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"Electricity is the most likely out of all of the alternative fuels ... to be the next fuel for the consumer."

That's what Jonathan Strickland of the website How Stuff Works tells NPR's Jacki Lyden.

But electric vehicles are not without their controversies or challenges. One of the biggest questions is how a transition from gasoline to electric fuel can actually take place.

Estonia is making that leap. The country now has a nationwide charging network for electric cars, making the claim that it's the first country to do so.

The head of Estonia's program, Jarmo Tuisk, said in an interview with Reuters:

"We have proved that there is a real possibility to set up a network in a country, and there are no technical barriers."

So how many Estonians are actually taking part? Here's what Reuters reports:

"Estonia, with a population of about 1.2 million, has 619 all-electric cars, of which 500 are used by public authorities, and about 100 by private people and companies.

"That amounts to one electric vehicle for every 1,000 cars, second only to Norway, which has four per 1,000. The Netherlands is third at 0.6 per 1,000."

One of the most important events in the national gun violence debate will take place Tuesday — in the snows of Chicago, a thousand miles from Newtown, Conn., or Washington, D.C.

That's where Democratic voters will choose their nominee to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. Because the district is so heavily Democratic, the winner will almost certainly be sworn in at the Capitol following the April general election.

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It's not as elegant as some languages, but neither is it as impenetrable as, say, an economics textbook or the iTunes user agreement.

"We have our own language on Capitol Hill," says Don Ritchie, head of the Senate Historical Office.

That language — the budget terms and political euphemisms that fly freely through the air in Washington, D.C. — often ends up seeping into the nation's discourse.

Reporters and bloggers pick up and spread terms such as "sequester" and "debt ceiling limit." The next thing you know, you just might find yourself using such jargon as you talk with friends about what a mess the country is in. But most people understandably might not be able to tell a COLA from a COBRA. It's primarily Beltway insiders who speak fluent acronym.

"Politics, like any other field, has its own language, its own jargon," says Martin Medhurst, a professor of political science and rhetoric at Baylor University. "It would be an odd field that didn't."

Beltway Berlitz

Match these terms to their correct Washington meaning:

Conference
A) A meeting you hope to sneak out of to play golf.
B) The way the House and Senate align different versions of legislation.

Impoundment
A) What happens to your car after it gets towed.
B) A power presidents had not to spend funds approved by Congress, up until 1974.

Message
A) Something that pops up on your phone.
B) Any thought or idea expressed briefly in a plain or secret language and prepared in a form suitable for transmission by any means of communication.

Oversight
A) Something that has been overlooked.
B) Increased attention to an issue, say, the Benghazi killings.

Reconciliation
A) The course your marriage counselor hopes you'll take.
B) A procedure for matching new budget policies with existing law.

Answers: (B) in every case. The definition for "message" is official Defense Department language. "Oversight" is a trick question, because (B) is correct on Capitol Hill while (A) is correct everywhere else.

— Alan Greenblatt

In the back and forth between Congress and the White House over immigration, both sides seem to agree that people now in the U.S. illegally should wait at "the back of the line" for legal residency — meaning no green card until all other immigrants get theirs.

But that presents a problem, because the wait for a green card can take decades.

Maria has been waiting in line with her husband for 16 years and counting for what the government calls a priority date for legal residency. Because she is in the U.S. without documents, Maria asked NPR to use only her first name.

Her story, though, is typical: Maria's mother-in-law is a U.S. citizen. So Maria's husband, who was born in Mexico, is eligible for a green card. While he's waiting, he is in the U.S. illegally, running a small construction business and, Maria says, paying taxes. When her husband gets his green card, Maria can apply for one.

But their lawyer, Mo Goldman, says it will be a while longer before applicants from 1997 are eligible.

"The date that they're currently processing right now is back to 1993 — and it doesn't move," he says.

In other words, grown Mexican-born sons and daughters of U.S. citizens are at the front of the line for permanent legal residency after applying two decades ago. Different family categories have different "lines" — spouses wait less time than siblings. Different job categories also have different lines — college graduates wait less time than lower-skilled workers.

"So it turns out there are many lines," says Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is writing a book on the immigration system. "There's something certainly questionable in the logic of a system that, on the one hand, says you qualify, but ... you have to wait 20 years."

Lawyer Goldman says this isn't the way it was a century ago when immigrants came through Ellis Island.

"It's apples and oranges," he says. "There's no way of comparing that because we didn't have this quota system. People got off a boat, you know, they were processed through, they got their medical examination, and ... they became permanent residents."

That is, if you were from Europe. If not, it was tough to immigrate even back then.

So in the 1960s, Congress tried to make things more fair by granting an equal number of green cards for each country. That means there are country quotas now, on top of all those family and employment categories. But some countries are larger than others — or, as Motomura says, they have more people who want to immigrate because of geography or political and economic ties.

"Right now, those countries are China, India, Mexico and the Philippines," he says. "So if you're from those countries, you have to wait longer."

The total estimated backlog for legal immigration is 4 million people. And Motomura thinks that long wait may have fueled illegal immigration.

That's what Stuart Anderson thinks, too. He was an immigration official during the George W. Bush administration and is now with the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, a Virginia think tank.

Anderson says people who need jobs or want to join their family won't endure a two-decade wait.

"The combination of that with increased border enforcement has led people to come in illegally and then end up staying once they got into the country because it's become more difficult to cross in the first place," Anderson says.

That brings us back to Maria and her husband from Mexico. They crossed and stayed in Tucson, Ariz., illegally at the same time his mother applied for him to live in the U.S. legally. And here's the kicker: Goldman, their lawyer, says if they do leave the United States and get caught coming back, the law automatically adds another 10 years to their wait.

"I stay here," Maria says. "I never come back to Mexico," even after deaths in her family.

Maria and her husband are not about to lose their place in line, even if they don't know how long the line is.

It's why almost everyone pushing an immigration overhaul says any new law has to ease the current backlog of legal green card applicants before putting the estimated 11 million undocumented in line behind them.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments next week in a case that tests the constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law considered the most effective civil rights statute in American history. At issue is whether a key provision of the statute has outlived its usefulness.

A staggering 49 friend of the court briefs have been filed, among them briefs from 11 states urging the court to either strike down or uphold the law. What is intriguing is that some of the states now arguing against the law were not troubled by its provisions just four years ago, the last time it was before the court.

In 2009, a small Texas utility district challenged the so-called preclearance section of the law, which requires nine states, most of them in the South, and parts of other states like California and New York, to get advance approval from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before changing any voting laws or regulations.

When the case got to the U.S. Supreme Court, only one state — Georgia — came out clearly against the law, claiming that the provision was unconstitutional. Alabama filed a brief echoing part but not all of Georgia's arguments. Both emphasized that their respective states have changed dramatically since 1965, and asked the court to seriously consider the legality of the preclearance section, given its burden on covered states.

The Supreme Court in 2009 dodged the preclearance question, but the issue is back this year in a challenge brought by Shelby County, Ala. And this time seven states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas — are asking the court to strike down the law.

Of the seven, Arizona has made the most noticeable switch between 2009 and 2013. In 2009, Arizona joined a brief supporting the law, along with North Carolina, California, Louisiana, Mississippi and New York.

Back then, Arizona and the other states said that the preclearance section of the law was "not onerous," and that indeed, preclearance had offered "some benefits," for example, protecting them from expensive litigation. The states supporting the law said that although some of them had expressed initial resistance to the preclearance process when the Voting Rights Act was originally adopted, "by 2006 the process for seeking preclearance had become painless and routine."

Today, however, Arizona is on the other side of the debate, saying something very different. The preclearance requirement, it now argues, is "arbitrary and burdensome," and unconstitutional.

Arizona's governor this time, as last, is Republican Jan Brewer. Though she was quite new to the job in 2009, she had previously held the job of Arizona secretary of state, the position that deals with elections.

