Gary Raymond had had enough of the lights in Warehouse No. 5.

The old metal-halide fixtures cast a sour yellow hue on the stacks of cardboard boxes inside the storage facility. They hummed incessantly and burned out well before their due.

So Mr. Raymond, the landlord, replaced them with a brighter, smarter Web-enabled lighting system. He hoped it would help attract and retain tenants in the increasingly competitive warehouse market on Chicago's Southwest Side. But when the next utility bill arrived, something looked very wrong.

The bill appeared to show only partial electricity use, and the bottom line was a tenth of what it normally was. The tenant thought the new lights might be broken, but as far as Raymond knew, they worked just fine.

The local utility couldn't believe it either. Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) dispatched an engineer to double-check that the meter was operating properly, Raymond recalls, and later hired a consultant to monitor the lights.

Everything checked out. The meter worked. The lights shone. The partial electricity use wasn't a result of the "intelligent" lighting system working improperly. It was a result of it working exactly as designed – and better.

"We were amazed," Raymond says. "We thought it'd be around 80 to 90 [percent savings], and it turned out to be more than 90."

Annual electricity costs at the 177,413-square-foot warehouse dropped from about $50,000 a year to less than $5,000, and ComEd awarded Raymond a $65,176.90 efficiency rebate.

Today, Raymond walks under a cool, white glow in Warehouse No. 5, extolling those lights with the intimate reverence typically reserved for the latest smart phone or luxury car. Forklifts beep past as he strolls through rows of boxes filled with the empty plastic bottles made in an adjoining plant. Twenty feet above his head, networked clusters of light-emitting-diode (LED) bulbs brighten as he moves near them and dim as he walks away.

"I assure you, you've never seen anything like this on a lighting system before," Raymond says back in an office where he demonstrates the lights' online interface, which tracks consumption data. Laughing, he adds, "This is the type of thing you'd see on 'Star Trek.' "

Call it "intelligent efficiency," or "cleanweb." Call it the "soft grid," or the "enernet." There's a host of buzzwords to describe the growth of Internet-enabled efficiency, and they all mean slightly different things. But they all pose the same underlying question: How can we harness the power of the Web to consume less energy? Their end goal is identical: a resource as clean as wind or solar, but as light and gossamer as a cloud.

Internet communications, inexpensive sensors, and data analytics are enabling a high-tech, holistic approach to energy efficiency. In the past it was, "How do I design an efficient light?" Now it's, "How do I design a whole network of efficient lights that talk to one another via Web communications, adjust output automatically, and report back through online data portals that optimize performance?"

This mash-up of energy industry and information technology gives efficiency a shiny interactivity that expands the conversation beyond "eat-your-vegetables" lectures about insulation and compact fluorescent light bulbs. It promises an energy reduction boom to parallel the oil and gas production boom that has transformed the global energy landscape.

"The energy-efficiency potential is larger than the entire proven oil reserves under the sands of Saudi Arabia,"

The energy-efficiency potential is larger than the entire proven oil reserves under the sands of Saudi Arabia.

says Gregg Dixon, senior vice president of marketing and sales at EnerNOC, an energy management company.

If that sounds hyperbolic, it's because academics, scientists, and politicians have long hailed efficiency as an unsung solution for the world's energy woes. But it can be abstract and hard to quantify. When President Jimmy Carter donned a cardigan to champion conservation, he did little to win over an abundance-loving public that often associates efficiency with discomfort and nanny states.

That's changing. Engineers and designers are taking topics we'd rather not think about – industrial lighting, utility bills, thermostats, our own energy footprint – and making them approachable, understandable, maybe even fun.

"[Beginning around 2005], we really saw the convergence of a bunch of technology innovations that enabled us to do things that we could have only imagined 20 years ago," says Neal Elliott, who leads research on "intelligent efficiency" at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). "With that, sort of came the awareness within the efficiency community that the component approach to efficiency was maybe not going to get us where we think the opportunity exists in the big picture."

Perhaps a systems-based approach could. We know it saves energy to turn off one unneeded light. We know the result of turning off a million lights simultaneously. Now we can harness the sum of those changes as a resource in and of itself, tallied in "negawatts"– a utility's "antimatter."

Intelligent efficiency could cut US energy consumption by 12 to 22 percent, according to a June 2012 ACEEE report. That would translate to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in energy savings and productivity gains.

We may already be seeing the effects. In the United States, carbon emissions are the lowest they have been since 1994, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Energy consumption is still growing, but "energy intensity"– energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product – has been steadily dropping since the early 1970s and is expected to continue to decline. That's thanks to proliferation of many efficient cars and appliances, and a more service-based economy, according to EIA.

Could the future of energy be in the power we don't use?

Caveats and political common ground

Internet-enabled efficiency is no panacea. Some evidence suggests efficiency gains are at least partially offset by savings applied toward more carbon-intensive purchases. The operator who installs smart lights reduces lighting energy, but might use the money saved to buy a gas-guzzling truck.

"You can carve off part of the system and say, 'Look at all the energy and money we saved,' " says Ted Nordhaus, chairman of The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, Calif., "but it's an open system, not a closed system."

This "rebound effect" is why many economists approach efficiency with an it's-too-good-to-be-true skepticism. Efficiency effectively reduces a good's price, which any Economics 101 student will tell you encourages more consumption of that good. But to what extent is debatable, and estimates range from a modest 10 percent to more than 100 percent.

Most critics don't suggest efficiency is flat-out wrong, but they do caution against irrational exuberance for energy-saving schemes.

"It obscures the scale of the climate challenge, rather than illuminating it," Mr. Nordhaus says. "It basically tells policymakers, 'It's all going to be easy, cheap, and you don't have to do the hard things. You don't have to make the scale of investments or regulations that you need to take to actually decarbonize the economy.' "

The supersmart next wave of efficiency also raises important questions about data security and privacy. Could a thief hack into a smart thermostat and find out if you're home or not? Does collecting data about the grid open us up to cyberattacks from abroad?

Those threats are serious, energy experts say, but manageable, and the benefits outweigh the risks. Energy data live behind layers of cybersecurity, they say, and the information energy companies collect pales in comparison with what online banks, stores, and social media sites collect from their users.

Overhyped or not, efficiency garners support from key stakeholders, and the intelligence component makes it even easier for politicians, investors, and (yes) journalists to fawn over. Even many utilities embrace efficiency, despite its resemblance to asking customers to buy less of their product. It's cheaper than building new power plants and is often mandated by public utility commissions, and it builds rapport with ratepayers.

"We want people to use less energy," says Cheri Warren, vice president of asset management at National Grid, an international electricity and gas utility headquartered in London. "We don't want to make our money on how fast the meter spins; we want to make money on the assets themselves."

In Washington, the issue of efficiency is a rare opportunity for common ground amid polarizing energy topics like clean-energy loans and power plant regulations. At press time, a bipartisan efficiency bill once thought to be a legislative slam dunk in the Senate was sidetracked indefinitely by issues wholly unrelated to efficiency – namely, political wrangling over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare." The bill would have provided funding for efficiency upgrades in buildings, manufacturing, and the federal government, and it would have been the first major energy bill to pass since 2007. If it were to eventually pass, the bill would save more than $65 billion and create 174,000 jobs by slashing energy waste, according to a September analysis by ACEEE.

An electric bill to look forward to

Up on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in Boston's innovation district, dozens of 20- and 30-somethings pore over computer screens in a gleaming white work space. It could be any high-tech firm designing the next cool photo-sharing application or smart phone game, but this space is as much about atoms and particles as it is about pixels and bytes. The software engineers here rub shoulders with electrical and mechanical engineers. There's a 3-D printer out back and a temperature testing chamber that simulates environments as diverse as the Arctic and the Amazon. In a sort of digital wood shop, 21st-century tinkerers labor beneath dangling wires, lights, and plugs, pawing through an array of colorful bins filled with metal and plastic bits that do only engineers know what.

This is Digital Lumens, the company behind the intelligent lights in Gary Raymond's Warehouse No. 5. Its goal, as president and chief executive officer Tom Pincince says, is "to use information technology and the LED [lights] component together to build a system where every light in the world is intelligent, and that intelligence goes towards efficiency that is dramatic, if not radical."

The company shaved more than 90 percent off Warehouse No. 5's utility bill (and expects the system will pay for itself in about two years). It cut annual lighting costs by 97 percent for a cold-storage facility in Kent, England. Associated Grocers of New England dropped 90 percent off energy costs for its cold-storage facility in Pembroke, N.H., according to Digital Lumens.

What makes those seemingly impossible savings possible? Each individual light is itself highly efficient, but that accounts for only half the savings, Mr. Pincince says. The other half is made possible by sensors, data, and the Internet technologies that control the entire network of lights. It's a scale of efficiency that exists only by thinking of an individual light not as a discrete unit, but instead as one light in a system of lights working together in concert to illuminate a space. Each light senses if anyone's around, and how much light is already there. If the sun comes out, the lights near the windows dim. If a forklift breezes by, the lights brighten. Light is cast only where it is needed. An online data portal lets operators adjust preprogrammed settings and see exactly how much they could save by, say, dimming lights an extra 10 percent when no one's around, or shortening the time it takes for a light to dim after someone has left the area.

That intelligence appealed to Henry Sick. The 2011 Northeastern University graduate works as a mechanical engineer for the company, passing his time "tinkering, designing, and doing." It's not always easy to explain to his friends what he does for a living, and building lights may not carry the same cultural cachet as a gig at Apple or Google. But that doesn't seem to bother Mr. Sick.

