Most Recent Posts

Prized Burgundies and Bordeaux once served at the presidential palace in France were for sale for the first time ever as the wine cellar at Elysee Palace gets an overhaul.

Some 1,200 bottles, or 10 percent of the palace wines, went on sale this week at the famous Drouot auction house in downtown Paris. On the block were vintages from 1930 to 1990, including famous names such as Chateau Latour, Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Montrachet.

Before the sale, one of the auction's organizers, wine expert Juan Carlos Casas, showed me the highest valued wine on the block — a bottle of Bordeaux Petrus that will fetch anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 at auction, and retails for about $7,000.

"This is one of the stalwarts of the international wine code," he says. "It's a wine that everybody wants in their cellar." But he says the Elysee no longer wants to serve expensive, grand cru — first growth wines — at state dinners.

Europe

Will French Election Mark A Reversal Of Austerity?

Prized Burgundies and Bordeaux once served at the presidential palace in France were for sale for the first time ever as the wine cellar at Elysee Palace gets an overhaul.

Some 1,200 bottles, or 10 percent of the palace wines, went on sale this week at the famous Drouot auction house in downtown Paris. On the block were vintages from 1930 to 1990, including famous names such as Chateau Latour, Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Montrachet.

Before the sale, one of the auction's organizers, wine expert Juan Carlos Casas, showed me the highest valued wine on the block — a bottle of Bordeaux Petrus that will fetch anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 at auction, and retails for about $7,000.

"This is one of the stalwarts of the international wine code," he says. "It's a wine that everybody wants in their cellar." But he says the Elysee no longer wants to serve expensive, grand cru — first growth wines — at state dinners.

Europe

Will French Election Mark A Reversal Of Austerity?

In 2004, Peter Obetz was in the middle of a divorce when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

"Food would get stuck down my throat, and it got worse and worse, so I met with my doctor. I had a tumor on my esophagus wall," says Peter, 48, during a visit to StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo.

His doctor told him surgery carried a 10 percent risk of death. "I remember telling the doc, 'You mean to tell me like one guy on my softball team isn't going to make it?' There's 10 guys on the team. He said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it. We can either do the surgery tomorrow or we can wait till Tuesday.' "

That's when he called his best friend, Jeff Jarrett, 52, who told him he needed to get the surgery as soon as possible. "I spent the day with your parents. And the surgeon met with us just after the surgery was completed and drew a graph," Jeff says. The graph showed Peter's percentages of survival over time.

"It started out at 90 percent on the day of the surgery and fell to 15 percent after five years," Jeff says. "That was my scariest moment — that there was only a 15 percent chance that I was going to have my best friend with me five years from now. The next day, you'd caught your mother with that little graph that the doctor had drawn and she wouldn't show it to you. And so I'd come in, and you said, 'I want you to sit down and tell me everything. So I did.' "

"I remember saying, 'I'm toast,' " Peter says.

"Your mom had said that to the surgeon. The surgeon said, 'No, he's lightly brown. He's not toast,' " Jeff says.

Cancer was a wake-up call Peter says he may have needed. "I was in a job where I was miserable, and it gave me the permission to leave," he says. "I went from making a lot of money to making very little and being happier."

He sold his big house and moved to an apartment. Not long after he moved, a unit downstairs opened up and Jeff moved in. "The only time usually that you live right next door to your best friend is when you're a kid because often your next-door neighbor is by default your best friend," Peter says.

"Exactly. Second-graders aren't that picky," Jeff says.

"When I think of every aspect of my life: My marriage has changed, my job has changed, where I live has changed. Our friendship is really the only thing that's constant," Peter says. "That's probably the greatest gift that you could've given me."

"When you were sick, everybody wanted to say, 'Peter, I love you so much, I'm so grateful for our friendship,' " Jeff says. "But I feel so lucky that if anything would have happened to you, there was never any ambiguity about how you feel about me or I feel about you. I love you very, very much."

"I love you too, man."

Peter's been cancer-free since 2009.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

The Mediterranean diet has long been a darling of nutrition experts as a proven way to prevent some chronic diseases. Heavy on olive oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts and fish, the diet most recently has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and dying compared with a typical low-fat diet.

But in many regions, including Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden, it's not easy to go Med. Olive oil, for one, is hard to find. And while obesity rates in the Nordic countries are much lower than in the U.S., there are still plenty of people at risk of diabetes and other chronic diseases who could use some dietary inspiration.

That's why a group of nutrition researchers in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway set out to design a "healthy" Nordic diet around locally produced food items, like herring, rapeseed oil (also known as canola) and bilberries (a relative of the blueberry). To test whether it was actually healthy, they prescribed the diet to people with metabolic syndrome — a precursor to diabetes — and compared them to others on an "average" Nordic diet higher in red meat and white bread.

The study was randomized and lasted 18 to 24 weeks in 2009 and 2010, with 96 people in the healthy diet group and 70 in the control group. The healthy Nordic diet group ate mostly berries (currants, bilberries and strawberries), canola oil, whole grains, root vegetables and three fish meals (preferably fatty fish like salmon and mackerel) per week, and avoided sugar. The rest of the time, they could eat vegetarian, poultry or game, but no red meat. The researchers provided them with some of the key ingredients for their meals.

The control group, on the other hand, ate butter instead of canola, fewer berries and vegetables, and had no restrictions on red meat, white bread or sugar intake.

While the researchers didn't see changes in blood pressure or insulin sensitivity in the people on the healthy Nordic diet, their bad cholesterol/good cholesterol ratio improved significantly, as did one marker for inflammation, according to Lieselotte Cloetens, a biomedical nutrition researcher at Lund University in Sweden who co-authored the study. In the long run, Cloetens says, the change in the inflammation marker could result in a 20 to 40 percent reduction in the risk of type 2 diabetes for people on the healthy diet.

The results appear this week in a European journal, the Journal of Internal Medicine.

The research coincides with a similar, but distinct movement in the region — "New Nordic" cuisine. Claus Meyer, the owner of the acclaimed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, boldly defined New Nordic with a manifesto. His aim? To inspire chefs and highlight the culinary wealth of the Nordic region — foods like fungi, beech leaves, birch juice, reindeer, and chick weed. New Nordic has become "a mentality of sort of scientific and creative exploration," Ben Reade, head of culinary research and development at the Nordic Food Lab, told NPR freelancer Sidsel Overgaard last year.

While Meyer has collaborated with researchers at the University of Copenhagen to explore whether a New Nordic diet could help overweight people drop pounds, his diet places a special emphasis on seasonal, local foods, and on foraging. "It is more defined, from a culinary point of view," than the healthy Nordic diet in the recent study, says Cloetens.

So will the Nordic diet be competing with the Mediterranean diet in far-flung countries seeking to emulate svelte Europeans? Cloetens is confident in its healthfulness, but warns, "since it contains many local produced food items, it might not be easy to consume by people outside the Nordic countries."

And, she says, next she and her colleagues need to investigate whether the healthy Nordic diet can also help people lose weight and keep it off.

Syria's government appears to be making gains this week in a battle against rebel forces in the key city of Qusair, along the border with Lebanon. NPR's Steve Inskeep traveled to the edge of the city, and we hear from him first, followed by Kelly McEvers, who reports from just across the frontier in Lebanon.

A Syrian provincial governor told us this week that the government army has largely retaken Qusair, though a battle continues for the airport. We asked to see for ourselves.

So the governor appointed two men to lead us to the city, which holds great importance because it is a busy crossing point with Lebanon. The drive proved to be revealing. Miles before reaching Qusair, we saw towers of smoke in the air.

From across a lake we made out Qusair's airfield, the scene of the heavy fighting this week. It should have been a short drive to the city, but we took a roundabout route.

Our guides, members of Syria's Alawite religious group, explained this was for security. President Bashar Assad is Alawite and depends on the group for his firmest support, though they make up just a little more than 10 percent of the population.

