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By some estimates, about a million people marched in cities across Brazil on Thursday, airing a wide array of grievances. As O Globo frames it, it was a day marked by violent demonstrations, vandalism and intense clashes with military police.

In Brasilia, the country's capital, about 60,000 people took to the streets, according to O Globo. Three people were arrested, 39 were injured and the country's Foreign Ministry was "left in a state of destruction."

"There is a lot of broken glass on the floor and garden lights and metal frames were thrown inside through a broken back door," the newspaper reports.

The Associated Press says one person in So Paulo state was killed "when a car rammed into a crowd of demonstrators, after the driver apparently became enraged about being unable to drive along a street."

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who has praised protesters, scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting for this morning.

O Globo says Rousseff wants to "analyze the situation in the country" and determine how the government can contain violent protests.

As we've reported, the protests started over a price hike on public transportation, but quickly broadened and became about everything from government corruption to the government's focus on the upcoming World Cup and Olympics. After the first wave of mass protests, some local governments relented, lowering the price of bus and metro tickets or promising to hold talks about them.

But, Reuters reports, protesters were undeterred by the overture:

"In central Rio de Janeiro, where 300,000 people marched, police afterwards chased looters and dispersed people crowding into surrounding areas.

" 'Twenty cents was just the start,' read signs held by many converging along the Avenida Paulista, the broad avenue in central So Paulo, referring to the bus fare reductions. Police there said 110,000 people lined the avenue."

Because of flooding that could prove historic, authorities in Calgary, Canada, have ordered 100,000 people in 22 communities across the city to evacuate their homes.

As the CBC reports, intense rain has caused flooding throughout Alberta province in Canada. More rain is expected today.

The CBC adds:

"Mudslides forced the closure of the Trans-Canada Highway, isolating the mountain resort towns of Banff and Canmore.

" 'The message tonight is that we are still expecting that the worst has not yet come in terms of the flow,' [Calgary Mayor Naheed] Nenshi told CBC News early Friday in a telephone interview from an emergency operations centre."

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has pledged a nationwide overhaul of public transportation, improved funding for schools and a crackdown on corruption in response to sometimes violent anti-government protests that have roiled the country for the past week.

In a 10-minute address broadcast on Friday, Rousseff broke her silence on the protests, saying she would spend more money on public transportation and divert some of the country's oil revenues to pay for education, The Associated Press reported. She also addressed widespread anger over government corruption.

"I want institutions that are more transparent, more resistant to wrongdoing," Rousseff said. "It's citizenship and not economic power that must be heard first."

But she also denounced attacks by protesters on government buildings and acknowledged concern about security ahead of a visit by Pope Francis in late July. She threatened to put the army on the streets if the violence continued.

"I assure you, we will maintain order," Ms. Rousseff said.

In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, Brazil's Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said the rising expectations of the country's emerging middle class were in part the cause of the protests.

"I think there is a widespread view that they reflect aspirations by citizens who have benefitted from rising living standards for [further] improvements in their lives," Patriota said.

Although the demonstrations began as a protest against a hike in the public bus fare, The New York Times reports:

"In So Paulo, the nation's largest city, protesters [Friday] blocked roads leading to the airport and thousands rallied at a downtown plaza to protest a measure backed by conservative legislators, known as the gay cure, that would allow psychologists to treat homosexuality as a form of mental illness.

The protests continued even though one of the main groups that had been behind the original demonstrations here said that it would not call for any more marches in So Paulo. The group indicated that it had won the concessions on bus fares it had demanded and that it was concerned that some members of allied groups, like left-wing political parties or social movements, had been singled out and beaten up at the demonstrations.

'We won the fight, so we are going to take time to think about what to do next," said Rafael Siqueira, a member of the group, Passe Livre, which had pushed for the rollback of a bus fare increase.'"

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of ten other countries are meeting in Qatar to coordinate military support to Syrian rebels vying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

The group, dubbed "Friends of Syria", is meeing in the Qatari capital, Doha, and includes European powers and regional Sunni Muslim-dominated countries. It could provide Syrian insurgents with the anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons they say they need to defeat Assad's military.

Reuters, quoting two Gulf sources reports that Saudi Arabia has stepped up its lead role in arming the rebels.

"In the past week there have been more arrivals of ... advanced weapons. They are getting them more frequently," the source was quoted by Reuters as saying. Another source told Reuters that the latest supplies had the potential to top the balance in the rebels' favor even as Syrian government forces have been making significant gains on the battlefield.

The White House announced last week that it would provide direct military support to Syria's rebels after it said Assad's forces had used chemical weapons against the insurgents.

On Friday, the U.S. said it would base another 700 combat-ready military personnel in Syria's neighbor, Jordan, after already saying it would leave F-16 fighters and Patriot missiles there following the conclusion of a joint-U.S.-Jordan military exercise.

NPR's Deborah Amos, reporting from Amman, says Jordan, on the front line of the conflict in Syria, and has more than a half-million Syrian refugees.

She says that "rebels have confirmed to NPR that Jordan hosts a covert military training program overseen by western intelligence agencies."

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin cautioned the West against arming the rebels, saying their ranks included "terrorist" elements. The U.S. has said that one of the groups fighting Assad, al-Nusra, is a terrorist organization.

Putin, speaking on a panel in St. Petersburg, Russia, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel said if the U.S. already recognized al-Nusra as a terrorist group, "how can one deliver arms to those opposition members? ... Where will they end up? What role will they play?"

Between his trip to Europe last week and his travels to Africa next week, President Obama is doing a lot of gift exchanges with foreign leaders.

In the past, he has gotten mixed reviews. Four years ago, he was panned for giving the queen of England an iPod. Other presents have gone over better. But the president does not personally select these gifts — a staffer does.

And there's a well-kept secret at the White House: When Obama wants to choose a gift himself for someone in his inner circle, he sets a very high bar.

Last November, Valerie Jarrett, one of the president's closest friends and advisers, had a birthday. The president's gift to her? Two historic documents that now hang in a large frame on the wall in her West Wing office — situated almost exactly above the Oval Office.

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Booker T. Jones — leader of the soul band Booker T. & the M.G.'s — made it big in 1962 with the song "Green Onions." But since "Green Onions" sounds suspiciously natural for the United States, we've decided to quiz him on Funyuns instead: three questions about the crunchy, onion-flavored snack food.

Establishing a name for yourself in a very famous literary family can seem quite daunting, especially if you're Owen King. His father is legendary horror writer Stephen King, and his mother, Tabitha King, has written eight novels to date. Even his brother is a well-known horror and comic book writer, under the name Joe Hill. Yet with his family's support, and a focus on contemporary literature, King has managed to carve his own path. King's debut novel, Double Feature, tells the story of a complicated relationship between a father and son, and the horrors of filmmaking.

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All Hail The King

The Greeks have been eating octopus since ancient times, and it's still on the menu of the country's many psarotavernes, or fish taverns.

On the islands, where the catch is often fresh, octopus is grilled over charcoal, seasoned with fresh lemon and served with ouzo. Friends and families often share this special summer meze during a hot day at the beach.

On Aegina, an island of pistachio trees off the coast of Athens in the Saronic Gulf, some of the best grilled octopus can be found in the southern seaside village of Perdika.

Small sailboats and speedboats are docked in the tiny port. Just above the port are the fish tavernas. The busiest is Miltos, a whitewashed little place with blue doors and outdoor tables. A street musician with a sunburned face plays a folk song on his clarinet. He weaves through tables, serenading local families, Spanish tourists and me and two journalist friends from Athens.

A young waiter runs through the menu. "Sea urchin salad, eggplant dip, fish roe dip, sardines, red mullet and, of course, octopus," he says. "The grilled octopus is especially good."

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Kane has written two books of poetry, which both deal with issues of displacement and cultural identity, and is currently working on a novel based on the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. She tells NPR's Melissa Block about the island, her Inupiat identity and the upcoming trip.

Kendamas seem to be the buzz these days at elementary schools all around Sacramento. My kindergartener knew all about them when I brought it up. He said his friends have them. Now he does, too.

But kendamas aren't that easy to find. They're usually at comic book stores, Japanese grocery stores, or online. And they aren't cheap. The one I bought cost about $17.

Vendors are reporting an uptick in the Midwest now, especially in Minnesota and Illinois. Seems like it might be possible for kendamas to go viral, even with no batteries, no screen, no buttons ... just a wooden ball attached to a wooden stick with a string.

On a memorable hallucination while taking LSD

"I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late, and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, 'I want to see indigo now.' And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall.

"Again it had this luminous, numinous quality; I leaped toward it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, 'This is the color of heaven.' ... I thought maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the Earth, or maybe it used to exist or no longer exists. All this went through my mind in 4 or 5 seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness, and I was haunted a little bit when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world.

"I would turn over little stones. I once went to a museum to look at azurite, a copper mineral which is maybe the nearest [to] indigo, but that was disappointing. I did in fact have that experience again, but when I had it the second time, it was not with a drug, it was with music — and I think music can take one to the heights in a way comparable with drugs."

On hallucinations that accompany bereavement

"With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing — in perception — have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination. But hallucination, in a way, simulates perception, and the perceptual parts of the brain become active. ... There's obviously a very, very strong passionate feeling of love and loss with bereavement hallucinations, and I think intense emotion of any sort can produce a hallucination."

