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In Elliott Holt's beautifully subtle debut novel You Are One of Them, the protagonist, an American in her 20s, moves to Moscow shortly after the Cold War. After a few months, she returns to the U.S. a changed woman.

Holt, who is 39, also lived in Moscow where she worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency as well as in London and New York. Currently, she resides in Washington, D.C. and writes full time.

I asked Holt to make a list of her favorite books about living abroad and then called her to interview her about her choices. We spoke about what it's like to be in your 20s, how Lolita is more than just a surprisingly sympathetic account of a pedophile, and why expat stories are the most classic stories of all.

The first book I wanted to ask you about is Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner [a novel about an American poet in Madrid].

Elliot Holt's Favorite 6 Books About Expatriates

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Mating by Norman Rush

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

"I hate to say this — it's a blast. It's kind of a Catch-22 now because, you know, since The Da Vinci Code I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me. But I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about, so that's, I often end up asking — half the questions I ask are about something totally unrelated, and half of the places I go see are unrelated, just trying to keep people off the track of what I'm writing about."

On creating Inferno's villain, "evil genius" Bertrand Zobist

"In any novel, you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against ... I find the most interesting villains [are] those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons — either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong. Here is somebody who says we have an enormous population problem on this planet and everybody's turning a blind eye, and there are no simple solutions, but there is a solution. And while it's terrifying, maybe there's a silver lining to it. Maybe he's actually the good guy in all this."

On his place in today's world of literature

"You know, it's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really — it is, for me, that simple. I'm somebody who likes codes and ciphers and chases and artwork and architecture, and all the things you find in a Robert Langdon thriller."

Read an excerpt of Inferno

If you're a homeless young adult, chances are good that you're gay, bisexual or transgender. And if you live in the Detroit area, the Ruth Ellis Center is trying to reach you. The center, based in Highland Park, Mich., has taken an unorthodox approach to helping homeless LGBT youth — and it starts on the dance floor, specifically with the dance form known as "vogue."

"It's all about your wrists and your imagination," says 21-year-old dancer Donnie Dawson. "You just have to make sure your hands are coordinated with your imagination."

Donnie, a regular at the Ruth Ellis Center, advises that you pretend you're holding a basketball, then mime with your hands the circular shape of the ball. Vogue dancing is sort of like break dancing meets ballet. But if you need a quick reference, think of Madonna's 1990 hit "Vogue" in which she sings about a dance form created by poor and working-class blacks and Latinos in New York City's gay community in the '60s and '70s. Today, vogue is still all about flipping, dipping and catwalking; it's acrobatic, sexual and at times very feminine in its movements.

See The Ruth Ellis Center's Dancers In Action

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: How Do You Get Support?

Science-fiction fans can get touchy when you mess with their icons — and few characters are as iconic as Star Trek's Spock. The half-human, half-Vulcan character was played by Leonard Nimoy in both the short-lived original series and the series of movies that eventually followed, and when director J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2009, fans worried about how he would handle Spock.

With the second Star Trek film out now, those worries are long gone. That's thanks largely to actor Zachary Quinto, who plays the famously rational bridge officer — with the blessing of his predecessor, who's since become a fast friend.

Quinto joins NPR's Audie Cornish to talk about his relationship with Nimoy, his Spock-ified eyebrows and why he went public about his personal life not long ago.

Enlarge image i

President Obama's first term was free from the kind of scandal that consumes every ounce of political oxygen in Washington. Now, in light of a trio of controversies, his supporters find themselves in the uncomfortable and unaccustomed position of having to defend some hard-to-defend events.

Democrats have offered up a range of responses. They view the issues — Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department snooping on The Associated Press — as separate issues that shouldn't be lumped together.

"It is shriekingly frustrating to me to learn a narrative is taking shape that utterly misses the main contours of the event now taking place," says Rick Perlstein, a liberal journalist and historian. "Three scandals or alleged scandals, all very different from one another in substance, seriousness and nature of their relationship to presidential accountability, being packaged together in a Scandal Moment."

Democrats who hope this will all blow over may have been encouraged by a Gallup poll released Thursday, which suggested that a "comparatively low" number of Americans are closely following the IRS and Benghazi stories.

But most of those surveyed said the two cases deserve further investigation. Knowing that Obama is in for weeks, if not months, of further scrutiny and criticism, progressives have offered a range of responses about what has happened and how it should be judged.

It's not exactly akin to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but that well-known outline is still a useful model for looking at the state of the left in this time of trouble for the Obama White House.

1. Denial

From the White House on down, Democrats believe the controversy over the terrorist attack last September on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, has been overblown.

Much of the debate, after all, has centered not on questions of security failures, but who offered edits to which draft of talking points after the fact. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has repeatedly asserted that administration critics are attempting to "politicize" the issue.

In the case of the IRS targeting Tea Party chapters and other conservative groups, the administration initially sought to deny responsibility, suggesting it was the unfettered work of low-level officials in the Cincinnati office. It has since conceded that decision-making took place at a higher level.

The Justice Department is investigating and Obama forced the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, on Wednesday. Miller told the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday that "foolish mistakes were made," although not with partisan intent.

Still, some commentators on the left have argued that the IRS was just trying to do its job in checking out applications from politically oriented organizations that were claiming to be "social welfare" groups.

Having "slogged through" the report of the Treasury Department's inspector general, blogger Brad Friedman doesn't find any evidence of the kind of "misconduct" the president himself has complained about.

"Further investigation may uncover such behavior, but if there was purposeful or criminal misconduct by anyone in the office, the IG's report doesn't seem to offer any actual evidence of it," Friedman writes.

2. Anger

There's plenty of anger — not just at Republicans for exploiting the scandals, but at the media for playing along with them.

"The right sees these contretemps as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of scandal," writes Heather Parton, who blogs under the pseudonym Digby. "And the press, caught up in the daily churn of information, fails to see the forest for the trees every time."

But there are also Democrats who are angry at the administration for its mistakes.

"I just think this has been handled so wrong," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Wednesday, referring to the Justice Department's broad pursuit of phone records in its hunt for the leaker who gave the AP information about a foiled terror plot.

3. Bargaining

Bargaining is the fallback position in the early stages of any scandal. If we release such-and-such cache of documents, won't that make the questions go away? How does our guy's transgression compare to what your guy did during his administration?

A key type of bargaining that takes place in the midst of scandal is the attempt to point out that there wasn't an intent to sin. Or, sometimes, that the sins under discussion are not unique.

At DailyKos, senior political writer Joan McCarter writes that liberal groups seeking tax-exempt status received the same queries from the IRS as Tea Party affiliates. "In fact, the only group to have its application denied was a liberal group," she writes. (On average, progressive groups received far faster approvals, though.)

Obama played the ultimate bargaining chip himself when he forced Miller to resign from the IRS.

"Based on my twitter feed, Washington scandal volcano does not find Steven Miller an appropriate sacrifice," tweeted Daniel Malloy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Meanwhile, some have pointed out in the AP snooping story the DOJ may have been motivated by pressure from congressional Republicans. Those lawmakers may be piling on now, but they were demanding answers about the AP's source.

And, with last week's reports of damaging emails about Benghazi turning out to be incomplete or misleading, former Obama adviser David Plouffe tweeted, "How is this not a 'scandal' with wall to wall coverage?"

4. Depression

If, as is often said, depression is anger turned inward, some Democrats are depressed.

From the president on down, most Democrats recognize that the IRS and AP situations, at least, are serious matters. Not everyone has been happy about how the administration has responded.

"His crisis-management communications team is absent without leave," Lanny Davis, formerly a top spinmeister for President Bill Clinton, told my colleague Frank James on Monday. "I've wondered if there's anybody there trying to get out in front of the facts."

The White House has since become more aggressive about releasing documents and responding to the various charges.

Some Democrats are still unhappy. MSNBC host Chris Matthews, an Obama fan, was notably very critical. On Tuesday, Matthews said Obama's "a ship with the engine off."

By Wednesday, Matthews was complaining that Obama "obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch."

5. Acceptance

Like a diver unable to find the bottom, Democrats know the president's season of scandal is nowhere near its end.

They may believe what's been revealed so far is not crippling, especially as Obama himself has not been implicated personally in any of the three controversies. Still, no one knows what the coming weeks of congressional hearings and media coverage may bring.

Greg Sargent, an online columnist for The Washington Post, suggests that the scandals will prevent Obama from engaging in an impulse many progressives consider his true flaw: his willingness to compromise with Republicans.

"Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is," Sargent writes. "That's because when scandal grips Washington, a president actually needs his core supporters more than ever to ward it off, making it harder to do anything that will alienate them."

Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Democratic strategist James Carville sounded optimistic, describing the Benghazi and AP stories as nonstarters and suggesting that the IRS controversy would "burn itself out" in 30 days.

