Cuba loosens restrictions on private enterprise

BAY OF PIGS, Cuba – Sitting at a wooden table at his 3-week-old restaurant, Saturnino Morrejon Ramos surveyed the turquoise water of this inlet on the Caribbean off Cuba's southern coast.

"I still remember the gunfire," Ramos, 64, said, referring to the failed, CIA-backed invasion by Cuban exiles to depose the regime of Fidel Castro in 1961.

Ramos and others like him are taking part in a decidedly capitalistic change in Cuba in which the communist rulers have relaxed state control of the economy to generate wealth. Results appear mixed because of high taxes on profits and restrictions on economic freedoms that could lead to demands for political liberties.

Ramos is happy about the changes. The tables, chairs and kitchen of the restaurant atop his house were bought using $5,000 worth of remittances, or cash that the family gets from relatives in the USA.

"It's definitely worth paying the taxes to the government because we're earning more money," he said, admiring both the view and the fish caught yards away that lay grilled on the plates of diners. "Everyone's pleased the government has allowed this."

Who Killed American Unions?

A new theory says that a wave of massive technological change gave life to organized labor -- and another wave took it all away

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker doesn't like unions, and unions don't like him. But the most remarkable thing about Walker's relationship to labor isn't that he thinks unions are worthless -- most Republicans agree -- but that he thinks about them, at all.

Today, unions have been swept into dusty corners of the U.S. workforce, such as Las Vegas casino cleaners and New York City hotel staff. For much of the 20th century, things were different. Almost every person living in the Northeast, Midwest and California "was in a union himself/herself, had a family member in a union, or, at least, had a friend or neighbor in a union," Rich Yeleson, veteran in the labor movement, writes in The New Republic. The apogee of the unions was also the apogee of the middle class, when it commanded more than half of total income. As the union membership rate dropped, middle class share of income fell, too.

Warmest U.S. spring on record: NOAA

So far, 2012 has been the warmest year the United States has ever seen, with the warmest spring and the second-warmest May since record-keeping began in 1895, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on Thursday.

Temperatures for the past 12 months and the year-to-date have been the warmest on record for the contiguous United States, NOAA said.

The average temperature for the contiguous 48 states for meteorological spring, which runs from March through May, was 57.1 degrees F (13.9 C), 5.2 degrees (2.9 C) above the 20th century long-term average and 2 degrees F (1.1 C) warmer than the previous warmest spring in 1910.