Most Recent Posts

Say you're in Midtown Manhattan at rush hour. You need to go a mile uptown, and you can't find a cab. A pedicab, a taxi-bicycle hybrid (like the one in the picture) may not be a bad option.

Riding through the middle of Manhattan on the back of a bike, dodging buses and cabs, feels like the Wild West of transportation options. The pricing feels that way too: Unlike buses or cabs, pedicabs don't charge a set fee. It's whatever the rider and the driver agree to. And, like in the Wild West, innocents often get fleeced.

"Last August, somebody was charged $442 to go from Mary Poppins to a restaurant called Milos," says Laramie Flick, a pedicab driver and president of the pedicab owners association. That's a trip of less than a mile. It took about 15 minutes.

"Before the ride, [the driver] told them it was a dollar a block," Flick says. "After the ride, he told them it was a dollar a block, yes, but it was $100 minimum per person. Then he asked them for a tip."

New York City does not want tourists to leave town feeling like they got hosed by a pedicab driver. So the city worked with Flick and the pedicab drivers to come up with new rules, which are set to take effect next week. The drivers can still choose their own rates. But those rates have to be posted clearly, and they have to apply to all customers. Per minute. No matter what.

Flick likes the new rules. Other drivers don't. Ibrahim Donmez, who has been a driver for eight years, says the price should be based on an upfront individual negotiation — perhaps charging more if the route is uphill, if it's raining, or if there's a large number of passengers. Or charge less, if it's an easy ride. "It's a human-powered business," Donmez says.

The news that the leaders of Venezuela and Nicaragua say they're willing to give asylum to "NSA leaker" Edward Snowden raises an obvious question:

If Russian authorties give him permission to leave, can he get to either country from Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where he's been lingering in legal limbo for nearly two weeks?

ABC News points out that:

"The only 'safe' commercial flight across the Atlantic — one that would avoid U.S. extradition treaties — is to Cuba. Cuba has an extradition treaty from 1904, but the Castro government could chose to ignore it. From Havana, Snowden could connect to Caracas, Venezuela, or Managua, Nicaragua."

But less welcome guests have sprung; frequent rain has helped the Dead Man's Fingers fungus grow.

It's your right to send complaints to your government officials. The trick is, after you send those letters, someone has to read them. That's where political analyst, blogger, and author Keli Goff got her start. Now, she serves as a political correspondent for The Root, and makes frequent appearances on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. Goff has also written a few books, including the critically acclaimed Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.

More From This Episode

Ask Me Another

Special Pundits Unit

The overwhelming and endless stream of electronic alerts and messages on our computers, phones and tablets is driving demand for a new kind of summer camp for adults. "Technology-free" camps that force their campers to surrender their gadgets, wallets and that nagging "fear of missing out" — FOMO — are booking up fast.

In June, Digital Detox held its first session of Camp Grounded, a three-day break from electronic devices in the Redwoods of Northern California. At a price tag of $350, the event sold out.

"You read articles about being present and being in the moment, and you kind of nod your head and you agree. But I don't think you know what that means until you put everything away and you're OK with where you are," says Anastasia Savvina, who attended the June camp.

Tech-free getaway options like this are growing. Hotels like the Lake Placid Lodge in New York and Hotel Monaco Chicago are offering digital detox or "black-out" services. The Check-In to Check-Out package at the Lake Placid Lodge invites guests to leave their electronic devices at the front desk and to immerse themselves in "the serenity of the Adirondacks."

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. "People are feeling like something's not right here," he says.

Enlarge image i

More jobs were created last month than economists had expected, but the unemployment rate held steady.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that employers added 195,000 jobs to public and private payrolls. That's better than the gain of 165,000 that forecasters had predicted.

The agency also revised up its estimate of job growth in May — to 195,000 positions, compared with the 175,000 it initially estimated.

But the jobless rate last month was unchanged at 7.6 percent.

We'll have much more from the report and reactions to it as the morning continues. Hit your refresh button to be sure you're seeing our latest updates.

Update at 10:35 a.m. ET. "Are We Well Yet?"

In a related story, NPR's Marilyn Geewax looks at the recent relatively slow growth in jobs.

Update at 9:45 a.m. ET. Economy "Continues To Recover," Says White House:

"While more work remains to be done, today's employment report provides further confirmation that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression," writes Alan Krueger, President Obama's top economic adviser.

Update at 9:30 a.m. ET. Boehner Calls Growth "Tepid":

"There's some good news in this report, but economic growth is still tepid, the unemployment rate is far too high, and the president continues to promote policies that undermine robust job creation," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says in a statement emailed to reporters by his office.

Update at 9:05 a.m. ET. How Will The Federal Reserve React?

Reuters writes that "job growth increased more than expected in June, which could draw the Federal Reserve closer to implementing a plan to start scaling back its massive monetary stimulus later this year."

Update at 8:55 a.m. ET. Sharp Upward Revision In April's Jobs Data:

A month ago, BLS revised down its estimate of the job growth in April. It had initially reported that 165,000 jobs were added to payrolls that month. Then, in its first revision of the data, it said the increase was 149,000. On Friday, it revised the figure again — to a gain of 199,000 jobs.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

"Of course, more revisions are possible. On average, the Labor Department changes its payroll numbers by about 46,000 — up or down — from the time the first estimate comes out until the third estimate is issued two months later, as more complete data comes in."

I saw Man of Steel last week — the latest retelling of the Superman story — and I was thrilled to see that now, finally, an effort has been made to make better sense of Superman's X-ray vision.

Surgeons have been performing cataract operations on the blind for centuries now and there is a large and ancient literature exploring the work. But what has not very often been discussed is the fact that removing cataracts does not typically have the effect of, as it were, pulling aside a a curtain and revealing, in one fell swoop, a coherent visible world. Visual information to someone who is unfamiliar with it can be confusing and, in fact, blinding.

Case studies describe patients who refuse to use vision to perform delicate or difficult tasks that they have long since mastered relying on senses other than sight. Such patients will shut their eyes to make their way across an intersection, or turn off the bathroom light so that they can shave. As Oliver Sacks, Richard Gregory and others have also documented, acquiring sight at a late age can be a demoralizing and unpleasant gift.

This is just the situation that we find young Clark in as his superpowers begin to develop.

Readers of my age will remember the ads at the back of comic books for X-ray specs that promised to enable you to see through ladies blouses. But Clark was not given his own voyeuristic power with the onset of X-ray vision. He was, rather, blinded and confused.

To see the skulls, or subcutaneous flesh, of the people around you, is not to see their faces, and so, really, it is not to see them. Clark found himself alone and scared, alienated from those around him. To see at all, Clark needed to learn not to see through things. He needed, that is, to come to understand that seeing is a way of paying attention, not to everything, but to what interests you or is relevant or important for this or that purpose.

In the film, Clark is represented as having wildly hyperactive senses, as though he suffered from a kind of ADHD, or something along those lines. To harness his powers, what was required, finally, was a kind of mindfulness training. He needed learn to focus and filter and shut out and pay attention.

But the true moral of Clark's situation — brought out when we notice the literature of the surgical restoration of sight — is that we are all always in the situation that Clark Kent finds himself in, his more powerful sensory capacities notwithstanding. It's not the sensations that matter to us. It's the world around us. And the way we learn to see is by learning to understand the way our sensations depend, in reliable and familiar ways, on our changing relation to a changing environment.

Clark Kent is, then, truly a super man.

Later in the film he is able to use his all-too-human understanding of the limitations inherent in our perceptual capacities to do battle with villains from Krypton who, although also equipped with the same heightened sensory powers, are, initially at least, no better than blind.

The overwhelming and endless stream of electronic alerts and messages on our computers, phones and tablets is driving demand for a new kind summer camp for adults. "Technology-free" camps that force their campers to surrender their gadgets, wallets and that nagging "fear of missing out"— FOMO — are booking up fast.

In June, The Digital Detox held its first session of Camp Grounded, a three-day break from electronic devices in the Redwoods of Northern California. At a price tag of $350, the event sold out.

"You read articles about being present and being in the moment, and you kind of nod your head and you agree. But I don't think you know what that means until you put everything away and you're OK with where you are," says Anastasia Savvina, who attended the June camp.