Four other states — Alaska, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas — also seem to have changed their tune since 2009. Back then, Louisiana supported the law, while Alaska, South Carolina and Texas were silent on the issue, taking no position. This time, Louisiana is silent, while Alaska, South Carolina and Texas are urging the Supreme Court to strike down the preclearance provision.

Among the states that are fully covered by the preclearance requirement, Mississippi seems to be the only one that has consistently supported the law. The state signed on to briefs in 2009 and again this year urging the Supreme Court to uphold the law.

New York, California and North Carolina — states that are only partially covered by the preclearance mandate — also have remained true to the positions they took four years ago. Like Mississippi, they are supporting the constitutionality of the law, declaring that it is not unduly burdensome.

U.S. counterterrorism efforts include choking off the flow of cash to extremists, and urging friendly countries to help. But in Nairobi, Kenya, suspicion of Somali money — and an increase in terrorist attacks — has prompted a country-wide crackdown, with Kenyan police accused of extortion and arbitrary arrests of thousands of Somali refugees.

But how do you tell the difference between tainted money and honest cash?

Take Eastleigh, a neighborhood in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Depending on whom you're talking to, the Eastleigh market is either a tangle of back alleys where Islamist terrorists and pirates go to launder money, or it's one of the brightest spots of African capitalism, a dynamic 24-hour shopping center that's the only place for hundreds of miles where you can buy new jeans and sneakers at 2 in the morning.

Part of the reason Eastleigh attracts such investment, and such suspicion, is that Somalis make up the majority of people doing business there.

"When you come to Eastleigh, you feel that you are in Mogadishu or in other parts of Somalia, so you don't feel that you are an outsider," says Mohammed Shakul. "You feel at home."

Parallel Financial System

Shakul was born in Mogadishu, but he fled the war in his country in the 1990s and managed grocery stores in Nashville, Tenn. Seven years ago, he moved to Kenya and opened a hotel in Eastleigh aimed at other American Somalis and British and Canadian Somalis who like him want to come to the Kenyan capital and invest the money they've saved up in immigrant jobs as taxi drivers and shopkeepers and airline stewards.

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10:55 a.m. ET: Declaring that Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius "has made a case to be released on bail," a South African magistrate on Friday set the stage for Pistorius to be set free while he awaits trial on the charge that he murdered his girlfriend.

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair announced that news after spending nearly two hours discussing the case, South African law and the history of bail. During that long ruling from the bench, Nair said Pistorius had "failed to show this court that there's a weakness in the state's case" against him. But, Nair added, the state's case is not "so strong and watertight" that it's obvious Pistorius would decide he "needs to flee or evade his trial."

Nair said he does not consider the world famous athlete to be a flight risk, that the prosecution did not produce evidence that he has a "propensity to commit violence" and that there's no evidence Pistorius would try to "interfere with the state's witnesses."

After a short adjournment following the announcement, Nair ruled that the bail would be set at 1 million South African rand (about $112,000), of which Pistorius would have to put up 100,000 rand ($11,200) in cash. Pistorius was also ordered to hand over his passport, stay in South Africa and not enter any international airports.

Following the hearing, reports The Guardian, Pistorius "left the magistrate court in a truck ... chased by reporters on motorcycles." His next court date is June 4.

For much more, here's our original post and our earlier updates:

7:10 a.m. ET: We're due to learn this morning whether South African Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius will be granted bail as he awaits trial in Pretoria on a charge of premeditated murder in the Feb. 14 shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

As NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton tells our Newscast Desk, "the defense and prosecution have delivered their closing arguments" in a bail hearing that has lasted four days and at times felt like a trial. Pistorius, she notes, says he thought Steenkamp was an intruder and killed her by mistake at his home. The prosecution has offered evidence that it believes shows he knew what he was doing — including a neighbor's account of shouting coming from the house before shots were fired.

There's much more about the case in our previous posts.

The 26-year-old Pistorius, known as the "blade runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses, is the first double amputee to have participated in a Summer Olympics and is a Paralympics champion. Steenkamp, 29, was a model and aspiring reality TV star.

We'll be updating.

Update at 9:23 a.m. ET. Pistorius Has "Made A Case" To Be Released On Bail:

"I come to the conclusion that the accused has made a case to be released on bail," South African Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair just declared in a Pretoria courtroom. Then he adjourned the hearing for five minutes.

Update at 9:10 a.m. ET. Another Hint That Bail Will Be Granted?

"I cannot find that it has been established that the accused is a flight risk," says Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair.

Update at 9:07 a.m. ET. A Hint About The Decision?

The defense, says Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair, has "failed to show this court that there's a weakness in the state's case" that would compel him to grant bail. But, he adds, the state's case is not "so strong and watertight" that it's obvious Pistorius would decide he "needs to flee or evade his trial." That could be a sign that Nair is leaning toward granting bail. But, he still hasn't announced his decision.

Update at 9 a.m. ET. Magistrate Continues:

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair, who has been speaking for the better part of the last 90 minutes, continues to discuss the case, the law and the evidence both sides have presented. He hasn't yet, though, given his ruling on whether bail will be granted.

Update at 8:41 a.m. ET. Hearing Resumes:

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair has come back to the bench.

Update at 8:37 a.m. ET. Adjournment:

It's unclear why, but Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair just adjourned the hearing for what he indicated might be about five minutes. Moments before, he had said that prosecutors had presented enough "circumstantial evidence" to merit considering the charge of premeditated murder as he debates whether to grant bail.

Update at 8:30 a.m. ET. Decision Soon?

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair has been speaking for nearly an hour. He has recapped the evidence, discussed the history of bail and current South African law, and appears to be getting close to announcing his decision.

Update at 7:50 a.m. ET. Live Tweets:

Storyful is curating tweets from journalists covering the trial.

Update at 7:40 a.m. ET. Hearing Resumes; Listen In:

Desmond Nair, the chief magistrate who is presiding over the bail hearing, has come back to the bench. The Guardian is among those live blogging from the court and audio from the courtroom is being streamed here.

South Africa's News 24 says it could take an hour for Nair to deliver his decision. He's beginning with a discussion about whether there should be TV coverage of the trial.

This interview was originally broadcast on Jan. 15, 2013.

At the Golden Globes, Ben Affleck looked genuinely surprised and delighted twice toward the end of the evening: first when he won best director for Argo, and then again when the film won for best motion picture/drama.

The film, which Affleck produced and in which he also stars, is the mostly true story of the CIA operative who helmed the rescue of six U.S. diplomats who managed to escape at the outset of the 1979 Iran crisis that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days after militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran.

Affleck, a Middle Eastern studies major in college, was a child when the crisis happened and does not remember the news coverage.

“ It's that struggle between ... the bookkeeper's reality and ... the poet's reality, and you make judgments as a director. And my judgment falls really cleanly on the line of, 'It's OK to embellish, it's OK to compress, as long as you don't fundamentally change the nature of the story and what happened.'

CNBC is far and away the television ratings leader in the financial cable news business. Now, evidence arrives that its executives, producers and reporters are going to great lengths to maintain its status.

The channel has adopted a policy that prohibits guests from appearing on rival channels amid breaking news if they want to be seen by CNBC's larger audience.

The tension over the policy with one of its peers offers a window into the intensity of the cable battles over what's called booking — landing interviews with key financial players, commentators, insiders and analysts.

"Every network should be trying to hustle to get content that's distinctive to their channel," said Andrew Morse, president of Bloomberg Television's U.S. operations. "That's our job. We're in the news business."

But Morse said Bloomberg doesn't try to dictate who can appear elsewhere.

"We want to talk to the newsmaker," Morse said. "If there's news we also understand, though, that newsmakers need to get their information out. People aren't in the world of just consuming one source of news and information now."

