Today the Securities and Exchange Commission will unveil several proposals aimed at restricting short-selling—a technique used by investors to profit from falling stock prices by selling at one price and then buying back at a lower price. While it has thus far been legal, it is widely considered underhanded. That may all change with the SEC's new rules. But there are many issues at the SEC that could also use revision, problems that go far beyond short-selling. The Takeaway is taking a broad look at SEC reform with John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School and director of that school’s Center on Corporate Governance.

It’s not surprising that after the bright lights fade from the floor of the Final Four championship games some college basketball players dream of going pro. But if you don't go pro, what do you do? The NCAA has tried in recent years to make it clear that they value academic success as much as athletics, but a new study reveals that their efforts may not be working. At least not among black male athletes. A recent study by The University of Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports reveals that the statistics are bleak: White male student athletes graduate at 80 percent versus only 58 percent of their black teammates. Michigan State had the greatest disparity in graduation rates among the Sweet 16 teams: All of its white players graduated, but only 43 percent of the black players got a diploma. Two colleges—Arizona and Gonzaga—didn’t graduate any black players at all. Some teams are doing better, the NCAA Basketball Champions, UNC, graduated 80 percent of its black players. And African American women in the tournament graduated at a rate of 78 percent. Joining us to discuss these troubling statistics is Dr. Boyce Watkins, professor of finance at Syracuse University and founder of YourBlackWorld.com.

The NCAA has been promoting academics through PSAs like this one:


Would this make you stay in school with the lure of an NBA salary?

For years, ethicist Randy Cohen has patiently guided readers through moral quagmires in his weekly column in the New York Times "The Ethicist." Now he is branching out from his popular Sunday column and is bringing his moral view to a new arena: The news. He will cast his ethical gaze on hot topics and in the news and discuss their broader moral implications. Randy Cohen joins The Takeaway to discuss his take on Madonna's failed adoption of a little girl in Malawi.

Check out Randy Cohen's column, Moral of the Story, in today's New York Times.

It’s been six months, almost to the day, since the TARP stimulus package was put into law. Last night, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the use of those funds and making sure the Treasury makes the right moves to stabilize the economy and the nation’s financial sector, issued a new report spelling out how the federal government is doing. The Takeaway's Todd Zwillich is here to give us a quick overview and we are pleased to have Richard Neiman, a member of the Congressional Oversight Panel, and the New York State Superintendent of Banks, joining us in the studio.

Click through for the transcript.


For more about the COP, here is a video they just released to accompany their report called Assessing Treasury's Strategy: Six Months of TARP.

Signaling its willingness to discuss improved relations with the United States under the Obama administration, Havana welcomed a contingent from the Congressional Black Caucus. On the agenda? The relationship between the two countries, but also an audience with Fidel Castro. Three members of the Congressional Black Caucus were the first American officials to meet with Fidel Castro since he fell ill in 2006. Representative Barbara Lee (D-Cal), Chair of the Congressional Black Conference, joins The Takeaway to report on the state of the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. and the state of health of Fidel Castro.

Click through for the transcript.

In 2000, in the tiny Central Texas town of Hearne, a military-style drug sweep sent 27 people to jail on felony charges of distributing crack cocaine. Nearly all of them were African American. One of them was Regina Kelly, who at the time was a 24-year-old waitress and single mother of four who refused to plead guilty. The film American Violet, a dramatization of the events in Hearne, will be released next week. The Takeaway talks to Bill Haney, the writer and producer of the film, and Nicole Beharie who stars in the movie.

Want to see the trailer? Here it is:

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere yesterday to protest in Moldova. The crowd was protesting the parliamentary elections held on Sunday, in which Communists won 50 percent of the vote, enough to allow them to select a new president and amend the Constitution. Using social networking tools like Twitter to mobilize a mob of mostly students, the protest shocked the government and the protesters were able to take control of the seat of government including the Parliament and the President's offices. When hundreds of firsthand accounts flooded onto the Internet via Twitter and Facebook, Internet service in Chisinau, the capital, was abruptly cut off. We have with us one of the protesters, Alina Martiniuc, a student in Moldova, to give her first hand account of the events.

Dooce blogger Heather B. Armstrong earns a living revealing personal details — an act that actually got her fired from her job as a web designer seven years ago. Since then she's made a reputation for brutal (and often hilarious) honesty and openness. Her new book, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita documents her post-partum depression and self-admission to a mental health facility. Not something many parents would be willing to put in hard copy. But you don’t have to be famous to have your personal details on the internet these days. So how do you shield your children from information you don't think they should know? And how much is okay to tell them? Heather B. Armstrong looks at how we decide where to draw the line.

Click through for the transcript

How much do you tell your children? What did your parents over-share with you? Tell us here.

An exclusive story from the Wall Street Journal says that cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system. In eerie echoes of the Cold War, government officials are blaming China and Russia, but is nearly impossible to know whether or not this act is government-sponsored because of the difficulty in tracking true identities in cyberspace. The spooks were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. And while the intruders haven't damaged the power grid, officials warned they could. For more on this startling story, we turn to the Wall Street Journal's Intelligence Correspondent Siobhan Gorman.

Read Siobhan Gorman's article, Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies in today's Wall Street Journal.