The guides were taking us from one Alawite village to another, fearing violence if they drove through villages of the majority Sunni Muslims, many of whom support the rebellion.

As we drew closer, we heard the thud of Syrian artillery, pounding Qusair. We also heard fighter jets overhead, and occasionally heard small arms fire. And yet even when the gunshots sounded as if they were close by, we would still see children sitting casually on the side of the street.

Blocked From The City

We were finally stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint, and they said we could not enter Qusair, telling us that rebel snipers were on the road ahead.

Unable to get closer, we knocked on the door of a nearby house, and the residents let us climb on the roof. We had a panoramic view of the landscape.

It did not look like Qusair was entirely under control. We saw smoke rising up from the city, suggesting the fighting was still going on.

The rebels have said they're still fighting in the city, though spokesmen for both sides say the Syrian army has captured most of the region.

In this battle, the government has supplemented its heavy weapons with help from the outside. Fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah joined the battle from across the border with Lebanon.

It's a sensitive topic here to discuss Hezbollah's involvement in the war.

The government has insisted it's the rebels, not the Syrian army, that rely on foreigners. But Hezbollah's involvement has become more open in recent days, and Qusair is especially well-placed for the Lebanese militia to play a role.

Enlarge image i

Scientists in Siberia say they've extracted blood samples from the carcass of a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, leading to speculation that a clone of the extinct animal might someday walk the earth. But researchers say the find, which also included well-preserved muscle tissue, must be studied further to know its potential.

The female mammoth's carcass was found "in good preservation on Lyakhovsky Islands of Novosibirsk archipelago," according to a news release about the discovery by North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Siberia.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat," said lead researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the Museum of Mammoths. "The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of tundra."

"The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out," Grigoriev said. " Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties."

The Siberian scientists say they want to work with Canadian professor Kevin Campbell, who has written in the journal Nature Genetics that mammoths' blood may have had special properties that allowed its hemoglobin to deliver oxygen to the body tissues even in extreme cold.

Campbell is also famous for "resurrecting this red blood cell protein hemoglobin from a woolly mammoth," as he told the CBC last year.

Asked about the new Siberian discovery by Scientific American, Campbell says he has no way of knowing whether what "appears to be a remarkable finding" is genuine — but he also said he wants to study the specimens. And he offered some ideas about why the sample was in a liquid state, even at temperatures such as minus 17 degrees Celsius.

"For instance, maybe they did have some sort of cryoprotectant (arctic ground squirrels certainly seem to), and this became concentrated during the long period of preservation," he tells Scientific American's Kate Wong. "Conversely, maybe they had absolutely no 'antifreezes' and instead most of the water in the sample was taken up by the surrounding ice, such that the remaining 'blood' became extremely concentrated–which would lower its freezing point."

Another explanation, he says, could be that the sample contains ice-living bacteria, which might have lent their cryoprotective properties to the pooled blood.

The North-Eastern Federal University says that some samples will also go to its "Mammoth rebirth" project, between the school and South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, with the goal of cloning a mammoth.

As our colleagues at the TED blog remind us, humans have a special fascination with wooly mammoths.

"Woollys are a quintessential image of the Ice Age ... We seem to have a deep connection with them as we do with elephants," DNA specialist Hendrik Poinar says in a TED talk. "I have to admit there's a part of the child in me that wants to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the North."

And for some folks, that fascination is joined by a desire to make money.

"Today, the hunt is on for woolly mammoth tusks in the Arctic Siberia," writes TED's Becky Chung. "Due to global warming, the melting permafrost has begun revealing these hidden ivory treasures for a group of local tusk-hunters to find and sell. A tusk can range from 10-13 foot in length and a top-grade mammoth tusk is worth around $400 per pound. Mammoth ivory, unlike elephant ivory, is legal."

As for cloning the extinct animals, not everyone is convinced it's a good idea to try to bring them back.

As scientist Daniel Fisher tells Kate Wong at Scientific American, "I have more confidence in our ability to generate new knowledge from the fossil record than in our ability to learn from cloned mammoths."

The State Department says Iran has stepped up its efforts on behalf of global terrorism to a level not seen for 20 years, but that the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are heading for defeat even as the network's affiliates remain a threat.

"Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism and [Hezbollah's] terrorist activity have reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa," says the Country Reports on Terrorism 2012.

Among those attacks was one that killed six on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Other attacks were thwarted in India, Thailand, Georgia and Kenya, the report says.

It says the vehicle for Iran's troublemaking has mostly been the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement, Iran's ally and proxy in Lebanon.

The report also says that al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan continues to decline owing to "leadership losses," and what remains of the group is increasingly focused on survival. However, despite "significant setbacks" to Yemen-based Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabab in Somalia:

"The dispersal of weapons stocks in the wake of the revolution in Libya, the Tuareg rebellion, and the coup d'etat in Mali presented terrorists with new opportunities."

Mitt Romney may have lost the biggest prize in American politics last year, but that doesn't mean he's left the game for good.

While there's no evidence to suggest he's interested in a third consecutive run for the White House, the man who topped the 2012 Republican national ticket is signaling his intent to play a role in the 2014 midterm election.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Romney indicated what could be read as plans to return to the political hustings to campaign for 2014 candidates, presumably Republicans. The Journal reported:

"He is considering writing a book and a series of opinion pieces, and has plans to campaign for 2014 candidates. But he is wary of overdoing it. 'I'm not going to be bothering the airwaves with a constant series of speeches,' he told The Wall Street Journal, speaking from his home in La Jolla, Calif."

The State Department says Iran has stepped up its efforts on behalf of global terrorism to a level not seen for 20 years, but that the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are heading for defeat even as the network's affiliates remain a threat.

"Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism and [Hezbollah's] terrorist activity have reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa," says the Country Reports on Terrorism 2012.

Among those attacks was one that killed six on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Other attacks were thwarted in India, Thailand, Georgia and Kenya, the report says.

It says the vehicle for Iran's troublemaking has mostly been the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement, Iran's ally and proxy in Lebanon.

The report also says that al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan continues to decline owing to "leadership losses," and what remains of the group is increasingly focused on survival. However, despite "significant setbacks" to Yemen-based Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabab in Somalia:

"The dispersal of weapons stocks in the wake of the revolution in Libya, the Tuareg rebellion, and the coup d'etat in Mali presented terrorists with new opportunities."

We are standing in front of a huge bank of screens, in the middle of which is a glowing map that changes focus depending on what the dozens controllers are looking at.

The room looks like something straight out of a NASA shuttle launch. The men and women manning the floor are dressed in identical white jump suits. With a flick of a mouse, they scroll through dozens of streaming video images coming into the center.

This is Rio de Janeiro in real time.

"This whole building is based on technology and integration," said Pedro Junquiera, the chief executive officer of the Rio Operations Center.

Enlarge image i

NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving offer a tearful goodbye to Michele Bachmann, a premature but constitutional welcome to James Comey to head the FBI and some Boardwalk Fries to President Obama and Gov. Christie. But they're not sure about Eric Holder's longevity as attorney general.

Dan Kennedy is a writer at heart, but if you ask him what he's versed in, you're bound to get a myriad of answers. The author and host of The Moth podcast spent some time fighting fires, so he knows a thing or two about wildland fire suppression tools. He's also held a marketing gig at a major record label, which inspired his bestselling memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. So when we asked Kennedy what he'd like to be quizzed on, he didn't respond with something broad like TV or movies — try "terrestrial and aquatic insects that trout eat to survive."

More From This Episode

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

APP has sold billions of dollars' worth of paper products to Staples, Disney and other big U.S. corporations. But environmental groups have accused APP of causing deforestation, destroying the habitat of Sumatran tigers and orangutans, and trampling on the rights of forest dwellers.

Asril Amran is the head of a nearby village. He says that the plantations have ruined the local environment.

Enlarge image i

President Obama will surround himself with college students at the White House on Friday and warn that the cost of student loans is about to go up.

