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More than 100 passengers survived a crash into the sea, after the Boeing 737 they were traveling on from West Java to Bali, Indonesia, missed the runway at Denpasar International Airport. The plane came to rest in shallow waters, simplifying rescue efforts. Photographs showed the Lion Air jet in the water, its fuselage broken just behind its wings.

The aircraft was carrying 101 passengers and seven crew members when it crashed; afterward, rescue workers used rubber boats to get people off the plane.

"The plane plunged into the sea at high speed," passenger Ignatius Juan Sinduk, 45, tells Agence France-Presse. "Everybody screamed and water suddenly surged into the plane. Passengers panicked and scrambled for life jackets. Some passengers fell, some ran into others, it was chaos.

"I managed to grab one [a lifejacket] and slowly swam out of the plane and to the shore."

Sinduk was taken to a hospital after injuring his chest in the crash. Reports also indicate passengers suffered broken bones and a possible brain hemorrhage.

At least two passengers say the crew did not warn them of the impending crash-landing.

"There was no signal, anything, it just happened suddenly," Santy Wiastuti tells the news site AU.com. An article in The Bali Post cites a different passenger with a similar account.

At least 40 people were injured in the crash. Reports of how many were hospitalized have varied, ranging from four to more than 20.

A budget airline, Lion Air has expanded rapidly since its launch in 2000. In recent months, it has placed large orders for more planes, from both Airbus and Boeing. The airline now serves cities in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.

As the Australian Broadcasting Network reports, Lion Air jetliners have been involved in at least six incidents of crashes or mishandled takeoffs and landings since the start of 2002.

Secretary of State John Kerry is asking China's government to help ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, where North Korea has issued threats of war as it tests its weapons systems. The top U.S. diplomat met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing just days before a North Korea-promised missile test.

"That meeting with the president ran over by quite a lot," NPR's Louisa Lim reports from Beijing. "And afterward, Kerry said it couldn't have been more constructive, and more forward-leaning."

The United States and China will "underscore our joint commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner," Kerry said, according to the AP.

Kerry has said his goals include getting China to stop the flow of money into North Korea, which operates under international sanctions but counts China as its main economic and political ally. It isn't clear whether Kerry was able to get Chinese officials to promise to apply pressure on North Korea; no details of any possible agreements were released.

But as The Washington Post reports, Kerry's bargaining chips in Saturday's discussions included "the possibility that if North Korea gave up its nuclear weapons capability the United States might reverse military moves in the region that have unnerved China, including additional missile defenses in Guam and Japan."

Kerry's meetings included a session with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, who said, "China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean Peninsula."

That sentiment isn't a new one for China, as Louisa tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon.

"China's top priority is stability," she says. "It wants the status quo. It wants North Korea as a buffer state between it and South Korea. So it might not be willing to do anything that might destabilize North Korea."

Kerry will travel to Japan Sunday, as his tour of East Asia continues.

North Korea's missile test is timed to coincide with the anniversary Monday of the birthday of its founder, Kim Il Sung, grandfather of current leader Kim Jong Un.

As the Two Way reported Friday, it remains possible that North Korea's young leader "might soon declare 'victory' and stand down," after U.S. and South Korean military forces conclude joint exercises in the region.

In Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro — the president of a powerful government — should be at center stage. But as he runs in Sunday's snap presidential elections, it's his larger-than-life predecessor who is getting much of the attention.

The death of Hugo Chavez, who taunted the U.S. and empowered the poor, is triggering the special vote. And Maduro is using Chavez's voice and image to ensure that the late president's socialist system remains in power for many more years to come.

Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver and Chavez confidant, became interim president last month, after Chavez, who transformed this country in 14 years of rule, died following a long battle with cancer.

The sympathy vote has given Maduro a huge advantage over opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, and most polls show the interim president with a big lead.

But Maduro is taking no chances — and that means using the Chavez card.

A Little Birdie Told Me So

On state television, Maduro explained how the late president came to him from the grave in the form of a songbird.

"All of a sudden, a little bird circled three times around me, stopped on a wooden beam, and began to sing a pretty song," Madura said.

"Then I, too, began to whistle," he said, whistling like a bird as he talked. "The little bird looked at me in a strange way. He sang, circled me once and flew away. And I felt his spirit. I felt him giving us a blessing, saying now the battle begins, go to victory."

Some in Venezuela ridiculed the story as crass politicking.

Among many of Chavez's followers, though, the story had an impact.

Daniela Paz is a 33-year-old street vendor who says Chavez was like a father figure to Venezuelans.

"No, I didn't think it was funny. There are people who took this like a joke, but I didn't see anything funny," she says about the notion of Chavez coming to Maduro in the form of a bird.

What's perfectly clear, she says, is that Chavez wanted Maduro to lead the country.

More On Venezuela

Author Interviews

'Comandante' Chavez Still Revered By Some, Despite Failings

Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders in Silicon Valley are banding together to push for comprehensive immigration reform, the Facebook co-founder announced this week. But Zuckerberg has dabbled in politically charged matters in the past.

In September 2011, the social media company created a political action committee geared for last year's election cycle, which could help Facebook gain legislative ground on privacy and patents.

And lobbyists? Facebook has them, too.

According to The New York Times, Facebook has had a Washington, D.C., office since 2007, and employs more than a dozen workers.

Just recently, Zuckerberg hosted a fundraiser for Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in Zuckerberg's Palo Alto, Calif., home. He'd been in contact with the governor since 2010 regarding Newark schools — Zuckerberg donated $100 million to them.

Business

Facebook CEO's Gift: Philanthropy Or Image Control?

Update at 11:50 a.m. ET. Radio 1 Will Play A Snippet:

There's word from NPR's Philip Reeves in London that BBC's Radio 1 now says its weekend Official Chart show will play "a clip in a journalistic environment" of "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead," which critics of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pushed up the British charts this week after the Iron Lady's death.

The BBC has more:

Our original post — "Thatcher Critics Make 'Ding Dong' No 1; Should BBC Play It?":

The death this week of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has provoked may words of praise — and many celebrations by those who did not admire the Iron Lady.

Among the things her critics have done is push "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, into the No. 1 spot on the U.K. singles chart. That, as The Associated Press writes, has created an issue for BBC Radio 1:

Should Radio 1 play the song this weekend on its Official Chart show, which as the name implies rounds up the hottest songs each week.

The Guardian reports that "the new BBC director general, Tony Hall, will have the final say." And it adds that:

"Hall told staff on Thursday that he personally thought the song and the accompanying social media campaign launched following Margaret Thatcher's death on Monday by people protesting against the former Conservative prime minister's 1980s policies was 'tasteless,' but stressed that the editorial independence of the BBC was sacrosanct."

Pizza Hut has always been a leader in stuffing more cheese into your pizza. First there was the famous Stuffed Crust, then the P'Sauna, which elevated your body temperature so you could achieve full cheese supersaturation. Now it's the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza, which replaces the crust with tiny little bowls of cheese.

Ian: Thanks, Pizza Hut! Before when I wanted to eat a bowl of cheese, I had to go through a bad breakup first!

Eva: It looks like a beautiful sunflower with a bad case of acne.

Miles: Italy just announced it's cutting off culinary ties with the United States.

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SB Nation is owned by Vox Media, which also created The Verge, a site covering digital culture, and Polygon, a gamer review and news site.

"We looked around the Web and we realized there was a race to the bottom, if you will, with a lot of content," says Jim Bankoff, the Vox CEO who hired Stout.

Bankoff was an executive with AOL in the 1990s and helped advise Arianna Huffington as she was launching The Huffington Post. He says many online aggregators focus on lists and photo galleries to the exclusion of reported pieces.

"Part of why Web content became shorter and less substantive was that publishers believed in order to have a successful digital business model, they had to produce things as quickly and as cheaply as possible," Bankoff says.

Bankoff decided to dart in the opposite direction at SB Nation.

"What we've found at Vox is that long-form stories are incredibly attractive to advertisers," Bankoff says. "People are spending a lot of time with them. I think on average it's about 17 minutes in our case, and sometimes much longer than that.

"And such a glut — and such a sea of stuff on the Web that is often not substantive, often is quick 'listicles' or even worse, we find that advertisers are flocking to quality and trying to get it where they can."

Vox is by no means the only new-media publisher betting long. The viral website BuzzFeed, which posts adorable animal and baby pictures by the cartload, also published many lengthy pieces toward the end of last year's elections. One was a reflective article by the political reporter McKay Coppins about his experience as a Mormon covering the nation's first Mormon major-party presidential nominee.

Older news organizations are finding new ways to tell stories, too. The New York Times received widespread accolades for the sophisticated marriage of narrative writing, video, photographs, maps and graphics it deployed to tell the story of an avalanche in Washington state in February.

The Wall Street Journal has posted not just hours of daily video but lengthy video treatments — effectively documentaries — on complex issues such as corruption among elite Communist Party leaders in China.

