Morning Edition

Facebook has launched a new feature that will let its users search for more detailed information across the social network. Soon, you'll be able to find the restaurants and TV shows your friends like or see every picture they've taken at the Grand Canyon.

As much as users may like the new features, the company hasn't exactly been a Wall Street darling. So, the new feature may be less about you and me and more about Facebook's bottom line.

"It's about time," Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester Research, said about the new feature. "It should have been there all along."

This may sound far-fetched, but football reminds me of Venice. Both are so tremendously popular, but it's the very things that made them so that could sow the seeds of their ruin.

Venice, of course, is so special because of its unique island geography, which, as the world's ecosystem changes, is precisely what now puts it at risk. And as it is the violent nature of football that makes it so attractive, the understanding of how that brutality can damage those who play the game is what may threaten it, even as now the sport climbs to ever new heights of popularity.

Britain's Observer newspaper ran a 2012 investment challenge pitting stockbrokers and wealth managers against Orlando. The calculating kitty chose stocks by batting a toy mouse onto a grid of options. The cat's portfolio came out ahead.

Thomas had gone seven years without saying a word in oral arguments. Then, on Monday, Justice Thomas made a remark. Several justices were talking at once, leaving his exact words unclear. But a detailed contextual analysis by The New York Times suggests he told a joke.

Wal-Mart is expected to announce that it will hire every veteran who wants a job as part of a new program beginning on Memorial Day. The only requirements: that he or she left the military in the previous year and wasn't dishonorably discharged.

France has intervened in the conflict in the West African nation of Mali, but why does that conflict affect the United States? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has offered the most basic take on America's interest in Maili: al-Qida is there.

The situation in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo is much less dire than it was a month ago. Food stalls are full of produce, albeit at much higher prices than before, and the bread crisis has been somewhat averted. The fighting is now centered on airbases on the outskirts of the city.

What does it feel like to be working in an emergency room during this nasty flu season? Monday. Every day feels like Monday, typically the busiest time of week in the ER.

"Now instead of having a Monday peak, it's seven days a week of a Monday," said Dr. Bill Frohna, who runs the emergency department at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

It's still too soon to say whether this is a historically bad flu season. But it's already clear that emergency rooms around the country are filled with a feverish throng that is much larger than the last time around.