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At a bustling polling station in the Lahore district where Imran Khan is seeking a parliament seat, the attitudes of Pakistani voters reflected the intensity of the contest between the former cricket star and former two-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Khan had ignited a passionate following among the country's youth as he campaigned for a "New Pakistan" and hoped to re-draw the electoral map. Nearly 40 million new young voters were added to the rolls this election.

First-time voter Bilal Ahmed, 22, sports a T-shirt that reads, "Love, Respect, Support for Imran Khan," whose PTI party symbol on the ballot was a cricket bat.

"Imran Khan is saying that we will stand as a nation, whereas the other parties are still considering [taking] loans," he says. "We don't need loans. We want to stand by ourselves, we will support ourselves, we will rise as one nation. ... We don't need loans; we need jobs. We need industry in our country. We don't want to be begging around the world. We don't want that. We want to be one nation that stands by itself."

In 2008, Rebecca Posamentier visited StoryCorps with her mother, Carol Kirsch.

"My mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and I was hoping to get her voice and her thoughts on tape before she couldn't express them anymore," Posamentier said recently during a second visit to StoryCorps.

Kirsch died in March 2011, but during that first visit, Posamentier chatted with her mother about well, motherhood.

"Um, Mom was very insecure, because she had polio as a child, and she had a limp for pretty much all her life," Kirsch said about her own mother. "She felt that she was not whole somehow, so I had a rocky relationship with Mom. And I was afraid to have children for many years, but I'm so glad I did."

At the time of the first StoryCorps visit, Posamentier was in the late stages of pregnancy with her first child. She asked her mother what she wanted to share with her granddaugher once she was born.

"Well, I'd want her to know that she's going to be very loved," Kirsch said. "And, you know, I've told you that I was worried that my Alzheimer's would get worse, and that I wouldn't be able to spend time I want with her. I really hope I can do that for a while."

And, for the first two years the grandmother and granddaughter were very close.

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пятница

In Polley's documentary, that recollection is accompanied by home-movie images of them building a snowman — conventional documentary footage, you might say. Other moments are less conventional. There are stops and starts in the voice-over — because Dad isn't just a character in this story, you see; he's the narrator, too, which gives the film a very intimate feel.

That only gets enhanced when her brothers and sisters drop one story on Sarah they might not tell someone else.

"I remember Johnny saying [that] your father might be someone that Mum had acted with in a play," one brother observes. "I remember we talked about how you didn't look like Dad," a sister says. "And Dad joked about it."

Those reminiscences about an elusive mother turn into a search for clues that will literally explain how this filmmaker came into the world. And though that might keep another director occupied, it's just the start here, because no two children, no two friends — no two lovers, even — paint the same portrait of Diane Polley. Mum was adventuresome but trapped, says a kid, dutiful but wild, says a confidant, talented (maybe) and unfulfilled (sometimes) and by many accounts a shy extrovert.

And as her youngest daughter processes all these contradictions, an exercise in family navel-gazing becomes something more meta — less about the stories themselves than about the often uproarious ways in which people tell stories.

Including the filmmaker, whose previous fictional treks behind the camera — the Alzheimer's love story Away from Her, for instance — have hardly been conventional. Here, she trips up your expectations right through the final fade.

Seriously, one of the most jaw-dropping revelations occurs halfway through the final credits. All of which makes the stories Sarah Polley tells in Stories We Tell an enormously intriguing lot. (Recommended)

After retiring as Pakistan's most celebrated cricket player, Imran Khan has dabbled on the margins of Pakistani politics for nearly two decades, trying to make a mark.

The sportsman turned philanthropist who led a playboy lifestyle in his younger days has attracted endless media attention but until now neither he nor his movement has had any real impact.

As Pakistanis vote in a crucial parliamentary election on Saturday, could this time be different?

Watching Khan in the final stretch of the race is to see a man who found it impossible to stop campaigning. His critics have called him a political dilettante in the past, but he now seemed addicted to the center of the political arena as the blue jean and T-shirt clad youth of the country mobilized behind him and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI party. He has benefited as discontent with the traditional political elite has begun to boil over.

The former national cricket team captain looked supremely confident in the final weeks of the campaign, relishing the throngs of supporters and sparring with television anchors.

More On Pakistan

The Two-Way

Pakistani Politician Imran Khan Falls From Lift During Campaign

They're baaack! Both Mark Sanford and Benghazi made triumphant returns to the national consciousness this week, as Sanford won the special election in South Carolina and career diplomat Gregory Hicks testified about what happened in Libya – testimony that pleased Republicans, displeased Democrats. Meanwhile, NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving are still seeking their own redemption.

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It's hard out here for a black man the Internet accidentally thrusts into the limelight. Those 15 minutes ain't no joke.

Charles Ramsey, the Cleveland man who helped Amanda Berry escape from her captor and free her fellow captives, is already a full-fledged Thing On The Internet, primarily owing to a live local television news interview. During that interview, Ramsey proved himself a fantastic storyteller, and he kept it extra-extra-real.

What made Ramsey really blow up on the Internet was his observation at the end of the interview.

"Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," Ramsey told a local TV reporter. The local reporter quickly pivoted away.

(He's not lying: Cleveland is one of the 10 most segregated cities in the U.S., according to a study from two researchers.)

Like Ted Williams, the homeless "man with the golden voice," Antoine Dodson of "Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife!" fame, and Sweet Brown of "Oh, Lordy, there's a fire!" — three other poor black folks who became unlikely Internet celebrities in recent years — Ramsey seemed at ease in front of the camera. And of course, he's already been Auto-Tuned.

Very quickly, they went from individuals who lived on America's margins to embodying a weird, new kind of fame. Williams ended up being offered work doing voiceovers for radio. Dodson leveraged his newfound notoriety to get his family out of the projects. (Our colleagues at Tell Me More sat down with Dodson a little while back to talk about blowing up and moving out of the 'hood.)

This new notoriety mimics the old, familiar trajectory of celebrity. We start to learn all sorts of things about these regular people that "complicates" them. Their foibles become part of the story. Williams' history of drug abuse and petty crime quickly came to the fore; he would go on to appear on Dr. Phil to talk about his estrangement from his family. Dodson would later land in the news for run-ins with the law for drug possession. (Just this week, Dodson announced that he was joining a nationalist religious order called the Black Hebrew Israelites and renouncing his homosexuality.)

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That's still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald's — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

"I have a feeling half the ppl who say 'Oooh I love watching him on the internet!' would turn away if they saw him on the street," the writer Sarah Kendzior tweeted.

Dodson and Brown and Ramsey are all up in our GIFs and all over the blogosphere because they're not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing on our TVs. They're actually not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing at all, which might explain why we get so silly when they make one of their infrequent forays into our national consciousness.

Eight people in New York have been charged as part of what prosecutors say was a global ring of cyber-criminals who stole $45 million by hacking into prepaid credit card accounts and then using the data to get cash from thousands of ATMs around the world.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch described the alleged scheme as "a massive 21st-century bank heist that reached across the Internet and stretched around the globe. In the place of guns and masks, this cyber-crime organization used laptops and the Internet."

Prosecutors say the eight suspects being charged, one of whom is now dead, were the New York cell of the operation that involved people in 26 countries.

Here's how the scam allegedly worked:

— Criminal hackers accessed computers handling transactions of prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit cards issued to customers in the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

— Once inside the system, the criminals harvested PINs and erased withdrawal limits on the cards.

— So-called "cashers" or "mules" encoded magnetic stripe cards, such as gift cards, with the stolen data so that ATMs would accept them.

— Using the stolen PINs, the cashers coordinated a time to make hundreds or thousands of large withdrawals en masse.

What isn't immediately clear is how prosecutors think everything was coordinated and how everyone allegedly got paid.