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. Obama has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would let the cost of student loans go up and down with the market.

If the alarm bells over rising student loan rates sound familiar, that's because the same thing happened last year. Back then, the president went on a barnstorming tour of college campuses, warning that a doubling of interest rates would cost the average student borrower $1,000 for each year of college over the life of his loan.

"I'll do a quick poll. This may be unscientific," he said. "How many people can afford to pay an extra $1,000 right now?"

Eventually, Congress agreed to keep rates where they were — at 3.4 percent for one more year. That year is almost up, and students again face the prospect of rates doubling to 6.8 percent July 1. Obama is urging Congress on Friday to block that increase.

Tobin Van Ostern, who's with the campus arm of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, says students will make the case themselves when they descend on Washington, D.C., next week.

"All day, we'll have people going in and out of Congress buildings, meeting with senators and bringing their personal stories and experiences directly to those who have the ability to keep interest rates low," he says.

Van Ostern says lawmakers do seem to have learned a lesson from last year's showdown. No one is eager to see rates double overnight.

"Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to do something about student loan interest rates to keep them low and affordable for borrowers," he says.

The president and congressional Republicans have offered different plans to do that, though they both start the same way: tying rates on student loans to the interest on a 10-year Treasury note. That rate is expected to be about 2.5 percent next year, climbing to just over 5 percent in 2018.

Under the GOP plan, a student who borrows money next year could see his interest rate rise every year after that, like an adjustable mortgage. In contrast, the president's plan would let students lock in rates for the life of their loan.

Beth Akers of the Brookings Institution says she thinks students might like that predictability.

"It simplifies the math they need to do when they're considering going to college," she says.

On the other hand, Akers gives the Republicans credit for setting an upper limit on interest rates of 8.5 percent. There's no such cap in the president's plan.

"I do think that a cap makes sense, because in a period of economic expansion, where we do have interest rates rising rapidly, we wouldn't want to see less college-going among students who are on the margin of being able to afford to go to college," she says.

Lower-income students would continue to get a break under the president's plan, with interest rates 2 percentage points lower than what others are paying. Under the GOP plan, Van Ostern of the Center for American Progress notes, all students would pay the same rate.

"In reality, that ends up meaning that lower-income folks pay a little bit more, and then it will save people who are middle- or upper-income folks some money," he says.

Compared to some other fights in Washington, these differences don't seem insurmountable. But unless lawmakers and the White House can agree on the details quickly, Van Ostern says, another temporary stopgap measure may be necessary.

"If we can't come up with a long-term plan by then [July 1], and time is ticking, then we certainly need to at least pass a short-term extension of current interest rates to give folks in Congress more time to figure out how to deal with it long term," he says.

The whole idea behind the switch to market rates is to take some of the politics out of the student loan business. For now, though, it's clear that politics is still standing in the way.

NPR has learned that former Justice Department official James B. Comey is in line to become President Obama's choice as the next FBI director, according to two sources familiar with the search.

Comey, 52, has an extensive track record at the highest levels of federal law enforcement. He served as the deputy attorney general — the second in command at Justice — in the George W. Bush administration, and as the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, where he filed charges against housewares maven Martha Stewart for lying about stock trades, among other notable cases. As a young prosecutor in Virginia, he pioneered an effort to remove guns from Richmond's streets.

In recent years, Comey has worked in the private sector, as general counsel at defense contractor Lockheed Martin and at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund, before leaving that post early this year to teach at Columbia Law School. Comey is a Republican, but he famously threatened to resign in the Bush years over a program that's been described as a form of warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007, years after the episode. "I simply couldn't stay."

He also angered some in the Bush administration by expanding the mandate of a special prosecutor investigating a leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame — a case that resulted in the prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a longtime aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In recent weeks, the White House narrowed the search to just two candidates — Comey and White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco. Monaco is a former assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department who only arrived at the White House earlier this year. The Daily Beast recently reported a new assignment in her portfolio — helping to resume transfers of detainees and eventually try to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Monaco would have been the first woman nominated to lead the FBI. It is a familiar place for her; she worked closely with the outgoing FBI director, Robert Mueller. Mueller took office only days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and proved so hard to replace that the Senate passed special, one-time-only legislation to extend his 10-year term.

Mueller is on track to leave this fall, and the White House needs to nominate a replacement soon to finish the confirmation process in time for the Senate's summer break. The choice of FBI director could be one of Obama's most lasting legacies in national security.

Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman, declined comment on any personnel decisions regarding the FBI, and another source told NPR it could be several days before Obama makes a formal announcement.

As the American military winds down its efforts in Afghanistan, grand plans for nation building are giving way to limited, practical steps: building up the Afghan forces and denying the Taliban key terrain, especially the approaches to Kabul.

About an hour south of the capital Kabul, one Green Beret team returned to a village where American forces had pulled out.

Lt. Col. Brad Moses, who was in the Sayed Abad district four years ago, wandered around the government center and expressed disappointment at the scene.

Glass is shattered at some buildings. The roof of one has caved in. Across the yard are stacks of scorched and twisted cars. All this damage is the work of a truck bomb in 2011 that killed five Afghans and injured nearly 80 U.S. soldiers. After that, the American forces pulled out.

"This was the agriculture building over here, and the women's affairs and all the line ministers that were working out of here," Moses says. "It was nice ... the glass fronts, that was all civil affairs projects put in there, the flag pole, demonstrating their resolve."

The small team of Americans here now is riding around in all-terrain vehicles and large armored trucks, wearing body armor and carrying weapons. One of the Afghan government workers greets them.

Enlarge image i

Only a few years ago, even large commercial vessels wouldn't take on the ice-bound Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific via the Canadian north — but climate change has changed all that.

Now, a group of hearty adventurers hopes to be the first to row the 1,900-mile route this summer.

"Several people have kayaked it [a section at a time] over several years. But no one has ever done this under human power in a single season. Not even close," Kevin Vallely, who is heading up the rowing team, told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

Vallely has completed his last shakedown cruise and plans to set off at the beginning of July from Inuvik in northern Canada with three crew mates in a custom-built, 23-foot rowboat. They expect to take 75 days to reach their eastern destination, the town of Pond Inlet. Along the way they're bracing for encounters with dangerous ice, storms and polar bears, not to mention the psychological challenge of four men in a small boat in those difficult circumstances.

"We have guns" as a precaution against polar bears, Vallely tells The Globe and Mail. "But we'll have rubber bullets and bear bangers ... we don't want to kill a bear."

The newspaper says Vallely, "who has done numerous wilderness treks over the past 20 years, said if your physical conditioning is just right, body fitness peaks during a long journey and then slowly deteriorates."

" 'Obviously you have to train enough that you don't get injured [by the exertion of the expedition]. But you don't want to train too much, because if you go into it Tour de France fit, in a couple of weeks you would be fried,' he said. 'So you go into it fit, but not crazy fit, and you build up and you get really strong about half-way through. And then you slowly start to fall apart. By the end you want to be tired, happy to be done, but not completely baked.' "

The newborn boy whose rescue from a sewer pipe in eastern China drew attention around the world earlier this week has been released from a hospital and is now in the care of his mother's family, according to media reports from Beijing.

There's also word that the mother will not be facing any charges. According to The Associated Press:

"The mother had initially raised the alarm about the baby when he got stuck Saturday in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom of a residential building. But she had cleaned the room of signs of a fresh birth and did not initially come forward as the mother, officials have been quoted as saying.

"She admitted she was the mother two days later when confronted by police who had found baby toys and blood-stained tissues in her apartment, the reports said.

"Police later concluded that the incident was an accident and that the woman did not initially come forward because she was frightened, but that she later started telling the truth, the Jinhua Evening News and a Pujiang county propaganda official said."

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

APP has sold billions of dollars' worth of paper products to Staples, Disney and other big U.S. corporations. But environmental groups have accused APP of causing deforestation, destroying the habitat of Sumatran tigers and orangutans, and trampling on the rights of forest dwellers.

