NPR News

With mild weather ahead, southern Europe is once again bracing for new boatloads of would-be migrants and asylum seekers from North Africa.

Italy has borne the brunt of this migrant flow for two decades, and it has responded with one of Europe's most repressive laws on illegal immigration.

But now the Italian parliament is trying to scrap a law that has made migrants vulnerable to exploitation and human rights abuses. The existing law has also produced detention camps where undocumented migrants are held in harsh conditions.

2014 is the first year most Americans will have to either have health insurance or face a tax penalty.

But most people who are aware of the penalty think it's pretty small, at least for this first year. And that could turn into an expensive mistake.

On a cold, blustery day at Port Elizabeth in New Jersey, one of several massive cranes whirs along a rail high above the pier, picks up a heavy container from a ship's deck and loads it on a waiting truck back on land. The truck drives away, another arrives, and the whole process starts again.

It's a scene played out every day along America's coasts as massive container ships from across the globe pull into deep-water seaports, waiting to be unloaded. The ships are enormous — some 10 stories high and several football fields long.

General Motors may be facing a criminal investigation over its delay in recalling vehicles with faulty ignition switches blamed for 13 deaths and 31 accidents, The New York Times and Reuters are reporting.

Both news organizations are quoting a person familiar with the investigation.

A lawyer for a group of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba is accusing the military of torture.

NPR's Martin Kaste filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"The military keeps hunger-striking detainees alive by forcing liquid food down their throats through a tube.

"Courts have refused to intervene, but lawyer Jon Eisenberg says he has new information that may change that.

This post was updated at 10:30 a.m. on March 12.

Republican David Jolly wrung out a victory during a special election in Florida on Tuesday for the Tampa Bay-area district vacated by the late Rep. Bill Young.

As our friends at It's All Politics reported, the neck-and-neck race between Jolly and Democrat Alex Sink was seen as "a proxy for how President Obama and his signature health care legislation will play at the polls in November."

The Senate was a chamber divided in reaction to Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein's diatribe against the CIA for allegedly hacking into Senate computers.

A no-nonsense Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, took to the Senate floor Tuesday to speak at length and publicly for the first time about a dispute with the agency.

When a plane crashes, it can take many months or years to find the black box that can provide clues as to what happened. Just what are these devices, how do they work, and why can they be so hard to find? With the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 making headlines around the world, we contacted the recorders division of the National Transportation and Safety Board to find out.

What is a "black box"?

Access to federal courts is difficult for people living on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The majority of cases are tried nearly five hours away. Other Western states, like Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, also lack courthouses close to tribal lands.

For the people there, this isn't just an inconvenience — the community has lost confidence in the notion that justice is something that's available to them.

A U.S. satellite company's call for help in finding a missing Malaysia Airlines jet brought a strong response on the Internet, as some people hoping to pitch in are finding a website struggling to handle all the web traffic.

The company, DigitalGlobe, says it's working to fix the problem and aid the search for the airliner, which has now been missing for four days. The search area for signs of the jet was widened Tuesday.