Those charged are Jael Mejia Collado, Joan Luis Minier Lara, Evan Jose Pea, Jose Familia Reyes, Elvis Rafael Rodriguez, Emir Yasser Yeje and Chung Yu-Holguin, all residents of Yonkers, N.Y. The eighth defendant, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pea, also known as "Prime" and "Albertico," was reportedly murdered on April 27 in the Dominican Republic.

According to Wired:

"The gang first struck December 22 when hackers targeted a credit card processor that handled transactions for prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued to customers of the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC, or RAKBANK, in the United Arab Emirates. They handed off the stolen card data to cashers in 20 countries who withdrew $5 million in cash in more than 4,500 ATM withdrawals.

"The eight charged in New York ... were responsible for allegedly siphoning at least $2.8 million from more than 750 Manhattan ATMs in 2.5 hours.

"The second round of the operation struck on February 19, beginning around 3pm and continuing until 1:30 the next morning. It targeted another bank card processor that handled transactions for the Bank of Muscat in Oman. Within 10 hours, cashers in 24 countries had made about 36,000 ATM withdrawals totaling about $40 million."

Let's start with a brief tour of streaming television online.

For quite a while, streaming television meant sitting and watching it on your computer. It wasn't ideal, for obvious reasons. Then, it got easier to sit and watch it on your phone. That wasn't ideal, either, if you liked the living-room experience. Tablets do a better job than phones of delivering a portable but less tiny experience.

But people who want TV to seem exactly like TV, the solution is either a smart TV, or some version of a set-top box. A set-top box might be your existing game console (like an Xbox or a PlayStation), your existing Blu-ray player, or a standalone device — most popularly (for the moment) an Apple TV if you're an Apple person or a Roku or Boxee device if you're not.

A set-top box uses your internet connection (some are wireless; some are wired) to stream content directly to your television, where it looks ... just like watching television. They can give you access to what you get from Hulu and Netflix, and they both have well-established purchase/rental outlets for things that don't stream free: on Apple TV you can use iTunes, and on the Roku, you can use Amazon Instant Video or Vudu, to name two.

Set-top boxes, depending on the one you pick, also have a bunch of other channels where you can get all kinds of other stuff, some of which is free, some of which requires a separate paid subscription (like MLB TV, which shows baseball), and some of which requires that you prove you have an existing subscription (like HBO GO, which will give you HBO content if you sign in as a cable subscriber who has HBO already). If you want to see how complicated this can get, look at this comparison chart, which is a year old but demonstrates the degree to which everybody's got a different collection of material.

As if this isn't all complicated enough, Apple will also let you get some content to your Apple TV by using apps on your iPhone or iPad and then beaming it from there to your television — that's how people with Apple TV get HBO GO, for instance. It's also how people with Apple TV have been able for a while to get the PBS programming that's available on the network's iPad app. PBS also streams lots of stuff on its regular site, but of course, that means sitting in front of your computer.

But this week, PBS unveiled a sprawling Roku channel that brings a massive haul of programs — science, drama, music, films, kids' stuff, and many of the other goodies public television has to offer — directly to the TVs of Roku users who have compatible boxes (apparently, not every Roku will work, but Engadget has a list of the ones that are compatible). There's a great deal of content here: a bunch of the documentaries I keep bothering you to watch (including the Wonder Woman one), some of Ken Burns' stuff, pieces from Great Performances, NOVA, Austin City Limits, and lots (and lots) more.

Cord-cutting (the industry term for getting rid of your cable subscription and getting everything through streaming) isn't yet a boom of any kind; it's happening steadily but is still a relatively unusual thing to do, as The New York Times reported recently. It's not clear, from the point of view of pure pragmatism, what the path is to breaking down the cable-bundle business model, given the intertwined content and cable universes (Comcast/NBC, most conspicuously). So far, you can't get HBO GO as a standalone, for instance, unless you subscribe the old-fashioned way — you theoretically can't, anyway.

But people are begging for it, and it's awfully hard not to notice as a consumer that if you have an average cable bill of $80 a month or so, you could at the moment subscribe to Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, and you could purchase four other episodes of television a la carte per week in HD (that's on top of everything you can already stream on many broadcast and cable networks' sites) at three dollars a pop, and you'd still spend less than cable costs. And with Netflix making its own stuff now — including the upcoming new Arrested Development episodes — there are things you can't even get with your big cable bill.

And the easier it gets to pull great things from the internet to your television (not to mention the fact that a not-insignificant number of us can still simply pull broadcast channels in with an antenna), the more you can hear the tense creaking of these deeply bowed business models, which certainly feel like they've got to snap sometime.

President Obama travels to Texas on Thursday for the second time in as many weeks. He will talk about job training and economic opportunity, but he may have a political opportunity on his mind as well.

Obama lost Texas by more than 1 million votes last year. But Democrats believe their fortunes in the Lone Star State may soon change, thanks to demographics and a new organizational push.

New numbers released by the Census Bureau on Wednesday highlight the rising political power of Latinos in the United States. In the 2012 presidential election, 1.4 million more Latinos voted than did four years earlier; the number of non-Hispanic white voters shrank by more than 2 million.

Political demographer Ruy Teixeira of the left-leaning Center for American Progress says Latinos' voting power would be even stronger if more of those who were eligible to vote actually did so.

"There's a lot of upside potential for the Latino vote. There are just going to be more of them, and second, there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of turnout rates," Teixeira says.

According to the census figures, turnout among Latinos who were eligible to vote last year was just 48 percent, 14 points lower than the turnout for non-Hispanic whites. Latino turnout was considerably higher in swing states, though. These numbers aren't as precise, because of smaller sample sizes, but the trend is clear: 52 percent of Latinos turned out to vote in Colorado, 62 percent in Florida and 67 percent in Virginia — all states where the Obama campaign invested heavily in Latino mobilization and won by narrow margins.

"I think it tells you you get what you pay for," Teixeira says. "We know there's this sleeping giant of the Hispanic electorate. So if you don't do anything, or you just do the average amount, you'll get your average turnout.

"But there's a potential there to put more effort, more mobilization, more money, more time, into getting the Hispanic voters to the polls, and it should produce an increment in their vote."

Jeremy Bird, who was national field director for Obama's re-election campaign, told volunteers in a video message this winter that their job is not finished.

"Where do we go from here?" he said. "One of the answers to that is Texas — a state at a political crossroads."

In Texas, Latinos account for nearly 40 percent of the population. But voter turnout among Texas Latinos is even lower than in the rest of the country. Bird said his team knows how to change that, and he has kicked off a long-term effort dubbed "Battleground Texas."

"Over the next several years, in every single community, in every single neighborhood, our team of volunteers and organizers will be knocking on doors, registering voters, and engaging Texans to make sure that they not only turn out to vote on Election Day, but they become more politically active in the day-to-day electoral process," he said.

Some Texas Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will be competitive in their state anytime soon. Gov. Rick Perry called it the biggest pipe dream he's ever heard of. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994. And Democrats fare even worse among non-Hispanic white voters in Texas than in many other parts of the country.

Still, the census data do show that big changes are possible over time. In 1996, turnout among African-Americans nationwide trailed white turnout by nearly 8 percentage points. Blacks began to close that gap even before the first African-American president was elected. And last year, black turnout actually topped non-Hispanic whites' for the first time on record.

If the fast-growing Latino population shows anything like that kind of improvement in turnout, and if Democrats manage to hold on to many of those new voters, Teixeira says it won't be a question of whether Texas turns purple, only a question of when.

"2016 — my guess is probably a bit too soon," he says. "2020 — I think it starts to look a lot more doable."

By 2020, Latinos are expected to outnumber non-Hispanic whites in Texas — and neither political party can afford to take them for granted.

Mother's Day is this Sunday. While some people are racking their brains to think of the perfect way to show their love and appreciation for Mom, a group of distinguished women recently flipped that script and wrote about the most profound gift their own moms gave to them. Their essays are collected in the new book What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most.