Asril Amran is the head of a nearby village. He says that the plantations have ruined the local environment.

Enlarge image i

Dan Kennedy is a writer at heart, but if you ask him what he's versed in, you're bound to get a myriad of answers. The author and host of The Moth podcast spent some time fighting fires, so he knows a thing or two about wildland fire suppression tools. He's also held a marketing gig at a major record label, which inspired his bestselling memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. So when we asked Kennedy what he'd like to be quizzed on, he didn't respond with something broad like TV or movies — try "terrestrial and aquatic insects that trout eat to survive."

More From This Episode

President Obama will surround himself with college students at the White House on Friday and warn that the cost of student loans is about to go up.

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. Obama has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would let the cost of student loans go up and down with the market.

If the alarm bells over rising student loan rates sound familiar, that's because we went through this very same exercise last year. Back then, the president went on a barnstorming tour of college campuses, warning that a doubling of interest rates would cost the average student borrower $1,000 for each year of college over the life of his loan.

"I'll do a quick poll. This may be unscientific," he said. "How many people can afford to pay an extra $1,000 right now?"

Eventually, Congress agreed to keep rates where they were — at 3.4 percent for one more year. That year is almost up, and students again face the prospect of rates doubling to 6.8 percent July 1. Obama is urging Congress on Friday to block that increase.

Tobin Van Ostern, who's with the campus arm of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, says students will make the case themselves when they descend on Washington next week.

"All day, we'll have people going in and out of Congress buildings, meeting with senators and bringing their personal stories and experiences directly to those who have the ability to keep interest rates low," he says.

Van Ostern says lawmakers do seem to have learned a lesson from last year's showdown. No one is eager to see rates double overnight.

"Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to do something about student loan interest rates to keep them low and affordable for borrowers," he says.

The president and congressional Republicans have offered different plans to do that, though they both start the same way: tying rates on student loans to the interest on a 10-year Treasury note. That rate's expected to be about 2.5 percent next year, climbing to just over 5 percent in 2018.

Under the GOP plan, a student who borrows money next year could see his interest rate rise every year after that, like an adjustable mortgage. In contrast, the president's plan would let students lock in rates for the life of their loan.

Beth Akers of the Brookings Institution says she thinks students might like that predictability.

"It simplifies the math they need to do when they're considering going to college," she says.

On the other hand, Akers gives the Republicans credit for setting an upper limit on interest rates of 8.5 percent. There's no such cap in the president's plan.

"I do think that a cap makes sense, because in a period of economic expansion, where we do have interest rates rising rapidly, we wouldn't want to see less college-going among students who are on the margin of being able to afford to go to college," she says.

Lower-income students would continue to get a break under the president's plan, with interest rates 2 percentage points lower than others are paying. Under the GOP plan, Van Ostern of the Center for American Progress notes, all students would pay the same rate.

"In reality, that ends up meaning that lower-income folks pay a little bit more, and then it will save people who are middle- or upper-income folks some money," he says.

Compared to some other fights in Washington, these differences don't seem insurmountable. But unless lawmakers and the White House can agree on the details quickly, Van Ostern says another temporary stopgap measure may be necessary.

"July First is not far away, which is the deadline when these interest rates will double," he says. :And so if we can't come up with a long-term plan by then and time is ticking, then we certainly need to at least pass a short-term extension of current interest rates to give folks in Congress more time to figure out how to deal with it long term."

The whole idea behind the switch to market rates is to take some of the politics out of the student loan business. For now, though, it's clear that politics is still standing in the way.

Dan Kennedy is a writer at heart, but if you ask him what he's versed in, you're bound to get a myriad of answers. The author and host of The Moth podcast spent some time fighting fires, so he knows a thing or two about wildland fire suppression tools. He's also held a marketing gig at a major record label, which inspired his bestselling memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. So when we asked Kennedy what he'd like to be quizzed on, he didn't respond with something broad like TV or movies — try "terrestrial and aquatic insects that trout eat to survive."

More From This Episode

The State Department says Iran has stepped up its efforts on behalf of global terrorism to a level not seen for 20 years, but that the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are heading for defeat even as the network's affiliates remain a threat.

"Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism and [Hezbollah's] terrorist activity have reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa," says the Country Reports on Terrorism 2012.

Among those attacks was one that killed six on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Other attacks were thwarted in India, Thailand, Georgia and Kenya, the report says.

It says the vehicle for Iran's troublemaking has mostly been the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement, Iran's ally and proxy in Lebanon.

The report also says that al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan continues to decline owing to "leadership losses," and what remains of the group is increasingly focused on survival. However, despite "significant setbacks" to Yemen-based Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabab in Somalia:

"The dispersal of weapons stocks in the wake of the revolution in Libya, the Tuareg rebellion, and the coup d'etat in Mali presented terrorists with new opportunities."

Pull into the Bourbon Drive-In just off U.S. Highway 68 near Paris, Ky., and it's like stepping back in time. Patricia and Lanny Earlywine own the seven-acre Bourbon Drive-in. It's been connected to the family since the theater opened in 1956. Even the popcorn machine is original.

"To do a drive-in, it sort of gets in your blood. You have to love it," Patricia says.

At one point there were more than 4,000 drive-in movie theaters across the country. Now there are fewer than 400. As a seasonal business, drive-ins have to compete with indoor theaters, other summer activities and perhaps most of all, the weather.

More From NPR

World

Curtain Call For Kenya's Last Outdoor Picture Show

Open a design magazine or turn on a home decorating show these days, and it's clear: Midcentury modern is hot. It first showed up in the 1950s and '60s — think low-slung sofas, egg-shaped chairs and the set of Mad Men. My first midcentury modern find was a dining set I bought on Craigslist for $75. There was something about the clean lines and gentle curves of the wooden chairs that got me. I saw the name Drexel Declaration stamped under the table, Googled it and found a world of people in love with 60-year-old furniture.

I quickly realized $75 was a steal.

"It's blazing hot. It really is," says Eddy Whitely, a midcentury modern furniture dealer in Baltimore. "People that are into it are into it."

So who are those people? Let's start with who they aren't: baby boomers. According to Stacey Greer, Whitely's business partner, "They just don't want to look at it anymore, they want something different. They grew up with it and their parents had bought it, so they want anything but that. It's definitely more of a younger, urban look."

'People Tend To Like What Their Grandparents Liked'

Martina Alhbrandt loves finding and fixing up vintage pieces, things her parents would call dated or tacky. She's drawn to the simplicity of midcentury design. (She even keeps a blog called My Mid-Century Modern Life.) She describes the style as "clean and functional" and says it reminds her of the values of her grandparents' generation.

"My grandparents were very frugal," Alhbrandt says. "They worked hard and they bought things with cash. And if something were to break, like the drawer of a dresser were to break, they would fix it. They wouldn't just throw it away and go to Wal-Mart and buy a new one."

According to Bobbye Tigerman, a curator of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, nostalgia is a big part of what's driving the trend. "People tend to like what their grandparents liked and reject the taste of their parents," she says.

Architecture

Nature And Design Meet In Lautner's Modern Homes

As the American military winds down its efforts in Afghanistan, grand plans for nation building are giving way to limited, practical steps: building up the Afghan forces and denying the Taliban key terrain, especially the approaches to Kabul.

About an hour south of the capital Kabul, one Green Beret team returned to a village where American forces had pulled out.

Lt. Col. Brad Moses, who was in the Sayed Abad district four years ago, wandered around the government center and expressed disappointment at the scene.

Glass is shattered at some buildings. The roof of one has caved in. Across the yard are stacks of scorched and twisted cars. All this damage is the work of a truck bomb in 2011 that killed five Afghans and injured nearly 80 U.S. soldiers. After that, the American forces pulled out.

