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It might seem like the only TV serious viewers are paying attention to right now is Breaking Bad, but on Sunday night, just as Walter White's penultimate episode is unfolding on AMC, we'll be finding out over on CBS whether his show, his portrayer Bryan Cranston, or other personnel will be taking home Primetime Emmy Awards.

An awful lot of familiar faces seem likely to win, as 2012-13 wasn't a big season for new breakout shows. You could easily see Breaking Bad take Outstanding Drama Series (which would be a first), or last year's winner, Homeland, or Mad Men, which had a four-year streak going before Homeland crashed the party in 2012.

It will almost certainly be a big year for the HBO film Behind The Candelabra, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and for Michael Douglas' performance as Liberace. And it's the last shot for 30 Rock, which has several shots at adding to what has been a very rich Emmy haul.

But the biggest curiosity on Sunday night will be the presence of Netflix, which has nominations in major categories for both House Of Cards, the political thriller that starred Kevin Spacey, and Arrested Development, the new and unconventionally structured season of a comedy that spent its three on-air years being celebrated but little-watched on Fox. Both series face stiff competition where they're nominated, but if Netflix were to win anything big in the very first year it was even trying, that would be a fairly authoritative arrival. (It will likely be back next year with Orange Is The New Black, which wasn't eligible this year.)

Hosted again by Neil Patrick Harris, a past Emmy host as well as everything-else host, the Emmys are likely to be — what else? — a long evening of celebrity speeches and corny montages. But in there somewhere, they're likely to be recognizing some pretty terrific television. Because there is, in fact, an awful lot of terrific television.

In the quirky little college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, home to many unconventional ideas over the years, there's now a small insect factory.

It's an unassuming operation, a generic boxy building in a small industrial park. It took me a while even to find a sign with the company's name: EnviroFlight. But its goal is grand: The people at EnviroFlight are hoping that their insects will help our planet grow more food while conserving land and water.

They don't expect you to eat insects. (Sure, Asians and Africans do it, but Americans are finicky.) The idea is, farmed insects will become food for fish or pigs.

The Salt

Maybe It's Time To Swap Burgers For Bugs, Says U.N.

The Republican-controlled House is set to vote Friday on a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open for business through the middle of December. And the White House has already said if it makes it to the president's desk, he'll veto it. That's because the bill also would defund the Affordable Care Act.

Congress has 10 days to get this worked out. If not, there will be a government shutdown. Passing what's known as a continuing resolution — a temporary bill to keep the lights on — should be routine. But this is turning into a huge fight that's likely to go right down to the wire.

And it's all because of Obamacare. Or more accurately, the determination of congressional Republicans to destroy President Obama's signature legislative achievement.

At the insistence of the most conservative wing of the House GOP conference, Speaker John Boehner is moving forward with a must-pass spending bill that includes the defunding.

Of course, the Senate is controlled by Democrats, and Majority Leader Harry Reid says any measure to defund Obamacare is "dead" and a "waste of time."

So the most likely scenario is that the Senate will take up the spending bill, restore the Obamacare funding and send it back to the House. Tag, you're it.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz says he's willing to try and filibuster the Senate's action, but because of Senate procedure, he may not get the chance.

Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have been pushing all summer to defund the health care law, but Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain warns that a government shutdown over the issue could hurt the GOP.

"It is not going to succeed because the American people do not want government shut down," said McCain. "And they'll blame Congress. It's not as if we haven't seen this movie before."

Congress was blamed for the last government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996. It didn't turn out well for Republicans. So, the question is, will they blink? What happens when the Senate inevitably sends a stopgap spending bill back to the House that doesn't defund Obamacare?

If Boehner has a plan, he's not revealing it. "I'm not going to speculate on what the Senate's going to do or not do, and where the votes are," said the Ohio Republican. "We'll have plenty of time next weekend to discuss that."

Yes, he said next weekend. Boehner already is planning for this to go into the 11th hour.

Jeff Garlin is a Chicago-born comedian who became well-known playing Larry David's manager on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He's got a new sitcom on ABC called The Goldbergs and a new film, Dealin' with Idiots, which he wrote, directed and stars in.

Every year, the Journal of Improbable Research gives out its IgNobel Prizes, for groundbreaking scientific research into important but neglected (and sometimes ridiculous) areas of knowledge. It just held its 2013 ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., so today we'll ask Garlin three questions about IgNobel prize winners.

When somebody enters a 12-step program to deal with addiction, it's meant to be an all-encompassing, life-changing process — and one we don't always hear about.