Reuters and Bloomberg News have beefed up their enterprise reporting and hired many experienced newspaper reporters. Some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced as well.

None of this activity replaces the watchdog reporting that was lost at state capitals and city halls throughout the country because of the hollowing out of major metropolitan newspapers, though some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced to try to fill the gaps.

Last month, the Pew Research Center issued a report that, if it were a Dickens novel, would have carried the title Bleak House for its depiction of depleted newsrooms filled with exhausted, demoralized reporters and editors.

The report perceived few positive trends on either the journalistic or the revenue side of the equation, though it noted new income from metered pay walls that require repeat readers to pay for access to online content. But Slate's Matt Yglesias took issue with the underlying and largely despairing conclusions of a time of constricted ambitions.

The American news media, he wrote, have "never been in better shape. ... Almost everything you'd want to know about any subject is available at your fingertips. ...

"Best of all, today's media ecology lets you add depth and context to the news," Yglesias said. He wrote that the report mistook the desires of journalists for the appetite of online readers.

Yglesias' essay triggered a sharp response. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf said Yglesias had missed the central component of American journalism: accountability.

"How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves?" Friedersdorf wrote. "How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog? Judged accordingly, the verdict is a lot murkier."

Banaszynski sees some hope, however, for the textured reporting and deep dives to which she has dedicated her career.

"When I go online, there's all of these little pockets of passion that have sprung up that are creating homes for it that never used to exist or at least were harder to find," Banaszynski says.

SB Nation's Stout says he doesn't care whether his bosses' motivation is commercial or journalistic. All he cares about, Stout says, is their willingness to let him publish the kind of writing he thinks is worth reading.

Victor (Patrick Bruel) is older, schlubbier, and has never seen a Woody Allen movie, but he also hides nothing, speaking his mind without affect and asking questions about Alice and her family that confound and challenge her — and send her back to that poster for guidance.

The choice between two men as different as Victor and Vincent at last prompts Alice to confront Allen's effect on her perspective — and how his movies fare as primers for navigating real-world relationships — but the movie doesn't want to go in that direction. (Perhaps because that would make too much sense.)

Instead, Paris-Manhattan ambles off on an extended detour through the brambles of Helene and Pierre's marital problems as Alice investigates whether the latter is having an affair. She enlists Victor, who works in private security, to break into her sister and brother-in-law's apartment, and that same night her parents do the same.

It's a setup with potential for classic comical misunderstanding, but the script plays so stultifyingly straight that no one's really surprised to see anyone else there, and they all go home. If you're wondering what the poster might have to say at a time like this, you're not the only one.

The plot lurches away from Alice on a couple more jaunts, one where Pierre and Helene wring their hands over all the time Laura is spending with the boyfriend they know so little about. He drives an SUV — is he a drug dealer? He gives her an expensive watch — is he older? What are his intentions? Who is he?

This newest problem is treated here as just another normal anxiety for the parents of a modern teenager, but, please — and this should perhaps be directed only to the parents of French teenagers who exist only in movies — just meet your adolescent daughter's boyfriend once, once, in the year they're seeing each other. It really will take some of that painful guesswork out.

Expanding the story into an ensemble piece balances some of Alice's self-absorption but also blunts her unique point of view. Woody Allen's movies have often explored an idea successfully through exaggeration, but Paris-Manhattan is a poor imitation, safely skimming the surface when a deep dive into a warped perspective would be far more interesting.

When Alice comes back into focus, it's clear that the central flaw of Paris-Manhattan is in its underwritten heroine. Alice hasn't made the mistake of seeing her life as a Woody Allen movie — it's just that she thinks life should play by those movies' off-kilter rules. The script doesn't make a judgment as to whether that's a bad thing or not, and it's unclear whether the reason Alice is single is her oversaturation with Woody Allen or that she just hasn't met the right guy yet.

The film's refusal to take a side on these questions — or even to make a statement about Allen himself — robs it of specificity. And on the topics of love, sex, life and the effect of art on how we live, Woody Allen has had a lot to say. Innocuous as it is, Paris-Manhattan does not.

The death this week of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has provoked may words of praise — and many celebrations by those who did not admire the Iron Lady.

Among the things her critics have done is push "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, into the No. 1 spot on the U.K. singles chart. That, as The Associated Press writes, has created an issue for BBC Radio 1:

Should Radio 1 play the song this weekend on its Official Chart show, which as the name implies rounds up the hottest songs each week.

The Guardian reports that "the new BBC director general, Tony Hall, will have the final say." And it adds that:

"Hall told staff on Thursday that he personally thought the song and the accompanying social media campaign launched following Margaret Thatcher's death on Monday by people protesting against the former Conservative prime minister's 1980s policies was 'tasteless,' but stressed that the editorial independence of the BBC was sacrosanct."

My earliest memory of code switching is at Pizza Hut, back when Pizza Huts were sit-down restaurants with salad bars and garlic bread. (Like any daughter of immigrants, most of my memories involve food.) My mom and dad would speak with the waiters in English, ordering our pan-crust pizzas and Pepsi products, but we used Mandarin at the table. Our Mandarin was our secret code.

It was only at restaurants, malls or school events that I ever heard my mother use English. My mom spoke to my brother and me exclusively in Mandarin since we were born, even though we were born in suburban St. Louis. My dad switched between English and Chinese with ease, but the memories of my artist-turned-diplomat mom and the early lessons she taught me — be it how to mix paints or bathe my cocker spaniel, or the importance of generosity — they all exist in Chinese.

Despite being a free spirit who raised us without many hard rules, mom insisted on our Mandarin use. "I let Sesame Street teach you English," my mom reminds me. (Thanks, public media!)

Growing up, dropping into Mandarin with Mom was so normal that nothing stands out about it in my mind. What became notable as I got older was her halting relationship with English. N's are a real trip-up for her; she likes to pronounce the letter N like "un" rather than "en," so I could tell she had to repeat or explain herself any time she needed to spell her name to make appointments. When we went to the mall together as a child, I noticed the makeup counter ladies didn't engage my mom like they did the other moms, and I wondered if she was getting left out of other mom-related groups, too.

The Angels' Share

Director: Ken Loach

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Running Time: 101 minutes

Not rated; some violent images, language, heavy alcohol usage

With: Paul Brannigan, Jasmin Riggins, William Ruane, Gary Maitland

Antiviral

Director: Brandon Cronenberg

Genre: SciFi, Thriller

Running Time: 108 minutes

Not rated; some intense images of gore, medical procedures and sexual situations

With: Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Lisa Berry

For years, undercover videos documenting animal cruelty at farms and slaughterhouses have cast the nation's meat and dairy farmers in a grim light.

In response, the livestock industry supported legislative efforts in multiple states designed to keep cameras from recording without permission in livestock plants. The Salt reported on these efforts, which activists call "ag gag" bills, last year.

But recently, the livestock industry seems to have taken a sharp turn in its legislative tactics.

Consider Assembly Bill 343 in California. Introduced in February, this bill would not prohibit a person from seeking employment at a slaughterhouse under false pretenses, which Iowa and several other states have outlawed. Nor would it forbid anyone from using a hidden camera while on the job, which Utah recently made illegal. All that AB 343 would do, in fact, is require that anyone who videotapes or records animal abuse turn over a copy of the evidence to police within 48 hours.

It sounds like the type of bill that animal welfare groups would welcome — but it isn't. Rather, these groups have branded AB 343 as simply a new, and subtler, attempt to stifle undercover investigations of animal cruelty.

"The 48-hour time limit is a new twist to stop people from compiling information," says Amanda Hitt of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helps investigate reports of animal abuses.

According to Hitt, in order to prove that a serious animal abuse problem is occurring, undercover investigators must gather lengthy documentation. "You can't prove that animal abuse is systemic and recurring through one snapshot or video of an abused cow," she says.

For this reason, says Matt Rice of the group Mercy for Animals, "The last thing we want to do is go to law enforcement at the first sign of animal abuses."

But Justin Oldfield, of the California Cattlemen's Association — AB 343's sponsor — says the bill only intends to protect animals. Rather than allowing witnesses to keep quiet while they continue to film or photograph, Oldfield says, the bill mandates prompt reporting. He says that requirement will allow enforcement agencies to take swift action at the first indication of abused animals.

But not everyone trusts that authorities will respond to such reports of abuse in the absence of uninterrupted undercover investigations lasting weeks or months.

Taimie Bryant, a professor at UCLA School of Law who focuses on animal law, tells The Salt that public prosecutors tend to prioritize types of crimes other than those involving animal cruelty.

In the past, videos shot by the Humane Society of the United States and turned over to federal prosecutors have resulted in quick action and the filing of charges, The New York Times recently reported.

In the case mentioned by the Times, charges were filed before the undercover video was made public. But that's uncommon in animal-related cases, according to Bryant. She says legal action usually only occurs if there is media coverage, public outrage and pressure to prosecute.

"Public response [to livestock abuse videos] and clamor are what usually moves these types of cases up the ladder of priorities and motivates prosecutors to take action," she says.

