The National Academy of Sciences — probably the country’s most prestigious scientific group — has reaffirmed its judgment that GMOs are safe to eat. But the group’s new report struck a different tone from previous ones, with much more space devoted to concerns about genetically modified foods, including social and economic ones.

The report marks an anniversary. Twenty years ago, farmers started growing soybeans that had been genetically modified to tolerate the popular weedkiller known as Roundup and corn that contains a protein, extracted from bacteria, that kills some insect pests.

In the years since, arguments about these crops have grown so contentious that the National Academy can’t be sure that people will believe whatever it has to say on the topic.

Even before this report came out, an anti-GMO group called Food & Water Watch attacked it. The group accused some members of the committee that prepared the report of receiving research funding from biotech companies, or having other ties to the industry.

“The makeup of the panel is pretty clear. People are coming in with a perspective that is pro-genetically engineered crop,” says Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch.

The preemptive attack frustrates Fred Gould, the North Carolina State University scientist who chaired the committee. Gould has been known in the past as a GMO critic. He has pushed for restrictions on the planting of some GMO crops. “I have not been a darling of the industry. As a matter of fact, they denied me seeds and plants to do my experiments,” he says.

Gould says that over the two years that he and the other members of this committee worked on this report, they had one important rule: “If you had an opinion, you had to back it up with data. If you didn’t have the data, it didn’t go into the report.”

The report tries to answer a long list of questions about GMOs, involving nutrition, environmental effects, effects on the farm economy and monopoly control over seeds.

The most basic conclusion: There’s no evidence that GMOs are risky to eat.

The committee also found that GMOs, as promised, have allowed farmers of some crops to spray less insecticide to protect their crops — although there’s a risk that the GMO crops may not work as well in the future, because insects could develop resistance to them. Also, there’s no evidence that GMOs have reduced the amount of wild plant and insect life on farms.

And the report found that some claims about the benefits of GMOs have been exaggerated.

For instance, the productivity of crops has been increasing for a century, and that didn’t change when GMOs came along. “The expectation from some of the [GMO] proponents was that we need genetic engineering to feed the world, and we’re going to use genetic engineering to make that increase in yield go up faster. We saw no evidence of that,” Gould says.

The report urges federal agencies to change the way they regulate GMOs. Up to now, companies have introduced just a small number of different kinds of genetically modified crops. That could change very soon, because there’s new technology, called gene editing, that isn’t exactly genetic engineering, but it’s not traditional plant breeding, either.

The report urges regulators to look at all new crops, no matter how they’re created, if they “have novelty and the possibility of some kind of risk associated with them,” Gould says.

Many scientists who got their first look at the report Tuesday praised it. Some called it the most comprehensive review of GMOs that anyone, so far, has carried out.

But longtime critics of GMOs were less impressed.

Patty Lovera, from Food & Water Watch, the group that attacked the National Academy’s committee for being too closely linked to industry, took a quick look at the report and didn’t see much that seemed new. “It’s not the final word” on GMOs, she says.

The National Academy of Sciences is trying to make this report more easily accessible to the public. It has set up a website where people can read the report and also look up the sections that address specific comments that were submitted by the public.

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Starting today, small companies can raise up to $1 million from ordinary investors through what are called “crowdfunding portals.” These portals are different from sites like Kickstarter. As one of the portal sites SeedInvest explains on its website:

“Kickstarter promises rewards for successful projects in the form of anything that is not monetary, whereas equity crowdfunding, as its name suggests, promises a financial slice of the pie when it comes to startup and small-business investment.”

So in other words, instead of just getting, say, a t-shirt, by investing through one of these portals, you get an actual equity stake in a small company that’s looking to raise money and grow. You own a piece of the company. And you can make money by selling that stake down the road if it appreciates in value.

It used to be that to buy shares in a company that’s too small or young to be publicly traded, you needed to be what’s called an “accredited investor.” That means you had to be pretty wealthy.

But as part of the JOBS Act in 2012, Congress decided there should be a way for ordinary Americans to invest in small businesses or startups too. To protect investors though, there are new rules surrounding the process.

If you’re a small business owner looking to raise money this way, you have to go through a registered broker dealer or a funding portal that’s been approved by regulators. Some of these new portals include NextSeed, SeedInvest, and Wefunder.

Of course there are risks for investors. The self-regulatory industry group FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) has posted advice for ordinary people interested in investing in an early-stage company through crowdfunding here.

For businesses, crowd-funding promises to expand the world of options for raising capital. It’s possible that businesses could raise money more cheaply and/or easily by crowdfunding than through traditional bank loans or professional investors. But, fees appear to be a question mark at this point. If the fees are too high, either for investors or businesses, that might stop crowdfunding from really taking off.

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Ah, the cardigan: your granny’s cozy go-to used to be available year-round, but in limited quantities and colors. It was considered the sartorial equivalent of flossing: necessary, but not glamorous.

“The cardigan used to be something to keep you warm in the work place,” explains Teri Agins, who covered the fashion industry for the Wall Street Journal for years. “It was not really an accessory you left on—unless you wore it as part of a twin set.”