Politico was first to report the policy last week. CNBC's top spokesman initially denied to Politico that any such explicit policy existed. But a guest interviewed on CNBC earlier this month shared with NPR a copy of an email from a CNBC producer.

It carried this warning in red:

"CNBC POLICY REMINDER: Per CNBC policy, we cannot use guests who have a same-day appearance on Fox Business or Bloomberg...By accepting a booking with CNBC, you acknowledge and accept the terms of this policy."

So much of broadcast news revolves around the booking — with the pressure on the booker to land the guest.

“ Bookers are a unique life form in the ecosystem of news gathering. They are often the snipers who sit waiting for their prey, drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes and striking at the ideal moment."

There is no end, it seems, to revelations of corruption in Spain, exacerbated by the country's economic crisis. The latest scandal threatens to topple the pedestal on which Spain's royals have long stood.

The newest suspect is the king's son-in-law, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars in public funds and faces a judge this weekend.

The story begins back in 1997, when the wedding of the year involved Spain's youngest princess, Infanta Cristina. She married the tall, handsome Iaki Urdangarin, an Olympian she met at the Summer Games a year earlier in Atlanta. Society magazines said it was love at first sight. Urdangarin got the royal title "Duke of Palma."

Related NPR Stories

Europe

Open Season On Spain's King After Luxe Hunting Trip

When Muslim extremists overran an oil and gas facility in Algeria's Sahara desert last month, Algerians saw the drama through the lens of their own painful history.

The news that terrorists had seized the In Amenas oil and gas plant stunned people in Algiers, the Algerian capital, who thought they'd seen the last of such attacks.

For most of the 1990s, a brutal civil war between Islamists and the military engulfed the country. More than 150,000 Algerians — mostly civilians — lost their lives in the violence. The oil site attack was a frightening reminder that things could re-ignite, says Adlene Meden, weekend editor of Al Watan newspaper.

"Algerian society was shocked by the attack for two reasons," he says. "It was the first time terrorists were able to take over a high-security energy site. And suddenly we found ourselves in a new war with terrorists, whether we wanted it or not."

But mixed with the fear was anger, says Meden.

The international community's reaction to the crisis irritated Algerians. The Western media characterized Algerian forces as brutal, as if they somehow adhered to different standards. Algerians complained that the West's tone was racist. Hostages were separated into two categories — foreigners and Algerians.

That prompted a wave of patriotism from a public that is usually anti-military, says Meden. Pictures and videos — such as one of Algerian special forces in training — became popular on Facebook.

The Legacy Of Algeria's Civil War

These days, Algiers is crawling with security, one of the consequences of the brutal war of the 1990s.

Houda Metaoui, a 42-year-old Algiers resident, says those were nightmare years.

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Algeria Attack A 'Wake-Up Call' For Energy Companies

Italy's election campaign has been dominated by an upstart comedian-turned-politician whose Five Star Movement is soaring in the polls. The movement is not expected to win in the weekend vote, but its strong presence in Parliament could be destabilizing and reignite the eurozone crisis.

Beppe Grillo is a standup comedian and the country's most popular blogger; 63 years old, with a mane of grey curly hair, he's hyperactive and foul-mouthed. His last name means "cricket," and he's the most charismatic politician in Italy today.

Europe

Berlusconi Plots His Comeback: 'You Italians Need Me'

We're due to learn this hour whether South African Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius will be granted bail as he awaits trial in Pretoria on a charge of premeditated murder in the Feb. 14 shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

As NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton tells our Newscast Desk, "the defense and prosecution have delivered their closing arguments" in a bail hearing that has lasted four days and at times felt like a trial. Pistorius, she notes, says he thought Steenkamp was an intruder and killed her by mistake at his home. The prosecution has offered evidence that it believes shows he knew what he was doing — including a neighbor's account of shouting coming from the house before shots were fired.

There's much more about the case in our previous posts.

The 26-year-old Pistorius, known as the "blade runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses, is the first double amputee to have participated in a Summer Olympics and is a Paralympics champion. Steenkamp, 29, was a model and aspiring reality TV star.

We'll update with word about the bail decision when it's announced.

Here's a headline that may sound familiar: Miami is in the middle of a condo boom.

Just seven years ago, Miami had a similar surge in condo construction. But it all came crashing down. There was an international banking crisis and the Florida real estate bubble burst — taking down investors and many developers.

But, new towers are once again reshaping the city's skyline.

Peter Zalewski, a real estate consultant with Condo Vultures, says there now there are 19 condo towers in the works with 7,000 total units in Miami, Fla.

U.S.

Miami's Condo King Changed City's Skyline

CNBC is far and away the television ratings leader in the financial cable news business. Now, evidence arrives that its executives, producers and reporters are going to great lengths to maintain its status.

The channel has adopted a policy that prohibits guests from appearing on rival channels amid breaking news if they want to be seen by CNBC's larger audience.

The tension over the policy with one of its peers offers a window into the intensity of the cable battles over what's called booking — landing interviews with key financial players, commentators, insiders and analysts.

"Every network should be trying to hustle to get content that's distinctive to their channel," said Andrew Morse, president of Bloomberg Television's U.S. operations. "That's our job. We're in the news business."

But Morse said Bloomberg doesn't try to dictate who can appear elsewhere.

"We want to talk to the newsmaker," Morse said. "If there's news we also understand, though, that newsmakers need to get their information out. People aren't in the world of just consuming one source of news and information now."

Politico was first to report the policy last week. CNBC's top spokesman initially denied to Politico that any such explicit policy existed. But a guest interviewed on CNBC earlier this month shared with NPR a copy of an email from a CNBC producer.

It carried this warning in red:

"CNBC POLICY REMINDER: Per CNBC policy, we cannot use guests who have a same-day appearance on Fox Business or Bloomberg...By accepting a booking with CNBC, you acknowledge and accept the terms of this policy."

So much of broadcast news revolves around the booking — with the pressure on the booker to land the guest.

“ Bookers are a unique life form in the ecosystem of news gathering. They are often the snipers who sit waiting for their prey, drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes and striking at the ideal moment."

Italy's election campaign has been dominated by an upstart comedian-turned-politician whose Five Star Movement is soaring in the polls. The movement is not expected to win in the weekend vote, but its strong presence in parliament could be destabilizing and re-ignite the eurozone crisis.

Beppe Grillo is a standup comedian and the country's most popular blogger; 63 years old, with a mane of grey curly hair, he's hyperactive and foul-mouthed. His last name means "cricket," and he's the most charismatic politician in Italy today.

Europe

Berlusconi Plots His Comeback: 'You Italians Need Me'

Here's a headline that may sound familiar: Miami is in the middle of a condo boom.

Just seven years ago, Miami had a similar surge in condo construction. But it all came crashing down. There was an international banking crisis and the Florida real estate bubble burst — taking down investors and many developers.

But, new towers are once again reshaping the city's skyline.

Peter Zalewski, a real estate consultant with Condo Vultures, says there now there are 19 condo towers in the works with 7,000 total units in Miami, Fla.

U.S.

Miami's Condo King Changed City's Skyline

Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln has earned 12 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director. Another Spielberg film — the multi-Oscar winning Schindler's List — will be celebrating 20 years since its release. These films have at least two important things in common: Spielberg and publicist Marvin Levy.

Levy started his career in New York writing questions for quiz shows. He wound up in publicity for MGM radio and TV personalities, but was lured to Hollywood in the mid-1970s. He took a job with Columbia Pictures and was later assigned to do publicity for the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. That began an almost 40-year relationship with the filmmaker.

Levy's office is in the back section of the Universal Studio lot, an area inhabited by DreamWorks Studios, the company Spielberg helped found. Adobe buildings were fabricated for the filmmaker to echo a southwestern motif because Spielberg grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz. This was a thank you from Universal, which financed and distributed Spielberg's 1982 megahit, E.T.

