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More than 1,000 inmates, many convicted of serious crimes, have escaped from a prison in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi, the country's prime minister confirmed.

According to The Associated Press, it wasn't immediately clear if the jailbreak at Koyfiya prison was part of a larger series of protests taking place across the country on Saturday in response to the assassination on Friday of prominent political activist Abdelsalam al-Mosmary, who was an outspoken opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to AP:

"Gunmen outside of the prison fired into the air as inmates inside began setting fires, suggesting the jailbreak was preplanned, a Benghazi-based security official said. Those who escaped either face or were convicted of serious charges, a security official at Koyfiya prison said. ...

Special forces later arrested 18 of the escapees, while some returned on their own, said Mohammed Hejazi, a government security official in Benghazi. Three inmates were wounded in the jailbreak and were taken to a local hospital, he said."

Russia so far has refused to extradite former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, portraying this as a principled stand to protect a whistle-blower.

But while the United States and Russia don't see eye to eye over extradition issues (the two countries don't have an extradition treaty), Moscow often cooperates with requests from governments in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

The human rights group Amnesty International says Russian authorities have unlawfully returned and sometimes forcibly abducted asylum seekers, sending them back to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, countries accused of widespread human rights abuses.

Many of the suspects are wanted on charges of belonging to banned Islamist groups or sharing extremist literature, claims that human rights groups say are often based on shoddy evidence.

An Abduction

Amnesty reports that Tajikistan sought the extradition of 27-year-old Savriddin Dzhurayev on charges that included organizing a criminal conspiracy in 1992.

Russian authorities approved the request, though Dzhurayev was only 7 years old at the time of one of the alleged crimes. After appealing to the European Court of Human Rights, Dzhurayev was released from detention in Russia and granted temporary asylum there — the status Snowden is now seeking.

But Dzhurayev, who denies the charges against him, told his lawyers he was abducted by a group of men in plainclothes while walking in Moscow in 2011.

They forced him into a van, he says, beat him and put him on a plane back to Tajikistan, even though he didn't have a valid passport. Russian authorities denied playing a role in Dzhurayev's return. He is now serving a 26-year prison sentence after what Amnesty says was an unfair trial.

Vitaly Ponomarev, director of the Central Asia program at Memorial, a Russian human rights organization, says evidence for charges of illegal religious activity is often obtained using torture.

To avoid ill-treatment, an individual being questioned in Uzbekistan may offer information about someone who no longer lives in the country, thinking this puts the person beyond the authorities' reach.

"There's not a citizen of Uzbekistan in Russia who can guarantee he won't be named by one of his old acquaintances during questioning and wind up on a list of extremists," Ponomarev said.

Russian authorities cooperate on removals in these cases, he said, because they view the religious element of the accusations with suspicion.

"They consider the presence of such individuals in Russia to be unwanted," Ponomarev said. "There's some fear in relationship to Islam."

Many Extraditions

Moscow has also cooperated with other governments in more traditional extraditions. The website of the Russian prosecutor general, the authority that handles extraditions, says that the office authorized the extradition of 1,101 people in 2007, the most recent year for which data were published.

This year, Russia agreed to return to Kazakhstan a former official accused of embezzlement.

In 2011 it sent Leonid Kaplan, a Soviet emigre and citizen of the U.S. and Israel, to Spain to face charges of money-laundering and organized crime.

And in 2010, Russia extradited Georgian crime boss Tariel Oniani, also to Spain, where he was wanted on money-laundering charges.

But human rights groups say kidnappings like Dzhurayev's are on the rise.

While Russia's forced returns to Central Asia have been found unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International says Western governments have been silent because they carry out similar operations when pursuing suspected terrorists.

A report by the Open Society Justice Initiative found that more than 50 countries have cooperated with the U.S. on extraordinary renditions and secret detentions since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Rep. Robin Kelly, one of the hosts of the urban violence summit in Chicago, said at the outset Friday that this wouldn't be just another summit.

"Maybe just some of you are tired having your leaders hold summits that are long on talk and short on action," she told attendees. "Today's summit aims to be different."

Kelly, a Democrat who replaced Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. in a special election earlier this year, joined her colleagues on the Congressional Black Caucus at Chicago State University on the city's South Side,

vowing to take solutions back to Washington. Kelly says Chicago's shootings are the tipping point that prompted the emergency summit.

According to the police department, murders are down 24 percent from last year. Overall, violent crime is down.

But a number of high-profile homicides – many involving young people – have alarmed leaders and garnered national attention.

More than 200 people attended the day-long forum. They discussed the proliferation of guns and the impact on youth – issues that go beyond Chicago. Fiery community leaders echoed oft-repeated problems and solutions.

Many spoke of the need for better education, parenting, mentoring and community reinvestment, but none offered new or specific solutions during the eight-plus hours of the forum. Many just needed the time to vent. And anything elected officials come up with would face a contentious Congress that is cutting government programs.

Still, Congressional Black Caucus leaders say ending violence is a priority. They want crime in black communities to draw the same support and sympathy as the Newtown school shootings.

Democrat Rep. Danny Davis represents the West Side of Chicago. He says curbing violence requires a long-term plan.

"I don't think the police are going to solve this problem," Davis says. "It may be putting a focus on early childhood education that does not give you the results you are looking for next week. But they may give you some results in the next 10 or 12 years. So there is the immediacy of the problem but there's not the immediacy of the solution."

Elected officials say Chicago may be the first stop in a national tour around urban violence – with New Orleans and Baltimore next on the list.

Rep. Maxine Waters, Democrat of Los Angeles, says leaders need to show love to young people.

"It's about development of the plan that will come out of this," Waters says. "And then let's see how the Congressional Black Caucus, how the White House, how the police, the Justice Department, how the local mayors, how the community activists can all play into the plan that they develop."

The Act of Killing

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

Genre: Documentary

Running Time: 115 minutes

With: Haji Anif, Syamsul Arifin, Sakhyan Asmara

(Recommended)

John Oliver has brought oracular authority to a three-month fill-in stint on Comedy Central this summer. With Jon Stewart off directing a film, the anchor chair at The Daily Show has been occupied by the show's senior British correspondent, John Oliver, whose own stand-up show on Comedy Central is just beginning its fourth season.

Oliver tells NPR's Robert Siegel that being an anchorman is "a pretty weird experience, sitting behind that desk. I knew that I was going to have some almost comically oversized shoes to step into ... I definitely feel like a child wearing a full adult clown pair of shoes."

(Updated 6:50 p.m. EDT)

Democrat Anthony Weiner's path to the New York City mayor's office got a lot more complicated Thursday, just two days after he asserted that new revelations of his lewd online conduct would not chase him from the race for his party's nomination.

A day that opened with a new poll showing his support and approval rating among New York Democrats plummeting since the new scandal emerged got progressively worse for the married Weiner, who resigned from Congress after similar online sexual conduct was revealed.

For the first time Thursday, Weiner — when pressed by reporters — admitted that he engaged in several online sexting relationships after he left Congress two years ago. On Tuesday, Weiner had addressed only one post-Congress online relationship.

Also Thursday, Weiner was excoriated by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker who was his Democratic colleague in Congress. She characterized his behavior, and that of Democrat Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego, as "reprehensible."

And she urged Weiner and Filner, accused by three women of sexual misconduct, to "get a clue."

"It is so disrespectful of women, and what's really stunning about it is they don't even realize it. You know, they don't have a clue," she said. "If they need therapy, do it in private."

Asked whether Weiner should drop out of the race, Pelosi said: "That's up to the people of New York."

And, later Thursday, Sydney Leathers, the young Indiana woman with whom Weiner began exchanging sexually explicit online messages months after he left Congress, told the television show Inside Edition that he was trying to fool voters into believing his lewd behavior was in his past.

In interview clips, Leathers said she "felt manipulated" by Weiner and that he had become "controlling" toward the end of their online liaison.

"He would tell me that he would be jealous," Leathers told Inside Edition. "He would look at my Facebook frequently. He would tell me that he would get jealous if other men would compliment me. Just little stuff like that."

Weiner, she said, once described himself to her as an "argumentative, perpetually horny middle-aged man."

"And at the time, I was like, 'Oh no, you're not.' But yes, he is," she said.

Thursday's head-spinning developments began with survey results showing his standing with New York City's Democratic voters, who will go to the polls in September to pick a mayoral nominee, taking a deep dive.

Weiner now is the mayoral primary pick of 16 percent of the city's registered Democratic voters. That's down from the 25 percent who put him at the top of the seven-candidate field last month.

The Marist Poll, the first survey undertaken since the new details emerged early this week, was conducted for NBC 4 New York and The Wall Street Journal.

(Original post below)

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner's standing with voters has plummeted since new revelations about his lewd online exchanges emerged this week, according to a survey released Thursday.

Weiner, who two years ago resigned from Congress after similar behavior became public, now is the mayoral primary pick of 16 percent of the city's registered Democratic voters, who will go to the polls in September.

That's down from the 25 percent who put him at the top of the seven-candidate field last month.

Enlarge image i

HBO's press tour presentations this year were quieter than they've sometimes been. They don't have a big, splashy new drama series to talk about — in part because they still make a limited amount of original programming and don't have a lot of room when they're happy with how things are going. They have a comedy series with Stephen Merchant, but since we haven't seen it, most of the questions touched in one way or another on how tall he is.