Tech-free getaway options like this are growing. Hotels like the Lake Placid Lodge in New York and Hotel Monaco Chicago are offering digital detox or "black-out" services. The "Check-In to Check-Out" package at the Lake Placid Lodge invites guests to leave their electronic devices at the front desk and to immerse themselves in "the serenity of the Adirondacks."

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. "People are feeling like something's not right here," he says.

Enlarge image i

The other day my 14-year-old asked me whether I would re-live my teen years for $1 million. The answer was a resounding "No!" Memories of searing humiliation still lurk in my (scarred) subconscious. The senior prom alone could keep me chatting with a psychiatrist for months. (Even though, from what I've heard, my date is happily out of the closet and a very successful interior decorator. All's well that ends well, right?) At this point, those memories should be a funny, rosy glow far in the distance. Ha.

The only plus side to my inability to forget is that I keenly enjoy novels in which characters have suffered similar trauma. These five novels are perfect for reading on a beach, surrounded by friends, far from the horrors of the past — because our worst memories make wonderful reading.

For at least a millennium, the heart of Britain's commercial and financial industries has been the City of London.

The City is not the large metropolis we know as London. It's much older and smaller. Many call it the Square Mile, though it's not square and a bit bigger than a mile. It's the home to big banks, medieval alleyways and St. Paul's Cathedral. And, for all those centuries, the area has had the same local government with an unusual name: The City of London Corporation.

This little government does more than just run schools and collect what the Brits call rubbish. It's a stealth power.

Architecture

Change Is On The Horizon For London's Famous Skyline

Last week was a wild one for China's economy.

Interest rates on the loans that banks make to one another soared to alarming levels, and lending began to freeze up. Shanghai stocks nose-dived, taking Asian markets and the Dow, briefly, with them.

Things have calmed down, but the crisis showed how China's new leaders are trying to confront threats to the health of the world's second-largest economy.

Many here see it as the first shot in a long battle to reform a once-successful economic model that is now running out of gas.

In this particular case, the People's Bank of China — the nation's central bank — wants to cut down on rampant and risky lending. So earlier this month, in a departure from the past, it refused to pump money into the system when some banks desperately needed it.

"The central bank wants to send a message," says Oliver Rui, a finance professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "Don't take it for granted that whenever you need the money, you can easily get it."

Rui says the government was targeting midsized, state-run banks that lend into what's known as China's "shadow banking" sector.

Risky Lending

Here is an example of how shadow banking can work and why it concerns the government: A state-owned company borrows from a state-owned bank at a government-set low interest rate, maybe 5 percent.

More On China

Asia

Belly Dancing For The Dead: A Day With China's Top Mourner

For at least a millennium, the heart of Britain's commercial and financial industries has been the City of London.

The City is not the large metropolis we know as London. It's much older and smaller. Many call it the Square Mile, though it's not square and a bit bigger than a mile. It's the home to big banks, medieval alleyways and St. Paul's Cathedral. And, for all those centuries, the area has had the same local government with an unusual name: The City of London Corporation.

This little government does more than just run schools and collect what the Brits call rubbish. It's a stealth power.

Architecture

Change Is On The Horizon For London's Famous Skyline

President Evo Morales warned on Thursday that he could close the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia, as South America's leftist leaders rallied to support him after his presidential plane was rerouted amid suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board.

Morales again blamed Washington for pressuring European countries to refuse to allow his plane to fly through their airspace on Tuesday, forcing it to land in Vienna, Austria, in what he called a violation of international law. He had been returning from a summit in Russia during which he had suggested he would be willing to consider a request from Snowden for asylum.

Morales made his announcement as the leaders of Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Suriname joined him in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba on Thursday for a special meeting to address the diplomatic row.

In a joint statement read after the summit, the presidents demanded an explanation and an apology from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. They also said they would back Bolivia's official complaint with the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Latin American leaders were outraged by the incident, calling it a violation of national sovereignty and a slap in the face for a region that has suffered through humiliations by Europe and several U.S.-backed military coups.

"United we will defeat American imperialism. We met with the leaders of my party and they asked us for several measures and if necessary, we will close the embassy of the United States," Morales said in the city where he started his political career as a leader of coca leaf farmers. "We do not need the embassy of the United States."

Morales' government has had a conflictive relationship with Washington.

It expelled the U.S. ambassador and agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 for allegedly inciting the opposition. The Andean nation restored full diplomatic ties with the U.S. in 2011. But relations soured again amid mutual distrust on drug war politics and hit an especially low point after Secretary of State John Kerry referred to Latin America as Washington's "backyard" in April 2013.

Morales expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development in May for allegedly seeking to undermine his government.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said Thursday that he and other leaders were offering full support to Morales following the rerouting of the plane, calling it an aggression against the Americas.

"We're not going to accept that in the 21st century there's first, second and third rate countries," Correa said.

"The leaders and authorities in Europe have to take a lesson in history and understand that we're not 500 years behind. This Latin America of the 21st century is independent, dignified and sovereign."

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro protested alleged attempts by Spanish officials to search the Bolivian presidential plane.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said Latin Americans treasured freedom after fighting for their independence from Europe in the 19th century and then surviving Washington's 20th-century history of backing repressive regimes in the Americas.

She then demanded an apology for the plane ordeal.

"I'm asking those who violated the law in calm but serious manner, to take responsibility for the errors made, it's the least they can do," Fernandez said. "To apologize for once in their life, to say they're sorry for what they've done."

Morales has said that while the plane was parked in Vienna, the Spanish ambassador to Austria arrived with two embassy personnel and they asked to search the plane. He said he denied them permission.

"Who takes the decision to attack the president of a South American nation?" Maduro asked. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano "Rajoy has been abusive by trying to search Morales' plane in Spain. He has no right to breach international law."

Morales, long a fierce critic of U.S. policy toward Latin America, received a hero's welcome in an airport in the Bolivian capital of La Paz late Wednesday night. His return followed the dramatic, unplanned 14-hour layover in Vienna.

Bolivia's government said France, Spain and Portugal refused to let the president's plane through their airspace because of suspicions that Snowden was with Morales.

Ahead of the meeting, Morales had said that his ordeal was part of a plot by the U.S. to intimidate him and other Latin American leaders.

He urged European nations to "free themselves" from the United States. "The United States is using its agent (Snowden) and the president (of Bolivia) to intimidate the whole region," he said.

France sent an apology to the Bolivian government. But Morales said "apologies are not enough because the stance is that international treaties must be respected."

Spain's Foreign Affairs Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said his country did not bar Morales from landing in its territory.

Amid the tensions, the U.S. embassy in La Paz cancelled Independence Day celebrations scheduled for Thursday. In the eastern city of Santa Cruz, Bolivian government sympathizers painted protest slogans on the doors of the American consulate.

Morales said he never saw Snowden when he was in Russia, and that Bolivia had not received a formal request for asylum for him.

Bolivia has said that it will summon the French and Italian ambassadors and the Portuguese consul to demand explanations.

Despite the complaints, there were no signs that Latin America leaders were moving to bring Snowden to the region that had been seen as the most likely to grant him asylum.

All of the region's leaders are not expected at the summit.

Brazil was represented at the meeting by Marco Aurelio Garcia, President Dilma Rousseff's top international adviser. He traveled to Cochabamba with government officials, although Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota missed the summit because he is currently attending meetings in Europe.

The presidents of Colombia, Chile and Peru, who have strong ties to the U.S., were not attending.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said earlier on Thursday that he supports Morales, but asked other leaders to remain cool and avoid an escalating dispute between Latin America and the European Union.

"We're in solidarity with Evo Morales because what they did to him is unheard-of, but let's not let this turn into a diplomatic crisis for Latin America and the EU," Santos wrote Thursday on Twitter.

It's still unclear whether European countries did block the plane and, if so, why. French, Spanish and Portuguese officials have all said the plane was allowed to cross their territory.

The emergency stop in Austria may have been caused by a row over where the plane could refuel and whether European authorities could inspect it for signs of Snowden.

The U.S. has declined to comment on whether it was involved in any decision to close European airspace, saying only that "US officials have been in touch with a broad range of countries over the course of the last 10 days," about the Snowden case.

"The message has been communicated both publicly and privately," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday. "He should be returned to the United States."

Snowden remains out of public view, believed to be stuck in a Moscow airport transit area, seeking asylum from one of more than a dozen countries.

