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A "walk-through" enclosure at the London Zoo apparently allows visitors to get a little too close to resident squirrel monkeys and several people have the bite marks to prove it, according to details of a report published in a U.K. newspaper.

The Camden New Journal says 15 people suffered bites from the black-and-tan monkeys over a 12-month period last year.

The Journal quotes from the report, saying that although it's been eight years since the "revolutionary" up close and personal squirrel monkey exhibit was launched, the nervous primates are still working out some "behavioural issues."

"These involve mainly grabbing of food from members of the public. There have been 15 bites over the past year, none serious, all reported to first aid."

...

"There is now a no pushchair [baby stroller] policy in the enclosure as they were a major target for the monkeys looking for food. Negative re-enforcement is implemented mainly by painting a bitter apple substance on objects of desire such as mobile phones used by volunteers."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced Saturday he would run to finish the late Frank Lautenberg's term in the U.S. Senate.

Booker, a 44-year-old Democrat who has served as mayor since 2006 and is Newark's third black mayor. He is hoping to claim Lautenberg's seat, which has been filled by Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa until a special election in October.

He made the announcement at a Saturday event in which he was endorsed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley.

Booker is considered an early front-runner in the August primary. He is expected to face fellow Democrats Rep. Frank Pallone and Rush Holt.

Politico calls Booker "a strong fundraiser and ... odds-on favorite.":

"But the special election this year allows Pallone to keep his congressional seat if he loses, making this something of a free shot for him.

...

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) is also likely to run — for the same reason as Pallone — according multiple sources."

I've been taking riding lessons, but I'm still green. And I can think of a million places I'd rather be than on top of a spooked racehorse. But I climb on, and we ease into a trot while Beverly observes. We're a good team moving counterclockwise, as if on a track. But clockwise proves more difficult. We haphazardly end up in the middle of the ring, both of us exhausted.

"He trots crooked," I say. Or maybe I do — it's hard to say. He doesn't know how to back up. He won't move sideways, either, or cross one leg over the other. "He is able to do all of those things," Beverly says. "He just hasn't learned yet."

I lead him back to the barn while he continues to munch, follow and nudge me amid a backdrop of equine commotion. Beverly's husband, Tom, is putting new shoes on a 5-year-old horse named Holiday Layup that arrived the night before. The horse neighs in protest, tossing his head and pawing at the ground. Another new arrival, 3-year-old Streaking Sunseeker, is in a stall nearby and would like everyone to know he'd rather be in the bluegrass. He shifts restlessly like a child in timeout, and neighs loudly in response to Holiday Layup.

A high school student is dropping off a box of donated tack, as part of an honor society project. And Kayla Poole, of Rocky Ridge, Md., is here to see a horse named Lou. Her thoroughbred died in January, and she's just now found the heart to look for another. "Rescues are overflowing in the industry now," she tells me.

Beverly has found homes for more than 700 slaughter-bound thoroughbreds through her MidAtlantic Horse Rescue Organization, which is funded entirely through fundraising, donations and adoption fees — money she just rolls back into saving more horses. She barely breaks even, and that's fine with her. "These horses have so much heart," she says. "We bred them for our sport and for our pleasure, and they're just discarded. They have so much to offer, and they just disappear."

With retraining, many ex-racehorses move on to successful second careers including sport riding, jumping and dressage. Some have slight injuries but still excel on the trail. They are the lucky ones. The others end up in the food chain.

I glance up at the meddlesome dark bay, who towers over me expectantly like a big, goofy dog waiting for the ball to be thrown. My rational brain keeps screaming, "Do not adopt this horse!" But two women come into the barn and ask about him. "He's mine," I say, and turn his head away from them.

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Prosecutors Friday recommended four years in prison for former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., following his guilty plea this year on criminal charges that he engaged in a scheme to spend $750,000 in campaign funds on personal items.

The government suggested an 18-month sentence for Jackson's wife, Sandra, who pleaded guilty to filing false joint federal income tax returns that understated the couple's income.

The government is also recommending that Jackson pay $750,000 in restitution to the campaign and that Sandra Jackson make a restitution payment of $168,000.

Because the couple has two children, prosecutors proposed that the sentences be staggered, with Sandra Jackson going first. According to the government, she could be out of prison in little over a year with credit for satisfactory behavior and serving the end of her sentence in home confinement. Both Jacksons are scheduled to be sentenced on July 3.

Jesse Jackson's lawyer, meanwhile, asked the judge to sentence Jackson to a term below guidelines. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the range is 46 to 57 months in prison. The lawyer, Reid H. Weingarten, argued that Jackson's ongoing treatment for depression and bipolar disorder, his record of good works and his family and community ties all support leniency. Jacksons' sentencing memo includes about five pages of redacted material on his health issues, and a few redacted lines on other issues.

Jackson, who had been a Democratic congressman from Illinois from 1995 until he resigned last November, used campaign money to buy items that included a $43,350 gold-plated men's Rolex watch and $9,587.64 worth of children's furniture, and his wife spent $5,150 on fur capes and parkas.

In Friday's 45-page sentencing memo, prosecutors urged the judge to take into account the advantages Jackson, the son of a famed civil rights leader, had in his life. Jackson "chose to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars despite having advantages in life and financial resources that few possess and that most can only dream of obtaining," the prosecutors wrote.

They noted that his yearly salary as a congressman ranged from $133,600 to $174,000, and that his wife's salary as Chicago alderman was also six figures. The memo said that Jackson's campaign paid his wife's consulting firm $5,000 a month during the time of the conspiracy — $340,500 in total.

"Before defendant or his wife stole a dime, they received substantial incomes," the government wrote, adding that in 2011, for example, their combined income was around $344,000 — putting them among the nation's high earners.

"This offense, at its core, is about greed and entitlement: defendant wanting more than even his substantial resources could afford him and believing he was entitled to both the items desired and campaign funds to purchase those items," the government said.

Prosecutors also argued that Jackson's behavior threatened to deter people from making campaign contributions and participating in the political process.

In a 22-page statement filed by prosecutors in February, Jackson admitted that he and his wife used campaign credit cards to buy 3,100 personal items worth $582,772.58 from 2005 through April 2012. Personal expenditures at restaurants, nightclubs and lounges amounted to $60,857.04. Personal expenditures at sports clubs and lounges were $16,058.91, including maintaining a family membership at a gym. Spending for alcohol was $5,814.43. Personal spending for dry cleaning was $14,513.42.

Prosecutors credited Jackson with cooperating with them in the investigation, which helped the government wrap up in weeks what could have taken months. While Jackson deserves credit for accepting responsibility and his level of cooperation, the government said, he already received that significant consideration in how the plea agreement was structured.

In Jackson's sentencing memo, his lawyer wrote that the former congressman's mental health may worsen under the stress of incarceration.

"During sentencing, federal courts have the authority to determine whether a defendant's mental illness warrants a below-guidelines sentence," Weingarten said.

"His public fall from grace has already made an example of him, warning other politicians and elected officials of the dangers of personal use of campaign funds," wrote Weingarten, who went on to detail Jackson's accomplishments in Congress and his help to others.

In a separate memorandum prepared for Sandra Jackson's sentencing, prosecutors said she was personally involved in the thefts, and they noted she served as treasurer of her husband's congressional campaign from January 2005 to November 2006. But prosecutors also credited her for cooperation and accepting responsibility.

June is a nice month for treading water — if you happen to be in a swimming pool.

But if you are in the labor pool and trying to make your way toward a job, a stronger current in the right direction would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department showed that the economy continues to drift along at a languid pace.

"This rate of growth is right in line with the average growth rate of the last year and is a perfect example of the ongoing slog in the labor market," Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a research group, said in her written assessment.

Four Years After The Recession

The Labor Department report showed employers added 175,000 jobs in May, a slightly better number than most economists had been forecasting. But the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a point to 7.6 percent as more people entered the labor market, seeking paychecks but not finding them.

The latest jobs report was issued at a time when the U.S. economy is marking the fourth anniversary of the official end of the Great Recession. The economy hit bottom in June 2009 and has been growing ever since, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

She found her brother's finger in the grass by the shed.

The grass glistened with the morning dew, but the finger did not.

She picked it up. She had seen it fall. He'd been running for the house, away from the toolshed, and he'd been holding onto the finger and onto the space where the finger had been, and despite his concentration, and in his haste, he had let go of the one to hold on tighter to the other.

She took it to her room and put it on her nightstand and then sat on her bed and looked at it for a while. She lay down on her bed and looked at it some more. She pretended it was fake and then she had to convince herself again that it wasn't.