But in Stuart Blumberg's romantic comedy Thanks for Sharing, which hits theaters this weekend, the 12-step program is front and center. In this case it's for people struggling day to day with sex addiction, forging bonds with their fellow addicts and sponsors.

And, in the case of the character played by Mark Ruffalo, with a new girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow). Indeed, the film's central storyline is about what happens when someone with an addiction tries to connect — to open up to — someone who doesn't share that burden.

"One of the really tough parts about this addiction is, sex becomes a drug," Blumberg says. "It doesn't become, necessarily, an avenue for exploring intimacy. And ostensibly, you want sex to be exciting and fun and thrilling, but you also want the ability to share tender feelings. And in the stories I heard [while doing research], the thing that was most challenging for a lot of people was recombining those two things."

Sex is everywhere at the movies, of course, but it's often sex for sex's sake, presented because it's time to show someone's body. But Blumberg, who was one of the writers behind The Kids Are All Right and The Girl Next Door, says that in Hollywood stories, sex is "not often looked [at] with an unflinching eye."

Blumberg talked with All Things Considered host Audie Cornish about making a movie about topics, and relationships, that are typically, and often intentionally, very private.

Enlarge image i

Brazil is known for its music and distinctive dances, not necessarily for its paintings or photography. But that is changing. Not only are Brazilian artists now getting big play in major museums around the world, but something new is happening inside Brazil: There's a burgeoning appetite for art.

"It's booming, Brazilian art is booming," says Brazilian photographer Claudio Edinger, whose work was being exhibited at a recent photography art fair in Sao Paulo. A Rio de Janeiro native, Edinger lived for decades in the United States, but moved back to Brazil because his work sold more in his native country.

Edinger's pictures capture a country in flux: the bright lights of Rio at night; the soft folds of hammocks on a barge in the Amazon. He says the country is undergoing a transformation.

"Our references are all new, we are creating our references right now, so there are a world of things to do here that you don't find anywhere else," he says.

And, he adds with a wink: "Money makes art grow."

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There's big money in fantasy sports. Last year, alone, people paid $1.7 billion to play in fantasy leagues. With all that money sloshing around, a fantasy economy has sprung up, giving rise to real businesses. Here are four of them.

The Insurance Company

Henry Olszewski founded of Fantasy Sports Insurance in 2008 — the year the financial system nearly collapsed. And, more importantly, the year New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady suffered a serious hit to the knee.

Brady was out for the season. And fantasy-football managers who had drafted Brady were screwed.

"And it kind of just hit me," Olszewski says. "Could this be an opportunity to put together a program to cover fantasy team owners against these type of injuries?"

It could.

Olszewski's business sells insurance — real insurance — to fantasy team owners. Here's how it works. Say you're a fantasy manager and you're paying $100 to participate in a fantasy league. You can buy insurance from Olszewski for $10. Then, if your star player goes down for the season, Olszewski will pay you $100.

This season, he says, the big player fantasy owners are insuring against is Minnesota Vikings Running Back Adrian Peterson.

The Judge

Say it's late in the season. A manager of a team that's not in contention trades a great player in exchange for a weak player. "Everyone raises up their arms and says, 'Wait a minute, that's crazy," says Bill Green, founder and CEO of fantasydispute.com. In extreme cases, fantasy managers accuse each other of cutting side deals that are against the rules.

When this happens, Green will serve as a judge-for-hire: For $14.95 he'll step in and issue a ruling to resolve the dispute.

The Vault

LeagueSafe holds entry fees and manages payouts for fantasy leagues. And while the businesses we described above — the insurance company and the judge — are small, part-time operations, LeagueSafe is a full-blown business.

"We're up to 8 employees, and we've got several hundred thousand people using the product," Paul Charchian, the company's founder, told me.

LeagueSafe doesn't charge a fee — they profit off the float, by investing the money they hold during the season.

Bonus: Carchian is also the the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Because even fantasy sports companies have their own lobbying group -

The High-Speed League

FanDuel lets fantasy players have more fantasy.

In a typical fantasy league, managers draft teams and wait all season to figure out who won. Fanduel lets players compete against each other every week in football, and every day in other sports.

In 2009, the year the company launched, it paid out $100,000 to people using its service. Last year, they paid out $49 million. This year, they estimate they'll pay $135 million.

Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani has launched a charm offensive ahead of his visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.

There have been political prisoners released, tweets, letters exchanged with President Obama, a television interview and even an op-ed in The Washington Post.

The activity has raised the possibility of improved relations between the two countries, whose ties have been marked by mutual antipathy and mistrust since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

But as NPR's Greg Myre noted upon Rouhani's election in June, we've heard this story before – several times. Greg wrote:

"Ever since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has been in search of moderate Iranian leaders who could steer the country away from its hostile standoff with America.