That look, sweater upon sweater, was considered too prim for a lot of young women. It was their mother’s look.

Enter Michelle Obama, and the game changed.

“She wore cardigans with her sleeveless dresses, wore a lot of print dresses with solid cardigans,” Agins says. She even sometimes belted her sweaters to show off her trim waistline.

And she didn’t just wear the sweaters behind closed doors at 1600 Pennsylvania. For a March 2009 Vogue interview about her new job, she wore a papaya cashmere cardigan with a soft ruffled blouse. When the Obamas made their first official trip to England, she donned a jeweled cream silk cardigan over a pale green pencil skirt when she visited 10 Downing Street. The London-based international press noticed. IDTV described the effect this way: “Her upbeat ensemble stood out alongside the British Prime Minister’s wife’s navy outfit.”

That sweater, from mid-market retailer J. Crew, sold out within hours the same day photos of Mrs. O were released. The total cost of the sweater and skirt (also J. Crew) was $400.

Kim Kardashian’s every outfit may be chronicled by photographers, too, but you don’t see sales of her cut-down-to-there dresses or super-shredded jeans selling out after those photos are published. Kardashian is a celebrity, but she does not move markets in the same way. Most celebrities don’t.

Michelle Obama does, and it’s often her more casual clothes that cause bottom lines and stocks to soar. There are even numbers that prove it: David Yermack, a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business actually tracked Mrs. O’s looks for about a year in a study that was published in the Harvard Business Review. How This First Lady Moves Markets looked at 189 outfits Mrs. O wore to public events from November 2008 through December 2009 and eyeballed 30 publicly traded stocks from the businesses whose brands the first lady wore. Yermack says the findings surprised even him:

“It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,” Yermack says. And it wasn’t just a freak blip on the graph: “This would be a very permanent thing,” Yermack emphasized. “The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.”

Hel-lo.

The brands tracked in the Yermack study yielded $2.7 billion in the cumulative appreciation of stock prices. While J. Crew had some of the biggest gains, clothes from Target, The Gap and Liz Claiborne also did well when Mrs. Obama wore them. As did high-end clothes from companies like LVMH—which owns Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, among others— and Saks Fifth Ave.

Markets can go up or down, professional fashion observers can praise or pan her, but Mrs. Obama herself has always downplayed her fashion savvy. She told ABC’s Robin Roberts in 2008 she felt there was some pressure to represent, since her clothes (like many first ladies’) were so closely scrutinized. “It’s hard,” she admitted to Roberts. “I’m kind of a tomboy-jock at heart—but I like to look nice.”

She has been widely praised for using clothes to reflect her personality and the occasion, but she hasn’t been perfect. Some people thought the red-and black Narcisco Rodriguez dress she wore in election night in Chicago was a risk that didn’t work. And there was a slight misstep on vacation the first year, when the Obamas visited a national park during a heat wave and the first lady exited Air Force One in shorts. (Sensible, but an apparent protocol no-no.) And some people, including the late Oscar de la Renta, thought a sweater — even, apparently, a very expensive one by Azzedine Alaia — was a little too casual to wear for drinks with Queen Elizabeth. He told Women’s Wear Daily, “You don’t … go to Buckingham Palace in a sweater.” He was also critical of her decision to wear an Alexander McQueen gown to a state dinner in 2011. (De la Renta later softened his stance on Michelle Obama’s choices, saying, “she’s a great example to American women today.”)

But when FLOTUS got it right, she really got it right: the full-skirted dresses in bright prints she’s worn since day one. The simple sheaths in jewel tones. The sleeveless dresses and blouses. The flats. Those looks translated into sales.

And the cardigan:

“The sweater business traditionally would not be doing well in a time like this,” says Marshall Cohen, who analyzes retail fashion for the market research firm NPD. “However, there are certain styles within the category that are doing well.”

And it’s probably not coincidental that Michelle Obama has glamorized this once-mundane staple. Her way of dressing has resonated with American women, says Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic for the Washington Post.

“One of the really vital things that Michelle Obama has done, is she’s wearing real fashion,” says Givhan, who covered the first lady for her first year in the White House. Mrs. Obama’s decision to wear consciously un-corporate looks, Givhan says, “was her own use of fashion as a way of defining who she was going to be in the White House.”

Mrs. Obama was going to continue being what she had been—a working wife and mother, wearing what she liked, what was comfortable and what worked for her. In doing that, Givhan says, the first lady was not so much initiating change as reflecting how women around the country already had begun to change their own look—dresses instead of suits, sweaters instead of jackets, bare legs instead of pantyhose. Those choices struck a plangent note.

“When Michelle Obama came along and made all these these things a matter of course,” Givhan says, “I think it validated a lot of things they were doing, and also validated things that they wanted to do but often felt they weren’t allowed to.”

Unlike style, fashion used to be restricted to a fairly small group: the young, the thin, the wealthy … and the white. Michelle Obama broadened the serious fashionista membership, says Teri Agins. And not just in dress size and economic status.

Besides Oprah, “we haven’t seen many middle-aged, brown-skinned women who have been celebrated for their beauty and style.”