Even in court, judges are often easy on defendants "if the evidence of animal abuse is thin," Bryant says.

In 2009, Mercy for Animals publicly revealed seven weeks' worth of footage recorded at the Willet Dairy in Locke, N.Y. The videos show employees cutting off cows' horns and tails without using anesthesia. Bellowing calves are seen dragged by the legs away from their mothers. At least one worker was recorded digging his fingers into a struggling calf's eye socket. Eventually, an employee named Phil Niles was fined several hundred dollars on a misdemeanor animal cruelty conviction.

The Cayuga County district attorney who handled the case, Jon Budelmann, tells The Salt that Niles' conviction was based largely on footage that showed Niles hitting a cow in the head with a wrench. Other events and images recorded at the Willet Dairy might also appear cruel to some outsiders, he says. But those events did not provide grounds for criminal prosecution, because "they were considered normal within the industry," Budelmann explains.

Occasionally, federal meat inspectors do speak up for animals — but their superiors don't necessarily listen.

Take the case of USDA veterinarian and slaughterhouse inspector Dean Wyatt. In 2010, Wyatt testified before a House subcommittee that, on several occasions, he was either overruled or threatened with demotion or transfer after he told superiors about instances of extreme animal abuse he'd witnessed.

Wyatt said he'd seen employees butchering live animals at both Bushway Packing, a veal plant in Vermont, and at Seaboard Foods, a pig slaughterhouse in Oklahoma.

"He went up the chain of command reporting violations [at the Bushway veal slaughterhouse in Vermont], and they did nothing until the Humane Society [of the United States'] video came out," says Hitt with the Government Accountability Project.

California's AB 343 is scheduled to be heard by the state Assembly on April 17. Tennessee, Vermont and Nebraska are also now considering legislation that includes clauses with time limits on turning over recordings of animal abuse.

If these bills become law, they could eliminate the only source of oversight available at dairies and feedlots, warns Bryant at UCLA. She says that federal inspectors assigned to oversee animal welfare only work at slaughterhouses.

"But for dairies and feedlots," she says, "these undercover videos are all we have."

There's been a bit of a brouhaha over the Federal Reserve's inadvertent early release Tuesday evening of minutes from its closed-door March 19-20 policy meeting.

As The Associated Press writes, "employees at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group, Wells Fargo and Citigroup were among those to receive [the] market-sensitive information."

The Fed says a staffer mistakenly sent the report to a group, also including some trade associations and lawmakers, that should have gotten the information right after it was made public — not before. The Fed's inspector general is going to investigate what happened.

There haven't been any reports to indicate that anyone who got the news a day early traded on the information (which was supposed to be released at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday; after discovering the mistake, the Fed put it out to the rest of the world at 9 a.m. ET that morning).

But once the minutes were there for everyone to see, they did move financial markets. As The New York Times writes, stock markets rallied. Traders focused on signs that Fed policymakers are committed to battling "a weak economy and soft labor market," CNBC says.

All this fuss about minutes of a meeting held three weeks ago raises a question: Why do they matter so much to so many investors and financial institutions?

It's because "the markets are always looking for tiny morsels of information about what these guys are thinking," says Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics, a bond and currency consulting service that provides its clients with economic analysis.

The minutes offer a chance to see how Fed policymakers are "balancing their different views," Englund tells us. "And any subtle changes can change perceptions in the markets."

Other than occasional speeches given by Fed policymakers as well as Chairman Ben Bernanke's twice-annual testimony before Congress and his handful of news conferences each year, Fed watchers don't get much information about what the central bank's chiefs are thinking. So the meetings' minutes get parsed carefully. The policymakers gather eight times a year.

And, Englund says, "this was a bad one to leak because it did [end up] moving the market." Traders concluded, he says, that "perhaps there was more energy" expressed by Fed policymakers for gradually reducing the amount of stimulus they're giving the economy — meaning that those policymakers thought the economy is on the upswing.

Of course, with economics there's always an "on the other hand." In this case, since the Fed policymakers met in mid-March there's been disappointing news on job growth. That could mean the economy isn't doing as well as those Fed officials thought, which in turn could mean that they won't move to ease up on their stimulus efforts.

We won't know what Bernanke and his colleagues think, though, until the third week of May — when the Fed releases (presumably on time) the minutes of their April 30-May 1 policy meeting.

For the first time in 14 years, Hugo Chavez is not on the ballot for a presidential election in Venezuela. The firebrand leftist died last month at 58 after a long fight with cancer.

Pollsters say the sympathy vote and the state's huge resources will translate into a big victory in Sunday's election for Chavez's hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver turned government minister who had been a Chavez loyalist for 20 years.

Still, the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, is mounting an all-out fight for a chance to lead the oil-rich nation out of socialism.

In the gritty streets of Caracas, the capital, the crowds have been as big as ever for the young, energetic Capriles.

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Roasted fish on a stick is OK, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to cook up some fish soup?

That's what might have crossed the minds of hunter-gatherers who made the world's first cooking pots. A new analysis of pottery made 15,000 years ago in what's now Japan reveals that it was used to cook seafood, probably salmon.

Not so long ago, scientists thought hunter-gathers were too busy roaming and foraging to invent cookware. But more recent archeological discoveries in China and Japan suggest that people were making ceramic containers as early as 20,000 years ago, long before the advent of farming.

What were they cooking? Speculation first centered on nuts and plants. But this new study, published online in the journal Nature, says it was fish soup.

To find out, a multinational team analyzed the residue on pot shards found in 13 places in what's now Japan. They were made 15,000 to 11,000 years ago.

About three-quarters of the 101 shards had traces of carbon and nitrogen, suggesting that they were used to cook food from fresh or salt water. Many had traces of marine fatty acids, while only one had fatty acids typical of a grazing land animal.

The high nitrogen levels suggest that the foods cooked were something that ate other fish, rather than mollusks, according to Oliver Craig, an archaeologist at the University of York in England, and a co-author of the study.

"As some of the vessels were found some distance from the coast and still had marine signatures," he says, "we think this may be from salmon, as these animals spend most of their lives feeding in marine environments before migrating up stream."

Evidently, these earliest cooks weren't too keen on dishwashing. But their neglect is science's gain.

Cooking food makes nutrients more readily available and is thought to have given early humans an evolutionary boost.

And cooking food in a pot conserves more nutrients than grilling, according to Peter Jordan. He's director of the Arctic Center in Groningen, Netherlands, and another co-author of the study.

With grilling, he says, "lots of nutrients run away into the fire and are lost. Whereas if you cook in a container, all the nutrients, the oils and the fats, are retained."

Clay pot cooking is also more efficient, because people could park the pots on the coals and let them simmer away, freeing up time for other tasks. Crockery cooking, he says, is "enormously beneficial."

The White House unveiled its proposal Wednesday for drastic changes in government programs that donate food to fight hunger abroad — and surprised no one.

As we reported last week, rumors of such an overhaul had been circulating for weeks, arousing both hope and anger among organizations involved in global anti-hunger programs.

The rumors, it turns out, were largely on target — and the groups that previously had expressed enthusiasm or skepticism repeated those views Wednesday.

The Obama administration wants to increase sharply the share of food aid that the U.S. provides in the form of cash, rather than through food commodities that are bought in the United States and shipped abroad. Humanitarian groups could use that cash to buy food wherever it can be found most cheaply and quickly.

In addition, the U.S. would end the awkward and much-criticized practice known as "monetization." This essentially uses food as a way to transfer cash. The government buys commodities in the U.S. and ships them abroad, only to sell them on local markets in order to fund local nutrition and agricultural development projects. Critics of monetization call it a highly inefficient way to fund such projects.

The change that may matter most for the proposal's chances of success, though, is purely bureaucratic. The Obama administration wants foreign food aid to be funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development instead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This change is more than symbolic. For one thing, the agriculture committees of the U.S. Congress would lose authority over these programs — a prospect that is unlikely to please those committees and will certainly complicate the prospects for this reform on Capitol Hill.

In addition, what people think of this bureaucratic switcheroo seems to depend a great deal on their opinion of these two agencies.

Supporters of the Obama administration's proposal have no love for the USDA. They see it as a knee-jerk defender of domestic farmers, hopelessly out-of-touch when it comes to fighting hunger abroad.

Defenders of the current system, meanwhile, see USAID as a lightweight agency that continually revises its programs to fit the latest political fashion in Washington. They point out, for instance, that USAID's new flagship program in agricultural development, called Feed the Future, is active in a relatively small number of countries, most of which are friendly to the U.S. Anti-hunger programs funded through traditional monetized food aid are active in twice as many countries.

As the world waits for what's expected to be another ballistic missile test by North Korea sometime in the next few days, NPR's Frank Langfitt reports there's reason to think that tensions on the Korean Peninsula might soon ease.

On Morning Edition, Frank passed along analysis from Daniel Pinkston, who focuses on North Korea for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization "committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict."