On the hallucinations accompanying his migraines

“ I usually get the zigzag, but I may also see lattice patterns, like tessellations; sometimes these lattice patterns seem to cover people's faces or a piece of paper I'm writing on. I mostly get complex geometrical patterns

Because of flooding that could prove historic, authorities in Calgary, Canada, have ordered 100,000 people in 22 communities across the city to evacuate their homes.

As the CBC reports, intense rain has caused flooding throughout Alberta province in Canada. More rain is expected today.

The CBC adds:

"Mudslides forced the closure of the Trans-Canada Highway, isolating the mountain resort towns of Banff and Canmore.

" 'The message tonight is that we are still expecting that the worst has not yet come in terms of the flow,' [Calgary Mayor Naheed] Nenshi told CBC News early Friday in a telephone interview from an emergency operations centre."

Gilbert Zermeno came from a big family that didn't have much. They lived on the plains of West Texas and got by on the $100 a week that Gilbert's father made working the cotton fields.

So when Gilbert wanted to join the school band in sixth grade, his parents had to get creative, as he explained to his wife, Pat Powers-Zermeno, during a recent visit to StoryCorps in Phoenix.

"I was imagining myself playing the saxophone," he says. One day, he brought home a note from school to show his mom. "The school is bringing in an instrument salesman and all the kids are going to be there that want to be in band," he told her.

There was a huge dust storm that day, Gilbert recalls, so his mother replied, "There's no way that we can drive in this dust storm, mi hijo [my son]. It's just too dangerous."

Undeterred, Gilbert made a plan. "I took this little statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and I put her on the window. And I said, 'I really want to be in the band. Please make this storm go away.' "

Ten minutes later, Gilbert says, the storm "just stopped. And I went over to Mom. I went, 'No wind.'

"So now, she's in a really tough spot," he laughs.

So they got in the car and drove to school, Gilbert explains. "And there's all these new shiny instruments. And the parents are just writing checks out. And my mom looks at one of the checks — it's like, 650 bucks. That's six weeks worth of work for my dad.

"So she says, 'Where's the band director? Donde esta el director?' So we went in, and the man said, 'Well, a senior left behind this trombone.' "

It wasn't a saxophone. It wasn't shiny. And it had "a bit of green rust around it," Gilbert says. "And he opens [the case] and the crushed-velvet is no longer crushed — It's like, annihilated inside. And I'm just looking at it going, 'That is so pathetic.' "

The director wanted $50 for the old trombone, so Gilbert's mother worked out a payment plan, sending $20 initially, then $5 each week.

"But I was horrible," Gilbert says. "I sat on the toilet in the bathroom, because it was the only room that had a door. And my poor mother had to listen to me play the same thing, over and over again. And she would be turning up the radio as loud as she could," he laughs.

"But, I also noticed that, the more I practiced and the better I got, the radio was turned down a little further. And I still have that trombone to this day."

And that's why the couple's daughter plays the trombone today, says Gilbert's wife Pat, laughing.

"She could have played any instrument she wanted, and I encouraged that," Gilbert insists. "I said, 'No, mi hija [my daughter]. Really, you can play any instrument you want. I could be one of those parents who could write a check out for a saxophone — anything you want.' "

But Gilbert's daughter knew her mind. As Gilbert describes it, she just said, "No, I want to play the trombone."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher.

One of the most anticipated shows of the summer, Under The Dome, starts Monday on CBS. It's about a tiny New England town that's suddenly and mysteriously sealed off by an impenetrable dome.

The series is the first onscreen collaboration between two of the biggest Steves in popular culture — Steven Spielberg and Stephen King.

"The Steven Squared, we call it," cracks Neal Baer, the show's executive producer.

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For a little more than a month now, we've been reporting on the IRS's flagging of Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny. Through it all, some basic questions remain: Who ordered the targeting? And why?

We don't have any satisfying answers to those questions yet — and it seems neither do the congressional investigators. But along the way, as new revelations have trickled out, we've noticed some surprising and even puzzling facts about the situation that haven't gotten much attention.

Here are four of them:

1. Most of the groups flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny didn't actually have to apply for tax-exempt status.

For the Tea Party groups that were forced to jump through hoops, this will be a head-slapper.

As it turns out, the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt "social welfare" groups aren't required to get approval from the IRS to carry on their activities, and in most cases, these groups had no tax liability anyway. For some groups, government certification as a social welfare group could serve as a kind of good housekeeping seal, making it easier to attract donations. This allows them to assure donors their names will remain secret and the only thing the groups actually have to do is file an annual tax return.

Of the nearly 300 groups singled out for extra scrutiny, just 89 actually had to apply. Those groups were seeking 501(c)(3) charitable status. They can offer their donors a tax deduction in addition to anonymity and have to apply.

It's hard to imagine a book more difficult to pull off, but Bell proves as self-assured as he is audacious. His prose, which manages to be both mournful and propulsive, is undeniable. While he's been compared to authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his style is very much his own, lacking any obvious antecedent. In the House contains passages far scarier than most mainstream horror novels, but Bell writes with a warmth, a humanity that renders the scenes gut-wrenching on an emotional level. Characters in fairy tales are often stand-ins for ideas, props used to illustrate a moral. Bell does a superb job of avoiding this trap, though; he writes about the family with both a clear sense of empathy and an expert novelist's unblinking eye.

Bell's novel isn't just a joy to read, it's also one of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years. In one scene, the husband remembers his father lecturing him, "telling me the purpose of a marriage was the improvement of a man and a woman, each meant to make the other better." The father continues, "It is enough. ... You cannot expect to make the world better, not by any love." It's apparent Bell disagrees; the novel is a monument to the uniqueness of every relationship, the possibility that love itself can make the world better, though of course it's never easy.

Read an excerpt of In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods

"Citizens who choose ...

To be defined by a wall,

or ... to tear it down. "

From Remarks by President Obama at the Brandenburg Gate. June 19, 2013.

****

(If you find examples of Haiku in the News, please send them to: protojournalist@npr.org)

Just as Dean meets Anne-Marie and decides to finish college, Lia is the catalyst that helps Viri begin the second half of his life. After their marriage, he "took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed." He, like Dean, went to Europe to meet a woman and "organize" himself. Lia and Anne-Marie are lunch stops on a man's road to self-discovery, their thoughts no more important to the narrative (and almost as absurd to worry about) as the thoughts of the tagliatelle that Viri actually orders.

Salter's depiction of women in his most recent book, All That Is, is no different, except that it's even more disturbing. The protagonist, Bowman, embarks on a love affair in Paris. He takes his ex-lover's college-age daughter there for a romantic weekend. But, of course, this affair is all about Bowman. When they first sleep together in New York, their sex is questionably consensual: "she moved from side to side and pushed his hand away, but he was insistent. Finally, not without relief, she gave in. She became his partner in it, more or less." In their final sex scene, Bowman realizes he is ready to forgive her mother for leaving him. He sneaks out of their hotel that morning, thinking about not anything she said or did, but rather "the freshness of her, even afterward." Much as you'd remember, well, a meal, though I feel icky just saying that.

Book Reviews

Real Writing, Real Life In Salter's 'All That Is'

Think our current culture has become food-obsessed? Take a look at this wall painting from ancient Egypt.

Long before Food Network, before Michael Pollan, before pop-up restaurants, humans were taking the time to enshrine the art of cooking. The painting depicts a recipe for baking bread that was carved on the wall of an Egyptian tomb some 4,000 years ago.

It's one of the many fascinating snapshots from the history of food that journalist William Sitwell chronicles in his first book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes.

The gastronomic compass guiding Sitwell's journey through time? The recipes, in all forms, left behind by the foodies whose tastes have helped shape the sophistication of our palates.

"I wanted to pinpoint foodie references in history that to me, told a very important part of the story of food," Sitwell tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne.

Sitwell decided to start with one of the most basic foods, bread. Which is how he ended up in Luxor, Egypt — an ancient capital for pharaohs known in antiquity by its Greek name, Thebes.

"I found myself scrambling up the dusty slopes of a hillside overlooking the Nile in Egypt, where there's this amazing tomb," he says.

That's where he found the carvings in the photo above. Ancient Egyptians filled their tombs with riches they thought would follow them into the afterlife. The fact that someone included a recipe signals just how important it was, he says.

By 1700 B.C., recipes had made the jump from walls to clay tablets — such as this one for a meat and vegetable stew, from ancient Mesopotamia.

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The revelations about secret National Security Agency programs, leaked by Edward Snowden earlier this month, have stirred great controversy, but this type of surveillance is not entirely new, according to journalist Shane Harris.

In his 2010 book, The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, Harris traced the evolution of these surveillance programs in the U.S.

He says that as the digital age advanced, the NSA reached a crossroads and realized that analog tactics like phone tapping were quickly becoming obsolete: There was a whole new world of digital information to be accessed.

"They're realizing," says Harris, "if we can get into this 'digital network' ... [that] they would effectively be able to monitor global communications."

Because these communications were traveling through lines inside the United States, the U.S. was the central switching station for the global communications grid. The laws at the time, however, forbade much of that kind of intelligence gathering in the United States.

"9/11 changed all that," Harris tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Harris is a reporter at Foreign Policy. He's also written about intelligence, surveillance and cybersecurity for the Washingtonian and National Journal.