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects of the housing crisis and a recession — both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans — didn't seem to dampen a sense of optimism and overall life satisfaction among respondents. But the survey did reveal a dramatic — if not exactly surprising — split between two evenly divided groups of respondents: 49 percent who saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 50 percent who described their finances as "poor" or "not good."

This finding mirrors attitudes of African-American respondents to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Then, the stats were similar: 49 percent polled saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 51 percent considered them "poor" or "not so good."

Robert Blendon, a professor of public health at Harvard and one of the 2013 study's co-directors, told NPR's Kathy Lohr that many African-Americans who don't consider themselves well-situated financially still have a sense of optimism. A combined 81 percent of respondents said they would one day attain the American dream — owning their own home, gaining financial security — or already had. Only 16 percent said they felt the dream was out of reach.

Why does anyone buy Bayer aspirin — or Tylenol, or Advil — when, almost always, there's a bottle of cheaper generic pills, with the same active ingredient, sitting right next to the brand-name pills?

Matthew Gentzkow, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth school, recently tried to answer this question. Along with a few colleagues, Gentzkow set out to test a hypothesis: Maybe people buy the brand-name pills because they just don't know that the generic version is basically the same thing.

"We came up with what is probably the simplest idea you've ever heard of," Gentzkow says. "Let's just look and see if people who are well-informed about these things still pay extra to buy brands."

In other words, do doctors, nurses and pharmacists pay extra for Tylenol instead of acetaminophen, or buy Advil instead of ibuprofen?

Gentzkow and his colleagues looked at a huge dataset of over 66 million shopping trips and found that, "lo and behold, nurses, doctors and pharmacists are much less likely to buy brands than average consumers," Gentzkow says. (Their findings are written up here.)

Pharmacists, for example, bought generics 90 percent of the time, compared with about 70 percent of the time for the overall population. "In a world where everyone was as well-informed as pharmacist or nurse, the market share of the brands would be much, much smaller than it is today," Gentzkow says.

I asked several people who had a bottle of Bayer or Tylenol or Advil at home why they'd bought the brand name. One guy told me he didn't want his wife to think he was cheap. A woman told me Bayer reminded her of her grandmother. Another guy, a lawyer, said he just didn't want to spend the time to figure it out, and decided it was worth the extra couple bucks to buy the brand.

In general, we often buy brands when we lack information — when, like that lawyer, we decide it's easier to spend the extra money rather than try to figure out what's what.

Jesse Shapiro, one of the co-authors of the headache paper, told me he buys Heinz ketchup rather than the generic brand. He likes Heinz. He thinks it's better than the generic, but he's not sure. "I couldn't promise that, if you blindfolded me, I could tell them apart," he says.

Why does anyone buy Bayer aspirin — or Tylenol, or Advil — when, almost always, there's a bottle of cheaper generic pills, with the same active ingredient, sitting right next to the brand-name pills?

Matthew Gentzkow, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth school, recently tried to answer this question. Along with a few colleagues, Gentzkow set out to test a hypothesis: Maybe people buy the brand-name pills because they just don't know that the generic version is basically the same thing.

"We came up with what is probably the simplest idea you've ever heard of," Gentzkow says. "Let's just look and see if people who are well-informed about these things still pay extra to buy brands."

In other words, do doctors, nurses and pharmacists pay extra for Tylenol instead of acetaminophen, or buy Advil instead of ibuprofen?

Gentzkow and his colleagues looked at a huge dataset of over 66 million shopping trips and found that, "lo and behold, nurses, doctors and pharmacists are much less likely to buy brands than average consumers," Gentzkow says. (Their findings are written up here.)

Pharmacists, for example, bought generics 90 percent of the time, compared with about 70 percent of the time for the overall population. "In a world where everyone was as well-informed as pharmacist or nurse, the market share of the brands would be much, much smaller than it is today," Gentzkow says.

I asked several people who had a bottle of Bayer or Tylenol or Advil at home why they'd bought the brand name. One guy told me he didn't want his wife to think he was cheap. A woman told me Bayer reminded her of her grandmother. Another guy, a lawyer, said he just didn't want to spend the time to figure it out, and decided it was worth the extra couple bucks to buy the brand.

In general, we often buy brands when we lack information — when, like that lawyer, we decide it's easier to spend the extra money rather than try to figure out what's what.

Jesse Shapiro, one of the co-authors of the headache paper, told me he buys Heinz ketchup rather than the generic brand. He likes Heinz. He thinks it's better than the generic, but he's not sure. "I couldn't promise that, if you blindfolded me, I could tell them apart," he says.

Bolivian President Evo Morales is scheduled to land in his home country late tonight, a day after his return journey from meetings in Moscow was disrupted when several European nations withdrew permission for his plane to fly through their airspace.

The delay of more than 13 hours reportedly stemmed from suspicions that Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence worker who leaked secret data, might have been aboard the plane.

Morales was forced to land at an airport in Vienna, Austria, where his plane landed after France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy reportedly refused permission to fly over their territories, as The Two-Way reported last night.

"Austrian officials said Morales' plane was searched early Wednesday by Austrian border police after Morales gave permission," the AP reports. "Bolivian and Austrian officials both say Snowden was not on board."

"We're talking about the president on an official trip after an official summit being kidnapped," Bolivia's U.N. Ambassador Sacha Llorenti Soliz told reporters in Geneva, according to Britain's The Independent.

Speaking to reporters at Vienna's airport last night, Morales used similar language, adding that the governments of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain had made a mistake of historic proportions.

French President Francois Hollande sought to clarify his government's role in the incident Wednesday, saying at a press conference in Berlin that there had been confusion over the aircraft and its occupants.

"There was contradictory information about the identity of the passengers aboard one or two aircraft, because there was also a doubt about the number of planes that wanted to fly over France," he said, according to the AP. "As soon as I knew that it was the plane of Bolivia's president, I immediately gave my authorization for the overflight."

On his way back to Bolivia, the plane carrying Morales stopped Wednesday afternoon to refuel in the Canary Islands, a territory of Spain. He is currently in Brazil, taking on fuel, reports Bolivia TV.

Many Latin American governments expressed their outrage over the incident Wednesday, calling for a full explanation of why the president of a sovereign nation would be refused passage.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff expressed her government's "outrage and condemnation" over the incident, reports El Dia.

"(These are) vestiges of a colonialism that we thought were long over," Reuters quotes Argentine President Cristina Kirchner saying. "We believe this constitutes not only the humiliation of a sister nation but of all South America."

The 12-nation South American group UNASUR denounced the "unfriendly and unjustifiable acts," Reuters adds.

South American heads of state including the leaders of Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, and Venezuela plan to gather Thursday in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in a show of support for Morales, according to FM Bolivia and other news outlets.

The incident has also raised the ire of the Organization of American States, whose secretary general, Jos Miguel Insulza, issued a statement demanding an explanation.

Insulza expressed his "deep displeasure with the decision of the aviation authorities of several European countries that denied the use of airspace to the plane carrying the President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales, from Moscow to La Paz," adding that he believes "nothing justifies an act of such lack of respect for the highest authority of a country.

Asked whether the U.S. played a role in the diversion of Morales' plane, U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki refused to get into the specifics of the question, saying only that "U.S. officials have been in touch with a broad range of countries."

Psaki said she would not identify those countries, with which U.S. officials have been in touch in the past 10 days.

As reporters persisted in asking if U.S. officials asked European countries to divert the Bolivian president's plane, Psaki said, "I would point you to those specific countries, to answer that question."

As the questioning grew a bit more contentious, Psaki said simply, "We've broadly asked for Mr. Snowden to be returned."

The celebrations in Egypt continue in the wake of the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi by the nation's military, who has played a dominant role in the country since the 1952 coup.

With the overthrow of previous president Hosni Mubarak still fresh in many people's minds, the question becomes what this coup, of a democratically-elected president, means for Egypt's transition.

Egypt's military has played a dominant role in the country since a 1952 coup, and Wednesday's ouster of President Mohammed Morsi showed that the armed forces still feel empowered to intervene when they disapprove of the country's course.

"They are the center of gravity in the Egyptian state," said Jeffrey Martini, a Middle East analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington, speaking shortly before the coup on Wednesday night. "They are the strongest player in the game."

The military's decision to push out Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader, prompted a huge celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. However, it's not clear how long the military's popularity will last.