"To cite one famous example, President Ronald Reagan's administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in the mid-1980s in the belief it could work with the country's 'moderate' elements even as Iran remained under the control of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini."

An appeals court in Texas has overturned the 2010 conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who had been found guilty of illegally funneling corporate money to Texas candidates during the 2002 campaign cycle.

DeLay, a Republican, had been out on bail while appealing his conviction and the three-year prison sentence he was handed afterward.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Thursday, the state's Third District Court of Appeals says "we conclude that the evidence presented does not support a conclusion that DeLay committed the crimes that were charged. ... The fundamental problem with the State's case was its failure to prove proceeds of criminal activity."

The court found that a political action committee DeLay created, which was at the center of the case, could accept donations from corporations and that the PAC "could lawfully transfer the corporate funds out of state." Therefore, the judges write, "the State failed to prove the 'applicable culpable mental states' for the donating corporations to support a finding of criminal intent by the corporations."

What's more, the appeals court says:

"There was no evidence that [the PAC] or RNSEC [the Republican National State Elections Committee] treated the corporate funds as anything but what they were, corporate funds with limited uses under campaign finance law. Rather, when viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the evidence showed an agreement to two legal monetary transfers: that [DeLay's PAC] transfer corporate money to RNSEC for use in other states and not in Texas in exchange for RNSEC transferring funds to Texas candidates out of a hard money account."

House Republicans, meet Sen. Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz, House Republicans.

Given the surprise expressed by some House members at the Texas senator's approach to the defunding of Obamacare, perhaps an introduction was in order.

A few dozen House members Wednesday morning successfully coerced a reluctant Speaker John Boehner into tying the Obamacare language to a must-pass government funding bill. This came after weeks of television ads featuring Cruz and fellow Senate Republican Mike Lee advocating exactly that plan, regardless of the consequences.

Yet not long after Boehner's announcement came a statement from Cruz commending House Republicans, but also warning: "Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so. At that point, House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people."

Got that? House Republicans did. After imploring them to act, Cruz essentially conceded that he could not realistically accomplish anything in the Senate, and therefore it was all on the House's shoulders. Great work guys! Keep that finger in the dike, and don't let us down!

Reaction from those House Republicans was swift and, well, more than a little bit tart.

Tim Griffin of Arkansas offered this tweet: "so far Sen Rs are good at getting Facebook likes, and townhalls, not much else. Do something." (This was later deleted.)

Georgia Rep. Tom Price had this: "House Republicans are turning words into action to defund #Obamacare. Ball will be in the Senate's court."

Perhaps those in the House had not been paying much attention to Cruz, who came to prominence within weeks of taking office this year by suggesting that Chuck Hagel, then the defense secretary nominee and a former GOP senator himself — might have taken money from the North Koreans.

Not long after, Arizona Sen. John McCain included Cruz among a group in Congress he considered "wacko birds." Since then, Cruz has become better known for his visits to early presidential primary states than for working with fellow senators on legislation.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Cruz did thank House Republicans for sticking their necks out, and deflected questions about his statement. "Americans don't care about petty political bickering in Washington," he said.

For his part, Boehner would not specifically address Cruz at his own news conference, but he did say: "It's time for them to pick up the mantle and get the job done."

S.V. Dte is the congressional editor on NPR's Washington Desk.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted Thursday to slash $40 billion from the federal food stamp program.

GOP lawmakers cited what they said was widespread abuse of the program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is intended to help poor individuals and families buy groceries.

The vote to cut food stamps came on a party line vote of 217-200.

"It's wrong for working, middle-class people to pay" for abuse of the program, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.

Democrats cited Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would deprive 4 million needy people of SNAP benefits in 2014. The $40 billion cut — $4 billion a year over the next decade — amounts to about 5 percent of the total program cost.

According to The New York Times:

"The bill would also cut off food aid after three months to recipients between the ages of 18 and 50 if they cannot find work or enroll in a job placement program. Exceptions would be granted for those with children who are still minors."

The Republican-controlled House is set to vote Friday on a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open for business through the middle of December. And the White House has already said if it makes it to the president's desk, he'll veto it. That's because the bill also would defund the Affordable Care Act.

Congress has 10 days to get this worked out. If not there will be a government shutdown. Passing what's known as a continuing resolution — a temporary bill to keep the lights on — should be routine. But this is turning into a huge fight that's likely to go right down to the wire.

And it's all because of Obamacare. Or more accurately, the determination of congressional Republicans to destroy President Obama's signature legislative achievement.