The book springs out of editor Elizabeth Benedict's personal experience. The last gift she received from her mother was a black wool scarf, embroidered at each end with yellow, pink and blue flowers. "She bought it at the assisted-living facility where she lived. And as soon as I began wearing it, people started commenting on how beautiful it was," Benedict tells Tell Me More host Michel Martin. "And after she died, I wore it all the time in the winter. And I was literally confused by how I could feel this attachment to the scarf and having felt so much distance from my mother."

Benedict went on to wonder about the experiences of other women, such as activist and MacArthur "Genius" Cecilia Muoz. "I lost my mom about five years ago, and it felt like a wonderful opportunity not just to pay tribute to her, but also to reflect on what she gave to me, what she gave to us," says Muoz. "In my case, I come from one of those big sprawling immigrant families and my mother was very much at the center of it."

Muoz is the daughter of Bolivian immigrants. Her parents married in 1950, and they planned to stay in the United States for just one year so her father could finish his engineering education. But when they decided to return home, their families told them to wait because of a poor economy and political situation.

Muoz received a wok from her mother, whose relationships with everyone in the family largely related to food. She was a homemaker and accomplished chef. She even sold cosmetics. "It's funny because we didn't see her as a working woman at the time because this is like one of those companies where you do makeup parties, essentially. ... She was terrific at it, but she designed it so she could also be there to take me to music lessons and take my brothers to debate practice, and you know, be a traditional mom in the same way she managed to do all of that," Muoz says.

Now that the activist is juggling an intense job and kids of her own, she understands why her mother was washing the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. or doing laundry at 6 a.m. Muoz does the same thing, she says.

The book includes many other diverse voices, like television host and minister Lillian Daniel, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Slate's Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick, best-selling novelist Lisa See, and even NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg. Benedict says she wanted a real range of experiences so the book would feel like the actual world we live in.

"I started with the idea that I wanted people to write about an object. And if I had said to all these people, 'Write me a story about your mother,' I think I wouldn't have gotten anything because people would've freaked out," Benedict says. "But I think being able to focus on one object and tell the sort of beginning and middle and end of that object and how it radiates and reverberates really allows people to get to the core of the relationship."

The objects are not diamond rings, fancy cars or houses. They're modest: a photograph, quilt, cake pan, plant, bottle of nail polish, even a cracked vase. "These are not gifts that have a lot of financial value, but the value of the gifts accrues over time," Benedict says. "The value comes from the relationships themselves, and how people process the relationships, and how people move through their lives with their mothers in life and in memory."

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

"Guccifer," the hacker responsible for introducing the world to former president George W. Bush's artistic side, appears to have leaked the opening chapters of Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell's newest novel. Killing Monica is a frothy roman a clef about the author of a popular series starring the fashionable "Monica" and her off-and-on lover "Charleston" (clear stand-ins for Sex and the City's Carrie and Big). This leak is an odd choice for "Guccifer," who has thus far targeted the Bush family, Colin Powell, and other members of the political and business elite.

"I travel to Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge / Not feeling groovy, 4:50 a.m." — poems written by New York City taxi drivers.

Ian Buruma writes about Imelda Marcos and political theater for The New York Review of Books: "Filipinos have a word, palabas, meaning show or farce. Much in the Philippines is palabas, including, alas, much of its politics. The Marcos dictatorship (1965–1986), corrupt, kleptomaniacal, and sometimes brutal, was full of palabas. Power was gilded with show — grandiose speeches, carnivalesque campaigns, huge artistic projects, endless pageantry and absurdly extravagant parties."

According to a report in Publisher's Weekly, a struggling USA Today offered buyout packages that were accepted by several of its books staffers, including critic Carol Memmott and Deirdre Donahue. (Carol Memmott is the wife of Two-Way blogger Mark Memmott, a former USA Today reporter and editor.)

For The New Republic, Alexander Nazaryan dissects the recent spate of celebrity imprints appearing at big publishing houses: "That the publishing world — buffeted by the forces of Amazon and apathy — has turned to celebrities for salvation is not surprising."

Mosin Hamid, the critically acclaimed author of books like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, has the dubious honor of being named "Hottie of the week" in Pakistan's Express Tribune, by virtue of his "boyish smile."

During World War II, the Nazis plundered tens of thousands of works of art from the private collections of European Jews, many living in France. About 75 percent of the artwork that came back to France from Germany at the end of the war has been returned to their rightful owners.

But there are still approximately 2,000 art objects that remain unclaimed. The French government has now begun one of its most extensive efforts ever to find the heirs and return the art.

French law states that at art pillaged during World War II must be publicly exhibited, if its condition permits, so that it can be recognized and claimed.

"Up until now, France put the maximum information at public disposal and waited for reaction. For people to come forward. Now we're proactively tracking down the descendants and families of those who had their art stolen," says Thierry Bajou, who is coordinating the French government's efforts.

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Mann recognizes the constant pressure on these players, each game "an extended audition" with long odds. (The Seattle Mariners, he says, have only produced one major leaguer from their farm system in seven years.) He envies the players' single-minded focus and drive as much as their talent. "It's a monastic life, with fidelity to one thing. And so to watch Erasmo play baseball is to watch more perfection, more focused thought, than I will ever achieve in a lifetime of critical thinking," Mann writes.

Readers seeking extended play-by-plays and assessments of skills would do better to look elsewhere. Jim Collins' The Last Best League, about the prestigious Cape Cod summer league of amateur college players — which produces 1 out of every 6 major leaguers (and which I've followed avidly for years) — gives a better picture of scouting, while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's 2008 movie Sugar, about a Dominican pitcher's trials in a single-A minor league team in Iowa, provides a sharper view of what's at stake for Latino players.

Mann offers a different sort of analysis, at once lyrical, intellectual and personal. His meditations on "a game that allows ample time for reflection and appreciation" lift Class A above the fray of more ordinary baseball books. He contrasts the players' undiluted optimism with his own studied, self-protective "nonchalance and irony" and his preoccupation with loss, centering on his older brother's death from drug addiction 10 years earlier. Nicknamed "Mannchild" on his Vassar College team, he's aware of straddling boyhood and manhood, like the players. He writes with self-deprecating honesty about missing bedtime baseball stories read to him by his father, about fear of failure, and about his attempts to impose metaphor and deeper meaning "onto a game and a group of people that want to be taken literally." He adds, "And yes, it is unfair to want Erasmo to feel more. I come to these games for meaning and metaphor, and he comes here for numbers, the right algorithm to move on."

Class A captures the longing, the uncertainty and the drive for recognition, both on and off the ball field.

Read an excerpt of Class A

On the types of schools that are particularly trapped in an economic bind

"Most small, private liberal arts colleges in general. I mean, if you look at a map of the country, most of the private colleges in the U.S. are in the Midwest and the Rust Belt and the Northeast, where all the population growth, especially of 18-year-olds, [is in] the South and Southwest. And so part of the problem is that they're having a hard time just attracting students, because students have to fly halfway across the country to pay $50,000 for a degree that they're not quite sure what they're going to do with."

On what higher education will look like in the future

"I still think that colleges are still going to exist — physical college campuses are still going to exist for those who want it. What will be different, however, is that you're going to have many more players in the system. [For example] if you decide to take a MOOC [Massive Online Open Course] ... and you want to transfer credit ... MOOCs might provide a piece of a person's education.

"This idea of competency-based education, which I think is perhaps the most disruptive force potentially entering higher education — so, right now we measure learning by time spent in a seat. They test you on the way in, they see what you know, and you basically focus on what you don't know. What I think the disruption will be is that some students could finish in 2 1/2 years. There's nothing really magic about 120 credits in four years. It's just tradition."

College Comparison Tool

Jeff Selingo and The Chronicle of Higher Education developed this website to allow students and parents to compare colleges' costs, graduation rates and graduate salaries.