Looking Back At 'Schindler,' 20 Years On

Marvin Levy is 80-something, small and peppy in a blue jacket, jaunty baseball cap and black-framed glasses. And he's still going strong.

On this day, Levy is meeting with Universal Home Video publicists and a representative from the USC Shoah Foundation about the 20th-anniversary marketing campaign for Schindler's List. Spielberg won Oscars for best director and best picture for his 1993 film.

More From This Series

Hollywood Jobs

For Film Set Decorators, Tiny Details Count

Fresh produce has never been hipper.

Need proof? Check out this video of Brooklyn-based songwriter-producer-artist extraordinaire Jonathan Dagan, better known as J.Viewz, playing a beautiful — and just plain awesome — cover of Massive Attack's 1998 hit "Teardrop" on a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Cool stuff, right?

We certainly thought so, and plenty of other people seem to agree.

Since the MaKey MaKey was released last year, people have been posting videos of themselves playing sweet tunes on all sorts of edibles, including oranges, doughnuts and even seafood. But if you really want to impress your friends, we suggest you opt for a true classic: the banana piano.

The New York Times points out something rather interesting about an otherwise mundane business story. Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter earnings report tells the tale of how changes in the tax code has both helped corporations and hurt them.

As the Times puts it, during the fourth quarter of last year, "the tax code gave and the tax code took away."

The paper explains:

"The company reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday of $1.67 a share, up from $1.51 a share a year ago, largely because of tax credits that brought its corporate tax rate lower than usual.

"But the recent payroll-tax increase and an Internal Revenue Service delay in processing tax returns hit consumers, and that affected the holiday period and sales in February. For the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Jan. 31, sales at stores open at least a year rose 1 percent at Wal-Mart stores in the United States; analysts had expected a 1.7 percent increase."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in 2009 banning violence against women. But the parliament, which is currently on its winter recess, has been unable to pass it and give it permanence as a law.

There's major disagreement on key provisions where Islamic and secular law come into conflict. And activists say the gains made in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 are slipping away.

Masooda Karokhi, a female member of parliament, has been pushing to get the proposal through the male-dominated legislature.

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Afghan Women Fear Backsliding On Key Gains

Friends in Karachi had me over for a beer Sunday evening. It wasn't hard for them to do. Alcohol is broadly outlawed in Pakistan, but with so many exceptions and so little enforcement, you can usually find something — in this case, tallboy cans of Murree's Millennium Brew from a Pakistani brewery.

Several of my friends were fathers, raising kids in a city where the number of homicides exceeded 2,000 last year. They told me they're not comfortable letting their younger children go out to play. Instead the kids play cricket, the national obsession, in apartment building hallways. One father is holding off buying furniture so his kids can push their bikes around the dining room.

Enlarge image i

There is no end, it seems, to revelations of corruption in Spain, exacerbated by the country's economic crisis. The latest scandal threatens to topple the pedestal on which Spain's royals have long stood.

The newest suspect is the king's son-in-law, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars in public funds, and faces a judge this weekend.

The story begins back in 1997, when the wedding of the year involved Spain's youngest princess, Infanta Cristina. She married the tall, handsome Iaki Urdangarin, an Olympian she met at the Summer Games a year earlier in Atlanta. Society magazines said it was love at first sight. Urdangarin got the royal title "Duke of Palma."

Related NPR Stories

Europe

Open Season On Spain's King After Luxe Hunting Trip

Sales of existing homes rose 0.4 percent in January from December and were up 9.1 percent from January 2012, the National Association of Realtors reports.

The trade group also says "a seller's market is developing and home prices continue to rise."

Bloomberg News writes that the news signals the housing sector is "showing more momentum" after enjoying "its best year since 2007."

The NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, says in the group's report that:

"Buyer traffic is continuing to pick up, while seller traffic is holding steady. In fact, buyer traffic is 40 percent above a year ago, so there is plenty of demand but insufficient inventory to improve sales more strongly. We've transitioned into a seller's market in much of the country."

The New York Times Co. will continue shedding assets, this time announcing it is looking to sell The Boston Globe.

The New York Times reports the company said it was looking to sell off the Globe and "other New England properties" to "focus energy and resources on its flagship newspaper."

The Boston Globe reports the Times bought the paper in 1993 for $1.1 billion, "a record in the newspaper business."

The Globe adds:

"The Times Co. last tried to sell the Globe in 2009, after first threatening to shut the newspaper down because it was losing money. After receiving wage cuts and other cost-saving concessions from Globe employees, the Times Co. decided not to sell at that time, because it had received bids lower than it had hoped from two different business groups.

"Since then, the Times Co. has sold a number of its other properties. The Globe and its online businesses BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com turned an operating profit in 2012, according to people involved in the company's results."

Consumer prices were flat in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But a driving force behind that good news has reversed itself since then. According to BLS, gasoline prices fell 3 percent last month. In February, though, gas prices have risen sharply. So watch for next month's BLS report on consumer prices to tell a different story.

Also this morning, the Employment and Training Administration reports that the number of first-time claims for jobless benefits rose by 20,000 last week, to 362,000. The increase was slightly larger than economists expected.

For the most part, the number of weekly claims has stayed within a range of 350,000 to 400,000 since the fall of 2011. They've been another in a series of signs that the U.S. labor market is only slowly recovering from the 2007-09 recession.

OK, yes: To gay comics fans like me, DC Comics' decision to hire an anti-gay activist like Orson Scott Card to write Superman — an iconic character who exists to represent humanity's noblest ideals of justice and compassion — is deeply dispiriting.

But it doesn't change the fact that today's mainstream superhero comics contain more LGBT characters than ever. Surely this is a good (if, let's agree, weirdly specific) thing. After all, superheroes remain the comics medium's dominant genre, and having the characters who populate that genre more closely resemble those of us who populate the world at large must count as progress.

Northstar. Batwoman. Hulkling. Wiccan. The Green Lantern of Earth-2. Bunker. Midnighter. Apollo. Shatterstar. Daken. Billy the Vampire Slayer. None of them is a household name, yet they're making their way into more and more households as an increasing number of storylines deal matter-of-factly with the sexuality of LGBT heroes. To organizations like GLAAD, which campaign for greater LGBT visibility in pop culture, that's what counts.

But visibility is a first step. And while I'm happy that the superhero genre is finally taking it, it must be noted that creators of manga and independent comics like the ones below have already taken many steps down this road, telling nuanced, compelling and at times discomfiting stories about the varied and complicated LGBT experience.

Get recipes for Girl Scout Cookie Lemon Fish, Aren't-You-Glad-You-Didn't-Give-Up-Carbs Girl Scout Cookie Stuffing, Thin Mints Popcorn, Must-Be-21 Girl Scout Bourbon Balls, Girl Scout Cookie Dessert Pizza and Gone-To-Heaven Girl Scout Cookies (above).

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When you're trying to decide where to eat, knowing what's on the menu is important. But for restaurants trying to bring customers through the door, what's not on the menu is just as important.

Secret menus aren't new. In-N-Out Burger has had one for years. But experts say that more companies are now adding secret menu items, and they're even catching on overseas in places like the United Kingdom and Singapore.

Especially in this economy, restaurants want to set themselves apart. And in order to do so, they have to connect with customers.

"If you have a secret menu or if customers know the secret menu, they feel like they're insiders," says Bret Thorn, senior food editor of Nation's Restaurant News, a trade publication. "They feel kind of a personal connection to the restaurant; they feel they know something that maybe not everybody else does. And everyone loves that."

Nowadays, secret menus pretty much have the same items you'd find on a regular menu, just mixed up in a different way. But the menus make people feel like they're in on something. It's like they've become restaurant insiders, or like they've cracked some big code.

The latest player to jump into the secret menu game is Panera Bread. Last month, the company rolled out six new items.

