Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, 67, was convicted in 2015 on a misdemeanor count of conspiring to violate federal mine-safety laws at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in southern West Virginia.

In 2010, 29 workers died there in the deadliest U.S. mine explosion in decades.

NPR’s Howard Berkes reports for our Newscast unit that Blankenship has resumed criticizing his prosecution.

“After a year in federal prison and a halfway house, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship immediately let loose on Twitter, condemning federal mine safety regulators, members of Congress and federal prosecutors.

“He raised again his own theories about the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, blaming federal regulators and nature. Those theories were discredited by four investigations.

“Blankenship was convicted of conspiring to violate mine safety laws.

“His release prompted Democrat Bobby Scott, the ranking member of the House Workforce Committee, to again urge passage of a languishing mine safety bill, which would make violations felonies with more serious jail time.”

Blankenship was acquitted of securities-related felony charges which would have carried a longer sentence.

Blankenship must still serve one year of supervised release.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Mr. Blankenship provided a window into his incarceration, saying it was tough but in many ways easier to endure than his impoverished upbringing in West Virginia, where he didn’t have indoor plumbing. He said he spent 10 months at the Taft Correctional Institution outside Bakersfield, Calif., followed by a month at a halfway house in Las Vegas and then one month of home confinement.

“At Taft, he said he had to return to his room several times a day to be counted and couldn’t choose what to watch on TV, and the lights went out at 10 p.m. He could have visitors four days a month.

” ‘Not being able to go anywhere off a 4-acre site is not pleasant, no matter what the conditions,’ he said. ‘It was not horrible.’ “

Former Upper Big Branch miner Tommy Davis, who lost a son, brother and a nephew in the explosion, told The Associated Press that Blankenship should still be in prison.

“He didn’t get what he deserved,” Davis said.

The company that now owns Massey Energy announced in 2012 that the mine would be permanently sealed.

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Cuba is not an easy place to buy things. Food is rationed, wages are low, and the black market is a way of life.

But now, Cubans can buy shirts with those little alligators on them at Lacoste. Or at L’Occitane en Provence, face cream for $162.40 an ounce. Or watches in the $10,000s.

Cuba’s first luxury mall, Manzana de Gomez, opened up a few weeks ago. And while those items are for sale, the prices are in a different sphere from what most Cubans can afford.

Indeed, the stores’ envisioned clientele seems to be tourists from abroad, rather than locals, and the new mall puts their differing means in high relief.

“A few blocks away, working-class Cubans live in decaying apartments on streets clogged by uncollected trash,” reports the AP:

“This hurts because I can’t buy anything,” said Rodolfo Hernandez Torres, a 71-year-old retired electrical mechanic who lives on a salary of $12.50 a month. “There are people who can come here to buy things but it’s maybe one in 10. Most of the country doesn’t have the money.”

Gaviota, the Cuban military’s tourism company, is the dealmaker behind the mall — and above it, the country’s first five-star hotel, opening in June. European luxury hotel brand Kempinski will operate the hotel, in a management deal with Gaviota. (American companies aren’t allowed to build in Cuba.)

“Gaviota is among the state-run companies under the umbrella of GAESA, a sprawling conglomerate run by the Cuban military,” the Miami Heraldexplained in February. “As a Cuban tourism enterprise, Gaviota’s portfolio includes 64 hotels and villas with more than 27,000 rooms in the 3, 4 and 5 star categories, marinas, a tour company and Transgaviota, a transportation services company.”

Despite the company’s state ownership, a press release about the forthcoming hotel doesn’t sound like a socialist tract.

“With its impeccable 120-year history, European-style luxury and extraordinary quality, Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group Kempinski is a perfect fit with the Manzana de Gómez,” says Carlos M. Latuff, executive president of Grupo de Turismo Gaviota, according to the statement. “Constructed at the beginning of the 20th century, as Cuba’s first European-style shopping arcade, it is an iconic building in an important historical area. Together with Kempinski we will make this jewel the city’s leading luxury hotel.”

Last summer, well before the luxury watches and face creams were for sale, the project’s construction brought its own controversy. In July, Reuters reported that Bouygues, the French construction group building the hotel, had hired 100 Indian laborers to work on the project, “breaking a taboo in the Communist-run country on hiring foreign labor.” The wire service reported that it was the first time a firm had hired foreign workers en masse, seemingly to finish the hotel faster in order to meet increased tourism demands:

“[F]oreign firms are required to partner with state-run construction companies that have strict limits on how much they can pay Cubans. They can pay foreign workers more, however.