At the insistence of the most conservative wing of the House GOP conference, Speaker John Boehner is moving forward with a must-pass spending bill that also would defund the health care law.

Of course, the Senate is controlled by Democrats, and Majority Leader Harry Reid says any measure to defund Obamacare is "dead" and a "waste of time."

So the most likely scenario is that the Senate will take up the spending bill, restore the Obamacare funding and send it back to the House. Tag, you're it.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz says he's willing to try and filibuster the Senate's action, but because of Senate procedure, he may not get the chance.

Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have been pushing all summer for a push to defund the health care law, but Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain warns that a government shutdown over the issue could hurt the GOP.

"It is not going to succeed because the American people do not want government shut down," said McCain. "And they'll blame Congress. It's not as if we haven't seen this movie before."

Congress was blamed for the last government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996. It didn't turn out well for Republicans. So, the question is, will they blink? What happens when the Senate inevitably sends a stopgap spending bill back to the House that doesn't defund Obamacare?

If Boehner has a plan, he's not revealing it. "I'm not going to speculate on what the Senate's going to do or not do, and where the votes are," said the Ohio Republican. "We'll have plenty of time next weekend to discuss that."

Yes, he said next weekend. Boehner already is planning for this to go into the 11th hour.

In a stinging response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's put-down of "American exceptionalism," Arizona Sen. John McCain told Russians Thursday that Putin "doesn't believe in you."

"He doesn't believe that human nature at liberty can rise above its weaknesses and build just, peaceful, prosperous societies," McCain writes in an op-ed posted by Pravda. "Or, at least, he doesn't believe Russians can. So he rules by using those weaknesses, by corruption, repression and violence. He rules for himself, not you."

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, is answering Putin's Sept. 11 op-ed in The New York Times.

In that piece, as we reported, Putin "made an unusual and direct appeal to the American people ... to reject President Obama's calls for possible use of force against Syria."

The Russian leader ended his message with this statement:

"My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional.' It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."

The nation's health spending will bump up next year as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage to more Americans, and then will grow by an average of 6.2 percent a year over the next decade, according to projections by government actuaries.

That estimate is lower than the typical annual increases before the recession hit. Still, the actuaries forecast that in a decade the health care segment of the nation's economy will be larger than it is today, amounting to a fifth of the gross domestic product in 2022.

They attributed that to the rising number of baby boomers moving into Medicare and the expectation that the economy will improve, according to a study published online in the journal Health Affairs.

The actuaries were not persuaded that cost-cutting experiments in the health law will have an impact. Neither were they convinced that new insurer procedures that change the way doctors, hospitals and others provide services will help. They assumed "modest" savings from those changes from the law.

"It's a little early to tell how substantial those savings will be in the longer term," Gigi Cuckler, an actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and lead author of the report, told reporters Wednesday.

Still, the Obama administration enthusiastically greeted the report. "We are on the right track to controlling health care costs, thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act," CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement. "More Americans will have the ability to get the health care they need, and that is a good thing. We have identified several areas where our reforms to control costs are making progress and we must build on those efforts in the years ahead."

But not everyone agrees. "I think it's quite clear from the study that the notion that the health care law fundamentally bends costs is just totally unsupported by facts," James Capretta, a budget adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview. "Something more fundamental needs to be done to slow costs than what is in the health law."

Shots - Health News

The 'Hard To Change' Legacy Of Medicare Payments

The Federal Reserve said today that it is not slowing down its monthly purchase of $85 billion in bonds.

The program is intended to stimulate a sluggish economy and the Fed was widely expected to announce that in light of a recovering economy, it was tapering the bond-buying program. Instead, it delivered a surprise that caused the markets to jump, as the Dow and the S&P closed at record highs.

In a statement issued after a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed said it was awaiting more data on the health of the economy before making a decision on the stimulus program:

"Taking into account the extent of federal fiscal retrenchment, the Committee sees the improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions since it began its asset purchase program a year ago as consistent with growing underlying strength in the broader economy. However, the Committee decided to await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases. Accordingly, the Committee decided to continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month."

If you are trying to buy a home, you just got good news: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it is not going to try to drive up long-term interest rates just yet.

Stock investors are happy for you. They like cheap mortgages too because a robust housing market creates jobs. To celebrate, they bought more shares, sending the Dow Jones industrial average up 147.21 to an all-time high of 15,676.94.

Unfortunately, if you are a retiree who wants a higher return on your savings in the bank — well, sorry. The interest paid to you will be meager.

