| Drone reaches record depth searching for Malaysia Airlines MH370
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 The mini-sub scanning the Indian Ocean floor for missing flight MH370 has reached record depths, exceeding its normal operation limits. The US Navy's drone dived deeper than its normal 4,500 metre (15,000 feet) depth range. The searching mission is now being carried out some 2,000 km (1,200 miles) west of the Australian city of Perth, where authorities believe Malaysian jetliner crashed into the ocean.
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| Wonkbook: Don't count out immigration reform just yet
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 Welcome to Wonkbook, Wonkblog's morning policy news primer by Puneet Kollipara. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism or ideas to Wonkbook at Washpost dot com. To read more by the Wonkblog team, click here. (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images) Wonkbook's Number of the Day: 8 million. That's the latest number of signups for health insurance in the Affordable Care Act's online marketplaces, before accounting for how many actually pay their premiums. Wonkbook's Chart of the Day: How Americans die, a stunning chart from Bloomberg's Matthew C. Klein. Wonkbook's Top 5 Stories: (1) Signs of hope for immigration reform; (2) Obamacare's latest milestone; (3) Ukraine crisis defused -- maybe; (4) Americans still aren't feeling the economic recovery; and (5) Obama going it alone on renewable energy. 1. Top story: Don't count out immigration reform just yet House immigration bills are still in the mix, GOP tells donors and industry. "Many lawmakers and activists have assumed the issue was off ...
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| A thousand years of sadness
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 Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstitions, violence and inequalities, died Thursday at his home in Mexico City at age 87. Referencing one of the author's greatest works, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos proclaimed 'a thousand years of loneliness and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time.'
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| The British want to stop Starbucks from dodging taxes. It won't work.
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 Starbucks said on April 16 it was relocating its European headquarters from the Netherlands to Britain a year after the U.S. coffee giant was heavily criticized by British lawmakers for tax avoidance. (Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images) Mention Starbucks in the U.K., and many people think of lattes, Macchiatos — and tax dodging. The coffee giant has faced boycotts, protests and general animosity from the British public since reports emerged in 2012 that Starbucks was paying little to no taxes in the U.K., despite having hundreds of stores in the country. There was nothing illegal being done, just the usual aggressive tax planning that's become standard for multinationals around the world. The company was under so much pressure that last year it promised to pay the government $16.8 million in 2013 and another $16.8 million this year, all voluntarily. Now, Starbucks has made another move in its effort to shore up relations. On Wednesday, Starbucks announced that it was moving its European headquarters from ...
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| How Democratic and Republican morals compare to the rest of the world
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 A six-pack of Boston Beer Co. Sam Adams Boston Lager sits displayed on a table during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, U.S., on Thursday, April 3, 2014. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg A Pew Research Center report out this week finds that morality is in many ways a function of where you live. It polled people in 40 countries on issues such as extramarital affairs, abortion and homosexuality to see whether people thought these behaviors were acceptable, unacceptable or simply not a moral issue. Even better, Pew provided breakdowns of American respondents by party. Read on to see how Democrats and Republicans compare to the rest of the world on eight different questions. Contraception Contraception is one area where Democrats and Republicans are in agreement with each other, and with most of the rest of the world. Fewer than 10 percent of Democrats and Republicans say contraception is morally unacceptable -- kind of makes you wonder what all the hoopla over the Obamacare contraception ...
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| Driverless vehicles will force us to rethink car ownership
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 Stylish, right? A Google driverless car photographed in 2010. (Google Inc. via Bloomberg) Brian Fung spotted an interesting pattern in a new national Pew Research survey out this week looking at how Americans perceive the future of technology. As part of the survey, Pew asked 1,001 adults this open-ended question: "If there was one futuristic invention that you could own, what would it be?" About 9 percent of the respondents went with some kind of cure for diseases (which was maybe not a direct answer to the actual question). But here are some of the next most popular answers: time machines, flying cars and flying bikes, personal space craft, self-driving cars, and teleporters. In short, people are looking for fantastical solutions to the otherwise mundane problem of getting around. When we try to envision how technology might significantly improve our lives, a lot of us are thinking about transportation. Of all of those inventions, autonomous cars are the closest to reality. Google is already piloting ...
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| More homeowners no longer need to be in foreclosure, and they may not even know it
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 They'll rent it back to you. (Rick Wilking/Reuters) An increasingly larger share of homes in the foreclosure process have positive equity. This baffling tidbit from RealtyTrac turns on its head the most common reason behind foreclosures in recent years. When the housing market soured and home prices plunged, many people ended up "underwater" – meaning they owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth and therefore could not refinance or sell their properties if they faced financial difficulties. But what's with the homes that are not underwater yet still in foreclosure? The share of foreclosures with positive equity in the first quarter reached 35 percent, up from 31 percent in the previous quarter and 24 percent in the third quarter of 2013, according to RealtyTrac, a mortgage research firm. These involve borrowers who have defaulted on their loans or are in some other stage of the foreclosure process but their homes have not been taken over by the banks. The metro markets with the most ...
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| Obamacare's high-risk pools are closing for real this time
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 After three previous extensions, it looks like Obamacare's temporary high-risk pools for the some of the country's sickest patients are finally closing as planned. The high-risk pools were set up in each state four years ago as a bridge to Obamacare's coverage expansion this year, when insurers can no longer deny people coverage or charge them more because of a pre-existing condition. The Obamacare program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, at its height covered 115,000 people whose medical conditions made it difficult for them to find affordable coverage. Many of the PCIP patients had been undergoing treatment for cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and advocates worried that vulnerable patients could experience a coverage gap if the program shut down too early. The PCIP program was originally supposed to sunset at the end of December 2013, but it was extended until January as HealthCare.gov struggled. Then it was extended until March. Then it was extended until April 30. That seems to ...
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(sources)
