World

What began as a company's suspicion that its infrastructure was being hacked turned into a case of a worker outsourcing his own job to a Chinese consulting firm, according to reports that cite an investigation by Verizon's security team. The man was earning a six-figure salary.

On today's Morning Edition, Shereen Marisol Meraji had a great piece about the memorial of Southern California public-television staple Huell Howser, who died of cancer earlier this month.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people turned out to remember him. As Meraji says, for these fans, Howser was "a man who took them to places they never knew they wanted to go and introduced them to people they never knew they wanted to meet."

In his New York Times Magazine column this week, Adam Davidson looks at economists' explanations for rising inequality in the U.S. and around the world.

As the financial crisis wanes, economists are shifting their attention toward a more subtle, possibly more upsetting crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality.

He'll always be best known as "the kindly white adoptive father of two young African-American brothers in the TV sitcom Diff'rent Strokes," as The Associated Press writes.

Conrad Bain, 89, died Monday in Livermore, Calif., his daughter says.

The mellowed-out party grooves of the daytime disco champions in Poolside were a big hit here at KCRW all last year. What could have been just a fun summer fling proved to have a lot of staying power, though, so by the time we got the L.A. duo in here for a live performance, there was a lot of excitement in the air. Poolside didn't disappoint, even pulling its tourmates from Bonde do Rolê into the studio for a song.

Zach Sayne was 25 when he died earlier this month at the place that had been his home for 15 years — a children's nursing home in Alabama.

But that was too far away, 200 miles too far, for his mother in Georgia. Nola Sayne was trying to bring him back, closer to her home. The story of why she couldn't reveals the bureaucratic traps, underfunding and lack of choices that plague state Medicaid programs.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan.

Two high-profile cabinet nominations go before the Senate soon. Senator John Kerry is expected to face little opposition to become the next secretary of state. Former Senator Chuck Hagel may have more problems. But as mentioned earlier, his nomination as secretary of defense is also expected to win approval.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Rockefeller won't run again, Treasury kills the trillion dollar coin, and the president calls on Congress to pony up. It's Wednesday and time for a...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Deadbeat.

CONAN: ...edition of the Political Junkie.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDINGS)

SARAH PALIN: Lipstick.

How evil is sugar? That's long been a hard question for researchers to answer. Most of the studies about sugar's health effects to date have been too small, too short-term, or too poorly designed to nail it one way or another.

Though it's the year's premier "world music" event, GlobalFEST embraces many homegrown sounds — and the 2013 roster was full of North American artists. A case in point: The Stooges Brass Band, a New Orleans brass band for the 21st century. It's got that unmistakeable sound of its hometown, but hip-hop, funk, R&B and soul are all in the group's DNA.

Based in Los Angeles and fronted by the smoky-voiced Marisol Hernandez, the fast-rising band La Santa Cecilia splices and dices an array of Mexican and South American sounds in its songs, from Mexican norteño and ranchera to Colombian cumbia. Here, its members perform smart originals and covers of U2's "One" and Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" — all with a wry, old-soul knowingness. La Santa Cecilia has already received a Latin Grammy nomination in 2011, but with this GlobalFEST appearance, it's poised to break out to a broader audience.

Set List

Martha Redbone's music chronicles the crossroads of the American experience. Born in Kentucky and of Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American descent, Redbone combines folk, Appalachian, soul and Native tradition in a group of settings of poetry by William Blake — a startling idea, perhaps, but one that brims with potency and freshness.

Set List

• "A Poison Tree"
• "On Another's Sorrow"
• "Drums"
• "This Train Is Bound For Glory"
• "Skin"
• "Undone In Sorrow"

The night ended with bumping beats down at Webster Hall's Studio space with the Ottawa-based Native collective A Tribe Called Red. The group calls its style "pow wow step" — an imaginative and dance-floor-ready blend of beats, aboriginal singing and dancing, and visuals and audio samples that turn "Indian" stereotypes on their heads. But the most memorable moments in the set come when A Tribe Called Red invites a dancer out to perform a traditional hoop dance, twisting and turning hoops into elegant and beautiful figures.

Set List

• "Wird"

On October 24, 2011, I had a bad day.

I honestly forget why. It was a Monday; that should be enough.

The soulful Persian classical virtuoso and composer Kayhan Kalhor has long been interested in creating artistic bridges to other musicians and styles, including in his work with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and a long-term collaboration with the Indian sitarist Shujaat Khan.

Sweet and hot: That's the sound that French-born, Brooklyn-based guitarist Stephane Wrembel brought to his intimate early set in The Studio, globalFEST's smallest space. Wrembel specializes in jazz manouche, or so-called "Gypsy" jazz — and his set with his quartet showed off the sparkling, speedy fingerwork already familiar to fans of Woody Allen, who has used Wrembel's music in his films Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris.

Set List

• "Voice From The Desert"
• "Momentum"

After five days of airstrikes aimed at Islamist rebels, French troops are engaged in their first ground battles with those forces in Mali, according to several news outlets.