College Reality Check

America's unlikeliest link to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reached out to his friend in a bid to have an American citizen released from one of the communist nation's notorious labor camps.

"I'm calling on the Supreme Leader of North Korea or as I call him 'Kim', to do me a solid and cut Kenneth Bae loose," former basketball star Dennis Rodman tweets.

Bae was last week given a 15-year sentence. According to The Associated Press, he is "a tour operator who was arrested in North Korea in November. The North's Supreme Court sentenced him ... for unspecified 'hostile acts' against the state. In a Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday, North Korea said the 44-year-old Washington state man entered the country with a disguised identity."

Rodman, you may recall, was in North Korea in late February and early March with a production crew for Vice Media. He'll be part of an upcoming documentary series on HBO that explores different cultures around the world. While there, Rodman had some one-on-one time with Kim — and sat with the North Korean leader to watch a basketball game involving some players from the Harlem Globetrotters and North Korean athletes.

"The Worm," as Rodman is known, came back from the trip saying of the young Korean leader that "I love the guy. He's awesome. He's so honest." As for the North's terrible record on human rights, Rodman told ABC's This Week with George Stephanapoulos that:

"I hate the fact that he's doing it, but the fact is, you know what, as a human being, though, he let his guard down. He did it one day to me. I didn't talk about that. I understand that."

The Senate is considering legislation to prevent a global helium shortage from worsening in October. That's when one huge supply of helium in the U.S. is set to terminate. The House overwhelmingly passed its own bill last month to keep the Federal Helium Program going.

That was a relief to industries that can't get along without helium. The gas is used in MRI machines, semiconductors, aerospace equipment, lasers and of course balloons.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the helium shortage is to talk to people like Stacie Lee Banks, who owns a flower shop in Washington, D.C. She is one of the go-to people in the city for filling large orders of party balloons.

Banks says she started noticing a problem about half a year ago. Her supplier used to send her two tanks of helium every time she was running short. Now he only sends one tank — if that. When she called him recently, he said he was completely out.

In a bind like this, Banks would normally pop over to the CVS pharmacy next door to fill up balloons.

"They're saying we can't use any of their helium anymore either," Banks says. "So it's like, I don't know where we're gonna get helium."

There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the federal government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas.

Sam Burton of the Bureau of Land Management helps manage the supply. Burton says "he lives and breathes helium," adding that he's a "total helium geek."

Burton says there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide-open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits.

"Imagine a layer cake being several thousand feet thick, layers of rock several thousand feet thick, you'd get an idea of how the gas has been stored in one particular layer," Burton explains.

Over the decades, private companies learned how to extract helium too. But they weren't extracting that much of it, partly because the government was selling helium so cheaply.

Then in 1996, Congress decided it was time to get the federal government out of the helium business so it wouldn't compete with private industry. Congress passed a law that would effectively end the helium program this October. The problem is: Private companies haven't caught up with demand, and a big hole would be left in the market if Washington suddenly cut off supply as scheduled.

Salo Zelermyer is lobbying to keep the government operating the reserve: "Certainly if you take half the domestic supply and a third of the global supply off the market just like that, you're going to get a lot of volatility in the system. You're going to have a lot of end users that aren't going to be able to meet the needs of both taxpayers and regular folks who go in to get MRIs or go out to buy high-end electronics."

So industries are nervous.

Carolyn Durand of Intel Corp., which makes semiconductor chips, says they're already learning to limit their use of the gas.

"Where we've been able to replace helium with another inert gas like argon or nitrogen, we have," Durand says. "Where we've been able to conserve, shut off things instead of keeping continuous flow, we will do that."

If legislation to head off the shortage passes, it would buy private companies time to find reliable domestic sources of helium.

A while back, Max Kornblith sent the following email to Tyler Cowen, an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution:

1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor's degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a "passion" such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist?...

For question two, then, you may sense where this is going...

2) Assume I have no such passion. Furthermore, I am a fairly well-qualified young generalist.* What paths should most appeal to me if my goal is to maximize doing "interesting" work? Doing meaningful work? Achieving social status? (Which of these goals should be primary?) Need I try to develop a passion before selecting a life path/career, and if so how do I do it?

All the best, Max

*Two years out with a BA from an Ivy League school. Top 10% of the class but not an academic rock star. A record of primarily reading/writing-intensive courses, as well as basic to intermediate economics, calculus, statistics, a proofs course. Time spent abroad in study and travel, though no foreign language fluency. Two years in the private sector with a decent amount of analytic and management experience, but without a big name behind it.

Anne-Marie Slaughter had been the director of policy planning for the State Department for two years — commuting from Princeton, N.J., where her family lived, to Washington, D.C., where the job was — when she realized something had to give.

"It was a fabulous job, but at the end of two years I simply had to recognize that I needed to be at home," Slaughter tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne. Moreover, she adds, "I wanted to be at home, and there was no way to do that and to do the kind of job that Secretary Clinton needed me to do."

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The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: Having It All

Hundreds of people died when a garment factory collapsed last month in Bangladesh. The tragedy is a reminder of the unsafe working conditions in overseas factories that produce so much of the clothing we buy.

Some people want more clothing to be made in the United States. A new website is connecting American designers and American manufacturers who want to produce high-quality fashion.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne has to order 10,000 Batman masks from a company in China — but they all come back with defects.

This is actually a common problem with outsourcing fashion. And if you're not a billionaire crime fighter — if you're just a small businessman in Brooklyn like Matthew Burnett — you can't write off 10,000 defects.

A few years ago, Burnett was making fancy designers wristwatches. He thought the only way to manufacturer them was to use foreign companies. It turned out to be a nightmare.

"There were the language barriers," Burnett says. "There was the time zone differences. So I would be waiting up at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning to respond to emails."

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hasn't said whether or not she's running for president in 2016. Indeed, if her husband, President Clinton, is to be believed, she hasn't even told him of her intentions.

Polling suggests, however, that among potential Democratic candidates, Clinton is the runaway favorite — at least at this early stage.

All of which makes the stinging criticism Clinton has received from Republicans over the Benghazi attacks seem, to some Democrats, like a pre-emptive strike against her possible run for the White House in 2016.

The Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Republican critics have laid those deaths at the feet of President Obama and Clinton, accusing them of everything from incompetence to a political cover-up.

A Wednesday hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform placed an inquisitorial spotlight on, among other things, Clinton's handling of Benghazi. It was just the latest marker in GOP efforts to ding Clinton.

Just days earlier, Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House panel, accused Clinton or her State Department staff of a "cover up."

That came on the heels of one of the most strident statements from a high-profile Republican. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is displaying signs of being interested in a 2016 presidential run, recently told a Missouri audience that Clinton has disqualified herself for future public office by her actions.

"I think that her dereliction of duty — I don't question her motives — but her dereliction of duty and her lack of leadership should preclude her from holding any other office," Paul said to a crowd that responded with cheers and applause at a "Spirit of Reagan" award ceremony. (The moment is captured on a YouTube video at the 13:58 mark.)

Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, didn't go as far as Paul in a Wednesday radio interview, but he certainly didn't see Benghazi as helping Clinton.

"I don't know how this doesn't taint her reputation," he said. "She was the one out there real fiery in the Senate with some of those oversight hearings, sort of that famous phrase of, 'What does it matter now?' These details do matter."

But asked if the GOP Benghazi allegations were an attempt to damage Clinton before 2016 rolls around, he said: "Absolutely not.

"These things rise above any sort of partisan element. I mean this is about the response of our government and our responsibility, frankly, to our diplomats, the security that they have with them. This is really about the truth coming out and the lack of judgment that some of these decision makers had to make sure this never happens again."

If Clinton were to decide to run, the Benghazi accusations could conceivably place her on the defensive on national security, an area where Democrats have enjoyed an advantage over Republicans during the Obama presidency.