"This was the agriculture building over here, and the women's affairs and all the line ministers that were working out of here," Moses says. "It was nice ... the glass fronts, that was all civil affairs projects put in there, the flag pole, demonstrating their resolve."

The small team of Americans here now is riding around in all-terrain vehicles and large armored trucks, wearing body armor and carrying weapons. One of the Afghan government workers greets them.

Enlarge image i

As the American military winds down its efforts in Afghanistan, grand plans for nation building are giving way to limited, practical steps: building up the Afghan forces and denying the Taliban key terrain, especially the approaches to Kabul.

About an hour south of the capital Kabul, one Green Beret team returned to a village where American forces had pulled out.

Lt. Col. Brad Moses, who was in the Sayed Abad district four years ago, wandered around the government center and expressed disappointment at the scene.

The glass is shattered at some buildings. The roof of one has caved in. Across the yard are stacks of scorched and twisted cars. All this damage is the work of a truck bomb in 2011 that killed five Afghans and injured nearly 80 U.S. soldiers. After that, the American forces pulled out.

"This was the agriculture building over here, and the women's affairs and all the line ministers that were working out of here," Moses said. "It was nice ... the glass fronts, that was all civil affairs projects put in there, the flag pole, demonstrating their resolve."

The small team of Americans here now is riding around in all terrain vehicles and large armored trucks, wearing body armor and carrying weapons. One of the Afghan government workers greets them.

Enlarge image i

Almost all of the federal government's actions against terrorism — from drone strikes to the prison at Guantanamo Bay — are authorized by a single law: the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Congress passed it just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Now, President Obama says he wants to revise the law, and ultimately repeal it.

The AUMF is one of the most unusual laws Congress has passed this century. It's less than a page long. The vote was nearly unanimous. And it went from concept to law in exactly one week.

It authorizes the president to go after the groups that planned, authorized, committed or aided the Sept. 11 attacks, or any groups and countries that harbored them. In broad terms, it justified invading Afghanistan. But two presidents have applied it around the world.

"It was vast in the powers that it gave," says Karen Greenberg, who runs the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. "And it was somewhat vast in its definition of the enemy. However, in many ways, that definition has expanded in the interim years."

Presidents Bush and Obama have used AUMF authority to kill terrorists in Somalia, Yemen and other places far from the Afghan battlefield.

More On Obama's Speech

National Security

Breaking Down Obama's New Blueprint For Fighting Terrorism

It was an "auntie" that left that lipstick mark on his collar, President Obama explained Tuesday evening at the start of a White House event marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

"I do not want to be in trouble with Michelle," he joked. And to the anonymous off-camera auntie of one attendee, he added: "That's why I'm calling you out." The White House has a 6+ minutes long video of his remarks. His explanation comes in the first minute. CBS News has a shorter version focusing on the lipstick comments here.

According to the president, the lipstick was a very visible sign of the warmth he was greeted with at the reception.

China's infamous bureaucracy has bedeviled people for ages, but in recent years, daily life in some major Chinese cities has become far more efficient.

For instance, when I worked in Beijing in the 1990s, many reporters had drivers. It wasn't because they didn't drive, but because they needed someone to deal with China's crippling bureaucracy.

I had a man named Old Zhao, who would drive around for days to pay our office bills at various government utility offices. Zhao would sit in line for hours, often only to be abused by functionaries.

I left China in 2002 and returned two years ago to work as NPR's correspondent in Shanghai. These days, I just walk across the street with my bills and pay them at a 24-hour convenience store. It takes about three minutes, and the clerks are unfailingly polite.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

How To Sneak Into A Chinese Village When Police Don't Want You There

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with the murder of 16 Afghan villagers in one of the worst atrocities of the American-led war in that country, will plead guilty as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty, his attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Bales' attorney, John Henry Browne, says his client was "crazed" and "broken" in March 2012 when he entered a village in southern Kandahar province and opened fire on sleeping Afghan civilians. He said Bales would plead guilty next week.

The AP writes:

"The Army had been trying to have Bales executed, and Afghan villagers have demanded it. In interviews with the AP in Kandahar last month, relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty.

...

Any plea deal must be approved by the judge as well as the commanding general at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Bales is being held. A plea hearing is set for June 5, said Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, an Army spokesman. He said he could not immediately provide other details."

Here's a question: If you go to the movies and the scheduled showtime is, say, 7:30, when do you actually expect the movie to start? If you said 7:30, you go to very unusual screenings. If you said 7:45, you're closer to what many experience. If you said 7:50, you're still in range: there's often some advertising other than trailers, the limit for trailer length is two and a half minutes, and theaters sometimes run seven or eight trailers. Eight would add up to 20 minutes.

Theater owners are antsy about the long delays and the complaints they get from patrons, and they're asking for a change, writer Pamela McClintock tells NPR's Renee Montagne on Thursday's Morning Edition.

McClintock recently wrote a piece in The Hollywood Reporter about the disagreement, in which theater owners have asked movie studios to shorten the length of trailers from two and a half minutes down to two. The reason? In their current form, theater owners argue, they both take up too much time and give away too much plot.

McClintock says the dispute could end in a couple of ways. The guidelines are voluntary anyway (and imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America, not theater owners), but certainly, the studios could choose to go along with the change, or with some change.

But studios are nervous that if there's no agreement, theater owners might just start refusing to play trailers at all unless they comply with the two-minute guideline. And even with the power of YouTube and other online outlets where trailers are seen, putting a trailer in a theater is still considered an enormously important part of marketing a film.

This entire area tends to be one of delicate negotiation, since theaters, after all, have their own reasons for wanting to help market films — especially in ways that make them look like great theater experiences. At the same time, going to the movies is expensive, and blockbusters seem to be getting longer all the time (even Star Trek Into Darkness is well over two hours long, and The Avengers was almost two and a half). Theater owners understandably want to make the experience more pleasant, and if that means fewer trailers, they just might be willing.

Brotherhood

Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream

by Deepak Chopra and Sanjiv Chopra

Hardcover, 366 pages | purchase

close

Purchase Featured Books

Brotherhood

Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream

Deepak Chopra and Sanjiv Chopra

Amazon »

Independent Booksellers »

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

"A record 40 percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family," the Pew Research Center reported Wednesday as it released data that certainly won't surprise many Americans but will underscore some dramatic shifts over recent decades.

Citing data from the Census Bureau as its source, Pew notes how much has changed in just a few generations: In 1960, so-called breadwinner moms were the sole or primary sources of income in just 11 percent of U.S. families with children.

According to Pew:

— "Breadwinner moms are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37 percent) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63 percent) are single mothers."

— "The growth of both groups of mothers is tied to women's increasing presence in the workplace. Women make up almost of half (47 percent) of the U.S. labor force today, and the employment rate of married mothers with children has increased from 37 percent in 1968 to 65 percent in 2011."

The research center also released results of a related survey of public opinion. Among the highlights:

— "About three-quarters of adults (74 percent) say the increasing number of women working for pay has made it harder for parents to raise children, and half say that it has made marriages harder to succeed. At the same time, two-thirds say it has made it easier for families to live comfortably."

— "About half (51 percent) of survey respondents say that children are better off if a mother is home and doesn't hold a job, while just 8% say the same about a father."

— "On the topic of single mothers, most Americans (64 percent) say that this growing trend is a 'big problem;' however, the share who feel this way is down from 71 percent in 2007."

The April 25-28 national telephone survey of 1,003 adults has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points on each result.

Related:

— Stay-At-Home Dads, Breadwinner Moms And Making It All Work.

— NPR's "Changing Lives Of Women" special series.

One year after Facebook's troubled initial public offering, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday that it has "charged Nasdaq with securities laws violations resulting from its poor systems and decision-making ... [and that] Nasdaq has agreed to settle the SEC's charges by paying a $10 million penalty."

According to the SEC, that is the largest such penalty ever paid by one of the stock exchanges.