In fact, the Fed's surprising announcement on interest rates created lots of winners and losers. But before sorting them out, let's first look at what happened:

Policymakers for the central bank met this week and concluded that the U.S. economy is still weak enough to need their help. They said they recognize that the country has seen "improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions," but they added that the Fed still has to tamp down interest rates as officials "await more evidence that progress will be sustained."

Their decision stunned most economists, who believed Fed officials were ready to switch gears away from the long-standing policy of restraining interest rates. The low-rate strategy has been in place throughout the Great Recession and slow recovery.

But many experts say it's time for a change. They think the economy is strong enough to allow interest rates to start to return to historical norms.

Back in June, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself suggested such a switch would come by year's end.

But since then, interest rates on mortgages have been ratcheting up on their own — in anticipation of the coming change. Ditto for interest rates on Treasury securities.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, Bernanke and his fellow policymakers sprang their surprise. After taking a harder look at the most recent information, they decided not to change course after all.

They are worried that congressional Republicans and the White House might have another big showdown this fall, which could rattle markets. And Fed officials don't like seeing the latest higher mortgage rates, which have been scaring off some potential homebuyers.

"The tightening of financial conditions observed in recent months, if sustained, could slow the pace of improvement in the economy and the labor market," the Fed officials said in a statement.

So for the time being, the Fed will not back off its strategy of buying $85 billion a month in bonds to push down on long-term interest rates. It could still taper those purchases by year's end if the policymakers think conditions have changed, but for now, the low-rate strategy is firmly in place.

As a result, these groups cheered the Fed announcement:

Homebuyers and sellers. Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates, which jumped from about 3.5 percent in April to around 4.5 percent recently, are more likely now to halt their upward march. That may prompt more people to get into the homebuying market.

Stock owners. Shares become more valuable when investors can't get much of a return from interest payments on insured securities. So stock prices shot to record highs as of Wednesday's close.

Gold owners. The price of gold surged more than 4 percent to about $1,360. The hike came because gold gets more attractive in times of economic uncertainty and inflation. Some people believe the Fed's current policies eventually will lead to inflation.

And these groups found little to celebrate:

Gas guzzlers. The price of oil — just like gold — rose on inflation fears. By late afternoon, U.S. crude had risen more than $3 per barrel to a high of $108.49.

Conservative savers. If you like to keep your money in very safe securities, your interest income will stay depressed. For example, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 2.71 percent after the announcement, down from 2.90 percent.

Job seekers. Not that you needed anyone to tell you this, but the Fed said the economic outlook is not great. It sees growth of 2.3 percent at best this year, down from its earlier forecast of growth as strong as 2.6 percent.

It was a day when most in Congress were obsessed with an increasingly likely government shutdown that would be of lawmakers' own making. But not the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The GOP-controlled panel held a marathon six-hour hearing on what South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy called the most important issue of all to the folks back home: the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead just over a year ago.

Usually it's congressional Republicans who push for Benghazi hearings — some have predicted that when all the facts come out, if they ever do, the deadly episode could become the Obama administration's Waterloo. But it was in fact Democrats on the oversight panel who called for this particular hearing, four months ago. That's how long it's taken to get the two men who headed an official investigation of Benghazi — and whose report came out last December — to sit down in front of the committee to defend their findings.

Both career diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were eager to expound publicly on their Benghazi probe. But Republicans on the panel, wary of what might spill out in public, insisted the two men first sit for four days of private interrogation. They forced Pickering to do so by serving him a subpoena.

Democrats used Thursday's hearing to knock down what they characterized as canards spread by Republicans and their media allies. Mullen assured them that there had been no order to stand down given to four U.S. Special Operations soldiers who wanted to travel from Tripoli to Benghazi once the attacks began on Sept. 11, 2012. He said there was no way U.S. warplanes could have been scrambled in time to protect the two U.S. sites in Benghazi that came under attack. Pickering said there was no need to interview Hillary Clinton for the investigation, since as secretary of state she did not have the operational responsibility that investigators were charged by Congress to probe.

Republicans called the official report on Benghazi a whitewash. In what Democrats saw as a bid to discredit their party's front-runner for the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, GOP committee members repeatedly pressed the two witnesses on why Clinton was not held responsible. Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz chided Mullen, who at the time of the attack was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs, for not requesting air support from NATO allies. "I actually commanded NATO forces," Mullen shot back, "and the likelihood that NATO could respond in a situation like that was absolutely zero."

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., complained that the two investigators had access to State Department officials who had not been made available to his panel as witnesses. He announced he would issue subpoenas to summon them.

There were demands from other Republicans that eyewitnesses at the scenes of the attacks be made available to the committee for questioning. Left unsaid was that the Benghazi "special mission," as Pickering called it, has been widely reported to have been a CIA operation rather than a diplomatic post.