It's a miracle, though we're not quite sure of the details yet.

A Vatican official confirms that a committee of theologians has approved a second miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II's posthumous intercession — a sine qua non for sainthood.

Italian media say a Costa Rican woman was cured of a severe brain injury after her family prayed to the memory of the late pope. The Vatican is set to release details in the next week or so.

The Telegraph reports that it occurred on the very day of John Paul's beatification, on May 1, 2011.

Another miracle attributed to the former pope was approved by the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 2011. It involved the healing of a French nun, who reportedly recovered from Parkinson's disease in 2005 after praying to the late John Paul. The Catholic Church maintains that there is no medical explanation for the nun's recovery.

According to The Associated Press:

"The case now goes to a commission of cardinals and then Pope Francis. John Paul's canonization is possible in autumn to coincide with the 35th anniversary of his election, though the official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to reveal details about the case that it may be too soon."

Face mask-clad Singaporeans enduring record-breaking smog got some more bad news from their government on Thursday: The pollution may last awhile.

The choking smog that blanketed the city-state earlier this week, generated by burning clear-cutting fires in Indonesia, has gone well beyond the "hazardous" level on the Pollutant Standards Index, hitting 371 on Wednesday before coming back down to about 250. The previous record was 226, reached in 1997.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at a news conference Thursday that it could "easily last several weeks and quite possibly longer until the dry season ends in Sumatra." He told residents to try to stay inside, adding, "We will get through this together."

As The Associated Press writes, while smog from Indonesia isn't unusual, hitting Singapore and Malaysia almost every year, "the severity of this week's conditions has strained diplomatic ties. Officials in Singapore say Jakarta must do more to halt fires on Sumatra island started by plantation owners and farmers to clear land cheaply."

The Independent says:

"The severity of this week's conditions threaten diplomatic ties between Singapore and Jakarta, with officials in the city state urging Indonesian authorities to do more to halt the fires on nearby Sumatra island started by plantation owners to clear land cheaply."

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking at how overdraft fees affect consumers in a detailed report released Tuesday.

One of the stunning finds: "Overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees accounted for 61 percent of total consumer deposit account service charges in 2011 among the banks in the CFPB report."

If you remember, the Federal Reserve passed a regulation in 2010 that required consumers to opt-in to these kinds of services. About 45 percent of heavy overdraft protection users ended up signing up for overdraft protection.

The message, however, that the CFPB seems to be sending today with this report is that overdraft protection creates more problems than it solves.

"Consumers need to be able to anticipate and avoid unnecessary fees on their checking accounts. But we are concerned that overdraft programs at some banks may be increasing consumer costs," CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a statement. "What is often marketed as overdraft protection may actually be putting consumers at greater risk of harm."

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

— Accounts that had at least one overdraft or non-sufficient funds fee in 2011, paid about $255 in annual fees for these services.

— Accountholders who were heavy overdrafters but who opted out of the service after the 2010 regulation went into effect saved on average more than $900 per year.

— The median overdraft fee at a large bank was $34.

— Consumers who opt in to these services were "more likely to end up with involuntary account closures." The CFPB reports that "at some banks in the study involuntary closure rates were more than 2.5 times higher for accounts that had opted in to debit and ATM overdraft coverage."

Supplies of oil have been surging this year, and U.S. drivers, who have been switching to more fuel-efficient cars, are using less gasoline.

That would seem to be the right economic combination to push down prices at the pump, but gasoline prices have remained stubbornly high this summer.

Even some people in the industry are wondering whether the law of supply and demand somehow has been repealed.

"I'm actually quite dumbfounded," says Azam Zakaria, vice president of Lone Star Petroleum, a family-owned company that owns and operates 15 gas stations in the Houston area.

Zakaria, who has been in the business for nearly three decades, used to believe that more oil would mean lower prices, but he hasn't been seeing that lately.

The disconnect between supply and demand seemed to get even wider Wednesday, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its latest data, showing that U.S. crude oil inventories rose by 0.3 million barrels last week. Most experts had been expecting the oil inventory to decline by 0.6 million barrels.

That sort of surprise keeps happening as more and more domestic oil gets pumped. In fact last year, the United States saw the largest-ever yearly rise in oil production, according to a statistical review released last week by BP, the global oil giant.

At the same time, global oil reserves continue to grow, the BP report said.

The price of crude oil, however, continues to hover around $100 a barrel, and an average gallon of regular gasoline is still running above $3.62 nationwide. At the start of this year, the price was about $3.20 a gallon.

Zakaria worries that speculators are pushing up prices beyond what the usual balance of supply and demand would dictate. "Just to be blunt with you, I think that it's a commodity now that is being exchanged at Wall Street," he said.

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Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market

We didn't plan it, but somehow, it has turned into Potato Week here at The Salt. The latest twist in the tater tales takes us to Capitol Hill.

Americans love to pile on the potatoes – we consumed a whopping 112 pounds per capita last year. But lately, the potato industry has been playing the part of jilted lover and taking its heartache to Congress.

According to the National Potato Council, the U.S. Department of Agriculture "discriminates" against fresh, white potatoes.

Huh?

Back in 2007, the USDA ruled that women and children enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, couldn't buy potatoes with the program's vouchers. Instead, the nearly 9 million WIC participants, who have to be poor and at risk of under- or malnutrition to enroll in the program, are given a monthly benefit ($10 for women and $6 for children) to buy any fruit or vegetable except white potatoes.

This month, industry groups persuaded some members of the House Appropriations Committee to introduce an amendment to change that — by permitting states the option to include potatoes in their WIC programs. The potato lobby is also hoping to change the final WIC rule on what foods are eligible for the WIC benefit. USDA is taking comments on it until June 29.

The Salt

The Mystery Of the Ridiculously Pricey Bag Of Potatoes

The Federal Reserve will continue its program of purchasing $85 billion in securities and will leave the target interest rate for federal funds untouched to support the U.S. economy, the U.S. central bank said in a policy update issued Wednesday afternoon.

Here's a summary of the state of the U.S. economy from the Fed, which concluded two days of meetings today:

"Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in May suggests that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Labor market conditions have shown further improvement in recent months, on balance, but the unemployment rate remains elevated. Household spending and business fixed investment advanced, and the housing sector has strengthened further, but fiscal policy is restraining economic growth."

The Federal Reserve will continue its program of purchasing $85 billion in securities and will leave the target interest rate for federal funds untouched to support the U.S. economy, the U.S. central bank said in a policy update issued Wednesday afternoon.

Here's a summary of the state of the U.S. economy from the Fed, which concluded two days of meetings today:

"Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in May suggests that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Labor market conditions have shown further improvement in recent months, on balance, but the unemployment rate remains elevated. Household spending and business fixed investment advanced, and the housing sector has strengthened further, but fiscal policy is restraining economic growth."

There's no cocktail more distinctly American than the martini. It's strong, sophisticated and sexy. It's everything we hope to project while ordering one.

Baltimore-born satirist H.L. Mencken is said to have called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet." But is the martini perfectly American? Maybe not entirely.

So in honor of National Martini Day on Wednesday, we decided to dig into the drink's muddled past.

The history of the martini is a murky one. As is the case with many alcoholic concoctions through time, things weren't always written down, and memories got fuzzy from drinking a few of them.

Many historians follow the martini back to a miner who struck gold in California during the Gold Rush. The story goes that a miner walked into a bar and asked for a special drink to celebrate his new fortune. The bartender threw together what he had on hand — fortified wine (vermouth) and gin, and a few other goodies — and called it a Martinez, after the town in which the bar was located.

The Martinez was a hit, according to the city of Martinez's official website, and word soon spread about the new drink. It was published in the Bartender's Manual in the 1880s.

And yet, author Barnaby Conrad III, who wrote a book on the drink's history, asserts that San Francisco is the martini's true birthplace. Then there's the claim that a New York bartender created it in 1911.

And wait, there's more: An Italian vermouth maker started marketing its product under the brand name Martini in 1863.

"Personally ... I think the martini may have gotten its name because of Martini & Rossi vermouth," says Robert Hess, secretary of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New York. "A customer asks for a 'Martini' cocktail because it utilized that product, much as they might ask for a 'sherry' cocktail in those days if they wanted a cocktail which used sherry. During the 1800s, many drinks were named very simply (gin cocktail, fancy gin cocktail, gin cobbler, gin daisy, etc.)," Hess tells us via email.

Over the years, the drink's fame has grown, as its ingredients (Butterscotch? Seriously?), the ratio of spirits to vermouth, and even its name changed (try saying Martinez three times fast). And there are people who prefer drier versions of a martini, vodka instead of gin, and shaken instead of stirred.

But where does that all-important olive garnish come in?

Nobody knows for sure, but our far-flung correspondent Deborah Amos may have a lead.

Last year, she tells The Salt, she was interviewing a Dr. Ammar Martini, a member of the Syrian Red Crescent, at a Syrian rehab hospital on the Turkish border.

"As we were chatting, I said, 'Hmmm, Martini, that's an unusual Arab name, no?' And he said, 'There are a lot of Martinis in northern Syria. In fact, my grandfather gave the name to a famous drink in the West,' " Amos recalls.

And how did that happen? she asked. Martini said that after the French left Syria (they occupied it from 1920-1946), his grandfather went to Paris and ran a bar and a caf.