The agency says that:

Police in France say that a 21-year-old Muslim convert who confessed to stabbing a French soldier was apparently motivated by his religious beliefs, in an eerie echo of an attack last week in London, in which a British serviceman was killed.

Pvt. Cedric Cordiez, 25, was approached from the back and stabbed in the neck at a shopping mall in a suburb of Paris on Saturday. He was treated at a military hospital and released on Monday, officials said.

The New York Times reports that Paris public prosecutor Francois Molins on Wednesday announced the arrest of Alexandre Dhaussy, 21, who authorities say confessed to the crime. Molins said investigators believe that Dhaussy had "acted in the name of his religious ideology."

Molins said authorities were treating the attack as a terrorist act, and that Dhaussy had been caught on surveillance video apparently saying a prayer minutes before stabbing Cordiez.

"The nature of the incident, the fact it took place three days after [the London attack], and the prayer just before the act lead us to believe he acted on the basis of religious ideology and that his desire was to attack a representative of the state," Molins said at a news conference. "It seems clear the intent was to kill."

The Times says that Dhaussy had been known to authorities since 2009, "when he was submitted to an identity check for praying in the street."

Last year when New Orleans' main paper, The Times-Picayune laid off dozens of newspaper employees and cut its circulation to three times a week, residents were shocked.

Sharron Morrow and her friends had bonded over the morning paper at a local coffee shop for the past 20 years.

"I've stopped my subscription, and I mourn the paper almost every day," she says.

Shifting Media Players

Newspaper circulation has been rapidly declining all over the country. Advertising revenue has plummeted while online revenue has been making small gains. The The Times-Picayune re-branded itself as The Times-Picayune NOLA.com, representative of its new Web-centered focus.

Multimillionaire John Georges was one of the local movers and shakers furious at the Times-Picayune's changes. He tried to buy the company, but the New York-based owners refused to sell it, so Georges decided to start his own daily paper.

He bought The Advocate, a daily paper based 80 miles away in Baton Rouge, and launched a New Orleans edition.

"We fought the Battle of New Orleans once before; some think we are going to fight it again in the newspaper," he says.

To lead the charge, Georges hired Dan Shea, a managing editor laid off from The Times-Picayune during cutbacks. In the weeks since his hiring, a slew of prize-winning reporters have jumped from The Times-Picayune to The Advocate. Shea says subscriptions in New Orleans are growing.

Enlarge image i

China's infamous bureaucracy has bedeviled people for ages, but in recent years, daily life in some major Chinese cities has become far more efficient.

For instance, when I worked in Beijing in the 1990s, many reporters had drivers. It wasn't because they didn't drive, but because they needed someone to deal with China's crippling bureaucracy.

I had a man named Old Zhao, who would drive around for days to pay our office bills at various government utility offices. Zhao would sit in line for hours, often only to be abused by functionaries.

I left China in 2002 and returned two years ago to work as NPR's correspondent in Shanghai. These days, I just walk across the street with my bills and pay them at a 24-hour convenience store. It takes about three minutes and the clerks are unfailingly polite.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

How To Sneak Into A Chinese Village When Police Don't Want You There

The makers of Smithfield Ham, an icon on America's culinary scene for decades, are selling the publicly traded company to China's Shuanghui International Holdings Limited for about $4.72 billion in cash. The deal also includes an exchange of debt.

The purchase values Smithfield Foods at $7.1 billion — a figure that would make the purchase "the largest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company," according to Bloomberg News.

In addition to Smithfield, the company's brands include Armour, Eckrich, Gwaltney, Kretschmar, and others. The company's roots stretch back to 1936, when the Luter family opened a packing plant in Virginia.

Terms of the purchase value Smithfield's stock at $34 a share — a premium of more than 30 percent over the company's closing share price yesterday. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the sale, says the company's shares rose sharply before the markets opened Wednesday.

The deal will require approval from U.S. regulators before it is final.

"This is a great transaction for all Smithfield stakeholders, as well as for American farmers and U.S. agriculture," Smithfield president and CEO Larry Pope said. "We have established Smithfield as the world's leading and most trusted vertically integrated pork processor and hog producer, and are excited that Shuanghui recognizes our best-in-class operations, our outstanding food safety practices and our 46,000 hard-working and dedicated employees."

Shuanghui International is the majority owner of Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. — "China's largest meat processing enterprise and China's largest publicly traded meat products company as measured by market capitalization," according to a news release.

"China is the world's biggest producer and consumer of pork and the third-largest market for U.S. pork," Reuters reports. "In recent months, a series of food safety scandals have dented consumer confidence."

Smithfield's headquarters will remain in Virginia, according to a press release announcing the deal this morning. The companies also said that Shuangui will not close any Smithfield facilities, and will leave all employee agreements — and the existing management team — in place.

The purchase would further solidify an economic relationship between China and Virginia that has been growing. The state has sent several trade missions to Asia in recent years, helping China become what Gov. Bob McDonnell calls "far and away our largest trading partner," as member station WAMU recently reported.

McDonnell made that comment earlier this month, when he announced Virginia's $638 million of agricultural exports to China in 2012. Pork and poultry placed third on the list of the state's exports; the top spot was taken by soybeans.

Members of Congress are back in their home states this week for a Memorial Day recess. It's a chance to talk with constituents about what could become the year's biggest legislative story: the push on Capitol Hill to fix what Democrats and Republicans alike agree is a broken immigration system.

A bill proposed by the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators, to revamp the nation's immigration rules passed out of committee last week and will soon be brought before the Democratic-led Senate. Less clear, though, is where the issue is headed in the GOP-controlled House.

A Senate Truce

The Senate chamber lately has become an even more partisan battlefield than usual, with verbal fights breaking out daily over stalled presidential nominations and a budget stuck in limbo. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is threatening to rewrite the Senate's filibuster rules to break the logjam.

That would infuriate the Republican minority and possibly doom any chance of bipartisan cooperation. But Reid says he's putting all that off until the Senate finishes the immigration overhaul — the one thing Democrats and Republicans do seem able to work on together.

"I'm going to do nothing to interfere with immigration," Reid says. "It is important for our country, and I admire the bipartisan nature of what happened with the Gang of Eight. It's exemplary of what we should do around here on everything."

But fierce opponents of the immigration bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants are preparing a series of poison-pill amendments. Leading that effort is Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose amendments almost all failed in committee.

"I think they would have a considerably better chance of passing on the floor than in the Judiciary Committee," Sessions says.

It's All Politics

Fears Of Killing Immigration Bill Doomed Same-Sex Amendment

Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, says he will step down to return to Princeton to resume his post as a professor of economics.

Krueger, who has served as CEA chairman for the past two years, will return to Princeton in time for the beginning of the fall term. The Associated Press quotes a source familiar with the situation as saying Jason Furman, who served in President Obama's 2008 campaign, will be tapped as a replacement.

"Alan was the driving force behind many of the economic policies that I have proposed that will grow our economy and create middle-class jobs," the president said in a statement on Tuesday. "And while we have more work to do, today our economy is improving – thanks, in no small part, to Alan's efforts."

Kreuger called his experience with CEA, "one of the highest privileges of my life."

About 2,200 passengers were being flown back to Baltimore on Tuesday, a day after their cruise ship caught fire on its way to the Bahamas. There were no injuries aboard Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas.

But in the wake of the incident and others like it, the cruise ship companies have something of a black eye. The industry is now trying to reassure passengers it's OK for them to sail, adopting what it called a passenger "bill of rights."

More people have been taking cruises worldwide and for the cruise ship industry profits have been on the rise. But Jaime Katz, an analyst at Morningstar, says the industry has also found itself struggling with a series of incidents that have eaten into its bottom line.

"The cruise companies were set up to have a much stronger year this year," Katz says. "Then obviously the Carnival Triumph kind of kicked off a lot of noise earlier in the year."