In the 2011 demonstrations that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the military was widely despised by the secular liberals who filled the same landmark square in central Cairo.

After Mubarak's ouster, the generals ran the country for nearly a year and a half, but they faced widespread opposition from many sectors of Egyptian society.

That experience may have convinced the military that it did not want to formally be in charge of the country.

After Morsi was elected and took power a year ago, the military was no longer front and center, though it retained its position as the country's most powerful institution.

And in announcing Wednesday's coup, the military said that the chief justice of the constitutional court would lead Egypt until new elections are held, though no date was set.

A Long History

As NPR's Eric Westervelt noted during the protests that toppled Mubarak:

"Since the 1952 military coup that toppled the monarchy, all of the country's leaders have come from the military. But Mubarak worked hard to keep his commanders out of politics and out of the public light. He frequently fired generals and reshuffled their commands so no one general grew too powerful or popular."

On Duplessis' death of tuberculosis as the great romantic story of the mid-19th century

"I think it was something that appealed to artists because there was something at that point rather romantic about tuberculosis, and it wasn't known quite how it was transmitted. And so ... the consumptive heroine was almost like an archetype in literature. ...

"People now think of her as an older woman because performance history has always made her this sort of older woman with a young boy, and that's the way I think it's played now. But she was a kid, she was just 23. She just had her birthday ... when she died."

On the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils

"He was very much in the shadow of his much more famous father, Alexandre Dumas, who was the author of The Three Musketeers, but he wrote this novel ... in eight days, and it was done in response to her death. And he wrote the novel, which was published in 1848, called La Dame aux Camlias (The Lady of the Camellias).

"There was then sort of a revolution in Paris, and so the novel sort of didn't make much of an impact, but he wrote a play based on the same subject. But he then spent three years trying to get it staged because it was thought to be just too shocking because French theater was very sort of embalmed in the past. And what he was trying to do was put a living courtesan who people still remembered — I mean, she'd only just died a couple of years ago — onto the stage. And this was so revolutionary that it couldn't be staged. But then finally he managed to get it on in 1852, and it was a sort of overnight, huge success."

Deceptive Cadence

'Becoming Traviata': A Look At Opera From Behind The Curtain

The Look of Love

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Genre: Biography, Comedy, Drama

Running Time: 101 minutes

Not Rated

With: Imogen Poots, Anna Friel, Tamsin Egerton

Audiences expecting a Pirates of the Panhandle from Verbinski — who paired with Depp on that swashbuckling franchise as well as on the ingeniously eccentric animated Western Rango — are in for some serious dry stretches.

The director's been saying his Lone Ranger is a sort of Don Quixote as seen through the eyes of a demented Sancho Panza, and as with that tale of a knight tilting at windmills, there's social commentary everywhere you look in this adventure. The script fancies itself a critique of capitalism, a manifesto on manifest destiny, and a saga about silver mines and the slaughter of Native Americans.

All very admirable, if not a great fit for scenes that involve Depp communing with snaggle-toothed cannibal bunny rabbits and taking a runaway train ride or six.

I mentioned Buster Keaton's train movie The General earlier, but when Keaton did stunts — playing pickup sticks with railway ties to clear the track in front of a moving locomotive, say — he actually did the stunts. The ties had weight.

Here, the director laid six miles of track in New Mexico and built two locomotives — built the locomotives, I said, reportedly for authenticity's sake — so he could do things with real trains.

But he's digitally enhanced and implausibly staged those sequences so thoroughly that he might as well have done the whole thing as a cartoon. There's a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of technical wizardry up there on screen, and nothing is at stake.

Except, maybe, for some future amusement park ride, and the sequels, and toys and hats and masks. And piles and piles of silver, if enough people lay down their hard-earned dollars to hear Hammer's hearty "Hi-yo."

Egypt's military has played a dominant role in the country since a 1952 coup, and Wednesday's ouster of President Mohammed Morsi showed that the armed forces still feel empowered to intervene when they disapprove of the country's course.

"They are the center of gravity in the Egyptian state," said Jeffrey Martini, a Middle East analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington, speaking shortly before the coup on Wednesday night. "They are the strongest player in the game."

The military's decision to push out Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader, prompted a huge celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. However, it's not clear how long the military's popularity will last.

In the 2011 demonstrations that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the military was widely despised by the secular liberals who filled the same landmark square in central Cairo.

After Mubarak's ouster, the generals ran the country for nearly a year and a half, but they faced widespread opposition from many sectors of Egyptian society.

That experience may have convinced the military that it did not want to formally be in charge of the country.

After Morsi was elected and took power a year ago, the military was no longer front and center, though it retained its position as the country's most powerful institution.

And in announcing Wednesday's coup, the military said that the chief justice of the constitutional court would lead Egypt until new elections are held, though no date was set.

A Long History

As NPR's Eric Westervelt noted during the protests that toppled Mubarak:

"Since the 1952 military coup that toppled the monarchy, all of the country's leaders have come from the military. But Mubarak worked hard to keep his commanders out of politics and out of the public light. He frequently fired generals and reshuffled their commands so no one general grew too powerful or popular."

Audiences expecting a Pirates of the Panhandle from Verbinski — who paired with Depp on that swashbuckling franchise as well as on the ingeniously eccentric animated Western Rango — are in for some serious dry stretches.

The director's been saying his Lone Ranger is a sort of Don Quixote as seen through the eyes of a demented Sancho Panza, and as with that tale of a knight tilting at windmills, there's social commentary everywhere you look in this adventure. The script fancies itself a critique of capitalism, a manifesto on manifest destiny, and a saga about silver mines and the slaughter of Native Americans.

All very admirable, if not a great fit for scenes that involve Depp communing with snaggle-toothed cannibal bunny rabbits and taking a runaway train ride or six.

I mentioned Buster Keaton's train movie The General earlier, but when Keaton did stunts — playing pickup sticks with railway ties to clear the track in front of a moving locomotive, say — he actually did the stunts. The ties had weight.

Here, the director laid six miles of track in New Mexico and built two locomotives — built the locomotives, I said, reportedly for authenticity's sake — so he could do things with real trains.

But he's digitally enhanced and implausibly staged those sequences so thoroughly that he might as well have done the whole thing as a cartoon. There's a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of technical wizardry up there on screen, and nothing is at stake.

Except, maybe, for some future amusement park ride, and the sequels, and toys and hats and masks. And piles and piles of silver, if enough people lay down their hard-earned dollars to hear Hammer's hearty "Hi-yo."

On Duplessis' death of tuberculosis as the great romantic story of the mid-19th century

"I think it was something that appealed to artists because there was something at that point rather romantic about tuberculosis, and it wasn't known quite how it was transmitted. And so ... the consumptive heroine was almost like an archetype in literature. ...

"People now think of her as an older woman because performance history has always made her this sort of older woman with a young boy, and that's the way I think it's played now. But she was a kid, she was just 23. She just had her birthday ... when she died."

On the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils

"He was very much in the shadow of his much more famous father, Alexandre Dumas, who was the author of The Three Musketeers, but he wrote this novel ... in eight days, and it was done in response to her death. And he wrote the novel, which was published in 1848, called La Dame aux Camlias (The Lady of the Camellias).

"There was then sort of a revolution in Paris, and so the novel sort of didn't make much of an impact, but he wrote a play based on the same subject. But he then spent three years trying to get it staged because it was thought to be just too shocking because French theater was very sort of embalmed in the past. And what he was trying to do was put a living courtesan who people still remembered — I mean, she'd only just died a couple of years ago — onto the stage. And this was so revolutionary that it couldn't be staged. But then finally he managed to get it on in 1852, and it was a sort of overnight, huge success."

Deceptive Cadence

'Becoming Traviata': A Look At Opera From Behind The Curtain

If you died 55,000 years ago in the lands east of the Mediterranean, you'd be lucky to be buried in an isolated pit with a few animal parts thrown in. But new archaeological evidence shows that by about 12,000 years ago, you might have gotten a flower-lined grave in a small cemetery.

Enlarge image i

In 2011, the state of California created a problem for the soda industry.

The caramel color that Coke and Pepsi used to give colas that distinctive brown hue contained a chemical, 4-methylimidazole — 4-MEI — that is listed as a carcinogen by the state.

And in accordance with California's Proposition 65 law, the levels of 4-MEI found in sodas would have warranted a cancer warning label on every can sold in the state.