"His contribution to the famous drink, according to his grandson, was to put an olive in the glass — and he did so because Idlib province in Syria [where he was from] is famous for olives — and so the drink was called Martini after its Syrian inventor," she tells us.

While it's a great story, "unfortunately, this particular one doesn't hold up when you realize that the martini cocktail existed pre-1900," Hess says.

It seems that everyone wants to take credit for this famous cocktail.

The House has passed one of the most far-reaching abortion bills in decades. But it's unlikely to ever become law.

By a mostly party-line vote Tuesday of 228-196, lawmakers passed the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," which would ban nearly all abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization.

"At 20 weeks maybe sooner, the baby feels pain," said physician and Rep. John Fleming, R-La., on the House floor. "And so I would just submit to you today Mr. Speaker; this bill is not just about abortion; it's about pain, it's about torture to that young life."

The contention that fetuses can feel pain starting at 20 weeks is hotly disputed. But it's been used as a justification to pass similar bills in multiple states over the past several years.

Bringing the federal bill to the House floor now was meant to capitalize on the publicity surrounding last month's murder convictions of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

"After this Kermit Gosnell trial and some of the horrific acts that were going on, a vast majority of the American people believe in the substance of this bill and so do I," Boehner said at his weekly news conference.

Democrats, however, say there's one huge and glaring problem with the bill: It's unconstitutional.

"The bill bans abortions prior to 20 weeks," said Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, ranking member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "Since Roe v. Wade, it has been well-settled law that no bill is constitutional that bans abortions before viability, which is later than that."

Most experts agree that viability begins somewhere around 23 weeks, depending on how you count.

But Democrats use the abortion-ban bill to make a larger point, as well: that Republicans are continuing this year where they left off last year, attacking the rights of women.

"This bill is extreme, an unprecedented reach into women's lives, and a clear indication that the well-being of women in this country is not something that Republicans care to protect," said Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

And Republicans, perhaps inadvertently, played into Democrats' hands.

During committee consideration of the abortion ban last week, the bill's sponsor, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, tried to fend off an amendment that would have provided an exception for victims of rape or incest.

In arguing against the exception, he said, "You know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy is very low."

Franks later said he was trying to say that most women who get pregnant as a result of rape have abortions well before they are six months pregnant. But the PR damage was done.

Republican leaders late last week decided not to let Franks manage his own bill on the floor. Instead, they turned to Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a longtime anti-abortion voice. They also added exceptions to the bill for rape and incest.

But Democrats were outraged at the choice of Blackburn to handle the bill, because she's not even a member of the Judiciary Committee that considered it.

"And if that is not PR, I don't know what is," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairwoman of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. "And if that is not simply trying to fool you, I don't know what else that is."

On the other hand, Republican leaders couldn't have chosen a woman from the Judiciary Committee, because the Republicans on the panel are all male.

Still, the entire effort was likely all for show. The Senate is not expected to take up the bill. And President Obama issued a veto threat against it on Monday.

Another interview with a key IRS employee, another oblique connection to Washington, D.C., and yet still no explosive revelations in the scandal surrounding the agency's targeting of Tea Party groups.

That, it seems, was precisely the point of Rep. Elijah Cummings' decision to release 205 pages of redacted interview transcripts Tuesday (here and here).

Although the name of the "screening group" manager was blacked out, NPR has confirmed it is John Shafer, a longtime IRS employee who supervised workers doing initial screenings of applications for tax-exempt status in the Cincinnati field office.

"I believe releasing this transcript serves the best interest of Congress and the American people by ensuring that there is an accurate and fair picture of the management challenges facing the IRS and that recommendations for legislative reform are appropriately crafted to address the specific problems identified as a result of our oversight efforts," said Cummings, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee's chairman.

Issa, a California Republican, shot back with a statement saying the release of this transcript could potentially harm the committee's investigation.

"I am deeply disappointed that Ranking Member Cummings has decided to broadly disseminate and post online a 205 page transcript that will serve as a roadmap for IRS officials to navigate investigative interviews with Congress," said Issa.

What's so special about Shafer's interview?

Cummings says it "debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases."

For the Maryland Democrat, it certainly can't hurt that Shafer describes himself as a "conservative Republican," and also says the elevating of Tea Party cases for further review started with him, rather than someone higher up the chain.

But much like transcripts of other interviews viewed by NPR, this lengthy interview reveals just a tiny piece of the ongoing investigation.

Another interview with a key IRS employee, another oblique connection to Washington, D.C. and yet still no explosive revelations in the scandal surrounding the agency's targeting of Tea Party groups.

That, it seems, was precisely the point of Rep. Elijah Cummings' (D-Md.) decision to release 205 pages of redacted interview transcripts Tuesday (here and here).

Although his name was blacked out, NPR has confirmed the "screening group" manager's name is John Shafer, a long-time IRS employee who supervised workers doing initial screenings of applications for tax exempt status in the Cincinnati field office.

"I believe releasing this transcript serves the best interest of Congress and the American people by ensuring that there is an accurate and fair picture of the management challenges facing the IRS and that recommendations for legislative reform are appropriately crafted to address the specific problems identified as a result of our oversight efforts," said Cummings, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee's chairman.

Issa shot back with a statement saying the release of this transcript could potentially harm the committee's investigation.

"I am deeply disappointed that Ranking Member Cummings has decided to broadly disseminate and post online a 205 page transcript that will serve as a roadmap for IRS officials to navigate investigative interviews with Congress," said Issa.

What's so special about Shafer's interview?

Cummings says it "debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases."

For the Maryland Democrat, it certainly can't hurt that Shafer describes himself as a "conservative Republican" and also says the elevating of Tea Party cases for further review started with him, rather than someone higher up the chain.

But much like transcripts of other interviews viewed by NPR, this lengthy interview reveals just a tiny piece of the ongoing investigation.

This week, Vice Magazine unveiled a fashion spread featuring images based on famous women writers who killed themselves. To call it merely tasteless would be to understate how calculated it was as well as how revolting it was — it literally created an image based on a real writer who really hanged herself with a pair of stockings, and then it told you where to buy the stockings.

And because it was awful, a lot of people wrote about how awful it was, and Vice eventually took it down from the online magazine while (of course) leaving it in the print edition, and they apologized, sort of, in that "sorry if you're mad about the fashion model we posed with a gun to her mouth" way that's so very common and dispiriting.

If I had to guess, I'd guess whoever thought of it will get a promotion.

Yesterday, my Twitter feed filled up with people who were horrified by the spread, but also with some folks arguing that it was the duty of all of us to ignore it and stop talking about it. The magazine, this thinking went, was obviously only were doing it to make people angry, to attract the attention that comes with horror, to get eyeballs that showed up expecting to be disgusted and were not disappointed.

If I had to guess, I'd guess it's probably true. The magazine's semi-apology claiming that this all stems from their attempt to be editorial isn't remotely persuasive; nobody puts a gun in a model's mouth and doesn't know that's going to be a storm. You only do it if you want the storm. They wanted the storm, they got it, they probably counted the clicks and are perfectly happy.

This particular line of thought, the settle-down line, holds that when you know something is bait, when you know it's there to make you angry, you simply ignore it. You see a fashion spread, for instance, where women killing themselves is used as fashion and commerce and smarmy provocation, and you know that if you say anything, they win. So you say nothing. You stay quiet.

There are times when this approach has some appeal to me. When I see on Twitter that someone with an egg avatar and two followers has gotten a writer I know to spend ages arguing back and forth about nothing, there is part of me that thinks, "Why bother? The world is full of awfulness; you will never beat back all of it." We all ignore things all day long; if we didn't, we'd never get anything done.

But Vice asks for credibility. It's trying to position itself as a force in a kind of gonzo journalism for bros. They have a series on HBO. They don't have an egg avatar. They get — and want — attention for the things they do that are serious. This isn't scouring the internet for obscure horrible people doing horrible things in tiny corners and exhausting yourself howling at the moon over it. This is seeing a powerful media brand selling degrading images of violence in an issue they're claiming is all about women in fiction.

It's insidious and frustrating, the idea that the more blatant an effort to offend for attention, the more the offended are to blame if they react. It imposes a sort of duty of measured inertness, as if you owe it to the greater good not to challenge something if the people who dumped it out into the world don't really believe in it but only want a reaction. It rewards anything you believe to be craven exploitation by suggesting that the more you believe it's just craven exploitation, the more you owe it to the world to sit silently, roll your eyes, and be quiet. It makes craven exploitation bulletproof.

It's insidious and frustrating, but (or maybe because) it's true. It's true, I suspect, that Vice probably got what they wanted from this when Jezebel wrote about it. It's true that we may all be following the intended script, including me. It's not that I don't get it; we all get it. And I can't speak for anybody else, but as a writer, I feel sort of bullied either way when things like this happen — bullied into responding as I know I'm expected to, or bullied into sitting quietly while somebody flicks me on the ear. Neither feels good; in fact, both feel awful.

But both feel awful because both are responses to something that feels awful already, which is seeing real and serious issues (I've seen it with race and sexuality and faith; in this case, it's the gross ways in which degradation, violence and fashion are mixed) exploited for attention. And that's still bad, even if it works.

When this happens, when I believe or half-believe that something is only there to make me angry, it feels less like simple click bait and more like taunting. What are you going to do about it? Go ahead. Get mad. You're only going to make it seem important.