‘The Cuban workers are not paid well so there is little motivation,’ a western diplomat familiar with the pay differential said, requesting anonymity due to diplomatic protocol. ‘The Indian workers are being paid around 1,500 Euros a month, more than 10 times what their Cuban counterparts receive.’ “

The Cuban government bars foreign firms from hiring local workers directly, the Heraldexplained in August, and instead forces them to hire through state labor agencies. The newspaper says that Cubans hired for construction work through a labor agency receive $25 to $30 a month.

As Cuba tries to grow its tourism industry, the AP reports that it’s “under pressure to change its state-run hotels’ reputation for charging exorbitant prices for rooms and food far below international standards.”

Airlines jockeyed for routes from the U.S. to Havana after President Obama began opening up relations with the country in December 2014. But as Bloomberg reported in February, U.S. demand hasn’t been as strong as many expected, and some airlines have started cutting flights.

In Old Havana, Cubans have been exploring the new mall, taking photos amidst goods that would perhaps take a lifetime to buy.

Just 90 miles away in America, nine U.S. retail chains have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, in a country with 23 square feet of shopping center space for each person, the highest of anywhere in the world.

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In a decision that could have global consequences, an Austrian court ruled on Friday that Facebook must delete postings deemed to be hate speech.

“[T]he Viennese appeals court ruled on Friday that Facebook must remove the postings against Greens leader Eva Glawischnig as well as any verbatim repostings, and said merely blocking them in Austria without deleting them for users abroad was not sufficient,” Reuters reports, adding that Facebook’s lawyers in Vienna declined to comment on the ruling, but that a court spokesman confirmed it.

The case was brought by Austria’s Green party after its leader, Eva Glawischnig, was insulted on Facebook by posts from someone who didn’t use their real name. According to the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, the posts called Glawischnig “miese Volksverräterin” and “korrupten Trampel,” which translate roughly as “lousy traitor” and “corrupt bumpkin.”

Facebook has argued that it is governed by the laws of California (site of its headquarters) or Ireland, the base of its European operations, Die Pressereported. But the court ruled that simply blocking the hate posts in Austria was not enough — they must be deleted across the platform.

The court said it was easy for Facebook to automate the process of deleting verbatim repetitions of the hate posts, according to Reuters. “It said, however, that Facebook could not be expected to trawl through content to find posts that are similar, rather than identical, to ones already identified as hate speech.”

“Facebook must put up with the accusation that it is the world’s biggest platform for hate and that it is doing nothing against this,” said Green spokesman Dieter Brosz, Reuters reports.

The Washington Postreported in December:

“The insults directed at Glawischnig appeared to have been spread via the same fake profile that was used to circulate false rumors during the run-up to Austria’s presidential vote this month, including that Alexander van der Bellen — who eventually won the election — was suffering from cancer and dementia. In what seemed like an echo of the U.S. presidential race, Van der Bellen, who is close to the Green Party, was forced to publish his health records to dispel the rumors.”

Facebook is facing increased pressure in Europe to respond more quickly to fake news. Last month, Germany moved forward with legislation that would fine social networks as much as $53 million “if they fail to give users the option to complain about hate speech and fake news or refuse to remove illegal content,” Bloomberg reported.

“Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet on Wednesday backed a bill that would also force the companies to purge content flagged as child pornography or inciting terrorism — two categories added to the original draft. Corporate officials responsible would risk separate fines of as much as 5 million euros. If passed by parliament, the measures would be the toughest regulation Facebook faces in any country where it operates. …

“Facebook … expressed concern that the measure ‘would force private companies instead of courts to decide which content is illegal in Germany.’ “

Last week, after a number of violent incidents appeared in videos on its network, Facebook announced that it would hire 3,000 employees worldwide to review violent or hateful content.

Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams that run on the site.

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About 1,800 economics graduate students converged on the chilly Chicago streets in early January. Some of them ran through those streets, trying to get to the next hotel on time.

They were trying to find a job.

At some point in time, the economics profession decided it was going to create a job market unlike any other. They were going to create a system that is the most efficient job market imaginable.

Every year, universities and companies that want to hire a professional economist converge on Chicago in the dead of winter. They set up shop in hotel rooms across the city. Every young economist who wants their first job shows up, ready for a make or break weekend of intense questioning.

Interviews are squeezed back to back, often conducted in hotel rooms. Sometimes, interviewees have to run to make their next appointment.

And that’s just the start.

Today on the show, finding the perfect job takes a lot of time and a lot of money. And economists hate wasting both of those things. So they created their own hyper-efficient, optimized job market.