Their best panel featured Larry David and Greg Mottola talking about Clear History, a straight-up comedy film David wrote and Mottola directed, in which David is initially unrecognizable under makeup. But they also paneled Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight, directed by Stephen Frears, which sounds like it would be about Muhammad Ali but is actually about the Supreme Court. If I'd been titling it, I'd have called it something else, because it's a little jarring to realize Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight is mostly about white guys. (And Thurgood Marshall, played by Danny Glover.) Lincoln has the same issue, but at least it's called Lincoln. Take note — Frears continues the trend of celebrated film directors working on made-for-cable movies, as Steven Soderbergh did with Behind The Candelabra.

They also presented Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth. It's HBO's film of Mike Tyson's one-man Broadway show, directed by Spike Lee.

The panel felt tense from the beginning, because it started with a question about how loose the script was, given that it seemed unlikely that Tyson — not trained in theater — was presenting a Broadway-show-length monologue scripted to the last word. In a lot of ways, assuming things are loose and improvised is a compliment in this room, and if anything, we love hearing people say they make it all up as they go. But it clearly felt to Spike Lee like it wasn't a serious endeavor but just Mike Tyson Talking. "This is legit," he assured us. It already felt like we as a room and Spike Lee as a director were talking past each other a little bit.

Spike Lee and Mike Tyson have known each other a long time. Since at least 1986, Lee says. They "blew up at the same time," he remembers, and they were both from Brooklyn. And Spike Lee is happy to tell you how much he respects Tyson.

Mike Tyson is the most honest human being I've ever met in my life. Because most – I'd said it this morning. But most human beings are not going to display the dark parts of themselves, the demons they have, to the world. I mean, that's just not human instinct. And when Mike — when you see this, and if the people saw the play, he's out there on this stage naked, sharing his experience, his ups and downs, to the audience. And it's traumatic. And to do that without thinking about how — whether people are going to love me or like me or hate me, that's not — he doesn't care about. He says, "I'm going to tell you the truth. This is my life, and do it with it what you will." And when he — and it's the most courageous thing I've ever seen in my life. Because I couldn't do it, and most people couldn't do it, where you just go up there, no b———t, no lies, no spin, and talk about the great things you've done and about the not-so-great things you've done. And tell them both with honesty.

The financial crisis in Greece has devastated the country's manufacturing sector, which has lost more than 30 percent of its jobs in the past three years. But at one factory in an industrial center in the north, workers have taken matters into their own hands.

Inside the cavernous factory on the outskirts of Thessaloniki, eight middle-aged men are filling bottles with a vinegar-based fabric softener that's scented with fresh lavender.

This assembly line used to produce glue for ceramic tiles. But the collapse of the construction industry killed demand for building materials.

Dimitris Mokas, one of the men working here, says Greeks still need to wash their clothes — and his firm's new line of laundry products are a good deal.

"You don't want to go to the supermarket and [buy] soap for clothes and pay 20 euros when we will give you for 3 euros," he says.

This firm is called VIO.ME. It's short for Viomichaniki Metalleftiki, or Industrial Mineral.

VIO.ME is a subsidiary of Philkeram Johnson, a Greek company that once made ceramic tiles and exported them to 29 countries.

Bankruptcy In 2011

Philkeram Johnson declared bankruptcy in 2011. VIO.ME's 70 employees stopped getting paychecks the same year. But they still came to work and continued making glue and tile-cleaning products. For a time, they also received unemployment checks, Mokas says.

"Unemployment benefits finished last September," he says. "We said, 'what can we do now? Stay only here and be guards here? We have to eat, we have to do something.' Because we want to have work."

Finding a job in Greece is daunting. More than 27 percent of Greeks are out of work; northern Greece is especially hard-hit. That's why half of the VIO.ME staff decided to occupy the bankrupt factory and revamp it to turn out environmentally friendly detergent and fabric softener.

The workers start their shifts at 7 a.m., and they do everything, Mokas says.

"I was driving a forklift and now I'm an accountant ... a supplier, driver, anything you want," he says.

That includes being a manager. There's no boss here, so for the past five months, Mokas and his fellow workers have also shared the administration of the plant.

The court has appointed a liquidation lawyer, Giorgos Vanaroudis, to administrate the bankruptcy of VIO.ME's parent company, Philkeram Johnson.

Enlarge image i

GREEN BEANS WITH PEANUTS AND CHILE DE ARBOL

Ejotes con Cacahuates y Chile de Arbol
Serves 4

INGREDIENTS:
1 pound green beans (or Chinese long beans), ends cut and diagonally sliced in about 2" pieces
1 tablespoon soy sauce
cup chicken broth
teaspoon brown sugar
teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 tablespoons peanut oil
cup roasted peanuts
4 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
3 to 4 chiles de arbol, stemmed and thinly sliced
4 to 6 scallions, thinly sliced, light green and white parts only

TO PREPARE:
Bring salted water to a boil in a large pot, add the sliced green beans and cook, uncovered for 2 to 3 minutes until al dente, drain and set aside.

Combine the soy sauce, chicken broth, sugar and salt in a small bowl and mix well.

Heat the peanut oil over high heat in a large heavy skillet until hot but not smoking. Add the peanuts, stirring constantly, as they begin to fry for about 20 seconds. Beware, peanuts burn faster than you would think... so don't wait until they look browned. Add the garlic and the chiles de arbol, stir for about 10 seconds, and add the scallions and stir for another 10 to 15 seconds. Add the green beans, stir to combine all the ingredients and finally pour soy sauce mixture, let it all cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Serve immediately.

(Updated 6:50 p.m. EDT)

Democrat Anthony Weiner's path to the New York City mayor's office got a lot more complicated Thursday, just two days after he asserted that new revelations of his lewd online conduct would not chase him from the race for his party's nomination.

A day that opened with a new poll showing his support and approval rating among New York Democrats plummeting since the new scandal emerged got progressively worse for the married Weiner, who resigned from Congress after similar online sexual conduct was revealed.

For the first time Thursday, Weiner — when pressed by reporters — admitted that he engaged in several online sexting relationships after he left Congress two years ago. On Tuesday, Weiner had addressed only one post-Congress online relationship.

Also Thursday, Weiner was excoriated by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker who was his Democratic colleague in Congress. She characterized his behavior, and that of Democrat Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego, as "reprehensible."

And she urged Weiner and Filner, accused by three women of sexual misconduct, to "get a clue."

"It is so disrespectful of women, and what's really stunning about it is they don't even realize it. You know, they don't have a clue," she said. "If they need therapy, do it in private."

Asked whether Weiner should drop out of the race, Pelosi said: "That's up to the people of New York."

And, later Thursday, Sydney Leathers, the young Indiana woman with whom Weiner began exchanging sexually explicit online messages months after he left Congress, told the television show Inside Edition that he was trying to fool voters into believing his lewd behavior was in his past.

In interview clips, Leathers said she "felt manipulated" by Weiner and that he had become "controlling" toward the end of their online liaison.

"He would tell me that he would be jealous," Leathers told Inside Edition. "He would look at my Facebook frequently. He would tell me that he would get jealous if other men would compliment me. Just little stuff like that."

Weiner, she said, once described himself to her as an "argumentative, perpetually horny middle-aged man."

"And at the time, I was like, 'Oh no, you're not.' But yes, he is," she said.

Thursday's head-spinning developments began with survey results showing his standing with New York City's Democratic voters, who will go to the polls in September to pick a mayoral nominee, taking a deep dive.

Weiner now is the mayoral primary pick of 16 percent of the city's registered Democratic voters. That's down from the 25 percent who put him at the top of the seven-candidate field last month.

The Marist Poll, the first survey undertaken since the new details emerged early this week, was conducted for NBC 4 New York and The Wall Street Journal.

(Original post below)

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner's standing with voters has plummeted since new revelations about his lewd online exchanges emerged this week, according to a survey released Thursday.

Weiner, who two years ago resigned from Congress after similar behavior became public, now is the mayoral primary pick of 16 percent of the city's registered Democratic voters, who will go to the polls in September.

That's down from the 25 percent who put him at the top of the seven-candidate field last month.

Enlarge image i

The city of Detroit may be on the skids financially, but one of its traditional "big three" automakers just scored a big win.

For the first time since it began making such comparisons between sedans in 1992, Consumer Reports magazine has given its top rating to a model made by a U.S. automaker — not one made by a European or Japanese company.

The 2014 Chevrolet Impala "rides like a luxury sedan, with a cushy and controlled demeanor, while delivering surprisingly agile handling, capable acceleration, and excellent braking," writes Consumer Reports. "Inside, the spacious cabin sets a new standard for Chevrolet fit and finish, with generally high-quality materials and trim."

According to Jake Fisher, director of the magazine's automotive testing, "the Impala's performance is one more indicator of an emerging domestic renaissance. We've seen a number of redesigned American models — including the Chrysler 300, Ford Escape and Fusion, and Jeep Grand Cherokee — deliver world-class performance in our tests."

The Impala outscored not only sedans that are comparable to its "mid-range" price, but much more expensive models as well — such as the Acura RLX and Jaguar XF.

It was just four years ago, as Pro Publica's timeline reminds us, that:

"GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As part of the restructuring, the U.S. government agreed to provide the company up to $30.1 billion [on top of earlier loans]. In exchange, the U.S. received a 60.8 percent stake in the company when it emerged from bankruptcy protection about a month later."

In the high-profile civil case against Wall Street titan Steven Cohen, federal authorities accuse the hedge fund head of allowing insider trading within his ranks. Cohen's lawyers offered up a defense fit for the digital age: They claim he didn't see a key, incriminating email because he gets too many messages — an estimated 1,000 a day, and opens only 11 percent of them.