Clinton actually said: "What difference at this point does it make?" in an attempt to explain at a Senate hearing that getting inside the heads of the killers of the four Americans wasn't exactly her top priority.

From nearly the moment she said it, the line became a weapon in the hands of her political foes. They've used it to accuse her, and the Obama administration, of either not taking a terrorist attack seriously enough or trying to conceal it.

Clinton, who as first lady once accused her and her husband's political foes of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is now being charged by her partisan opponents with being at the center of a left-wing conspiracy.

Democrats made their own accusations about Republican motives in going after Obama and Clinton. At the Wednesday hearing, at which three State Department whistle-blowers testified about the administration's alleged failings in Benghazi, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said in his opening statement:

"Let me be clear: I am not questioning the motives of our witnesses. I am questioning the motives of those who want to use them for political purposes."

On the types of schools that are particularly trapped in an economic bind

"Most small, private liberal arts colleges in general. I mean, if you look at a map of the country, most of the private colleges in the U.S. are in the Midwest and the Rust Belt and the Northeast, where all the population growth, especially of 18-year-olds, [is in] the South and Southwest. And so part of the problem is that they're having a hard time just attracting students, because students have to fly halfway across the country to pay $50,000 for a degree that they're not quite sure what they're going to do with."

On what higher education will look like in the future

"I still think that colleges are still going to exist — physical college campuses are still going to exist for those who want it. What will be different, however, is that you're going to have many more players in the system. [For example] if you decide to take a MOOC [Massive Online Open Course] ... and you want to transfer credit ... MOOCs might provide a piece of a person's education.

"This idea of competency-based education, which I think is perhaps the most disruptive force potentially entering higher education — so, right now we measure learning by time spent in a seat. They test you on the way in, they see what you know, and you basically focus on what you don't know. What I think the disruption will be is that some students could finish in 2 1/2 years. There's nothing really magic about 120 credits in four years. It's just tradition."

College Comparison Tool

Jeff Selingo and The Chronicle of Higher Education developed this website to allow students and parents to compare colleges' costs, graduation rates and graduate salaries.

College Reality Check

During World War II, the Nazis plundered tens of thousands of works of art from the private collections of European Jews, many living in France. About 75 percent of the artwork that came back to France from Germany at the end of the war has been returned to their rightful owners.

But there are still approximately 2,000 art objects that remain unclaimed. The French government has now begun one of its most extensive efforts ever to find the heirs and return the art.

French law states that at art pillaged during World War II must be publicly exhibited, if its condition permits, so that it can be recognized and claimed.

"Up until now, France put the maximum information at public disposal and waited for reaction. For people to come forward. Now we're proactively tracking down the descendants and families of those who had their art stolen," says Thierry Bajou, who is coordinating the French government's efforts.

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Movies

Movie Review: 'Love Is All You Need'

The resignation of veteran Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is an event causing ripples that go way beyond the island where the Scotsman spent his long and illustrious career.

Walk into a bar pretty much anywhere from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, mention Ferguson or his star-studded team of Red Devils, and you can be sure of a lively conversation — and perhaps a heated argument.

Ferguson's name is not always greeted with warmth, especially by supporters of rival English soccer teams whom he so often frustrated in the battle for trophies, of which he won an astounding 38 during his Manchester years.

He was a tough and highly competitive character in a notoriously ruthless business. In the English game, managers and coaches whose teams fail to perform tend to be sacked with unceremonious speed. It is a measure of Ferguson's remarkable success that he held his job for 27 years.

Ferguson's hard-nosed approach was particularly felt by soccer journalists. Those who upset him were banned from his press conferences. For seven years, Ferguson refused to be interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corp. because he was angry about a program it broadcast about him and one of his sons.

He could, at times, be abrasive and also outspoken: He knows how to get under the skin of opposition managers before a big game. He has a long record of lambasting referees for decisions he disliked — apparently undeterred by the resulting fines. In fact, his critics frequently accuse him of striking such fear in the heart of match officials that they become biased in favor of Manchester United players.

He could be a strict disciplinarian with his team and staff. "He was always falling out with people," Michael Crick, author of a book about Ferguson called The Boss, told the BBC. It is said that in Scotland, in the early stages of his managerial career, Ferguson once fined a player merely for having the gall to overtake his car while driving to the ground.

Tributes Flood In

News of Ferguson's decision to leave Manchester United at the end of this season is being greeted with a chorus of tributes from around the world, and a tsunami of statistics about his achievements: two European Champions League crowns, five FA Cups and five League Cups, and more. He leaves on a high — this year, for the 13th time on his watch, Manchester United won the highly prestigious English Premiership title.

In England, Ferguson's departure came as a surprise — and prompted a wave of emotional calls to radio phone-ins from Manchester United fans. But it has been the subject of discussion for years. There is speculation that his health perhaps played a part: He is reportedly due to have a hip operation soon.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Manchester United's Alex Ferguson Is Retiring

When Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last year, the software giant billed the new operating system as one of the most critical releases in its history. The system would bridge the gap between personal computers and the fast-growing mobile world of tablets and smartphones.

But this week, the company sent signals that it might soon alter Windows 8 to address some early criticism of the operating system.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Tami Reller, head of marketing and finance for the Windows business, said "key elements" of the flagship product will be changed and rolled back when the company releases an update — which was code named Blue — later this year.

The Financial Times played this as a major concession, calling it a "U-turn," and implied that Microsoft was backing away from the touch-centric user interface that really defined the new operating system and was supposed to take the company into the next generation of computing to help it compete in a world that's in love with the tablet.

Analysts compared the apparent turnaround to the New Coke debacle in the 1980s, and within hours Microsoft issued a statement saying the FT got the story wrong.

Clearly this wasn't the story Microsoft was trying to tell. It wanted to trumpet the fact that more than 100 million copies of this operating system had been sold. That's a big, impressive number, but it comes at a time when PC sales are falling and some manufacturers are blaming Microsoft for that.

Windows 8 has been criticized by many who found the software's new touch-centric user interface difficult to navigate on a desktop. Microsoft has been trying to respond to those critics, and it's likely some key features — like the start button — that disappeared from Windows 8 will be back.

The next update is certain to make this latest version of windows more familiar and easier to use on a desktop. Microsoft says it will release that update to developers this June.

Microsoft isn't backing away from tablets, however, and this software's touch interface isn't going to disappear. In fact, the update will also feature changes that the company says will make the operating system easier to use on smaller tablets.

Apple CEO Tim Cook famously compared Microsoft's attempt to create one OS for both desktops and tablets to trying to merge a refrigerator and a toaster. Obviously, a tablet and a PC are pretty different, and people use them differently.

Microsoft expected its tablets to be an attractive alternative to an iPad, for executives and road warriors who wanted something that worked for movies and books or on a plane, but also had all the tools to do real work.

The bigger problem for Microsoft is that more and more people are wondering why they need a desktop PC in the first place.

Most of what you need a desktop PC for, you can do pretty well on a tablet: Answering email, surfing the Web and even writing or mixing a radio story are all things you could do on an iPad.

Desktop PCs and laptops are generally still much more powerful machines than a tablet. Many of us have computers that 20 years ago would have passed for supercomputers. They are powerful enough to run facial recognition programs or produce animated movies, but we're just using them to do mundane things on the Internet.

There hasn't been a boom in creative software that would inspire people to buy these machines, except in high-end gaming. For many people who buy them, though, they just kind of sit there and their potential goes largely untapped.

Microsoft has tried to address that with the creation of the Windows Store, but there aren't as many apps there yet as the company originally hoped. They also are not really the kinds of programs that set a PC apart.

If Microsoft is to reclaim its former glory, it needs a healthy developer ecosystem that helps answer this question: What can I do with a PC that I just can't on a tablet?

During World War II, the Nazis plundered tens of thousands of works of art from the private collections of European Jews, many living in France. About 75 percent of the artwork that came back to France from Germany at the end of the war has been returned to their rightful owners.