Music: “El Gringo,””Desperate Nights” & “Future Satisfaction.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts or PocketCast.

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The health care bill passed by the House on Thursday is a win for the wealthy, in terms of taxes.

While the Affordable Care Act raised taxes on the rich to subsidize health insurance for the poor, the repeal-and-replace bill passed by House Republicans would redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars in the opposite direction. It would deliver a sizable tax cut to the rich, while reducing government subsidies for Medicaid recipients and those buying coverage on the individual market.

Tax hikes reversed

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is funded in part through higher taxes on the rich, including a 3.8 percent tax on investment income and a 0.9 percent payroll tax. Both of these taxes apply only to people earning more than $200,000 (or couples making more than $250,000). The GOP replacement bill would eliminate these taxes, although the latest version leaves the payroll tax in place through 2023.

The House bill would also repeal the tax penalty for those who fail to buy insurance as well as various taxes on insurance companies, drug companies and medical device makers. The GOP bill also delays the so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-end insurance policies from 2020 to 2025.

All told, the bill would cut taxes by about $765 billion over the next decade.

The lion’s share of the tax savings would go to the wealthy and very wealthy. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 20 percent of earners would receive 64 percent of the savings and the top 1 percent of earners (those making more than $772,000 in 2022) would receive 40 percent of the savings.

Help for the poor reduced

Over time, the GOP bill would limit the federal contribution to Medicaid, while shifting control of the program to states. Depending on what happens to costs, states may be forced to provide skimpier coverage, reduce their Medicaid rolls, or both. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that an earlier version of the bill would leave about 14 million fewer people covered by Medicaid by 2026. (The House voted on the current bill without an updated CBO report.)

CBO also anticipated fewer people would buy insurance through the individual market. With no tax penalty for going without coverage, some people would voluntarily stop buying insurance. Others would find coverage prohibitively expensive, as a result of changing rules governing insurance pricing and subsidies.

The GOP bill would allow insurance companies to charge older customers up to five times more than younger customers — up from a maximum 3-to-1 ratio under the current health law. The maximum subsidy for older customers in the GOP plan, however, is only twice what is offered to the young.

The bill also allows insurance companies to offer more bare-bones policies. As a result, young, healthy people could find more affordable coverage options. But older, sicker people would likely have to pay more.

In addition, because the subsidies offered in the Republican plan don’t vary with local insurance prices the way subsidies do in Obamacare, residents of high-cost, rural areas would also suffer. That could include a large number of Trump voters.

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For the first time in history, federal researchers report that a majority of U.S. homes rely only on cellphones for a telephone connection, without a landline.

The number of cellphone-only households predictably has been climbing over the years, surpassing the households with both a landline and a mobile phone and now reaching almost 51 percent. And it’s tracked by — of all agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics records all kinds of trends about the state of Americans’ health. One of its surveys traces the decline of landlines and what kinds of health habits are common to mobile-only homes. (Hint: the drinking and smoking kind.)

As a note, the CDC’s definition of a landline does account for Internet-connected phones — also known as Voice-over-IP or VoIP phones — because the question that is asked in the survey is, “Do you have a telephone in your home that is currently working and is not a cellphone?”

How did the CDC become the expert on the rise of cellphone use? In 2015, I spoke with Stephen Blumberg, who’s been leading this research. The interview below originally ran on Dec. 3, 2015, and had been edited for length and clarity.

So you’re the guy who’s basically monitoring the slow death of the landline.

I guess I am.

Why does the CDC study this?

You’re definitely not the first one to ask that. Back in 2003, we recognized that the telephone-based surveys conducted by the CDC would be missing an ever-growing segment of the population (that didn’t have a landline phone). We looked to find a survey that would answer the questions about who this population is and what their health characteristics are.

The National Health Interview Survey is an in-person survey with more than 40,000 households annually. And because it’s conducted face-to-face by Census Bureau interviewers, it contacts landline households, wireless-only households, households that have no service at all. That made it an ideal vehicle for tracking the prevalence of the characteristics of the wireless-only population.

Since then, all of the major telephone surveys that CDC conducts now include cellphone numbers … but we’re the one survey in the federal statistical system that is tracking this estimate, and so we continue to do so.

In effect it started out of your own necessity?

That’s correct. For telephone surveys, at first we were able to make adjustments for the exclusion of the individuals, or what’s known as coverage bias — because we knew that they were younger, they were more likely to live in rented housing, they were more likely to be low-income. And so we could make adjustments.