So, as I reported last year, Coke and Pepsi both said they would switch to a reformulated caramel color, one that did not contain 4-MEI.

Now, it appears that both companies have managed to complete this transition for sodas sold in the state of California.

But a new analysis by the Center for Environmental Health found that 10 of 10 samples of Pepsi products purchased nationwide during the month of June (in locations outside California) contained levels of 4-MEI that were about four to eight times higher than the safety thresholds set by California. The testing was conducted by Eurofins Analytical laboratory in Metairie, La.

In contrast, nine of the 10 samples of Coke products purchased in locations outside California contained little or no trace of 4-MEI.

"We applaud Coke," wrote Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health, in a release announcing the findings.

"Pepsi's delay is inexplicable," Green added. "We urge the company to take swift action."

A Pepsi spokesperson tells The Salt that sodas sold throughout the U.S. should complete the transition to the new caramel coloring by February 2014. The company says efforts are also underway to switch the color formulation for sodas distributed globally.

"The FDA and other regulatory agencies around the world, including the European Food Safety Authority and Health Canada, consider our caramel coloring safe for use in foods and beverages," Pepsi Co. wrote in an email to The Salt.

So, are the higher levels of 4-MEI found in sodas using the old formulation a threat to human health? Well, consider the dose.

The FDA issued a statement last year, before the formulation of caramel coloring was changed, stating that a consumer would have to drink more than 1,000 cans of soda a day to reach the doses that have been shown to lead to cancer in rodents.

And the American Beverage Association wrote in a statement last year that "the science simply does not show that 4-MEI in foods or beverages is a threat to human health."

If you died 55,000 years ago in the lands east of the Mediterranean, you'd be lucky to be buried in an isolated pit with a few animal parts thrown in. But new archaeological evidence shows that by about 12,000 years ago, you might have gotten a flower-lined grave in a small cemetery.

Enlarge image i

For many watching the abortion fight in Texas, it's deja vu all over again.

Abortion-rights protesters once again gathered Monday at the state capitol building to express their outrage at the Legislature's attempt to further restrict abortions in the state. The images from Austin looked a lot like the previous week's when state Sen. Wendy Davis famously filibustered to stop the legislation from passing.

But another reason the scene looks familiar is that Texas is the latest state in which protesters in the hundreds have descended on a Republican-controlled state capitol to try to stop legislative efforts to implement elements of a conservative agenda.

And just as the protesters in Texas appear to have the odds against them, so did protesters in Wisconsin and North Carolina who failed to stop the changes that spurred their activism.

In Wisconsin, protesters laid siege to the state capitol in 2011 as part of an attempt to turn back the effort by Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature to restrict the collective bargaining power of most public employee unions.

Not only did protesters fail to stop the legislation they despised but they also fell short in their goal to oust Walker or to gain partial control of the Legislature.

This spring, protesters in North Carolina, led by the NAACP, staged what they called Moral Mondays, rallies at the state capitol building in Raleigh to protest legislative efforts by the Republican governor and lawmakers that progressives found abhorrent.

Many demonstrators wound up getting arrested, placing further strains on an already strained county court system, according to one news report.

But they couldn't stop the conservative agenda put forward by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and GOP lawmakers. Among the laws pushed through: an end to long-term jobless benefits and a resumption of executions, a penalty that had been halted for several years owing to concerns about racial disparities in death sentences.

Measured by their success in stopping the legislative efforts that galvanized them, the protests in North Carolina and Wisconsin didn't accomplish much, at least to date. And in Texas, protesters are likely to share a similar outcome.

But these protests may end up advancing other goals. They've served as focal points for organizing, they've helped new leaders to surface and they've proved to be great tools for raising money.

The Texas protests, for example, have raised Davis' profile, sparking talk that she could use the publicity as a springboard to run for governor. Texas Democrats have also used the protests and the successful filibuster to raise money. That's a double-edged sword, however: Republicans have countered by telling their own supporters that their donations can help protect against "mob rule."

The Look of Love

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Genre: Biography, Comedy, Drama

Running Time: 101 minutes

Not Rated

With: Imogen Poots, Anna Friel, Tamsin Egerton

A recent spike in mortgage rates has created a new predicament for potential homebuyers: Forge ahead and try to lock in now? Or hold off?

Dhruv Gupta was quoted a 3.5 percent rate in May while searching for a place to buy in the San Francisco area. Less than two months later, he's looking at 5.2 percent for the same loan. But this trend has not deterred Gupta.

"It's a fact of life," he says. "I mean I can't control them, so what do you do?"

Over the weekend, Gupta bit the bullet and put a down payment on a two-bedroom condo in Oakland. It's so hard to find anything available and in his price range, he says, so he just went for it. He hopes rates will decline again, and that he'll be able to refinance. But for now, Gupta doesn't know how he feels about his decision.

"I'm more anxious than excited because of the commitment," he says.

Downstate in Temecula, Juan Johnson has had the opposite reaction to the market. "I learned that the interest rates had changed significantly enough where it made me reconsider my offer," he says.

He was in the process of making an offer on a house when his loan officer told him rates had suddenly jumped half a percentage point from the last quote he'd received.

"I was shocked," Johnson says. "You know, I said, 'You've got to be kidding me right?' And he said, 'Nope ... and they're supposed to continue to rise.' "

It was challenging enough trying to find a home his family likes, Johnson says, much less compete against investors making cash offers. Now, he's battling interest rates too.

"Bummed would be a, uh, a kind way to put it," Johnson says.

So, while Gupta jumped in, Johnson held back. Those differing reactions are reflected in the data as well. On one hand, the Mortgage Bankers Association says purchase applications rose 7 percent between early May and last week. But, according to the real estate website Redfin, the number of clients making offers declined more than 10 percent from May to June. Fewer people are requesting home tours, as well.

Market experts have long said rates would eventually rise, from their unprecedented 3 1/2 percent levels. But what touched off the jump was speculation the Federal Reserve would begin unwinding the stimulus programs that had been depressing rates.

Then, on June 19, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke put a specific time frame on it, saying the central bank would wind down one of its bond-buying programs by the middle of next year if the economy continued showing signs of strength. Investors reacted as if Bernanke had sounded a siren.

"Almost as soon as the words left his mouth during that press conference, you had a big run-up in rates," says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of research for the Mortgage Banks Association.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Fed Leaves Interest Rates And Bond Purchase Plan Untouched

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

For most of the 20th century, Texas was a stronghold for Democrats. But Republicans have dominated the state for decades now.

An organization created by veterans of President Obama's presidential campaigns wants to change that. The group says the state's shifting demographics — including a fast-growing Hispanic population — combined with an intense grass-roots effort can create an opportunity for Democrats.

A New Campaign

It's 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon in downtown Houston, where about 200 volunteers have gathered in a union hall to hear from a 34-year-old political whiz and data cruncher.

Jeremy Bird's skill at identifying potential voters, getting them registered and turning them out was a key part of Obama's election — and re-election.

Bird asks the group, "Are you fired up?" and they respond: "Ready to go!"

Clearly old habits die hard for the 2012 Obama campaign's national field director.

But Bird is in Houston to talk about his new mission: Battleground Texas. He tells his audience it will be very hard work, but that it's OK to believe that Texas is a place where Democrats can win.

More 'Texas 2020'

It's All Politics

How To Turn A Red State Blue: California Edition

Here's how Big Brother works.

Producers throw a bunch of people into a house, where they're stuck for about three months. All day and all night, they're watched by cameras, and they can be watched online — these are the so-called "live feeds," which are sort of like watching the security cameras in the most boring juice bar in Los Angeles. (I wrote about touring the house in 2010; it's very creepy.)

Three nights a week, CBS edits together some of the footage and creates the prime-time television show Big Brother, which obviously includes only a tiny percentage of what they've collected. Of course, the difference between this show and other reality shows is the measure of transparency: people who watch the live feeds (and yes, a significant number of people watch them, meticulously log them, and discuss them all summer) know a lot more about what happened than what's put on the broadcast, and they can get very angry when they feel like the editing has hidden the truth.

But this isn't the only thing that distinguishes this particular show. More and more, Big Brother has set itself apart by the sheer average hatefulness levels among its casts. Shows like Survivor always combine a few jerks with a good number of normals, because those are the people you're supposed to root for, and they're the ones who often win. Big Brother doesn't really bother with the normals anymore, nor does it bother with many people who don't look good in bikinis.