But there are still approximately 2,000 art objects that remain unclaimed. The French government has now begun one of its most extensive efforts ever to find the heirs and return the art.

French law states that at art pillaged during World War II must be publicly exhibited, if its condition permits, so that it can be recognized and claimed.

"Up until now, France put the maximum information at public disposal and waited for reaction. For people to come forward. Now we're proactively tracking down the descendants and families of those who had their art stolen," says Thierry Bajou, who is coordinating the French government's efforts.

Enlarge image i

On China's increasingly irreverent social media, some people tried to look on the bright side and suggested that Shanghai's river had essentially become a giant bowl of pork soup.

Soon afterward, another, far more serious meat problem emerged in this city of 23 million. The H7N9 virus showed up in live fowl in Shanghai's fresh meat and produce markets. The government shut down live poultry sellers and killed more than 100,000 chickens, ducks and other birds. One apartment complex downtown even penned off a handful of black swans, warning residents to keep their distance just in case.

The virus has killed 13 people in Shanghai, home to nearly half of all the fatal cases in China. Scientists say so far, the virus appears to be transmitted from birds to people, and there's no clear evidence of sustainable human-to-human transmission, which could spark a pandemic.

Some city restaurants, including a Sichuanese place where I order Kung Pao chicken, stopped serving chicken, but many others continue to stock it. On May 1, a national holiday, a KFC on Nanjing Road, Shanghai's main shopping street, was jammed at lunchtime.

Shots - Health News

What's In A Flu Name? Hs And Ns Tell A Tale

Read Gary Rivlin's Article For 'The Nation'

"How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank"

Read Gary Rivlin's Article For 'The Nation'

"How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank"

In the end, it wasn't even that close.

Republican Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor whose political career seemed to end in ignominy in 2010, capped a remarkable political comeback Tuesday by defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, 54 percent to 45 percent.

His victory in a Charleston-area House special election came despite Republican worries that the taint surrounding his highly publicized extramarital affair — and unflattering recent publicity concerning a February trespassing incident involving his former wife — would be too much to overcome.

The dramatic arc of the former two-term governor's narrative made him seem like an updated version of a Robert Penn Warren character: He started as a youthful reformer and outsider, then rose to prominence as a Southern governor with an eye toward the presidency.

But that was before his career unraveled before the nation in 2009. Sanford was forced to admit to an affair with an Argentine mistress after first claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail. His situation was compounded by a rambling and emotional press conference that was televised nationwide.

A humbled Sanford, who referred to himself in the special election campaign as "a wounded warrior," recognized the hurdles he faced in his bid for redemption. While he wasn't a prime combatant in the culture wars during his three House terms in the 1990s, in a conservative state like South Carolina his public betrayal of his wife and political partner, the state's popular first lady Jenny Sanford, left him an unsympathetic character.

"I think you can go back in and you can ask for a second chance in a political sense once," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday after casting his ballot.

Early polling in the Republican-oriented district suggested the party's nomination of a flawed candidate might prove to be another squandered opportunity at a time when the GOP is struggling with its identity. But late polls suggested a surge in support for Sanford, whose fiscal conservatism was in line with the district's thinking, over Colbert Busch, the sister of TV comedian Stephen Colbert.

In the end, voters proved willing to give Sanford a second chance — according to unofficial election returns, he carried all five counties that make up the 1st Congressional District.

In doing so, Sanford not only resuscitated his own career, but also gave hope to a legion of disgraced former politicians — among them former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat who's considering a bid for New York mayor just two years after resigning his congressional seat in a sexual scandal.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Ignacia Moreno, the point person at the Justice Department for prosecuting environmental crimes, says she will leave government service next month.

Moreno, the first Latina to lead the department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in November 2009. Her tenure spanned one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010. Eleven men died in that firestorm. The Justice Department extracted a record $1 billion civil penalty from Transocean, the rig owner, earlier this year. And a civil trial continues in New Orleans over other environmental damages.

"To date, we have already achieved significant resolutions for liability in the Gulf," Moreno said in an exit interview with NPR. "We are focused on holding those responsible accountable to the fullest extent of the law."

The unit also successfully defended Obama administration regulations of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, winning a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year.

But veterans of the environmental unit worried it had lost some prestige by ceding ground in the massive Gulf oil spill case to the Justice Department's criminal division, which led a federal task force and prosecuted giant BP and several individual employees in connection with the disaster.

"However it looks on the outside, we have all worked very closely together ... in making sure we do right by the people of the Gulf," Moreno said.

Moreno plans to spend the summer with her 12-year-old son before looking for opportunities in the private sector.

The resignation of veteran Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is an event causing ripples that go way beyond the island where the Scotsman spent his long and illustrious career.

Walk into a bar pretty much anywhere from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, mention Ferguson or his star-studded team of Red Devils, and you can be sure of a lively conversation — and perhaps a heated argument.

Ferguson's name is not always greeted with warmth, especially by supporters of rival English soccer teams whom he so often frustrated in the battle for trophies, of which he won an astounding 38 during his Manchester years.

He was a tough and highly competitive character in a notoriously ruthless business. In the English game, managers and coaches whose teams fail to perform tend to be sacked with unceremonious speed. It is a measure of Ferguson's remarkable success that he held his job for 27 years.

Ferguson's hard-nosed approach was particularly felt by soccer journalists. Those who upset him were banned from his press conferences. For seven years, Ferguson refused to be interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corp. because he was angry about a program it broadcast about him and one of his sons.

He could, at times, be abrasive and also outspoken: He knows how to get under the skin of opposition managers before a big game. He has a long record of lambasting referees for decisions he disliked — apparently undeterred by the resulting fines. In fact, his critics frequently accuse him of striking such fear in the heart of match officials that they become biased in favor of Manchester United players.

He could be a strict disciplinarian with his team and staff. "He was always falling out with people," Michael Crick, author of a book about Ferguson called The Boss, told the BBC. It is said that in Scotland, in the early stages of his managerial career, Ferguson once fined a player merely for having the gall to overtake his car while driving to the ground.

Tributes Flood In

News of Ferguson's decision to leave Manchester United at the end of this season is being greeted with a chorus of tributes from around the world, and a tsunami of statistics about his achievements: two European Champions League crowns, five FA Cups and five League Cups, and more. He leaves on a high — this year, for the 13th time on his watch, Manchester United won the highly prestigious English Premiership title.

In England, Ferguson's departure came as a surprise — and prompted a wave of emotional calls to radio phone-ins from Manchester United fans. But it has been the subject of discussion for years. There is speculation that his health perhaps played a part: He is reportedly due to have a hip operation soon.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Manchester United's Alex Ferguson Is Retiring

Get recipes for Slow-Roasted Butter Pecans, Matzo Candy With Caramel, Chocolate And Halvah, Rhubarb-Ginger Fool, Posh Porcini Popcorn and Curried Egg Salad Sandwich.

Updated at 9:29 pm ET —- Former South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford easily beat Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch to regain the House seat he once held.

For Sanford, the victory in the strongly Republican 1st Congressional District was sure to be widely viewed as a personal redemption. Sanford left the governor's mansion in 2009 after an extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman who is now his fiancee led to the breakup of his marriage.

For his party, Sanford's win was portrayed as a rejection by a solidly Republican district of everything the Democratic Party stands for.

In a statement Chad Connelly, chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, said:

Chad Connelly, Chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, stated in part:

"Tonight, the voters of the First District made it crystal clear that the baggage of Obamacare and Barack Obama's liberal policies are too much, even for a credible Democrat candidate to overcome...

"Voters demonstrated they cannot be bought and that they know Mark Sanford will be another vote for fiscal sanity in Congress. We look forward to Governor Sanford returning to Washington..."

The Senate is considering legislation to prevent a global helium shortage from worsening in October. That's when one huge supply of helium in the U.S. is set to terminate. The House overwhelmingly passed its own bill last month to keep the Federal Helium Program going.