Given the polarities of our time, perhaps it's not surprising that some Obama supporters took greater heart from a prediction by conservative pundit Dick Morris that Obama could ultimately face impeachment.

"Dick Morris says IRS scandal could lead to Obama's impeachment," tweeted David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones. "Which means ... it won't."

U.S. oil production is rising sharply and increased output from shale will be a "game changer" in global energy markets in the coming years, according to a new report out Tuesday by the International Energy Agency.

"U.S. shale oil will help meet most of the world's new oil needs in the next five years, even if demand rises from a pick-up in the global economy," the Paris-based agency said in its five-year outlook, called the Medium-Term Oil Market Report.

"North American supply is an even bigger deal than we thought. A real game changer in every way," said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA's executive director.

She said that North American production has set off a "supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world" and urged the United States to dismantle the Export Administration Act of 1979, which bans the sale of U.S. crude abroad, except to Canada and Mexico.

"This issue is on the table. I think it has to be addressed because if there are no export licenses for crude, then the industry will find different ways, as they are looking for now already with processed, half-processed products, things like that," van der Hoeven said.

The IEA report forecasts:

"North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-OPEC supply growth of 6 [million barrels per day]. World liquid production capacity is expected to grow by 8.4 [million barrels per day] – significantly faster than demand – which is projected to expand by 6.9 [million barrels per day]. Global refining capacity will post even steeper growth, surging by 9.5 [million barrels per day], led by China and the Middle East."

If you watch Scandal, you know that there, Fitzgerald Grant is the President of the United States, and that he goes by "Fitz." Now "Fitz," let's face it, is already a pretty punchable name, given that combined with his personality, it makes him sound like somebody with a beanie and a lot of polo shirts grew up, got even richer, had a son, and taught him how to give swirlies to the math team. Fitz is involved, on and off (currently off, or possibly on, but maybe off) (maybe half-off, like end-of-the-season shoes), with Olivia Pope.

Olivia is the protagonist of Scandal, and even though she is a terrible person*, she probably deserves better than Fitz.

(Did I mention this contains spoilers? It contains spoilers.)

Anyway, why does Olivia deserve better than Fitz? Because we all deserve better than Fitz. Did you hear me, O Women Of The World? If you are reading these words, you deserve better than Fitz. Unless, that is, you are Mellie, Fitz's wife, who exactly deserves Fitz, which is part of what makes the show's central romantic mythology kind of hard to give a hoot about. If Olivia had a lick of sense, she would make the "that's that" motion with her hands like she's smacking the dust off, say "ptooey," and go have sex with someone more worthwhile. Meaning: anyone.

And Fitz and Mellie would go off and have a whole bunch of evil babies and tour the world like the Von Trapp Family Singers, only they would be a troupe of lying, well-dressed hypocrites who would cry and complain instead of singing "So Long, Farewell."

Because honestly, Fitz is the worst. He is the absolute worst. In case you don't believe me, I am prepared to present my list of reasons.

1. Personally murdered an old lady with cancer to save his own neck.

2. Cheated on his wife and managed to blame both the wife and the cheatrix. (I just made that word up; I think we need it.) (Especially for this show.)

3. Found out he became president fraudulently, and instead of setting anything right, looked at everyone who fraudulently made him president and was like, "HOW COULD YOU? I AM THE SADDEST BOY IN ALL THE LAND."

4. Borrowed from the military a fellow named Jake, whose task was to stalk and spy on Olivia.

5. Possibly maybe directly or indirectly responsible for getting Jake thrown in The Big Box O'Jail, a terrible tiny hole in a cement floor where nobody has fun.

6. Somehow managed to feel betrayed when he found out that while he remained with his wife in the office he corruptly obtained, his cheatrix slept with the guy he hired to stalk her. WOE IS FITZ!

7. When sad, makes a face like he's trying to pass a kidney stone made of love and anguish.

8. Threatened his wife that if she didn't go away quietly and leave him and Olivia to restart their lives together, he would ruin her possible political future by falsely telling everyone she was a racist who only objected to his relationship with Olivia because Olivia is African-American.**

9. Oh, wait — that was after he bragged to his wife about how his relationship with Olivia was going to be a boon to race relations in America.

10. Clearly believes his simpering self-pity is his father's fault, because he can't even take responsibility for his unwillingness to take responsibility for anything.

11. Clearly believes the problems in his relationship with Olivia are more the result of the fact that she doesn't understand him and nobody understands him and WOE IS FITZ and less the result of the fact that he is a married corrupt sniveling jerkface weasel.

12. Who PERSONALLY MURDERED AN OLD LADY WITH CANCER TO SAVE HIS OWN NECK.

Olivia should dump Fitz. Mellie should dump Fitz. Everybody should dump Fitz. People who have never met Fitz should dump Fitz. White House tour groups should be brought through his office for the sole purpose of dumping him at the end of the visit. Strangers should be encouraged to queue up to dump him in more and more interesting and violent ways, like the "Calm down, get a hold of yourself!" line in Airplane!

Because Fitz is absolutely the worst.

*Helped fix an election, encouraged tormented employee to resume life as torturer, falsely set up only nice person in Washington to look like abusive boyfriend to save lover's behind, picked wrong guy as dangerous mole, doesn't know enough to keep her undies on when in the Oval Office.

** Olivia's idea.***

***Because Olivia is a terrible person.

Since DeChristopher's trial was postponed several times, the filmmakers were able to follow him for several years. He's a vigorous and interesting character, with the rhetorical skills of a veteran speechifier.

Yet in private moments, he seems younger than the prematurely balding 27-year-old he was when the case began. The movie shows him at home on the morning of his sentencing, making breakfast and drinking milk directly from the bottle. It also revisits his West Virginia childhood, which encouraged his love of nature and his outrage at its despoiling.

Less informatively, Bidder 70 scants the legalities of the case. Clearly, DeChristopher peeved the Bureau of Land Management and the oil and gas industries, but the movie doesn't detail which law or laws he actually broke.

After Redford calls the auction bids "a peaceful protest," the documentary quickly sketches the history of civil disobedience, invoking some names that may be familiar: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and such. But the DeChristopher case really speaks to a newer phenomenon: the attempt to elevate economic interests over freedom of speech, wherein a growing number of right-wing lawyers and judges are interpreting (or reinterpreting) laws to privilege corporations over individuals, and elevate business efficiencies over the messy, time-wasting distractions of full public debate.

DeChristopher's primary concern is climate change, which is no small issue. But Bidder 70 would be more compelling if it had used the U.S. government's assault on the ad hoc activist to also discuss threats to the American political environment.

As 17-year-old Tarik al-Nakib tells it, he was just out to buy some bread one afternoon in April when a silver bus from the Gaza Strip police department pulled up next to him.

"One guy opened the door and asked me to get in the bus," Nakib says. "Another came out and pushed me in. I was trying to understand what was going on, what did I do? No one wanted to answer me."

He says the van picked up four other teenagers before heading to the central police compound. Turns out, the police were after his hair. Like many of his friends, Nakib likes to style his hair so the top is longer and waxed to stand up.

"They told me, 'We will cut your hair because you're not a man. We're going to make you look like a real man,'" Nakib recalls. "I said, 'I'm not a real man because of my hair?' They said, 'Yes.'"

At the station, police made him empty his pockets and took a mug shot, he says. They showed him into a small room with no windows and one chair. A man with an electric razor came in and shaved Nakib's head bald. Nakib says the man then asked him to sweep up the fallen locks, but he made an excuse as a small attempt at defiance.

"I had tried to prevent them from taking me in the bus, but at the police station I didn't try to resist anything," Nakib says. "They said go in the room, I went in. They said sit down, I sat down. He shaved my hair. But I didn't clean up."

The Hamas-run government in Gaza doesn't have a formal decree against certain hairstyles. But the Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented a series of incidents in Gaza last month when police picked up young men and forcibly cut their hair.

Ihab Al Ghusain, the head of the Gaza government media office, told the center that the campaign was started by the Islamic Bloc, a student organization active in Gaza and the West Bank

Pants that sag below the waistline apparently also drew police interest. The human rights center reports some young men picked up for their hair had to sign a statement promising not to wear low-rider trousers.

Al-Ghusain backed that idea in April 15 posts on both his English and Arabic Facebook pages.

He said he would ask the Palestinian Legislative Council to outlaw behavior that goes against conservative customs, and linked to an article about a U.S. town banning low-riders.

"If this happened in Gaza we'll hear all human rights organizations shouting," he wrote.

It's not clear how far the crackdown on men's hairstyles could go.

"They're just trying to scare the young guys," says Samir Ashar, a local hair products manufacturer. "But some soldiers and even Hamas police officers style their hair."

He hasn't seen a drop in sales, which run about 3,000 jars of gel a month.