It was altogether stiffer and thinner and lighter than she would have imagined, if she had ever considered imagining what her brother's index finger might feel or look like separated from the rest of his fingers, which she had not.

By the time her parents had brought him back to the house from the hospital, she had pressed that finger to her tongue, twice. The finger first, then her own, and then the finger again. She had wanted to see what the difference might be, but there wasn't any, not that she could tell.

She did not hold it in her mouth long enough to see if it had a taste, something different than what her own finger, her own skin might taste like because that would have been gross. Even she knew that that would have been gross.

She had pressed it wetly against the bridge of her nose and had tried to imagine her brother's weight behind it.

She had poked it against her forehead and poked it against her cheek and poked it against her shoulder like her brother had in the past but wouldn't any more. Not with this finger, anyway.

She'd clipped the nail with her father's toenail clippers. Her brother kept his nails long and sharp for when he would grab her by the arm and grip and squeeze. She clipped it, but not very well and it was still sharp and pointed and jagged and, somehow, even uglier than it had been before.

And finally, before they brought him home, she had considered giving it back to him, in a box maybe, or wrapped in a ribbon and left outside his door. She was good at making something pretty out of stuff that was not. Old beer bottles, the brown and green glass smashed into pieces and fit together on construction paper, and then covered in glitter-glue. The bleached, crumbling jawbone — of a possum or raccoon, she couldn't tell — that her brother had dug up, or maybe their dog had dug it up and her brother had found it, had found it and snuck it into the house, and snuck with it into her bedroom late one night and laid on her pillow.

She hadn't made that into anything, not yet, but she would, and it would be pretty, she knew.

Then she decided that she didn't want him to have it back, so she took the finger back beyond the toolshed out to the pond at the far end of their property, and then she threw that finger as hard and as far out as she could throw it, hoping that it would sink to the bottom, down to the very bottom of the pond, and that the catfish would find it there, and then pick it clean.

June is a nice month for treading water — if you happen to be in a swimming pool.

But if you are in the labor pool and trying to make your way towards a job, a stronger current in the right direction would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department showed the economy continues to drift along at a languid pace.

"This rate of growth is right in line with the average growth rate of the last year and is a perfect example of the ongoing slog in the labor market," Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a research group, said in her written assessment.

Four Years After The Recession

The Labor Department report showed employers added 175,000 jobs in May, a slightly better number than most economists had been forecasting. But the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a point to 7.6 percent as more people entered the labor market, seeking paychecks but not finding them.

The latest jobs report was issued at a time when the U.S. economy is marking the fourth anniversary of the official end of the Great Recession. The economy hit bottom in June 2009, and has been growing ever since, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Alan Krueger, head of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out that steady improvement.

"The economy has now added private sector jobs every month for 39 straight months, and a total of 6.9 million jobs has been added over that period," he said in a statement. "So far this year, 972,000 private sector jobs have been added."

Digging Out Of A 'Deep Hole'

But he also recognized that, with 11.8 million people still unemployed, things aren't exactly going swimmingly. "We continue to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007," Krueger said.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement that the "modest job growth is a positive sign," but he noted that "millions of Americans have been out of work for more than several months, wages are stagnant, and the unemployment rate is still far higher than the Obama administration promised."

Most economists and Wall Street investors were just glad the economy didn't do a spring swoon, as it has for the last three years. In those previous years, the economy would start the year fairly strong, then lose momentum in the spring. This year, the pace has held steady.

Keeping The Fed On Hold?

That steadiness bolstered confidence among investors, who interpreted the report as good news because it was neither strong enough to push the Federal Reserve to suddenly stop pumping money into the economy, nor weak enough to signal a looming recession. Most stock indexes moved up in the wake of the report.

This latest employment report showed that private employers added 179,000 jobs last month, while the federal government cut 14,000 positions. Local governments added 13,000 jobs.

The U.S. labor force grew by 420,000 in May, and average hourly wages nudged up 1 cent to $23.89. The average workweek held steady at 34.5 hours.

Consumers have been helping the economy with additional spending, and that caused retailers to add 28,000 jobs while restaurants added 38,000. Because of growth in residential housing, construction companies added 7,000 jobs, but manufacturers pulled back, lopping off 8,000 jobs.

June is a nice month for treading water — if you happen to be in a swimming pool.

But if you are in the labor pool and trying to make your way towards a job, a stronger current in the right direction would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department showed the economy continues to drift along at a languid pace.

"This rate of growth is right in line with the average growth rate of the last year and is a perfect example of the ongoing slog in the labor market," Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a research group, said in her written assessment.

Four Years After The Recession

The Labor Department report showed employers added 175,000 jobs in May, a slightly better number than most economists had been forecasting. But the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a point to 7.6 percent as more people entered the labor market, seeking paychecks but not finding them.

The latest jobs report was issued at a time when the U.S. economy is marking the fourth anniversary of the official end of the Great Recession. The economy hit bottom in June 2009, and has been growing ever since, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Alan Krueger, head of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out that steady improvement.

"The economy has now added private sector jobs every month for 39 straight months, and a total of 6.9 million jobs has been added over that period," he said in a statement. "So far this year, 972,000 private sector jobs have been added."

Digging Out Of A 'Deep Hole'

But he also recognized that, with 11.8 million people still unemployed, things aren't exactly going swimmingly. "We continue to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007," Krueger said.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement that the "modest job growth is a positive sign," but he noted that "millions of Americans have been out of work for more than several months, wages are stagnant, and the unemployment rate is still far higher than the Obama administration promised."

Most economists and Wall Street investors were just glad the economy didn't do a spring swoon, as it has for the last three years. In those previous years, the economy would start the year fairly strong, then lose momentum in the spring. This year, the pace has held steady.

Keeping The Fed On Hold?

That steadiness bolstered confidence among investors, who interpreted the report as good news because it was neither strong enough to push the Federal Reserve to suddenly stop pumping money into the economy, nor weak enough to signal a looming recession. Most stock indexes moved up in the wake of the report.

This latest employment report showed that private employers added 179,000 jobs last month, while the federal government cut 14,000 positions. Local governments added 13,000 jobs.

The U.S. labor force grew by 420,000 in May, and average hourly wages nudged up 1 cent to $23.89. The average workweek held steady at 34.5 hours.

Consumers have been helping the economy with additional spending, and that caused retailers to add 28,000 jobs while restaurants added 38,000. Because of growth in residential housing, construction companies added 7,000 jobs, but manufacturers pulled back, lopping off 8,000 jobs.

More From This Episode

TED Radio Hour

What Are The Clues To A Good Story?

Ahead of Friday morning's much-anticipated report about the nation's unemployment rate and how many jobs were (hopefully) added to payrolls in May, economists are expecting to hear:

— That the jobless rate was unchanged from April's 7.5 percent.

— That there were about 170,000 more jobs, a modest increase.

In other words, as NPR's Yuki Noguchi said on Morning Edition, it's likely to be a more-of-the-same kind of report.

Bloomberg News says U.S. stock futures are little changed as the 8:30 a.m. ET release of the employment news approaches — a sign that the markets are also thinking that the report will be yet another sign that job growth remains sluggish.

A month ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that 165,000 jobs were added to payrolls in April (a figure that could be revised in Friday's report).

We'll update with news from the May report once it's released.

Police in India say they've arrested three men in connection with the alleged gang rape of an American woman in northern India earlier this week.

The unidentified suspects, aged 22 and 23, were arrested Thursday near Manali, police officer Vinod Dhawan was quoted by The Associated Press as saying.

As we reported on Tuesday, the woman, whose identity has not been made public, was reportedly attacked when she accepted a lift from a group of men near Manali, a resort town in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh about 335 miles north of the capital, New Delhi.

According to the AP, the woman's complaint alleges that after accepting the ride, she was driven to a secluded spot and raped. Reuters quotes local police as saying the incident occurred Monday night as she was hitchhiking back to her guest house after being unable to find a taxi.

The suspects were being questioned by police and their truck has been impounded, a police statement said.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been a lightning rod for the president's fiercest critics during his four years in office. Lately, he's been back on the hot seat with a crisis of his own making: the Justice Department's aggressive stance toward reporters in national security leak cases.

Holder heads to the Senate on Thursday, where lawmakers are sure to demand an explanation.

Being in the center of the storm is nothing new for Holder. Even before he was confirmed by the Senate in 2009, Republicans in Congress singled him out for criticism, says former spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler.

"I think with some members of Congress — particularly some Republicans — the attorney general has been a favorite target of theirs, partly because he is the perfect proxy for the president," Schmaler says.

Schmaler says Holder has drawn all that attention because he's one of the more left-leaning members of the Cabinet, and he's personally close to President Obama and the first lady.

