Morning Edition on WRVO-1: NPR News

Governor Andrew Cuomo, speaking by phone to a gathering of advocates for the poor, says he’s rescinded a 14-year-old state regulation that required food stamp recipients be subject to fingerprinting before receiving benefits.  

“Poverty and hunger are not crimes,” said Cuomo. “So we shouldn’t treat the poor or the hungry as criminals.”

The Vermont Air National Guard is proposing to start taking training flights over the Adirondacks and Watertown with F-35 aircraft.

The big, loud planes would replace the smaller, quieter F-16s the National Guard is using now —but not until at least 2015.

The Guard has issued a draft environmental impact statement – and it has held public hearings  around the area. The planes would take off and land in Burlington, Vermont. A meeting there drew more than 500 people.

Police say Richard Matthews stole a $20,000 diamond in Windsor, Ontario. He apparently swapped it for a fake gem and ate the real one. But police caught him. Feeding him high-fiber food, they've been waiting a week for the gem to emerge.

It's not clear what message high school students in Clayton, Ind., were sending with this year's senior prank. They attached 11,000 blank Post-it Notes to various surfaces: Doors, chairs and desks. Six students got suspended. Which led to a student protest, and 50 more suspensions.

Greece keeps cutting its budget to help pay debts and avoid default but then its economy keeps contracting, making the problem worse. The new French President Francois Hollande wants to find a way to stimulate Europe's economy.

Mitt Romney is disavowing a plan by some wealthy Republicans to attack President Obama for ties to his controversial former pastor. Even the people behind that proposal said they are abandoning it after their idea was plastered on the front page of The New York Times.

The proposal centered on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was a mentor to Obama before the two parted ways during the last presidential campaign.

Republicans unaffiliated with Romney were considering spending $10 million on a racially tinged advertising campaign tying Wright to the president.

In Florida on Thursday, Romney disapproved of the plan: "I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America."

Next week on Morning Edition, NPR's Frank Langfitt will have a four-part series on Mongolia. Extracting Mongolia's vast mineral resources may imperil its traditional way of life.

The New York Rangers play the New Jersey Devils Saturday in game three of the Eastern Conference finals. Delta Airlines is offering free plane tickets to New Jersey for some lucky Rangers fans. The flight time for the 20 mile trip is 17 minutes but the estimated travel time, with airports and the TSA involved, is around three hours.

Florida prosecutors have released hundreds of documents, recordings and pictures related to the George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman is the neighborhood watch captain who shot and killed Trayvon Martin after the two scuffled.

Hewlett-Packard reportedly has decided on a restructuring that will eliminate 30,000 jobs worldwide. The company isn't expected to say anything publically until next week when it announces quarterly earnings.

David Greene talks to financial writer William Cohan about Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. Before he was an award-winning journalist, Cohan was a banker at JPMorgan. The Justice Department is looking into the bank's risky trades which resulted in at least a $2 billion loss.

Would that big, bad JPMorgan Chase trade have violated the Volcker Rule?

It's too soon to say, despite the fact that the rule is part of a two-year-old law.

The Volcker Rule bans deposit-taking banks from making speculative bets. But it allows banks to make investments to hedge risks.

Whether the JPMorgan trade counts as a hedge gone horribly wrong (and therefore kosher under Volcker), or as a speculative bet (and therefore prohibited) depends in part on the details of how the rule is written.

The New York Racing Association is defending its authority to name its officers and operate freely in what they believe is the best interests of thoroughbred racing.

NYRA promoted two executives while the state is investigating allegations the association intentionally held back roughly $8.5 million in winnings from bettors. State government officials have threatened to replace NYRA, which operates the Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga thoroughbred tracks under a state franchise.

This year's statewide school budget vote was the first to take place after Governor Andrew Cuomo convinced the legislature to adopt the property tax cap.

The governor says the tax cap imposed “fiscal discipline.”

He says he’s  pleased  that few school districts attempted to override the cap, that most districts kept tax increases to a minimum and that so many budgets were approved by voters.

He says taxpayers, as well as state government, are tapped out.

Three people have died in the last three years in Central New York from the Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus, which can be spread from mosquitoes to  humans.

The deaths have sent scares across the region, and the health departments in Onondaga, Oswego, Madison, and Oneida Counties are taking it seriously.

“It is a rare disease, but it is a very fatal disease and I think that that is very frightening for everybody,” remarked Onondaga County Health Commissioner Cynthia Morrow.