Nakib is growing his hair back, but he says the police haircut did have an impact. He'd rather stay home now than go out with his friends.

One of his pals, Mohammad Abu Ramadan, stopped styling his hair for a while. But he's back to the wax and the stand-up look now.

"It's not a matter of challenging them," Abu Ramadan says. "But I won't change my personality for them. I see myself as more handsome this way. This is me."

About Amanda Palmer

Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer believes we shouldn't fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable — and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans. Known for pushing boundaries in both her art and her lifestyle, Palmer made international headlines when she raised nearly $1.2 million via Kickstarter (she'd asked for $100,000) from nearly 25,000 fans who pre-ordered her album, Theatre Is Evil.

But the former street performer, then Dresden Dolls frontwoman, now solo artist hit a bump the week her world tour kicked off. She revealed plans to crowdsource additional local backup musicians in each tour stop, offering to pay them in hugs, merchandise and beer per her custom. Bitter and angry criticism ensued — she eventually promised to pay her local collaborators in cash. Summing up her business model, in which she views her recorded music as the digital equivalent of street performing, she says: "I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them."

If you watch Scandal, you know that there, Fitzgerald Grant is the President of the United States, and that he goes by "Fitz." Now "Fitz," let's face it, is already a pretty punchable name, given that combined with his personality, it makes him sound like somebody with a beanie and a lot of polo shirts grew up, got even richer, had a son, and taught him how to give swirlies to the math team. Fitz is involved, on and off (currently off, or possibly on, but maybe off) (maybe half-off, like end-of-the-season shoes), with Olivia Pope.

Olivia is the protagonist of Scandal, and even though she is a terrible person*, she probably deserves better than Fitz.

(Did I mention this contains spoilers? It contains spoilers.)

Anyway, why does Olivia deserve better than Fitz? Because we all deserve better than Fitz. Did you hear me, O Women Of The World? If you are reading these words, you deserve better than Fitz. Unless, that is, you are Mellie, Fitz's wife, who exactly deserves Fitz, which is part of what makes the show's central romantic mythology kind of hard to give a hoot about. If Olivia had a lick of sense, she would make the "that's that" motion with her hands like she's smacking the dust off, say "ptooey," and go have sex with someone more worthwhile. Meaning: anyone.

And Fitz and Mellie would go off and have a whole bunch of evil babies and tour the world like the Von Trapp Family Singers, only they would be a troupe of lying, well-dressed hypocrites who would cry and complain instead of singing "So Long, Farewell."

Because honestly, Fitz is the worst. He is the absolute worst. In case you don't believe me, I am prepared to present my list of reasons.

1. Personally murdered an old lady with cancer to save his own neck.

2. Cheated on his wife and managed to blame both the wife and the cheatrix. (I just made that word up; I think we need it.) (Especially for this show.)

3. Found out he became president fraudulently, and instead of setting anything right, looked at everyone who fraudulently made him president and was like, "HOW COULD YOU? I AM THE SADDEST BOY IN ALL THE LAND."

4. Borrowed from the military a fellow named Jake, whose task was to stalk and spy on Olivia.

5. Possibly maybe directly or indirectly responsible for getting Jake thrown in The Big Box O'Jail, a terrible tiny hole in a cement floor where nobody has fun.

6. Somehow managed to feel betrayed when he found out that while he remained with his wife in the office he corruptly obtained, his cheatrix slept with the guy he hired to stalk her. WOE IS FITZ!

7. When sad, makes a face like he's trying to pass a kidney stone made of love and anguish.

8. Threatened his wife that if she didn't go away quietly and leave him and Olivia to restart their lives together, he would ruin her possible political future by falsely telling everyone she was a racist who only objected to his relationship with Olivia because Olivia is African-American.**

9. Oh, wait — that was after he bragged to his wife about how his relationship with Olivia was going to be a boon to race relations in America.

10. Clearly believes his simpering self-pity is his father's fault, because he can't even take responsibility for his unwillingness to take responsibility for anything.

11. Clearly believes the problems in his relationship with Olivia are more the result of the fact that she doesn't understand him and nobody understands him and WOE IS FITZ and less the result of the fact that he is a married corrupt sniveling jerkface weasel.

12. Who PERSONALLY MURDERED AN OLD LADY WITH CANCER TO SAVE HIS OWN NECK.

Olivia should dump Fitz. Mellie should dump Fitz. Everybody should dump Fitz. People who have never met Fitz should dump Fitz. White House tour groups should be brought through his office for the sole purpose of dumping him at the end of the visit. Strangers should be encouraged to queue up to dump him in more and more interesting and violent ways, like the "Calm down, get a hold of yourself!" line in Airplane!

Because Fitz is absolutely the worst.

*Helped fix an election, encouraged tormented employee to resume life as torturer, falsely set up only nice person in Washington to look like abusive boyfriend to save lover's behind, picked wrong guy as dangerous mole, doesn't know enough to keep her undies on when in the Oval Office.

** Olivia's idea.***

***Because Olivia is a terrible person.

Update at 5:38 p.m. ET. One More IRS Official To Leave

Another official is out at the embattled agency.

The Associated Press reports that Joseph Grant, commissioner of the IRS' tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3. The division scrutinized Tea Party groups when the applied for tax-exempt status.

Update at 4:45 p.m. ET. Obama Names New IRS Acting Chief

The president on Thursday named Daniel Werfel as acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. Werfel replaces Steven Miller who was ousted Wednesday over the agency's improper scrutiny of conservative groups.

In a statement, the White House said Werfel will serve through the end of the fiscal year. Here's more about him from the White House statement:

"Mr. Werfel, 42, currently serves as Controller of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he has led efforts across the federal government to improve Federal program integrity, including all areas of financial management, financial reporting, accounting standards, improper payments, and financial systems, among others. Prior to his current role, Mr. Werfel served in multiple career civil service capacities at OMB, including as Deputy Controller, Chief of the Financial Integrity and Analysis Branch, Budget Examiner in the Education Branch, and Policy Analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Werfel has also served as a Trial Attorney in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

"Mr. Werfel is a recipient of both national and local awards from the Association of Government Accountants for his contributions to Federal financial management. During the Bush Administration, he was the recipient of the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Service. Mr. Werfel also served as a member of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board from 2006 to 2009.

"Mr. Werfel holds a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Duke University, a Juris Doctor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Bachelors Degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University."

Four years ago, 21 men with intellectual disabilities were emancipated from a bright blue, century-old schoolhouse in Atalissa, Iowa. They ranged in age from their 40s to their 60s, and for most of their adult lives they had worked for next to nothing and lived in dangerously unsanitary conditions.

Earlier this month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won a massive judgment against the turkey-processing company at which the men worked. The civil suit involved severe physical and emotional abuse of men with intellectual disabilities.

The EEOC now says the $240 million judgment will be reduced because it exceeds a legal cap on jury awards. But the case highlights the difficulty of preventing and identifying abuse of vulnerable workers, who are also the least likely to come forward about violations.

“ [H]opefully we don't ever in the future have to ask the question: 'How could this go on for so long and nobody notice?'

The film takes a long road to spirituality, though, with plenty of stops for violence and perversion along the way. Like Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, this story is determined to put core Christian principles to the harshest tests imaginable. What does it mean for God's forgiveness to extend to everyone? Can a just God really forgive every sin Gang-do commits — sins that seem to get worse with each scene, and which go unpunished amid a grim temporal landscape of unchecked decay?

Then Pieta, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, gets even more complicated. The woman's seemingly boundless compassion for Gang-do, however unearned, starts to rub off, inhibiting his ability to do his job as his capacity for sympathy starts to flower. He's changed by her kindness toward him, even if her seeming goodness is not what it first appears.

Which raises another question relevant to modern Christianity: What does it mean to practice virtue in the service of a faith that can never be verified — one that might even be misplaced?

Kim offers no easy answers, and never backs away from the toughness of the questions, in a film that's ugly in both its material and its presentation. Apart from a few shots of nature breaking through on the edges of the city, Pieta stays deep in the squalor of its setting, often using a handheld approach that makes escape feel impossible.

It's tough but rewarding viewing, highlighted by Jo's enigmatic performance; she suggests there may be divine motivations behind her character's professed reasons for helping Gang-do, then never quite abandons that suggestion even after Pieta reveals the true source of what drives her. That's fitting for a film that, even amid the muck and blood, holds out the possibility of finding some hard-won hope. (Recommended)

Remember the economy?

The election year was dominated by talk about jobs and the economy, but neither the administration nor Congress seems to have any grand ideas for jump-starting a still sluggish recovery — and they're not even talking about it much.

President Obama sought to turn attention back to economic issues with a speech last week in Texas on manufacturing, but that's already long since been forgotten. A cascade of scandals has driven the issue entirely off the Washington radar.

