When Angelina Jolie opened up about her preventative mastectomy, she raised awareness of the many challenges faced by women predisposed to and treated for breast cancer. For some women, that includes something as simple as finding a new bra.

That's why Allana Maiden of Richmond, Va., petitioned Victoria's Secret on change.org to make a "survivor" line of bras for customers like her mother, who recently underwent a radical mastectomy. But after two meetings with Victoria's Secret representatives, Maiden was disappointed to learn that the company is ill-suited to make the the bras, which feature pockets to hold prosthetic breasts and require an in-person measurement to ensure a good fit.

"Through our research, we have learned that fitting and selling mastectomy bras . . . in the right way . . . a way that is beneficial to women is complicated and truly a science," said Victoria's Secret spokeswoman Tammy Roberts Myers in a prepared statement Tuesday. "As a result, we believe that the best way for us to make an impact for our customers is to continue funding cancer research."

 

Americans have a history of underground bunkers. Think of the fallout shelter boom during the Cold War. Or the flurry of survivalist activity before Y2K, that point at the start of the millennium when all the computers were supposed to shut down and thrust civilization into an apocalypse.

But the annual -- and very real -- threat of lethal weather is driving a new boom in tornado shelters as more Americans find themselves in the path of deadly storms like the one that roared through suburban Oklahoma City on Monday.

Experts say sheltering in place and getting underground during a tornado are your best bets for survival, but that advice might not always be practical.

 

Walt Disney's (DIS) ESPN, long considered a cash cow for the media giant, is laying off hundreds of workers as it faces escalating costs for sports programming and increased complaints about the fees it charges.

A tipster to Deadspin pegs the job cuts at about 400. The network acknowledged "difficult" changes across the company Tuesday but would not confirm any specific layoff numbers. This is the first staff reduction at the channel since 2009, according to the blog.

Like its broadcast counterparts, ESPN has been socked with skyrocketing costs for sports programming. Last year,  the channel, along with News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox and Time Warner's (TWX) TBS, spent $12.4 billion for the broadcast rights for Major League Baseball from 2014 to 2021, an agreement that will double MLB's annual payout. 

New jobs and economic growth are far from the minds of President Barack Obama and congressional leaders these days. No one in Washington, D.C., seems to care.

The Washington Post reports that lawmakers have "all but abandoned efforts to help the economy recover faster." Why? Because there's no consequence from voters. Their inaction will not be punished.

Obama is not negotiating with Republicans in Congress on any laws to spur growth, Jim Tankersley reports. No "gangs" of senators are looking to craft joint job-creation bills.

Blame the dead weight of a lame-duck second presidential term. Blame the vehement infighting between congressional Democrats and Republicans. But you can also blame the wealthiest political donors, who feel like the stock market and the rest of the economy are doing just fine, Tankersley reports. 

Apple's (AAPL) $102 billion in cash stored overseas is becoming a big problem for CEO Tim Cook, who was testifying before Congress on Tuesday about this issue. How big? That mountain of money is larger than the GDP of many countries, and the U.S. government can't get its hands on the cash even though most of it was earned here.

In fact, as Citizens for Tax Justice noted, that money is out of reach of the taxing authorities of any government. As leader of the iPhone and iPad maker, Cook insists his company hasn't done anything wrong. Sadly for American taxpayers, he's right.

As the nonprofit tax organization notes on its website: "Under current law, corporations can indefinitely defer paying U.S. income taxes on their offshore profits." 

We're at a fascinating and potentially profitable crossroads with a new technology as the emerging drone industry comes up with solutions to some of today's problems while helping create possible guidelines for the future.

This is the case with the growing focus on unmanned aerial vehicles -- also known as UAVs or drones -- for use in agriculture. While drones have a decidedly military connotation for most people, researchers and the ag industry hope the UAVs in development will help farmers reconnect with their crops in a high-tech manner.

Large corporate farms already use remote-sensing technologies like satellite monitoring, aerial photography and GPS coordinates to help keep track of their crops. But they've been looking for relatively inexpensive and semi-autonomous systems that can work in real time and help them inspect crops in greater detail.

 

Maybe Emma Lazarus' famous poem "The New Colossus," which is displayed on the Statute of Liberty, needs to be updated. Instead of declaring, "Give me your tired, your poor . . . Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," it should say, "Give me your thin, your young, your pretty . . . Your huddled masses longing to be be fashionable."

That's a more accurate view of America's twisted immigration priorities. According to Bloomberg News, fashion models are almost twice as likely to receive H-1B visas than computer programmers or engineers are. Data from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services show that 250 out of the 478 visa applications by models were approved in 2010, an acceptance rate of more than 52%. That contrasts to an acceptance rate of only 28%, or only 90,800 the 325,000 applications, for foreign technology workers, the news service says. 

Well, America's rich, the fiscal cliff compromise that bumped the top effective income tax rate from 35% to 39.6% could have been a lot worse. The deal could have taken all of it and more.