Meanwhile, over the past couple of decades, the job of attorney general has become more politicized. That's something that makes Holder uncomfortable every time he goes to Capitol Hill, says onetime prosecutor and Senate lawyer Stephen Ryan.

"The question is," says Ryan, "Is the attorney general ready for people who punch wildly and below the belt on occasion, and land some blows that are quite honest and above the belt? And so I think he's got some problems that in the second term are hard to deal with."

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Holder Isn't Sure How Often Reporters' Records Are Seized

Babylon, like many favelas, is located a short distance from the most affluent areas of Rio, where property is among the most expensive in the world. Shoup lives only a few hundred feet from the tourist beach at Leme. She says the main reason she moved to a favela was because it was cheap, but the low cost isn't why she stays.

"I always say I feel a lot safer at night walking here than I do in Copa or Leme," she says. "I like sprint through Copa or Leme when I get off the bus. When I get here, I say whoa, OK."

That feeling of security in favelas like Babylon is the result of a government project called pacification. In the past, police used to raid the favelas, battle with the drug gangs and then withdraw.

Now a specially created cadre of police called Police Pacification Units live and work in certain favelas full time, providing a permanent security presence. It's been a success in places like Babylon; the drug gangs have been driven out and now foreigners are moving in.

It's a similar story across town in the favela called Vidigal where 23-year-old Kate Steiker-Ginzberg lives.

"I have 180 degrees of ocean views living here in Vidigal," she says.

It's one of the ironies of Rio that its poor have the best views in the city. Many of Rio's favelas crawl up the city's verdant cliffs. The makeshift cinder-block homes sprout from the creases in the hills, overlooking the long white beaches and tourist hotels where the affluent come to play. In Vidigal, in particular, the views are breathtaking.

But it's not just the vista that attracts Steiker-Ginzberg.

"I think there are a lot of young people and a lot of students who come here with this idea of: How can we come and live here and really try and learn from a place?" she says. "How can we really try and insert ourselves in the community?"

Business Is Booming

There's another reason why many foreigners and Brazilians with means are coming to the pacified favelas these days — money.

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President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are meeting this weekend at Sunnylands, an exclusive retreat center near Palm Springs, Calif. On top of 11 lakes, a private golf course and a world-renowned art collection, the compound holds more history than even a 200-acre estate should be able to contain. Obama is the eighth U.S. president to have spent time there. Frank Sinatra married his fourth wife there.

Many news organizations have written about the history of Sunnylands, including The New York Times. In a story Wednesday morning, the newspaper published the photo below, saying it shows "Henry Kissinger during a dinner at Sunnylands, date unknown."

"That was me," Carol Swanson Price told me. Price is the woman in the green dress, sitting to Kissinger's right in the photo. She was close friends with Walter and Leonore Annenberg, who built Sunnylands as their winter home. Her late husband was Ambassador Charles Price, who represented the United States in Britain during the Reagan administration.

"The Annenbergs were like a second family to me," Mrs. Price says, joking that her car practically drove to Sunnylands on autopilot.

As for the photo, "I believe that that was taken at Walter's 75th birthday," she says. "He died in 2002 at 90, so that was a long time ago." Twenty-six years, to be exact: The photo was taken in 1987.

"Lee always had a very special birthday party for him and always made it wonderful with great conversation," Price says. "She took a lot of time and effort to try to place people well so they'd enjoy one another. She was a fabulous hostess."

You can hear the full story of Sunnylands's colorful history on tonight's All Things Considered.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama

Running time: 115 minutes

Not rated: smoking

With: Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, Denis Podalydes, Anne Consigny, Michel Piccoli

In French with subtitles

German Garcia-Velutini got into his car and left work one day. It took him 11 months to get home.

Kidnappers had nabbed the Venezuelan banker. His abduction is part of a problem that's been getting worse every year for the past decade in Venezuela, which belongs to a region riddled with crime and the most violent cities in the world.

Gracia-Velutini tells his story at an outdoor table at a hotel in Caracas, the capital, with a view of a mountainside that climbs into the clouds.

He recalls his departure from work that fateful day in 2009, which took him as usual to a highway ramp, where he had to hit the brakes.

"It was like a stopover by what I thought were policemen because of their jackets," he says. "They had long guns, automatic rifles."

Garcia-Velutini is a trim man, with glasses and a mild expression that matches his mild tone as he describes learning the men were not police.

"They took me out of the car and pushed me into another vehicle and injected me" in the thigh, he recalls.

"I passed [out] in seconds. ... When I woke up, I was being pushed in a small room. They took all my clothes," he says, leaving him only with a T-shirt and underwear.

The banker had fallen into the hands of professional kidnappers, who held him for months as they demanded ransom from his family.

"They were very proud of what they were doing. They took pride in their profession," says Garcia-Velutini, who came to that conclusion because of the kidnappers' elaborate techniques.

They kept him in one windowless room. Music played constantly so he would hear nothing from outside. Cameras followed his every move. He never saw his kidnappers, who pushed food and notes for him through a sort of doggy door.

Enlarge image i

Babylon, like many favelas, is located a short distance from the most affluent areas of Rio, where property is among the most expensive in the world. Shoup lives only a few hundred feet from the tourist beach at Leme. She says the main reason she moved to a favela was because it was cheap, but the low cost isn't why she stays.

"I always say I feel a lot safer at night walking here than I do in Copa or Leme," she says. "I like sprint through Copa or Leme when I get off the bus. When I get here, I say whoa, OK."

That feeling of security in favelas like Babylon is the result of a government project called pacification. In the past, police used to raid the favelas, battle with the drug gangs and then withdraw.

Now a specially created cadre of police called Police Pacification Units live and work in certain favelas full time, providing a permanent security presence. It's been a success in places like Babylon; the drug gangs have been driven out and now foreigners are moving in.

It's a similar story across town in the favela called Vidigal where 23-year-old Kate Steiker-Ginzberg lives.

"I have 180 degrees of ocean views living here in Vidigal," she says.

It's one of the ironies of Rio that its poor have the best views in the city. Many of Rio's favelas crawl up the city's verdant cliffs. The makeshift cinder-block homes sprout from the creases in the hills, overlooking the long white beaches and tourist hotels where the affluent come to play. In Vidigal, in particular, the views are breathtaking.

But it's not just the vista that attracts Steiker-Ginzberg.

"I think there are a lot of young people and a lot of students who come here with this idea of: How can we come and live here and really try and learn from a place?" she says. "How can we really try and insert ourselves in the community?"

Business Is Booming

There's another reason why many foreigners and Brazilians with means are coming to the pacified favelas these days — money.

Enlarge image i

Two weeks after the brutal murder of a British soldier that brought a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in the U.K., a fire devastated an Islamic community center in London Wednesday. Scotland Yard says the cause of the blaze is being treated as suspicious.

"Graffiti was found amid the charred ruins, including an abbreviation for a far right anti-Muslim fringe group," NPR's Philip Reeves reports for our Newscast unit. "Detectives are trying to figure out when it was written."

Counter-terrorism officers are among those now working on the case, according to multiple reports.

The building, the Al-Rahma Islamic Centre, had been used by the Somali Bravanese Welfare Association, which is listed on a government website for Barnet, the local borough,as providing recreational activities, financial advice, and other services.

"I have absolute confidence in the police and their commitment to get to the heart of this matter," the leader of the borough council, Richard Cornelius, said. "We are very proud of our diversity and Barnet has long been a model of tolerance. In part this is because of the support the police give to all communities in the borough."

At the scene of the fire, the chairman of Somali Diaspora UK, Mohamed Elmi, told The Guardian that his group has received more than 100 phone calls today.

Fifty percent of those who contacted the organization "are scared – scared to leave their homes or women scared to wear their hijabs in the street," Elmi said. He said the fire had shaken many people in his community, but he added, "We have to be calm and strong and not let these people win."

Two main suspects in the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, who was killed on a street in Woolwich, in southeast London, by men wielding knives and a meat cleaver, are in police custody.

One of the men, Michael Adebolajo, 28, participated in a court hearing today by video link — but the judge ordered the video turned off after the suspect persisted in interrupting him, the BBC reports.

Summer time means backyard BBQs and parties on the patio! Chef Robl Ali knows all about good times and good food. The 29-year-old New Yorker has served big names like Michael Jackson, Vanessa Williams and President Obama. He got his start in a professional kitchen at age 15 and honed his skills at the Culinary Institute of America. After climbing the ranks of the restaurant world, he started his own catering business 'Chef Robl & Co.' He's gotten some strange requests from clients: a live monkey at dinner, a medieval feast with trolls running around, and even a wedding for Chihuahuas.