Pinkston says that once the U.S. and South Korean militaries conclude their joint exercises later this month, North Korea "will probably claim victory. ... They will say that 'look, the Americans were really going to invade us. They were preparing for it and they ran away scared because of our nuclear deterrent [and] our great commander. ... Now we can celebrate.' "

Andree Heuschling — she was called DeeDee — was in search of fame and fortune. But she'd never heard of Renoir.

"She didn't know nothing about the painting, the painter, who was famous or not at this moment," Bourdos says.

In the film, DeeDee is sent to visit Renoir by his wife, Aline. The artist's son Jean says it was his mother's last gift to her husband. But Bourdos says there's another story about how DeeDee got there.

"She shows up one time to see Matisse, and he said, 'You are not a Matisse; you are a Renoir.' "

Sure enough, she became Renoir's last model. Pearly rose and serene on his canvases, DeeDee registers in the film as a wild girl — determined, forceful.

"She was a kind of tornado," Bourdos says. "Full of energy and a little bit lunatic. A lunatic? Yeah, yeah."

Renoir liked that: a person who knew who she was. The painter had his own demons. He could be cold. Aloof.

"To paint or create, to write, to make music — you need huge concentration," Bourdos says. "It's not an easy work. People think because you are painting flowers, children, nudes, it's an easy job. It's not at all."

Once DeeDee arrived, Bourdos says, the distracted, sad, crippled artist began coming out of himself.

"She came, and he found again a new energy to create," the director says. "That's the whole point of the story. He didn't just start to paint again. He started to paint nudes again."

"What interests me is skin," Renoir says — "the velvety texture of a young girl's skin." (Much of the film's dialogue comes from his son Jean's memoir of his father.)

"That's pretty sexy," Bourdos says. "Not just a painter saying that. It's a man. It's true for a filmmaker too."

A Bridge Between One Art And Another

And it was true for son Jean Renoir, who fell in love with DeeDee. He'd been struggling with a lack of motivation; she pushed him to make something of himself. They married. Jean Renoir became a major filmmaker and put DeeDee in some of his movies. The beautiful, wild redhead was a lover to the son and a muse to the father.

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The White House unveiled its proposal Wednesday for drastic changes in government programs that donate food to fight hunger abroad — and surprised no one.

As we reported last week, rumors of such an overhaul had been circulating for weeks, arousing both hope and anger among organizations involved in global anti-hunger programs.

The rumors, it turns out, were largely on target — and the groups that previously had expressed enthusiasm or skepticism repeated those views Wednesday.

The Obama administration wants to increase sharply the share of food aid that the U.S. provides in the form of cash, rather than through food commodities that are bought in the United States and shipped abroad. Humanitarian groups could use that cash to buy food wherever it can be found most cheaply and quickly.

In addition, the U.S. would end the awkward and much-criticized practice known as "monetization." This essentially uses food as a way to transfer cash. The government buys commodities in the U.S. and ships them abroad, only to sell them on local markets in order to fund local nutrition and agricultural development projects. Critics of monetization call it a highly inefficient way to fund such projects.

The change that may matter most for the proposal's chances of success, though, is purely bureaucratic. The Obama administration wants foreign food aid to be funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development instead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This change is more than symbolic. For one thing, the agriculture committees of the U.S. Congress would lose authority over these programs — a prospect that is unlikely to please those committees and will certainly complicate the prospects for this reform on Capitol Hill.

In addition, what people think of this bureaucratic switcheroo seems to depend a great deal on their opinion of these two agencies.

Supporters of the Obama administration's proposal have no love for the USDA. They see it as a knee-jerk defender of domestic farmers, hopelessly out-of-touch when it comes to fighting hunger abroad.

Defenders of the current system, meanwhile, see USAID as a lightweight agency that continually revises its programs to fit the latest political fashion in Washington. They point out, for instance, that USAID's new flagship program in agricultural development, called Feed the Future, is active in a relatively small number of countries, most of which are friendly to the U.S. Anti-hunger programs funded through traditional monetized food aid are active in twice as many countries.

Roasted fish on a stick is OK, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to cook up some fish soup?

That's what might have crossed the minds of hunter-gatherers who made the world's first cooking pots. A new analysis of pottery made 15,000 years ago in what's now Japan reveals that it was used to cook seafood, probably salmon.

Not so long ago, scientists thought hunter-gathers were too busy roaming and foraging to invent cookware. But more recent archeological discoveries in China and Japan suggest that people were making ceramic containers as early as 20,000 years ago, long before the advent of farming.

What were they cooking? Speculation first centered on nuts and plants. But this new study, published online in the journal Nature, says it was fish soup.

To find out, a multinational team analyzed the residue on pot shards found in 13 places in what's now Japan. They were made 15,000 to 11,000 years ago.

About three-quarters of the 101 shards had traces of carbon and nitrogen, suggesting that they were used to cook food from fresh or salt water. Many had traces of marine fatty acids, while only one had fatty acids typical of a grazing land animal.

Evidently, these earliest cooks weren't too keen on dishwashing. But their neglect is science's gain.

Cooking food makes nutrients more readily available and is thought to have given early humans an evolutionary boost.

And cooking food in a pot conserves more nutrients than grilling, according to Peter Jordan. He's director of the Arctic Center in Groningen, Netherlands, and a co-author of the study.

With grilling, he says, "lots of nutrients run away into the fire and are lost. Whereas if you cook in a container, all the nutrients, the oils and the fats, are retained."

Clay pot cooking is also more efficient, because people could park the pots on the coals and let them simmer away, freeing up time for other tasks. Crockery cooking, he says, is "enormously beneficial."

Apples and especially pears are vulnerable to a nasty bacterial infection called fire blight that, left unchecked, can spread quickly, killing fruit trees and sometimes devastating whole orchards.

"It's basically like a gangrene of your limbs. It's hard to stop" once it takes a hold, says Ken Johnson, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University.

It's such a big threat that for decades, growers have seen two antibiotics, streptomycin and oxytetracycline, as vital weapons in the fight to control the disease – even on organic apples and pears.

But their use has raised questions about transparency in organic labeling, amid concerns about the overuse of antibiotics in food production.

"This isn't what consumers expect out of organics," says Urvashi Rangan, the director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports. "Organic is supposed to be consistent in meaning," she tells The Salt.

Here's the back story.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national organic labeling standards went into effect in 2002, the two antibiotics were listed as synthetic materials approved for use in organic apple and pear production. Items on that list are revisited on a periodic basis. The notion behind the exemption for these two fruit crops was that, in-between reviews, growers would devise effective non-antibiotic-based methods for controlling fire blight.

But the antibiotic exemption is set to expire in October 2014. This week, the National Organic Standards Board is meeting in Portland, Ore., to decide on a petition from organic growers to extend that exemption one more time. Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports, is among the groups who say the answer should be a resounding no.

Antibiotics have been used in American plant and livestock agriculture since the mid-20th century. About 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. go to livestock – not just to treat disease and prevent infections, but also, primarily, to help animals put on more weight.

That heavy usage has been widely blamed for promoting the spread of antibiotic-resistant bugs. And resistance can jump from bacteria that infect livestock to microbes that sicken people. The problem of drug resistance has led to widespread calls for reining in the use of antibiotics on farms, in order to preserve the medicines' effectiveness in treating human disease.

But antibiotic use in plant agriculture is far more limited – just a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of total agricultural use, according to Virginia Stockwell, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University who studies fire blight management. Put another way, about 30 million pounds of antibiotics were used in livestock in 2011. By comparison, 36,000 pounds of antibiotics were sprayed on fruit trees – mostly on pears and apples, according to data from the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

In the U.S., up to 16 percent of all apple acreage and up to 40 percent of all pear acreage gets sprayed with antibiotics each year, she says, citing data from NASS. That's including all organic and conventionally grown fruit. Not every orchard gets sprayed every year.

"There have never been any cases where we've been able to link an antibiotic-resistant pathogen in humans to orchards," says Stockwell, who recently conducted a review of the literature on the subject for the National Organic Safety Board.

Research suggests both of the antibiotics used on fruit crops are rendered inactive in soils, she says, minimizing concerns that residues that drift to the ground after spraying would be a problem. Any residue on fruit, she says, is miniscule.

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Get recipes for Preserved Lemons, Chicken With Preserved Lemon And Green Olives, Root Vegetable Couscous With Preserved Lemon and Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette.

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.

When President Obama on Wednesday unveils his blueprint for the government's 2014 budget, he'll offer lots of ideas for changes in taxes and spending.

But the proposal likely to grab the most attention will be the one dealing with cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Many economists would applaud a change in the way Social Security officials measure inflation, but many older Americans may hiss, fearing a new formula will cut their benefits.

If Congress were to approve it, the change would directly affect the wallets of current — as well as future — recipients of Social Security.

So what is this different formula? Here are some answers about the politically charged proposal that would affect nearly all Americans who are — or plan to be — retired.