Even before Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice controversies started heating up, the economy had consistently taken a back seat to issues such as immigration and gun control.

"The economy is by far the most important issue for voters," says Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's not unusual for Washington preoccupations to be different than those of the public."

She says that the public is skeptical that Washington can provide economic answers at this point. Politicians themselves seem a little dubious.

The two parties remain far apart on economic issues. The type of debt reduction Republicans seek through overhauling entitlement programs is gaining little traction among Democrats, while the GOP-controlled House will never approve further stimulus of the type Democrats would like.

"We've moved away from proposals for big changes and toward piddle policy," says Stephen Weatherford, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "My impression is both the president and the people around him have ratcheted back their expectations, so they've ratcheted back what they're willing to send to Congress."

The Economic Picture

If you looked only at Wall Street, it would seem that happy days might be nearly here again. The Dow Jones average passed a milestone last week, closing above 15,000 for the first time — nearly double its value at its trough early in the Obama presidency.

Looking at Main Street, however, the picture looks entirely different. "We're just sort of worn down by this subpar recovery that continues but doesn't ever seem to accelerate, and if so, not for very long," says Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

Wall Street cheered last week's jobs report, which showed more people found work in April than expected. But it was still far from enough to take up much slack in the labor market.

"That level of growth will not get us up to pre-recession levels of unemployment until 2020," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "We are still in a massive crisis in the labor market."

No Agreement In Washington

Liberal economists like Shierholz argue that current conditions demand more stimulus — federal spending on things like infrastructure and aid to states and localities that would put people back to work.

"We have a situation where we have persistent high unemployment and interest rates near zero," Shierholz says. "This is precisely the time when you want to do fiscal stimulus."

Conservatives couldn't disagree more. Rather than increases in spending, Republicans are concerned with the nation's debt problem, which they see spiraling out of control.

"The administration is not willing to put forward a serious proposal to address the fiscal challenge, which would include meaningful reforms to Medicare and Social Security," says Phillip Swagel, who served as a Treasury Department official in the Bush administration. "Instead, the administration has put forward modest proposals in both areas to intense opposition from progressive supporters."

No Ideas To Sell

For some, the deficit is starting to feel like a less pressing concern. In April, the Treasury Department ran a relatively rare monthly surplus, of $113 billion.

Still, spending cuts demanded by the sequester are proof enough that Washington will not be getting back into the stimulus business, says Jason Seligman, an economist at Ohio State University.

The nation can't spend more in the short term if it can't get its long-term budget in order, he says. But there's no agreement about how to get long-term spending under control.

"Really, we can't agree on anything," Seligman says.

Indeed, there appears to be no appetite in Washington for further talk of a "Grand Bargain," in which both parties would put cherished priorities on the table. Such cooperation would be politically risky at any point, but seems especially unlikely now, at what appears to be the beginning of a season of scandal and myriad congressional investigations.

The end result is that any help the economy could use from Washington is going to remain long in coming.

"The issues circulating around the economy are so central to both parties' ideologies that their incentives for obstruction are even larger than they are for other issues," says Weatherford, the Santa Barbara professor.

Congress is considering a bill that would allow states to collect sales taxes from online retailers. Proponents say a law is necessary to level the playing field with brick-and-mortar stores and to raise revenue for states.

Simply put, the Marketplace Fairness Act would require any online retailer with more than $1 million in annual sales to collect and remit sales tax. But Joseph Henchman, a vice president at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, says it's not that simple. He says the bill, at about five pages of text, is unusually brief. And, he says, it doesn't come close to matching how complex collecting sales tax can get.

"It also doesn't include a lot of detail about implementation," Henchman notes. For example, the bill says the states will have to provide automated tax software to businesses free of charge. But what if a business' existing systems don't work with available tax software? Who pays? What if a state doesn't provide adequate software? To whom should the business take its complaint?

Fearing A Logistical 'Nightmare'

These are the types of questions that dog Stacey Strawn, president of the gift shop Silver Gallery. The business has a small storefront in Waynesboro, Va., but the lion's share of its $3 million in annual sales are made online and over the phone. Strawn, like some other online retailers, is crying foul on the bill. Trying to comply with the law, she says, would "be a nightmare."

If the law passes, Strawn would have to collect taxes for every purchase, then remit them to every state and local government where her customers live. She says software that automates tax collection is not a plug-and-play solution that meets all needs.

"Something gets exchanged and it's sent to another state. Then we have to figure out how to refund the taxes from the first state, collect our refund from that state, then charge the customer the new tax," she explains.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Senate Poised To Approve Online Sales Tax Bill

Drivers will find this summer's gas prices are lower than last year's, the result of a spike in crude oil production. Government forecasters say a gallon of regular gasoline will cost about $3.50 this summer — a slide of more than 10 cents from last year.

Energy Department analysts say "the regular gasoline price will average $3.53 per gallon over the summer," citing lower crude oil prices. "The annual average regular gasoline retail price is projected to decline from $3.63 per gallon in 2012 to $3.50 per gallon in 2013 and to $3.39 per gallon in 2014."

As Danielle Karson reports for NPR's Newscast Desk, increased U.S. petroleum exports could keep domestic prices from taking a sharp dive, despite a slight slump in demand.

"U.S. refineries are also exporting a record amount of diesel and gasoline to developing countries, including China, where demand for diesel is through the roof," Diane reports.

Oil industry analyst Patrick DeHaan tells Diane that if gas companies "build domestic inventories too much, it will hurt their bottom line. Maintaining exports while not allowing inventories to grow out of control, is what they're likely trying to accomplish."

Last Memorial Day, the U.S. average for a gallon of unleaded was $3.636 — "down about 15 cents" from 2011, CNN reported. But prices rose at the end of the summer, due in large part to Hurricane Isaac.

The International Monetary Fund recently urged governments to cut subsidies and allow higher gasoline prices, seeing it as a way to encompass the costs of increased traffic, pollution and global warming, in addition to exploration, production and transportation.

As David Wessel, economics editor of The Wall Street Journal, told NPR's Linda Wertheimer on Morning Edition, the IMF "says that subsidizing energy or mispricing it aggravates budget deficits, crowds out spending on health and education, discourages investment in energy, encourages excessive energy use, artificially promotes capital-intensive industries," and creates other problems.

"Some governments spend more on energy subsidies than they do on education and healthcare," David said. "And nobody really thinks that's a great idea."

But, he added, "David Lipton, the number two at the IMF .... says it's better to do this the right way than to do it right away, but it's important to do it."

A couple generations ago, when older Americans retired they could rely on pension plans to support them. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many companies switched their retirement plans over to 401(k) accounts. The security of workers' retirement savings suddenly became subject to the vagaries of the stock market.

Read Robert Hiltonsmith's Research

Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work And Fueling Inequality

When 23-year-old Solomon "Sully" Omar felt the music scene in his native Denver wasn't giving him what he was looking for, he made a radical move. He headed for Kabul, capital of the war-torn country his parents had fled decades ago.

"I came here to continue my education and at the same time see what's in the music scene here and bring some of the skills and abilities that I have to the music scene," says Omar.

Omar is a member of District Unknown, a full-on metal band whose performance was one of the highlights of the recent Sound Central Festival of alternative music and arts in Kabul. More than 30 bands performed over four days during the third annual event.

And if you can imagine it, District Unknown's sweat-inducing set had the hundreds of Afghan spectators on their feet.

Enlarge image i

It turns out that the desire to speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with $610,000, will buy you a cup of coffee. That's the winning bid offered in a charity auction for up to an hour of Cook's time.

As we reported last month, the chance to grab coffee with Cook at Apple's headquarters zoomed past the suggested value of $50,000 set at the Charitybuzz auction site, rising to more than $600,000 in just three days.

The winner hasn't been identified; an earlier glance at the list of bidders suggested that many of them have companies or entrepreneurial projects they might like to discuss with Cook. The winner has one year in which to coordinate a date to grab coffee with the executive.

The proceeds of the auction, in which Cook and other celebrities are taking part, benefits the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Perhaps to keep any would-be bidders from using the auction as a way to get free publicity, the Charitybuzz site added a note to the Cook auction requiring any bids of more than $500,000 to be authenticated with financial records.

The winning bid places a much greater value on Cook's time than his annual salary reflects. When the bid surpassed the $600,000 mark, our calculations found that if all of Cook's time were to be valued at the same rate, he would earn more than $1.25 billion in a year.

Plenty of celebrities leverage their star power to raise awareness of complicated food issues. Some of the biggest names include Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, Prince Charles and Paul McCartney.

Down in New Orleans, actor Wendell Pierce, who stars in David Simon's Treme and, previously, The Wire, has been taking on food insecurity in low-income communities with brand new convenience stores. Pierce has received plenty of attention for his efforts and appeared this week on NPR's Tell Me More to talk about the opening of the first grocery store in his New Orleans-based Sterling Farms chain earlier this spring.