Chef Robl Ali's catering adventures are the focus of his reality TV show on Bravo, titled Chef Robl & Co. The second season started this week.

The chef joined guest host Celeste Headlee to talk about his cooking, catering, and staying skinny.

It's too early to tell whether North Korea's offer on Thursday of talks with the South — potentially the first such dialogue in years — is more than just another negotiating tactic.

But Seoul readily accepted the offer, and though Pyongyang said the agenda should be discussing the reopening of the jointly run Kaesong factory complex inside North Korea, it left the door open for the possibility of broader negotiations.

"We call for meeting between authorities to normalize Kaesong Industrial Complex and reopening of Mount Kumgang Tourist Region," Pyongyang's official KCNA news service reported. "If necessary, we could negotiate humanitarian issues such as bringing together separated families."

As The Associated Press writes:

"The envisioned talks could help rebuild avenues of inter-Korean cooperation that were obliterated in recent years amid hard-line stances by both countries, though the key issue isolating the North from the world community — its nuclear program — is not up for debate."

On the heels of Liz & Dick, Lifetime's campy take on the love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that starred none other than Lindsay Lohan, BBC America will be delivering another made-for-TV version this fall. Because they couldn't call it Liz & Dick, this one is called ... Burton And Taylor. (Innovation!)

This one stars Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter, and the first photo was released yesterday.

Of the many problems with Liz & Dick, one of the most prominent — which we discussed on our weekly pop-culture podcast at the time — was that Lohan in particular always seemed far too much a child, not nearly worldly and knowing enough to give you the woman Taylor was when she was with Burton. Helena Bonham Carter is not only an actress with a substantially weightier resume, but one with a lot more capacity for both unhinged energy and knowing seriousness, as you see right in this picture, actually. West, too, is giving a pretty persuasively Burton-ish vibe here. It was always quite difficult to imagine the Lindsay Lohan version of this story playing as anything but a stunt, but seeing these actors in this photo is kind of intriguing.

If you've ever wondered how to say "May the Force be with you" in Navajo, you're in luck. On July 3, a new translation of Star Wars will be unveiled on the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona. The 1977 classic has been translated into many languages, and the latest effort is the brainchild of Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Ariz.

"We needed a way to preserve our culture," Wheeler tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "Language is at the core of a culture. And I felt we needed a more contemporary way to reach not just young people but the population in general. And so, that's when the idea of translating a major movie into the Navajo language came up."

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

Until recently, the German language's longest "authentic" word was the 63-letter Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz, meaning "the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling," according to The Telegraph. But the law was recently repealed, leaving Germans with no reason to use it (except perhaps to lament the loss of the word Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz). Although it appeared in government documents, it hadn't made its way into the Duden German dictionary, where the reigning champion is the measly 36-letter word Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, or "motor vehicle liability insurance." And the Telegraph notes that "a 39-letter word, Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, insurance companies providing legal protection, is considered the longest German word in everyday use by the Guinness Book of World Records."

The 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards (or "Lammys"), for "excellence in LGBT literature" were awarded Monday night in New York. Winners included John Irving, who won the Bridge Builder Award for being an "ally to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community," as well as the bisexual fiction prize for his novel In One Person. Jeanette Winterson won the lesbian memoir category with Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Augusten Burroughs won a special Award for Excellence in Literature. The Wall Street Journal notes that the prize was given by The New York Times' Frank Bruni, who said of Burroughs, "He's not just a talented man, he's a freakishly talented one."

The Onion publishes an "op-ed" from Joyce Carol Oates with advice on becoming a famous author: "Success in writing takes serious commitment and a willingness to devote thousands of hours to the craft of having sex with key publishing professionals." (As you might have guessed, the article contains strong language.)

Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist and author who was nabbed for fabricating quotes and other transgressions, is reportedly shopping a book about the science of love. Slate cites "sources in the publishing industry" for the tip.

For The Rumpus, Alec Michod interviews Colum McCann about writing: "It all feels like one big, long, complicated failure. Until it doesn't."

The Japan Times reports that two Japanese men were arrested for allegedly using an illegal smartphone app to steal about $2,000 worth of ebooks.

Brain Pickings' Maria Popova unearthed a 1947 recording of T.S. Eliot reading his poem "The Ad-dressing of Cats": "I bow, and taking off my hat, / Ad-dress him in this form: O CAT!" (Incidentally, the book of poems in which it was published, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, went on to inspire the Broadway musical CATS.)

Wedgwood is a priest of sorts, practicing his faith in the kitchen, where he has developed a sort of theology of food. Capt. Mabbot insists that he sit down with her each Sunday and share his luscious shipboard creations, and their dinner-table conversations frequently veer toward the mystical.

"I have begun to think of the mouth as a temple, of the kind that Adam and Eve might have made in a cave," he says at one point. "The temple is open on both ends. On one side is the known world, lit by the sun and in the order nature and man have designed. On the other end is darkness and transformation. Between these poles of birth and death, serenity and insanity, lies taste."

All this and tea-smoked, eel ravioli; brandied mango tart; and pheasant mole! Some of the recipes, to be honest, sound a little modern — but I did look up the history of ravioli, and discovered that it was known in England as early as the 14th century. And as the pirate ship sails eastward to a rendezvous with destiny in China, it seems plausible that Wedgwood could be picking up things like miso paste, squid and lemongrass, ingredients that wouldn't seem out of place in a Whole Foods supermarket.

There's certainly more to Cinnamon and Gunpowder than the high-seas cookery, which forms only part of the larger narrative. There's the pirate ship's colorful cast of characters — Mr. Apples, the knitting thug; mysterious twins Feng and Bai; and Joshua, who can neither hear nor speak and becomes a sort of adopted son to Wedgwood — plus buried family secrets aplenty and a thorough condemnation of the inhumane trading of tea, slaves and opium.

But really, this is Owen Wedgwood's story. As he unbends, changing inch by reluctant inch from a pampered landlubber to a grizzled but lusty pirate chef, you'll savor every bite.

If you want to eat like a queen, maybe it's time to break out the cold chicken, curry and cream sauce.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated the 60th anniversary of her coronation in a ceremony Tuesday at Westminster Abbey. But the event also marks the anniversary of a dish as resilient as the British monarch herself: Coronation Chicken.

The recipe was invented as a solution to a conundrum of royal proportions: What to make – in advance – to serve 350 foreign dignitaries attending a banquet following the queen's coronation on June 2, 1953? Oh, and did we mention that Britain was still living under post-war food rations that made many ingredients hard to come by?

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Working jointly with the FBI, Microsoft says it has disrupted a botnet responsible for stealing more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide.

In a blog post published late last night, Microsoft said this was its "most agressive botnet operation to date" and the "first time that law enforcement and the private sector have worked together" to "execute a civil seizure warrant as part of a botnet disruption operation."

In English, what happened here is that about 5 million computers worldwide were infected with a program that recorded the passwords of bank accounts online. The so-called Citadel botnet — one of the largest in the world — then sent the credentials to a network controlled by criminals. Using the passwords, they were able to take funds from the accounts.

According to Reuters, which broke the story, thieves were able to steal from dozens of banks including "American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, eBay's PayPal, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo."

What Microsoft and the FBI did was seize some servers central to the botnet, therefore disrupting communication with about 1,400 of those nodes.

Reuters explains:

"While the criminals remain at large and the authorities do not know the identities of any ringleaders, the internationally coordinated take-down dealt a significant blow to their cyber capabilities.

"'The bad guys will feel the punch in the gut,' said Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit."

One week after the S&P/Case-Shiller indices showed a 10.9 percent jump in U.S. home prices from March 2012 to March 2013 — the biggest year-over-year gain in that data since April 2006 — there's another report showing a similar jump in April.

CoreLogic, which collects data on real estate sales, says home prices were up 12.1 percent in April vs. April 2012. According to The Associated Press, it's the largest year-over-year increase in CoreLogic's data since February 2006.

Reuters notes that "prices have been gaining for over a year as the housing market turned a corner, helped by low interest rates, a pick up in sales and less available supply."

Economists watch home sales closely. They're a major indicator of consumer confidence. Also, when home sales rise, the ripple effects spread out through the economy as new owners buy furniture and appliances or put money into renovations and repairs.

One of the last things Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel did before he resigned to join the Nixon Cabinet was to fill a Senate vacancy caused by the December 1968 death of E.L. Bartlett, a Democrat. Hickel picked a GOP state representative by the name of Ted Stevens. Stevens, who only months before lost a Republican primary bid for a different seat, went on to serve more than 40 years in the Senate, longer than any Republican in history. Appointing Stevens was by any definition a good move.