That was a relief to industries that can't get along without helium. The gas is used in MRI machines, semiconductors, aerospace equipment, lasers and of course balloons.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the helium shortage is to talk to people like Stacie Lee Banks, who owns a flower shop in Washington, D.C. She is one of the go-to people in the city for filling large orders of party balloons.

Banks says she started noticing a problem about half a year ago. Her supplier used to send her two tanks of helium every time she was running short. Now he only sends one tank — if that. When she called him recently, he said he was completely out.

In a bind like this, Banks would normally pop over to the CVS pharmacy next door to fill up balloons.

"They're saying we can't use any of their helium anymore either," Banks says. "So it's like, I don't know where we're gonna get helium."

There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the federal government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas.

Sam Burton of the Bureau of Land Management helps manage the supply. Burton says "he lives and breathes helium." Adding, he's a "total helium geek."

Burton says there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits.

"Imagine a layer cake being several thousand feet thick, layers of rock several thousand feet thick, you'd get an idea of how the gas has been stored in one particular layer," Burton explains.

Over the decades, private companies learned how to extract helium too. But they weren't extracting that much of it, partly because the government was selling helium so cheaply.

Then in 1996, Congress decided it was time to get the federal government out of the helium business so it wouldn't compete with private industry. Congress passed a law that would effectively end the helium program this October. The problem is: private companies haven't caught up with demand, and a big hole would be left in the market if Washington suddenly cut off supply as scheduled.

Salo Zelermyer is lobbying to keep the government operating the reserve: "Certainly if you take half the domestic supply and a third of the global supply off the market just like that, you're gonna get a lot volatility in the system. You're going to have a lot of end users that aren't going to be able to meet the needs of both taxpayers and regular folks who go in to get MRIs or go out to buy high-end electronics.

So industries are nervous.

Carolyn Durand of Intel Corporation, which makes semiconductor chips, says they're already learning to limit their use of the gas.

"Where we've been able to replace helium with another inert gas like argon or nitrogen, we have," Durand says. "Where we've been able to conserve, shut off things, instead of keeping continuous flow, we will do that."

If legislation to head off the shortage passes, it would buy private companies time to find reliable domestic sources of helium.

вторник

President Obama says the United States and South Korea are determined to stand firm against North Korean threats and that the days of Pyongyang manufacturing a crisis to get international concessions "are over."

In a joint news conference with South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday, Obama said the two leaders "very much share the view that we are going to maintain a strong deterrent" against North Korea.

"We're not going to reward provocative behavior, but we remain open to the prospect of North Korea taking a peaceful path," he said.

"So far, at least, we haven't seen actions on the part of the North Koreans that would indicate they're prepared to move in a different direction," he added.

He said he's never spoken directly to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose actions seem to be leading his country to a dead end.

Obama's talks with newly installed President Park show that the North has "failed again" to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul, he said.

The president spoke of the "deep friendship" and the "great alliance" between the two countries.

Park's visit, her first abroad since becoming president in February, marks the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance and comes amid ramped up rhetoric from North Korea, including threats to attack South Korea and the United States with nuclear missiles.

As we reported Monday, however, North Korea appears to have moved two medium-range missiles off launch standby in the country's east — a move that could signal a toning down of tensions.

That big immigration bill working its way through the Senate would let in lots more highly skilled workers on temporary visas. But there's a catch.

The bill says all employers who want to hire workers on these H-1B visas:

... would be required to advertise on an Internet website maintained by the Department of Labor and offer the job to any U.S. worker who applies and is equally or better qualified than the immigrants ... sought...

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

According to a report in The Guardian, Sigmund Freud's famous couch has fallen into disrepair, and the Freud Museum in London has issued a plea for donations to finance the restorations. A gift from one of his patients, it went with him from Vienna to London when he fled the Nazis, and seated some of his most famous patients, such as the hysterical "Dora" and neurotic "Wolf Man." Freud supposedly told a friend that he used a couch because "I cannot let myself be stared at for eight hours daily."

In New York Magazine, critic Kathryn Schulz dares to be in the Great Gatsby-hating minority: "I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent."

An article in a London tabloid claiming that Martin Amis hates "Brooklyn hipsters" has generated an odd amount of buzz, particularly given that so many people love to hate Brooklyn hipsters. What's next — Jonathan Franzen hates traffic and the flu?

For The New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood advises on the use of dreams in fiction: "So let your characters dream if they must, but be advised that their dreams — unlike your own — will have a significance attached to them by the reader. Will your characters dream prophetically, foretelling the future? Will they dream inconsequentially, as in real life? Will they use accounts of their dreams to annoy or attack or enlighten the other characters? Many variants are possible. As in so many things, it's not whether, but how well."

The Cuban government and the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation are collaborating to digitize and preserve papers and records from Ernest Hemingway's estate on the outskirts of Havana, which scholars in the United States have not previously had access to. Digital images of 2,000 papers will go to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. According to The Associated Press, "The newly digitized files include letters from Hemingway to the actress Ingrid Bergman, letters to his wife Mary, passports documenting his travels and bar bills, grocery lists and notations of hurricane sightings."

понедельник

The grim toll from the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh last month has risen to more than 650, as more bodies have been pulled from the rubble of the eight-story complex.

The number of people confirmed dead has now reached 657, CNN quoted Col. Sheikh Zaman, a military official overseeing the recovery operation in Savar, as saying.

Meanwhile, Adidas said Monday that it is encouraging workers in Asian factories where its popular sports gear is produced to use a new hotline to report possible grievances.

The Germany-based Adidas AG said in a statement that workers had only to "send an SMS [to the hotline] when they feel their rights are breached."

The Associated Press says: "Adidas' efforts to improve control of labor conditions coincide with a renewed debate on working conditions at the suppliers of Western firms in the wake of deadly incidents in Bangladesh's garment industry."

As we have reported, last month's collapse of Rana Plaza has put several Western retailers supplied by factories in Bangladesh in a difficult position, forcing some of them to take a stand on poor working conditions in the country.

The Senate is expected to approve a measure on Monday that would end tax-free shopping for online purchases, a move that concerns many e-retailers, but has the support of the states that stand to collect billions in previously lost revenues.

As NPR's Dave Mattingly reports, the Marketplace Fairness Act would give states the power to require retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for the first time.

"The money would be sent back to the state where the shopper lives," he says. "Currently that requirement only applies to retailers with a physical presence in a state, giving Internet retailers a pricing edge over traditional stores."

The bill has drawn bipartisan support in the Senate, with conservatives such Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi and Sen. Lamar Alexander among its supporters. It is expected to pass in the Senate, but faces a tougher battle in the House "where some Republicans regard it as a tax increase," The Associated Press reports.

According to the AP:

"As Internet sales have grown, 'It's putting pressure on the brick-and-mortar competitors and it's putting pressure on state and local sales tax revenues,' said David French, senior vice president of government relations for the National Retail Federation. 'It's time for Congress to create a level playing field so that all retailers are treated fairly.'

On the other side, eBay says the bill doesn't do enough to protect small businesses. Businesses with less than $1 million in online sales would be exempt. EBay wants to exempt businesses with up to $10 million in sales or fewer than 50 employees."

Meet Tony Stark at the opening of Iron Man 3: insanely wealthy, possessed of every toy, and traumatized by an attack on New York that has left him restless, anxious, belligerent, and given to both hunker-down security measures and fate-tempting swagger. He declares his total lack of fear, then builds the fortress walls higher.

Let's step back.

The most important scenes in last summer's The Avengers took place between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers — Iron Man and Captain America, although their true identities are crossed over, such that the real beings involved are the man on one side and the superhero on the other. (This is how they acknowledge each other from their first meeting, even while they're both suited up: "Mr. Stark." "Cap.") Cap represents the most traditional ideas about American exceptionalism — there's a wonderfully economical exchange in which Black Widow warns Cap that Thor and Loki are "basically gods," and Cap says, "There's only one God, ma'am, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that." It's a line in which he manages to come out in favor of monotheism, chivalry, and machismo in 14 words, right before he jumps fearlessly out of a plane.