Without getting into the plausibility of that defense, this did raise the unrelenting issue of email overload and how people today are managing the onslaught.

"What we do see is that email has a general tendency to be quite disruptive to people who aren't able to truly put tasks at the back of their minds," said Barry Gill, who analyzed email trends for the global software firm, Mimecast. His findings are published in the Harvard Business Review. Gill says that for those in the knowledge sector, as much as half an employee's workday can be spent interacting with messaging platforms.

"For some people that will be productive and for others it'll be unproductive," Gill says.

Former Microsoft and Apple executive Linda Stone knows all about these distractions. She coined the term "continuous partial attention" to describe how complex multitasking is nearly impossible. She says trying to do more than one thing that requires focused thinking leads to a state in which we're all sort of distracted, all of the time.

"It's that nothing really gets much attention at all," Stone says. "So if you're sending an email while you're talking on the phone, the person on the other end of the phone says, 'Hey, I don't think you're listening to me.' And the person who's the recipient of the email you wrote says, 'Hey, you didn't understood what I said.' So it means that we end up doing everything more poorly and we wind up really amping up our stress level."

This got us wondering about the people who probably get much more email than the rest of us — CEOs and entrepreneurs — and their systems for managing their inboxes. A fascinating thread on the question-and-answer site Quora features some of their tricks. And here's a sample from New York-based entrepreneur Nat Turner, who explains on his blog:

"Generally, my strategy is to archive anything that does not need immediate attention so that every item in my inbox represents something that I need to do. This departs from some people's strategy of using read vs. unread to denote items needing attention. I personally like to keep things clean and as such use the Archive function for inbox management frequently (I'd go crazy if I saw 4,300 messages in my Inbox like most people keep)."

Terraferma

Director: Emanuele Crialese

Genre: Foreign

Running Time: 88 minutes

Rated R for some language and brief nudity

With: Mimmo Cuticchio, Filippo Pucillo, Donatella Finocchiaro, Beppe Fiorello

(Recommended)

The Wolverine

Director: James Mangold

Genre: Action

Running Time: 126 minutes

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, some sexuality and language

With: Hugh Jackman, Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima

The news out of Detroit has been grim of late, but there are some bright spots coming from one corner of the Motor City. On Thursday, General Motors posted its 14th straight profitable quarter since emerging from bankruptcy. Ford announced its 16th consecutive profitable quarter Wednesday and Chrysler is expected to offer good news soon, as well.

And for the first time in more than 20 years, a domestic sedan, the Chevy Impala, won top marks from Consumer Reports.

But while this should be good news in a city that has just filed for bankruptcy, what's good for Detroit's automakers isn't always good for Detroit.

None of the car companies would agree to talk about Detroit's bankruptcy on tape for this story. But when you consider the Big Three — and the auto industry as a whole — there's one fact to recognize, says Michael Robinet, an analyst with IHS Automotive.

"The epicenter for the U.S. automotive industry, from a vehicle production perspective, is probably northern Kentucky," he says.

Robinet says cars and Detroit are inextricably linked emotionally and culturally, but not so much financially anymore.

"All the major decisions within the global automotive industry somehow weave their way through Detroit," he says. "So this is still the heart of the industry. A lot of the muscle around it has sort of moved to other parts of the country."

The home of General Motors sits in downtown Detroit, but it's the only auto company actually headquartered inside the city limits. The company has about 30,000 employees in the Detroit area, but just a little more than 4,000 of them work inside the city itself.

Ford, in contrast, is headquarted in Dearborn, Mich., and its plants in the region are outside the city limits. Chrysler is headquartered in Auburn Hills, north of the city.

News

Detroit Businesses See Opportunity In Bankruptcy

GREEN BEANS WITH PEANUTS AND CHILE DE ARBOL

Ejotes con Cacahuates y Chile de Arbol
Serves 4

INGREDIENTS:
1 pound green beans (or Chinese long beans), ends cut and diagonally sliced in about 2" pieces
1 tablespoon soy sauce
cup chicken broth
teaspoon brown sugar
teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 tablespoons peanut oil
cup roasted peanuts
4 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
3 to 4 chiles de arbol, stemmed and thinly sliced
4 to 6 scallions, thinly sliced, light green and white parts only

TO PREPARE:
Bring salted water to a boil in a large pot, add the sliced green beans and cook, uncovered for 2 to 3 minutes until al dente, drain and set aside.

Combine the soy sauce, chicken broth, sugar and salt in a small bowl and mix well.

Heat the peanut oil over high heat in a large heavy skillet until hot but not smoking. Add the peanuts, stirring constantly, as they begin to fry for about 20 seconds. Beware, peanuts burn faster than you would think... so don't wait until they look browned. Add the garlic and the chiles de arbol, stir for about 10 seconds, and add the scallions and stir for another 10 to 15 seconds. Add the green beans, stir to combine all the ingredients and finally pour soy sauce mixture, let it all cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Serve immediately.

If NSA leaker Edward Snowden is allowed to leave the Moscow airport and enter Russia, as some news reports suggest, he'll join a fairly small group of Americans who have sought refuge there.

So how did it work out for the others?

In short, not so well. Some became disillusioned and left, like Lee Harvey Oswald. Others were sent to Josef Stalin's gulags, where they served long sentences or were executed. Some lived out their days in an alcoholic haze.

"There's little evidence from historical records that [Snowden] has anything good to look forward to," says Peter Savodnik, a journalist and author of the upcoming book, The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. "Essentially, nobody from the U.S. who has defected to Russia has gone on to think that's a smart decision."

A Long History

In the 1920s and '30s, hundreds of American leftists moved to what was then the Soviet Union, motivated by a desire to build socialism.

Alexander Gelver of Oshkosh, Wis., was taken there by his parents. But when the 24-year-old wanted to return to the U.S., he was stopped by Soviet police outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He was arrested and disappeared. Only in the 1990s did his fate become clear: He was executed in 1938, one of Stalin's many victims.

The Associated Press documented the case of Gelver and 14 other Americans who disappeared in the Soviet Union in 1930s and '40s. All were either imprisoned or executed. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of other Americans, met a similar fate during the rule of Stalin, who suspected that foreigners were spies.

A famous case in the Cold War era has parallels to Snowden. William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, cryptologists at the NSA, defected in 1960. But they came to regret their decision and became alcoholics. Martin died in Mexico in 1987. Mitchell died in Russia in 2001.

One defector who did return was Oswald. He left for the Soviet Union in 1959, returned to the U.S. three years later, and became infamous as the assassin of President Kennedy in 1963.

Valuable To Russia's Intelligence Service

Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and a 35-year veteran of the CIA, says Snowden is exactly the kind of person Russia's intelligence service would be interested in.

"This is an individual with knowledge about a major national security organization [the NSA], one Russia would love to penetrate," Earnest says. "He's a pretty smart guy. With only a GED, he was able to secure employment with the CIA, the NSA and Booz Allen, and with it a high-level security clearance. So he'd be a very useful resource to them."

But Savodnik, the author and journalist, says it's likely Snowden has served his purpose in Russia.

"Whatever value he has to the Kremlin has already been drained," he says. "They'll probably try to marginalize him and send him where he's less likely to make noise or attract the attention of the media or others."

The Snowden story began in May when the NSA contractor boarded a plane in Honolulu and headed to Hong Kong. From there, he went to Moscow, apparently with the intention of heading to a third country. But with the U.S. canceling his passport, Snowden's been stuck at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport since June 23.

The question of where he'll go next has been the subject of intense speculation — as has the duration of how long he's been in the airport's transit lounge.

"It's a slow-motion opera," Earnest says.

His name is Roberto Francisco Daniel, but he goes by Padre Beto. He sports an ear clip, and a rosary around his neck that dips into an open-necked patterned shirt. In short, Padre Beto looks cooler than your typical priest.

His decision to become a Catholic priest came late, he says. He was 28. He'd been to college, worked, and he wasn't a virgin. He says he thinks that's why he has a different way of looking at church doctrine.

"When I came back to Brazil from Germany in 2001 and became a parish priest, I naturally included my views in my homilies," he says in Portuguese. "I don't think that there are some things people can't hear or that shouldn't be discussed."

In fact, it wasn't only in church that he discussed his opinions, but also on YouTube and on the radio. He was popular; he was gaining a following. The problem: What he was preaching went against church doctrine.

"What really shaped my views was what I heard in the confession box as a priest," he says. "I had men who came to confess who were homosexual, who had tried to live a life according to the church. They got married, they had children, but they found themselves in a terrible situation, thinking that they were sinners. It was hell for them."

They were living a lie, Padre Beto says, in order to comply with their faith. And, he says, that can't be right.

"The Catholic Church is one of hypocrisy, and because of what I heard in the confessional, I decided to engage in the debate," he says.

Padre Beto not only believes in gay marriage, but is in favor of divorce and of open marriages where either party can have an extramarital affair as long as both spouses agree.

"The Catholic Church has to change. We know now because of scientific discovery a great deal about human sexuality, for example," he says.

How can we, he says, in this day and age, expect people to be chaste before matrimony?

"I would have young people in their 20s confessing as if it were sinful that they had sexual relations with the person they were going to marry before they said vows," he says. "Sex is the most natural thing in the world. How can someone get married without first knowing their partner sexually? That's absurd nowadays."

The Pope's Visit

Against this backdrop, Pope Francis has received a rapturous welcome in Brazil, and on Wednesday he led the first public mass of his first international trip. In a sermon, he spoke of helping the young turn away from what he called the "idols" of "money, success, power, pleasure."