Less successful was Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's opportunity some 40 years later to fill a Senate seat. With Barack Obama having been elected president, Blagojevich decided to offer the seat to the highest bidder. By doing so, he got himself impeached, removed from office, and sent to prison. It was also the beginning of the end for Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a rising star who ultimately was brought down thanks to his own greed and crashed to Earth (and served time as well).

One of the last things Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel did before he resigned to join the Nixon Cabinet was to fill a Senate vacancy caused by the December 1968 death of E.L. Bartlett, a Democrat. Hickel picked a GOP state representative by the name of Ted Stevens. Stevens, who only months before lost a Republican primary bid for a different seat, went on to serve more than 40 years in the Senate, longer than any Republican in history. Appointing Stevens was by any definition a good move.

Less successful was Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's opportunity some 40 years later to fill a Senate seat. With Barack Obama having been elected president, Blagojevich decided to offer the seat to the highest bidder. By doing so, he got himself impeached, removed from office, and sent to prison. It was also the beginning of the end for Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a rising star who ultimately was brought down thanks to his own greed and crashed to Earth (and served time as well).

It's ridiculously, absurdly early to talk about 2016 presidential politics. Only a fool would try to predict who will be the next Republican nominee just seven months after the last election for the White House.

Still, in most election cycles, the GOP would already have an obvious front-runner by now, one who would more than likely prevail as the party's pick.

Not this time.

"This will be the most open Republican nomination in 50 years," says Tom Rath, a former GOP attorney general of New Hampshire and a veteran of early state presidential politics.

Plenty of Republicans had their doubts about the early front-runners in 2008 and 2012 — John McCain and Mitt Romney, respectively — but each ended up as the nominee.

This time, no one appears to be anointed. There are lots of likely candidates (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie), question marks (former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, South Dakota Sen. John Thune), possibilities (Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) and potential holdovers (former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Texas Gov. Rick Perry).

People in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina fully expect to see something in the neighborhood of 20 serious candidates stopping by to take soundings.

"There's no formidable candidate who's going to scare people out of the race," says Dave Carney, a GOP consultant and longtime Perry strategist. "There's no heir apparent."

Usually, there is. Republicans have given their candidates credit for time served, offering preference to the "next in line" vice president, veteran senator or candidate who paid his dues and knows the ropes from running the last time around.

For decades, the party has drawn from a small pool. There was a Bush or a Dole on every national ticket from 1976 through 2004. For 20 years before that, Richard Nixon was on the ballot in every election but one.

That type of dynamic is playing out this time around on the Democratic side. If presumptive favorite Hillary Clinton decides not to run, Vice President Joe Biden will have a leg up over lesser-known hopefuls such as Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Martin O'Malley of Maryland.

"It's been a long time since there really hasn't been an obvious front-runner [among Republicans]," says Lewis Gould, a historian who wrote Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans. "It's hard to see somebody becoming a juggernaut in the next eight or 12 months, so that by summer of 2014 people are saying, 'It's X's to lose.' We're a long way from that."

The result is likely to be a long nominating season. In contrast to the usual fashion, in which there's a king and a group of individuals aspiring to dethrone the king, a wide-open field means more candidates can linger in hopes of getting hot later in the game.

"When you get past New Hampshire, the field is usually down to two or three candidates," Rath says. "I'm not sure that will happen this time."

The lack of a clear front-runner reflects the number of competing factions in the party just now, says Chip Felkel, a Republican consultant based in South Carolina. It also gives candidates more of a chance to test-market ideas that might appeal to a broad constituency.

"The party needs to get through a serious bit of soul-searching," he says. "If you had a front-runner, you'd have all these people out there saying why that front-runner is no good."

Consultants like Carney also think it's good news that the candidates getting the most attention early on are mostly still in their 40s — young enough to be the children of Romney or McCain (or, in the case of Paul, actually being the child of ex-perennial hopeful Ron Paul).

"It's good for the brand to have young guys who are peers of the generation that the Republican Party is supposedly not doing well with," says Matt Reisetter, a GOP consultant in Iowa.

New faces, younger and non-Anglo candidates, and a longer nominating season may reconfigure the party's ultimate chances.

But people in the party are convinced they can't be any worse than the traditional formula, which has helped Republicans lose the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.

"Historically, Republican Party politics have all been about whose turn it was," Felkel says, "and that hasn't worked too well for us."

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, a lightning rod for Republican critics of the Obama administration's handling of the September 2012 attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is moving into the post of national security adviser at the White House.

That's what a White House official tells NPR's Ari Shapiro — echoing reports earlier Wednesday morning from The Associated Press and other news outlets.

The current national security adviser, Tom Donilon, is resigning, according to CBS News and other news organizations.

The New York Times says the move of Rice to the White House is "a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation."

Rice had been a leading contender to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. But Rice withdrew her name from consideration last December, saying that "If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly" to the administration.

The attack in Benghazi led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Donilon, the Times notes, has been a "central member of Mr. Obama's foreign-policy team since he first took office. ... But Mr. Donilon has also hit a rough patch recently, with the publication of an unflattering profile in Foreign Policy magazine that cast him as a sharp-elbowed infighter and a domineering boss, who had strained relationships with colleagues, including his former deputy, Denis R. McDonough, now the White House chief of staff. Mr. Donilon and Mr. McDonough, however, both denied those reports."

Donilon is expected to depart in early July. The president's announcement about Rice's appointment is expected to happen later Wednesday. The president is also expected to announce who he will nominate to replace Rice at the U.N. According to what a White House official tells NPR's Mara Liasson, the president plans to name long-time adviser and aide Samantha Power.

As The Associated Press writes, "a defiant Chrysler is refusing to recall about 2.7 million Jeeps the government says are at risk of a fuel tank fire in a rear-end collision."

The Detroit Free Press says the company has "put its reputation for safety and quality on the line" by initially saying "no" to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's request.

"Chrysler must feel like it has a compelling reason to take such a bold stand," Michelle Krebs, an auto analyst with Edmunds.com, tells the Free Press. "Since Toyota was publicly humiliated for dragging its feet on recalls just a few years ago, automakers have been quick to recall vehicles at NHTSA's request."

The models involved are Jeep Grand Cherokees built from 1993 through 2004 and Jeep Libertys built from 2002 through 2007. According to the AP, NHTSA found "that the Jeeps' fuel tanks can fail when hit from the rear, leak fuel and cause fires if there's an ignition source. The placement of the tanks behind the rear axle and their height above the road is a design defect, NHTSA wrote in a letter to Chrysler dated Monday."

Meanwhile, the wire service adds, "Chrysler says its review of nearly 30 years of data shows a low number of rear-impact crashes involving fire or a fuel leak in the affected Jeeps. 'The rate is similar to comparable vehicles produced and sold during the time in question,' the company said in a statement."

According to The Detroit News:

"Chrysler has until June 18 to formally respond to NHTSA's request. The agency could then issue a formal finding and hold a public hearing seeking a recall. Chrysler last objected to a recall in 1997."

There were 135,000 jobs added to private employers' payrolls in May, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report, which was released Wednesday morning.

That's slightly better than in April, when the payroll processing firm says its data show that there were 113,000 more jobs on private payrolls. (In its Wednesday report, ADP revised the April figure; it initially said there had been 119,000 new jobs that month.)

But job growth remains slow. ADP collects and analyzes the numbers in collaboration with Moody's Analytics. Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, says in a statement released with the May data that:

"The job market continues to expand, but growth has slowed since the beginning of the year. The slowdown is evident across all industries and all but the largest companies. Manufacturers are reducing payrolls. The softer job market this spring is largely due to significant fiscal drag from tax increases and government spending cuts."

On the heels of Liz & Dick, Lifetime's campy take on the love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that starred none other than Lindsay Lohan, BBC America will be delivering another made-for-TV version this fall. Because they couldn't call it Liz & Dick, this one is called ... Burton And Taylor. (Innovation!)

This one stars Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter, and the first photo was released yesterday.

Of the many problems with Liz & Dick, one of the most prominent — which we discussed on our weekly pop-culture podcast at the time — was that Lohan in particular always seemed far too much a child, not nearly worldly and knowing enough to give you the woman Taylor was when she was with Burton. Helena Bonham Carter is not only an actress with a substantially weightier resume, but one with a lot more capacity for both unhinged energy and knowing seriousness, as you see right in this picture, actually. West, too, is giving a pretty persuasively Burton-ish vibe here. It was always quite difficult to imagine the Lindsay Lohan version of this story playing as anything but a stunt, but seeing these actors in this photo is kind of intriguing.