Not much that was new came to light at the hearing. But that was not the point. Democrats wanted their two highly respected witnesses to publicly counter the conservative drumbeat about a Benghazi cover-up. Republicans had one more chance to show constituents they're still on the case.

But there has been one big change since the standing-room-only Benghazi hearings held earlier this year. This time, except for the row behind the witnesses, most of the audience seats were empty. Not even Fox News bothered to carry the hearing live.

Benghazi may still be the most burning issue in Trey Gowdy's district. That clearly is no longer true in Washington.

Zaytoun

Director: Eran Riklis

Genre: Drama

Running Time: 110 minutes

Not Rated; violence, profanity, smoking.

With: Stephen Dorff, Abdallah El Akal

In Arabic and Hebrew (with subtitles), and English.

While NPR's Melissa Block is in Brazil, we'll be showcasing the work of several Brazilian writers. On Tuesday we heard Tatiana Salem Levy's love letter to Rio. Now we turn to 20-year-old Yasmin Thayn, who discovered her love for writing as a teenager when she participated in a local program aimed at cultivating artistic talent in low-income communities.

Her story, "Mc K-Bela," was published in the Brazilian literary magazine Flupp Pensa — which features the work of writers from favelas and what Thayn calls "the people's neighborhoods." In the story, Thayn, who is black, writes about her decision to cut off her chemically-straightened hair, and let it go natural.

Strong pleas echoed over in Africa, sending me, with the generosity of affirmation and self-esteem, two beautiful figures who fortified my weak strands, hidden in despair: Carla Cris Campos, who put her light hands on my head, and Bruno F. Duarte, who made me look in the mirror with confidence. Bruno made me realize that hair is the mark that registers our encounters with the world and with life.

I cannot understand how I missed the news that Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones are about to open as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, but this charming list of past pairings makes me want to watch the play ... a lot. (David Tennant and Catherine Tate! I didn't know that, because I don't hang out on the particular message boards where it was undoubtedly the most important thing to happen to culture since Shakespeare himself.) [The Telegraph]

There's something about aging theaters that's just ... more poignant than other buildings, I think. A slideshow of those at risk of destruction is both a gorgeous thing and a sad thing. [The Guardian]

The ingredients: Michel Gondry, LCD Soundsystem, the NFL, working out, music with a beat, and Gillette. The result: cool. [The Hollywood Reporter]

There's nothing that gets your Thursday off to a good start quite like British baking gossip. Prominent cooking reality show lady likes premade frozen brownie traybakes! Which I think are ... pretty much frozen brownies! I learned a new word! For ... frozen brownies! [The Guardian]

Here does not come Honey Boux Boux: the French Senate approved a bill to ban beauty pageants for kids under 16. [Morning Edition]

The Canadian film world is getting more attention, and rightly so. Among other things, I saw several films in Toronto that were shot there and actually take place there, as opposed to all the films shot there that claim to be taking place in New York or wherever. Better to let Canada be Canada. [The New York Times]

As wackadoo internet theories go, the Grand Unified Theory Of Pixar is slightly less bonkers than "Ferris Bueller is a figment of Cameron's imagination" but slightly more bonkers than "It is totally unmistakably true that Tony Soprano died." [Slate]

Today in intriguing casting news: Bryan Cranston will play blacklisted and imprisoned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in an upcoming film. [Deadline via Vulture]

If anything, the salary negotiation news that came out today that Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch will now make $60,000 an episode tells me that they're still not being paid enough, considering the crazy money The Big Bang Theory is making and how much better it's been since their roles became more prominent. [E! Online]

Adam Pally is one of the many actors from the dearly missed Happy Endings who I'm dearly hoping does well in the future — including as a regular on The Mindy Project. [The Hollywood Reporter]

And finally, lest you think there is no Breaking Bad news today, it turns out that the final two episodes are set to be longer than usual — 75 minutes each. Not a huge surprise, but who can be against prolonging the suffering? [Vulture]

In a stinging response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's put-down of "American exceptionalism," Arizona Sen. John McCain told Russians Thursday that Putin "doesn't believe in you."

"He doesn't believe that human nature at liberty can rise above its weaknesses and build just, peaceful, prosperous societies," McCain writes in an op-ed posted by Pravda. "Or, at least, he doesn't believe Russians can. So he rules by using those weaknesses, by corruption, repression and violence. He rules for himself, not you."

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, is answering Putin's Sept. 11 op-ed in The New York Times.