If you think about it, most reality shows require a commitment of maybe a month; Big Brother requires that you be able to be locked up all summer. That, too, encourages it to be full of idle people who don't really do anything with their lives to begin with. There are exceptions, but the rule is that people are on Big Brother specifically because nobody and nothing will miss them. They don't have the desire of Amazing Race contestants to see the world, or of Survivor contestants to compete physically and try life out in the elements. They just want to sit here, on television, on a big set, doing nothing.

But in the last few seasons especially, it's become a regular ritual that every summer, people watching the live feeds report on breathtaking examples of racist, sexist, homophobic, and other outbursts that you can clearly watch if you're a feed viewer but that you will never see if you're tuning in on television.

Reality television blogger Andy Dehnart is among those who have followed this issue over the last few years, and he's actually asked executive producer Alison Grodner why racist rants are cut from the show in ways that sanitize players' behavior for broadcast watchers. Her argument was that when people say things that the producers "don't necessarily agree with and condone and want to put out there further," they don't show them. "And so for the most part, when this goes down," she said, "we keep that out of the show."

Whether or not you want to swallow that explanation of the motive for excising bigotry from the broadcast version of the show, the effect is to perpetuate a pernicious untruth: that the producers throw a variety of largely shallow, thoughtless people from different ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations into a house, lock them up for three months, and ask them to play a social game with a huge amount of real money at stake, and those differences never come up, and even behind closed doors, in secret, when they're whispering at night, that kind of ugliness doesn't come out.

If you've been following this issue this season — which is only a couple of weeks old! — you know that there have already been reports of what Dehnart deemed "a torrent of racist, sexist and homophobic comments" from "almost half the cast." They include racial slurs (including, yes, some n-words), a couple of angry references to an Asian cast member suggesting she should go cook some rice, gay slurs, comments about a black woman making a bed smell bad (in which she was referred to as "black Candice" in case anyone missed it), references to not being able to see a black woman in the dark, and comments that black players were "tokens" who would always stick together. That's not all of it, but it's some of it.

It's not just that it sanitizes people who deserve scorn when this stuff doesn't make the show, though it does that. It's that it creates an actively dishonest narrative about the roles of race, class, gender and sexuality in the ways that people act in frivolous but also dead-serious situations in which they are frivolously grabbing for attention but dead-seriously trying to win a lot of money. What makes a show like Survivor, for instance, fun is figuring out the personal dynamics that cause rifts between people or bonds between them. And when race comes up on Survivor, they're not afraid to show it — they've done it. They've talked about how it affects relationships. They have people talk about tensions that come up over sexuality and gender and religion as well.

It's completely dishonest, even by the standards set by other similar competition shows, if they're removing the fact that people are making all kinds of racist comments about Candice, for instance, when they present the story of how she gets along with the group. Nobody who thinks black women smell bad can turn around and interact with them as if he doesn't. Nobody who calls you "Kermit the F-g" is otherwise treating you the same way they'd treat anybody else.

Removing this stuff leaves a giant sucking void where the prejudices in play here should rightfully be, and makes it appear that personalities are simply clashing, or that strategies are in conflict, when in fact, part of the reason some of these people don't get along with or don't trust the cast members of color may be that some of them are racists. The same goes for some of the men in their dealings with women and some of the straight people in their dealings with some of the gay people. Where that's the case, it's wrong to hide that; it's wrong to lie about it; it's important not to. It's incredibly unfair, for instance, to put a black woman in the house and make it look like she's not fighting people's preexisting prejudices when you know she is, or to put a gay man in the house and make it look like everybody's cool with him when you know they're not. It's bad enough to pack your cast with jerks; it's quite another to conceal the burdens you've put on the people those jerks treat poorly.

Bizarrely enough, this currently hideous exercise has the capacity to be interesting, because the cameras are on these people so much, so relentlessly, for so long, that they really do have no choice but to give in and act in ways they would really act. People might be able to hold back for as long as they're on TV for Top Chef or even The Amazing Race, but when you're in a human terrarium for 24 hours a day for months, people eventually see who you really are. And if a part of a person's pedestrian foolishness and superficiality regularly includes bigotry, it's a lie to say it doesn't; it's a lie to protect those comments from being revealed as a part of what drives the personal dynamics on the show.

It's seeing the way these underlying assumptions are woven into day-to-day interactions of respect, trust, social bonds, and other matters that ultimately casts some light on how they work in the real world. Live feed viewers pick up on really interesting things sometimes — they've been talking about the fact that a white woman who's been making nasty, racially insensitive remarks about a black woman behind her back stopped in the middle of an argument between them to correct her that it's "ask," not "ax", for instance. That — the analysis, not the comment — is kind of great stuff, sociologically speaking, if you're looking at the ways that prejudices creep into conversations that seem not to be about race. This is how it really works in a lot of situations; people know what they're supposed to say, and then there are the things they say to their friends when they're mad. There's the overt and the covert, and if you watch people for hours and hours — silly as it sounds — you'll ultimately see both.

It's a really dumb show, but it doesn't have to be evil. Nobody assumes the show is endorsing the rest of these dopey people's comments and behaviors and approaches to being a human being. It's not necessary to snip out this stuff. And, in fact, it's better not to.

Andrea Brearley's kids really want to see Pixar while on vacation. The problem is that the family is staying in San Francisco and with rail workers on strike, they're having a hard time figuring out how to get to the cartoon-maker's headquarters across the bay in Emeryville, Calif.

Brearley, who lives in Windsor, Ontario, says it's been "scary" trying to figure out an alternative route. "Three different people told me three different buses," she says.

In fact, many of the natives are confused. The area has multiple transit agencies, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit system links a number of them, serving an average of 400,000 riders on weekdays.

Enlarge image i

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Texas is a large, diverse state with broad regional differences in population and demography. Its politics is subject to wild swings, too, depending on location. Take the 2012 presidential election, for example.

President Obama, who didn't campaign in the Lone Star State, got only 41 percent of the statewide vote last year. Compare that with the 57 percent of the vote received by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who also didn't devote any energy to Texas.

The map is staggeringly red, with Obama winning just 26 of the state's 254 counties, whose populations range from 4 million residents (Houston's Harris County) to 82 residents (rural Loving County):

My name is Maureen, and I am an Ikea-holic. Sure, I laughed knowingly at The Narrator's "slave to Ikea" speech as much as the next Fight Club fan. But the awful truth is, I've got a BEDDINGE in my bedroom.

And I'm not embarrassed to say so.

But for the world's millions of refugees, a home supplied by Ikea would be no joke. And testing will soon be under way on a temporary structure that could transform their lives.

Enlarge image i

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

To see the speed of demographic change in Texas, look no further than its largest city — Houston. Only 40 percent of the city's population is non-Hispanic white, and by a Rice University count, it's the most racially and ethnically diverse city in America.

"Houston is an immigrant magnet," says Glenda Joe, a Chinese-Texan community organizer whose extended family came to Houston in the 1880s.

Enlarge image i

Gay rights activists celebrated two big victories this week before the U.S. Supreme Court, as justices overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and cleared the way for same-sex marriages in California.

Now gay marriage opponents and supporters are turning their attention to individual states, like New Jersey, where polls show most residents support same-sex marriage. So far, one person, Gov. Chris Christie, has stood in the way.

"I believe that the institution of marriage for 2,000 years has been between a man and a woman, and I believe that it should continue to be," Christie said on a radio call-in show in Trenton last week.

Heading into a re-election campaign, Christie remains popular, even though most voters in the state disagree with him on this issue. He says advocates should put the issue before voters with a referendum this November.

"The proponents have said all along that the majority of people in New Jersey want it," he told radio listeners. "Well then, put it on the ballot and then it'll pass and then it's the end of the discussion."

Privately some gay marriage supporters say they want to avoid an expensive campaign. But more important, they say a referendum is not how they want to win.

Sheila Oliver, speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, says guaranteeing civil rights should be the role of courts and lawmakers. Last year New Jersey's Legislature approved a gay marriage bill, but Christie vetoed it.

"Many of our legislative leaders believe that civil rights should not be litigated in a public referendum," Oliver said. "I think the next tactic you will see, in the next coming weeks in New Jersey, are efforts to get a veto override."