But there have also been protests. Dozens of activists supporting gay marriage demonstrated in Rio de Janiero on Monday. Same-sex unions have become big issue in the region.

The percentage of those between the ages of 15 and 29 who describe themselves as Catholic in Brazil has fallen sharply, and Brazil's main religion is facing a growing challenge from evangelical Christians.

More On Brazil

Parallels

Brazil's Evangelicals A Growing Force In Prayer, Politics

In a conflict zone, getting the basics — food, water, shelter — is a constant challenge. And it likely involves being on the move.

Now imagine pregnancy. There might not be a functioning medical facility for miles. And your environment makes you and your baby more susceptible to complications.

Aid groups are increasingly relying on conflict midwives to help women in these situations. Take Emily Slocum, a midwife with Doctors Without Borders, who worked with women affected by the violent conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some traveled days to reach her.

The Congo war lasted from 1998 to 2004, but as NPR's John Burnett has reported, ongoing conflict continues to disrupt daily life. The country has millions of displaced people.

Slocum worked at a hospital in South Kivu, where the conflict still lingers, from November 2011 to May 2012. She tells Shots that one of the challenges was keeping underweight newborns warm. Without an incubator, the best practice is to have the mother hold the baby to her skin, to keep its body temperature up, she says. She had to teach nurses and mothers to do that when she arrived.

"The baby was immediately sort of taken away and assessed by the nurse and sometimes not given back to the mom immediately," she says. In Syria, an MSF midwife encountered a similar problem, and to improvise, she heated IV fluid bags in the microwave to make small hot water bottles to warm the newborns.

Breastfeeding is also critical in situations where potable water and food access is limited and general hygiene is poor, the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health says.

Crises also put people at higher risk for sexual violence. In the Congo, women had very limited access to health care at all – nevermind contraceptives, Slocum says. But even for a population that's constantly fleeing violence, Slocum could provide long-term solutions with particular birth control methods, such as implants that can last up to five years.

In our "Weekly Innovation" blog series, we explore an interesting idea, design or product that you may not have heard of yet. Previously we featured the sink-urinal and Smart Bedding. (Do you have an innovation to share? Use this quick form.)

You can easily lose your wallet, but it's pretty difficult to lose your face. That's the motivation behind Finland-based startup Uniqul, which is testing a system that lets users conduct payment transactions with their faces. PopSci reports:

"A Uniqul tablet at check-out stations would take the customer's photo as they approach. Within seconds the tablet processes biometrical data to locate the individual's account within the database, which can be registered with any major credit card, Uniqul says. All the customer needs to do is confirm the payment by pressing the 'OK' button."

The city of Detroit may be on the skids financially, but one of its traditional "big three" automakers just scored a big win.

For the first time since it began making such comparisons between sedans in 1992, Consumer Reports magazine has given its top rating to a model made by a U.S. automaker — not one made by a European or Japanese company.

The 2014 Chevrolet Impala "rides like a luxury sedan, with a cushy and controlled demeanor, while delivering surprisingly agile handling, capable acceleration, and excellent braking," writes Consumer Reports. "Inside, the spacious cabin sets a new standard for Chevrolet fit and finish, with generally high-quality materials and trim."

According to Jake Fisher, director of the magazine's automotive testing, "the Impala's performance is one more indicator of an emerging domestic renaissance. We've seen a number of redesigned American models — including the Chrysler 300, Ford Escape and Fusion, and Jeep Grand Cherokee — deliver world-class performance in our tests."

The Impala outscored not only sedans that are comparable to its "mid-range" price, but much more expensive models as well — such as the Acura RLX and Jaguar XF.

It was just four years ago, as Pro Publica's timeline reminds us, that:

"GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As part of the restructuring, the U.S. government agreed to provide the company up to $30.1 billion [on top of earlier loans]. In exchange, the U.S. received a 60.8 percent stake in the company when it emerged from bankruptcy protection about a month later."

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

Jane Austen will be the new face of the 10-pound banknote, replacing Charles Darwin, the Bank of England announced Wednesday. That follows an uproar after the bank said it would replace Elizabeth Fry — the only woman to appear on a banknote other than the queen — with Winston Churchill on the 5-pound note. Austen's portrait will be accompanied by a quote from the insipid Miss Bingley: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"

Buzzfeed has launched a books page, and it's exactly what you'd expect. A sandwich-themed reinterpretation of Yeats' "Second Coming" reads: "Turning and turning in the widening gyro / The kebab cannot hear the kebaber; / Wraps fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

For The Millions, Alan Levinovitz writes a history of back-cover blurbs: "The excesses and scandals of contemporary blurbing, book and otherwise, are well-documented. William F. Buckley relates how publishers provided him with sample blurb templates: '(1) I was stunned by the power of [ ]. This book will change your life. Or, (2) [ ] expresses an emotional depth that moves me beyond anything I have experienced in a book.' ... My personal favorite? In 2000, Sony Pictures invented one David Manning of the Ridgefield Press to blurb some of its stinkers."

The Flamethrowers author Rachel Kushner lists her favorite art books in The Guardian. She says of Feelings Are Facts by Yvonne Rainer, "This is the motherlode, as a crash course on the art and artworld social scene of the 1960s and early 1970s in downtown New York, with in-depth portraits of the main personalities, in all their glory and sordidness."

The book-recommending website Goodreads says its membership has doubled in the past 11 months and now has 20 million members. The site was recently bought by Amazon, despite an uproar in literary circles, but the move doesn't seem to have put off potential members.

In a spree that lasted for years, Anders Burius, a librarian at the National Library of Sweden, stole more than 50 rare and valuable books and sold them to collectors. Two of these books, worth a collective $255,000 according to the library's lawyers, were returned Wednesday at a ceremony in New York. After the thefts were discovered, Burius confessed to the crime in 2004 and committed suicide soon after. Baltimore bookstore owner Stephan Loewentheil had bought and then sold the two volumes, but he bought them back at his own expense after finding out that they were stolen.

The death toll is approaching 80, scores more were wounded and the eyewitness accounts are sobering in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, after Wednesday's crash of a high-speed passenger train.

Reuters writes that "in what one local official described as a scene from hell, bodies covered in blankets lay next to the overturned carriages as smoke billowed from the wreckage after the disaster. ... Cranes were still pulling out mangled debris on Thursday morning, 12 hours after the crash."

"The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," the head of the Galicia region, Alberto Nez Feijo, said in a radio interview, according to The Guardian.

A man who went to help, 47-year-old baker Ricardo Martinez, tells the wire service that:

"We heard a massive noise and we went down the tracks. I helped getting a few injured and bodies out of the train. I went into one of the cars but I'd rather not tell you what I saw there."

So was that real?

I hear variations on this theme all the time from readers. Titrating fact and fantasy can give a story a mysterious energy. Writers fetch up those details that sate the senses, allowing us to touch and taste, hear and feel how things were once upon a time. A woman steps out in Gilded Age New York City. Would she wear muslin or silk, petticoats or a hoop of whale baleen? Short kid gloves or long satin ones? How deep is her decolletage? All the particulars, please!

Some classics — Jack Finney's Time and Again comes to mind — place invented characters in an authentic historical milieu. This approach is great. But I have a soft spot for those authors who revive some living, breathing figure, often a relatively minor one (hello, Thomas Cromwell). Real events, forgotten or infamous, also have a welcome grit about them.

Each of these summertime reads picks up where history leaves off. All are rich enough that I felt satisfied even before I read the author's source notes. But when I learned "what was real" in these books I reached a whole new level of delight.

From the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg, shack dwellers can look across a ravine to the spires of Sandton City, which houses the most lavish shopping mall in sub-Saharan Africa.

Alex, as this slum of roughly a half a million people is known, was home to Nelson Mandela when he first moved to Johannesburg in 1941.

The small house where Mandela rented a room is marked with a plaque, but the yard is littered with trash and construction debris. The concrete wall around the compound is collapsing and someone has spray-painted, "Do not pee here" in Zulu slang across the front of it.

"South Africa is poor, brother. Poor, poor," says Wellington Nzuza, standing nearby leaning against the compound wall. He says the biggest problem in South Africa is that people don't have work.

“ When Mandela dies, watch out, xenophobia is going to come up again.

Patricia Mulvey discovered her favorite taste of summer during a disastrous trip to Mexico in 1995. The bright moment of that trip was the Ensenada Slaw. She describes it as "a lightly dressed, crisp vegetable salad with a touch of heat from hot sauce and a touch of acidity from lime juice."

Mulvey — who now lives in Madison, Wis., and runs a farmers market menu planning service — was on the trip with her husband. They had borrowed a Ford Escort from a friend in San Diego and were cruising down the Mexican coast when a large rock appeared in the road. It was being used by a construction crew in lieu of a safety cone. Mulvey had to act fast.

"Well, if I swerve left, I'm going to hit 60 mph oncoming traffic. If I swerve to the right, I'm going off a cliff," she says.

She elected to stay the course and drive over it. Mulvey's husband got out to survey the damage, which didn't seem too bad — but when she tried to start the car, she says there was "a hideous, shredding, shrieking, awful sound. [It] threw me into a tizzy and I just spazzed out."

Mulvey jumped out of the car and ran toward the construction crew. She waved down the man on the road roller and said, "Hay un gran pierna in la calle." Translation: "There is a big leg in the street." He ignored her. She then waved down the next car on the road and hitched a ride to nearby Ensenada.

