A year ago Thursday, jubilant Democratic lawmakers — including then-Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank — joined President Obama on stage as the president signed a new financial reform law.

"The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes. There will be no more tax-funded bailouts — period," Obama said.

The so-called Dodd-Frank Act will mean no firms are too big to fail, the president said.

The algae which once blanketed the prehistoric earth could help power Kentucky’s cars.  Within ten years, plant and soil sciences professor Joe Chappell says algae under study at the University of Kentucky could provide a high value oil.

University of Kentucky football coach Joker Phillips is confident he has the offensive arsenal needed to take on the SEC this season. The Wildcats no longer have Derrick Locke and Randall Cobb to run and catch the ball, but Phillips says his team has worked through transitions before.

Independent gubernatorial candidate Gatewood Galbraith filed the necessary paperwork with the Kentucky Secretary of State’s office Thursday to be on the November ballot, but the perennial contender forgot to bring his campaign treasurer with him. Independent candidates must turn in at least 5,000 signatures to be placed on the general election ballot and Galbraith, who has run for governor four times before, carried 7,396 signatures with him. But state law also requires a candidate’s treasurer sign the proper documents as well.

This morning, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $50 million grant to the Sierra Club, to be doled out over four years. The Sierra Club says they’ll use the money for their “Beyond Coal”campaign, which works to transition the nation away from coal.The Sierra Club said the gift from Bloomberg will effectively retire one-third of America’s aging coal-fired power plants by 2020, and replace them with clean energy.  The announcement was made in front of a power plant in Alexandria, Virginia, by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.

With the president praising their plan, and with critics from both sides of the political aisle taking shots at it, the "Gang of Six" is this week at the center of the deficit-reduction talks in Washington.

One of the big-ticket items in any budget deal will have to be the defense budget. The latest budget request calls for spending about $700 billion on defense next year, the highest level since World War II. President Obama has already proposed hundreds of billions of dollars in defense cuts, and proposals by the Senate's "Gang of Six" call for hundreds of billions more over the next decade.

Michele Norris speaks with Dorien Schroeder, a team leader with Ocean's Research, who lived a Jaws-like moment when a great white jumped on deck of her team's research boat after they threw fish into the water to lure sharks closer. This all happened off the coast of South Africa.

Schroeder says the shark was three meters and it managed to curl up in the back part of the board, seemingly unharmed.

The research team released the shark back in the water and it swam away.

NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton talks with Michele Norris from the town of Dadaab on the Kenya-Somali border, which is the destination point for thousands of Somali refugees fleeing famine.

Michele Norris talks about an interview that President Obama did with NPR's Michel Martin.