The Triumph is a Carnival cruise ship that caught fire in February, leaving passengers stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for days. Incidents like these have generated bad publicity that has discouraged a lot of new passengers from booking trips. Katz says the industry has responded the way it always does, by lowering its fares.

"As long as they go ahead and fill all those cabins and set sail full, generally they're able to turn a pretty nice profit," she says.

A Difficult Recovery Seen

And yet the fallout from these incidents has been especially brutal. Ross Klein teaches at Memorial University in Newfoundland and writes a blog about cruising. He says the industry won't be able to recover as easily as it has in the past.

"When we have a number of events within a short time, such as was the case with Carnival Cruise Lines in the early part of this year, I think that has a longer term impact," Klein says.

The Cruise Lines International Association, the industry's trade group, recently issued what it called a passenger bill of rights. It guarantees, for example, that cruise lines will fully reimburse passengers for a cruise that is interrupted by mechanical problems. The cruise lines also promise to provide transportation back to port for stranded passengers.

"I think the significance for consumers is it provides them a single source of clearly communicated information that demonstrates the industry's commitments to our passengers," says David Peikin, a spokesman for the association.

A 'Public Relations Move'

But Klein for one isn't very impressed with the move. "The bill of rights is a nice public relations move," he says.

Klein says many of the promises in the bill of rights are already standard practice in the industry. And though the association says the bill of rights amounts to a legal contract, Klein says it's not clear whether a court would see it that way.

Still, there are a lot of people out there who have never taken a cruise before and they represent huge potential revenue. If the cruise ship industry is ever going to lure them on board it needs to convince them it's looking out for their interests, and that means spelling out how passengers will be protected if another disaster occurs.

This much is true: Many Canadians apparently think their government has embedded a maple-scented scratch-and-sniff patch in the nation's $100 bills.

According to CTV, "dozens of people" contacted the Bank of Canada after the polymer bills were introduced in 2011 to say they were sure there was something fishy ... or perhaps we should say sweet ... about the money.

But alas, this is also true: "Bank official Jeremy Harrison says no scent has been added to any of the new bank notes," CTV says.

Now, hearing about this on Morning Edition made us wonder:

— Who smells their money?

— What might be a good scent for U.S. bills? Maybe pizza? Apple pie? Bacon?

If you could choose a scent for U.S. currencies, what might it be?

Arizona Sen. John McCain spent his Memorial Day in Syria. As NPR's Jonathan Blakley reports from Beirut, McCain's spokesman says the senator crossed into northern Syria from Turkey to meet with rebels in the country, ripped apart by the 2-year conflict turned civil war.

The Daily Beast reports McCain was with Brig. Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army, and met with rebels for a few hours before going back to Turkey. The Daily Beast added:

"Idris praised the McCain visit and criticized the Obama administration's Syria policy in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Beast. 'The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time,' he said. 'We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation.' "

One of the suspects in the murder last week of British soldier Lee Rigby has been released from the hospital and is in police custody. Michael Adebowale, 22, received treatment after being shot by police following the brutal attack on Rigby in Woolwich, London. The other main suspect, Michael Adebolajo, 28, remains in the hospital.

After being discharged from the hospital, Adebowale was also arrested under the suspicion of attempting to murder a police officer, reports The Daily Mirror.

More details of that alleged crime were not immediately available.

Monday, British authorities arrested a man suspected of conspiring to murder Rigby, bringing to 10 the number of people arrested since last Wednesday's attack.

Five men who were arrested have been released on bail, The Mirror reports; two women who had been suspected of conspiracy to murder were released without being charged.

Over the weekend, Kenyan officials said that "Adebolajo was arrested in Kenya in 2010 with five others near the country's border with Somalia," the AP reports. "Police believed that Adebolajo was going to work with the Somali Islamic militant group al-Shabab."

Reports have also emerged in which Adebolajo's friends and relatives say that Britain's MI5 tried to get Adebolajo to spy for them after his arrest in Kenya.

"They asked some questions and they obviously asked him would he be a spy for them," his brother-in-law told ITV News.

The family of Michael Adebolajo, who like Adebowale is a British citizen of Nigerian descent, issued a statement Tuesday in which they expressed their "horror" over Rigby's killing.

"As a family, we wish to share with others our horror at the senseless killing of Lee Rigby and express our profound shame and distress that this has brought our family," the BBC quotes them as saying. The statement continues:

"We wish to state openly that we believe that there is no place for violence in the name of religion or politics.

"We believe that all right thinking members of society share this view wherever they were born and whatever their religion and political beliefs.

"We wholeheartedly condemn all those who engage in acts of terror and fully reject any suggestion by them that religion or politics can justify this kind of violence.

"We unreservedly put our faith in the rule of law and with others fully expect that all the perpetrators will be brought to justice under the law of the land."

This much is true: Many Canadians apparently think their government has embedded a maple-scented scratch-and-sniff patch in the nation's $100 bills.

According to CTV, "dozens of people" contacted the Bank of Canada after the polymer bills were introduced in 2011 to say they were sure there was something fishy ... or perhaps we should say sweet ... about the money.

But alas, this is also true: "Bank official Jeremy Harrison says no scent has been added to any of the new bank notes," CTV says.

Now, hearing about this on Morning Edition made us wonder:

— Who smells their money?

— What might be a good scent for U.S. bills? Maybe pizza? Apple pie? Bacon?

If you could choose a scent for U.S. currencies, what might it be?

President Obama often tells audiences that he has waged his last campaign. But that's not exactly true.

The White House is gearing up for a massive campaign this summer that will cover all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. And the president's legacy may hinge on whether it succeeds or fails.

The Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," has been through more life-and-death cliffhangers than a season finale of Homeland. After squeaker votes in Congress and a 5-4 ruling upholding the law at the Supreme Court, now there's another big hurdle: getting uninsured people to buy health care when it becomes available Oct. 1.

When Obama delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College this month, his advice to the graduates — along with working hard and helping others — was to sign up for health insurance this fall.

"We've got to make sure everybody has good health in this country," he said. "It's not just good for you, it's good for this country. So you're going to have to spread the word to your fellow young people."

Reaching Out

David Simas, deputy senior adviser to the president, works in a quintessential West Wing office — a windowless basement room — where he oversees one of the top projects on the Obama agenda: implementing universal health coverage.

In the first year, the administration hopes to sign up 7 million people across the country. Simas says that will require TV ads, door knocking and lots of word of mouth.

"It is an on-the-ground effort," he says. "It is a social media effort. It is a paid media effort. It is an earned media effort. But [it's] all leading to the same thing, which is that man or woman sitting in their living room online, comparing different prices for different products and deciding what works best for them."

The administration is developing an Expedia-style website, hoping to make the experience as customer-friendly as possible.

But just getting people to that website is a huge task. Last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that 4 in 10 Americans don't even know the health care law is still on the books.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, who has worked on this issue for years — until recently as Obama's deputy chief of staff — says that's not a cause for concern.

"The truth is that people weren't paying attention until now," she says. "There's so much else going on that even if we had wanted to start a campaign two years ago, it wouldn't have been very effective because people weren't listening."

Financial Stumbles

But with the sign-up date approaching fast, the administration's efforts have already stumbled. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has repeatedly asked Congress for money to implement Obamacare.

Republicans have repeatedly said no, while they vote to repeal the law.

Without the money she wanted from Congress, Sebelius tried to fundraise for an independent group called Enroll America that is focused on implementing Obamacare. When Republicans heard that she was asking insurance companies and health care providers to donate millions of dollars, they cried foul.

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander told Fox News: "Congress has said we refuse to give you more money to implement Obamacare, and she's saying, 'Well then, if you won't do it, I'll go outside and I will raise private money, use a private organization, and do it anyway.' "

Now two Republican-controlled House committees are investigating the solicitations. Dan Mendelson of the health care consulting group Avalere says that makes donors skittish.

"Much as a health care company might really want to improve enrollment, they also need to make sure that they do not run afoul of politicians on either side of the aisle," Mendelson says.