Hayley Gorenberg, an attorney with Lambda Legal, said at a rally Thursday that there's a clear legal argument now to establish same-sex marriages in the Garden State. New Jersey already has civil unions, but gay rights groups want full marriage.

"Based on the Supreme Court decision, we will file a motion for summary judgment for an immediate ruling that same-sex couples be allowed to marry," Gorenberg told supporters.

In neighboring Pennsylvania, several Democratic lawmakers are introducing same-sex marriage legislation. But those bills will likely have an uphill battle in the Republican-dominated Legislature.

The Two-Way

Prop. 8 Plaintiffs Marry In California, After Stay Is Lifted

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Democrats who hope to turn Texas from red to blue are looking to California for inspiration.

Golden State Democrats now hold every single statewide office and big majorities in both houses of the Legislature. In the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, Republican registration has fallen below 30 percent. And California hasn't voted for a Republican for president since 1988.

More 'Texas 2020'

It's All Politics

Big Growth Could Shake Up Texas' Old Political Equation

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

To see the speed of demographic change in Texas, look no further than its largest city — Houston. Only 40 percent of the city's population is non-Hispanic white, and by a Rice University count, it's the most racially and ethnically diverse city in America.

"Houston is an immigrant magnet," says Glenda Joe, a Chinese-Texan community organizer whose extended family came to Houston in the 1880s.

Enlarge image i

Two top officials of the Vatican bank resigned Monday just days after a senior cleric with ties to the institution was arrested after police caught him with the equivalent of about $26 million in cash that they say he was trying to bring into Italy from Switzerland.

Paolo Cipriani, the bank's director, and his deputy, Massimo Tulli, stepped down, the Vatican said in a statement [h/t National Catholic Reporter]. Ernst von Freyberg, the bank's president, will take over as interim director general.

The resignations are the latest blow to the Vatican bank, which has been plagued by concerns it's used as an offshore tax haven. Last week Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, who was already under investigation for money laundering, was arrested along with two other men.

The Associated Press reports:

"In addition to his Rome arrest, Scarano is also under investigation in the southern city of Salerno for alleged money-laundering stemming from a 560,000 euro cash withdrawal he made from his IOR charity account in 2009. Sica, the attorney, has said Scarano arranged complicated transactions with dozens of other people and eventually used the money to pay off a mortgage."

Since Sandwich Monday began, certain sandwiches have been our white whales: the Hippogriff Burger, a Reuben signed by J.D. Salinger, an Actual White Whale sandwich. Also, the mysterious St.Paul sandwich, native to St. Louis: It's an egg foo young patty, with lettuce, pickle and mayo, on white bread. But we finally caught one.

Miles: This is the same sandwich my Model U.N. group made the first time we all got high together.

Ian: This really comes from the "These Are The Only Things I Had In My Fridge" school of cooking.

Enlarge image i

If you're looking for a deal on prescription drugs or tired of standing in line at the drugstore counter, maybe you'd be inclined to try an online pharmacy.

Perhaps you'd feel better about that choice if the site carried the name of a well-known chain, say, www.walgreen-store.com or www.c-v-s-pharmacy.com.

Well, not so fast. The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. attorney's office in Colorado cracked down on those misleading sites, which weren't connected to their namesakes, and more than 1,600 others that the feds say are breaking the law by selling prescription drugs, some of them counterfeits.

"Illegal online pharmacies put American consumers' health at risk by selling potentially dangerous products," John Roth, director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations, said in a statement. "This is an ongoing battle in the United States and abroad ...."

Many of the websites that were shut down claimed to be Canadian companies. But the FDA says that was a lie. The websites made use of bogus licenses and certifications to trick U.S. consumers, the FDA said.

The far-reaching bust is part of an international effort with a catchy, prehistoric name: Pangea VI. Pretty sure online drug sales weren't a problem back in the supercontinent's heyday.

This modern sweep was part of an International Internet Week of Action that wrapped up June 25.

The Interpol-coordinated Pangea project, now in its sixth wave, goes after sites hawking unapproved or risky drugs. Many of the them also sell drugs that legally require a prescription without actually getting one.

The FDA told one operator of many websites, including canadianfamilypharmacy.biz and cheapcanadianpharmacy.net, to stop selling drugs that violate U.S. laws. The agency's warning letter said a couple of impotence drugs being sold as "Levitra Super Force" and "Viagra Super Force" hadn't been approved by the agency. FDA also faulted the sites for selling "generic Celebrex." Problem is that Celebrex, a painkiller, is only available as a brand-name drug in this country, so a generic version is verboten.

Separately, Maine just enacted a law making it OK for residents to buy prescription drugs from other countries.

The FDA doesn't approve. "Medicine bought from foreign sources, such as from Internet sellers, from businesses that offer to buy foreign medicine for you, or during trips outside the United States, may not be safe or effective," an FDA spokesman told Shots via email in response to questions about the Maine law..

When Chinese workers have a grievance, they are increasingly taking dramatic and direct action.

As we've reported, an American executive at a Chinese factory has been prevented by workers from leaving the plant since Friday. Chip Starnes of Specialty Medical Supplies says it's a misunderstanding following a decision to shut down part of his medical-supply business and move some jobs to India where wages are lower.

He says workers erroneously believe he plans to lay them all off. As of Wednesday, he still wasn't allowed to leave the plant on the outskirts of Beijing.

This story is part of a larger pattern of labor strife in China.

As The Wall Street Journal noted: "While bosses aren't held captive in their companies every day in China, Starnes is not the first one. In January this year, around 1,000 workers at Shanghai Shinmei Electric Company held Japanese and Chinese managers hostage in the factory, claiming that work rules for bathroom breaks and punishments for tardiness were too harsh."

Li Qiang, executive director of New York-based China Labor Watch, says though the problem is common, it's rare for a Westerner to be involved.

"Generally, a lot of worker protests are similar to this because of unpaid wages," he told NPR through a translator. "Bosses move factories without a heads up to workers, and so workers are left unpaid."

Indeed, as the Journal says: "Numbers for such disputes are hard to come by, though an investigation by the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper published by the official Xinhua news agency, found that more than 400 bosses ran away from bankrupt factories in Eastern China's Zhejiang province in 2008.

Most of those executives worked for foreign companies, meaning workers had virtually no hope of claiming months or even years of back pay owed to them."

NPR's Anthony Kuhn explained the root of the story on Tuesday's Morning Edition:

"The big picture is that Chinese wages are starting to rise pretty quickly, particularly in the coastal manufacturing enclaves. And so foreign manufacturers have to look farther inland where wages are lower or they have to look to other countries, including Southeast Asia. Every country welcomes investment coming in. When it [investment] starts to look elsewhere, when it starts to move out, sometimes companies experience difficulties. ... We may be seeing this more and more in the future, and the question is: Does China have the infrastructure and the institutional resources to deal with this? And in this case, the answer is no."

Last week was a wild one for China's economy.

Interest rates on the loans that banks make to one another soared to alarming levels, and lending began to freeze up. Shanghai stocks nose-dived, taking Asian markets and the Dow, briefly, with them.

Things have calmed down, but the crisis showed how China's new leaders are trying to confront threats to the health of the world's second-largest economy.

Many here see it as the first shot in a long battle to reform a once-successful economic model that is now running out of gas.

In this particular case, the People's Bank of China — the nation's central bank — wants to cut down on rampant and risky lending. So earlier this month, in a departure from the past, it refused to pump money into the system when some banks desperately needed it.

"The central bank wants to send a message," says Oliver Rui, a finance professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "Don't take it for granted that whenever you need the money, you can easily get it."

Rui says the government was targeting midsized, state-run banks that lend into what's known as China's "shadow banking" sector.

Risky Lending

Here is an example of how shadow banking can work and why it concerns the government: A state-owned company borrows from a state-owned bank at a government-set low interest rate, maybe 5 percent.

More On China

Asia

Belly Dancing For The Dead: A Day With China's Top Mourner

On the fun of writing a book that didn't require research

"I wrote so much of this book so quickly because I didn't really have that inhibition that I always had with the previous books. You know, my first book is about the Korean War. I always, writing those previous books, was worried that I would make some kind of mistake. Not an artistic mistake, but just a mistake, you know, write the wrong stuff. With this book it was a lot easier to just kind of look to my gut and think, 'Would she do it? Yeah, she would.'