Once in town, they called a tow truck and went back to the car. When they arrived, Mulvey was alarmed to see the area "teeming" with machine gun-wielding federales with drug-sniffing dogs.

"My stomach's doing flips as the guys come up to us with their guns and tell us we can go," she says. "And we so wanted to go."

When the tow truck driver examined the car, he found the entire oil pan had been torn out, and there wouldn't be a quick fix.

"We decide to just call it a night — find a restaurant, have a margarita, and we order the fish tacos, which are topped with this amazing slaw. It was a revelation to me. It was bright; it was crisp; it had just the right hint of heat," she says.

Vote For Your Favorite

This recipe is among three finalists in our Taste of Summer contest. Take a look at the two others below and vote for your favorite by sending a message to All Things Considered here. Make sure to put "Taste Of Summer Vote" in the subject line.

Nothing about where "NSA leaker" Edward Snowden may go next ever seems to be certain. Remember the flurry of excitement about that Aeroflot flight he was supposedly on (but wasn't)?

So it is with a large grain of salt that we pass along these reports:

— "Russia's Immigration Service has reportedly granted entry permission to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been stranded at a Moscow airport since last month. 'The American is currently getting ready to leave. He will be given new clothes. Lawyer Anatoly Kucherena will bring the papers he needs to leave the transit zone of the airport,' says Interfax, citing a source familiar with the situation. The migration service would not immediately confirm the information." (Russia Today)

— "Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden has been granted the papers that will allow him to leave the transit area of a Moscow airport where he is holed up, an airport official said on Wednesday. The official told Reuters that Snowden, who is wanted by the United States for leaking details of U.S. government intelligence programs, would be handed the documents by a lawyer later on Wednesday at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport." (Reuters)

If these reports turn out to be correct, that would seem to mean that Snowden has been granted the temporary asylum he's been seeking from Russian authorities. His next step, presumably, would be to seek permanent asylum in one of the nations that have said they're willing to take him — Boliva, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

From Moscow, NPR's Corey Flintoff tells our Newscast Desk that "if Snowden is allowed to leave the transit area, it could escalate tensions with the United States. That would free Snowden to visit the embassies of other countries that have offered him asylum. Some analysts have speculated that President Obama might cancel a planned visit to Moscow in September to show U.S. displeasure with such a move by Russia."

Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who wants to be New York City's next mayor, admitted Tuesday that the same behavior that led to his resignation from Congress in 2011 — trading lewd messages with women — continued into the summer of 2012.

That would be well after his June 16, 2011, announcement that he was leaving Congress — an announcement that included his apology for "the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused ... particularly to my wife Huma."

Politics

Weiner Says He Won't Leave New York Mayor's Race

Ask yourself: Are you addicted to technology — any technology? Do you check email obsessively, tweet without restraint or post on Facebook during Thanksgiving dinner? Or perhaps you are powerless in the face of an iPad loaded with Angry Birds?

Many of the most popular technologies of our time tap into powerful reward mechanisms in our brains. And while most researchers stop short of calling video games and modern tech addictive, there's evidence that these technologies alter how our brains work and change how we behave.

Research has even demonstrated that gamers will get a boost of dopamine when they play.

Many techies and marketers are tapping, sometimes unintentionally, into decades of neuroscience research to make their products as addictive and profitable as possible.

A couple of weeks ago I got a pitch from Uber, the creators of the car service app of the same name. Every once in a while when you open the Uber app, you are greeted with a surprise, and the company will offer an unexpected service.

"We've done pedicabs in Austin," says Travis Kalanick, Uber's co-founder and CEO, "[and] we've done on-demand Texas barbecue. We've done Uber chopper and we've done on-demand roses on Valentine's Day."

Last Friday, the surprise was on-demand ice cream.

"It's not our core business; it's not what we do normally," Kalanick says. "It's just fun."

The thing about these PR stunts is that customers love them. Traffic to Uber skyrocketed Friday. The other thing is that you never know when to expect these little rewards, so it pays to check Uber's app and click, and then click again.

And something about that reminded me of a very old, very famous psychology experiment known as the Skinner Box.

Hey, baggage fees — happy fifth birthday!

Even if passengers aren't eager to celebrate, airlines are. The fees, born in 2008, helped financially desperate carriers stay aloft as the U.S. economy was spiraling down.

"That was a watershed year that scared the bejeezus out of the airline industry," said Mark Gerchick, an aviation consultant who has just released a book, Full Upright and Locked Position. Even as ticket sales were sliding, jet fuel prices were shooting to historic highs.

"Suddenly, everyone's thinking changed in the industry," he said. Rather than try to provide a single price for comprehensive service, airlines started charging fees — typically $15 per bag — to boost revenues.

Today, fees are not only the norm; they are heading higher still. Checking a bag now costs $25 to $35 on most domestic flights, and roughly three times that amount on many overseas flights. And on any given flight, just about everything comes with a price tag — from 2 more inches of legroom to a can of Coke.

One carrier, Denver-based Frontier Airlines, has announced it soon will begin charging up to $100 for a single carry-on bag for any customer who fails to book through the company's own website.

Having people book directly online eliminates payments to travel agents and "is a big cost saver for us," Frontier spokeswoman Kate O'Malley said. And, of course, it also generates yet another stream of revenues.

Now United Airlines is trying a new approach, offering annual "subscription" fees to allow customers to prepay a year's worth of baggage fees, seat upgrades or airport club access. The plans start at $349 and allow you and your family to check up to two bags per flight.

Related NPR Stories

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Flying High And Low In 'Full Upright And Locked Position'

We've been looking at working conditions in Bangladesh where the collapse in April of a building that housed garment factories killed more than 1,000 people.

But Bangladesh isn't the only country where conditions in garment factories have come under criticism. The same industry has expanded dramatically in Cambodia in recent years, and a report from the U.N.'s International Labor Organization says compliance on key workplace issues needs to be improved. That's a reversal for a country that was once lauded as a model in the developing world.

Here's more: "This report demonstrates that improvements are not being made in many areas including fire safety, child labor, and worker safety and health."

The report noted "impressive improvements" in the 10 years following the signing of the 1999 U.S.-Cambodian trade agreements, but reversals over the past few years.

The Better Factories Cambodia report was released last week, and it notes that "some of this deterioration may be attributed to the rapid growth of the industry."

The report follows the death in May of two workers at a shoe warehouse south of the capital, Phnom Penh.

Like Bangladesh, Cambodia's low labor costs make it an attractive destination for Western retailers. Here's more about the industry from the Wall Street Journal:

"Cambodia exploded onto the global garment scene in the 1990s. Development specialists saw the sector as a major growth opportunity for the country, which had only recently emerged from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which according to some estimates left 1.7 million people dead during the late 1970s.

"Taking advantage of cheap labor, factories sprouted up in Phnom Penh residential areas as well as on farmland and rice paddies on the outskirts. There are 462 export factories now, said Ken Loo, secretary-general of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia. That is up from 185 exporting factories in 2001, he said, citing his earliest records.

"But the rapid growth was accompanied by complaints of sweatshop conditions. As activists called for a solution, U.S. officials negotiated a 1999 trade deal with Cambodia. Washington offered to expand access to the American market — which had quotas on garment imports — if Cambodian firms improved labor standards."

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner says he did, indeed, trade lewd messages with a woman after his departure from Congress.

Weiner, if you remember, resigned from his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives due to an extramarital sexting scandal and the lies he told to try to cover up what he had done.

Today, TheDirty.com — described by Buzzfeed as a "nightlife site" — revealed a series of explicit messages allegedly sent from Weiner to an unidentified woman in August of 2012. The website also published explicit photographs allegedly sent by Weiner.

After the original scandal, Weiner stayed away from the limelight. But he returned to politics earlier this year, announcing a run for New York City mayor. The announcement was preceded by a media blitz, in which Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin — a long-time aide to Hilary Clinton — appeared to talk frankly about the struggles stemming from the scandal. The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy feature, the central message of which was that Weiner and his wife had mended fences and Weiner had learned his lesson.

USA Today reports that Weiner's campaign issued a statement saying some of the allegations made by The Dirty were true, that Weiner had continued sexting even after he resigned his seat in June of 2011.

"I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out, and today they have," Weiner said in a statement, according to USA Today. "These things that I did were wrong and hurtful to my wife and caused us to go through challenges in our marriage that extended past my resignation from Congress."

Weiner added:

"While some things that have been posted today are true and some are not, there is no question that what I did was wrong. This behavior is behind me. I've apologized to Huma and am grateful that she has worked through these issues with me and for her forgiveness. I want to again say that I am very sorry to anyone who was on the receiving end of these messages and the disruption that this has caused. As my wife and I have said, we are focused on moving forward."

One day after his two years in limbo ended and he was confirmed by the Senate as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray told NPR that though political bickering held up his nomination he now believes he has bipartisan support for the bureau's work.

"It was a bipartisan vote to confirm me as director — 66 to 34 — and I like to think that reflects the fact that people recognize the work we're doing benefits constituents in every state," Cordray told All Things Considered host Audie Cornish.

Before Cordray could get confirmed, of course, there had to be a "showdown" over filibuster rules that had held up his nomination and those of some others — capped by an extraordinary behind-closed-doors meeting of nearly all 100 senators. And a deal had to be struck that saw President Obama withdraw two nominees for posts on the National Labor Relations Board in order to get Republicans to agree to votes on the nominations of Cordray and a few others.