What we started to recognize, however, fairly quickly, is that, in fact, their health characteristics were different, even when you controlled for all of those demographic differences. People who are wireless-only are more likely to smoke, they’re more likely to binge drink, they’re more likely to be uninsured. In effect, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

(Editor’s Note: The latest report from May 2017 does, however, say that compared to adults in households with landlines, wireless-only adults were “more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good.”)

All the daredevils are dropping their landlines!

You know, we can’t say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior.

It would make sense for it to be a factor of youth, no?

Well, except when we controlled for age, we still saw these differences. Essentially, if we just looked at young people, we still saw that those young people who were wireless-only were more likely to drink and more likely to smoke than young people who had landlines.

Somebody once suggested that it would be interesting to try to extend preventive health messages to wireless-only individuals and try to target them for health promotion activities, but I don’t know that anybody has actually done that.

So is it related to income?

We know that there’s an income effect; however, part of that, if not all of that, is a function of age and living status. So young adults living in rented housing are more likely to be wireless-only. Those people are also more likely to have lower incomes than older adults who own their home.

We certainly see that lower-income households are more likely to be wireless-only. We think that’s primarily the function of age and household tenure, but we also recognize that it costs money to have both a landline and a wireless phone, and those people who are looking to save money may recognize that a wireless phone gives them more functionality than a landline phone.

Are you still seeing that correlation with risky behavior, or are we maybe approaching a point where only having a cellphone is more of a factor of convenience?

We still see it in the general data, so if you take a look at the report, you can see that 29 percent of wireless-only adults are binge drinkers whereas only 18 percent of adults living in landline households drink heavily.

And what’s the value of this information to the CDC?

It’s a reminder to us that for our telephone surveys we still need to be vigilant to include proper proportions of wireless-only households. That’s the primary benefit at this point.

We continue to track (the information about wireless-only households) because it increases the accuracy of the health data we collect in our survey.

In the years that you’ve studied these households, has something about the data surprised you?

I don’t know that surprise is the word. But we’ve been tracking this for 12 years now. I think we had expected that by now we would see some leveling off in the prevalence of wireless-only households — we don’t see any evidence yet that that’s occurring.

So people are still dropping landlines?

That’s correct.

I would have actually thought that by now, we would only see a small percentage of people even having landlines.

I’m guessing you’re fairly young.

I haven’t had a landline in a very long time. Though I’m talking to you over a landline now.

And yet I’m talking to you on a cellphone!

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The city of San Francisco has settled with Airbnb and HomeAway, concluding a lawsuit brought by the two short-term home rental companies by agreeing to new registration procedures for prospective hosts. The case, which had been heard in federal court, hinged on how the companies comply with a recently instituted city law.

“This agreement helps protect the city’s precious housing supply by obligating these companies to ensure that all their listings are legal and properly registered,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera said Monday in a statement. “This is a game changer.”

In Airbnb’s federal lawsuit — which the company filed in June last year, and which HomeAway later joined — the companies objected to the steep fines they faced if their hosts failed to register with the city as short-term rentals. The city’s board of directors had decided to introduce those fines as a means of adding teeth to a 2015 law mandating the registration.

Herrera’s office estimates that about 2,100 short-term rental hosts have registered in San Francisco — in other words, only about a quarter of the number of listings for Airbnb in the city.

But with the settlement, both sides have agreed to streamline the registration process, automatically sending new host applicants from the companies’ websites straight to the city’s Office of Short-Term Rentals. The agreement also requires the companies to provide the office with listings on a monthly basis, so that San Francisco officials can compare these listings with its own registration records.

“Similar to other agreements we have established with cities all around world, this agreement puts in place the systems and tools needed to help ensure our community is able to continue to share their homes,” Airbnb spokesman Christopher Nulty said in a statement, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Once fully implemented, every host in San Francisco will be registered and compliant with home-sharing rules the city put in place in 2014.”

The paper reports that “within six months, Airbnb and HomeAway will require all new hosts to be registered with San Francisco before they can post a rental listing on either site.”

Yet San Francisco is not the only city with whom Airbnb has shared some friction. TechCrunch notes the other cities the company has sued:

“In Anaheim, Airbnb filed a lawsuit, which has since been dismissed because Anaheim ‘pulled back their law,’ [Airbnb Head of Global Policy Chris] Lehane said. In Miami, a judge ruled last week in Airbnb’s favor and there’s a bit of a grey area in Santa Monica, Lehane said. Last year, Airbnb settled its lawsuit with New York City.”

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