Interviews

In-N-Out Burger Sticks To Basics, Finds Success

Author Interviews

'I Accepted Responsibility': McChrystal On His 'Share Of The Task'

New Zealand seems to be the destination of choice for wayward Antarctic penguins.

The BBC reports that a Royal penguin was found Sunday washed ashore on a beach in New Zealand, where another penguin, a three-year-old emperor dubbed "Happy Feet," turned up in June 2011. Months later, Happy Feet was released, ostensibly destined for a return to his homeland. Sadly though, he is believed to have been eaten, possibly by a shark, sometime after his release into the Southern Ocean.

Veterinarians say the latest arrival, "Happy Feet, Jr.," is being cared for at a Wellington Zoo. Scientists there believe the "young male" may have departed about a year ago from a breeding colony on Macquarie Island, more than 1,200 miles away, and drifting been around since then.

The BBC quotes Lisa Argilla, a vet at the zoo, as saying the flightless aquatic bird had possibly struggled to find enough food and come ashore to go through his seasonal molting.

"It's very weak, doesn't want to stand. It's making very small progress every day but it's still in critical condition," Ms. Argilla told the TVNZ channel.

Argilla told the French news agency AFP that Happy Feet, Jr. was having some kidney trouble and she said "hopefully we can reverse that, feed him up and bring him back to good health," but she added that it's "touch and go for at the moment."

The penguin was found on Sunday by Jenny Boyne, who was walking along Tora beach on New Zealand's Wairarapa coast, says The New Zealand Herald.

"She saved this bird's life. I don't think he would've survived another night without veterinary attention," Argilla said.

Couch couldn't wait to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian radical imam (who is still being held at Guantanamo Bay) — but it didn't take long before he concluded that the evidence he had to work with was inadmissible if not worthless. As Bravin reports, at Guantanamo Slahi was stripped naked and subjected to a probe of his anal cavity; beaten so hard that he suffered "rib contusions"; exposed to extreme temperatures under a heater or in a room known as "the freezer"; forced to stay awake amid blaring rock music and strobe lights; and taken to a room whose walls were covered with images of women's genitalia while female interrogators rubbed their breasts over his body.

Eventually he provided his interrogators with some kind of testimony. But Couch, a devout Christian, at first had religious misgivings about torture, then legal ones. When he told his superior that Slahi's interrogation had violated the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, he was waved away. So he refused to prosecute. "I hate to say it," he tells his wife, "but being a Christian is going to trump being an American."

Couch, like other brave figures in the military and the administration, spoke out about the inadequacy of the tribunals, but that hasn't made them go away. When he came to office in 2009, President Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay (he did not, of course), but he didn't exactly promise to end the military tribunals that were taking place there. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the Sept. 11 mastermind whom Eric Holder attempted and failed to have tried in New York — is currently being prosecuted in one of these tribunals, and as Bravin witnesses from the press box at Gitmo, it's a fiasco. The defendants fail to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, while a military censor hits a button to cut the audio feed to journalists, families of Sept. 11 victims and the rest of the outside world.

Why has Obama, a distinguished constitutional law scholar in an earlier life, failed to roll back the massive expansion of executive power orchestrated by the last administration's lawyers and advisers, people whose vision of justice he doesn't come close to sharing? Bravin speculates that the president really did want to end the program but thought "his political capital was better spent on other priorities — health care, economic recovery, the Iraq drawdown." Given Obama's embrace of drone strikes and other elements of Bush's military strategy, that may be a wishful read. Whatever the reason, the military commissions now have "a bipartisan imprimatur that virtually ensures they will be a fixture of American law for years to come." It's a stark conclusion to this essential book, but a necessary one. The Terror Courts may read like a thriller at times, but really it's something else: a bona fide American tragedy.

Read an excerpt of The Terror Courts

Author Interviews

'I Accepted Responsibility': McChrystal On His 'Share Of The Task'

Unless Congress acts, across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to take effect March 1 will be felt throughout the government. Some of the most visible effects will be noticed by air travelers.

Officials predict that cutbacks at the Federal Aviation Administration could lead to takeoff delays and fewer flights overall.

The FAA's work is done largely out of public view, in airport control towers and regional radar centers, in hangars and workshops. But if the spending cuts, known in Washington-speak as sequestration, start taking effect on schedule, the importance of that backstage work will move front and center.

Danny Werfel of the Office of Management and Budget said at a Senate hearing last week that the sequester will take a toll at the FAA.

"FAA is going to face a cut of roughly $600 million under sequester," Werfel said. "A vast majority of their 47,000 employees will be furloughed for one day per pay period for the rest of the year, and, as importantly, this is going to reduce air traffic levels across the country, causing delays and disruptions for all travelers."

In a letter to agency employees, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the temporary layoffs would require "a reduction in FAA services to levels that can be safely managed by remaining staff."

Marion Blakey, who used to head the FAA and is now CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, says she agrees cutbacks will not go unnoticed.

"If sequestration goes into effect, level-headed people all over this town, all over Washington, are saying, 'Yes, it will have a major effect on the aviation system,' " she says. "And this isn't doomsday; this isn't some sort of science-fiction plot that we're all talking about. This is reality, and it's reality coming up next month."

Blakey says more than 2,000 air traffic controllers will be furloughed at one time or another, and there will be ripple effects.

"It's one of those things that when you start cutting back on service, it affects even community airports, because, after all, they don't have the flights coming in," she says. "The landing fees, the concessions, the parking lot — all of those sources of revenue suffer."

Blakey says that could mean an annual loss of $1 billion in tax revenues.

It's not only controllers who face furloughs. There are thousands of FAA technicians, who fix equipment such as radar and navigation systems.

It's All Politics

Whose Sequester Is It Anyway?

Maximina Hernandez says she begged her 23-year old son, Dionicio, to give up his job as a police officer in a suburb of Monterrey. Rival drug cartels have been battling in the northern Mexican city for years.

But he told her being a police officer was in his blood, a family tradition. He was detailed to guard the town's mayor.

In May 2007, on his way to work, two men wearing police uniforms stopped Dionicio on a busy street, pulled him from his car and drove him away. That same day, the mayor's other two bodyguards were also abducted. Witnesses say the kidnappers wore uniforms of an elite anti-drug police unit. The three men haven't been seen since.

'It's So Bleak'

At a weekly meeting at a downtown Monterrey human-rights center, relatives of the disappeared hold hands and pray. There is no shortage of heartbreaking stories here, says Sister Consuelo Morales Elizondo.

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With immigration policy in the news again, I asked three economists dream big: If you could create any immigration policy for the U.S., what would it be? Here's what they said.

1. The Best and the Brightest

Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, would give out more visas to highly-skilled workers: scientists, engineers, computer programmers and doctors.

In this universe, with fewer low-skill immigrants, low-skilled labor would be more expensive. So food would cost a bit more. Childcare might, too. There could be fewer restaurants. On the other hand, having more doctors could mean that really expensive things like medical care would be cheaper.

2. The Highest Bidder

The problem with favoring highly-skilled workers is defining "highly skilled." Our government already tries to do that and it's a mess, according to UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri.

In Peri's ideal world, the US would auction the visas off to the employers who were willing to pay the most, he says. That way, employers could determine which would-be immigrants would add the most to the U.S. economy.

Peri does think there should be space for low-skilled immigrants, so in his dream world there would be separate visa auctions for high- and low-skilled workers.

3. Let 'Em In.

Alex Nowrasteh, a self-described libertarian at the Cato Institute, says we should almost everybody in.

"My dream setup would be a system where only criminals, suspected terrorists, and those with serious communicable diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis are barred from coming to the United States to live and work," Nowrasteh says.

Open borders were the law of the land for almost 100 years of American history, he points out. He says between 50 and 100 million people might move to the U.S. if we re-instated those rules now. He says that's fine. Compared to Europe, the U.S. is a big, empty country.

The movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fairy tale of a film. It might not seem to have much in common with documentaries about evangelical Christians in Uganda or the billionaire Koch brothers. But these films were all funded by a not-for-profit group called Cinereach. It was started by a couple of film school graduates who are still in their 20s. And now, with Beasts, it has a nomination for Best Picture at this year's Oscars.

Cinereach funded almost all of the $1.5 million budget for Beasts of the Southern Wild, the immersive art-house film about a child who's figuratively and literally adrift in Louisiana swamp country. Named Hushpuppy, and played by youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis, she vows to survive: "They think we're all gonna drown," she says. "But we ain't going nowhere."

The movie has earned more than $12 million, along with multiple awards and Oscar nominations.

Michael Raisler, at 27 years old, is one of the Best Picture nominee's producers and the creative director of Cinereach, which he founded with Philipp Engelhorn when the two were classmates at New York University's film school. They found that they shared a love for movies and a passion for social change. "Our key goal is to support what we call 'vital stories artfully told,' " he says.

As they learned about the film business, Raisler and Engelhorn learned that the money didn't go to the good movies; it went to the movies that would make more money. Engelhorn decided he wanted his film production company to be separate and apart from worries about commercial viability: "We're not protecting a potential upside or profit potential; we're protecting the vision."

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In Pakistan, a controversial Muslim cleric has been shaking up the political scene.

Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri returned to his home country late last year, after spending eight years in Canada. Since coming back, he has ignited a disgruntled electorate and has left many people wondering what exactly his plans are.

On a recent day, a lively drum band wandered among a crowd of about 15,000 Pakistanis gathered in the eastern city of Faisalabad for a rally organized by Qadri.

The slight, 61-year-old cleric, wearing his trademark blue pin-striped cloak and shiny white religious cap, captivated the crowd with a long and fiery speech.

Qadri says Pakistan's oppressed and destitute are with him in his fight against inequality and corruption. His speech touches a nerve for many in the crowd.

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Get recipes for Girl Scout Cookie Lemon Fish, Aren't-You-Glad-You-Didn't-Give-Up-Carbs Girl Scout Cookie Stuffing, Thin Mints Popcorn, Must-Be-21 Girl Scout Bourbon Balls, Girl Scout Cookie Dessert Pizza and Gone-To-Heaven Girl Scout Cookies (above).

If you've been behind the wheel recently, you already know gasoline prices are up.

The national average price for regular gas rose to nearly $3.75 a gallon Tuesday, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report.

"Retail prices have gone up for each of the last 33 or so days — dating back to about Jan. 17," says Denton Cinquegrana, executive editor at the Oil Price Information Service.

He estimates prices will rise a bit more in coming weeks, but he doesn't expect them to go above $4 a gallon like they did in the summer of 2008.

Cinquegrana says prices rise near the end of winter every year. As refineries switch to summer blends to reduce smog, they shut down units and work on maintenance. Traders worry there won't be enough supply, so they start bidding up prices.

Cinquegrana says this time around it's happening a few weeks earlier than typical. One reason is refiners are catching up on maintenance and repair work they weren't able to do late last year because of Superstorm Sandy.

At an Exxon station just outside Philadelphia, regular gas is selling for nearly $3.78 per gallon.

"I've been looking around for the past four stations, and this was the cheapest one," Billy Boylan says while filling up his white sedan.

A few pumps over, Nicole Cornwell fondly remembers when the price was $1.50 a gallon. Actually, winter of 2003 was the last time gas hovered around that cost, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Economy

With Gasoline Prices Rising, Consumers Are Having A Tough Year

By now, it's widely accepted that indiscriminate spending cuts in defense and domestic programs due to start March 1 are likely to occur due to the failure of President Obama and the Republican-led House to reach an agreement to avoid the budgetary cleaver.

So now, the contest boils down to each side scampering for the higher ground of moral indignation.

For weeks, the president has alleged that the ideological extremism of congressional Republicans is to blame for the impasse. A fresh example of that came Tuesday at a White House photo op at which the president, with men and women in uniform as his backdrop, warned that such first responders would be impacted if the cuts — $1.2 trillion over 10 years — were allowed to happen:

"So now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them? Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That's the choice."

More From The Debate

Some people in Shanghai – especially the foreigners — think the city's new Pudong section of town is dull, without character and profoundly unfashionable.

Twenty years ago, Pudong was mostly farms and warehouses. Today, it's home to those sleek glass-and-steel skyscrapers that have come to define the city's skyline in movies like Skyfall and Mission Impossible 3.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Clues Connect Global Hacking To Chinese Government, Security Firm Says

These should be good times for Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez.

New Jersey voters re-elected him last fall in a landslide, and he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee a few weeks ago. But along the way, Menendez has come under scrutiny by the Senate Ethics Committee and perhaps other government investigators – and certainly the media — for his connections to a long-time friend and generous campaign donor.

In July, Menendez called two Obama administration officials to his Foreign Relations subcommittee to explain to him why Washington wasn't sticking up for U.S. business interests in Latin America.

Menendez cited several examples, including a couple involving the Dominican Republic. He said one company, which he didn't name, had American investors and a contract with the Dominican Republic government to provide port security. But officials there wanted to start their own port security operation and "they don't want to live by that contract either," the senator said.

He declared that the U.S. needed to side with the company, not the government. "You know what? If those countries can get away with that, they will," Menendez said.

What he didn't say was that the company was partly owned by a wealthy Florida eye doctor named Salomon Melgen.

Here's how Menendez described Melgen during a recent press conference in New Jersey: "Someone who I've known for 20 years, someone who has been a friend, someone who has been a supporter."

Melgen in fact has been a longtime and generous supporter. Last year, his medical practice gave $700,000 to a Democratic superPAC, which spent nearly $600,000 to help Menendez in the November election.

Ken Boehm is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group that has investigated Menendez. He says the senator knew what he was doing.

"[Menendez] knew he was carrying water for one specific donor at the very time the donor was writing very large checks to benefit the senator," Boehm says.

And there are other connections. Twice since 2009, Menendez went to Medicare on Melgen's behalf after health care officials alleged the doctor had overbilled by nearly $9 million. Last month, agents from the FBI and Health and Human Services raided Melgen's office in West Palm Beach, Fla., hauling away boxes of documents.

Menendez has also admitted that he failed to disclose two trips on Melgen's private jet — flights to a Dominican Republic resort community where Melgen has a house.

"I welcome any review, but I have no intention of having the smears try to deviate me from the work that I have been doing and will continue to do," Menendez told reporters in New Jersey.

Menendez is one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, with a net worth in 2012 that was as little as $200,000, according to his Senate disclosure. He reimbursed Melgen last month for the flights — $58,500 in all.

The Senate Ethics Committee is looking into the case.

At the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Melanie Sloan says the subject of doing favors for donors is a touchy one. "I think many members will be hesitant to take Menendez on for that," she says, "given that they can't afford to have their own campaign donations examined too closely."

There's also another complication: because the port-security matter was discussed at that subcommittee hearing, it could be considered an official debate — and constitutionally off limits for prosecutors.

Menendez has come under scrutiny before but has never been charged. He even had a reputation as the clean guy in one of the state's most corrupt county organizations.

"In fact, he testified in his younger days in a bulletproof vest in a federal corruption trial against his mentor," says Tom Moran, a columnist with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.

And a poll released last week showed that so far, none of these new allegations seems to matter much to New Jersey voters.

Three years of spiraling economic crisis in Greece have devastated every sector of the economy. The Greek media are among the hardest hit. Many newspapers and TV outlets have closed or are on the verge, and some 4,000 journalists have lost their jobs.

Many people believe the country's news media have failed to cover the crisis — and lost credibility along the way. And many Greek journalists acknowledge that a massive conflict of interest sooner or later had to explode.