Well, so be it. Perhaps there isn't a good way to call out quests for attention without rewarding them in the short term. But in the long term, this spread still happened, and Vice will always be the magazine that published it. And I will always be a writer who predictably wrote about how gross it was. I suppose we'll both have to live with it.

No such thoughtfulness greets Gretta's sensitive, guilt-prone first-born, Michael Francis, when he trudges home from his dreary job teaching history. After a shotgun wedding, he had to abandon his Ph.D. studies and dash his dreams of a professorship at an American university. Now that their second child is ready to start school, his wife, Claire, who's barely talking to him, is paving the way to her liberation by studying to complete her long-abandoned degree. Michael Francis is distraught at the thought of losing her.

O'Farrell piles on the misery in this section of the novel, though Monica, 10 months younger than her brother, is too peevish and self-righteous to arouse much compassion. Her first husband left her after a rude discovery of just how determined she was not to have children. Now she's terribly unhappy in her new country life, married to an older antiques dealer whose two small daughters treat her with disdain.

O'Farrell's sympathies generally lie most solidly with black sheep — or rather, black ewes. As such, Aoife (pronounced like Eva with an F sound, we're told) is the bleating heart of the novel. Ten years Monica's junior, she had, in her mother's words, "gone off the rails" and "flounced" to New York City three years earlier after a major falling-out with her sister. This defection capped a miserable childhood blighted by undiagnosed dyslexia. Enthralled with her freedom from family censure, Aoife has managed to support herself by working multiple jobs, including the first she's ever loved, as a photographer's assistant. But her carefully hidden illiteracy threatens her job and a serious budding romance.

More Maggie O'Farrell

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The House has passed one of the most far-reaching abortion bills in decades. But it's unlikely to ever become law.

By a mostly party-line vote Tuesday of 228-196, lawmakers passed the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," which would ban nearly all abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization.

"At 20 weeks maybe sooner, the baby feels pain," said physician and Rep. John Fleming, R-La., on the House floor. "And so I would just submit to you today Mr. Speaker; this bill is not just about abortion; it's about pain, it's about torture to that young life."

The contention that fetuses can feel pain starting at 20 weeks is hotly disputed. But it's been used as a justification to pass similar bills in multiple states over the past several years.

Bringing the federal bill to the House floor now was meant to capitalize on the publicity surrounding last month's murder convictions of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

"After this Kermit Gosnell trial and some of the horrific acts that were going on, a vast majority of the American people believe in the substance of this bill and so do I," Boehner said at his weekly news conference.

Democrats, however, say there's one huge and glaring problem with the bill: It's unconstitutional.

"The bill bans abortions prior to 20 weeks," said Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, ranking member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "Since Roe v. Wade, it has been well-settled law that no bill is constitutional that bans abortions before viability, which is later than that."

Most experts agree that viability begins somewhere around 23 weeks, depending on how you count.

But Democrats use the abortion-ban bill to make a larger point, as well: that Republicans are continuing this year where they left off last year, attacking the rights of women.

"This bill is extreme, an unprecedented reach into women's lives, and a clear indication that the well-being of women in this country is not something that Republicans care to protect," said Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

And Republicans, perhaps inadvertently, played into Democrats' hands.

During committee consideration of the abortion ban last week, the bill's sponsor, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, tried to fend off an amendment that would have provided an exception for victims of rape or incest.

In arguing against the exception, he said, "You know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy is very low."

Franks later said he was trying to say that most women who get pregnant as a result of rape have abortions well before they are six months pregnant. But the PR damage was done.

Republican leaders late last week decided not to let Franks manage his own bill on the floor. Instead, they turned to Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a longtime anti-abortion voice. They also added exceptions to the bill for rape and incest.

But Democrats were outraged at the choice of Blackburn to handle the bill, because she's not even a member of the Judiciary Committee that considered it.

"And if that is not PR, I don't know what is," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairwoman of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. "And if that is not simply trying to fool you, I don't know what else that is."

On the other hand, Republican leaders couldn't have chosen a woman from the Judiciary Committee, because the Republicans on the panel are all male.

Still, the entire effort was likely all for show. The Senate is not expected to take up the bill. And President Obama issued a veto threat against it on Monday.

The furor over recently exposed government surveillance programs has posed an abundance of political challenges for both President Obama and Congress. Relatively unmentioned in all of this, however, is the role of the courts — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and how its role has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Obama has said that there are tradeoffs between privacy and security in an age of international terrorism. But he emphasized that the two surveillance programs exposed this month were repeatedly authorized and reviewed by Congress, with federal judges "overseeing the entire program throughout."

Despite being overseen by judges, they are not examined in the way that a normal application for a search warrant is.

For decades, the government conducted warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States deemed to be a national security threat. But in 1978, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such warrantless searches unconstitutional, Congress passed legislation that created a special intelligence court to review government requests for warrants. The law was tweaked over the years, but the core of the court's powers remained unchanged for decades. If the government wanted to listen in on conversations or other communications in the U.S., it had to get a warrant from the foreign intelligence court based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that national security was being compromised.

All Tech Considered

A Guide To Tech Terms In The NSA Story

There is one basic question that keeps being asked about the U.S. auto industry: Is it on the rebound?

"People ask a lot, is the auto industry back?" says Kristin Dziczek, a director at the Center for Automotive Research. "And it depends on what scale you want to look at."

U.S. automakers are adding jobs, but the gains are slower compared with recoveries from previous recessions.

Against all Vatican expectations, the pope's Twitter account in Latin has gained more than 100,000 followers in six months and continues to grow.

Followers are not exclusively Roman Catholics or Latin scholars, but represent a wide variety of professions and religions from all over the world. Some go so far as to claim that the language of the ancient Romans is perfectly suited to 21st-century social media.

Pope Benedict XVI launched the first papal Twitter account last December in eight languages, including Arabic. Soon, there were millions of followers.

Then letters started pouring in asking why the pope wasn't tweeting in the official language of the Vatican.

When the Latin account was launched in January, Vatican officials didn't expect more than 5,000 Latin nerds, that is, followers. But by May, it had surpassed Polish and was in a tie with German at more than 100,000.

Adducit nos Christus ut ex nobismet plus excedentes plusque ipsi dedamur aliis aliis famulemur.

— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) June 4, 2013

NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.

If you go onto a site like Artnet or Saatchi Online, you can shop for art by price, style or even size. It's not that different from buying a mutual fund on the Web. This suits Cappy Price just fine. She's a former Wall Street portfolio manager who now consults with clients about art as an alternative asset. She loves art for its beauty, but she also says it's an investable asset — one that wasn't really accessible to ordinary people until recently.

"The Internet is driving the ability of the masses to do their own research, do their own due diligence just as they do with a stock — really enabling individuals to determine and place their own value on individual pieces of art," Price says.

Why invest in art? One reason, Price says, is that fine art has a proven track record as a good choice during hard times. "It outperforms in times of economic turmoil and trouble. It has outperformed during all of the wars of the 20th century. It's outperformed during the last 27 recessions."

Like any other asset, the market for art goes through ups and downs. Over the past 60 years, the total return on art has been very similar to the return on the S&P 500-stock index, says Mike Moses, a retired New York University business school professor who co-created the Mei Moses World All Art Index. The index tracks repeat auction sales of fine art.

"If you use the last 30 years, the S&P substantially outperforms art," Moses says. "If you look at the most recent eight [to] 10 years, art has outperformed the S&P."

For paintings in my price range — we're talking a few hundred dollars — there's no Mei Moses index, no record of auction sales to use as a guide. So I have no idea whether it's a smart move financially for me to buy art. But I do know this: Art is different than other investments. It's there in your house, part of your life.

"You are telling people something about yourself when you hang it," Moses says. "And therefore, I think that emotional investment gives you a certain tie to that work that you don't find in other objects that you buy."

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Dollar For Dollar: Adventures In Investing

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Faced with the threat of mutiny for what seems like the umpteenth time during his speakership, John Boehner moved to mollify fellow Republicans Tuesday, saying immigration legislation would need the support of a majority of the House GOP before it could be brought to a floor vote.

After emerging from a meeting with House Republicans, following days of warnings by conservatives that the Ohio Republican had better not try to pass an immigration bill with mostly Democratic votes, Boehner sought to calm the roiling Republican waters.

"I also suggested to our members today that any immigration reform bill that is going to go into law ought to have a majority of both parties' support if we're really serious about making that happen," he told reporters waiting outside the meeting room. "And so I don't see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn't have majority support of Republicans."

The practice of bringing to a floor vote only legislation supported by a majority of the party is known as the Hastert Rule. Denny Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was speaker from 1999 to 2007, mostly stuck to the practice of bringing to a vote only those bills with a "majority of the majority" supporting them. It was a good way to keep his political base in the House contented.

Boehner's words to the House GOP were meant to reassure Republicans opposed to provisions in the legislation the Senate is now considering - provisions that would create a citizenship pathway for people in the U.S. illegally.

In a clear shot across the bow of Boehner's speakership, on Monday Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California said in an interview that if the speaker let legislation reach the floor that a majority of House Republicans found objectionable, Boehner should be evicted from the speaker's office. Rohrabacher said:

"I would consider that a betrayal of the Republican members of the House and a betrayal of Republicans throughout the country. If Speaker Boehner moves forward and permits this to come to a vote even though a majority of Republicans in the House oppose whatever is coming to a vote, he should be removed as speaker."

