A padlock hangs from a door of a foreclosed home in Islip, N.Y. The time a foreclosure will take from start to finish varies widely from state to state.
Real estate is about location, location, location. And foreclosure is no different. Depending on the state, it can take an average of three months or three years to process a foreclosure. And the disparity in how states deal with foreclosures is getting bigger.
The fate of thousands of troubled homeowners in Central Florida rests in the hands of Lee Haworth, foreclosure administrative judge for Florida's 12th Judicial Circuit. "We were hit pretty hard," Haworth says.
Bruce Springsteen and the retooled E Street Band ripped through a nearly three-hour "secret" concert at the Moody Theater, the new home of Austin City Limits, during SXSW. Ever the showman, Springsteen crowd-surfed.
The SXSW music convention takes over Austin, Texas, for five days each March. This year, NPR Music's Ann Powers is in Austin trying to catch as much of the action as she can. At South By Southwest's midpoint, Powers spoke to Morning Edition's Renee Montagne about the highlights so far (including that awesome Springsteen keynote, which you can listen to in its entirety), and what she's looking forward to seeing over the festival's second half.
Petition signatures sit in a box at a Sept. 21, 2011, news conference in Washington, D.C. The signatures, collected by Change.org and other groups, were delivered to congressional co-sponsors of legislation to ban hiring discrimination against unemployed workers.
Credit Damian Dovarganes / AP
Michigan high school student Katy Butler, 17, and Change.org organizer Mark Anthony Dingbaum deliver petitions with more than 200,000 signatures to the Motion Picture Association of America in Los Angeles on March 7, asking the group to change the R rating on the documentary Bully.
Petitions have been a common form of protest throughout modern history, at times bringing attention to causes through little more than handwritten letters and word of mouth.
But like a lot of other things, petitions are going viral. And one website in particular has contributed to the phenomenon.
Change.org offers tools to let individuals start their own online campaigns, a way to bring instant awareness to issues that range from the environment to human rights.
One night in 1995 completely reshaped the lives of Phil and Laura Donney. Their parents were arguing, and their father stabbed their mother, killing her. Phil was 7; his sister was 4.
Ken Donney was sent to prison, and the children went to live with their mother's sisters.
Phil, 23, recently sat down with his aunt, Abby Leibman, the twin sister of his mother, Nina Leibman.
"What was it like becoming a parent to my sister and I overnight?" Phil asks.
An extraordinary special investigation by a federal judge has concluded that two Justice Department prosecutors intentionally hid evidence in the case against Sen. Ted Stevens, one of the biggest political corruption cases in recent history.
A blistering report released Thursday found that the government team concealed documents that would have helped the late Stevens, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, defend himself against false-statements charges in 2008. Stevens lost his Senate seat as the scandal played out, and he died in a plane crash two years later.
Kansas State's Angel Rodriguez (13) gets control of a loose ball in front of Southern Mississippi's Neil Watson during the first half of an East Regional NCAA tournament second-round college basketball game on Thursday.
Shell Oil Co. has chosen a site near Pittsburgh for a major, multibillion-dollar petrochemical refinery that could provide a huge economic boost to the region.
Dan Carlson, Shell's general manager of new business development, said Thursday that the company signed a land option agreement with Horsehead Corp. to evaluate a site near Monaca, about 35 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Early on Thursday, lawmakers in New York approved a bill that will make the state the first to require DNA samples from almost all convicted criminals — and make its DNA database one of the largest in the nation.