Nikos Xydakis, a columnist with the daily newspaper Kathimerini, says the big media conglomerates never bother to analyze what's going on in society.

"A big part of the media is controlled by construction moguls and oligarchs," he says. "They reproduce the talk, talk, talk of politicians. This is not journalism, it is everyday propaganda."

Cozy Relationships

Freelance journalist Nikolas Leontopoulos says Greek media owners are too close to political and financial centers of power. "They didn't care so much to earn money out of their media businesses, they cared more about winning state contracts," he says.

This exchange of favors — news outlets that won't criticize the government or the banks in return for public works contracts and loans – contributed to one of the most inflated media sectors in Europe. In 2009, there were 39 national dailies, 23 national Sunday papers, 14 national weekly papers and dozens of TV and radio stations for a population of 11 million.

Some papers had a circulation of just 100 copies but survived thanks to ads by state-owned businesses

Now the country's economic crisis has wiped out both public works and advertising. Circulation is plummeting, media outlets are closing, and many media owners are no longer able to pay back the loans from their crony bankers.

Opinion polls show the media's credibility has plunged. And many reporters who still have jobs have seen their salaries slashed up to 40 percent.

Leontopoulos says worse is to come: "Recently there was a prediction that in the following year, in 2013, almost 50 percent of journalists that used to work for the media will have lost their jobs."

A Push For Transparency

But the crisis in the media is also producing some new, independent initiatives, especially online.

One such startup is the brainchild of a group of techies who used the profits they made creating web sites to form a site called The Press Project to fill the Greek information vacuum. It started as an aggregator of foreign media articles on the Greek and eurozone crises and has only grown.

"Eight months now, we have a full news portal for Greece, we have a newsroom with breaking news, we have some investigative reporters," says director Kostas Efimeros.

The 11 staff members and 10 paid freelancers have taken advantage of a new government web site that Efimeros calls anything but transparent. In fact, he says it was created and designed "with the only goal that you can't find anything."

But Press Project's journalists have found plenty. They've decoded and indexed every single official decision and details of every public works contract and tenders — and in the process uncovered numerous questionable transactions.

Efimeros and his colleagues are also working on a glossary of economic crisis lingo that is incomprehensible for the average Greek, terms such as "spread," "credit default swaps," "haircuts" and many more.

Press Project journalist Pandelis Panteloglu explains the site's purpose this way: "We haven't actually seen serious public dialogue in Greece for decades now. Well, it was about time."

Online media is increasingly popular, especially with young Greeks. But even alternative outlets are threatened by the reality of the crisis — more and more newly-poor Greeks are being forced to give up Internet access to pay for their minimum daily needs.

Zadie Smith first met Nick Laird when she submitted a short story to a collection he was editing. They were both undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Her story, Laird told The Telegraph in an interview in July 2005, "was just head-and-shoulders above anything else." Smith's career took off after that. Her first novel, White Teeth, was an international best-seller and won critical acclaim. Later, Laird said that going to literary parties with Smith made him feel "two feet high." Even so, the two writers support each other — showing each other their unpublished work and exchanging advice.

Smith has also publicly described their relationship. In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, she explains that she and Laird work in the same library in New York — on different floors. At the end of the day, they tell each other about the people they have seen out and about, and re-enact the conversations they have overheard (at one point she says she couldn't wait to tell her husband about a cat-eyed teenager in a Pocahontas wig she saw "sashaying" down Broadway). "The advice one finds in ladies' magazines is usually to be feared," she writes. "But there is something in that old chestnut: 'shared interests.' "

"So, like, you're from Europe?" asks Ethan. Despite his talent for spouting disarming bits of folksiness, the fact that he's a mere mortal is a non-starter for "casters" (magic users) like Lena and her cane-wielding, cravat-wearing uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons), who vows to keep the two apart.

The true problem is that when Lena turns 16 (a long hundred-plus days away), she's scheduled to be claimed by either the light or the dark side of magic — a fairly arbitrary event, and something that only female casters have to deal with, for some unspecified reason. The fate of the world is also involved, of course, since Lena's mother, Sarafine, is a powerful dark caster, and her forces are marshaling against Macon's.

This all leads to some truly satisfying scene-chewery from Irons as Macon forbids Lena to see that boy again (and again), even if there are only so many times a variation on that scene can play out before Irons' delicious Southern accent starts to wear. Emma Thompson, too, gets in on the act of overacting with relish as the town's most conservative churchgoer; the malevolent Sarafine possesses her, and she and Macon have it out good in a not-so-subtle scene in one of the town's churches.

Tone in Beautiful Creatures is a strange thing to keep track of; see above as regards camp, teen melodrama and social critique. While Ehrenreich and Englert fall in love in one movie and Irons and Thompson magically and verbally spar in another, Emmy Rossum and Viola Davis occupy individual universes of their own. Rossum, as Lena's seductive cousin already claimed for the dark, isn't so much chewing scenery as alternately screaming at or making out with it, while Davis balances the camp as a friend of Ethan's mother, the only person truly still looking out for him.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be an apt comparison, given its appetite for banter, pop-culture references and the supernatural as metaphor for various coming-of-age struggles, but unlike that cult favorite, Creatures can't quite manage to tame its disparate parts into a single experience.

The resulting mishmash is a lot like Ethan himself — full of aspirations, good intentions and eagerness to charm its way into your heart, even as it trips over itself. Creatures bogs down when it yet again rewrites its sometimes confusing mythology, and when its plot meanders waiting around for the days to count down to Lena's claiming — it's less ticking clock than sleepy swamp-gator lumbering — but the movie is at least savvy enough to circle back regularly to Ethan and Lena. The scenes where it's just the two of them talking and connecting as real people glimmer with a magic all their own.

Of all the patriarchs of science, Johannes Kepler is the least known. We often talk of Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravity (and laws of motion, and the calculus, and laws of optics), of Galileo's impetuosity and his telescopic discoveries (and law of free fall and pendular motion), and of Copernicus, the man who put the sun in the center of the cosmos. But Kepler? Sounds familiar; but what was it again?

We need to do better. Kepler is, hands down, one of the most fascinating characters in the history of science. Of course, most of the readers of 13.7 know this already; they know Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion, the first mathematical laws of astronomy: that planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits; that the imaginary line connecting sun to planet sweeps equal areas in equal times; and that the square of the planet's orbital period equals the cube of its average distance to the sun. (These laws apply to any planet orbiting a star.)

I know, sounds kind of boring. But, as with much in life, relevance depends on context. Kepler was the link between the old and the new, a visionary who lived to show that the order we see in the cosmos was the handiwork of a divine mind, well-versed in geometry. To Kepler, faithful to what the Pythagoreans preached two millennia before him, only math could unveil the mystery of creation. The relationship between man and cosmos obeyed the same resonances as the planetary orbits, an expression of the harmony of the spheres.

If his spirituality may seem innocent to us today, we must recall that his dreams of cosmic harmony inspired his work throughout his life. They were the fire that breathed life into his breakthrough scientific discoveries. Kepler found the ellipse not because he looked for it but because it was the only curve that fit the data collected over decades of meticulous observation by the Dane Tycho Brahe. In this, Kepler showed his modernity: if a theory is in conflict with data, change the theory. This was not as obvious in 1609 as it may (or should) be now. The circle, after millennia of prominence in the skies, gave way to the imperfect ellipse.

Nature, not mind, had the last word.

Even if his search for a cosmic harmony, his mysterium cosmographicum, was more a holy grail than science, it represented one of the noblest aspirations of the human spirit, to transcend its mortal chains in search of eternal knowledge.

Today, we can identify similar trends in the search for unification in physics, also inspired by dreams of a universal harmony, albeit one based on the vibrations of fundamental strings as opposed to planetary orbits. From Kepler, we learn that we must dream. But we also learn that such dreams are only useful if, when we wake up, they help us make better sense of the observed world.