With all that now behind, Cordray said his bureau is going to focus on exposing "deceptive and misleading marketing" schemes, "debt traps" that such consumers in over their heads financially and on educating consumers so that they aren't "just lambs to slaughter" when it comes to dealing with those looking to manage their investments.

"We're here to stay," he said of the bureau, which was created over the opposition of many Republicans.

We'll add the as-aired interview with Cordray to the top of this post later.

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Catherine Russell: The Fresh Air In-Studio Concert

Andrew Rosenkranz says at least two or three times a week, he finds himself sitting across from an employee at his market research firm near Seattle, listening to some complicated personal problem.

Just last week, an employee described how her daughter and baby granddaughter were assaulted by a boyfriend. The daughter wanted to come back to Washington state but didn't have money for a plane ticket. And so, Rosenkranz says, the employee "was coming to ask, 'Hey, is there anything you can do to help us here?' "

A lot of conversations like that one have made Rosenkranz think his employees need more than just an advance on the next paycheck. Over and over, he says, he's seen the people who work at his company make financial choices that were likely to have bad consequences.

His employees borrow at punishing interest rates. They fail to enroll in the company's 401(k) despite the fact that the firm matches employee contributions. This actually saves Rosenkranz money; he doesn't have to make matching contributions when employees don't contribute. But, he says, he wishes more of his employees would take his money and sign up for retirement plans, because it's such a sensible move.

So Rosenkranz recently started offering his staff some time with a financial adviser. These days, this isn't so rare; a quarter of companies now offer one-on-one financial counseling, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. And more than half offer one-on-one investment advice, up from 38 percent four years ago.

Rosenkranz contracted with a credit union called Neighborhood Trust, a group that has also provided financial counseling to staff at a burger chain, stylists at a hair salon and employees of a home care cooperative in the Bronx.

Jose Robles, the maintenance supervisor at the home care cooperative, has been struggling with debt for years, taking out loan after loan. A judge recently allowed one of his creditors to deduct $71 from Robles' paycheck.

Robles recently met with a financial adviser from Neighborhood Trust, who helped him make a spreadsheet to show what he was earning and what he was spending. Robles thought he was working his way out of debt. But when he added up all the numbers in the spreadsheet, he realized he was wrong: He was actually going deeper and deeper into debt.

"You look at those numbers and you wonder, Whoa, wait a minute, I'm spending more than I'm actually bringing in," he says. "I thought I had it under control, and I didn't."

Now Robles is trying to cut back everywhere he can, from bowling less with his kids to eating out less often. He's hoping to save a chunk of money big enough to negotiate a lump sum deal with the debt collector.

The mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got hit so hard by the housing crisis that they required a massive federal rescue. Now lawmakers are looking to scale back the two entities' role — and the government's — in the mortgage market.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected to vote Thursday on President Obama's nominee to head the agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie.

The government took them over during the worst of the housing crisis, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $200 billion. Now that the housing market is recovering, the companies have turned profitable, and they are sending money back to the Treasury.

But many lawmakers remain worried about the government's outsize role in the mortgage market, and they're looking to make a change.

Before Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government in 2008, they operated in a kind of legal limbo. They were for-profit companies, helping to funnel money into the housing market. But they had an implicit guarantee that if they got into trouble, the government would bail them out.

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker says that has always been a problem. He says "almost everybody would say" that it's not appropriate to have "private gain and public losses."

"This implicit guarantee is incredibly inappropriate," he says.

New Approaches

Corker, a Republican, and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia have crafted a plan to gradually do away with Fannie and Freddie, while handing one of their functions over to a new government agency. That agency would guarantee mortgage-backed securities, to keep money flowing into the housing market. But unlike Fannie and Freddie, the new agency would collect a fee for the government's backing.

The plan includes a number of other safeguards designed to protect taxpayers: Homebuyers would have to make a 5 percent down payment. And the companies issuing mortgage-backed securities would have to hold at least 10 percent capital in reserve. Corker says that's twice as much capital as Fannie and Freddie would have needed to weather the housing crisis without a government bailout.

"If Fannie and Freddie had had 5 percent capital, there would have been no taxpayer contributions," he says.

The Obama administration says it welcomes the bipartisan Senate approach.

Meanwhile, House Republicans, led by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, have crafted an alternative bill. It would move the government even further out of the mortgage market, leaving only a limited role for the Federal Housing Administration to help first-time homebuyers and low-income families.

But Warner told a gathering at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Wednesday that the House approach is a political nonstarter. He said Hensarling's bill is an "ideologically pure exercise which will never have a single Democrat ever support it."

What Change Could Mean For Homebuyers

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says either bill would result in slightly higher interest rates on home loans.

But Zandi says the increase would be bigger under the House Republicans' bill because the measure would lack a government guarantee.

"More importantly for most Americans, there probably would be very few 30-year, fixed-rate loans out there — at least not for the typical homebuyer," Zandi says. "And the other thing to consider is that in really bad times, if the government really didn't step in, it would be pretty tough to get a mortgage loan for anybody at any time."

House Republicans insist their bill would not end 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. They note such loans are already available for high-priced homes that are too expensive to qualify for a government guarantee.

But Zandi says the experience in other countries suggests that without a government backstop, long-term fixed-rate mortgages would not be widely available. He also says it's unrealistic to pretend the government would stay out of the mortgage market altogether.

"The reality is that when push comes to shove, if things are really bad, the government will step in," he says. "So it's important that we all understand that, make that explicit, price for it to make sure that taxpayers don't pay for it in the future."

These days, it's Fannie and Freddie who are paying taxpayers. The companies have returned $131 billion in dividends to the Treasury so far.

Corker argues that's one more reason the government should move quickly to wind down the mortgage giants — before lawmakers become too attached to that money, and it becomes harder than ever to cut the cord.

Watch C-SPAN long enough, and you'll see members of Congress using visual aids: big, brightly colored poster boards, known on Capitol Hill as floor charts.

They've become an essential part of congressional messaging.

Almost every day the House of Representatives is in session, lawmakers line up to give what are known as one-minute speeches. Florida Democrat Frederica Wilson is always there.

And she always has her floor chart with her. It displays the number of days since Wilson came to Congress and the number of Americans unemployed.

"When you are in the minority, you have to find ways to get your message across because there's no other way. You don't have a bill that they're going to hear. There's no committee that will receive your suggestions," Wilson says.

She's been reusing the same chart since February, just swapping out the number of days in red type. Some members have dozens of them, ready to go at a moment's notice. Indiana Republican Rep. Todd Rokita has a whole stack of charts in his office, leftover from a lengthy presentation he gave back in April on the national debt. Back then, he offered a bar chart showing budget deficits through the years, with pictures of presidents on top of each bar. If you had seen it on C-SPAN, occasionally you'd see a hand come into the shot, switching to the next chart. That is Zach Zagar, Rokita's communications director.

"I was Vanna White on the House floor, one beautiful night this spring," Zagar says.

So how exactly do these things get made?

First the content: These are actually just PowerPoint slides from a presentation Rokita often gives when he's back home in his district — printed real big for use on the House floor.

"The House doesn't quite have a PowerPoint projector on the floor," says Zagar. "So this is what we get."

There are a couple of nice ones, made expertly and mounted by the House graphics office. But most in this stack are just printed on giant sheets of paper, then wrapped around and taped onto previously used poster boards. Zagar says the House Republican Conference has a big printer, which makes these charts cheap to make, if not aesthetically perfect up close.

"Sometimes you get the backend of a weird leftover presentation. Sometimes you get a poster board with a giant wedge taken out of it, so yeah, it varies," he says. "The presentation via television is barely noticeable."

A little secret about Congress that may not be obvious watching on TV: Often when members give these speeches, the room is virtually empty. But that doesn't really matter, because C-SPAN's cameras are always rolling.

Bill Gray is a producer at C-SPAN, and a man so obsessed with floor charts he's created a blog to catalog their use.

"Budget and deficit and deficit reduction and anything that has to do with hard numbers, those are the most popular because if you show a giant red line going from low to high, then it's going to draw the number, and it's just very simple — this number is higher than it used to be, here we go," Gray says.

But perhaps the most popular floor chart of all time (though, admittedly, this is hard to gauge) was used by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa back in 2009.

Here's how he described that chart at the time: "the rising cost of health care as a massive fire-breathing debt and deficit dragon."

That's right. The debt and deficit dragon — a gray fire-breathing dragon, labeled with yellow Olde English-style print on a blue background. It got a lot of attention, which is exactly what Grassley says he's going for.

"I think they're very beneficial, probably more to the public at large than they are to our colleagues," Grassley says.

At this point, a taxpayer might wonder how much these charts cost. In reality it varies, from an estimated $10 for the giant-printer-used-poster-board method to, well, no one would say how much it costs to get one of the fancy charts made by the House and Senate graphics offices. Something comparable made by a national printing chain would cost $129 per chart. But everyone insists they aren't spending that much.

If you think it's tough being a Cabinet secretary in the U.S., having to deal with the demands of a fiercely partisan Congress and testify a few times a year, try being the Afghan interior minister.

"I have been summoned by the lower house 93 times, and 79 times by the upper house," says Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, who for the past 10 months has been in charge of the ministry that oversees the Afghan National Police.

"Based on this calculation, I have had one day in a week to work for the people," he says.

In addition to answering calls to appear before Parliament, he's had to answer 15,000 request letters from parliamentarians. "Some of them legal and some of them are illegal," he continues. "Most of the requests are personal demands."