"So I kind of wrote most of the first draft in this sort of, like, headlong rush — which is, in a lot of ways, the way Regina goes barreling through this series of events in her life, kind of obeying her appetites and her instincts, which often lead her way wrong and then, you know, finding herself — oh, my God — in situations that she didn't really anticipate.

"That happened to me when I was writing it. I didn't plan out everything that would happen, you know? It was fun."

On youth and the nature of sexuality and sexual identity

"There's a passage in the book in which kind of her older self reflects on it and says, 'We didn't really think about the fact that we were two women.' She says that that wasn't ever a primary thought, I think because there weren't a lot of thoughts. And I really wanted to bring that alive. Her lover — who's older, who's actually in a marriage — is sort of the one who's like, 'We just can't do this the way you think we can do it.'

"Regina's very young, she thinks like, 'What? What? What's wrong? We love each other. Well, why should we have to think about anything else?' And I wanted to capture both the intensity of that — thinking there's no obstacles — and her older self looking back and kind of marveling that she could ever feel that way."

More On Susan Choi

Book Tour

Susan Choi Draws 'Interest' from Headlines

Embassy Row — otherwise known as Massachusetts Avenue — in Washington, D.C., is decorated with flags of every nation, flying in front of impressive embassy buildings.

In front of the embassies, there are often statues of national heroes. Winston Churchill graces the grounds of the British Embassy. Outside the Indian Embassy, Mahatma Gandhi looks as though he's in full stride, clad in loincloth and sandals.

And now, there's a Hindu goddess. Saraswati just arrived. She stands in a garden in front of Indonesia's embassy, glowing white and gold, with her four arms upraised.

Indonesian Ambassador Dino Patti Djalal says the goal was to stand out from the other embassies.

"I think this is exactly what we wanted to do with Massachusetts Avenue," he says, "add something that would jazz it up."

Saraswati is the goddess of learning and wisdom, Djalal says. At her feet are three children studying. It was crafted by three Balinese sculptors in three weeks.

Her expression is beatific. "This would be the same expression that you would see in Hindu goddesses throughout Bali," Djalal says. "A face of calm ... blessing those who are seeing her."

Although Indonesia is home to the largest population of Muslims in the world, Djalal chose a symbol of the Hindu religion for the embassy in Washington.

"One of the most famous, if not the most famous, islands in Indonesia is Bali," he says. "And Bali is a Hindu enclave in Muslim-majority Indonesia. And I think it says a lot about our respect for religious freedom that the statue in front of the country with the largest Muslim population is a Hindu statue."

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

To see the speed of demographic change in Texas, look no further than its largest city — Houston. Only 40 percent of the city's population is non-Hispanic white, and by a Rice University count, it's the most racially and ethnically diverse city in America.

"Houston is an immigrant magnet," says Glenda Joe, a Chinese-Texan community organizer whose extended family came to Houston in the 1880s.

Enlarge image i

Sometimes pictures do a better job of conveying what's going on in the world. Here are three images — two from Sunday and one from Saturday — that describe the nature of protests in Egypt, Brazil and Turkey.

Enlarge image i

San Francisco, New York and other cities across the country and the globe are hosting gay pride festivals this weekend, capping off a week of legal decisions cheered by advocates for gay rights.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. On Friday, California couples lined up to wed after a federal court of appeals lifted the state's ban on same-sex marriage.

Moscow isn't on the list of cities hosting pride events, as a court has banned gay pride parades there for the next 100 years. So in lieu of a physical march, Russian LGBT activists are holding a virtual one online. As the New York marchers start making their way down Fifth Avenue at noon Sunday, their counterparts in Moscow will take virtual steps toward Red Square along a route marked with supportive tweets tagged #virtualpride.

The online march comes at a particularly difficult time for Russia's gay community. Two men were beaten to death recently in attacks authorities say were prompted by their sexual orientation.

And while U.S. attitudes toward gay people have grown significantly more positive over the past decade, Russia seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Russian President Vladimir Putin is poised to sign into law a bill that would make it a crime to provide children with information about homosexuality.

People protesting the bill in St. Petersburg and Moscow were attacked by anti-gay demonstrators, and in the neighboring former Soviet republic of Georgia, a recent gay rights rally ended in mob violence.

Putin is also expected to sign a bill that bans the adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples and single people in countries where same-sex marriage is legal.

Igor Yasin, a gay rights activist in Moscow, told NPR's Corey Flintoff that the ban on so-called "homosexual propaganda," which proponents say is meant to protect children, will harm youth.

"This law will make the lives of LGBT teenagers very difficult, because it will be difficult for them to get proper information about their sexuality," he said.

Against this backdrop of anti-gay sentiment at home, expatriates from the former Soviet Union will ride the first-ever Russian-themed float at Sunday's New York pride march. They're putting a new spin, organizer Pasha Zalutski told PRI's The World, on the Soviet phrase "Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live."

The activists behind Moscow's virtual pride march would likely agree that "Russian gays were, Russian gays are, Russian gays will be."

As Egyptians gathered Sunday in Cairo and other cities for what are expected to be the largest protests so far against the year-old government of President Mohammed Morsi, some in the streets were telling NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson that they expect he will be toppled in much the same way as President Hosni Mubarak was in February 2011.

One protester told Soraya that Morsi is a "wounded lion in a corner ... if he attacks us, he loses ... if he doesn't attack us, he loses."

At midday in Cairo, Soraya said on Weekend Edition Sunday, things were peaceful. But there were concerns that pro-Morsi Egyptians might clash with the protesters later in the day. Many eyes, she said, are on the Egyptian army. Its leaders have said they will "protect the will of the people." Protesters say that means the army will defend them, as it did at times during the Arab Spring protests against Mubarak. But Morsi's supporters say it means the army will stand up for the democratically elected president.

Being "born with a silver spoon in your mouth" has long been known to have advantages. Apparently, eating off a silver spoon also has its perks — it seems to make your food taste better.

That's the word from a group of researchers who've been studying how cutlery, dishes and other inedible accoutrements to a meal can alter our perceptions of taste. Their latest work, published in the journal Flavour, looks at how spoons, knives and other utensils we put in our mouths can provide their own kind of "mental seasoning" for a meal.

"Some of my wine-drinking colleagues would have me believe that flavor is really out there on the bottle, in the glass or on the plate," says Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University. "But I think it is much more something that we ... understand better through looking at what's happening inside the brain, and not just the mouth of the person eating or drinking."

Alterations in taste perceptions aren't necessarily the result of the cutlery itself, he says, but of the mental associations we bring to a meal. "Silver spoons and other silver cutlery, I'm guessing, are more commonly associated with high-quality food in our prior eating experiences," Spence says.

In recent years, psychologists have found that the color and shape of plates and other dishes can have an impact on the eating experience. Studies have found, for example, that people tend to eat less when their dishes are in sharp color-contrast to their food, that the color of a mug can alter a drinker's perception of how sweet and aromatic hot cocoa is, and that drinks can seem more thirst-quenching when consumed from a glass with a "cold" color like blue.

So why study cutlery? For starters, there wasn't any real scientific literature on the topic, Spence tells Linda Wertheimer on Weekend Edition Sunday.

Enlarge image i

Shortly before midnight last Thursday, in front of a cheering crowd, 31-year-old Hussein al-Deik was picked as the president of Palestine.

It wasn't a real election; just the grand finale of a TV reality series, shot in front of a live audience. Suheir Rasul, co-director of the Jerusalem office of Search for Common Ground, the organization that put on the show, said the goal is to get young people excited about the democratic process.

"The word is to reenergize and reignite the people, to remind them that we can be democratic, we believe in democracy, and the youth have a voice," Rasul explains.

But Palestinians have held only two presidential elections since the Palestinian Authority was established almost 20 years ago. The current president, Mahmood Abbas, has stayed on several years past the end of his term.

Palestinian political analyst Daoud Kuttab says a lack of elections leads to a lack of legitimacy.

"In most political events, you need a kind of election cycle to create leaders," Kuttab says.

The lack of elections also makes restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations difficult. Secretary of State John Kerry has been in the region for the past three days, trying to convince leaders on both sides to come together for talks.

Palestinian political leaders have long had their roots in militias who fought against Israel, but Kuttab says people are beginning to look for leadership elsewhere.

Parallels

'Arab Idol' Win Unites Palestinians In Jubilant Celebration