Judy Van der Veer is an American author (1912-1982) who wrote books that are too little remembered now. In her works of fiction and non-fiction, Van der Veer beautifully brings alive small California worlds close to nature.

The novel November Grass (1940) tells of a 23-year-old woman (called "the girl") who lives on a ranch in the valleys east of San Diego. Surrounded by animals, she observes the small details of their lives. She notices the cow who labors in pain, then turns to greet her calf "with all love in her eyes."

This is no cute-animal story, however. The girl fattens calves then takes them from their mothers for sale; this the girl both accepts as necessary and as a weight on her heart. Out walking the hills, she finds signs of death:

Skulls of cattle, eyes no longer empty, but filled with grass. ...

The ivory whiteness of these bones made her think that death treated them better than it did the buried bones of men who had owned the cattle. ... Here at least the bones were free of the flesh that kept them from wind and sun. But the poor bones of man were ever in darkness. She wished that her own bones, when she was done using them, could rest cleanly in the sunshine.

Get recipes for Tropical Amaranth Porridge With Coconut Milk, Mango And Ginger, Saffron-Scented Millet Porridge, Savory Polenta Porridge With Poached Egg and Sunflower Apple Oat Bran Porridge.

The White House and congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm bells over the consequences of the sequester, the across-the-board cuts to the budget that are scheduled to go into effect in March.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said the cuts would offset "pretty good" economic activity over the past few months. He said President Obama had a plan to cut an addition $1.5 trillion from the deficit.

"He's ready to do another $1.5 trillion to get up to the $4 trillion target that economists across the country tell us is needed to stabilize the debt over the next 10 years," McDonough said on ABC's This Week. "So that's exactly what the president has done, working with Democrats and Republicans."

But he insisted that the plan would be "balanced," which would likely mean an increase in tax revenue.

Speaking on the same program, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, was pessimistic about a deal to avert the cuts.

"The Senate hasn't passed a bill to replace the sequester. The president gave a speech showing that he'd like to replace it, but he hasn't put any details out there. So that is why I conclude I believe it's going to take place," he said.

McDonough's comments follow remarks by other officials who have warned of the consequences of the cuts.

Speaking on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the sequester would affect both "time and casualties" in the military.

"The way this plays out, when you hollow out readiness, it means that when the force is needed, when an option is needed, to deal with a specific threat ... it would take us longer to react to those. So time is the issue," he said. "Some people would say, 'So what?' Well, time generally translates into casualties in my line of work."

As NPR's Brian Naylor is reporting for our Newscast unit, the cuts will mean federal spending will be reduced by $85 billion between March 1 and the end of September. Here's more from Brian's report on the effects of the sequester:

"HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan says it will mean a 5 percent reduction in funding for recovery from superstorm Sandy, and that some 100,000 homeless or formerly homeless, including veterans, would be removed from their current housing and shelters. The government also says because USDA food inspectors face layoffs, some meat processing plants wont be able to open, leading to higher food prices. Senate Democrats have proposed avoiding the sequester by spreading the cuts out and raising some taxes, but Republicans say that idea is a nonstarter."

As the European editor of Rolling Stone, Jonathan Cott spent his time interviewing legendary musicians like Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend. But in 1968, he finally got the opportunity to meet his hero, John Lennon. Cott was nervous.

"He said, 'There's nothing to be nervous about,'" Cott recalls. "'It's going to be OK, and we're doing it together, and that's what really matters.'"

Cott forged a working relationship and friendship with Lennon, and with Yoko Ono, that would span more than two decades. He sat in on recording sessions for The Beatles' White Album, and was the last journalist to interview Lennon — just three days before Lennon died.

Cott's new book, Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, chronicles his years in the couple's company. He spoke with NPR's Jacki Lyden about being in the studio with The Beatles and the depth of Lennon and Ono's relationship.

The transformation is subtler in my favorite story, "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis." It's about a group of boys who, owing to the requirements of masculinity and a cruel culture, become predators. Their prey? The eponymous Eric Mutis, wearer of Hoops sneakers. "At school, we made a point of stealing Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair used to enrage me. The H logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I'm poor!"

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For Valentine's Day, Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy shares a family love story from 70 years ago.

I always knew that my mother's aunt Debika was the most beautiful of all the great-aunts. I didn't know that when she was young, she jumped off a moving train for love.

She is now 90. Bent with age, she shuffles with a walker. But she's still radiant, her hair perfectly dyed.

It sounds like a typical Bollywood story. Boy meets girl in pre-independence India. They fall in love. Her family says no way. The boy came from the same clan. That was regarded almost as marriage between siblings. And there were far more suitable boys for such a beauty, like the son of a top-ranking civil servant. Debika says her uncle and brother kept two guns handy to shoot over-eager Romeos on sight.

So one night in 1941, she decided to escape. She packed a bundle with everything she needed: a couple of blouses, a petticoat and two albums — one with family photos, the other with postcards of Hollywood movie stars like Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert.

She put a roll of false hair on the pillow so it looked like she was sleeping. There were dozens of servants to be evaded, big dogs patrolling the yard and many locked doors. She retraces her steps for me more than 70 years later.

She left barefoot, in the kind of sari housemaids wore, to look like a young woman going to work in the breaking dawn. Her fiance was waiting to take her to the train station, but she panicked when she realized the taxi driver recognized her. She was afraid her powerful uncle would show up at the next station with guns. So the runaways decided to jump off before the station. Guards came running, but they nonchalantly strolled away as if they jumped off trains every day.

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At least 15 people are dead and dozens injured Sunday in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, after multiple car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in mainly Shiite areas.

NPR's Kelly McEvers is reporting on the blasts for our Newscast unit.

"The explosions targeted shops and outdoor markets in Shiite districts around the city. After the blast helicopters were circling over many parts of the city.

"Overall violence has gone down in recent years but lately there've been a string of suicide attacks targeting Shiite interests and security forces.

"A suicide bomber killed a top Iraqi army intelligence officer on Saturday.

Tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are on the rise again in Iraq, as widespread protests in Sunni areas have called for the downfall of the Shiite-led government."

Interiors intrigue me. Like many New Yorkers, I am often tempted to see what is inside those great doorman-barricaded buildings that line Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. Step into the marble lobby, ride the elevator to the penthouse and let your imagination be carried aloft. What would it be like to live in a vast suite overlooking Central Park, with its parquet floors, coffered ceilings, and handsome antiques? Surely, dwelling here means being beautiful, rich and glamorous.

In reality, most people who live in big cities live in small rooms with tiny closets and a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. But one can dream.

The three novels I have chosen allow fanciful musings of the Gilded Age — which roughly spans the period in American history between Reconstruction and the turn of the 20th century — with its grand apartments and lavish furnishings. But of course, then, as now, most people lived in cramped quarters with little to look at. And if life amongst the gilded rich seemed enchanting, for the masses existence could be dreary at best.

"We got it framed and it's now in our living room. And a few weeks after we did this, we got a call one day from the school that one of our daughters had gotten into a spat in the classroom. We had never gotten one of these calls and we didn't know what to do. Here we were, clueless parents, we should be responsible, what do we do? So we called our daughter in and we were kind of grasping and my wife said, 'Look up, there's the family mission statement, anything there seem to apply?' And my daughter kind of read down the list and she got to near the end and she said, 'We bring people together?' And suddenly, boom ... we had a way into the conversation. This is a value, this has been violated, now we had a way to talk about it."

On rethinking — or even eliminating — family dinner

"It is like the big bogeyman in families today ... Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives. Well, guess what? Dig deeper into the research and it's very interesting. It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive conversation in any family dinner. The rest is taken up with take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. And what researchers have found is you can take that 10 minutes and put it in any time of the day and get the benefit. So, if you can't have family dinner, have family breakfast! Even one meal a week, on a weekend, has the same benefit.

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