NPR News

Tennessee's state Medicaid program faces hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts in the coming months. The program, known as TennCare, won't pay for overweight patients to get counseling from dietitians, but it will pay for the morbidly obese to lose weight through surgery, such as gastric bypass.

That has led some critics to complain that TennCare won't pay for an ounce of prevention but will pay for a pound of cure.

Fifteen million troubled kids who need a mentor don't have one, according to The Mentoring Group, which links troubled kids with responsible adults.

One program that tries to bridge that gap through paid mentorships is Friends of the Children, founded by Portland, Ore., multimillionaire-turned-social-entrepreneur Duncan Campbell.

"We go to the most difficult neighborhoods and the most difficult schools and ask for the child they don't expect to finish grade school, let alone high school," Campbell says.

But do paid mentors make a difference?

Police in Baltimore are pleading for help to find a 17-year-old who vanished from her family's apartment Dec. 28. Foul play is suspected but there are no leads, and detectives and family members hope media coverage of Phylicia Simone Barnes' case will help them find her.

Barnes' cousin, Harry Watson, recently stood on a corner in the chilly sun, passing out fliers to the people hurrying in and out of the tall office buildings in downtown Baltimore.

A man stopped to ask: "You haven't found her yet?"

"Not, not yet," Watson replied.

The weeks between Valentine's Day and Easter are usually the sweetest time of year for the chocolate industry. But confectioners are nervous this year because of political unrest in Ivory Coast, the West African country that produces 40 percent of the world's cocoa beans.

The current ban on cocoa exports from Ivory Coast is raising concerns of a chocolate shortage.

For now, cocoa beans from Ivory Coast are still arriving in U.S. ports.

It only took a Buffalo, N.Y., jury an hour earlier this month to find Muzzamil "Mo" Hassan, the founder of a Muslim-oriented suburban television station, guilty of beheading his wife, Aasiya. The killing received national attention not just because it was brutal — but because both the killer and his victim were Muslim.

When Aasiya Hassan was murdered in 2009, some journalists immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was an honor killing — but it wasn't. And the Muslim community in the Buffalo area has been fighting the stereotype for the last two years.