The comedian in question is Marc Maron. He does a popular podcast, called WTF, out of his garage in California. It's an interview show, with other comedians and artists. Maron recently found an extraordinary letter in his mailbox. This letter said, basically, that by doing his podcast, out of his garage, he was violating a technology patent. His podcast was, according to the letter, "illegal."

"...They sent a copy of the patent with this letter," Maron says. "Which looks like a large bunch of legal gibberish."

When Marc Maron started up his podcast— he didn't think he was stealing anyone's invention. He's a comedian. He'd never seen a patent before.

A couple other podcasters have received similar letters like this— Jesse Thorn, host of the public radio show Bullseye, for one. NBC, CBS, the Adam Carolla show, have all been sued.

The person behind these letters and lawsuits is Jim Logan. Jim Logan claims to have invented podcasting, with a company called Personal Audio, back in the mid-nineties. He has a patent that he claims covers podcasting, that's been recently updated, but dates back to October 2nd, 1996. That means, according to the letter his company sent out, every time someone creates a podcast— and distributes it— that person owes his company money.

Jim Logan says, back in the mid-nineties, he imagined a personal audio device that could "interact with the internet and your preferences to pull down, to your personal player, all the personal stuff you wanted to listen to. "

"The idea of downloading playlists to your audio player and podcasts are how the world has gotten around to implementing those ideas," says Logan.

Jim Logan tried to build an mp3 player and bring it to market. It didn't work ou, but he did manage to put out a much lower tech version of what he feels is the same idea. He brought the manifestation of this idea to our interview. It was a stack of cassette tapes. The idea was, you'd be able to pick from a selection of newspaper and magazine articles, and his company would send you a tape of those articles being read out loud.

The tapes didn't get much traction. And over the next ten years, Logan says, he kind of forgot about these old audio patents. Until 2007, that's when, as he tells it, his patent attorney, Charlie Call, was working on a project that involved iTunes. "I wasn't a big music listener and Charlie Call wasn't either," Logan says. "We didn't own iPods. We didn't use iTunes, so it was all kind of foreign to us." When Call did discover iTunes," Logan says, he realized that our patent "was being infringed by iTunes."

Logan's company, Personal Audio, sued Apple, over the ability to create a playlist. The jury sided with Personal Audio, and awarded them a 8.5 million dollar payout. Apple appealed, Personal Audio appealed back, and there was a settlement of some kind. The results are not public.

In the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter that Logan's company did not create iTunes or the iPod. "This is the road map," his licensing guy, Richard Baker, says. "That would tell someone how to do podcasting, how to do mp3 players." Even if the guy who had invented iTunes never read Logan's patent, publicly available, on the U.S. Patent website, "that does not matter," Logan says.

Right now that's how the system works, and a lot of people think, this is a big problem. The fact that somebody like Jim Logan could even get a patent this broad, some say, means that the patent system is not working like it's supposed to. Rather than encouraging more innovation— it's hurting it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group, is planning to challenge the patent at the patent office. They claim the patent is too broad, and too obvious.

To Jim Logan, when he uses patents to make back money he lost on his failed business that's a good thing. He says having a patent makes it safer for people like him to try and start their next new idea.

The people he's threatening to sue, of course, don't see it that way.

"I'm not a tech company," Marc Maron says. "I'm a guy who turns on his computer and does his thing!"

Yesterday, in President Obama's call for reform of the patent system, he may have allied himself with Maron's side. He specifically called for more protection for what he calls "end-users of products containing patented technology." People who aren't even trying to make a new product— just turning on their computers, for example, and doing their thing.

The Cost Of Mutual Fund Fees

Here's what happens after 20 years to a $100,000 investment with a 6 percent annual return and an annual fee (expense ratio) of 1 percent.

Total expenses and costs: $58,400

Ending value: $262,314

For the same investment with an annual fee of .10 percent:

Total expenses and costs: $6,354

Ending value: $314,360

Calculate: Click here to estimate how fees affect your investments.

A U.S. trade agency says Apple infringed on its Asian rival Samsung's patent in its manufacture of some older models of the iPhone and iPad.

Bloomberg reports on the order from the U.S. International Trade Commission: "It's the first patent ruling against Apple in the U.S. that affects product sales, covering models of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G made for AT&T Inc."

Reuters notes that the ITC panel "issued a limited import ban and a cease-and-desist order for AT&T models of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G."

President Obama has 60 days to overturn the order. An Apple spokeswoman told the AllThingsD website that the company was "disappointed" with the decision, and planned to appeal.

"Today's decision has no impact on the availability of Apple products in the United States," she told AllThingsD. "Samsung is using a strategy which has been rejected by courts and regulators around the world. They've admitted that it's against the interests of consumers in Europe and elsewhere, yet here in the United States Samsung continues to try to block the sale of Apple products by using patents they agreed to license to anyone for a reasonable fee."

A Samsung statement to the website praised the ITC's decision.

As NPR's Steve Henn reports for our Newscast Unit, the two technology giants have been battling in courts all over the globe.

"Last summer Apple won a one billion dollar jury verdict against Samsung after accusing the Korean electronics giant of "slavishly copying its designs" smartphones and tablets," Steve says.

In March, the judge overseeing the patent case decided to throw out about half of those damages.

Faced with reports of a "black spot" that interfered with the mobile network in several neighborhoods, technicians at Australian cellphone provider Telstra say they recently found the source of the problem: a man's beer fridge in his garage. The refrigerator was tracked by "software robots" and workers wielding special antennas.

"I'm amazed something like that could knock out part of the network," Craig Reynolds of Wangaratta, northeast of Melbourne, tells the Herald Sun. "You're certainly going to stop and wonder. I'm going to run and see if my fridge is all right next time there's a problem with the network."

The beer fridge's motor was blamed for causing the disturbance, with Telstra engineers saying that an electric spark evidently created enough radio frequency noise "to create blackouts on the 850mHz spectrum that carries our mobile voice calls and Internet data," according to the Herald Sun.

Telstra's Greg Halley tells the newspaper that technicians used directional "Mr. Yagi" antennas (aka the Yagi-Uda antenna, named for its inventors) to track the precise location of the disruption. In the past, they've found ATM machines and illegal signal boosters to be culprits. As you might expect, the engineers deal with hundreds of such cases each year.

"The sources vary — it can be domestic equipment, it can be [TV] masthead amplifiers, it can be electric or plastic welding stuff in industrial estates, it can be illegal repeaters," Telstra manager Richard Henderson told iTnews.

"There's no particular focus now on beer fridges," he added.

The incident has sparked discussion on Slashdot, where comments ranged from discussion of "how dodgy does a motor have to be" to disrupt the network, to a more pressing question: What did Craig Reynolds do with his beer?

Get recipes for Paletas De Aguacate (Avocado Ice Pops), Blueberry Cheesecake Ice Cream, Raspberry Frozen Yogurt, One-Ingredient Ice Cream and Slow-Cooker Kulfi.

When Mitch Hurwitz and his collaborators began making the Fox sitcom Arrested Development 10 years ago, it was loaded with jokes — in-jokes, recurring jokes and just plain bizarre jokes — that rewarded viewers who watched more than once. But even though it won the Emmy for best comedy series one year, not enough viewers bothered to watch it even once, so the show was canceled in 2006 after three seasons. And that would have been it, except for a loyal cult following that built up once the show was released on DVD and the Internet. So finally, on Memorial Day weekend, Arrested Development was reborn with 15 new episodes released all at once through Netflix. I binge-viewed them all immediately, and loved watching them that way.

It's the structure of this new season of Arrested Development that impresses me the most. Like Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, it's got a season-long story arc, as well as tightly sculpted plot twists within each installment. And the new season tries something daring by focusing each episode primarily on a specific character from the large and talented ensemble. This allows the show to revisit the same moments from various points of view, in a way that becomes its own running gag. Those legs you see in one episode? You'll find out who they belong to many, many episodes later. Hidden identities, sudden surprises, perplexing mysteries — they're all unfolded slowly, in intertwined fashion, like some sort of comedy double helix. And watching everything in one sitting helps to make those connections even clearer.

“ [I]t seems almost unfair to single out any of them — except for Bateman, whose dry delivery is the gravity that keeps this whole enterprise from spinning off into space.

We now have faces and emotional words to attach to the scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service and its targeting of conservative "tea party" and "patriot" groups during the 2012 campaign cycle.

At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Tuesday, representatives of six organizations described the long delays they have experienced when trying to get the IRS to rule on applications for tax-exempt status. They spoke of the extensive questionnaires and demands from the IRS to see their donors' lists and other information.

And they used stirring language to call for change.

"This dialogue is about the jackboot of tyranny upon the field of our founding documents," said Karen Kenny from the San Fernando [Calif.] Valley Patriots.