That statement would be virtually impossible to spin, even in Washington, into anything less than a bald-faced threat.

In the past, Boehner has passed legislation most fellow House Republicans found odious, like the bill that averted the fiscal-cliff. It passed in January with just 85 of 241 Republicans voting for it, causing the speaker to rely on nearly unified Democratic support for passage.

Comments he made in a recent ABC News interview caused the latest bout of concern among Republicans. The speaker described revising the nation's immigration laws as his "top priority." That led some in the GOP to surmise that he would do anything to get a bill passed, even one most of them didn't like.

There were at least two other things worth noting about Boehner's Tuesday comments. One, he prepared the ground for the argument that Democrats would be to blame if immigration legislation should fail in the House.

Some Senate and House Republicans have argued that for any legislation to pass, it will have to have strong border enforcement measures whose positive results can be measured before any individuals now in the country illegally get the chance at citizenship. Democrats have generally balked at going as far on border-enforcement features.

Boehner said:

"... I just think the White House and Senate Democrats ought to get very serious. We know that border security is absolutely essential, that — if we're going to give people confidence that we can do the rest of what's being suggested. And I frankly think that the Senate bill is weak on border security. I think the internal enforcement mechanisms are weak and the triggers are almost laughable.

"And so if they're serious about getting an immigration bill finished, I think the president and Senate Democrats ought to reach out to their Democrat — Republican colleagues to build broad bipartisan support for the bill."

Whether it's a free upgrade on a hotel room or skipping ahead in the check-in line, many businesses give preferential treatment to some customers, hoping to make them more loyal. The practice often works — but a new study suggests that when we get perks we didn't earn, negative feelings can result. And they can make a surprise deal a little less sweet.

That's the gist of a study to be published later this year in the Journal of Consumer Research, with the forthright title "Consumer Reaction to Unearned Preferential Treatment."

"The current research demonstrates that, although receiving unearned preferential treatment does generate positive reactions, it is not always an entirely pleasurable experience," write the study's authors, Lan Jiang, Joandrea Hoegg, and Darren W. Dahl.

The displeasing aspects of a treat tend to peak, they write, when the perks are given in public, in front of other customers who are no different than the recipient of the business's generosity.

"We propose that receiving something that others have just as much right to receive can activate concerns about negative evaluations, reducing the satisfaction with the preferential treatment," write the researchers, who teach marketing at business schools at the University of Oregon and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The study's authors found that "satisfaction with receiving preferential treatment can be restored if the observer who does not receive such treatment reacts positively to the recipient's good fortune or if the observer is of a higher status than the recipient."

That's right. The test subjects enjoyed "the positive experience of 'beating' a superior'" so much, the authors say, that it brought "increased overall satisfaction."

It also helps if nobody's looking. To test that theory, the researchers conducted experiments to test "feelings of social discomfort" and try to determine where they come from. They found that even in the most seemingly fair context — a random drawing — the winner felt best about it if they were alone.

All of the tests placed participants in situations in which one person received a surprise bonus. In one case, a booth that was dispensing free product samples suddenly gave one subject more than the others. That was welcomed — especially if no one else was around.

"It's like they wanted to get out of there," co-author JoAndrea Hoegg tells The Globe and Mail. "It's the fear of negative evaluation. If you're getting something you don't deserve, you're thrilled – as long as no one is watching you."

All of this isn't meant to imply that businesses should stop giving people free perks, the researchers say. The trick is to be sure all customers know the deal — and why they're not getting it. Other options include using scratch-off game tabs and loyalty emails, which can be kept private, to connect with customers.

Such steps, they say, "would minimize the potential for negative emotions."

Earlier this year, the U.S. government accused China's military of running a massive cyberspying campaign to steal business secrets from American companies.

"We've made it very clear to China and some other state actors that, you know, we expect them to follow international norms and abide by international rules," President Obama told ABC News in March.

Last week, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked details of the agency's surveillance programs, told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA had hacked civilian computers in the Chinese territory and the mainland over a period of four years. After months of criticism from the U.S., China's government finally had a weapon of its own.

"It's Christmas in June in Beijing and Snowden is Santa Claus," says Bill Bishop, who writes Sinocism, a popular daily news digest on China. "If you look at the reactions of the Chinese government over the last few months or a year, specifically to all the allegations of hacking coming out of China, China will say, 'We're a victim, too. We are one of, if not the biggest victim of hacking in the world.' So, now, these revelations come out and they can say, 'See? We were telling the truth.'"

There is a distinction in the hacking allegations. China's government is accused of mass spying on U.S. companies for economic advantage. The U.S. is accused of hoovering up huge amounts of private information at home and abroad for what it says is an effort to find terrorists. China's state-run media has glossed over that nuance, and gone for the jugular.

Bishop cites two recent cartoons here.

"One depicted the Statue of Liberty, but her shadow was a secret agent with several eavesdropping devices," he says. "And another was a rat dressed as the Statue of Liberty, pulling off the cover of a computer and the cover was a Chinese flag."

Patrick Xu, an associate professor at Communication University of China in Beijing, says the U.S. has "damaged its reputation."

In a column for the government news portal China.org, he compared Snowden to Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and said China should grant him asylum. Xu says speeches by American officials criticizing China for Internet prying now ring hollow.

"It turns out this was a rather big lie," he says.

How much all of this resonates with ordinary Chinese is questionable. On Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, Snowden did not even make Tuesday top 10 topics. No. 1 was a Chinese movie star who recently put on a lot of weight. And when NPR spoke to 13 people in Shanghai on Tuesday, only three had even heard of Snowden.

One was a doctor who only gave his English name, "John," because he thinks the topic is sensitive to the government.

John thought Snowden was gutsy.

"At least he let the public know potential security risks," he said, speaking in Chinese. "Our privacy can be easily exposed by others. It feels like you are stripped naked."

John, who was sipping coffee at a Burger King, said the NSA revelations didn't change his view of the U.S. He thinks most countries do the same thing. John lives in far western China where ethnic Uighur people are at odds with the government in Beijing.

"I am from Xinjiang and we experienced big ethnic riots in 2009," he says. "Lots of information was blocked. The Internet was cut off" for 10 months.

As Chinese state media has criticized the U.S., Chinese officials have kept quiet.

Joseph Cheng, a political science professor at City University of Hong Kong, says that's smart.

"Now, that China has enjoyed this accidental publicity coup, certainly China has no intention to further embarrass the Obama administration, which may well lead to a deterioration in the bilateral relationship," he says.

The two countries held a presidential summit earlier this month in California to improve ties. Right now, it serves neither side to make them worse.

They are young, they are angry and they have drawn inspiration from protest movements a world away in places like Turkey and the Middle East.

Tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets Monday night across the country and more demonstrations are slated for the coming week. Brazil doesn't have a history of this kind of mass dissent, but it seems to be catching on very quickly.

"The social movements in the world are learning from each other," said Marco Antnio Carvalho Teixeira, a professor at Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Sao Paulo. "This is a brand new way of protesting in Brazil."

The Brazilian protesters have a lot in common with their Turkish counterparts: They are leaderless, the message is a bit fuzzy, the growth of the movement has been organic and organized on social media.

And like Turkey, Brazil is also a vibrant democracy and a growing global power.

Unlike the protesters in the Arab Spring, Brazilians can take their grievances to the ballot box.

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Mass Anti-Government Protests Swell In Brazil

Mike: It's like Burger Jenga.

Ian: It's so tall, I got two patties in my mouth and one of the top patties hit me in the eye. I like a burger that requires protective eyewear.

Eva: I just scraped ketchup off my forehead.

Enlarge image i

Advocates of tougher voter registration standards have racked up wins in recent years — voter ID laws have taken hold across the nation, for example.

But those who believe that government should make voting as easy as possible just gained a significant victory with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision slapping down an Arizona law that required potential voters to prove their citizenship.

In its 7-2 decision, the court ruled that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called motor voter law, trumped an Arizona law passed in 2004. The state law demanded that voters produce documentation of their citizenship at the time they registered to vote.

The federal law requires those registering in federal elections only to attest to their citizenship. The process is simple enough that people can register by postcard.

The high court's decision on the Arizona law put an extra bounce in the step of officials at civil and voting-rights organizations.

"We are very, very pleased with the outcome today after several long years of litigation up through the district court and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court," said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was among officials from several voting-rights groups who spoke with reporters in a teleconference. "This is not just a victory [for the individuals on whose behalf MALDEF filed suit] but it's a victory for voter registration organizations."

After the Arizona law took effect in 2006, voter registration fell 44 percent in Maricopa County, the state's most populous county, which includes the city of Phoenix. The higher standard not only kept many people of Latino ancestry from registering — Perales told NPR's Nina Totenberg in an interview that 80 percent of those whose voter registrations were rejected were non-Hispanic whites.

But the decision may not have been an unalloyed victory for voting-rights groups. Rick Hasen, an election law expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the Supreme Court's ruling left states with the ability to wipe the smile off the faces of voting-rights advocates. In an analysis of the court's decision, Hasen wrote:

"To begin with, Justice Scalia provided a road map for Arizona ultimately to win this very case when it goes back to the lower courts. The court wrote that Arizona should go back to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to ask it to reconsider its request to include the citizenship requirement on the federal form."