"I'm doing work that has an impact and – regardless of what that work is – I know it's meaningful," Sick says.

At Digital Lumens, he says he can contribute to something larger than himself. With conviction, he adds: "We're saving a huge amount of energy."

Peer pressure power

Alex Laskey opens his February 2013 TED Talk with a series of simple questions: How often do you check your e-mail? At least once a day, if not once an hour. How often do you check your bank account? Weekly, maybe. Now, how often do you check your energy consumption? Once a month, if that.

That's the challenge facing Mr. Laskey, president of Opower, an Arlington, Va.-based company that aims to save energy by making it more personally relevant to utility customers.

"When it comes to the Internet helping energy, you actually have to get people to care about their energy use first," says Rod Morris, senior vice president of marketing and operations at Opower.

How is that done? With financial incentives? Moral reasoning? No, something far more potent: peer pressure.

Opower partners with utilities to provide end-users better information about not only their own energy consumption – be it on a paper utility bill, a smart thermostat, or an iPad app – but also information about their neighbors' energy use. The data is anonymous, but it gives homeowners critical context about their consumption levels, not to mention a deeply human desire to smother the competition.

"We're testing to see who can get their family to use less energy," Mr. Morris says. "We have the largest body of energy data in the world, [and] we're able to get incredible insights on how to harness the power of individual choices."

Today, Opower partners with 85 utilities across seven countries, providing easy-to-read bills and digital consumption alerts over the Internet to 18 million homes. The company calculates that its behavioral energy-efficiency programs have saved more than 2.7 terawatt-hours (and counting) of electricity worldwide. That's more than what it takes to power all the homes in a city the size of Atlanta for a year. It translates to about $320 million saved by consumers, according to Opower, and a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.

It's the work of, as Morris puts it, "behavior change, powered by Big Data, run through really smart communications technology."

Say you've left town for a weekend away. You're a hundred-odd miles down the road when you realize you forgot to reprogram your thermostat for the time you're gone . The dreadful image of a needlessly warm, empty house hangs over you. In your mind, dollar bills spew from the vents.

It's why some thermostats these days come with apps that let you adjust your thermostat remotely. And it's why – with the next generation of Internet-enabled, sensor-equipped, "smart" thermostats – some thermostats do the adjusting for you.

In 2011 Nest Labs debuted a "learning" thermostat that promised to do exactly that.

If Opower banks on data-driven competition to engage customers, Nest Labs uses the power of slick gadgetry to get people to think about – and thus reduce – their energy consumption.

The founders of the Palo Alto, Calif., company came from Apple where they got their "PhD in consumer products," as cofounder Matt Rogers puts it. After helping the company revolutionize the telecommunications industry with the iPhone, Mr. Rogers and cofounder Tony Fadell set out to make a splash in the energy sector. They targeted the thermostat – a decidedly banal but vital tool, convinced they could make it better.

"The gap between the consumer experience in mobile products and the ones in our homes is enormous," Rogers says. "I've been a programmer my entire life and could not program a thermostat for the life of me."

Getting started was rocky, he says. "If you pitch thermostats to venture capitalists, they go, 'really?' " But this was no ordinary thermostat. The company's roots at Apple are immediately recognizable in the Nest Learning Thermostat's polished black and silver design. There are no dials, buttons, or monochromatic screens to squint at. There is just one big disc with the temperature on it.

"At the core," Rogers says, "it's a smart phone on your wall."

You turn the Nest thermostat up and down as you would any other thermostat. But this one keeps track of those changes and "learns" your routine. After a couple of weeks, it adjusts automatically, aided by a built-in sensor that determines whether you're home or not.

The savings are similar to those of traditional programmable thermostats – about 20 percent. But the problem is that many people don't actually take the time to program their programmable thermostat or at least do so effectively. The $249 Nest aims to take the guesswork out of it, engaging the human as much as it can, and leaving the rest up to algorithms and sensors.

That functionality motivated Andrew Kimpton, a software engineer, to install five Nest Learning Thermostats in his family's recent remodel in Winchester, Mass. When the family goes skiing in Vermont, the Nest will automatically turn down the heat even if the Kimptons forget to do so before they leave. And they make use of the thermostat's iPhone app on the way home. "[W]hen we get to the Massachusetts state line we turn it on again, and the house is warm by the time we get home," Mr. Kimpton says. Nest and Opower aren't alone. The home energy management systems market is valued at $1.5 billion in the US, according to GTM Research, an energy market analysis firm. By 2017, that number will more than double to surpass $4 billion.

The ratio of pixels to persons is high at the EnerNOC Network Operations Center. Bathed in the glow of a bank of computer monitors displaying numbers, data, charts, and graphs, the men and women working there could be landing an astronaut on the moon. The room, with a large map of the US splotched with clusters of white dots, evokes NASA's "Houston," but quieter, more earthly.

When demand for electricity threatens to outstrip its utility partners' ability to provide it, EnerNOC contacts customers who have agreed – in return for a predetermined payment from their utility – to temporarily reduce their consumption. In some cases, EnerNOC can directly adjust its customers' loads remotely.

Thousands of grocery stores dim their lights. A major university turns campus-wide air conditioning down a hair. A manufacturing plant idles some machinery. Those tiny adjustments add up, and suddenly the line charting upward on EnerNOC's demand monitor starts to level out and decline. Blackout averted.

EnerNOC is one of several companies that focus on the demand side of a utility industry that has traditionally solved capacity issues with adjustments in supply. The typical response to a demand increase is to build more power plants. But those plants are only useful during peak periods of demand – like when temperatures spike and everyone blasts the AC. The rest of the time they sit idle, unused.

"Enter the demand side of the equation," says Mr. Dixon, of EnerNOC. "If we can connect demand to the grid with communications and control the load that way, we can operate the system much more efficiently."

Instead of investing in expensive new power plants, why not just pay customers to turn off nonessential equipment when demand peaks? Why generate more energy if you can simply better manage the energy you already have?

That's the logic behind demand response. It's not a new concept, but it is growing in popularity as cheap sensors, Web-enabled smart meters, and even social media make energy management possible on a previously unimaginable scale.

EnerNOC, for example, has between 24,000 and 27,000 megawatts under management. It can curtail 30 to 35 percent of that load – about 8,500 megawatts – for demand response. That's more than twice the size of the output of the largest nuclear plant in the US. It's a source of power made not with concrete, steel, and fuel, but with communications, algorithms, and data stored in the cloud.

As EnerNOC puts it, it's building virtual power plants to curtail the need for real ones.

It all adds up

If a light shines in a room, and there's nobody there to see it, does it actually illuminate? Yes, it does. We have the technology, data, and communications to prove it and to show just how much energy that wastes.

Intelligent efficiency isn't cheap, and there are concerns about rebound, privacy, and security, but industry leaders say the risks of not adopting the technology are even greater.

That resonates with Gary Raymond, landlord of Warehouse No. 5 and owner of Silver Beauty Real Estate – named for the B-17 bomber his father flew in World War II.

He's convinced intelligent lighting is the future, and says he regularly gives tours of Warehouse No. 5 to representatives of major companies looking to cut costs, but wary of the new technology. He tells them what he tells everyone: "The LEDs, the motion sensors, the daylight harvesting – it all adds up."

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Join the conversation about this story »

Join the conversation about this story »

After 20 years in the US military, James Cummiskey was divorced and looking for a change. Relenting to his buddy's request, he flew to Medellín, Colombia, for a visit. He looked, he saw, and, by dinner time, he decided to stay. Permanently.

"After four to five hours, I was immediately captured by everything I saw," says the ex-marine, who has lived in 35 countries. He spent the next four months selling two homes, three vehicles, two motorcycles, and one airplane. He put the money aside and decided to retire early.

Now he lives in a posh section of the mountain city of 3.8 million, surrounded by lush vistas. He married a Colombian woman, started a coffee export business, and seems to get goose bumps every time he thinks about his new life. "I tell you honestly I have had more fun here in the past four years than in the previous 50," he says.

Mr. Cummiskey’s story is being repeated thousands of times – minus perhaps the sale of a personal plane – as more and more Americans retire to countries all over Latin America. Lured by sun-dappled landscapes and cheap living costs, they are settling in culturally vibrant towns in central Mexico, beach communities in Costa Rica, high-rise enclaves in Panama, and mountain retreats in Nicaragua. 

Even Medellín, once the drug and murder capital of the world, has transformed itself into something of an urban showcase, attracting baby boomers to a place where cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar used to carry out his ruthless craft.

Though the phenomenon of Americans retiring in Latin America began 25 years ago, it has accelerated in the past five to 10 years. Call the region America's new "Sun Belt."

"Thirty five years ago, this idea was truly on the far fringe – that if you thought about retiring out of the US, you were labeled 'renegade' or 'strange' or 'weird,' or 'over-adventurous,' " says Jennifer Stevens, editor of International Living magazine. "Now it is much more acceptable, desirable, and even normal to do this. It's a huge trend."

The exodus south is being driven by a confluence of factors. The baby boom generation – the largest in history – is reaching retirement age, and millions are looking for places to spend the next phase of their lives. As the most educated, well-traveled, and adventurous generation in history, many of these boomers are deciding to retire outside the country – including in Latin America.

They're also looking for places that will allow them to stretch their 401(k)s after they lost a lot of money in the last stock market collapse. With the US economy remaining so tentative, and health-care costs so aggressive, retirees want to live where they can afford greens fees and where a trip to the emergency room won't bankrupt them.

