In these economic times, it's all about confidence. Markets responded with a surge of confidence to U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's announcement of a revised plan to help banks rid their balance sheets of toxic assets yesterday. Stock markets may be overused as indicators, but yesterday's gains were significant as stocks surged almost seven percent. Add to that the almost 5.1 percent upswing in home sales and things are starting to look good, right? Is all this good news the start of the economy turning around? Or are we still bumping up against the bottom? Kelly Evans, economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and Juliana Liu, the BBC's Asia business correspondent in Singapore, join The Takeaway to tell us how much confidence is actually warranted.

Nineteenth century England during the Industrial Revolution was a grim place. The air in the cities was thick with coal dust, forcing people indoors and huge numbers of children suffered from soft bones and weak, twisted limbs. Doctors realized that children in rural areas didn't suffer the same ailments as their urban peers and ailing city kids were shipped off to the countryside and when they came back to the cities, they were usually just fine. The disease? Rickets, a condition defined by a twisting of the bones. The cure was sunshine and what we now know is more Vitamin D. Lesson learned, right?

A new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that between 1994 and 2004, the number of Americans with Vitamin D deficiency rose. And a lack of the vitamin isn't just tied to rickets anymore, but to cancer, heart disease and infections. For an explanation, we turn to Gabrielle Glaser, an author and journalist who writes about how culture affects health.

In his new book Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, Mark Rudd looks back at his time as a founding member of the radical anti-war group the Weather Underground. He joins John to share his assessment of a tremendously turbulent period in American history and examine the legacy of the student movement.

Here's Mark Rudd in 1969:



Here's the trailer for the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground:

Tiny, affordable cars may seem like a great idea for the environment and the pocketbook. But our guest Linda Blake says putting thousands of Tata Nanos on India's roads is actually a bad idea for India's developing and smog-choked cities. She joins us now to explain.

TIMELINE: CARS FOR THE PEOPLE

Ford Model T
1909
Considered the first affordable car in America, Henry Ford's Model T sold for $850, undercutting competition priced between $2,000 and $3,000. "It will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one, and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces," Ford said.

AMC Rambler
1958
The Rambler's manufacturer, American Motor Corporation, was the only auto company to turn a profit during the recession of 1958. Created cheaply by conserving on steel, it became a car of choice and eventually won a Motor Trends "Car of the Year" award in 1963.

Toyota Tiara
1964
The 1960's forced American car manufacturers to face competition from abroad. Toyota's Tiara was the first of many successful Japanese imports. In 1967, the Tiara sold for $1,670, cheaper than the average American car.

Volkswagen Beetle
1960's
The Volkswagen Beetle, another car in the new wave of imports, sold at around the same price as the Tiara, $1,675. But by 1973, Beetles were selling much better than the Tiara, surpassing sales records of the previous record holder, the Ford Model T.

Zastava Yugo
1985
Just 141,500 of Zastava's Yugos sold in the United States from 1985 to 1991, making it one of the worst-selling cars ever. However, priced at $4,000 when it was first introduced, it was the cheapest car available at the time. In 1991, due to United Nations sanctions on Yugoslavia, the car had to be pulled from the U.S. market. An updated version of the car is still sells in several countries, including Egypt and Poland.

Chevrolet Aveo
2009
Priced at $11,965, the Aveo is currently the cheapest small car produced by a U.S. automaker. "Well, the Aveo is cheap, but, well, it's cheap," read a recent review of affordable small cars in U.S. News & World Report.

Tata Nano
2009
The Nano, produced by India's Tata Motors, is small. It's 10 feet long and five feet wide, and runs at a top speed of about 60 mph. In India, one can purchase the basic model, without radio, air conditioning or air bags, for $2,500 — It meets Indian safety standards and gets an admirable 50 miles to the gallon.

In 2004 the typical black family had twelve cents for every dollar held by the typical white family. By 2007, that number had dropped to ten cents. Why is the gap getting wider? Today the Color of Wealth 2009 Policy Summit in Washington will bring scholars, policy experts, and advocates together with lawmakers to analyze the reasons for the growing gap and devise ways to close it. Meizhu Lui, Director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, joins John with a look at some of the issues addressed at the conference.

Democrats are meeting today to hash out preliminary steps towards finalizing a budget before the recess. Republicans are organizing opposition to a spending plan that many in their ranks call irresponsible. Todd Zwillich from Capitol News Connection joins us to talk about the public opinion war being waged on Capitol Hill this week and what the final budget might look like.

Ten years ago today NATO planes, led by the United States, began bombing Serbia. The air strikes were aimed at forcing Serb troops out of Kosovo, then a province of Serbia, where the majority wanted independence and were rebelling against Serbian rule under Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo was eventually taken under the wing of the United Nations. Since then, in 2008, Kosovo declared independence and Milosevic was brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes, but died during the proceedings. Joining The Takeaway to look back at that NATO bombardment ten years ago, and the legacy it left behind, is Serbian journalist Ljiljana Smajlovic, the former editor of the Serbian daily newspaper Politika. She joins us from the BBC studio in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

Here is some footage from NATO's attack on Serbia.

While banks in the U.S. and Europe have been bailed out or boarded up, a different scenario has played out in Lebanon: banks there are thriving. The man responsible for bucking the banking trend is Riad Salame, the Governor of Lebanon’s Central bank. In 2005 he prohibited banks in Lebanon from investing in mortgage-backed securities and today his prudent move has proved to be prophetic. Governor Salame, joins us from Beirut to discuss how Lebanon’s economy is weathering the global economic meltdown.

Earlier this month Riad Salame rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Watch below.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's plan to get so-called toxic assets off of the nation's bank balance sheets relies on private investment firms, including pension and hedge funds investors, to buy up the bad assets. In return for the investment, the government would help minimize their risk. Despite this assurance from the government, who is willing to buy the assets and how exactly will this work? New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has a great deal of experience in both the private and public investment markets and he joins The Takeaway now to explain why these bad debts might be a good investment.

Japanese and Korean fans packed Dodgers stadium in Los Angeles last night for the championship game of the World Baseball Classic. Japan clinched the game in the tenth inning beating long time rival South Korea by two runs. Jeff Beresford-Howe, The Takeaway’s sports contributor, was at the game last night. He joins us now for a report.

Contributor’s Notes: Jeff Beresford Howe

Japan Wins the WBC Again

Getting Ichiro out with a championship on the line turns out to be a hard way to make a living. Korea couldn’t do it last night and because they couldn’t, Japan is baseball’s world champion again. Ichiro spoiled a bunch of wicked sliders and mid-90s fastballs from Chang Yong Lim and then whacked a tenth inning, two run single to give Japan a 5-3 victory in the World Baseball Classic at Dodger Stadium last night. Ichiro’s hit and a scoreless bottom of the tenth from Iranian-Japanese phenom Yu Darvish finished a magnificently dramatic game that featured a Japanese team that couldn’t quite land a knockout punch (they left 14 on base), brilliant fielding by Korea to get out of jam after jam, a two-out ninth inning rally by Korea to temporarily stave off defeat and a crowd that started banging and screaming from the first pitch and didn’t let up once for the four hours it took get to Ichiro and Dervish.

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A new study finds that a diet rich in red meat and processed meats can lead to premature death. The study, which is the largest of its kind, came out yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. For 10 years researchers tracked 500,000 people, ages 50-71, documenting what they ate over the course of that decade. The results find that people who consumed the equivalent of one hamburger a day increased their chances of dying by 30 percent. To fully understand the implications of this research we are joined by Barry Popkin who wrote an editorial accompanying this study. He is a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he heads the division of nutrition epidemiology.