And for decades, we haven’t seen women of any race or age who have been able to make cash registers ring simply by stepping out the front door.

Safe to say the fashion industry is going to miss this Obama Effect.

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The pharmaceutical company Pfizer said Friday it will move to prevent its drugs from being used in lethal injections.

Pfizer was the “last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions,” The New York Times reported. More than 20 other U.S. and European drugmakers had already blocked their drugs from being used in executions.

“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve,” Pfizer said in a statement. “Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”

The company said it will begin restricting distribution of certain drugs that some states use in lethal injections. The newly restricted drugs are pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, propofol, midazolam, hydromorphone, rocuronium bromide and vecuronium bromide.

“Pfizer’s distribution restriction limits the sale of these seven products to a select group of wholesalers, distributors, and direct purchasers under the condition that they will not resell these products to correctional institutions for use in lethal injections. Government purchasing entities must certify that products they purchase or otherwise acquire are used only for medically prescribed patient care and not for any penal purposes. Pfizer further requires that these Government purchasers certify that the product is for ‘own use’ and will not resell or otherwise provide the restricted products to any other party.”

For years, states have had difficulty obtaining drugs to use in executions because pharmaceutical companies don’t want their name to be associated with killing people.

As NPR’s Wade Goodwyn reported last year, “this has forced states to seek new formulas using untested doses and find new compounding pharmacies to make their execution drugs.”

These tests, however, don’t always go smoothly, and in 2014, there were four botched executions. Wade reported on one such case:

“Michael Kiefer, a veteran reporter for the Arizona Republic, has over the years been witness to five Arizona executions. Last July, Kiefer was observing the execution of double murderer Joseph Wood. For Wood’s execution, the Arizona Department of Corrections was using a different drug formula for the first time.”

Kiefer says that with those drugs it usually took about five to 10 minutes for an inmate to die. But in this case, something unexpected happened at the six-minute mark.

” ‘Suddenly he opened his mouth,’ Kiefer says. ‘His mouth sort of made this funny round shape, and you could see this expulsion of air, and we all jumped. This was something different.’

“Wood had begun fighting for his life, taking large intermittent breaths.”

Despite attempts from the executioner to reassure the distressed crowd that everything was OK, Wood continued to struggle. Two hours and 15 lethal injection doses later, Wood died.

Recently, executions have been delayed over concerns about the efficacy of the lethal injection drugs. And last year in Utah, the state passed a law bringing back the firing squad as a backup method of execution if there is a shortage of lethal injection drugs.

The New York Times reports that “a majority of the 32 states with the death penalty have imposed secrecy around their drug sources, saying that suppliers would face severe reprisals or even violence from death penalty opponents.”

It adds:

“But others, noting the evidence that states are making covert drug purchases, see a different motive. ‘The secrecy is not designed to protect the manufacturers, it is designed to keep the manufacturers in the dark about misuse of their products,’ said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group in Washington.

“Georgia, Missouri and Texas have obtained pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies, which operate without normal F.D.A. oversight and are intended to help patients meet needs for otherwise unavailable medications.”

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Facing an uproar from conservatives and even calls for a congressional inquiry from a prominent lawmaker, Facebook is going to great lengths to explain how it decides what shows up on its trending news notifications.

On Thursday, the company released a 28-page internal document that details the instructions to the humans who shepherd the “Trending Topics” feature. It’s the news section you – and Facebook’s 1.6 billion users world-wide — see at the top right-hand corner of Facebook on desktop or when you do a search on mobile.

What we now know is that trending topics are driven in part by an algorithm and in part by humans. A Gizmodo article this week cited anonymous former contractors from the Trending Topics team, saying that human curators sometimes passed up conservative-leaning topics in favor of more liberal ones.

The release of the internal document represents Facebook’s continued pushback against bias allegations. The document was made public for the first time after being shared with The Guardian. As Trending Topics’ chief said on Monday, the guidelines do not allow or advise some kind of systematic discrimination against sources with particular ideologies.

What the document shows is how people are involved in the process, sometimes “injecting” newsworthy stories and sometimes “blacklisting” stories, for example for not being a “real-world world” event or for being duplicative. This kind of role of human curators has drawn suggestions that Facebook was becoming more of a publisher — in a traditional sense, like the mainstream news media — than a perfectly neutral platform.

Facebook says it hasn’t found any evidence of intentional manipulations of the Trending Topics section to suppress conservative stories, the New York Times reports. The paper outlines some big takeaways from the guidelines:

“For instance, after algorithms detect early signs of popular stories on the network, editors are asked to cross-reference potential trending topics with a list of 10 major news publications, including CNN, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times.

While algorithms determine the exact mix of topics displayed to each person, based on that user’s past actions on Facebook, a team of people is largely responsible for the overall mix of which topics should — and more important, should not — be shown in Trending Topics.”

The document did not detail the inner workings of the algorithm behind the Trending Topics, nor did it touch upon the way that the company determines what posts are deemed worthwhile to show up in someone’s main feature, Newsfeed.

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