"A lot of people are saying, 'I'm tired of worrying about my retirement years,' so they are beginning to ask questions and go in search of great deals ... and they are finding them," says Kathleen Peddicord, founder of the Live and Invest Overseas publishing group and author of "How To Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad." She says that many are taking advantage of what she calls the "perception gap"– the idea that countries such as Colombia and Nicaragua are still thought of as countries with huge problems of drug violence even though the violence has largely been erased. One other factor: In the age of Skype and FaceTime, meaningful contact with children and friends, no matter where one retires, is now only a finger tap away.

While living in Latin America isn't for everyone – crime, cultural differences, and even phone connections can be problematic – is it any wonder that Naples, Fla., and Flagstaff, Ariz., are no longer America's only leisure-years Shangri-Las?

•   •   •

Jeanne Mendez was drawn by the views of three volcanoes and the "gentle pace of life." After her husband died in 2004, Ms. Mendez went on a yoga retreat held on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. She ended up building a circular home in Santa Cruz, a village that borders the expansive 50-mile lake.

Mendez, who for 20-plus years worked in finance in New York City and then for Microsoft in Seattle, now has to board a small boat to get groceries from a local market, which is part of the charm. "For a person who used Excel spreadsheets for every decision," she says, "it was an unusual decision [to move here], but it was a powerful urge for me."

Mendez represents another dimension of the surge of Americans southward: Many of them are settling in countries other than the usual haunts. For years, Americans have been retiring in Panama, Costa Rica, and parts of Mexico. Many still are. But now a growing number are also exploring Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and other countries not often mentioned in retirement brochures.

What makes Guatemala attractive to retirees, for instance, is not only its enviable views but its cheap costs, even relative to other Central American countries. A house that would go for half a million dollars in Costa Rica or Panama can be found or built in Guatemala for $250,000, according to Armand Boissy, a real estate agent and developer who has lived in the Lake Atitlán area for the past 25 years.

Patricia and David Bibb, both artists in their 60s, decided to settle near Lake Atitlán after searching for places in Belize, Honduras, and other parts of Guatemala. "It was as beautiful as Hawaii," says Ms. Bibb, who has lived in North Palm Beach, Fla., and Georgia.

The couple renovated an existing home, doing some of the work themselves, since he is a master woodworker and she is a ceramic artist. They have three grown children and three grandchildren in the United States whom they see four or five times a year. But they have no plans of returning. "We consider this our last home," says Ms. Bibb with finality.

To a certain extent, the move south by Americans is just part of a larger trend of retirees settling in places all around the world – from France to Thailand to craggy New Zealand. When Ms. Peddicord launched the Live and Invest Overseas publishing group in 2008, she had 10,000 subscribers the first year. Now she has more than 200,000.

But Latin America is drawing a particularly large number of expatriates, both because of its proximity to the US and because of the relative inexpensiveness of many parts of the region. While no one knows the precise number of retirees living in the area, signs suggest it is substantial – and growing:

•The number of Americans receiving Social Security checks in Central America and the Caribbean – one gauge of how many people live outside the US – rose 26 percent between 2005 and 2012, to 28,126, according to the Social Security Administration. It jumped 112 percent in Panama and 32 percent in Costa Rica.

•The number collecting US Social Security checks in South America increased 48 percent over the same seven-year period, to 22,019. It rose 87 percent in Colombia and 47 percent in Ecuador.

•Mexican officials estimate that more than 1 million US-born citizens now live in Mexico – up from 360,000 in 2000.

"There are 20,000 Americans just here in Lake Chapala and more in Guadalajara," says Thomas Heller, a real estate agent who grew up in Washington State and married a woman from Mexico he met while studying there.

The Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Baja California have traditionally served as destinations both for tourists and retired Americans. But Mexico City has become a magnet for American migrants, too, as security and quality of life have improved in the city.

In Jalisco, the number of US citizens over age 55 more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, increasing from 2,480 to 5,918. The number has expanded far more dramatically over the past decade. "We have the best weather in the world, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and very good medical care," says Bruce Newby, the president of the American Society in Guadalajara, Jalisco's capital city.

Mr. Newby, a lawyer who grew up in Indiana and later lived in California, first came to Jalisco to visit a friend who had moved there. He soon decided to relocate himself.

"The restaurants are wonderful, cheap, and very good," says Newby, sounding like a one-man chamber of commerce.

Newby won't get any arguments from Diane Golz. When she and her husband were first considering retiring, they bought numerous books and did extensive research on where to settle outside the US. The couple from Georgia finally decided on the Guadalajara area, buying a house near Lake Chapala, in part because it was so close: They could simply put their dog in the car and drive down from Atlanta. Now the two of them can also easily fly to visit their children in other parts of the US.

Besides, says Ms. Golz, the food here "is not at all like Taco Bell."

•   •   •

While many people are moving to Latin America permanently, others are choosing to live there a few months of the year. For these people – mainly "snowbirds"– the region has become the new Florida.

Take Jay and Kathleen Snyder. Grandparents of six, they now divide their time between Landgrove, Vt., and Granada, Nicaragua. In 2005, after 40 years of running an inn in Vermont, the couple decided they wanted a change and a little more sun.

"It was as though I could hear a voice saying, 'Go south, old man,' " says Mr. Snyder. He visited Nicaragua and enrolled in a Spanish-immersion program.

The Snyders are now doing in Nicaragua what they've long done in Vermont: beckoning others to come stay. They made an offer on a piece of land in Granada and, finding out no such thing as a rental-management program existed, built a set of condos and started one themselves.

"If it works for me, I figured, it'll work for others just like me," he says. "Something like, build it ... and the retirees will come."

The transition has not always been easy. Snyder has been unnerved at times by Nicaragua's political vicissitudes. In 2001, when he made his first trip to the country, the real estate market was booming. By 2005, it had slowed considerably. A pullback ensued after Daniel Ortega, the former firebrand Marxist who now espouses a mixture of Socialism and free enterprise, was elected president in 2006. But the fears subsided, and his condominiums kept selling.

Nicaragua also may not be the place for people expecting Trump Tower living conditions. Many deliveries Snyder gets are still by burro and cart. The architecture is what he calls "original." But that's what Snyder likes about living there: a rustic existence that echoes life from another century. "This isn't a place like Costa Rica, where huge developers and resorts have come in and done their own thing," he says.

It's not just retirees who are taking advantage of the appeal of Latin American countries. Kent Davis, who grew up in Hawaii, moved to Panama when he was 27. Now, six years later, he calls his life in the country "fantastic." Mr. Davis, the founder of the real estate firm Panama Equity, says homes there aren't necessarily any cheaper than they are where his mother lives in Richmond, Va. But the cost of doctors, dentists, and car repairs is about one-fourth what it is in the US.

The lifestyle is vibrant, too, even for young people. He attributes part of that to the diverse expatriate community – one made up of people not just from the US, but also from Colombia, Venezuela, and Canada. The migrants busy themselves with activities ranging from book clubs to singing groups to scuba diving.

Young expats, he says, like to surf and barbecue. Retirees tend to go to restaurants and tap into a growing, if nascent, arts scene. They might volunteer to teach math, English, or basic computer skills. "Nobody leaves here because they are bored," he says.

One reason so many American expats are settling in Panama is the incentives. While governments throughout much of Latin America are now trying to lure Americans, Panama's was among the first and most aggressive to target US baby boomers. A series of laws over recent administrations created the pensionado program, offering foreigners lifelong residence in Panama if they prove they receive a monthly pension of more than $1,000. Foreign-earned pensions are not taxed by the Panamanian government.

In addition, so-called jubilados (retirees) receive a one-time exemption of duties on the importation of household goods and a wide array of benefits. This includes 50 percent off entertainment; 30 percent off bus, boat, and train fares; 25 percent off monthly energy bills; as much as 50 percent off hotel stays; and 15 percent off hospital bills in some cases. It's one of the best retirement programs in the world, according to International Living magazine, which rated Panama at the top of its annual "global retirement index" six years in a row.

"I had to look for a place where I could afford to retire, and actually retire and not have to keep working," says Clyde Coles, a 26-year veteran firefighter from Corpus Christi, Texas, who injured his neck in the job and couldn't carry out his duties anymore.

His solution: a tiny beachfront town about 90 minutes outside Panama City, where he and his wife purchased an older home on an acre of land. They live on about $2,500 a month. For the couple, the biggest draws were Panama's lower cost of living, its retirement benefits, and good health care at a fraction of the cost in the US.

Inexpensive but good quality medical care is a major reason many retirees are settling in parts of Latin America. Many talk of trips to the doctor that cost only $15 and of medical treatments that cost one-third of what they do in the US. Many countries also allow foreigners to enroll in their national health-care programs.

Andy and Fran Browne of Charlotte, N.C., both lost their jobs during the 2008 recession and were swamped by their private health insurance policies, which were costing them $1,800 a month. (They were still too young to be eligible for Medicare.)

A planned Memorial Day vacation to Costa Rica turned into a reconnaissance mission. The couple moved there a year later, eventually settling in the beachfront community of Pl aya Hermosa on the northwest coast. The Brownes now rent a four-bedroom home that offers them tangerine sunsets over the Pacific. "By coming to Costa Rica our burn rate was extended 20 to 25 years," says Mr. Browne, referring to how long their retirement money will last.

Terry Zach, a retired media specialist at a San Francisco advertising agency, moved south for similar reasons. Facing retirement 14 years ago, he realized that he and his partner, who had no medical insurance, couldn't afford any place they wanted to go in the US.