If health care companies hold back, he says, it's going to be much harder to reach all of those people in all of those communities.

"The fact of the matter is that if you starve a media campaign for funding, you're not going to have the reach that you otherwise would, and that's the situation that we find ourselves in," he says.

There's another key part of this campaign: Sicker and older people without insurance may be eager to sign up Oct. 1. But to make the system work financially, young and healthy people who don't need much medical care have to get into the pool, too.

So you can expect administration officials around the country to give lots more commencement speeches this season, telling captive audiences of 20-somethings: Congratulations on your diploma. Now make sure to sign up for health coverage in the fall.

It's difficult for an American president to govern through nuance, especially when it's necessary to persuade a majority of the people that certain actions are essential for national security. And effective persuasion usually requires clarity.

That's how you arrive at President George W. Bush's stark formulation "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" after Sept. 11, and much of what sprang from it.

But if President Obama's newly recalibrated counterterrorism strategy as outlined in his speech Thursday demonstrates anything, it is his penchant for nuance.

It's a tendency required by the times. After more than a decade of two large-scale wars, Americans long ago hit the kind of war weariness that made them open to the notion of downsizing what Obama's predecessor had described as a "global war on terror" that could last decades.

But there are still enemies who seek to wage an asymmetric fight against the U.S. Thus the need for the kind of complex U.S. approach — in short nuance — that can be hard to explain or easy to misstate in the Twitter era.

For an example of this nuance, just take Obama's new guidance for when the U.S. will target individuals for destruction by drone. In the past, a terrorist suspect could apparently be targeted for that fact alone.

But the administration's new guidance, according to a White House fact sheet, requires that a suspected terrorist only be targeted if he's a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons. It is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons; if a terrorist does not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force."

That's a distinction that's difficult to imagine the Obama administration's immediate predecessor making, with its more cut-and-dried approach.

But part of Obama's appeal to many Americans when he was first elected in 2008 was his promise of a smarter approach to counterterrorism than Bush's, one that would improve the U.S.' image abroad. That was a vow that appeared challenged, at least when it came to the Obama administration's controversial use of drones.

Obama greatly expanded the use of the remotely controlled unmanned vehicles, with their Hellfire missile payloads, far beyond anything that occurred under Bush. The result? Growing anger toward the U.S. in unstable places like Pakistan and Yemen, and in other nations with Islamic majorities across the region.

While the use of the high-tech weapons has engendered outrage elsewhere in the world, Americans have mostly embraced the tactic.

Recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans support drone attacks on terrorist suspects. Civil libertarians and human-rights activists like Code Pink protester Medea Benjamin, who interrupted the president's speech Thursday, may question the killing by drone of U.S. citizens abroad or of the innocent — but that doesn't appear to be a majority concern.

It's this widespread support of U.S. drone warfare among the public that has given Obama the latitude he has enjoyed until now to increasingly conduct these attacks. The president didn't mention in his speech the popularity of the drones with Americans among the reasons for continuing their use. Americans' support of the use of drones certainly has made this part of his counterterrorism policy easier than it would be otherwise.

Ironically, the one part of his counterterrorism policy in which Obama showed the least nuance has arguably been the most vexing: his campaign promise to close Guantanamo, freeing those detainees deemed as not dangerous while transferring the rest to the U.S. mainland for trial.

It's not by choice, of course. He ran into fierce congressional resistance when he first tried to make good on his promise in 2009 shortly after entering the White House, and all indications are that Republican lawmakers will do their best to thwart him again. And with most Americans agreeing with them that Guantanamo should remain open, their chances of winning are probably better than Obama's.

More than 30 million Americans experience significant hearing loss, but only a third of them gets hearing aids.

There are a lot of reasons why someone who needs a hearing aid won't get one: Some think their hearing loss is not that bad, others are too embarrassed to use them, and many people say they are just not worth the price.

A hearing aid costs an average of $1,500 per year for a basic model, and unlike most technology, their price has not dropped over time.

What is worse, most insurance companies do not pay for the devices. Even Medicare does not cover hearing aids — and the Affordable Care Act will not change that.

Some businesses see the hearing aid market as an opportunity. Costco has opened hearing aid centers in discount warehouses all over the country. Other companies have started selling their own brands of the devices directly online.

Ross Porter, the founder of online retailer Embrace Hearing, says that hearing aids are only expensive because audiologists and distributors charge steep markups on them.

But Virginia Ramachandran, an audiologist with the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, says it is unwise to buy a hearing aid for the first time online. She says the device might be fine, but you will not know how to use it correctly.

"If someone gave you a laptop computer, and you have never used one before, you would not know how to turn it on, you would not know what programs or how to use them," she says.

Shots - Health News

Listen Up To Smarter, Smaller Hearing Aids

In his national security speech Thursday, President Obama discussed drone warfare and the Guantanamo detention camp. But a third controversial issue went largely unmentioned: the use of interrogation methods that are tantamount to torture.

Obama banned those interrogation techniques on his second day in office. But he has largely avoided the debate over whether torture in some cases has produced valuable information. He may soon find himself caught between Senate Democrats and the CIA, however.

A Senate committee report approved last December essentially concluded that the CIA's enhanced interrogation program was a disaster. The CIA is preparing a response, which is expected to challenge some of the report's assertions.

Did It Work?

It's been years since a suspected terrorist faced waterboarding. But the debate over past practices continues, thanks in part to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Investigators from that committee spent six years poring over millions of CIA documents relating to agency interrogations of suspected al-Qaida members.

The committees' findings resulted in a report that's 6,000 pages long — and scathing.

Related NPR Stories

It's All Politics

Obama's Terrorism Fight Is Colored Gray, Not Black And White

The European Union plans to end its embargo on arming the Syrian opposition, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday.

The Associated Press reports: "Hague insisted that Britain had 'no immediate plans to send arms to Syria. It gives us flexibility to respond in the future if the situation continues to deteriorate.' "

The EU will continue its sanctions against Bashar Assad's government, which had been set to expire on June 1, Hague said.

"The decision came after lengthy talks in Brussels," the BBC reports. "Britain and France had been pressing to send weapons to what they call moderate opponents of President Assad. But other countries had opposed the move, saying it would only worsen the violence."

As we reported earlier, U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who supports arming the Syrian opposition, met with rebels on Monday after crossing into the country from Turkey.

Arizona Sen. John McCain spent his Memorial Day in Syria. As NPR's Jonathan Blakley reports from Beirut, McCain's spokesman says the senator crossed into northern Syria from Turkey to meet with rebels in the country, ripped apart by the 2-year conflict turned civil war.

The Daily Beast reports McCain was with Brig. Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army, and met with rebels for a few hours before going back to Turkey. The Daily Beast added:

"Idris praised the McCain visit and criticized the Obama administration's Syria policy in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Beast. 'The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time,' he said. 'We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation.' "

In the fall of 1945, my father was honorably discharged from the Navy. He was one of the lucky ones. He'd served on a destroyer escort during the war, first in convoys dodging U-boats in the Atlantic and then in the Pacific where his ship, the USS Schmitt, shot down two kamikaze planes. My dad always kept a framed picture of the Schmitt above his dresser, but, like most men of his generation, he didn't talk a lot about his war years.

One story he did tell me, because it haunted him, was about a shipmate who was lost on duty one night. That sailor had told the other guys on watch that he was going to the galley to get some cherry pie and coffee; while he was crossing the deck a wave smashed into the ship and washed him overboard. The captain, against regulations, ordered the ship's lights turned on to search for the sailor in the black waters. That poor guy was never found. Like I said, my dad was one of the lucky ones.

And how special he must have felt in late December of 1945, when a letter from Washington, D.C., came for him at his sister's house in Llanerch Hills, Pa. My father was living with his sister and her family because, by then, both of his parents had died. The letter, signed in fountain pen, was from the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. It began:

My dear Mr. Corrigan:

I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy's pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.