Even though New Orleans' restaurant sector is booming — there are over 1,200 in the city, even more than before Hurricane Katrina — many communities outside the center have been waiting in vain for supermarkets to return. That's because of investors' "economic apathy," Pierce says.

A food desert is defined as an area where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away. And New Orleans has plenty of them, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new Food Access Research Atlas shows. "For me, growing up in New Orleans, where so much of the culture is based around food, it's unacceptable [to have them]," Pierce told Tell Me More.

But even with Pierce's leadership (he was recently named one of FastCompany's 100 most creative people in business) and investment dollars behind the effort, a host of stumbling blocks still make it hard to get fresh, healthful foods to people living in these areas. And as food activists are discovering all over the country, grocery stores alone won't make the food desert bloom.

On a sunny spring day in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia province, Afghan officials and U.S. troops and civilians gather inside the ancient mud fort in the center of Forward Operating Base Gardez. They're attending a ceremony marking the formal end of the work of the provincial reconstruction team, or PRT.

“ You stay too long and inadvertently you smother the capacity that you're trying to build up.

When Duan Biggs was growing up in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, he used to watch elephants and rhinos walking past his bedroom window. He left home to pursue degrees in biology and economics, and when he returned in 2011 the park looked and sounded "like a pseudo war zone," he says.

"There'd be helicopters flying overhead all the time," he says. "I remember one afternoon coming back to my home from a game drive and the bush was crawling with people with assault rifles, from the army, from the police, and from National Parks. They were looking for poachers."

The military-grade equipment — drones, tracking chips, thermal scopes — deployed to protect wildlife against poachers hasn't prevented transcontinental cartels from slaughtering rhinos across Africa to supply a black market concentrated in East Asia, especially Vietnam, where rhino horn is consumed as a traditional medicine for modern ailments.

Parallels

Vietnam's Appetite For Rhino Horn Drives Poaching In Africa

A new video from Syria is shocking even by the standards of a war that keeps setting new standards for brutality.

In the video, a rebel fighter identified as Khalid al-Hamad is shown cutting out and eating the organs of a dead government soldier.

This appeared shortly after a pro-regime militia filmed the aftermath of a massacre of Sunni villagers in the coastal town of Banias, in which at least 62 people, including babies, were stabbed or shot to death.

War crimes are increasingly defining the Syrian conflict, where cellphone cameras are as prevalent on the battlefield as weapons and competing images of savage events are uploaded to the Internet to spread hatred and fear.

A Swiss-based group, Geneva Call, is hoping that a course in international humanitarian law can mitigate some of the offenses. A recent workshop in Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, introduced Syrian opposition fighters to the international laws of warfare.

Osama Abu Zaid, a Syrian activist, organized the workshop on behalf of Geneva Call.

"They are hungry and eager for knowledge," Zaid says of the rebels, whose ranks include government military officers who defected. Some of the opposition fighters left the battlefield in Syria for the workshop in a Turkish hotel.

"They now realize they have done some things wrong," he says.

"Fighters Not Killers" is the name of the two-day course that focuses on 15 principles of the Geneva Conventions that codify the rules of war.

Working On Case Studies

The participants work on case studies that encourage them to link classroom exercise to their experiences in the Syrian civil war.

"They are learning the rules," Zaid says as small groups go through the exercises. "For example, when the enemy is surrounded, they don't have the right to shoot him, but must arrest him."

Zakaria Haj Hussein is a police officer from Latakia who defected and joined the rebels.

"We came here to know international law and not to make the mistake of a war crime," he says.

Hussein says he never had this training in Syria. As a policeman, he explains, the law says that officers are to protect civilians. But Syrian officials made clear, he says, that "we could do whatever we wanted" when it came to arrests.

In a separate corner of the hotel, a group of rebels from the eastern province of Deir Ezzor is wrestling with another case study.

A rebel commander reads the exercise to his group: "The Red Cross guy responsible for medical aid comes to our headquarters to complain. He is worried that we are using an ambulance to transport weapons. Why is he worried?"

The young rebels offer different opinions.

"Because we are using it for military stuff," says one.

"Because he's afraid the enemy will hit it?" says another.

The group leader waits for discussion to wind down before he weighs in.

"This is a bad job, it's a war crime," he says and then adds, "if the enemy knows we use an ambulance to deliver weapons, then he will shoot at all the ambulances."

It is impossible to calculate the impact of a short course in the rules of war on a conflict that has brutalized Syria and become increasingly sectarian.

The trainer, a specialist in international law, asked that we not use his name. He has conducted workshops in other conflict zones and says "the knowledge" can make a difference.

"There is an impact on the ground. You see public statements change. You see the types of weapons change," he says.

He knows the training has changed attitudes on the battlefield when he gets complaints from commanders who say that when the orders come to launch a rocket, "his men want to know, where?" And when combatants start to carry maps and buy GPS devices to make sure they are hitting enemy soldiers not civilians, he knows the training has taken hold.

U.S. oil production is rising sharply and increased output from shale will be a "game changer" in global energy markets in the coming years, according to a new report out Tuesday by the International Energy Agency.

"U.S. shale oil will help meet most of the world's new oil needs in the next five years, even if demand rises from a pick-up in the global economy," the Paris-based agency said in its five-year outlook, called the Medium-Term Oil Market Report.

"North American supply is an even bigger deal than we thought. A real game changer in every way," said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA's executive director.

She said that North American production has set off a "supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world" and urged the United States to dismantle the Export Administration Act of 1979, which bans the sale of U.S. crude abroad, except to Canada and Mexico.

"This issue is on the table. I think it has to be addressed because if there are no export licenses for crude, then the industry will find different ways, as they are looking for now already with processed, half-processed products, things like that," van der Hoeven said.

The IEA report forecasts:

"North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-OPEC supply growth of 6 [million barrels per day]. World liquid production capacity is expected to grow by 8.4 [million barrels per day] – significantly faster than demand – which is projected to expand by 6.9 [million barrels per day]. Global refining capacity will post even steeper growth, surging by 9.5 [million barrels per day], led by China and the Middle East."

President Obama announced late Wednesday that the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Steve Miller, has resigned in the wake of a report that employees at the agency engaged in partisan scrutiny of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

The president, appearing for a brief statement at the White House, said he had directed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew "to accept the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS."

He said it was part of a larger effort to "make sure nothing like this ever happens again" by holding responsible individuals responsible.

Obama said he had also directed Lew to implement the recommendations contained in the inspector general's report that brought the situation to light.

"I will not tolerate this conduct in any way, especially from the IRS, given the power it has," the president said.

As we reported earlier this week:

"Miller could have alerted Congress to what the IRS had been doing last summer. ...

On July 25 of last year, Miller testified before the oversight subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. According to a transcript of the hearing, GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas said, 'I have been contacted by several of the groups in my district. And they feel like they are being harassed. I don't have any evidence that that is the case. But they feel like they have been harassed and feel like the IRS is threatening them with some kind of action or audit.'"

Walmart says it has drafted its own plan for improving safety at garment factories in Bangladesh rather than join other Western retailers in a legally binding agreement to pay for improved conditions for workers in the South Asian country.

The announcement by the world's largest retailer comes nearly three weeks after the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka that killed more than 1,100 people. The New York Times on Wednesday reported that a Walmart contractor from Canada produced jeans at one of the factories in the collapsed complex.

Walmart said it would not join H&M, the parent company of Zara, Benetton, Marks & Spencer and other European labels in an agreement to conduct independent inspections and to help pay for safety upgrades at factories where they manufacture clothing.

Instead, Walmart has said it will "conduct in-depth safety inspections at 100 percent" of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh and publicize the results on its website.

"Walmart believes its safety plan meets or exceeds" the plan put forth by other manufacturers, the company said in a statement Tuesday, adding that the retailer "will get results more quickly."

The Times reports:

"Wal-Mart promised to stop production immediately at factories if urgent safety problems were uncovered and to notify factory owners and government authorities of improvements. But the company ... stopped short of committing to help underwrite the improvements — one of the crucial aspects of the Bangladesh safety agreement adopted by European companies."

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: How Do You Get Support?

A bill making its way through the Louisiana Legislature would let Cajun citizens celebrate their ancestry by customizing their driver's license, adding the phrase "I'm a Cajun" below their photograph.

It would cost $5 to add the message; the money would go toward "scholarships distributed by the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, a program promoting French language and culture in the state," reports NOLA.com.

The Senate has already approved the bill; it's headed to the House now, after the he House Committee on Transportation, Highways and Public Works unanimously supported the change Monday.

A similar bill in the House would create a license plate bearing the message "I'm Cajun .... and proud." It also includes an "I'm Creole" option.

Both measures are aimed at shoring up funding for CODOFIL, especially its "La Fondation Louisiane for the Escadrille Louisiane" scholarship program.