So when his partner saw an article about Boquete, a town in Panama's highlands resembling Boulder, Colo., the two were intrigued. From the moment they arrived, "we knew this was it," says Mr. Zach. The small-town feel combined with the breathtaking nature and easy access to most modern conveniences, such as shopping malls and good hospitals, made it a simple decision.

The two now live well on about $2,000 a month. They helped start an English-speaking Rotary Club, a community theater, and a service offering free neutering to cats and dogs.

"We couldn't live like this in the US," Zach says.

•   •   •

Retiring outside the US certainly isn't everyone's idea of utopia. One of the biggest obstacles is a simple one: managing expectations. Some people think living in Ecuador, Panama, or Mexico will be the same as living in the US, only cheaper. It isn't.

As Zach notes, many countries in the region operate at a different rhythm. A less-frenetic pace can be good for retirees. But it can also mean slower service at a restaurant, notorious bureaucratic delays in getting land titles or driver's licenses, and scheduled dates with plumbers or carpenters that never happen.

"Mañana doesn't mean tomorrow," says Zach. "It means not today."

Americans are used to good roads, first-rate telephone and Internet service, and reasonable customer service. Moving south can be jarring. "The streets are bad and poorly maintained, there are no lights or signage, and parking spaces are nonexistent," says Cummiskey of urban life in Medellín.

Crime is a predominant concern. While levels of violence vary widely across the region – and the vast majority of expats settle in communities that are considered safe – retirees caution that it's important to know when and where to travel. Some thieves prey on foreigners. Drug violence remains a concern in parts of Mexico and other countries.

Mr. Coles, the retired firefighter, says that even though Panama is safer than Mexico and Ecuador, violent crime still exists and one has to take precautions. The judicial system, he adds, is notoriously inefficient and ineffective.

Sara Laing can sympathize with that. Eight years ago, she bought 17 acres of unspoiled land on a mountaintop in Santa Rosa de Copán, a city in western Honduras. Ms. Laing, a savvy world traveler who had lived in 20 countries as a volunteer and mental-health professional, moved because she had tired of retirement life in Sarasota, Fla., which mostly consisted of going to concerts and theater productions.

"I wasn't living life," she says. "I was just watching it."

In Santa Rosa de Copán, she teaches English and other classes at two village schools and enjoys her veranda, which offers stunning views of the woodlands.

But one day two men with guns tied up a man who cares for her home and then ransacked the house while she hid in a closet. The incident, combined with the distance she lives from her grandchildren and the inability to live in Honduras on her Social Security income of $760 a month, is prompting her to return to the US.

"I am sad," she says, "because I love it here, and I do think it is one of the most beautiful countries. I want to see it flourish."

Language can be another barrier. Many Americans have settled in areas with large expat communities or ones that cater to outsiders, and they can get along without learning Spanish. Newby, for instance, says that most of the American retirees he knows in Mexico's state of Jalisco don't speak Spanish fluently.

"They don't need to," he says. Most people "retire here because the weather is great, not because they studied Spanish in college."

For others, learning the native tongue and local customs can take time, but is usually worth the effort. "In your daily life, you can go a long time without speaking Spanish, but it's much easier if you do," says Joel Moskowitz, a lawyer from Malibu, Calif., who, with his wife, Anna, moved to Roatán, one of the Bay Islands that is part of Honduras.

Still, for all the challenges of retiring in America's new Sun Belt, many expats see the advantages far surpassing the disadvantages. Consider Cummiskey and his fondness for Medellín.

He likes the city's predictable climate. He likes the shopping malls, the antique stores, the nightclubs. He likes the vegetation and the views. But, most important, he likes the people.

"They have one of the highest poverty rates in the world and yet the people are not at all depressed," he says. "They are completely happy all the time and that is very, very cool and appealing to me."

• Contributing to this report were Seth Robbins in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Lomi Kriel in Boquete, Panama; and Nathaniel Parish Flannery in Mexico City.

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Clay Aiken is apparently thinking about running for Congress in his home state of North Carolina. That’s the rumor roiling Tar Heel State political circles Friday, in any case. The “American Idol” singer hasn’t confirmed this yet, but there’s a story about the possible candidacy in the Washington Blade that’s got lots of details and sounds well sourced.

Mr. Aiken, the Blade says, has talked to D.C. political operatives about running as a Democrat in North Carolina’s Second Congressional District outsideRaleigh. He’s started making phone calls to gauge support in the state and is working with a woman named Betsy Conti, a Raleigh strategist and former aide to ex-Gov. Bev Perdue.

“Another Democratic source said Aiken was in D.C. last month meeting with pollsters at Hart Research Associates to examine polling data with one of the partners at the firm,” writes the Blade’s Chris Johnson.

The Blade focuses on issues of importance to the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. Aiken, who said he is gay in 2008, finished second in the “American Idol” competition in 2003, and he's since become one of the bestselling artists to emerge from the competition. Does he have the star power and political chops to pull off a Democratic victory in a state that went for Mitt Romney in 2012?  

Well, first of all, someone or some group wants him to try. That’s our reading of the anonymously sourced Blade story. It reads like a leak intended to push further into the political arena someone who’s considering a bid for office. The usual suspects for this would be locals who think he represents their best chance to unseat GOP incumbent Rep. Renee Ellmers or national groups who think he’d bring issues they support to the fore.

It’s also possible that Aiken himself leaked the story, as a classic trial balloon.

Second, victory in this case isn’t an impossible dream. The Second District was represented by a Democrat,Rep. Bob Etheridge, from 1997 until 2011. Mr. Etheridge lost to Ms. Ellmers in the GOP landslide of 2010. Aiken could easily raise lots of money, which can make a big difference in a House race. Plus, he’d be running in a state that isn’t shy about electing celebrities. Remember Rep. Heath Shuler?  He’s a former NFL quarterback who was also a three-term conservative Democratic lawmaker from North Carolina’s 11th District. (Mr. Shuler declined to run for reelection in 2012 after redistricting made the 11th more Republican.)

But in the end, Aiken would still face a tough race. In fact, our prediction is that like Ashley Judd, who toyed with opposing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) in Kentucky, Aiken eventually will decide not to run in 2014. Midterms are not hospitable environments for political neophytes of the incumbent presidential party. They’re especially tough if you’re running in a state that’s lately leaned the other way, in a district that’s become more solid for your potential opponent.

Political prognosticator Charlie Cook rates North Carolina’s Second District as “solid Republican” in his Cook Political Report. So does University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato in his“Crystal Ball” newsletter listings.

John McCain beat Barack Obama by 12 percentage points in the Second in 2008. Mr. Romney won it in 2012 by almost 17 points. Those numbers indicate that any Democrat faces a steep uphill climb in the district this year.

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Guidelines to make voting more accessible were released Wednesday, but they are not binding, which leaves election reform advocates worried that the recommendations may be difficult to implement.

President Obama commissioned the report in March 2013, seeking solutions to the laundry list of problems revealed in the presidential election cycle the previous year: lines lasting for hours outside polling places, inaccurate voter registration lists, and hazards in counting overseas ballots, to name a few.

The 112-page report by the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration offers the most comprehensive recommendations to date on ways to make voting easier and more equitable. The proposals are an attempt to address the increasingly fractured voting landscape, streamlining the mechanics of voting and the registration process so that regulations are the same in every state.

“This report is honing in on the inconsistency of election administrations across the country, [which has gotten] to the point that where you live determines whether your vote will count on Election Day,” says Jocelyn Benson, director of the Michigan Center for Election Law at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit.

Many of these problems are decades old but have not been fixed despite similar reports, she says. The White House cannot force states to adopt the measures without congressional action, and it has no ability to monitor Election Day reforms in real time.

The recommendations include: 

• Expanding online voting registration to improve voter roll accuracy.
• Expanding mail balloting or early voting before Election Day, and improving military and overseas voting access.
• Greater reliance on schools as polling sites.
• Updating voting technology and integrating voter data collected from Departments of Motor Vehicles with state election office lists.
• Making sure that no voter should have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.
• Creating uniform training standards by state.
• Auditing voting equipment after each election with full public disclosure of the results.

Many election reform advocates are cheering the report’s recommendations. They are “a significant advance in the way we think about voting,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law.

“The commission makes clear that there are achievable, bipartisan reforms that can be implemented now to transform voting.… It recognizes that we can’t fix long lines until we first fix our outdated voter registration system,” Mr. Waldman said in a statement.

An online voter registry is critical to reform, advocates say, because it expands voter access.

Rock the Vote, an advocacy group based in Washington, told the commission that it has developed online registration tools over two decades and is making them available for free to state elections administrators.

Nineteen states have functioning online voter-registration systems, and five are pledging to add the technology by 2016, says Amanda Brown, national political director for Rock the Vote. She says that expanding the technology is necessary because some states, such as Texas, are passing restrictions on voting registration, which require voters to produce a state-approved form of photo identification to vote. This makes it harder for minorities, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor to vote, she and others say.

“What we’ve seen over the last two or more years is some states have been taking aggressive measures to cut back on opportunities to vote,” says Ms. Brown. “The fact that states have tried to block the vote in such egregious ways has made it harder to push forward” on reform measures of the past.

Advocates of voter ID laws say the laws help prevent voter fraud, though studies on the issue have not found significant fraud.

Some advocates worry that the new recommendations will suffer the same fate as similar reports published following past election cycles.

“You’re asking those elected in the current system to change the game that they have already won,” says Professor Benson of Wayne State. “So the commission report is helpful because it hones in on specific changes that need to happen, but without an external push, history teaches us we are unlikely to see a lot of change.”