How does the Social Security Administration calculate inflation now?

Government officials know that rising consumer prices can erode the buying power of Social Security checks. So each year, they consider whether to provide a cost-of-living adjustment to keep incomes in line with consumer prices.

Their annual decision is based on any changes in prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, prepared by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. As this year began, the nearly 62 million Americans receiving Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits saw their checks go up by 1.7 percent to keep pace with the rise in the CPI.

Is the CPI a good measure of inflation?

Many economists say the CPI is not a good way to measure what people actually are spending at the store because it doesn't take into account the common-sense decisions routinely made by shoppers.

For example, if the price of blueberries were to go up, you might not buy them. Instead, you'll pick up the strawberries that are on sale. When the price of beef is high, you'll get the pork roast. The thing that matters to your budget is the total cost you pay for all of your groceries when you get to the checkout register, not what any one item costs separately.

So how would the White House change the measure for determining any cost-of-living adjustments?

Assuming that Obama does what political pundits predict, he will propose that Social Security administrators start using a different inflation measure, known as the "chained CPI." The Bureau of Labor Statistics invented this measure in 2002 to reflect how people react to price increases by using substitution, such as switching from expensive beef to cheaper pork.

What would it mean for Social Security recipients if the administration were to use the chained CPI measure to calculate benefits?

Economists say it would restrain the growth in cost-of-living-adjustments. At first, the changes would seem small because the chained CPI is usually only about a 0.25 percentage point lower than the CPI. In other words, if the CPI were to rise 2 percent, the chained CPI would show a 1.75 percent increase.

But the trimmed growth in benefits would compound over time and save the government a lot of money over coming years. In fact, the change would save Social Security nearly $130 billion in just the first decade, the Obama administration estimates.

Of course, if the government were to start putting smaller raises into Social Security checks, then recipients would be getting less money in their pockets. "It's much more than a technical fix; it is a reduction in benefits," Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR.

So why would Obama support this change? Don't Democrats always go to the mat to protect Social Security?

Typically, Democrats vigorously defend the existing structure for Social Security, and a number of them are strongly opposed to switching to the chained CPI.

But many lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — are worried that the coming waves of retiring baby boomers will put too great of a financial strain on the system that supports retirees. They are looking for ways to reduce the cost of Social Security without radically restructuring the popular program.

And Obama has said he wants to reduce federal deficit spending by nearly $2 trillion over the coming decade.

White House spokesman Jay Carney has told reporters that to achieve that fiscal goal, Obama would include the inflation-calculation change in his budget — but only if that concession were paired with higher tax revenues, particularly for the wealthy. And Obama wants special protections written into the law for the oldest and poorest seniors.

"It's not the president's ideal approach, but it is a serious compromise proposition that demonstrates that he wants to get things done" in terms of reaching a compromise with deficit hawks, Carney said.

Obama's new budget, which is subject to congressional debate and approval, would take effect Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

Would the chained CPI measure only be used to cut benefits?

No, it could be used to boost revenues as well. That's because many parts of the federal tax code, such as tax brackets and standard deductions, are adjusted annually for inflation, based on the CPI reading. But the White House wants to use the alternative benchmark. Using the chained CPI when setting the tax code would raise an additional $124 billion of tax revenue through 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Beer lovers might be alarmed to hear that beer can pick up small amounts of arsenic as it's filtered to be sparkly clear.

But researchers in Germany reported Sunday that they've found arsenic in hundreds of samples of beer, some at levels more than twice that allowed in drinking water.

When we checked in with experts about arsenic and the filtering process, which is also widely used in the wine industry, they weren't too surprised. That's because the filtering agent in question, diatomaceous earth, is a mined natural product that contains iron and other metals.

"We already knew that," says Roger Boulton, a professor in enology at the University of California, Davis. "The levels shouldn't be alarming, because it's the kind of thing you see in dust or air."

One reason that chemists are now discovering arsenic in beer is that testing methods are much more precise than in decades past, Boulton says, detecting low levels of naturally occurring elements that have always been in food products.

Still, the prospect of arsenic in a frosty lager or a rich chardonnay does beg for further exploration.

It turns out that any beer or wine that's clear has been filtered to strain out plant matter, yeast and anything else that would leave a drink looking unappealingly cloudy.

"It's really there for aesthetics," says Tom Shellhammer, a professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. "People in general will make positive quality associations with clearer beverages."

There are exceptions, he says, like a cloudy Hefeweizen beer. But the notion of a cloudy pinot grigio does lack appeal. "For many beer and wine producers," he says, "clarity is a clear performance indicator."

For centuries, the filter of choice for wine and beer has been diatomaceous earth. It's a beige powder made up of the skeletons of diatoms, tiny algae that lived in oceans many moons ago. Because the diatom fossils have lots of minute holes, they do a great job of filtering liquids — from swimming pool water to pricey champagne.

Arsenic in beer hit the news this week when Mehmet Coelhan, a researcher at the Weihenstephan research center at the Technical University of Munich, reported at a meeting of the American Chemical Society that many of the nearly 360 beers tested in Germany had trace amounts of arsenic.

A few were found to have more than 25 parts per billion of arsenic. That's twice the 10 parts per billion standard for drinking water in the United States.

Germany is proud of its Reinheitsgebot, a 16th-century purity law that demands that beer can be made of only water, hops and malt. Coelhan and his fellow chemists do a lot of work analyzing water and other ingredients for the German beer industry, so they know arsenic wasn't in the water or malt.

But they did find it in the diatomaceous earth. "We analyzed kieselguhr," Coelhan told a news conference at the ACS meeting in New Orleans on April 7, using the German word for diatomaceous earth. "We found high concentrations of extractable arsenic."

But people don't drink as much beer as they do water (or they shouldn't), and there's no U.S. or European standard for arsenic in foods. That has become an issue with arsenic in rice, which has been found in some products in the United States, including toddler formula and energy bars. So there's no way of knowing if there's enough arsenic in beer to pose a health risk.

The German researchers' findings square with a much smaller 2008 study of Italian beers, which found similar levels in some brews, as well as cadmium and lead, which are also poisonous. A few other studies have found arsenic in wine.

The wine industry has been moving away from using diatomaceous earth for decades, says John Giannini, a lecturer and vintner for the University of California, Fresno — not because it contains arsenic, but because it contains silica, so breathing it "can do damage to your lungs," he says. He has switched largely to cellulose-fiber filters to reduce the risk to students.

The downside, Giannini says, is that the cellulose can give the wine a bit of a papery taste. "What I'm doing is blending the two, to minimize the paper taste and minimize the use of DE."

Other options for filtering wine and beer include polyethylene filters, centrifuges and cross-flow filtration, which doesn't use a filter medium at all.

Washing diatomaceous earth before use reduced the amount of arsenic it released, Coelhan says, but that method hasn't been tested commercially.

Indeed, scientists have some work to do to find out if diatomaceous earth really is causing problems with arsenic in beer and wine.

"The proper study would be to compare unfiltered beer to filtered beer, beer filtered using diatomaceous earth, beer filtered using perlite, beer filtered using cross-flow filtration," says Charlie Bamforth, a professor of brewing science at the University of California, Davis. He's skeptical that diatomaceous earth could be causing troubling levels of contamination.

Abandoning diatomaceous earth altogether won't guarantee there's no arsenic or other heavy metals in beverages, UC Davis wine expert and chemical engineer Boulton told The Salt. "The sense that if you didn't use diatomaceous earth, there would be no heavy metals in beer at all is a little out of touch with nature."

In the 75 years since it was introduced, Americans have been arguing over the minimum wage.

Some say government intervention to artificially raise wages lowers demand for workers and interferes with economic freedom — preventing people who would be willing to work for less from getting jobs at all. They argue that the minimum wage especially hurts teenagers and young adults with few or no skills.

More From The Debate

In the 75 years since it was introduced, Americans have been arguing over the minimum wage.

Some say government intervention to artificially raise wages lowers demand for workers and interferes with economic freedom — preventing people who would be willing to work for less from getting jobs at all. They argue that the minimum wage especially hurts teenagers and young adults with few or no skills.

More From The Debate

On Election Day 2012, black voters waited on average nearly twice as long to vote as did white voters, while the wait time for Hispanic voters fell in between those two groups.

So say the available data, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart III. He decided to see what he could learn by examining statistics on Election Day waits and sums up his findings in a research paper titled "Waiting to Vote in 2012."

Stewart says the national average wait for white voters was 12 minutes, while that same metric for African-Americans was 23 minutes. For Hispanics, it was 19 minutes.

Although it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that some form of discrimination might have been at work, Stewart suggests that other factors could be at play, such as geography.

The data, for instance, indicate that waits tended to be longest in cities and shortest in rural ZIP codes as a general rule, though there were exceptions. Stewart writes:

"On the whole, states with the smallest populations had the lowest waits. This is related to the fact that rural areas had the shortest wait times and cities had the longest. Among respondents living in the most rural ZIP codes in the study, the overall national average wait was 5.7 minutes; among those living in the most densely populated ZIP codes, the average wait was 17.7 minutes.