As the Houma Today website explains, "During last year's regular session, Gov. Bobby Jindal cut $100,000 from CODOFIL, saying in his official veto message that the program 'has been adequately funded.'"

In their current states, neither of the two bills seem to include requirements for proving ancestry or other connections to the culture being celebrated.

"There is a certain sense of uniqueness about Louisiana that people fall in love with," Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle tells NOLA.com. He added that the new ID would be "a way to identity and create a little bit of pride."

The possibility of Cajun IDs was welcome news to readers commenting on the NOLA story. One of them even inspired our headline for this post. Another simply wrote, "A little comic relief from yesterday's news. Gotta love it."

Attorney General Eric Holder has defended the Justice Department's actions in secretly obtaining journalists' phone records as part of a probe into leaks of classified material, but said he himself had nothing to do with the subpoena.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Holder said he'd recused himself from the investigation at the time the records were sought, and that Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole was in charge of the case in which phone records of Associated Press reporters were obtained.

According to a Justice Department statement, Holder stepped aside because he himself was being interviewed in the probe over who provided information for an AP story disclosing details of a CIA operation in Yemen, according to the AP.

Holder said that the investigation itself was aimed at locating "a very serious leak, a very grave leak" that "put the American people at risk."

The remarks come on the same day Holder sent a letter to AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt. In it, he writes that DOJ policy is to "issue subpoenas for phone records of media organizations only in certain circumstances.

"In this case, the Department undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue," Holder says.

On Monday, Pruitt had blasted the Justice Department for secretly obtaining the logs for the period between April and May 2012, saying there was "no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters."

Holder said he understood Pruitt's position "that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn ... but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope."

NPR's David Folkenflik reports:

"Deputy Attorney General James Cole authorized the subpoena of records for 20 phone lines involving a two-month period. The failure to tell the AP means the organization could not negotiate a more narrow release of records or fight it in court."

The sudden eruption of second-term scandals in his administration will have many costs for President Obama, but surely the most grievous will be the lost opportunity to transcend the partisan wars of Washington. That aspiration was his fondest dream for his second term, much as it was for his first. Now it seems destined to be dashed once again.

Of course, there are those who believe Barack Obama never intended to be anything but a conquering hero of the left. The most intractable of his detractors see the recent revelations about the IRS and certain conservative groups as caught-red-handed confirmation of a White House plot to destroy its opponents. That impression of abused power is only reinforced by news of the Justice Department's swooping down in secret on the telephone records of The Associated Press.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said that his department swept up the AP records last year in investigating "a very grave leak" related to national security. That is a justification Americans have heard often enough to inspire skepticism. Holder was not able to describe the security breach in question, so we are left to take its gravity on faith. And there's precious little of that in Washington, even in the best of times.

Holder has also joined the dog pile on the IRS, which has admitted it sent extra-onerous questionnaires to groups starting in 2011 if they had "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names. While that may have begun as a way for IRS bureaucrats to prioritize within a mountain of new applications for tax exemption, it smacks of using the power to tax to persecute.

Obama's Vision

These episodes recall the excesses of previous administrations, back to Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, two strong presidents whose landslide victories propelled them to the heights of political power. Subsequent overreach brought each to earth with such force that the craters are still visible in the American political landscape.

Obama's aspirations were different. He never thought he could win 40 states or 60 percent of the popular vote. He knew he was struggling for just enough votes to win. But beyond Election Day, he was no less ambitious than his predecessors in the breadth and loft of his program. He set out to remake the health care and immigration systems, as well as to redefine financial regulation and the tax code and the nation's balance of energy and environment. And beyond these goals, he wanted to make a clear majority of Americans stakeholders in his program.

By so doing, he believed, he could build a coalition of the middle around solutions more practical than ideological. Were he able to do all that, he would be remembered as more than the champion of one party and the victor in two presidential elections. He would be a president who moved the nation, as a nation, in a certain direction. That has been the judgment of history on FDR and Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan — all partisan warriors in their rise to power who are widely revered in retrospect.

Was it hubris that made Obama hope for a place in such company? His first term began with tremendous momentum. Not only was his election itself historic, but the banking crisis of 2008-2009 forced the warring parties in Congress to act in concert — if only for a season. Early on, the new president and his inner circle thought they could negotiate on health care and other issues on a bipartisan basis. They saw a Republican Party chastened by the election of 2008 and ready to deal. They saw the prospect of a new consensus.

Opposition To President

But within the first few months of that term, a more virulent form of opposition developed within conservative ranks. It manifested itself in protest marches, angry town hall meetings and primary challenges to mainstream Republican officeholders. Call it the Tea Party or the anti-Obama movement or just the resurgence of traditional attitudes. By any name, it dominated the elections of 2010, especially at the state level. The enactments of 2009 and 2010 gave way to the fiscal wars and confrontations of the past 24 months.

The Obama team endured all that and kept its focus on November 2012. Re-elected, the president hoped his return to the Oval Office might occasion "a fever break" in Washington. There could be a sense of capitulation, a season of acceptance. Given the distinct demographic evidence from Election Day, Republicans would want to appeal to a younger, more diverse electorate.

But it hasn't happened that way. Set aside the urgings of one report offered up by the Republican National Committee in March, the standard posture of the GOP has been anything but conciliatory. From the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling to gun control and the immigration laws, the opposition party has been as unified and as oppositional as ever.

Even before the IRS and AP stories burst into view, the Republican focus was on the Benghazi tragedy of last September. And this week, the House will have yet another vote to repeal Obamacare, the 37th such attempt to repeal the law in whole or in part. In the Senate, Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is incensed that the secretary of health and human services is coordinating efforts with private groups to promote participation in the new health care law.

We can now be sure that the capital's pre-existing condition of partisanship will worsen with complications from multiple investigations, probes and Hill hearings as far as the eye can see. Whatever else that means, it means that the President Obama we have will not be the President Obama he wanted to become.

Remember the economy?

The election year was dominated by talk about jobs and the economy, but neither the administration nor Congress seems to have any grand ideas for jump-starting a still sluggish recovery — and they're not even talking about it much.

President Obama sought to turn attention back to economic issues with a speech last week in Texas on manufacturing, but that's already long since been forgotten. A cascade of scandals has driven the issue entirely off the Washington radar.

Even before Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice controversies started heating up, the economy had consistently taken a back seat to issues such as immigration and gun control.

"The economy is by far the most important issue for voters," says Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's not unusual for Washington preoccupations to be different than those of the public."

She says that the public is skeptical that Washington can provide economic answers at this point. Politicians themselves seem a little dubious.

The two parties remain far apart on economic issues. The type of debt reduction Republicans seek through overhauling entitlement programs is gaining little traction among Democrats, while the GOP-controlled House will never approve further stimulus of the type Democrats would like.

"We've moved away from proposals for big changes and toward piddle policy," says Stephen Weatherford, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "My impression is both the president and the people around him have ratcheted back their expectations, so they've ratcheted back what they're willing to send to Congress."

The Economic Picture

If you looked only at Wall Street, it would seem that happy days might be nearly here again. The Dow Jones average passed a milestone last week, closing above 15,000 for the first time — nearly double its value at its trough early in the Obama presidency.

Looking at Main Street, however, the picture looks entirely different. "We're just sort of worn down by this subpar recovery that continues but doesn't ever seem to accelerate, and if so, not for very long," says Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

Wall Street cheered last week's jobs report, which showed more people found work in April than expected. But it was still far from enough to take up much slack in the labor market.

"That level of growth will not get us up to pre-recession levels of unemployment until 2020," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "We are still in a massive crisis in the labor market."

No Agreement In Washington

Liberal economists like Shierholz argue that current conditions demand more stimulus — federal spending on things like infrastructure and aid to states and localities that would put people back to work.

"We have a situation where we have persistent high unemployment and interest rates near zero," Shierholz says. "This is precisely the time when you want to do fiscal stimulus."

Conservatives couldn't disagree more. Rather than increases in spending, Republicans are concerned with the nation's debt problem, which they see spiraling out of control.

"The administration is not willing to put forward a serious proposal to address the fiscal challenge, which would include meaningful reforms to Medicare and Social Security," says Phillip Swagel, who served as a Treasury Department official in the Bush administration. "Instead, the administration has put forward modest proposals in both areas to intense opposition from progressive supporters."

No Ideas To Sell

For some, the deficit is starting to feel like a less pressing concern. In April, the Treasury Department ran a relatively rare monthly surplus, of $113 billion.

Still, spending cuts demanded by the sequester are proof enough that Washington will not be getting back into the stimulus business, says Jason Seligman, an economist at Ohio State University.

The nation can't spend more in the short term if it can't get its long-term budget in order, he says. But there's no agreement about how to get long-term spending under control.

"Really, we can't agree on anything," Seligman says.