Mr. Obama said Wednesday that his administration intends to “publicize” the findings and “then reach out to stakeholders all across the country to make sure that we can implement this.”

The recommendations, including online tools and best practices, are available on the commission’s website, supportthevoter.gov, which is curated by the Caltech-MIT Voting Project.

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A bid by Northwestern University football players to unionize faces significant legal barriers, but even the specter of a union could help tip the highly commercialized playing field more in student-athletes’ favor.

“My goal is to make sure that all student athletes are set up for success long after their playing days are over,” said Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter at a press conference Tuesday in Chicago, where he outlined plans to form the College Athletes Players Association.

Among the issues driving a move to unionize college athletes are low graduation rates among players and the absence of protections for student athletes who face injury-related medical issues long-term, he said.

Northwestern was not mistreating its players, Mr. Colter added, but simply playing by the rules of the game as they currently stand. “We need to eliminate unjust NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] rules that create physical, academic, and financial hardships for college athletes across the nation,” he said.

A majority of Northwestern football players signed cards to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, Colter said. The NLRB is expected to conduct a hearing within about 10 days.

The NCAA was quick to point out that there’s no precedent for this type of union: “Many student athletes are provided scholarships and many other benefits for their participation…. Student-athletes are not employees within any definition of the National Labor Relations Act or the Fair Labor Standards Act,” said NCAA chief legal officer Donald Remy, in a statement.

If the NLRB does recognize the group as a collective bargaining unit, “it will be pretty significant,” says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. But the impact would be “primarily in the momentum and publicity it garners,” he says. The NCAA or some other outside body, such as Congress, could feel the pressure to bring about the kinds of changes the players are looking for, he adds.

On the other hand, a successful effort to unionize at Northwestern could also throw a monkey wrench into the whole system of competitive college football, creating a patchwork of teams that aren’t competing under the same terms, says Michael LeRoy, an expert on collective bargaining in athletics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That’s because private universities are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, but public universities, home to many of the major college football teams, are governed by state laws that vary in whether they allow public employees to unionize.

Unions at some schools could therefore lead to more spending on players, thereby disrupting the parity that NCAA rules are designed to ensure, Professor LeRoy says. It could also lead to a scenario where a stadium is packed with fans and one of the two teams slated to play suddenly decides to go on strike.

The question of unionization plays into ongoing debates about whether players are being “properly compensated for what amounts to de facto employment,” LeRoy says. With players routinely putting in more than 40 hours a week for football-related activities, the term “student-athlete” becomes somewhat “paradoxical,” he adds.

“How can they call this amateur athletics when our jerseys are sold in stores and the money we generate turns coaches and commissioners into multimillionaires?” Colter asked at Tuesday’s press conference, while also noting that the point of unionizing would not be to ask for players to be paid outright. “The current model represents a dictatorship…. We just want a seat at the table,” he said.

The president of the College Athletes Players Association, former UCLA football player Ramogi Huma, said the union would help ensure that scholarships cover the full cost of tuition, and that medical coverage extends beyond the playing years, two goals shared by another organization he heads, the National College Players Association.

Mr. Huma described the union push as “the first domino,” and said efforts could move beyond private universities to public ones as well.

The United Steelworkers is supporting the college football players’ effort, including paying for legal expenses.

If approved, “the strategy the union pursues would be vitally important,” says Professor Zimbalist. One big question would be whether the NCAA would kick out a unionized team “for transgressing the strictures of amateurism,” he says. But if the union is simply asking for better health insurance benefits and cost-of-attendance stipends, it isn’t necessarily violating any of those rules.

While a union is probably a long way off, given the legal process involved, colleges and universities are very concerned about protecting players from injury, says Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, a higher education membership organization in Washington.

Jim Phillips, Northwestern’s vice president for athletics and recreation, said in statement that the university agreed with the NCAA that student-athletes are not employees, but added that “the health and academic issues being raised by our student-athletes and others are important ones that deserve further consideration.”

• Material from Associated Press was used in this report.

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Which television network do most Americans flip to when seeking unbiased reporting? Well, the answer is not clear.

According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic-leaning polling firm based in Raleigh, N.C., more Americans (35 percent) say they trust Fox News than any other television news network. This puts Fox ahead of all other networks including PBS (14 percent),ABC (11 percent), CNN (10 percent), CBS (9 percent), Comedy Central and MSNBC (6 percent each), and NBC (3 percent).

However, when assessing the “least trusted” network, Fox News also came in at No. 1, with 33 percent agreeing. MSNBC was the second least trusted network (19 percent), followed by Comedy Central (14 percent), CNN (11 percent), ABC (5 percent), CBS (4 percent), and NBC and PBS, which received 2 percent each.

The reason, PPP experts say, is party affiliation. Republicans are much more aligned with Fox News than are Democrats. In fact, 69 percent of Republicans prefer the network, with no other network polling above 7 percent for GOP viewers. Democrats are united more in their dislike of Fox News. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats agree that Fox News is the least trusted network; Comedy Central came in a distant second at 18 percent.

“Republicans trust Fox News, but not much else, while Democrats trust everything except Fox News. Our country is just as polarized on TV news as it is on most hot button issues,” said PPP President Dean Debnam, in a statement.

A clearer snapshot of television news allegiance might be this one: When PPP asked respondents what they thought of networks individually, PBS received the highest approval for trustworthiness (57 percent). Democrats were most likely to say it is trustworthy (80 percent to 6 percent), while Republicans were more evenly divided at 38 percent each. 

In case you were wondering, if Americans were faced with a 2016 presidential choice between Fox New pundit Bill O’Reilly and Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert, they were relatively split: Mr. O’Reilly got the nod from 38 percent; Mr. Colbert, from 35 percent.

Don’t fret Colbert Nation. Thirty-eight percent polled said Colbert has better hair, compared with just 13 percent for O'Reilly.

PPP conducted the poll Jan. 23-26 among 845 registered voters. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.4 percent.

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Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas are both favorites of the tea party wing of the Republican Party. If both run for president in 2016, as seems likely at the moment, they’d vie for the same conservative voters as a base upon which to build a winning GOP primary coalition.

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The US Department of Homeland Security wants a new nationwide database of vehicle license plates to help it track illegal immigrants and fugitives from the law, a move that is raising privacy concerns among civil libertarians.

Perhaps anticipating those concerns, DHS is asking that a private company build and manage the database, to be called the National License Plate Recognition database, so that a federal government agency would not maintain such information itself. 

DHS last week released a request for proposal for companies to bid on the contract, according to a Washington Post report, and the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be the primary user, with a focus on "criminal" illegal immigrants. 

DHS envisions a database that would allow its enforcement officials to snap a photo of a license plate with their smart phones or other devices, send the image to a server that would cross-reference the license plate number with those in the database, and receive notifications indicating a positive match.

Civil liberties advocates caution that indiscriminate tracking of individuals violates the privacy of citizens who have done nothing wrong.

“Where people travel can reveal a great deal about them – where they go to the doctor, who all of their friends are, every deviation from their daily routine,” Catherine Crump, a staff attorney in New York for the ACLU, said in a 2013 report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union. “That is not the type of information that should be collected about each and every one of us when there is no reason to believe we are doing anything wrong.”

A spokeswoman for ICE said the information would be held by a third party and “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals,” according to the Post report.

DHS wants the company to be able to retain the information for at least one year, but it does not indicate if the company would have the discretion to keep the data for longer.

Tens of thousands of automatic license plate readers mounted on patrol cars, bridges, and overpasses already capture snapshots of passing vehicles' license plates, according to the ACLU report. These images are currently stored in local databases and sometimes connected to regional sharing systems.  

The number of large police departments using license plate readers has skyrocketed in recent years, according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal investigation. "It's one of the most rapidly diffusing technologies that I've ever seen," Cynthia Lum, a former police officer and the current deputy director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, told the Journal.

In 2012, police officers in Orlando, Fla., scanned 38,000 license plates, WFTV has reported. Only 557 of those plates were associated with a crime. In June of that same year, The Star Tribune reported that Minnesota police captured images of 805,000 license plates.

Not all states have welcomed such technology.

Revelations that the federal National Security Agency has been tracking phone call metadata and online activity have spurred at least 14 states to consider new laws that would restrict indiscriminate data collection, including of license plates, reports Fox News.

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Did a cozy relationship between Duke Energy, America’s largest electric utility, and politically-connected state regulators in North Carolina contribute to the massive coal ash spill into the Dan River near the Virginia border earlier this month?

Judging by a series of federal subpoenas and affidavits, that’s an emerging line of questioning as US attorneys and the Environmental Protection Agency take a tough look at the regulatory environment in the Tar Heel State, and whether regulators went easy on Duke Energy with regards to its inventory of aging and seeping coal ash lagoons that now “threaten the long-term health of the Dan River” and other waterways, according to lawsuits now filed by the state.

Court documents refer to a “suspected felony” in the case.

“It’s an unusual case: federal authorities scrutinizing not only a company that polluted but also state regulators,” writes reporter Craig Jarvis, in the Raleigh News & Observer.

The federal investigation comes amid heightened awareness of major inland spills. A toxic mix of chemicals bled into West Virginia’s Elk River in early January, causing officials to warn residents against even washing their hands in tap water.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service says streams have become more, not less, pristine, over the last decade, but recent spills and questions about regulatory priorities have raised awareness that such water quality gains can be easily lost.

The North Carolina Department of Energy and Natural Resources, which regulates power plants in the state, have said they’ve done nothing wrong, and that they are actively pursuing fixes and fines from Duke.