Of course, the little-known Election Assistance Commission actually exists more in theory than reality now, as all four of its posts are vacant — a casualty of Washington's partisan animus.

That led another California law professor, Tom Caso at Chapman University, who once served on The Federalist Society's board, to say in a statement:

"The Supreme Court today opened the door to noncitizen voting ... by striking down Arizona's voter registration proof of citizenship requirement. The Court conceded that the Constitution granted Arizona the authority to restrict voting to citizens, but ruled that Arizona's demand for documentation conflicted with a federal voter registration law. In order to ensure that only citizens are allowed to vote, according to the Court, Arizona must submit an application to a federal Commission that has no members for permission to change the federal voter registration application. The Court conceded that it may not have the power to require the Commission, which has no members, to take action on Arizona's application."

While important, the Arizona case isn't the superstar voting-rights case of the current term. That would be Shelby County v. Holder, which challenges Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section requires certain state and local governments with a history of discrimination against minority voters, particularly African-Americans, to receive Justice Department approval before they change their election laws. That so-called pre-clearance provision could be struck down. The conservatives on the court appeared to be leaning in that direction during the oral arguments.

But Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she hoped the Arizona decision augured well for the court upholding Section 5.

"They do both fundamentally serve the same purpose," she said of the motor voter and Section 5 laws in the conference call with reporters. "And you would hope if the court was being consistent that they would uphold this law because they serve the same purpose of guaranteeing to Americans, to all citizens, the right to vote unfettered by onerous practices — be they based on discrimination or be they based on unnecessary and unreasonable burdens on the right to vote."

Once upon a time, it was MySpace. (Huh. Turns out you can still link to it.) Then Facebook happened. And Twitter. And beyond those two dominant social-media platforms, there are a host of other, newer options for staying in touch and letting the digital universe get a look at your life. And for certain kinds of sharing, some of those other options make more sense to tech-savvy teens than the Big Two do.

On today's All Things Considered, NPR's Sami Yenigun talks to a roomful of teenagers to see who uses which for what these days. (The answer, like most involving tech or teens, is subject to change like the weather.)

Some takeaways:

Facebook is for finding old friends, and maybe for arranging parties. (Unless they're the kind of parties you don't want the police knowing about. "Oftentimes, parties that are all over social media get busted by the cops really easily," one 17-year-old tells Sami.)

Twitter is more for personal expression. "People be in their feelings on Twitter — they vent," says Jamal Royster, 18.

Visual communication? It's a different mode of connection. And as with text-based platforms, use cases vary among the teens Sami talked to.

Vine is where you publish (and watch) short video clips — seven seconds or so. People make all kinds of clever short films with the app. Check out Waka Flocka Elmo, a recent viral hit recommended by 17-year-old Jesse Aniebonam.

Instagram, a relative veteran in the pics-and-flicks category, is the go-to app when it comes to documenting your days and nights. "I Instagram everything," says Grace Plihal, 18. "It's kind of my way of showing myself to the world, I guess."

(Interesting, that, given how much control Instagram gives users over the look and feel of what they post. "Showing myself" is a telling way to put it.)

But the observation that struck me most, when Sami told me about the shape of his story, was this one, from 13-year-old Caroline Lamb. There are times when you want to take a back seat to the story you're telling, she suggests — and those are the times for Tumblr.

Here's how she puts it in her own words:

High-tech spying with satellites. Intimidation. Price fixing.

Sound like the makings of a Hollywood thriller? These are actually among the allegations being thrown about in a federal court case against America's alleged "Potato Cartel." It's enough to make Mr. Potato Head blush.

A civil lawsuit that shifted into U.S. district court in Idaho – America's potato country — last week alleges that the United Potato Growers of America has become a veritable OPEC of Spuds. The group's members, who produce about 75 percent of the potatoes grown in this country, are accused of illegally conspiring to inflate 'tater prices.

The allegations – which the potato growers deny — are being lobbed by the Associated Wholesale Grocers, which represents more than 1,900 retailers, according to its website. The grocers group is based in Kansas, where the suit was originally filed this spring.

In its lawsuit, the grocers accuse Big Potato of enforcing its pricing schemes through a variety of strong-arm, high-tech means, including using GPS systems and satellite imagery of farmland to make sure farmers aren't planting more spuds than they're supposed to. They were "using Spudnik, if you will, from the sky," AP reporter John Miller, who recently wrote about the case, joked with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. Growers who violated the production limits, the suit alleges, were fined $100 per acre.

At issue is whether the potato growers were engaging in predatory conduct or merely running a smart cooperative that helped its members avoid the cycle of boom and bust in the potato biz. According to its website, United Potato Growers of America formed in 2005, following the creation a year earlier of an Idaho cooperative with a mission to "manage their potato supply, matching it to demand to help their growers receive a reasonable price for their product."

Mission accomplished, it would seem: In 2004, AP's Miller says, a 10-pound bag of potatoes sold for about $8 or $9; by 2006, that price had shot up to $15 or so.

Now, under a 1922 law known as the Capper-Volstead Act, agricultural producers are allowed to band together to more efficiently market their products. And the potato folks clearly think they're on the right side of the law.

In a statement, UPGA told NPR: "United Potato Grower's goal has been to help growers provide quality potatoes at reasonable prices to American consumers. We have always acted openly and within the bounds of the law. We are confident in our legal position and look forward to a favorable outcome in court."

But in recent years, the Justice Department has been scrutinizing just how far such antitrust exemptions should apply to large modern agricultural operations.

And the current lawsuit is quite similar to another lawsuit filed against the potato co-op back in 2010. The judge in that case, Miller says, rejected a motion to throw the case out of court. Instead, the judge says it remains an open question just how far growers can stretch Capper-Volstead's antitrust protections.

Call Me Kuchu

Director: Katherine Fairfax Wright, Malika Zouhali-Worrall

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Running Time: 87 minutes

With: David Kato, Christopher Senyonjo

(Recommended)

In 2004, Horace Atwater Jr. took in Adrian Hawkins as a foster child. Adrian was a teenager at the time, "this little, skinny kid, about 14," Horace recalls. "You didn't really have any clothes. You had mismatched socks."

Adrian had lived a difficult life as a child. He lived in several group and foster homes before moving in with Horace. "I remember times being hungry, seeing drugs and all kinds of stuff," Adrian tells Horace at StoryCorps in Atlanta. "I mean, some things had to happen for me to be in foster care."

When Adrian asks why Horace, now 61, would "care so much for a stranger," it's clear that Adrian didn't just find a home with Horace; the two found a home in each other. As Adrian describes it, Horace "had it good one time," but then his life took a turn.

"I had a personal experience where I lost everything — a wife, two fine sons — because of drug addiction and anger," Horace explains. "I didn't experience my own sons growing up. I would only see them on visitation periods, but when my wife remarried, she married a man that embraced my sons as though they were his own.

"He has been an excellent father to them," Horace continues. "And I am so grateful that he embraced them the way he did. I'm also grateful for the opportunity that I had to embrace you. So, that's the least that I owe — the least I could do," Horace says.

His foster dad may have made mistakes in his past, Adrian says, "but you're the most influential person in my life," he tells him. "I'm just glad that I met you."

Horace is proud of how well his one-time foster son is doing today. Adrian, now 22, hopes to become a pharmacist. "You know, it makes me look like I'm smart, but you're the one who's smart," Horace laughs. "God, for you to become the man that you are I am so proud of that."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher.

This text is adapted from Alva's book Out of Our Heads.

The start of almost all reflection on this problem is the idea that our knowledge of how others think and feel, indeed, our knowledge that they think and feel and are not mere automata, is based on what we can see and hear and measure. We observe behavior, or, as in the case of patients with persistent vegetative state or locked-in syndrome, we measure neural activity. It can seem, then, that the closest we can come to knowing other minds, in a theoretically respectable way, is having some account according to which behavior and neural activity provide reliable criteria of a person's psychological state.

But this is really to concede that we don't have knowledge of other minds, at least not in a respectable way. For observations of behavior (what people say and do) and measurements of neural activity, don't yield knowledge of other minds. Surely this is an important lesson from persistent vegetative states and locked-in syndrome. Mere behavior is at best an unreliable guide to how things are for a person. And moreover, we really don't understand the connection between neural activity and experience any way.

Would the results of a brain scan ever convince us that our daughter was no longer a living person, especially when she continues to appear to respond to us, to our words, sounds, touch? If what people say and do, and measurements of what their brain is doing, are the best we have to go on, then it would seem that our commitment to the minds of others is epistemically ungrounded, a mere act of faith.

There is another piece of the puzzle about our knowledge of other minds. It is this: No sane person can take seriously the suggestion that our knowledge of other minds is merely hypothetical. However weak our evidence that others have minds may be, it is plainly outrageous to suggest that we might, for this reason, give up our commitment to the minds of others. That my friends and children and parents are thinking, feeling beings, that a world shows up for them, that they are not mere automata, is something that only insanity could ever allow one to question.

So we face a paradox: Although we lack sufficient reason to believe in the minds of others, it would be plainly unreasonable for us to give up this commitment.

Paradox is a dead giveaway that we've made a mistake in our thinking somewhere along the line. There must be something amiss in the way we have framed the question at the outset.