Indeed, there appears to be no appetite in Washington for further talk of a "Grand Bargain," in which both parties would put cherished priorities on the table. Such cooperation would be politically risky at any point, but seems especially unlikely now, at what appears to be the beginning of a season of scandal and myriad congressional investigations.

The end result is that any help the economy could use from Washington is going to remain long in coming.

"The issues circulating around the economy are so central to both parties' ideologies that their incentives for obstruction are even larger than they are for other issues," says Weatherford, the Santa Barbara professor.

U.S. oil production is rising sharply and increased output from shale will be a "game changer" in global energy markets in the coming years, according to a new report out Tuesday by the International Energy Agency.

"U.S. shale oil will help meet most of the world's new oil needs in the next five years, even if demand rises from a pick-up in the global economy," the Paris-based agency said in its five-year outlook, called the Medium-Term Oil Market Report.

"North American supply is an even bigger deal than we thought. A real game changer in every way," said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA's executive director.

She said that North American production has set off a "supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world" and urged the United States to dismantle the Export Administration Act of 1979, which bans the sale of U.S. crude abroad, except to Canada and Mexico.

"This issue is on the table. I think it has to be addressed because if there are no export licenses for crude, then the industry will find different ways, as they are looking for now already with processed, half-processed products, things like that," van der Hoeven said.

The IEA report forecasts:

"North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-OPEC supply growth of 6 [million barrels per day]. World liquid production capacity is expected to grow by 8.4 [million barrels per day] – significantly faster than demand – which is projected to expand by 6.9 [million barrels per day]. Global refining capacity will post even steeper growth, surging by 9.5 [million barrels per day], led by China and the Middle East."

Those debating were:

FOR THE MOTION

Scott Gottlieb, M.D., is a practicing physician and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2005-2007, Gottlieb served as deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration and, before that, from 2003-2004, as a senior adviser to FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan and as the FDA's director of medical policy development. He left the FDA in the spring of 2004 to work on implementation of the new Medicare drug benefit as a senior adviser to the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he supported the agency's policy work on quality improvement and coverage and payment decision-making, particularly as it related to new medical technologies. Gottlieb has held editorial positions on the British Medical Journal and the Journal of the American Medical Association and appears regularly as a guest commentator on the cable financial news channel CNBC.

Peter Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on the issues of drug development, energy, technology and the law. Before joining the Manhattan Institute, Huber served as an assistant and later associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for six years. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then on the U.S. Supreme Court for Sandra Day O'Connor. Huber also is a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen and Todd. He is the author of The Bottomless Well (2005), which he co-wrote with Mark P. Mills. He is also author of the forthcoming book The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law Is Undermining 21st Century Medicine.

AGAINST THE MOTION

Jerry Avorn, M.D., is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. An internist, geriatrician and drug epidemiologist, he studies the intended and adverse effects of prescription drugs, physician prescribing practices and medication policy. Avorn pioneered the "academic detailing" approach to continuing medical education, in which noncommercial, evidence-based information about drugs is provided to doctors through educational outreach programs run by public-sector sponsors. Such programs are now in use in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe. He has served as a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Standards for Developing Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guidelines and is the author or co-author of more than 400 papers in the medical literature on medication use and its outcomes. He is the author of the book Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs (2004).

David R. Challoner, M.D., is vice president emeritus for health affairs of the University of Florida. Challoner has held leadership and health policy positions in many national organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges, where he holds distinguished service membership; the American Medical Association, where he served as chairman of the Section on Medical Schools; and the American Federation for Clinical Research, where he served as president. From 1988-1990, he was appointed by President Reagan to chair the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science. He also served as a member of the governing council of the Institute of Medicine and was a member of the governing board of the National Research Council. He received the 2010 Walsh McDermott Medal of the IOM for distinguished service. He chaired the IOM's Committee on the Public Health Effectiveness of the FDA 510K Clearance Process (2011).

U.S. oil production is rising sharply and increased output from shale will be a "game changer" in global energy markets in the coming years, according to a new report out Tuesday by the International Energy Agency.

"U.S. shale oil will help meet most of the world's new oil needs in the next five years, even if demand rises from a pick-up in the global economy," the Paris-based agency said in its five-year outlook, called the Medium-Term Oil Market Report.

"North American supply is an even bigger deal than we thought. A real game changer in every way," said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA's executive director.

She said that North American production has set off a "supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world" and urged the United States to dismantle the Export Administration Act of 1979 that bans the sale of U.S. crude abroad, except to Canada and Mexico.

"This issue is on the table. I think it has to be addressed because if there are no export licenses for crude, then the industry will find different ways, as they are looking for now already with processed, half-processed products, things like that," van der Hoeven said.

The IEA report forecasts:

"North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-OPEC supply growth of 6 [million barrels per day]. World liquid production capacity is expected to grow by 8.4 [million barrels per day] – significantly faster than demand – which is projected to expand by 6.9 [million barrels per day]. Global refining capacity will post even steeper growth, surging by 9.5 [million barrels per day], led by China and the Middle East."

Spade's arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging through his blue sleeves.

Attorney General Eric Holder has defended the Justice Department's actions in secretly obtaining journalists' phone records as part of a probe into leaks of classified material, but said he himself had nothing to do with the subpoena.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Holder said he'd recused himself from the investigation at the time the records were sought and that Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole was in charge of the case in which phone records of Associated Press reporters were obtained.

According to a Justice Department statement, Holder stepped aside because he himself was being interviewed in the probe over who provided information for an AP story disclosing details of a CIA operation in Yemen, according to the AP.

Holder that the investigation itself was aimed at locating "a very serious leak, a very grave leak" that "put the American people at risk."

The remarks come on the same day Holder sent a letter to AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt. In it, he writes that Department policy is to "issue subpoenas for phone records of media organizations only in certain circumstances.

"In this case, the Department undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue," Holder says.

On Monday, Pruitt had blasted the Justice Department for secretly obtaining the logs for the period April-May 2012, saying there was "no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters."

Holder said he understood Pruitt's position "that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn ... but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope."

NPR's David Folkenflik reports:

"Deputy Attorney General James Cole authorized the subpoena of records for twenty phone lines involving a two month period. The failure to tell the AP means the organization could not negotiate a more narrow release of records or fight it in court."

The civil war in Syria feels far away for many Americans. But it hits close to home for one Chicago doctor and has pulled him, and many of his colleagues, to the front lines.

Tell Me More host Michel Martin spoke with Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a practicing critical care specialist in Chicago and president of the Syrian American Medical Society.

Sahloul says that for safety reasons, local physicians in Syria have established an underground health care system.

"In every area in Syria," Sahloul notes, "there is what's called field hospitals or medical points. These field hospitals and medical points are usually hidden in the basement of buildings or sometimes in natural caves. I've seen a field hospital in the mountains of Latakia that is made in a cave — natural cave — because it's hidden from the authorities. It cannot be bombed and shelled."

On the type of injuries he sees

"Many of the conditions are related to shrapnel. ... There is a phenomenon in Syria called barrel bombs. These are barrels that are stuffed with bomb powder and dropped on populations.

"We are also treating more and more patients who have infectious diseases related to the disintegration of the health care system. We are seeing more resurgence of measles, for example, because of lack of vaccination in Syria."

Middle East

Syrian-American Doctors Head To The Battle Zone

Four retailers who represent the largest purchasers of clothes produced in Bangladesh announced Monday that they have will help finance safety upgrades at apparel factories in the South Asia country after the collapse of a garment complex killed more than 1,000 workers.

The news comes as the death toll in the April 24 collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza near Dhaka rose to at least 1,127, according to officials.

In a statement from Sweden-based H&M and Inditex, the parent company of Zara, the retail giants urged others to join them. Within hours Britain's Primark Stores and Tesco as well as C&A of the Netherlands said they would also sign on to the legally binding agreement to "guarantee safe working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry."

H&M spokeswoman Helena Hermersson said the company's "strong presence in Bangladesh" gave it a unique opportunity to "contribute to the improvement of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and contribute to the community's development."

H&M called the agreement a "pragmatic step," and said if other brands follow suit they could collectively cover all of the country's estimated 5,000 garment factories.

Karen Stinebrickner-Kaufman, executive director of the watchdog group SumOfUs.org praised H&M and Zara and expressed hope that "Gap and other brands follow their competitors' lead.

"Only legally binding programs that are accountable to workers themselves can guarantee that the clothes we buy aren't being made in death traps," she said.

The New York Times reports that the agreement:

"... calls for independent, rigorous factory safety inspections with public reports and mandatory repairs and renovations underwritten by Western retailers. A legally enforceable contract, it also calls for retailers to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make necessary safety improvements, and for workers and their unions to have a substantial voice in factory safety."