The company meanwhile says it’s cooperating fully with the federal probe. “We feel like we’ve been forthright and prompt and transparent on this, and have done everything we could to accelerate the recovery process,” Duke spokesman Tom Williams told North Carolina newspapers last week.

But environmental groups say they’ve had to push the energy and resources agency numerous times to take action against Duke Power’s 14 coal ash holdings, some of which are now seeping into state waterways.

Just last week, the company was forced to cap another leaking pipe that spilled more coal ash into the Dan River. In at least three cases, state regulators didn’t take action against Duke until environmental groups threatened to sue.

Environmental regulations have long been seen as more lax in Southern states, where business advocacy sometimes leads to laissez-faire views on environmental costs of doing business, often when profit expectations squeeze expensive environmental protection or remediation requirements.

In that light, the federal probe into whether the company and regulators acted responsibly now “raises the stakes considerably,” Amy Adams of the conservation group Appalachian Voices told the Charlotte Observer.

Also notable is that the investigation is being led by US Attorney Thomas Walker, who has made a priority of prosecuting criminal cases of environmental pollution. Court documents do not make it clear whether Walker was investigating the relationship between Duke and state regulators before the spill.

Environmental groups allege Duke Power, founded by one of the state’s most powerful families, has long been given broad discretion by state regulators, even when there’s evidence of problems.

Piquing the federal interest is that the current chief of the state regulatory agency was appointed by Gov. Pat McCrory, who worked for Duke for 28 years.

Specifically, according to court records, federal prosecutors want detailed inspection records for the coal ash sites, as well as copies of all enforcement actions against those sites. More critically, investigators are trying to understand the connections between Duke Power officials and dozens of state regulators, and whether any graft ever took place.

This week, Gov. McCrory, a Republican and former mayor of the Southern banking center of Charlotte, briefly raised hopes among environmental groups when he told an audience that Duke should be forced to move the coal ash storage sites out of harm’s way, which is what environmental groups ultimately want.

Later in the day Mr. McCrory’s office said the governor meant that moving the sites – an extremely expensive proposition – was merely “one option” for Duke.

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Joe Biden says his experience as a senator and vice president “uniquely positions” him to run for president if he so desires.

In an appearance Tuesday on ABC’s “The View,” Mr. Biden pointed in particular to his experience in foreign policy and his engagement with world leaders as his value-added qualities. President Obama has loaded him with foreign assignments, Biden said, such as figuring out how to get the United States out of Iraq. Plus, before Mr. Obama tapped him as veep, Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so he’s got lots of experience in this area.

Of course, potential 2016 rival Hillary Rodham Clintonwas secretary of State, a job that consists of running US affairs around the world. Fortunately, none of the women on “The View” pointed this out. It might have been awkward.

RECOMMENDED: Beyond Hillary Clinton: Eight Democrats who might run if she doesn’t

In the context of unique experience, Biden also pointed to his belief that the middle class “is the single focus ... we should be looking at” in domestic affairs.

Again, that’s different from you-know-who in what way, Joe? Last we heard, Mrs. Clinton was not pushing for lower taxes on the rich.

OK, we’re being a bit snarky here. Talking about possibly running for president in a manner that leaves open the possibility of not running, without losing credibility or sounding strained, isn’t easy. Biden’s decent at it. He’s been all over talk shows this week, and he seems to have a good time swatting at the inevitable queries about 2016.

For instance on “The View,” Biden proffered a small gift to retiring panelist Barbara Walters and promised that if she sticks around, he’ll reveal his future plans on her show. Then again, he said kind of the same thing during a Monday night appearance on Seth Meyer’s new “Late Night” gig.

Biden joked that he’d planned to make a “major announcement” in front of Mr. Meyers but that he’d decided against it because he didn’t want to steal the spotlight on Meyers’s big night.

“So I hope you’ll invite me back,” Biden teased Meyers.

Biden looked like he was having a pretty good time on both shows. And he said something pretty revealing about the nature of his current job. After Jenny McCarthy told him that her son had said the job of a VP was “to attend a lot of funerals,” Biden laughed.

Then he said, “A vice president has no inherent power. It’s all reflective power. It all depends on the relationship with the president of the United States.”

That’s true. And Biden seems to have maintained a fairly good relationship with Obama. The VP said they were ideologically compatible and personal friends.

Biden’s problem going forward is that “ideologically compatible with Obama” is not exactly a campaign slogan. Vice presidents who run for president face a tricky balance: They have to establish a separate identity without trashing their former boss.

Some – such as Al Gore – don’t seem to manage it.

The fact is that it’s rare for vice presidents to run for and win the presidency on their own. Fourteen former VPs have become president, but of those, nine assumed the office upon the death or resignation of the Oval Office occupant.

In the modern era, only George H.W. Bush has won election to immediately replace the man under whom he served. (Ronald Reagan, in Mr. Bush’s case.) The last veep to pull that off prior to Bush was Martin Van Buren, in 1836.

And here’s a bit of VP trivia: One vice president defeated the sitting president with whom he served to claim the nation’s top political job. Who was this ingrate?

It was Thomas Jefferson, who beat John Adams in the election of 1800. Back then, nobody expected VPs to be the president’s chief assistant. The vice president was the person who came in second in the presidential election.

Jefferson and Adams were of different parties, and as VP, Jefferson basically spent much of his time preparing for his presidential run and writing a guidebook on legislative procedure, according to the Senate Historical Office.

By the way, on the substance of running for president, Biden this week continued to say what he's been saying for months. He might run, he might not, and what Mrs. Clinton does won't factor in that decision. He'll decide in coming months.

RECOMMENDED: Beyond Hillary Clinton: Eight Democrats who might run if she doesn’t

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It’s not true that Sarah Palin once said “I can see Russia from my house.” That was comedian and Palin impersonator Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live.”

But back in 2008 when she was the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, trying to establish her credentials on things like foreign policy, the ex-Governor of Alaska did say of Russia, “They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Which is literally true – on a clear day if you stand on your tippy-toes and gaze from the Alaskan island of Little Diomede across the International Date Line to the unpopulated Russian island of Big Diomede two and one half miles away.

This running joke about Ms. Palin – who went on to become a Fox News commentator, star of her own brief reality show, and well-paid Obama scold on behalf of the tea party – came to mind when she went on Facebook to comment on the crisis in Ukraine:

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” she wrote. “I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine. Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008: ‘After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.’”

Then she went on Fox News to elaborate.

"Back in 2008, I accurately predicted the possibility of Putin feeling emboldened to invade Ukraine because I could see what kind of leader Barack Obama would be,” she said. “The bullies of the world are always emboldened by indecision and moral equivalence. We can expect more of this sort of thing in a world where America is gutting its military and 'leading from behind.'"

As usual, Palin is nothing if not controversial, and she delights in tweaking the “lamestream media.”

Earlier in the week, Palin won Newshound’s “most outrageous quote” reader poll for another Facebook post: “If he is good enough for Ted Nugent, he is good enough for me!” (Newshound’s motto is “We watch Fox so you don’t have to.”)

Ted Nugent, of course, is the geezer rocker who called President Obama a “communist-educated, communist-nurtured, subhuman mongrel.” Palin’s reference was in support of Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for Texas governor now serving as the state’s Attorney General, who has welcomed Nugent’s endorsement – or at least refused to say anything critical about “The Nuge’s” political pronouncements.

Meanwhile, fellow tea partiers have been chuckling over Palin’s Ukraine moment.

“Palin not only knows where Russia is, but she knew what Putin would do to Ukraine with Obama as president,” radio talk show host Mark Levin tweeted.

“In light of recent events in Ukraine … nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now,” wrote Tony Lee at Breitbart.com.

Others note that Mitt Romney was accused of reviving the Cold War when, as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate debating Obama, he stated that Russia is "without question our number one geopolitical foe."

At the moment, Palin’s Facebook post on Ukraine has 66,684 “likes” and 15,442 “shares.”

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"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe it," the renowned science educator and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once told Bill Maher.

This Sunday, Dr. Tyson will take to Fox TV to make the wonders of the physical universe all the more believable, with a reboot of Carl Sagan's beloved 1980 PBS series, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage."  After a 34-year interval packed with scientific discoveries –  planets outside our solar system, full genome sequencing, the refinement of the Standard Model of particle physics – the sequel, called "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" will again explore "the saga of how we discovered the laws of nature and found our coordinates in space and time," according to a press release.

"The new 'Cosmos' is about opening the door to the widest possible audience, to entertain them, to uplift them, to make them feel the great, the awesome power of the scientific perspective," Dr. Sagan's widow Ann Druyan, a writer, producer, and director for the new show, told Mother Nature News. "When Carl Sagan was alive, we weren't trying to preach to the converted. We wanted to evoke in people, who might have even had hostility to science, a sense of wonder."

The new series arrives just weeks after Bill Nye, the TV science educator, made a highly publicized trip to Kentucky's Creation Museum to debate its founder, Ken Ham, on whether or not the theory of creation is a viable model for explaining human origins.

But Tyson, who gleefully uses Twitter to debunk sins against astronomy as they crop up in Hollywood films (the Oscar-sweeping 'Gravity' included!), has redirected many an interviewer's efforts to engage him in polarizing debates about religion. 

"As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others," he said in a recent interview with Huffington Post. "In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves. I don't just tell them no. That's pontifical."

That is not to say the show will avoid the intersections of science with politics. "We tell the stories of scientists in different cultures and different eras whose life work was fought against by the culture or the governments that controlled their lives or by social mores that interfered with their exploration of the truth," he told HuffPost.

"Some gave their lives for having found truth and in that world you learn that there are science martyrs. They're people who cared more about the truth than their own relationship to their homeland."