Our challenge: Where did we go wrong?

This week, the Internet radio broadcaster Pandora made what seems like a backward move — technologically speaking. Pandora purchased a local radio station in Rapid City, S.D. The company says it's aiming to get the more favorable royalty rates given to terrestrial broadcasters, but the move has songwriters and composers up in arms.

Blake Morgan is an independent musician whose "Better Angels" was among a number of his songs that got some 28,000 plays on Pandora. "The song earned $1.62 in royalties over a 90-day period on Pandora," he says, "which is a very typical rate."

If his song were played over iHeart Radio — a streaming service owned by Clear Channel — he would get paid even less. That's because Clear Channel, which owns hundreds of terrestrial radio stations — pays the same amount in royalties for online streaming that it does for broadcasting the same songs. Pandora attorney Christopher Harrison says that's not fair.

"Pandora shouldn't be discriminated against simply because we don't own a radio station," he says. So, this week Pandora purchased KXMZ, a small adult contemporary station on the main street in Rapid City — population 70,000 — in an effort to get the rate enjoyed by iHeart Radio.

Royalty rates are negotiated mostly with rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI, which represent hundreds of thousands of songwriters and music publishers. Back when rates were established, playing a song on the radio was considered a free advertisement for a record. Since rights holders were getting money from record sales, they got less from radio royalties. Paul Williams, the president of ASCAP, says broadcasters pay the same in royalties for radio and streaming because those streams account for a tiny portion of their audience.

"The fact is," he says, "they're very, very different models. Internet radio and terrestrial radio use music and generate revenue in different ways."

He says Pandora's purchase of KXMZ isn't going to reduce its rates. "This is what I would refer to as a stunt — a way to do an end run to reduce the price of what they pay just one more little notch."

It should be said that ASCAP and Pandora are already in court battling over what the Internet radio service claims are unfair business practices.

Pandora, which is the No. 1 Internet radio service, saw more than $125 million last quarter in revenues — 55 percent more than the year before. But the company still isn't profitable, in part because it pays over 60 percent of its revenues to acquire music. Harrison says if Pandora gets into the radio business it should pay the same rate as Clear Channel does for its iHeart Radio.

"From our perspective, what we're trying to do is make sure that we operate at parity with our biggest competitors," he says. "If iHeart Radio's personalized Internet radio service pays a particular rate, we think we're entitled to operate under that same rate."

But the future is clearly in Internet radio services like Pandora. According to a survey by the NPD Group, people under 35 spent a quarter of their listening time on the Internet in 2012 — up 17 percent from the year before. Time spent listening to radio went down 2 percent.

At the same time, people are buying less music. Musician Blake Morgan says the only way for him to make a living going forward is for streaming services to pay a fair rate.

"I have a new record coming out — most people have new records coming out," he says. "These are things that we've worked on for months, if not years, and we're not looking to be paid unfairly. We're simply looking for a fair working wage for the music that we make."

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren sent out emails to musicians trying to get them behind Pandora's attempts to even the rates between terrestrial and Internet radio. Morgan wrote back to Westegren furious: "He cashes in a million dollars of stock every month on the first of the month and he's done so over the same 14-month period that recording artists like me earned $15.75."

That's not likely to change anytime soon. The issue of Internet radio royalty rates will almost certainly wind up in court.

Facebook and Microsoft Corp. say the government has given them permission to reveal orders they've received to hand over user data, but that they are still prevented from giving anything other than very broad figures.

Facebook says it received 9,000 to 10,000 requests during the last six months of 2012, while Microsoft says it got 6,000 to 7,000 requests, affecting as many as 32,000 accounts.

"These requests run the gamut — from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat," Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said in a blog post late Friday.

"The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts," Ullyot said. He compared that to the 1.1 billion Facebook accounts worldwide, saying the requests affected "a tiny fraction of one percent" of the social media giant's users.

John Frank, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, wrote in a similar blog post that the requests it had received impact only "a tiny fraction of Microsoft's global customer base."

Among other things, Microsoft owns the Hotmail email service.

As NPR's Jim Zarroli reported earlier this week, companies like Facebook and Microsoft are very much caught in the middle of the current debate about national security and privacy.

And both Ullyot and Frank expressed frustration with the limitations on what they were allowed to reveal to their customers and the public.

"In light of continued confusion and inaccurate reporting related to this issue, we've advocated for the ability to say even more," Ullyot wrote.

Frank said Microsoft believes "that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues."

Both companies said they remain involved in discussions with the government to gain permission to publish more specific data.

Jordan's King Abdullah says his country stands ready to respond to any threat from a spillover of the civil war in neighboring Syria, a day after the U.S. announced it would leave fighter jets and Patriot missiles in his country after joint military exercises end this week.

"If the world does not help as it should, and if the matter becomes a danger to our country, we are able at any moment to take the measures to protect the country and the interest of our people," Abdullah said, speaking to graduating military cadets.

He said Jordan "will emerge victorious in the face of all challenges, the way we always have in the past."

As NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Amman, the Pentagon's decision to leave the F-16s and missiles in Jordan at the conclusion of the exercises has led to speculation they could be used in establishing a no-fly zone over Syria.

The White House last week said it would provide direct military support to rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad after it established that Syria had used sarin gas against its people.

Amos says Jordan has backed the U.S. campaign against the Syrian regime and "has become a transit route for secret arms shipments and hosted a covert rebel training program."

White House economic adviser Alan Krueger took some ribbing from his boss this week. President Obama noted that Krueger will soon be leaving Washington to go back to his old job, teaching economics at Princeton.

"And now that Alan has some free time, he can return to another burning passion of his: 'Rockanomics,' the economics of rock and roll," the president said. "This is something that Alan actually cares about."

In fact, Krueger gave a speech this week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where he said the music business offers valuable lessons about the broader U.S. economy.

For More

Read Alan Krueger's full speech

In recent years, programs that double the value of food stamp dollars spent at farmers markets have generated a lot of attention. The basic idea: Spend, say, $10 in food stamps and get an extra $10 credit for purchases at the market.

The model, which has spread to more than 25 states, has been hailed as one of the most effective ways to help low-income consumers get better access to fresh fruits and vegetables, while also supporting local farmers. But it has one major flaw: Most people don't shop at farmers markets.

That's why the Fair Food Network announced Friday that it's taking its food stamp incentive program to a new frontier: grocery stores.

The Fair Food Network already runs one such program, called Double Up Food Bucks, at 100 farmers markets in Michigan and Ohio. The program gives consumers a credit of up to $20 a day for using food stamps, or SNAP benefits, at the markets.

But Fair Food is well aware of the shortcomings of this approach. So the organization will soon pilot a new version of its program — the first of its kind — at three independent grocery stores in Detroit. This time, shoppers who use food stamps will get a $10 reward card for local produce with the purchase of $10 of groceries.

According to Oran Hesterman, president and CEO of the Fair Food Network, involving grocery stores in healthy food incentive programs is a critical step in reaching even more people who rely on federal food assistance.

"Ever since we started the program in 2009, we never conceived of it as just a farmers market program," Hesterman tells The Salt. "We knew that while farmers markets were a great place to demonstrate that people would use the program, if we were going to have an impact on a big scale, at some point we would have to move from farmers markets to grocery stores, where most people get their food most of the time."

So why Detroit? It's notorious for its food deserts, and fruits and vegetables are especially expensive for its poorest residents. But, Hesterman says, the city has a billion-dollar food economy, and half of that is spent by people on food assistance, "so it's the perfect place for us" to test the idea. (The Fair Food Network is based in Ann Arbor, Mich.)

One in 7 Americans receives food stamps, known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, benefits. The average recipient receives about $133 a month. As one of the biggest government assistance programs at $80 billion, SNAP has been highly successful at reducing food insecurity and poverty in the U.S. Still, there's long been a debate about which foods should be allowed in the program and how to encourage healthful choices.

That's one reason why Fair Food Network and Wholesome Wave, another organization offering SNAP incentive programs, decided to partner with farmers markets. (Check out our Q&A with Wholesome Wave CEO Michel Nischan for more on their work.)

But Osterman says the programs are not just about encouraging people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables; they're also about building a market that local farmers can depend on.

"The more we can capture those SNAP dollars in the community, the more wealth and jobs we can generate," says Hesterman. "We're trying to demonstrate that we can think about using SNAP not just as a hunger and food insecurity program for low-income families, but also as an economic development tool."

In the new grocery pilot program, he says SNAP recipients will have about 15 Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables to choose from at the three participating stores. This local produce will be in a special section of the stores, labeled as eligible for the program.

Each store will have a different selection, depending on the season, but Hesterman says he expects most will be offering tomatoes, eggplants, squash and a variety of fruit.

"This year we are going to have a fabulous fruit crop in Michigan," he says. "So these stores will likely have apples, peaches, cherries and blueberries galore."

The participating stores are Honey Bee Market, Metro Foodland and Mike's Fresh Market; the pilot will run between July 1 and Oct. 31.

Despite the success of the incentive program at farmers markets, there's some uncertainty about whether it will work in grocery stores. The program isn't yet integrated in the grocery stores' computer systems, which is why the recipients will get their credit for produce purchases on a separate card.

"My biggest fear is that people won't know about it," says Hesterman. To get the word out, his group will be advertising the program on the radio and through billboards.