"However, it should be noted that California had among the shortest wait times in the country, at an average of 7 minutes; Los Angeles County, the largest electoral jurisdiction in the nation, also averaged 7 minutes to vote. Thus, while large, urban areas may be prone to longer lines, they are not destined to have them."

British Prime Minister David Cameron's office announced Tuesday morning that "Lady Thatcher's funeral service will take place on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 at St Paul's Cathedral."

The "Iron Lady" — former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — died Monday in London following a stroke. She was 87.

According to the BBC, the funeral ceremony will include "full military honors." Both Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, plan to attend. It will be a "ceremonial" service like those held for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother in recent decades. That's "one rung down from a state funeral," the BBC adds.

According to USA Today, state funerals are normally "reserved for members of the royal family ... [though] the last state funeral held in the United Kingdom was in 1965 following the death of Sir Winston Churchill."

Thatcher was a controversial leader. During her 11 years as prime minister (1979-90) she teamed with President Reagan to stand up against communism. But she also broke Britain's trade union movement — angering many — and led her nation into a short war with Argentina over the Falklands.

There were some arrests and injuries at "celebrations" of her death Monday night in Britain, the BBC says.

Some of our earlier coverage:

— Margaret Thatcher: A Remembrance

— 5 Things To Know About Margaret Thatcher

— Britain's Thatcher An Unlikely Icon For American Conservatives

— Thatcher Authorized A Posthumous Biography

President Obama will visit Connecticut on Monday to keep pushing for new federal gun laws. The poster children for this campaign are just that — children.

The president has invited kids to the White House to watch him sign new executive orders on guns. And the images of the kids who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School are a constant reminder of the toll gun violence can take.

And it's not just the gun debate. Right now, children are also central to campaigns on immigration and same-sex marriage — demonstrating their effectiveness as political messengers.

A Time-Honored Tactic

In Miami in 1977, Anita Bryant started a campaign against gay rights. She gave her group a name that would resonate with parents in Florida and around the country: Save Our Children.

"Please join us in voting for the human rights of children — voting for decency," she urged during her campaign.

Kids are still a key part of this debate, but more often they show up on the other side, as part of the push for gay rights.

When the Supreme Court heard arguments on same-sex marriage last month, Justice Anthony Kennedy pointed out that California alone has some 40,000 kids living with two moms or two dads.

"They want their parents to have full recognition and full status," Kennedy said. "The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?"

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia brought up kids, too, but in another context: "There's considerable disagreement among — among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a — in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not," Scalia said during arguments. "Some states do not — do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason."

On almost any issue, kids can make an argument more compelling.

"Kids are more of a blank canvas," says Elizabeth Wilner, who studies political advertising for the firm Kantar Media CMAG. "The standard prejudices and thoughts people might bring to a particular issue tend to get left by the wayside when they're watching an ad that features a kid."

People can easily pass judgment on gays and lesbians or condemn those who came to the United States illegally. It's much harder to dismiss their children.

"I think it immediately unfangs the opponent," says Mark Fitzloff, an executive at the advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. "Because what are you going to do? You're going to attack children? I mean, it's a smart chess move to anticipate your opponent's next move and pull the power out of it."

That's one reason the DREAM Act kids have been such an effective face of the immigration debate. They came to the United States illegally through no fault of their own. And people have seen that message online more than half a million times in this video.

Thousands of supporters will descend on the U.S. Capitol Wednesday to call for legislation that creates a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Sound familiar?

But this time, unlike in 2007 and 2010 when immigration legislation died in Congress after similar demonstrations, proponents of an overhaul say politics has swung in inexorably toward their side.

"I've been working on this issue for more than a decade, and it feels unstoppable now," says Ana Avendano, director of immigration and community action at the AFL-CIO.

Momentum, however, has met Congress, where bipartisan "gangs" in the Senate and the House have been wrestling with writing comprehensive overhaul legislation — with some success, and a few setbacks.

The long-awaited bill from the Senate's Gang of Eight, which includes Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is now expected to be released next week at the earliest.

Senators and lobbyists continue to haggle over two of the stickiest remaining issues: Rules governing visas for foreign agricultural workers and border security thresholds Republicans like Rubio want met before citizenship paths are opened.

Rubio spokesman Alex Conant says that the senator, seen as key to a legislative deal, is not commenting on the thresholds or "triggers," or any other part of the bill while senators are negotiating.

Republican opponents of citizenship options are wary of the implications of getting behind anything that smacks of amnesty, and the border controls are seen as one element of mitigating political fallout.

But it appears that a consensus has developed among advocates for a comprehensive overhaul that a path to citizenship should trump every other legislative consideration.

Says Gustavo Torres, a Maryland-based activist and one of the rally organizers: "What we really want is legislation now. We want a path to citizenship."

The Senate gang has been considering a 13-year path to citizenship, and perhaps considerably shorter for farm workers here illegally, as well as a system that could levy fines and assess back taxes on those seeking permanent status.

"The path to citizenship is the prime directive of the civil rights community," Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said this week.

Trip Wires

The AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have worked out a deal on one potentially polarizing element of the effort.

A new program will allow, over five years, up to 200,000 low-skilled foreign workers to receive visas to work at jobs gone unfilled by Americans.

In its first year, the deal would allow about 20,000 workers in any industry to receive visas, says Avendano of the AFL-CIO. There would be a limit on the number allotted to construction companies.

"The agreement with the Chamber is solid," she says. "It has broad support across the country."

In a statement, Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue called the worker program "just one important component of comprehensive immigration reform," and said border security, a pathway to citizenship "under tight criteria" and an employment verification system also needed to be part of a solution.

What remains unresolved is how a new temporary, seasonal guest worker visa program would play out in the agricultural industry.

There, negotiators representing the growers and the laborers remain at loggerheads over the number of visas and minimum wage requirements under any new program.

Diana Tellefson Torres, executive director at the United Farm Workers Foundation, declined to disclose specifics of confidential negotiations underway.

But she characterized current industry proposals as potentially harmful to the wages and working conditions of agricultural workers here legally.

"We want to make sure that those who are already here are not affected adversely," Tellefson Torres says.

Legal farm workers earn an average hourly wage of $10.80, Tellefson Torres says, and of the 1.6 million farm workers in the U.S., and estimated 1 million are here illegally.

Those familiar with the negotiations say that agribusiness has advocated a program that would begin with the authorization of 200,000 guest worker visas, know as "H-2A visas," and raise or eliminate the cap going forward.

The current H-2A program since 2005 has set a cap of 85,000 visas for seasonal farm workers.

But the debate over agricultural guest worker visas may remain unresolved as the legislation moves forward, first to the Senate Judiciary Committee where Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, has promised a full airing.

"A specific agricultural program would be good, but it's not essential," Tellefson Torres says. "Our first priority is to ensure that farm workers that are here are able to get on the path to citizenship."

The Coalition

Immigration overhaul advocates have worked to expand their reach, and diversity the face of immigrants to beyond the Hispanic community.

In a conference by rally organizers this week, Gustavo Torres of Casa de Maryland, a Latino and immigrant advocacy organization, was joined not only by union officials, but also by representatives of the LGBT community and those advocating for Filipino immigrants.

The Migration Policy Institute in a 2009 study estimated that the number of unauthorized immigrants from the Philippines had increased about 33 percent since 2000. Filipinos, however, make up just 2 percent of immigrants here illegally.

Gay and lesbian activists like Rachel Tiven have characterized the immigration issue as a "shared struggle among the overlapping LGBT and immigrant communities."

Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, which provides legal services to those in the LGBT community affected by U.S. immigration law, says that the gay community's recent civil rights successes should be seen as a model.

"We play to win," Tiven said this week. "We want the right to get in line, and when we get in, we want to make sure it's a line that's going to move."

In the 75 years since it was introduced, Americans have been arguing over the minimum wage.

Some say government intervention to artificially raise wages lowers demand for workers and interferes with economic freedom — preventing people who would be willing to work for less from getting jobs at all. They argue that the minimum wage especially hurts teenagers and young adults with few or no skills.

More From The Debate

Buckle up — climate change could make this a bumpy flight.

That's according to a newly published study by two British scientists who say increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will make "clear air turbulence" — which can't be easily spotted by pilots or satellites — more common over the North Atlantic. That means the potential for gut-wrenching flights between the U.S., Europe and points east.

According to Scientific American, researchers Paul D. Williams and Manoj M. Joshi, "used computer simulations to fast-forward to the year 2050. They fed that future climate data to 21 turbulence-predicting algorithms."

According to the BBC:

"The modelling suggested the average strength of transatlantic turbulence could increase by between 10% and 40%, and the amount of airspace likely to contain significant turbulence by between 40% and 170%, where the most likely outcome is around 100%. In other words, a doubling of the amount of airspace affected.