Tonight at 8pm, FOX will host a live interactive Q&A session with Tyson, Druyan, and co-producerSeth McFarlane, which will be screened for free at theaters across the country.

All 13 of the original episodes, which for ten years remained the most widely watched series in PBS history, will be rebroadcast this weekend. The National Geographic Channel will run a marathon from 12pm to 6pm on Saturday, March 8, and from 12pm to 7pm Sunday. That will leave devotees enough time to tuck in dinner before the new show airs at 9pm.

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A House Oversight Committee hearing on whether the Internal Revenue Service unfairly targeted conservative political groups for scrutiny degenerated into near-chaos Wednesday as a key witness refused to testify and the Republican panel chairman cut off the microphone of the ranking Democrat as he attempted to speak.

Shouting ensued, some of it electronically amplified, some not. Eventually committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California left the room and held a press conference just outside, drawing the crowd with him.

“Mr. Chairman, what are you hiding?” said the visibly agitated Rep. Elijah Cummings (D) of Maryland as Rep. Issa walked away.

Wow, why the anger? Yes, Congress is polarized, but most committee hearings don’t end this way. Lawmakers generally disagree without the whiff of actual fisticuffs hanging in the air. What happened?

Long story short, the IRS investigation is a highly fraught subject. And Wednesday’s hearing frustrated both sides for different reasons.

It began with former IRS official Lois Lerner invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and refusing to answer committee questions. Ms. Lerner is the former head of the unit of the IRS that investigated applications for tax exempt status for political groups, and thus a key figure in the investigation.

She took the Fifth at a May hearing as well, but she also delivered a statement defending herself before refusing to answer questions. GOP committee members think it’s an open question as to whether this statement constituted a waiver of her Fifth Amendment rights, and there was some talk in congressional halls that she’d testify at Wednesday's hearing. But she didn’t, and now the Republican House leadership may up the pressure.

Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday he would wait for a report on the issue but that “she has to testify or she should be held in contempt” of Congress. That could lead to a court ordering her to speak.

Republican members of the committee were particularly frustrated because they think they’ve got some documentary evidence that establishes a motive for Lerner’s office to unfairly target conservative groups applying for tax exempt status under section 501 (c) 4 of the tax code.

Investigators have obtained IRS e-mails that show Lerner was very concerned about the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling on political spending, according to a report in Politico.

Republicans think Lerner may have wanted to limit the political activity of conservative groups to level the political field. Lerner’s lawyer has called that assertion “fiction,” and the text of the e-mails made public so far don’t seem to indicate any party bias on Lerner’s part.

“My object is not to look for political activity – more to see whether self-declared c4s are really acting like c4s,” she wrote at one point, according to the Politico story.

Without Lerner’s testimony that may be as far as the trail leads, said Issa after the contentious hearing.

“At this point, roads lead to Ms. Lerner,” he said. “It may dead-end at Ms. Lerner” if she does not talk at some point.

This apparent dead end has led some conservatives to wonder why the committee does not just do what Lerner’s lawyer wants, and give his client immunity from prosecution in return for her testimony.

“Maybe Issa and the GOP are worried that conservatives will be angry with them if they let Lerner walk. That’s a small price to pay, though, if she has incriminating info on others up the chain,” writes right-leaning Allahpundit at the Hot Air site.

Democrats, for their part, say Issa has spent years on open-ended investigations of alleged Obama administration wrongdoing and has little to show for it. They’re frustrated by what they say is the autocratic way he conducts committee business. That’s what finally appeared to put Representative Cummings, a liberal whose district includes half of Baltimore, over the edge.

It started just after Lerner declined to speak. Issa, who appeared frustrated, tried to adjourn the hearing. He stood up as if to depart.

Cummings said he had a procedural question. “Mr. Chairman, you cannot run a committee like this. You cannot do this. We’re better than that as a country. We’re better than that as a committee.

At that point Issa leaned over and switched off Cummings’ mike.

“If you will sit down and allow me to [ask] the question, I am a member of the Congress of the United States of America, I am tired of this,” an unplugged Cummings bellowed into the room.

Afterward, Cummings said that as far as he is concerned, Lerner has not waived her Fifth Amendment rights. Nor has the investigation shown any political motivation by IRS agents, or any links to anyone in higher office, including the White House, said the Democratic lawmaker.

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein is not to be trifled with. As the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, the senior senator from California has staunchly defended America’s intelligence community even as the world has railed against its mass surveillance of phone records. So when she takes to the Senate floor to say that the CIA “may well have violated” the Constitution in interfering with her committee’s investigation of the agency, that’s a serious allegation.

It may also signal more muscular senatorial oversight of America’s spymasters, a function that has weakened over the decades since the 1975 Church Committee – led by the late Sen. Frank Church of Idaho – investigated the country’s intelligence agencies in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War.

“After several decades of erosion of legislative oversight power and authority, a powerful committee chair is saying ‘That’s enough,’ ” says Richard Baker, co-author of the new book, “The American Senate: An Insider’s History.” The oversight of US intelligence agencies is a crucial congressional function, and this faceoff is “extremely weighty,” says the Senate historian emeritus.

Senator Feinstein, he says, “enjoys a huge amount of respect and is very thoughtful…. If somebody’s going to draw the line, she’s the one to do it.”

She certainly did that on Tuesday. In an unusual and detailed speech, she parted the curtains on a committee investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program begun in 2002 – under President George W. Bush – and which is now defunct.

During the course of the committee’s investigation, which was conducted on separate computers for Senate staff at a secure location in northern Virginia, the CIA multiple times denied committee staff access to documents that the agency had previously provided, according to Feinstein. It also conducted a search of committee computers at the facility, she says. The matter has since been referred to the Justice Department for investigation.

Feinstein spoke out Tuesday to “set the record straight” in the face of various articles in the media about the investigation. She said, for instance, that her staff’s removal of printouts of a CIA internal review of the program, called “the Panetta review,” was perfectly legal and done according to security protocol. Although she acknowledged that taking a copy of the review violated an agreement with the CIA not to remove anything without prior clearance.

The agency’s interference with the committee’s work “may well have violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution,” she said, and she accused the CIA of “intimidating” staff. CIA Director John Brennan on Tuesday denied the agency was trying to stop the committee’s work or that it had hacked into the committee’s computers.

Senate expert Baker points to decades of mistrust between the CIA and Senate oversight. “The CIA and the Senate investigating committees have had a rather rocky relationship ever since the days of the Church Committee in 1975,” he explained.

Perhaps with the exception of the Iran-Contra investigation during the Reagan presidency, the Senate has shied away from the massive investigations that characterized the Church era, according to Baker. They were too time consuming, required large staffs, and took place in highly partisan conditions.

Instead, senators have turned to outside commissions, such as the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that looked at how the US failed to connect the dots that led to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

It’s not clear how this complaint will turn out, but it would help strengthen Feinstein’s case if she had bipartisan backing. Senators in her own party are standing behind her. Two of the Senate’s Republican hawks, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also spoke out.

"If true, this is Richard Nixon stuff," Senator Graham said, suggesting those responsible should be fired, according to the Los Angeles Times. Senator McCain said there may be a need for an independent investigation. If Feinstein’s allegation’s stand up, there must be “repercussions,” he said.

But several other Republicans were reserving judgment, including the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Intelligence, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. “There’s disagreement as to what the actual facts are,” he said, even as CIA Director Brennan urged senators to “take their time to make sure that they don’t overstate what they claim.”

In closing, Feinstein called this a “defining moment” for the committee’s oversight role. “How this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”

That’s a strong statement from the California senator, who, according to McCain, he wouldn’t try to “second guess.”

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The same high-profile assets that make California an engine for America’s creativity and economy – think Silicon Valley and Hollywood – have made it a magnet for international criminal enterprises. If that sounds like a cover story for “Duh Magazine,” the first comprehensive report about it was released here Thursday, and it backs up the assertions with data and investigative evidence – and recommends what to do next.

“California is a global leader on a number of fronts and, unfortunately, transnational criminal activity is one of them,” says a report by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, calling the state the top target in theUnited States for fraudulent and lawless organizations originating everywhere from China to Africa to Eastern Europe.

Specifically, California leads all US states in the number of victims of Internet crimes, the number of computer systems hacked or attacked by malware, the amount of financial losses suffered by all of the above, and the number of victims of identity fraud, according to the 181-page report, entitled “Gangs Beyond Borders.”

The report describes operations as running “the gamut from traditional crimes – such as narcotics, weapons or human trafficking – to complex money laundering schemes and specialized cybercrimes.”

The amount of illicit money moving through California’s economy – approximately the world’s eighth largest – “threatens the security of the state’s financial institutions, local businesses, and communities, with an estimated $30 to $40 billion in illicit funds laundered through California commerce every year,” it says.

From 2009 to 2012, the number of intentional breaches of computer networks and databases in the US jumped by 280 percent, and California – whose gross domestic product is currently $2 trillion – leads the nation, it says.

"It is no surprise that California is in the sights of transnational criminal organizations which commit large-scale crimes involving the theft of Intellectual Property,” says Prof. James Cooper, director of the International Legal Studies Program at California Western School of Law in San Diego. “Much of the state's economy is based on IP rights and the revenue streams that innovation brings,” he writes in an e-mail.

Some cybercrime experts say the report only states the obvious.

“It’s not really news that this is going on. The question is, what are they going to do about it?” says Peter Toren, author of “Intellectual Property and Computer Crimes” and a former federal investigator of cybercrimes. The state, he says, should concentrate on educating in-state corporations how to avoid cybercrimes rather than trying to go after organizations in foreign lands. “The federal government should be doing that,” he says.