A List Of Headaches

Not unlike officials in Western governments, Patang says he gets patronage requests to hire relatives of parliamentarians, to fire people they don't like, or in seven specific cases, to promote uneducated and/or illiterate officers to the rank of general. But, he says, his headaches don't end there.

Patang says lawmakers are illegally cruising around in 46 Ford Ranger police trucks belonging to his ministry. In addition, 254 of the ministry's rifles and 51 pistols are also illegally in their hands. He has received demands for 84 permits for armored vehicles, despite the fact that, he says, Parliament has more than enough. And, he has received 232 requests for taxi permits, which he says lawmakers turn around and sell.

Now, the reason he happened to be rattling all this off is because he was in the process of being impeached by Parliament. Lawmakers say the vote to dismiss him was because of his failure to fight corruption in the ministry, and because he wasn't doing enough to combat deteriorating security in parts of the country.

'Immature Act'

But one of those who supported him says that's a cover story.

"Unfortunately, today's voting was not about security in Afghanistan," says Shukria Barakzai, a member of Parliament. She argues that MPs didn't like the fact Patang would not cave to all their demands. The straw that broke the camel's back, she says, was the fact that he declined to appear before Parliament over the weekend.

Barakzai says Patang was legitimately too busy doing his job tending to the ongoing security transition in Afghanistan, and the vote to impeach him was an "immature act" that will undermine security in the country.

Patang argues that part of the reason he's been sacked is because he's independent – he's not a member of any political party or beholden to any tribe, warlord, or mafia. As a result, he doesn't have strong patrons in Parliament to prevent this.

"This is plot against educated and elite people," he says.

But he's not going down without a fight. He threatened that in his next news conference he will disclose the names of 72 land-grabbers in Parliament, MPs who are spies for Pakistan's intelligence service and those affiliated with drug mafias.

Turning The Tables

Parliament has impeached several ministers over the years, and in most cases, President Hamid Karzai kept them on as "acting" ministers.

A few months ago, Parliament initiated impeachment proceedings against Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal. But he fended off the vote by going on the offensive. He accused one lawmaker of illegally importing nearly 2,000 cars and of smuggling alcohol into the country. Zakhilwal accused another parliamentarian of smuggling fuel and yet another of smuggling millions of dollars worth of flour. Parliament was too busy howling at that point to continue his impeachment.

The Presidential Palace issued a statement saying that the Supreme Court must evaluate the legality of Patang's sacking, and until then he will remain the acting minister of interior.

And one footnote: During the proceedings, Patang revealed another profound statistic: In the past four months, 2,748 police officers, roughly 2 percent of the police force, were killed fighting militants. That's more than the number of U.S. troops who have been killed during the entire war.

Long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who covered every president from Eisenhower to Obama, has died at age 92, according to The Gridiron Club & Foundation.

Thomas, who spent much of her career at United Press International before switching in her last decade in journalism to Hearst Newspapers as a columnist, died Saturday morning at her Washington apartment after a long illness, according to the Gridiron Club, where Thomas was the first female member and a former president.

Her longevity at the White House gave Thomas a coveted front row seat at briefings and allowed her, as the senior wire-service reporter, the first question at presidential news conferences. That ended when she left UPI in 2000.

NPR's David Folkenflik reports that the sometimes controversial journalist "broke barriers that prevented women from rising in the Washington press corps."

Thomas was born to Lebanese immigrants of little means and grew up in Michigan. She attended Wayne State University before heading to the nation's capital as a copygirl for the now-defunct Washington Daily News.

She covered women's issues, but held onto the White House beat for UPI, staying for decades.

The New York Times writes:

"Presidents grew to respect, even to like, Ms. Thomas for her forthrightness and stamina, which sustained her well after the age at which most people had settled into retirement. President Bill Clinton gave her a cake on Aug. 4, 1997, her 77th birthday. Twelve years later, President Obama gave her cupcakes for her 89th. At his first news conference in February 2009, Mr. Obama called on her, saying: "Helen, I'm excited. This is my inaugural moment."

It appears that it's just a matter of days before it becomes official that Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate's top Republican, will be primaried by a Louisville businessman with Tea Party backing.

The news that Matthew Bevin, owner of a bell-manufacturing company and an investment company executive, intends to soon announce his effort to oust McConnell, is interesting because it appears to place McConnell in something of a bind.

As Senate minority leader, McConnell has seen his role as at times negotiating compromises with Democrats in order to break impasses, something he has done repeatedly in the past two years. Most recently, there was the fiscal-cliff deal at the start of the year that McConnell negotiated with Vice President Biden that allowed tax rates to rise on individuals with more than $400,000 in annual taxable income. It was a compromise because President Obama had sought a much lower threshold.

It's that role as a compromiser, however, long part of the unwritten job description of Senate leaders in the majority and minority, that has gotten McConnell in trouble with those conservatives who find any compromise with Democrats anathema. They couldn't care less that McConnell is a fan of fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, who as an antebellum senator became earned the sobriquet The Great Compromiser.

Despite the negative feelings many conservatives have about compromise, there will still be situations that require it. For instance, Congressional Republicans will need to negotiate with President Obama and Democratic lawmakers later this year on the debt ceiling and federal budget.

And therein lies the problem for McConnell. How will he be able to compromise without inflaming the already inflamed Tea Party Republicans who support Bevin's expected challenge?

One possibility is that McConnell repeats as many times as possible the scenario that just occurred, with the just concluded negotiations to end the GOP filibuster of seven of Obama's executive branch appointments.

McConnell let Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to lead those negotiations while the Kentuckian tried to keep his distance, a move that theoretically would allow him to maintain some plausible deniability as he wades into his primary fight. It was a kind of "leading from behind."

Of course, plausible deniability only works when those in the know allow you to keep up the pretense. That didn't work out so well for McConnell in the filibuster fight, since McCain and fellow Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Kentucky testily outed McConnell.

Despite that, McCain is apparently still willing to play a similar role in future inter-party negotiations. And McConnell, presumably, would still try to stay in the background.

"What other choice is there [for McConnell]?" said Richard A. Baker, who served as the Senate's first official historian between 1975 and 2009 and is co-author of "The American Senate. An Insider's History."

"You can sign your death warrant now or sign it later. It's a real tough situation," Baker says.

"In earlier days (the early 1950s) [party] leaders got knocked off because they were viewed as not coming back to the state often enough. They had gone Washington, so to speak. That was the reason that they were vulnerable.

"Now, of course, in the era of instant communications, that's not a problem anymore. [The problem is] being caught between political factions. It's two separate tracks, being the party leader and being the representative of your state in the Senate. And here's the classic example of where those tracks are running at cross purposes. It's a rock and a hard place for sure."

The McConnell described in Baker's book, however, comes across as a shrewd political strategist and tactician. Robert Bennett, a former Republican Senate colleague of McConnell's who was himself primaried out of the Senate by a Tea Party challenger, is quoted in Baker's book as calling the Kentuckian "the best political mind" in the chamber.

Which leads Baker to say that if anyone can navigate the treacherous waters facing the Senate minority leader, it's McConnell. "I would put my money on him to do that," he says. "Whether it's possible to do in the scope of larger things we'll know later. But he would be the guy for the challenge."

We've been looking at working conditions in Bangladesh where the collapse in April of a building that housed garment factories killed more than 1,000 people.

But Bangladesh isn't the only country where conditions in garment factories have come under criticism. The same industry has expanded dramatically in Cambodia in recent years, and a report from the U.N.'s International Labor Organization says compliance on key workplace issues needs to be improved. That's a reversal for a country that was once lauded as a model in the developing world.

Here's more: "This report demonstrates that improvements are not being made in many areas including fire safety, child labor, and worker safety and health."

The report noted "impressive improvements" in the 10 years following the signing of the 1999 U.S.-Cambodian trade agreements, but reversals over the past few years.

The Better Factories Cambodia report was released last week, and it notes that "some of this deterioration may be attributed to the rapid growth of the industry."

The report follows the death in May of two workers at a shoe warehouse south of the capital, Phnom Penh.

Like Bangladesh, Cambodia's low labor costs make it an attractive destination for Western retailers. Here's more about the industry from the Wall Street Journal:

"Cambodia exploded onto the global garment scene in the 1990s. Development specialists saw the sector as a major growth opportunity for the country, which had only recently emerged from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which according to some estimates left 1.7 million people dead during the late 1970s.

"Taking advantage of cheap labor, factories sprouted up in Phnom Penh residential areas as well as on farmland and rice paddies on the outskirts. There are 462 export factories now, said Ken Loo, secretary-general of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia. That is up from 185 exporting factories in 2001, he said, citing his earliest records.

"But the rapid growth was accompanied by complaints of sweatshop conditions. As activists called for a solution, U.S. officials negotiated a 1999 trade deal with Cambodia. Washington offered to expand access to the American market — which had quotas on garment imports — if Cambodian firms improved labor standards."

Already known as "the world's most endangered feline species," the Iberian lynx is headed to extinction in the wild within the next five decades, an international team of researchers warn in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions," they write.

The problem, they say, is that climate change has reduced the availability of the cats' "main prey, the European rabbit," CBS News reports.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Iberian lynx could become "the first cat species to become extinct for at least 2,000 years. ... In the early 19th century the Iberian lynx was found in Spain, Portugal and Southern France. It has steadily declined since then, falling to the dangerously low levels today."

The researchers estimate there are "only an estimated 250 individuals surviving in the wild." That's up slightly from a decade ago thanks to "habitat management, reduction of destructive human activity and, more recently, reintroducing the lynx into suitable areas where they have lived in recent history."