" 'The probability of moderate or greater turbulence increases by 10.8%,' said Dr Williams."

My earliest memory of code switching is at Pizza Hut, back when Pizza Huts were sit-down restaurants with salad bars and garlic bread. (Like any daughter of immigrants, most of my memories involve food.) My mom and dad would speak with the waiters in English, ordering our pan crust pizzas and Pepsi products, but we used Mandarin at the table. Our Mandarin was our secret code.

It was only at restaurants, malls or school events that I ever heard my mother use English. My mom spoke to my brother and me exclusively in Mandarin since we were born, even though we were born in suburban St. Louis. My dad switched between English and Chinese with ease, but the memories of my artist-turned-diplomat mom and the early lessons she taught me — be it how to mix paints, or bathe my Cocker Spaniel or the importance of generosity — they all exist in Chinese.

Despite being a free spirit who raised us without many hard rules, mom insisted on our Mandarin use. "I let Sesame Street teach you English," my mom reminds me. (Thanks, public media!)

Growing up, dropping into Mandarin with Mom was so normal that nothing stands out about it in my mind. What became notable as I got older was her halting relationship with English. N's are a real trip-up for her; she likes to pronounce the letter N like "un" rather than "en," so I could tell she had to repeat or explain herself any time she needed to spell her name to make appointments. When we went to the mall together as a child, I noticed the makeup counter ladies didn't engage my mom like they did the other moms, and I wondered if she was getting left out of other mom-related groups, too.

President Obama will visit Connecticut on Monday to keep pushing for new federal gun laws. The poster children for this campaign are just that — children.

The president has invited kids to the White House to watch him sign new executive orders on guns. And the images of the kids who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School are a constant reminder of the toll gun violence can take.

And it's not just the gun debate. Right now, children are also central to campaigns on immigration and same-sex marriage — demonstrating their effectiveness as political messengers.

A Time-Honored Tactic

In Miami in 1977, Anita Bryant started a campaign against gay rights. She gave her group a name that would resonate with parents in Florida and around the country: Save Our Children.

"Please join us in voting for the human rights of children — voting for decency," she urged during her campaign.

Kids are still a key part of this debate, but more often they show up on the other side, as part of the push for gay rights.

When the Supreme Court heard arguments on same-sex marriage last month, Justice Anthony Kennedy pointed out that California alone has some 40,000 kids living with two moms or two dads.

"They want their parents to have full recognition and full status," Kennedy said. "The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?"

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia brought up kids, too, but in another context: "There's considerable disagreement among — among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a — in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not," Scalia said during arguments. "Some states do not — do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason."

On almost any issue, kids can make an argument more compelling.

"Kids are more of a blank canvas," says Elizabeth Wilner, who studies political advertising for the firm Kantar Media CMAG. "The standard prejudices and thoughts people might bring to a particular issue tend to get left by the wayside when they're watching an ad that features a kid."

People can easily pass judgment on gays and lesbians or condemn those who came to the United States illegally. It's much harder to dismiss their children.

"I think it immediately unfangs the opponent," says Mark Fitzloff, an executive at the advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. "Because what are you going to do? You're going to attack children? I mean, it's a smart chess move to anticipate your opponent's next move and pull the power out of it."

That's one reason the DREAM Act kids have been such an effective face of the immigration debate. They came to the United States illegally through no fault of their own. And people have seen that message online more than half a million times in this video.

Congress returns from a two-week recess amid reports that a gun deal in the Senate may have gained late momentum; a focus on immigration to include a rally on Capitol Hill; and a budget proposal from President Obama that already has some in his own party fuming.

Here's what's happening on key issues this week:

Guns
Obama travels to Connecticut on Monday to keep the focus on gun control in the state where, nearly four months ago, 20 young children and six educators were massacred. Last week, the Connecticut Legislature passed tough new state gun restrictions, a measure signed into law by Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy.

While some states have taken action to toughen and, in some instances, loosen gun restrictions since the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown, Conn., Congress remains slowed by its own processes and the competing political pressure of interest groups.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported Monday that despite opposition from the NRA, "fresh Republican support" could allow a bipartisan agreement on a measure to expand federal background checks for gun buyers. The idea has overwhelming public support in polling, and would close a loophole in current law that requires no such check for sales at gun shows.

The idea was considered an important but relatively middle-of-the-road proposal among post-Newtown calls for a new ban on assault weapons and a bullet limit in ammunition clips. But over time, support in Congress failed to materialize sufficiently to assure much of anything would become law. Now, background checks might form the framework of any deal on Capitol Hill. The Post reports:

"In a move that could draw other Republicans as well as Democrats from conservative states who have not yet backed Obama's agenda, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), a key Democratic broker, has spent the past few days crafting the framework of a possible deal with Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.).

"Manchin and Toomey are developing a measure to require background checks for all gun purchases except sales between close family members and some hunters, which addresses concerns of some conservatives."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minster and "Iron Lady" who died on Monday, authorized a biography to be published after her death. Written by Charles Moore, it will be published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin UK. Allen Lane said in a statement: "The biography was commissioned in 1997 on the understanding that it would not be published during Baroness Thatcher's lifetime. Charles Moore was given full access to Baroness Thatcher's private papers and interviewed her extensively." The book, titled Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning, will be published "immediately following her funeral" next week.

On a related note, let's all take a moment to remember the time Thatcher publicly spanked Christopher Hitchens. From Hitchens' "On Spanking," in the London Review of Books: "I stooped lower, with an odd sense of having lost all independent volition. Having arranged matters to her entire satisfaction, she produced from behind her back a rolled-up Parliamentary order-paper and struck — no, she thwacked — me on the behind. I reattained the perpendicular with some difficulty. 'Naughty boy,' she sang out over her shoulder as she flounced away. Nothing that happened to the country in the next dozen years surprised me in the least."

Victoria Beale takes down Paulo Coelho in a vicious essay for The New Republic titled, "The Gospel of Success: Paulo Coelho's Vapid Philosophy": "If you've absorbed any of Coelho's incredible commercial success, without actually reading the 65-year-old, Brazilian author, it's genuinely shocking to realize just how shoddy and lightweight his books are, how obvious and well-trodden their revelations." That is what Coelho gets for writing things like this in his latest book: "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books, tells New York Magazine about phrases he'd like to ban from his magazine: "Even more insidious and common is in terms of, a fine phrase if you are talking about mathematical equations or economic functions in which specific 'terms' are defined, but it is just loose and woolly when you say things like 'in terms of culture,' for which there are simply no clear terms."

President Obama launches a brain mapping initiative, but he can't concentrate enough to shoot better than 2-for-22 on the basketball court during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. Mark Sanford wins the GOP runoff in South Carolina and faces Stephen Colbert's sister next month. Plus, NPR's Ron Elving and health correspondent Julie Rovner on the NRA's proposal of having armed guards in schools.

There's breaking budget news from several places this morning:

— "President Obama next week will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his annual budget in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to compromise with Republicans and revive prospects for a long-term deficit-reduction deal, administration officials say." (The New York Times)

— "President Obama will release a budget next week that proposes significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security and fewer tax hikes than in the past, a conciliatory approach that he hopes will convince Republicans to sign onto a grand bargain that would curb government borrowing and replace deep spending cuts that took effect March 1." (The Washington Post)

— "President Barack Obama will offer cuts to Social Security and other entitlement programs in a budget proposal aimed at swaying Republicans to compromise on a deficit-reduction deal, a senior administration official said." (Reuters)

— "President Barack Obama's budget will include the final deficit reduction offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner in December, including cuts to both Medicare and Social Security, according to a senior administration official." (Politico)

Politico adds that "the administration hopes including the cuts — adopting the chained CPI for Social Security and slashing about $400 billion from Medicare over the next decade — can persuade Republicans to roll back the cuts in the sequester and agree to further revenue hikes."

In July 2011, NPR's Scott Horsley reported for Morning Edition about how using the "chained CPI" to measure inflation might help reduce the deficit because it could mean lower increases in payments to those who get some federal benefits.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

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Potter's latest film proceeds in a different way in terms of style and storytelling from her past work.

Orlando, for instance, featured actors talking straight into the camera. Potter's cross-cultural love story Yes had the actors delivering their lines in iambic pentameter. And Rage consisted entirely of dramatic monologues staged to look like interviews on a cellphone camera; the film was even released on the iPhone. Potter says she wrote the script of Ginger & Rosa with "accessibility" in mind. It was a deliberate strategy to avoid the filmmaking touches of her previous work.

"It's always a good principle to reinvent and to be prepared to throw away the things that you cling to as being your identity," she says. "And I don't just mean this in films; I mean this in life. We're not a set of habits. And I think sometimes to return to kind of first principles of pure intention, and be prepared to throw away your signature, if you like, can be incredibly liberating. It's quite terrifying, but very liberating, too. And in that way one finds new things to do."