"I laid there for probably five minutes, then the entire night just erupted into automatic gunfire. My first initial thought is that we were being re-kidnapped by another group, or maybe it was al-Shabab [the Islamic military group in Somalia] — that was always the eminent threat, and then I knew there was no hope for survival if it was al-Shabab. And I just, I laid there and I prayed and I also just said, like, 'I can't survive another kidnapping. I've already learned this group. ... I'm so tired, I can't, I can't do this anymore.'

"The next thing I know, somebody pulls the blanket from my face and then I hear a man say my name. You know, I haven't heard anybody say my name in so long. And then he says, 'We're the American military, and we're here to save you, we're here to take you home. You're safe now.' And I ... was just in so much shock I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. The American military, they knew I was here? Americans are here? I'm not alone? One of them just scoops me up, I mean, like a movie, and just, you know, runs across the desert with me to a safe place, and they quickly give me medication and at one point form a ring around us because they weren't sure if the premises was completely safe."

On how she responded when a Navy SEAL asked if she'd forgotten anything at the camp

Buchanan: "I can't believe I did this, but I had a small little powder bag that they had let me keep, and inside I had re-stolen from them a ring that my mom had made, and I thought, 'I can't leave it here in the desert.' [Her mother had recently died.]

"And so I ask him to go back and get the bag for me. And, I mean, these men are just, they're incredible. He goes back out, into a war zone basically, to go get my ring. And then he comes back with the bag."

On being reunited at a base in Italy, where military personnel told them to take things slow

Buchanan: "Our first meeting was one hour. I don't think either one of us could have handled any more."

Landemalm: "No. No, it was — I mean, inside of yourself you want to talk about everything. But I think that [in] one hour you are able to kind of relay the main message that you love each other and that whatever has happened during these 93 days we have the rest of our lives to talk about it."

NPR Coverage Of The Kidnapping

The Two-Way

In Daring Raid, Navy SEALs Free 2 Aid Workers From Somali Kidnappers

Here's the paradox with international news.

In our wired and rapidly shrinking world, there is no distant war, no isolated economic crisis and no social trend that observes national borders.

When a building collapses in Bangladesh, photos of the dead and grieving appear instantly. When a battle takes place in Syria, YouTube videos surface in real time. You can even get tweets from North Korea.

Yet all this technological wizardry can easily become a confusing cacophony, a discordant electronic buzz that has erupted at a time when many American news organizations have retreated from international coverage. There's no substitute for having a reporter at the scene, and yet they have become increasingly scarce.

But NPR has been bucking that trend. We have reporters around the world who are willing to go anywhere to find a good story and explain what it means. And they are the reason we are launching this blog.

Our correspondents won't just be reporting the news, they will be looking to tell stories that connect us all. They will be seeking out, well, parallels, between stories far away and those close to home. And in the process, we hope to offer up some uncommon answers and alternate perspectives.

So many stories cross borders and we have the reporters to cover them at both ends. After the bombing at the Boston Marathon, the focus of the story soon moved to the family roots of the suspects, who came from the Caucuses region in southern Russia. NPR's Corey Flintoff was there to help explain the complicated history of this troubled territory.

As we begin the blog this week, our reporters will be taking you from Africa to Asia as we look at the increasingly sophisticated nature of international poaching. South Africa has the largest number of rhinos, and the best protected. Yet high-tech poachers are slaughtering them by the hundreds for their horns. The destination may surprise you: it's often Vietnam, where the newly emerging rich are prepared to spend big money in the misguided notion that these horns can cure everything from hangovers to cancer.

We'll be visiting many other countries as well. We know we have well-traveled readers engaged in the world, and your feedback will be invaluable. As the host of this blog, I invite you to join in the conversation.

In December 1944, the Nazis looked like a spent force: The U.S. and its allies had pushed Hitler's armies across France in the fight to liberate Europe from German occupation.

The Allies were so confident that the Forest of Ardennes, near the front lines in Belgium, became a rest and recreation area, complete with regular USO performances.

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

Amazon debuted a virtual currency called "Amazon Coins" on Monday. The coins can be used to buy apps in Amazon's Appstore and on Kindle Fire. A dollar will get you 100 of the new coins, though the Internet retailer will discount coins bought in bulk. Although you can't yet buy books with Amazon Coins, the move has raised eyebrows in the publishing industry. Amazon did not respond to an inquiry about the exchange rate between its coins and the currency of Chuck E. Cheese.

A lost journal written by poet W.H. Auden at the onset of World War II has been discovered. The notebook runs 96 pages and spans the period from August and November 1939 — around the time he wrote the poem "September 1, 1939." The Independent cites one journal passage that reads: "Paper reports German attack on Poland. Now I sit looking out over the river. Such a beautiful evening and in an hour, they say, England will be at war." The manuscript will be auctioned at Christie's in June.

Glen Ellyn School District 41, an Illinois school district, has banned the young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower from its library and classrooms after parents complained about its discussions of sex and drug use. At least they can probably still read The Diary of Anne Frank.

For Out magazine, Bret Easton Ellis, the controversial author of American Psycho (who identifies as gay), denounces what he says is the stereotypical roles gay men play in the media: "The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is – lamentably — still in media play."

Barbara Salinas-Norman, a Chicana author and activist, was found dead in her apartment in Santa Fe, N.M., earlier this month. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that police speculate the 70-year-old woman known as Bobbi had been dead for several months. Salinas-Norman had been a successful children's author and the founder of Piata Publications, but she later fell out of contact with friends and family, and her home was said to be in foreclosure.

Last year, almost the entire Michigan apple crop was lost due to 80 degree days in March and then some freezing April nights. This year, the apples are back, but everything always depends on the weather. The state was under a freeze warning Sunday night — a scary prospect if you're an apple grower and your trees have just come into bloom.

Tim Boles and his agribusiness colleague Case DeYoung were driving to work one morning in late April 2012 after a killing frost had hit the apple orchards in The Ridge, a region of ridges and rolling valleys in west-central of the state close to Lake Michigan. They stopped at a high point and knew things were bad when they saw the helicopters hovering, hoping to push down a warmer layer of air.

The Salt

Shriveled Mich. Apple Harvest Means Fewer Jobs, Tough Year Ahead

A bill making its way through the Louisiana Legislature would let Cajun citizens celebrate their ancestry by customizing their driver's license, adding the phrase "I'm a Cajun" below their photograph.

It would cost $5 to add the message; the money would go toward "scholarships distributed by the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, a program promoting French language and culture in the state," reports NOLA.com.

The Senate has already approved the bill; it's headed to the House now, after the he House Committee on Transportation, Highways and Public Works unanimously supported the change Monday.

A similar bill in the House would create a license plate bearing the message "I'm Cajun .... and proud." It also includes an "I'm Creole" option.

Both measures are aimed at shoring up funding for CODOFIL, especially its "La Fondation Louisiane for the Escadrille Louisiane" scholarship program.

As the Houma Today website explains, "During last year's regular session, Gov. Bobby Jindal cut $100,000 from CODOFIL, saying in his official veto message that the program 'has been adequately funded.'"

In their current states, neither of the two bills seem to include requirements for proving ancestry or other connections to the culture being celebrated.

"There is a certain sense of uniqueness about Louisiana that people fall in love with," Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle tells NOLA.com. He added that the new ID would be "a way to identity and create a little bit of pride."

The possibility of Cajun IDs was welcome news to readers commenting on the NOLA story. One of them even inspired our headline for this post. Another simply wrote, "A little comic relief from yesterday's news. Gotta love it."

You might remember the story of the uproar earlier this year over a piece of art by the mysterious graffiti artist Banksy that disappeared from its home on a wall in north London and ended up on the auction block in Miami.

That auction was canceled, and residents of Haringey Borough, the area from which the mural disappeared, were jubilant, hoping that "Slave Labour," the Banksy mural, would be returned to its home. Unfortunately for them, that might not happen.

The stencil of a young boy sewing the Union Jack is the centerpiece of a June 2 exhibition in London, after which it will head to the U.S., where it is to be part of an "important private collection," according to the Sincura Group, which is organizing the exhibition and auction. In a statement, it adds: "The showing of this piece was the culmination of months of hard work and we simply wish to display it ... again [in] its home city before it disappears forever."

The statement notes that law enforcement authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have determined that the mural was removed legally.

It was initially reported that Sincura was auctioning the artwork, but the company noted that it was "making no financial gain from displaying this piece of art."

The Haringey Independent newspaper notes that the local council is working to get the artwork back.

In a statement, the head of the Trades Union Council for Haringey said:

"We appreciate that Sincura have made efforts to check that nothing illegal has taken place but it is a matter of business ethics. Banksy was certainly not asked before the work was removed let alone the people of Haringey in whose area he painted it. It should not be in private hands in the US, however it got there, but on display and not in Covent Garden but in Wood Green N22."