In that piece, as we reported, Putin "made an unusual and direct appeal to the American people ... to reject President Obama's calls for possible use of force against Syria."

The Russian leader ended his message with this statement:

"My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional.' It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."

In a stinging response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's put-down of "American exceptionalism," Arizona Sen. John McCain told Russians Thursday that Putin "doesn't believe in you."

"He doesn't believe that human nature at liberty can rise above its weaknesses and build just, peaceful, prosperous societies," McCain writes in an op-ed posted by Pravda. "Or, at least, he doesn't believe Russians can. So he rules by using those weaknesses, by corruption, repression and violence. He rules for himself, not you."

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, is answering Putin's Sept. 11 op-ed in The New York Times.

In that piece, as we reported, Putin "made an unusual and direct appeal to the American people ... to reject President Obama's calls for possible use of force against Syria."

The Russian leader ended his message with this statement:

"My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional.' It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."

They never quite get over it.

Whenever there's a mass shooting, a tragedy that occurs with depressing frequency, survivors of earlier events have their own memories brought back vividly and horribly.

Kristina Anderson, one of dozens of people who was shot at Virginia Tech in 2007, now works across the river from Washington, D.C. When the news of the Navy Yard shootings there broke on Monday, her day melted into tears.

It's hard to feel safe when massacres can take place seemingly anywhere — a movie theater or school or even a government building that's supposedly secure.

"For me, it's pretty close to home," Anderson says. "Quickly, I start thinking about the families who are about to be called and the people who are in lockdown in the buildings. I can identify with the feeling of not knowing what's happening."

Not Just About Guns

As the news broke about Monday's shootings, residents of several previously traumatized communities — Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Tucson, Ariz.; Oak Creek, Wis. — were traveling to Washington to lobby Congress for broader background checks on gun sales.

"It brings you back to square A when you see something like what happened at the Navy Yard," Amardeep Kaleka, whose father was killed in the Sikh temple shootings in Oak Creek last year, told a local television station. "You just start to unravel at your core because everything you thought couldn't happen is happening."

The Navy Yard shootings came a week after much of the political media had run obituaries on gun-control efforts, given the recalls of two Colorado state senators who were ousted for having supported stricter gun laws.

"We can debate endlessly about gun issues, but frankly we might get nowhere on it," says Oak Creek Mayor Steve Scaffidi.

But he says something has to be done about recognizing "patterns of violence" in people who might be mentally unstable and potentially capable of going on a murderous rampage. Scaffidi says he and other mayors of towns that have experienced massacres are working on a set of proposals that they hope to present soon to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

"It's disappointing and discouraging that a country with as many great minds as we have can't lessen the impact of things like this," he says.

Bringing It All Back

Scaffidi says memories of the immediate aftermath of the killings in his town come flooding back after an event like the Navy Yard shootings.

"Obviously, being in Sandy Hook, there's heightened anxiety anytime there's news about a shooting," says Candice Bohr, executive director of Newtown Youth and Family Services, a mental health center.

Phones there have been ringing pretty consistently this week, she says. But there's nothing new about that. She notes that a number of teenagers have been killed recently in car accidents in the area.

"It could be anything," Bohr says. "It's not necessarily a mass shooting that triggers what people have anxiety about."

'Don't Have The Answers'

Survivors of such events are, for the most part, remarkably resilient. Art McDonnell says he's been able to create a "psychological safe zone," a part of his brain where he stores his memories and locks them away.

McDonnell, who is the mayor of Kirkwood, Mo., was serving on the city council of the St. Louis suburb in 2008, when a gunman entered the chamber at City Hall and began firing, killing McDonnell's predecessor, two colleagues on the council and three other individuals.

Almost any loud noise — a car crash, cannons shot off at historical re-enactments — can bring back memories of the shooting McDonnell experienced.

"It does come forward when you have incidents like this," McDonnell says. "It comes back to you like a quick flashback of everything that happened."

McDonnell belongs to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but he's not convinced that even ridding the country entirely of guns would end this kind of violence.

"It's not just the gun," he says. "How do we find a way to reach these individuals who perpetrate these horrible crimes? I don't have the answers. I wish I did."

A Renewed Call To Action

There's a danger of becoming inured. There have been so many mass shootings, McDonnell says, that there's a risk individuals and the media will shrug them off, as they already do with car crashes and individual killings in large cities.

Anderson, the former Virginia Tech student, says every successive mass shooting is horrific, but also offers a call to renew her commitment to do something to address the problem.

In her case, she cofounded a company called LiveSafe, developers of a personal safety mobile app that allows people to interact directly with law enforcement agencies.