The report calls for the Legislature to change state law so that prosecutors can freeze the assets of transnational criminal organizations and associated gangs before seeking an indictment.

Some question that recommendation.

“Seeking pre-indictment seizure of assets – I get it, but it could be subject to abuse and I don’t like it. And indictments are prepared under seal so contemporaneous seizure would accomplish the same,” says Ian Wallach, an intellectual property attorney.

The report also says the state should mimic federal law by increasing punishment for people convicted of supervising, managing, or financing transnational criminal organizations.

Attorney General Harris “is apparently seeking harsher prison sentences for supervising or managing transactional offenders than those currently in place,” Mr. Wallach says. “I don’t think prolonged incarceration ever works as a deterrent, and it is terribly expensive. Our prisons are already unconstitutionally overcrowded – largely as a result of unnecessarily long sentences.”

But Professor Cooper sees drawbacks to how punishment is currently meted out. "The reason that transnational criminal organizations engage in these illicit industries [involving intellectual property] is that the profit margins are so high and the fines (or ... prison time) are so low,” he writes. “Why transport cocaine or meth when you can just copy a Hollywood DVD and make big bucks selling it on street corners around California's cities?"

Some question Harris’s motivations in releasing the report.

“I think she is coming out with this simply as a way to draw attention to excite the public about the issue to get more funds to battle the problem,” says Rob D’Ovidio, assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he teaches for the criminal justice program.

If so, that’s not a bad idea, others say.

“More power to her,” says Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy. “This is an issue that sorely needs our attention. Many people are asleep about this.”

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Sergei Nakonechniy was sitting in a cafe in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk when a middle-aged woman rose from a nearby table and stormed toward him. She pointed to his camouflage jacket, which bore the insignia of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – a controversial World War II anti-Soviet movement.

“Your fascist badges and uniforms are provoking the whole conflict in this country,” she shouted at the pro-Ukraine activist and journalism student. 

“All of our problems are because of you and your fascist friends from western Ukraine. You should be ashamed!”

With Crimea effectively part of Russia, if perhaps not legally, Mr. Nakonechniy and other residents of Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern regions are now the new focus in the battle for the future of this country of about 46 million. But Donetsk and the industrialized region around it, known as the Donbass, are less likely to follow Crimea’s example due to an array of constraining factors – not least among them a generational divide between youths like Nakonechniy and their parents who still harbor an affinity for Russia.

A former Soviet industry hub

Unlike Crimea, the Donbass has a stable economic base from its industrial output and coal resources – an inheritance from its Soviet past.

Older generations in the Donbass nostalgically remember the Soviet Union, when the coal miners, steel workers, and laborers in the region’s heavy industries were heralded as heroes building a utopian, communist future. They were rewarded with vacations on the Black Sea resorts and received special food packages with high-quality delicacies not available in state-owned grocery stores.

For many in Donetsk, the anti government protests in Kiev and across western Ukraine seemed to be a dismissal of the respect they deserved in building the Soviet state. So when Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his March 18 speech, which announced his decision to annex Crimea, that USSR dissolution was one of the century’s biggest tragedies, people in Donetsk felt he was acknowledging them.

Nakonechniy’s father shares those sentiments. A construction worker, he lives and works inMoscow, and stopped speaking to his son three months ago – after the shock of learning that he had participated in the antigovernment protests on Kiev’s Maidan square. 

In Donetsk, Euromaidan activists have tried to stage rallies to support Ukrainian unity. At their height, the numbers have reached into the hundreds – a scenario that would have been impossible in pre-referendum Crimea, where opponents to joining Russia had all but been forced underground.

People of all ages attended the rallies in Donetsk, according to Katya Zhemchuzhnykova, a young local pro-EU activist. But there is a large portion of the pro-Europe supporters who are young, like Nakonechniy, and “identify themselves as Ukrainian and as being born in independent Ukraine,” Ms. Zhemchuzhnykova said.

“They might speak Russian, but they see themselves as Ukrainians,” she said.

Moscow’s gravitational pull

Many people here feel similarly bound to Moscow, if not by citizenship then by a deep historic bond. Pro-Russia demonstrators greatly outnumbered a pro-Ukraine group on March 13, when a violent clash in the city center left one person dead and scores injured. Today, people with Russian flags guard the statue of Lenin in the city’s central square.

“For us, watching the destruction of Lenin statues around Ukraine was heartbreaking,” said Lyudmila Kanchanovskaya, a local teacher. “We have a lot to be grateful for what he did for us. He gave hundreds of millions of Russians an education…. We may not be the Soviet Union anymore, but we shouldn’t forget his role in our history and just remove him.”

But at the same time, support for a full-out split with Kiev is much more measured here, even among the pro-Russian activists.

“As I see it, there are now two options for Ukraine: become a federation or completely disappear as a country,” says Sergei Buntovskiy, an activist from Russian Bloc, a pro-Moscow political party. “But dividing the country? No one wants this, the older generations or the younger ones. If a referendum were held today, I think only 30 percent of the population would agree to it.”

Russian troops would also not be as widely supported here as they were in Crimea, Mr. Buntovskiy said. “I think more than half of the population would be very scared by troops arriving in Donbass.”

“Crimea has a stronger history of the nationalist question than we do here,” said Ms. Zhemchuzhnykova, the pro-EU activist. “We are more mixed here because so many different Soviet people came here to work. That may save us from Russia trying to use ethnicity as a tool in this game.”

The language flash point

If Kiev grants rights and guarantees to eastern Ukraine, many residents say, a future under the Ukrainian flag is possible.

Those who are in favor of closer ties with Russia reject what they say are nationalist tones from the new government in Kiev. They want equal rights for Russian speakers, spelled out in laws that would allow commercials, signs, and most importantly educational institutions, to use Russian.

“Right now, students have to write dissertations in Ukrainian,” said Buntovskiy, who is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Donetsk National University. “If I write a research paper in Ukrainian, my potential audience is about 30 million. If I write it in Russian, that number grows about 5 times.”

Language issues are a driving force in the debate for Ukraine’s future, and the new Kiev government has played a part in fueling the tension. Shortly after being sworn into office, the parliament passed a law that essentially barred equal status for the Russian language in regions like Donetsk.

The interim Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov, vetoed the law in an attempt to deescalate the situation.

The interim government in Kiev this week signaled that it was examining legislation to allow for more regional autonomy, which could allow individual districts to decide for themselves about language and other local issues. For many younger eastern Ukrainians like Buntovskiy, these sort of changes are the only way to remain part of Ukraine. But Kiev must “cease trying to make Ukraine a nationalist dictatorship,” he said. 

Many in the older generations here, who remember what communist life was like, feel ready to join Russia because they think they will have a better, more stable life, Buntovskiy said. For them, it’s not a matter of feeling more Russian or more Ukrainian. Often, they simply say that they feel more Soviet, and that is largely what has driven the divide between the generations. 

“We are Soviet people here, and we shouldn’t be shamed for that,” Kanchanovskaya said. “In the west, they have their heroes, who fought against our grandfathers [in World War II]. “But they aren’t heroes to us. We have our Soviet heroes, and we are proud of them.”

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Moscow appears to be shrugging off Western leaders' resolve to reduce the Group of Eight leading countries by one, suspending Russia from the prestigious club over its annexation of Crimea and continuing threats against Ukraine.

"We're not attached to this format, and we see no big misfortune if [the G-8] doesn't meet," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday.

"Let it be an experiment for a year or two, to see how we live without it."

For now, President Vladimir Putin probably doesn't need to worry about losing face with his own people over the expulsion. Polls show that his job approval rating has soared by more than 10 points in recent weeks to a three-year high of 76 percent, due in part to the successful Sochi Winter Games but mostly to his forceful handling – from the point of view of average Russians – of the Ukraine crisis.

But once upon a time the Kremlin lobbied hard to gain admittance to the world's most prestigious group. Membership was taken as a sign of Russia's return from post-Soviet oblivion when then-President Boris Yeltsin was invited in 1998 to join Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US at the table as a full participant.

Russia was handed the group's rotating presidency at the beginning of this year, and its annual summit was supposed to have taken place in Sochi. All that is off now, and the trimmed-down G-7 will gather in Brussels instead.

Perhaps prophetically, Vladimir Putin's address upon assuming the role stressed that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable place.

"However, crisis response tools are not always effective," he said.

Some experts say that Russia has been seen as an outlier in the group since it joined. In recent years, it has been increasingly at odds with its Western partners on most key foreign policy issues of the day, including Syria, Iran, and now Ukraine.

At last year's summit in Northern Ireland, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the sense of division explicit, saying "I don't think we should fool ourselves, this is G-7 plus one."

The break has been in the making for a long time, says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal.

"It became clear over time that Russia had a different stance, and instead of becoming a forum for dialogue, the G-8 was mainly theater" that projected a false impression of unity, Mr. Lukyanov says.

"There are other places now, such as the G-20, and Russia's role as the only non-Western power in the conversation is no longer so important. So, bottom line, we don't really care" about losing the G-8 seat, he adds.

Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the upper house of parliament's international affairs committee, says it's a pity Russia is being kicked out at a time when the need for dialog seems greater than ever.

"These seven countries have decided instead to make a demonstration of punishing Russia, like a small child who's been disobedient. It looks pretty strange to behave that way when the world's problems are more acute than ever," Mr. Klimov says. "But they wanted a scapegoat, and Russia is it."

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