(Of course, one could reasonably ask how Cap thinks God does dress, given that Thor and Loki's long hair and flowing robes are actually pretty similar to traditional Judeo-Christian iconography, but Cap gets his point across: Thor and Loki dress silly. God dresses like ... well, a man.)

Stark represents a much newer mythology of American might: he gets his power from earned egotism, unchecked capitalism, and entrepreneurial genius. Cap's military-made respect for authority ("We have orders, we should follow them") impresses Stark not at all ("Following's not really my style"), and Cap in turn has no use for Stark's slick, wise-guy self-regard ("And you're all about style, aren't you?"). Cap's accusation in their climactic argument is that Stark is all weaponry and no character ("Take that off, [and] what are you?"); Stark's defense is that inside the suit, he apologizes for nothing, because he's hit all four fundamentals of the Successful American Man. He calls himself a "genius billionaire playboy philanthropist," meaning he has brains, money, women and respectability. Cap cares about the common good; Stark argues that the purity of his self-interest works just as well for everyone.

The ultimate resolution of the conflict in The Avengers is essentially a draw. The film posits that both can work and both are needed, as are Hulk's distilled fury and Thor's connection to everything otherworldly and ancient. But while the message might seem inexact, the ending is pure Joss Whedon: like all his hero stories, it moves to a rhythm of sacrifice and Pyrrhic victories, followed by a bruised effort to regroup. As we look at New York at the end of the film, after it is "saved," it's Cap who somberly says, "We won," and Stark who weakly says, "All right, yaaaay. All right, good job, guys." The city is devastated. A lot of people are dead.

The story of Iron Man 3 could have been told with no reference to the events The Avengers at all. Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) has come up with a classic medical MacGuffin: an intervention with theoretically therapeutic potential that becomes evil in the wrong hands. (See also: The Amazing Spider-Man, to name only one recent example.) Stark must find him and stop him. Alone, it's not much of a story.

What creates the film's complexity, though, are its continuing interest in the conflict from The Avengers and its use of Stark to say pretty provocative things about the American psyche. His panic attacks brought on by what he saw in battle – in fact, the words "New York" are nearly adequate to induce them – are crippling, he's building unmanned weapons he can't entirely control, and his conviction that he should speak fearlessly and invite whoever cares to confront him to do so is at odds with his fear that his vulnerabilities (and those of the people he loves) will be exposed. When the battle is brought home to him in a couple of ways, he confronts exactly what Cap asked him: "Take that off, what are you?"

Which, according to a strong undercurrent of our cultural conversation about old heroes versus new ones, is pretty much what a guy who fought in World War II might say about Google Glass.

Of course, Stark's mastery of the universe is signaled most of all by his extraordinary wealth. It is a given in American films about wealth that he who has nothing must rise (provided he's deserving) and he who has everything must fall (unless he's deserving). The original Iron Man is about Stark proving he's worthy of his wealth, which meant he could keep it. Here, in the film's middle section, Stark's arrogance — mixed with moments in which he was callous and cruel — takes him from a man who has everything to a man who, at least temporarily, has nothing.

If Tony Stark in The Avengers still had a dollop of our pre-recession, tech-bubble cockiness, this is the story where he is brought low and has to start over. Five minutes after he was using his fancy suit to fly, he is pulling it through the snow on a rope; his reliance on technology goes from blessing to burden in an instant. (And talk about tapping into the American psyche: what fells Tony Stark is that his battery runs out of juice.) The un-granting of powers is certainly a common superhero trope (it happens to Thor all the time), but it's a powerful image seeing Tony Stark lugging the body of Iron Man behind him.

And as he undertakes this battle, part of Stark's responsibility is to figure out who the actual enemy is. He's been told it's a terrorist called The Mandarin, a man with a topknot and a long beard who appears in videos to threaten the United States. But how this man is connected to Killian is initially difficult for Stark to parse, precisely because he's susceptible to certain ingrained ideas (which arise partly from experience) about what terror looks and feels like, and the idea that it might not be all that it appears doesn't come to him easily, despite how clever he both actually is and thinks he is.

Stark will eventually see his suits again. He will get his armor back. It's an Iron Man movie, after all. But there is a late scene that draws an unmistakable connection between the destruction of weapons and the advancement of patriotism — between a tentative and perhaps temporary retreat from super-militarism and a celebration of the Fourth of July. For all that Stark has accomplished, his biggest assets turn out to be a best friend in a polo shirt and jeans, the kindness of strangers, and a loving partner. His most important power is healing. His final acquired skill is trust, and his final act of faith is in others and in science.

The biggest difference between Stark and other superheroes, both in the Marvel universe and elsewhere, is that his goodness is not instinctive. Superman is reflexively good, Spider-Man spends his life making up for one weak moment, and Bruce Wayne often seems to be incidentally wealthy as a byproduct of his efforts to improve life for everyone. Cap was born good, Thor was born good, Bruce Banner was born good. They're certainly not perfect — crises of conscience arise over whether these guys want to get involved. "With great power comes great responsibility," and so forth.

But Stark, as Robert Downey, Jr. plays him, is a reflexively selfish, self-promoting, ego-driven person with a genuine tendency toward bluster and rudeness. What fascinates about him is that the power comes first and the decision to become good comes later. He was rich and powerful before he was decent, as the opening moments of this film make clear; he gives of himself by conscious choice, by teaching himself a kind of ethics that don't come naturally. He does it reluctantly, always for a complex combination of selfish and unselfish reasons. Until you hit him close to home, he'd always rather stay out of trouble.

He is, in many ways, the new Captain America. He is friends with the other one, of course — he came to respect Cap's brand of old-school good-doing, and was influenced by it. Steve Rogers, as the little guy who became the big guy, who went from weakling to protector and who is aghast at the idea of selfishness, still has an undeniable pull. But the biggest conversations we're having now? About balancing self-sacrifice and ego and capitalism, generosity and gadgetry, embracing other human beings versus shutting ourselves inside ever more advanced fortresses at every level from national security down to personal technology? It's pure Tony Stark.

The economy may be on the rebound, but many cultural institutions are still struggling to regain their financial footing. That's especially true for one of the country's most recognized museums — the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Known internationally for its research as well as its exhibits, the Field Museum must pay off millions in bond debt — and toe an ethical line as it does.

The first thing you see when you enter the main hall of the Field Museum is Sue, the largest specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex around. "A woman fossil hunter found her, Sue Hendrickson," docent Jan Lariviere tells a crowd. "Sue and her dog were out fossil hunting and they saw the backbone sticking out of a ridge in South Dakota."

The Field Museum's encyclopedic collections range from dinosaur skeletons like Sue, to taxidermy exhibits that include the infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo that terrorized a railroad camp in Kenya more than a century ago. There are more than 20 million biological and geological specimens and cultural objects at the museum, but only a small portion are ever on display.

In 2002, the museum board approved issuing bonds to add an underground collections center and to update other areas of the Field's ornate neoclassical building. Joanna Woronkowicz, a research associate at the University of Chicago's Cultural Policy Center says back then other institutions were doing the same thing.

"Before the economic decline, for the arts and cultural field, it was a time at which it felt like you could do anything. You could plan a multimillion-dollar project and there wasn't a substantial risk of having to suffer any major consequences," she says.

But then the stock market tanked, and the Field's endowment took a hit, says Richard Lariviere — he's docent Jan's husband, and he also happens to be the museum's CEO. "If you think you've got to cross the street to get to the restaurant on the other side, and you get run over by a car you think — why did I ever want to go to that restaurant?" he says. "And we've been hit by a car like every other institution."

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