But, they warn, "ongoing conservation strategies could buy just a few decades before the species goes extinct."

"The species is extremely vulnerable to shifts in habitat quality or to changes in the abundance of their rabbit prey due to climate change," says Professor Barry Brook, Chair of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide, in a statement released by the researchers.

What do the researchers recommend? They say: "A carefully planned reintroduction program, accounting for the effects of climate change, prey abundance and habitat connectivity, could avert extinction of the lynx this century." They also suggest putting some of the cats in "higher latitude and higher altitude regions on the Iberian Peninsula" where the climate should be more hospitable.

So much fascinating tech and culture news, so little time. But we certainly think you should see the journalism that's catching our curiosity each week, so each Friday we'll round up the week that was — the work that appeared in this blog, and from our fellow technology writers and observers at other organizations.

ICYMI

In case you missed it ... here on All Tech, Steve Henn wrote about the clever ways that developers are hacking Google Glass to do what Google doesn't want them to do. Martin Kaste reported on the troves of data that law enforcement has captured, and in many cases, saved, about our license plates and our whereabouts. Our weekly innovation pick was Smart Bedding, which purports to keep your top sheet from bunching up while you sleep. We revisited a spring study about online ranters — it turns out that online outrage makes you feel worse in the long run.

On our airwaves, All Things Considered featured several pieces about the rush to digitize medical records and one of the companies behind electronic records.

The Big Conversations

The larger tech conversations this week focused on phone payment plans (more on that later) and the future of television viewing, with Netflix making history by garnering Emmy nods for its original programming and sparking questions about the end of consumer relationships with cable, aka, cord-cutting. "Google is freshly rumored to be pursuing the same kind of deals in order to 'stream traditional TV programming' across the Internet. Google, however, has sought these kinds of deals before and failed, so there's no guarantee the company will succeed this time," writes The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan, in a smart piece called "The Tyranny of Traditional TV."

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are now all offering installment plans for their mobile phone customers. The analyses on these new upgrade plans are almost all negative. Some sample headlines: "Smartphone Upgrade Plans Are A Bad Deal," "Make it stop: Verizon's Edge phone upgrade program is just as bad as AT&T's," and "Verizon and AT&T early upgrade plans are steaming hot piles of rip-off."

Wired compared the three plans Friday morning.

What's Catching Our Eye

In no particular order:

The New York Times: How Googling Unmasks Child Abuse

Fascinating research on how Google searches for certain terms that are a proxy cry for help.

The Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner on Reddit

The popular online community is growing up and grappling with what to do about some darker subreddits that give hateful, misogynistic, racist sentiments a home.

Atlantic Wire: Tumblr's Gaping Security Hole

If you're a Tumblr user, you probably got the notice midweek: Tumblr asked all users of its iPhone and iPad app to change their password and download an update to fix a major security glitch. "It's such a huge and egregious error," Kevin O'Brien, an enterprise solutions architect for CloudLock, told the Atlantic Wire.

TechCrunch: Google Brings Street View to the Eiffel Tower

An elegant experience. I think I had more fun visiting the Eiffel Tower from my desk than when I actually visited the Paris icon. Those darn tourists everywhere ...

As we reported during Coffee Week in April, coffee aficionados pay top dollar for single-origin roasts.

The professional prospectors working for specialty coffee companies will travel far and wide, Marco Polo-style, to discover that next champion bean.

But to the farmers who hope to be that next great discovery, the emergence of this new coffee aristocracy is less Marco Polo, more Cinderella: How do you get your coffee bean to the ball?

Consider this tale of impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers whose beans once sold for rock bottom prices:

The yellowed highlands around the city of Jimma in Ethiopia are where coffee was discovered in the 8th century. But by the end of the 20th century its reputation had become as shaky as a car ride on its mountain roads.

Carl Cervone, a coffee agronomist for the New York-based non-profit organization Technoserve, says most of the coffee here is labeled Jimma 5, because it has all five major defects that come from poor farming.

"The types of defects that you have include overripe beans, which are called foxies, and under-ripe beans, which are called quakers," says Cervone. There are also cracked beans, and beans chewed by insects.

"But the worst of them all which is called a stinker, which means that you've basically left a bean fermenting for much longer than you should and it becomes rotten and its basically like putting a rotten egg in an omelet it kind of ruins the entire cup," he says.

Jimma 5 was so bad it became the trade term for bad coffee in Ethiopia, according to Cervone.

And yet ask one of the farmers here, Haleuya Habagaro, she'll tell you her coffee isn't just not bad, it's exquisite.

"When I roast the coffee people come to ask where that strong fruity smell is coming from," says Habagaro. "It's like when you hold an orange."

Enlarge image i

The age of the traditional landline telephone is in rapid decline, as NPR's Dan Bobkoff reports on today's All Things Considered.

"For nearly a century, the government has promoted universal access: the idea that anyone should be able to get a reliable home phone connection at a reasonable cost," Dan says. "But phone customers have been ditching traditional phone service. Some now get their home phone from the cable company. Others have gone completely wireless. Verizon has seen a 67 percent drop in the number of customers using copper landlines since 2000."

That statistic prompted us to look at how telephone use has changed around the world. The International Telecommunications Union maintains data about this. It's a U.N. body based in Geneva that, among other things, allocates global radio spectrum and satellite orbits.

Here's a snapshot of the data. Please note the numbers are regional, not country-based, so the figures for the Americas include both North and South America. The CIS refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet Union. (The * at 2012 and 2013 denotes estimates).

The death toll is climbing after two earthquakes that struck western China early Monday.

More than 70 people are dead and at last 400 others are injured, the BBC says. According to The Associated Press, China's state media say the death toll stands at 75.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the first temblor registered a strong 5.9 magnitude. It struck around 7:45 a.m., local time (Monday evening in the eastern U.S.). The second quake, with a magnitude of 5.6, was felt about an hour later.

The BBC adds that "at least 5,600 houses in the province's Zhangxian county are seriously damaged and 380 have collapsed, while some areas suffered from power cuts or mobile communications being disrupted, the earthquake administration added." The area is about 770 miles west of Beijing in Gansu province.

China's Global Times writes that "days of downpours and a series of aftershocks have added difficulties to rescue efforts. ... Aftershocks and minor landslides with falling rocks were seen in the mountainous region following the quake."

In the old days, when a book came out it just had to compete with other books. But these days a book has to compete not only with other books, but also with blog posts and tweets and tumblrs and everything else in written form. There's only so much that readers feel like reading, and as a result, every year many good books get lost under a tide of prose. How many times does a writer go to a party and someone asks, "When is your book coming out?" And the answer is, "Uh, six months ago." And then there's an awkward, horrible silence, and the person asking the question mutters something and rushes off to refresh his drink.

The publication of every good book should ideally be met with a triumphal, trumpet fanfare. But that doesn't always happen. I looked back over many of the books that have been published this year and selected five that deserve a little more fanfare.

Israel said Saturday that it's prepared to release a number of Palestinian prisoners following a breakthrough in talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yuval Steiniz, Israel's intelligence and strategic affairs minister, said the release would involve "heavyweight prisoners in jail for decades". He said the prisoners would be freed soon. (Note: the translation used by The Associated Press has it as "hardcore" instead of "heavyweight").

The remarks follow an announcement Friday night by Kerry that Israeli and Palestinian officials would meet soon in Washington to work out the resumption of peace negotiations that broke down in 2008.

As NPR's Emily Harris reports from Jerusalem, releasing long-term inmates from Israeli custody has been a key issue for Palestinian officials in order to restart talks. She reports that although the exact terms for resuming negotiations have yet to be formalized, minister Steiniz "says his government did not agree to stop Israeli settlements, or define future borders before negotiations start."

Kerry, speaking in Amman, said the two sides had agreed in principle to restarting talks, but he declined to provide details. He told reporters that the "best way to give these negotiations a chance is to keep them private."

Talks could resume in the next week or so "if everything goes as expected," Kerry said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who met with Kerry on Friday, said in a statement that "some details still need to be worked out."

On the release of Palestinian prisoners, the BBC reports:

"While the number of detainees to be freed is unclear, one Palestinian official said discussions had earlier focused on the release of 350 prisoners over a period of months, including around 100 men held since before 1993, when Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo peace accords.

According to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, 4,817 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails."

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition has won a decisive election victory, extending its control to the upper house of parliament and setting the stage for the country's first stable government in years.

Based on exit polls, national broadcaster NHK predicts that Abe's Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, New Komeito, will take 71 seats, giving them a total of 130 seats, eight more than needed for a majority in the chamber.

The election, which gives the ruling coalition control of both houses of the Diet for the first time in six years, is seen as a mandate on Abe's economic program, including aggressive monetary and fiscal stimulus programs that have helped spur growth after decades of near stagnation in Japan.

While The Japan Times notes that turnout was low, it says the election can be "viewed as a gauge of support for [Abe's] radical deflation-busting economic strategy dubbed 'Abenomics.'"

However, Abe's hawkish foreign policy has caused tensions with regional neighbors China and South Korea.

The Associated Press reports:

"The Liberal Democrats' "Recover Japan" platform calls a strong economy, strategic diplomacy and unshakable national security under the Japan-U.S. alliance, which allows for 50,000 American troops to be stationed in Japan.

The party also favors revising the country's pacifist constitution, drafted by the United States after World War II, to give Japan's military a larger role — a message that alarms the Chinese government but resonates with some Japanese voters troubled by territorial disputes with China and South Korea and widespread distrust of an increasingly assertive Beijing."