Among the questions her group was asked, Kenny said, was her "personal favorite ... which in relation to protests asked for a listing of our 'committed violations of local ordinances, breaches of public order or arrests' then requested details on how we 'conduct or promote' illegal activities. I think the IRS needs to fix its labeling machine: We're the San Fernando Valley Patriots, not Occupy Oakland."

Kenny said her organization applied for tax-exempt status in October, 2010. But she "stopped the costly and exhausting IRS process in July 2012. We survive on my credit card and donations in our cake tin. Like patriots before us, we persevere."

Becky Gerritson from the Wetumpka [Ala.] Tea Party said it took 635 days for her group's application to be approved. The information she had been asked for along the way, Gerritson said, included "my list of donors, including the amounts that they gave. ... 501c4 organizations do NOT have to disclose donor information. I knew that. Why didn't [the IRS]?"

Choking back tears, Gerritson concluded her statement to the committee by saying she isn't "interested in scoring political points. I want to protect and preserve the America I grew up in, the America that people cross oceans and risk their lives to become a part of. And I'm terrified that it's slipping away."

Also during the hearing's first hour, John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage testified about how confidential information concerning his organization's donors was leaked in March 2012 and that it appears the document "originated from within the IRS itself."

The statements submitted by each of the witnesses are posted here. We'll be monitoring the hearing and updating as warranted.

The hearing's early hours produced a moment of partisan dispute among the lawmakers. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., told the witnesses that what happened to them was wrong — but suggested that they were mostly inconvenienced and that they should be talking about what information the IRS should be requesting from them, not only what what they believe they should not be asked.

That led Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., (the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee) to say that McDermott was suggesting "that these citizens are to blame for applying."

"You're to blame, I guess that's the message here," Ryan said.

McDermott didn't have a chance to respond at that moment.

As we've reported, a Treasury Department inspector general's report concludes that "ineffective management" allowed "inappropriate criteria" to be used during the processing of such groups' requests.

The former acting commissioner of the IRS, who lost his job after word of the scandal broke, has said "foolish mistakes were made" but has also insisted that the motivations were not partisan. On Monday, newly installed Acting Commissioner Danny Werfel said his "primary mission" is to restore trust in the agency.

See-through pants brought Lululemon (and some of its customers) unwanted attention back in March, as we reported at the time. They were pulled from shelves.

Now the yoga and running clothier says that thanks to "more fabric across the bum" and other design changes, the black pants are coming back to stores this month.

Lululemon cautions though, that customers need to "get real about sheerness. ... Luon is a knit fabric — if you stretch a knit fabric far enough, it will go sheer. That's why the right fit is key."

Related post:

Product Chief Is Out At See-Through-Pants-Plagued Lululemon

This summer, NPR is taking a closer look at media for kids, taking it as seriously as what's offered to adults. Our first piece looks at a new show starting Monday night on ABC Family.

The Fosters could not be more literally named. It's about a foster family with two moms: one black, one white. They're parenting a houseful of teenagers— biological, adopted and fostered, from different cultural and ethic backgrounds. The first episode begins with a new kid, Callie, stumbling into the family, bruised physically and emotionally by the foster care system's inadequacies.

Hadi is skinny with a scruffy beard and a wad of tobacco wedged in his lower lip. Two months ago, his quick action helped save the lives of Americans and Afghans. An Afghan national policeman had opened fire, killing two American Green Berets and two Afghans. Hadi ran to a nearby truck, grabbed a machine gun and shot him dead.

Hadi stops next to a river, just before the patrol crosses into the village.

He seems undisturbed about the U.S. leaving, noting that his men have the same weapons as the Americans.

"We are good in here," he says.

Hadi is among the most highly skilled Afghan soldiers. He serves on one of two-dozen Afghan special forces teams in eastern Afghanistan. The Americans want to train six more teams.

"I'm lucky because the guys I work with are doing the right thing, but there may be other areas that aren't as lucky as me, for sure," says the American Green Beret captain whose job it is to advise the Afghan forces.

For security reasons, we can't use his name.

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The Internal Revenue Service must earn the trust of the American people, the tax agency's new leader said on Capitol Hill Monday, as he promised to hold employees accountable for targeting the tax-exempt applications of conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

A recent report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General faulted the IRS for using "inappropriate criteria" to identify groups for further review.

"In my first few days, I have initiated a comprehensive review of the agency," acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said, "and have taken immediate actions to begin to address the significant and alarming problems identified in the report."

Another audit from the inspector general's office, to be released Tuesday, details how the IRS spent nearly $50 million on employee conferences in three years. The list of expenses includes videos with silly themes and dances.

In his first congressional appearance since being named to lead the agency, Werfel told members of the House Appropriations subcommittee that the IRS doesn't need more money to deal with its problems right now. Instead, he said, the agency first needs to develop a detailed plan.

When asked about a possible special prosecutor to investigate the IRS, Werfel said he felt the current inquiries are sufficient.

Here are a few more highlights of Monday's oversight hearing:

Asked by House Financial Services and General Government subcommittee chairman Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) if he believes the IRS has betrayed the public's trust, Werfel answered, "I do, Mr. Chairman. I think that's why — thinking about this in terms of my primary mission — is to restore that trust," The Daily Caller reports.

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George "said no IRS employees, during his audit, acknowledged who gave the directive to target conservative groups," according to The Washington Post.

Saying that "it's hard to shock and awe someone who's from Chicago, Illinois about scandals," Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) noted that he's recently seen governors and congressmen sent to jail. "So I get it," he said. "But this is getting there." That's according to The Chicago Sun-Times.

"We may want to consider putting conditions on your funding that allow us to monitor your agency's compliance with proper practices," House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R., Ky.) said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Like all great traditional Boston foods — the Boston Cream Pie, Boston Baked Beans, the Chicago Pizza at the Pizzeria Uno near Fenway — the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich is about to go national. Someday, Bostonians will talk about how they heard it play when it was just a cool, local sandwich.

Ian: I never realized how pointless bagels were before.

Miles: I like a breakfast that forces me to take a nap right after waking up.

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This is coming to you from Venice, where I am attending the opening of the Art Biennale.

I find myself interested in Tino Sehgal's live piece installed in one of the main galleries of the Giardini. If the piece has a title, it isn't posted anywhere. I say "live piece" rather than "performance" because the work itself seems crafted precisely to question the nature of performance.

It has no beginning, middle, or end; it is just there, just as pictures hanging on the wall of a gallery are just there.

In Sehgal's piece, a small number of people sit or lie on the ground; they improvise their own music with their voices. Sometimes it's vaguely electronic sounding, or even human beat-box; sometimes it's more like droning, or chanting, and always very rhythmic.

They move, evenly, slowly, to this self-generated music. Some movements are dancerly, others less so. Beyond the temporal organization of the music and smooth pacing of the movement, there is an obvious organizational structure. The performers — they are performers, after all — pay attention to each other, clearly responding to movements, gestures or sound.

I had the impression that they imitate each other, but not quite directly, always as if going to some core quality of a movement or feeling.

The piece hardly jumps out at you when you first enter the gallery. There are people on the floor moving slowly, making noise; there are dozens of visitors milling around them in the gallery. The work is invisible at first, just as it is unclear what, if any, logic or rule governs what is going on.

My first impulse was to find it uninteresting. I wanted to move on. Gradually, it came into focus. When I left, over an hour later, I felt that I had gotten to know something definite and particular.

The performers are made into objects in this piece. You feel no inclination to applaud them when they stop, no inclination to compliment them on their work. This is because their actions — though clearly their own and often quite virtuosic — seem governed by a task or instruction. Their performance is, in this sense, automatic.

Moreover, this work doesn't play the "attention" game that is so basic to the performing arts. It doesn't try to capture your attention, or direct it, or organize it. The work is just there, like a picture on the wall, and the actors might as well be battery-operated machines.

Of course, they are not automata. They are people. They are lovely, each in their own way, and they are obviously making choices about what to do and how to interpret whatever task it is that they have been given as a team and as artists.

On the surface, though, they are indifferent to you, entirely turned in on themselves and the demands of their task. Only one performer, in the course of the 90 minutes I watched, directed her gaze to me and to other people in the gallery.

Because they were on the floor of the gallery, moving and singing, and because the gallery was full of people, I actually had a vivid sense of the spatial boundaries of the piece. I also, of course, had a somewhat anxious feeling about how fragile those boundaries were. The actors colonized space on the floor, but occasionally someone — a child, for example — would walk through their grouping. Sometimes people would stand nearby talking loudly, or telephoning, as if not noticing they were intruding into the territory of the piece, disrupting it for others.