A 'Kitchen-Sink Drama' Made New

This time the new thing to do turned out to be something old, says poet and critic Sophie Mayer, author of a book on Potter's films. Mayer says Ginger & Rosa draws on the realist style that swept onto British stage and screen productions, as well as literature and painting, in the period this film depicts.

"It seems very familiar to us now, but at the time it was a huge shock to depict people in their kitchens," Mayer says. "You know, you use the phrase 'kitchen sink drama' to dismiss things, but until that point, people hadn't been seen in their kitchens. There was no consciousness in film of that kind of domestic life."

There was also no consciousness of the politics of domestic life — the silent suffering for women such as Ginger's mother in the film. It's the silence of that generation of women in 1962 who could not know they were on the cusp of feminism's reawakening, and it was on Potter's mind as she wrote the script for Ginger & Rosa.

"When my mother died in 2010, I remembered — in a way, painfully — the struggles of her and the women of her generation, and [I] experienced them as ... silent partners in the beginning of the time of change in the '60s," Potter says. "Women, who, in many ways, were sacrificed for that change."

It's a sacrifice Potter acknowledges at the end of Ginger & Rosa with a dedication to her mother.

The budget President Obama will send to Congress Wednesday is expected to include some $400 billion in reductions to Medicare and other health programs.

And if the word around Washington is correct, it may also include a proposal aimed at winning some bipartisan backing – by changing the way Medicare patients pay for their care.

But there have been previous efforts to streamline Medicare's antiquated system of deductibles and copayments. And none, so far, has been successful.

Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says having separate deductibles and co-insurance schemes for Medicare's parts A and B is an anachronism that dates back to the 1960s, when Medicare was created.

"That's been a legacy which has been very hard to change," he says, "because it requires an act of Congress, which requires agreement ... which tends not to be the case."

Currently, Medicare Part A, which covers hospital and skilled nursing home care, and Part B, which covers doctor and outpatient costs, have separate deductible and copayment schemes. This year the Part A hospital deductible is $1,184; the Part B outpatient deductible is $147.

Miller is one of many economists who say it would make much more sense to have a single, merged deductible of around $500. That, however, would likely make many patients pay more. That's because most Medicare patients aren't hospitalized in a given year, but they do almost all go to the doctor.

Under most of the proposals floating around, said Howard Bedlin, vice president for public policy and advocacy of the National Council on Aging, "about 30 million beneficiaries would end up paying more and about 2 million would end up paying less."

In exchange, however, says Miller, beneficiaries would likely get something they don't get now – "stop-loss" protection. That agreement for Medicare to cover all of a patient's medical costs after he or she reaches a specific threshold is something the program currently – and almost inexplicably – lacks.

"That's the world in which you need insurance," Miller says. "But Medicare traditionally doesn't have that type of structure."

Shots - Health News

The Hidden Costs Of Raising The Medicare Age

The United States lost close to 6 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2009. Now, slowly, some of those jobs are coming back. Over the past three years, the U.S. economy has gained a half-million manufacturing jobs.

But even with the manufacturing recovery, there are both winners and losers — and sometimes they're created by the same company.

Take the case of the Swedish manufacturer Electrolux. A century ago, it got its start in vacuum cleaners, and now it makes a wide range of appliances. It's the world's second-largest appliance manufacturer behind Whirlpool, owns the Frigidaire brand and makes Kenmore products as well.

In 2004, Electrolux began a major restructuring, shuffling jobs from high-cost to low-cost areas, from Sweden to Hungary, from England to Poland and from Denmark to Thailand. This summer, Electrolux will begin moving jobs from a town outside Montreal to Memphis, Tenn., where it will begin production of ovens and stoves in a brand-new, high-tech plant.

With the move, Electrolux will go from paying a base union wage of close to $19 an hour in Canada to roughly one-third less in Memphis. The company is expected to eventually hire about 1,200 people at the Memphis location.

'Back To The Future'

Jack Truong, president and CEO of Electrolux Major Appliances North America, won't speculate on how long the company might stay in Memphis. The company has not committed to a minimum amount of time, but Truong says Electrolux is committed to working with Memphis to build success so that it can stay there for the long term.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton is delighted about the jobs. "We're actually going back to the future here. This used to be a heavy manufacturing city," he says.

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On the importance of luck and family connections

"[Success] is so much about luck — that's the real thing — or it's often about class. I mean, if you were born into a family with connections, that is huge.

"[Jules] doesn't [have family connections]. And she doesn't understand that in the beginning when she thought that they all started out the same and that their lives would have a trajectory in sort of lockstep — like the Rockettes, going off into the world kicking at the same pace. ... When my friends and I first moved to the city, everybody lived in these junky little apartments and we all had takeout from Chinese restaurants and we all just sort of lived the same semi-marginal lives. But as time went on, and this is true in this novel, certain things could somehow take effect. Like if you were an artist, instead of getting a job as a paralegal, maybe your parents would give you money and you could go off and rent the cottage of a friend in Maine and you could really write a novel there. Whatever it was, she didn't understand that that was going to happen. She thought it was all even and it was all fair, and of course nothing's even and nothing's fair."

On Jules' struggle with envy for Ethan and Ash

"I was really interested in the subject of envy. But not that kind of big, overt envy, but instead the kind of quiet envy that you might feel for people you really love. She doesn't have — Jules — a big, big talent. So she becomes a therapist. She actually is pretty good at it and her patients love her. But then she looks over and over there in the distance are Ash and Ethan and they are living a life that she always thought was possible for her. So, can you enjoy your life? Is it enough if you're the therapist married to the really nice husband? What's enough to do with your talent and your brain?

“ It's like your life gets put through a funnel, and you see what remains.

"In any case — although I did not know it then — to fall asleep on Ifat's bed was milk enough, to sleep in crumbling rest beside her body. Sometimes like water she runs through the sentences of sleep, a medium something other than itself, refracting, innocent of all the algae it can bear and capable of much transmogrification. Her water laps around me almost in reproach: '"You were distracted, when I requested your attention. You were not looking. I was milk."'

The elegiac immediacy of this passage, the elaborateness of its metaphor, the language teetering on the edge of overreach — these are hallmarks of Meatless Days. Here, she describes her stubborn grandmother dragging home to her appalled family a live goat to be butchered for the festival of Eid: "Like a question mark interested only in its own conclusions, her body crawled through the gates ... moving in her eerie crab formations, [she] ignored the hangman's rope she firmly held as behind her in the gloaming minced, hugely affable, a goat."

Comedy and tragedy, tenderness and horror, sit close to one another in this remarkable book, doing justice to the piecemeal, intimate ways memory actually lives in the mind.

You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

In some ways, it was like any other writing class: backpacks, books, rough drafts, discussions about literature. But instructor Christine Dumaine Leche and her students weren't sitting in a college classroom or a community center — they were on an air base in Afghanistan and the students usually came to class after long days in a war zone. Leche was teaching them to translate their experiences — the danger, the boredom, the painful separation from their families, the fear and the hatred — into prose.

Out of that classroom came dozens of intimate narratives of life as a soldier, including an essay by Sgt. 1st Class Billy Wallace about a previous deployment to Iraq. It contains this scene of him leaving home for that tour:

The dreaded time had come. Time to walk the family to the truck and say goodbye. My wife, Stefanie, and I walked hand in hand. She was squeezing my hand pretty hard. The walk to the truck seemed like the "green mile." I picked up my two youngest, Devon and Caleb.

"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Caleb.

"I'm going to Iraq to make it a better place."

Then he plunged his fist, a pretend dagger, into my heart. My oldest, Austin, assured me he would be the man of the house.

Then Caleb piped up again, "Are you going to die in Iraq, Daddy?" Before I could answer he started crying as if he had broken his leg — long, deep guttural screams.

Devon, who has Down syndrome and is a total daddy's boy, said, "Daddy, no die please."

In some ways, it was like any other writing class: backpacks, books, rough drafts, discussions about literature. But instructor Christine Dumaine Leche and her students weren't sitting in a college classroom or a community center — they were on an air base in Afghanistan and the students usually came to class after long days in a war zone. Leche was teaching them to translate their experiences — the danger, the boredom, the painful separation from their families, the fear and the hatred — into prose.

Out of that classroom came dozens of intimate narratives of life as a soldier, including an essay by Sgt. 1st Class Billy Wallace about a previous deployment to Iraq. It contains this scene of him leaving home for that tour:

The dreaded time had come. Time to walk the family to the truck and say goodbye. My wife, Stefanie, and I walked hand in hand. She was squeezing my hand pretty hard. The walk to the truck seemed like the "green mile." I picked up my two youngest, Devon and Caleb.

"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Caleb.

"I'm going to Iraq to make it a better place."

Then he plunged his fist, a pretend dagger, into my heart. My oldest, Austin, assured me he would be the man of the house.

Then Caleb piped up again, "Are you going to die in Iraq, Daddy?" Before I could answer he started crying as if he had broken his leg — long, deep guttural screams.

Devon, who has Down syndrome and is a total daddy's boy, said, "Daddy, no die please."