For reasons I won't discuss, Sehgal prohibits the documentation of his work. This meant that the performers in today's installation had two jobs. They were either on the floor "in" the work. Or they were out in the gallery policing the room. Every time someone with a press badge started to take pictures, the actors, like undercover cops, pounced.

Whatever the intent, this patrolling of the boundaries of the piece belongs to the work itself. What we have is a piece within a piece, and we ourselves are folded into the act.

The play within a play is an object for us to contemplate. But the play itself, the one in which we find ourselves, is anxious; its boundaries are undefined, its subject matter open ended; it is an object of contention.

Art doesn't activate us, as psychologists and neuroscientists like to think. Rather, it gives us an opportunity to activate it, to switch it on and make it happen. Sehgal's work at this year's Biennale is a fine example.

Detroit doesn't have to wait for Antiques Roadshow to come to town to know the city owns priceless treasures. The city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts holds works by van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir and other artists that could bring in tens of millions of dollars each.

And they just might sell. With the city more than $15 billion in debt, Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager trying to straighten out Detroit's finances, has asked the museum to inventory its works with an eye toward potentially selling them off.

It's a scenario that has people in the art world up in arms. When Edsel Ford commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals for the museum back in 1932, he wasn't thinking they might be sold in 2013 to pay for pensions.

"To sell off artwork to pay for a city's general debt is unconscionable," says Kathleen Bernhardt, an art dealer in Chicago. "It's a short-term sell-off of a magnificent part of their heritage."

Museums sell works all the time, but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it's to get rid of pieces that don't suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They're not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards.

But when museums aren't free-standing institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can't help but see dollar signs. The van Goghs are just hanging there, waiting to be put up for auction.

"A lot of institutions are gun-shy about trumpeting what the size of their assets [is], so that a trustee is not tempted to sell them off," says Kris Anderson, director of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington.

Some Universities Want To Sell

All museums have to inventory their works for insurance purposes. But Anderson says the bottom line has been more closely held information ever since Brandeis University talked about selling off the entire collection of its Rose Art Museum back in 2009.

"In the case of Brandeis, you had a truly visionary president who did so much good for the university, but got caught up in a very short-term temptation to look at an easy fix," says Michael Rush, who then served as Rose's director. "To our way of thinking, the university was really selling its birthright by even considering selling its collection."

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"A friend introduced me — he worked with me as a driver in 2010, and we came by car to this village of this humped desert in northern Afghanistan where nothing grows. The only water source in the village is two diseased wells. People live extremely poor — one of the poorest villages I visited in Afghanistan."

On the significance of carpet weaving

"I want people who happen to own an Afghan carpet or who go in a dealership in New York, or Philadelphia, or San Francisco and examine and admire an Afghan carpet, I want them to remember that these were woven by hand in a village, that the entire village participated. That this one carpet helps sustain the livelihoods of a lot of families, starting with the very poor weaver in Oqa to the slew of middlemen and traders who sell it each time at a markup larger than the previous markup."

On village reaction to the U.S. war in Afghanistan

Read an excerpt of The World Is a Carpet

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 of 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 jumpsuits. 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 Junqueira, the chief executive officer of the Rio Operations Center.

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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.

Many people in Syria are accustomed to the sound of daily gunfire. It is normal in battle-scarred cities like Damascus or Qusair.

But along the beaches and in the cafes of Tartous, an area that is a center of support for the embattled President Bashar Assad, the sounds are a bit more peaceful.

Near the water's edge of the Mediterranean, tables, chairs and umbrellas sit upon huge stones. At one of these tables sits a brother and sister on vacation.

The brother, a 21-year-old Syrian soldier who didn't want to give his name, is given a few days off every few weeks. He doesn't talk about his duties, but says he has been under fire. Going from combat to the beach is a bit strange, he says.

"Of course I think about it," he says, "and it's hard to ignore that I could have been killed. But I believe in what I'm doing."

His sister is a law student, though her studies have been delayed since her university is in the embattled city of Homs. Their father is a real estate developer. She says one thing Americans don't understand about Syria is the love and respect they have for the president and their country.

Refuge From Conflict

Many, though not all, of Syria's elites have stayed loyal to the Assad regime, under which they prospered. And many people now rely on this Assad stronghold for more than vacation; many are displaced and looking for work as well.

Around 300,000 Syrians have fled to the Tartous area. Some live in relatives' apartments, in converted schools and some stay in a government office building.

At a main route into the center city, the newcomers see a steadily expanding row of high-rise buildings. Even as the destruction of many Syrian cities continues, construction continues in Tartous, including many buildings intended to be apartments for young people.

The newcomers may have plenty of time to study those buildings.

A military checkpoint nearby stops people entering the center city for as many as 40 minutes at a time to check credentials or search their cars. Above the checkpoint hangs a poster of President Assad.

The intensity of the search betrays something of the authorities' tension about preserving this stronghold. It's a strategically important spot, as Russia, one of Syria's few allies, maintains a naval base there.

It's also politically important because the whole Syrian coastline remains supportive of Assad. Nizar Mahmood, a provincial official coordinating aid to refugees, say there's a reason for that.

"The rebels have a hard time finding support here," Mahmood says, "[because] the coastal area has a higher proportion of educated people than other areas ... making them less likely to be deceived into accepting foreign money."

Assad supporters here regularly blame outsiders for fueling the rebellion. They blame "the media," "the international media" or in some cases "the Jewish media" for creating the impression the rebels have legitimate grievances.

A Non-Sectarian Issue

There may, however, be a different reason Tartous remains quiet. The region is home to a heavy concentration of Muslims from the Alawite sect, the minority group to which President Assad belongs.

Sheikh Ahmad Bilal, an Alawite religious leader, is a traditional adviser to the community on religious matters, just as his ancestors were. He says he worries about what would happen if the Assad regime should lose. There are fears of a bloodbath because many believe the rebels will open the borders to terrorists.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

Watching From The Rooftops As A Fierce Syrian Battle Unfolds

Gar then told his own story. He grew up in South Africa and immigrated to Israel on his own. He says he spent five years in a religious youth movement in Australia, married an Israeli immigrant from Canada and fathered four children.

Gar is good with imagery. As a reservist with a counterterrorism unit, he always has two weapons with him. "It looks a bit odd," he says, but he pushes his young twins in a stroller to synagogue with an M16 strapped to his back.

In addition to his counterterrorism service and teaching at Caliber3, Gar told the group that he is studying to become a rabbi and runs a Torah program for Jewish youth with special needs, like Down Syndrome and autism.

His storytelling has a purpose: humanize the image of Israeli soldiers.

"I wanted to tell you this because I want you to see what we're all about. I'm a family man. I see myself as an educator."

About his military work: "We do this because we love, we don't do this because we love killing."

Gar asks the American visitors to "help fight terrorism" by speaking up against negative views of Israeli soldiers they might see or hear back home. To seal the deal, there's one more story. Gar describes how five members of a Jewish family — a husband, wife and three of their children — were killed two years ago in their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. He says he was part of the team that took two Palestinian suspects back to the family's house to re-enact the murders, using toy knives and dolls.

"They had smiles on their faces as they went from room to room slaughtering a family," Gar said. "Once they left, they heard a baby crying. They responded. One terrorist held the baby while the other took a knife and slit her throat."

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Sixteen million men and women served in uniform during World War II. Today, 1.2 million are still alive, but hundreds of those vets are dying every day. In honor of Memorial Day, NPR's All Things Considered is remembering some of the veterans who died this year.

There were no "typical" tours of duty in World War II, but U.S. Army nurse Mildred Dalton Manning's was particularly extraordinary. Manning, along with six dozen other nurses, was held captive by the Japanese for almost three years. The group became known as the "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor."

Manning died in March in New Jersey. She was 98.

A native of Georgia, Manning was serving in the Philippines when war broke out. In 1942, after treating wounded soldiers in the jungles of Bataan and in an underground hospital on the island of Corregidor, she was taken captive during heavy bombing by the Japanese.

"She was very, very reluctant to talk about it most of my life," says her son, James Manning. "I would say the last five years of her life she started talking about it."

With the help of a granddaughter, Mildred Manning eventually videotaped memories of her Manila detention. She said conditions there were tolerable at first, but got worse later.

Remembering Heroes Of The Second World War

The anomaly looks like a line or scar in what otherwise is a fairly smooth area.

TIGHAR concedes that:

"Maybe the anomaly is a coral feature that just happens to give a sonar return unlike any other coral feature on the entire reef slope. Maybe it's a sunken fishing boat that isn't mentioned in any of the historical literature. Maybe it's the boat nobody knows about that that brought the castaway nobody missed who died at the Seven Site."

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.