"It keeps happening and you see more people being traumatized," she says. "History has shown if you push it away, it's only going to keep happening."

A city in northwest Spain issued a rather unusual lost-and-found notice this week:

FOUND: A lottery ticket bought more than a year ago, which entitles the owner to an unclaimed $6.3 million jackpot.

LOST: The ticket's owner.

The little plastic sample tray is empty, but the man behind the counter quickly replaces it with one full of a mooncake cut into teeny-tiny pieces. I grab a piece (okay, a couple) before the jostling crowd behind me can get to it. Samples are, after all, the only reason to visit Costco in the middle of a Sunday. There's a large display of square tins, each decorated with a painting of a Chinese man. I take one back to my mother and ask "Can we get one?"

The mooncake is traditionally only served during the Mid-Autumn Festival, on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. They're shared among family and friends as a symbol of wishing prosperity in the coming year. They'll need it, too. A box of four mooncakes generally costs anywhere between $10 and $50 (though more expensive brands can certainly be found), and my parents are usually willing to splurge on the higher end of that scale for their favorite brand.

At home, my family cuts the mooncake into wedges and we eat crowded around the kitchen counter or bent over the sink to avoid spilling crumbs. I've been eating these pastries since I can remember, and I start craving them right at the cusp of fall, as sunsets get earlier and the nights grow colder.

Mooncakes are about the size and heft of a hockey puck, with a thin crust. A dense rich filling of sweetened lotus seed paste envelops the yolk from a salted duck egg. The salty, crunchy yolk crumbles when cut and contrasts with the almost cloyingly sweetness around it. The yolk isn't my favorite part, so my mother gets most of what ends up in my portion. Mooncake fillings are almost always sweet and can be made with different nuts, seeds, or beans. There's a type known as "five kernel mooncake" which, according to my father, is the Chinese fruitcake that's often gifted and re-gifted to unfortunate recipients.

It's a pretty esoteric food (describing them to friends almost always results in furrowed brows and exclamations of "What's lotus root? Wait, a duck egg?!"), and they might seem completely out of place at an American warehouse chain. But I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, one of the United States' largest and fastest growing ethnoburbs, where many of the cities are majority Asian.

In my particular city, Asian grocery stores and businesses exist next to 7-Elevens and McDonalds on streets with names like "Las Tunas" and Del Mar." Instead of a Starbucks on every corner, we had boba – that's a Taiwanese tea drink which has chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom. (The song "Asians Eat Weird Things" was filmed in the Asian supermarket where my family shopped weekly. It's a point of pride that I can say I've eaten most of the featured foods.) It made such sense that Costco — the place where you could find almost anything — would also have mooncakes that it was almost unsurprising to suddenly find them among the granola bars and trail mix.

Enlarge image i

The nation's health spending will bump up next year as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage to more Americans, and then will grow by an average of 6.2 percent a year over the next decade, according to projections by government actuaries.

That estimate is lower than the typical annual increases before the recession hit. Still, the actuaries forecast that in a decade the health care segment of the nation's economy will be larger than it is today, amounting to a fifth of the gross domestic product in 2022.

They attributed that to the rising number of baby boomers moving into Medicare and the expectation that the economy will improve, according to a study published online in the journal Health Affairs.

The actuaries were not persuaded that cost-cutting experiments in the health law will have an impact. Neither were they convinced that new insurer procedures that change the way doctors, hospitals and others provide services will help. They assumed "modest" savings from those changes from the law.

"It's a little early to tell how substantial those savings will be in the longer term," Gigi Cuckler, an actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and lead author of the report, told reporters Wednesday.

Still, the Obama administration enthusiastically greeted the report. "We are on the right track to controlling health care costs, thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act," CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement. "More Americans will have the ability to get the health care they need, and that is a good thing. We have identified several areas where our reforms to control costs are making progress and we must build on those efforts in the years ahead."

But not everyone agrees. "I think it's quite clear from the study that the notion that the health care law fundamentally bends costs is just totally unsupported by facts," James Capretta, a budget adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview. "Something more fundamental needs to be done to slow costs than what is in the health law."

Shots - Health News

The 'Hard To Change' Legacy Of Medicare Payments

If you are trying to buy a home, you just got good news: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it is not going to try to drive up long-term interest rates just yet.

Stock investors are happy for you. They like cheap mortgages too because a robust housing market creates jobs. To celebrate, they bought more shares, sending the Dow Jones industrial average up 147.21 to an all-time high of 15,676.94.

Unfortunately, if you are a retiree who wants a higher return on your savings in the bank — well, sorry. The interest paid to you will be meager.

In fact, the Fed's surprising announcement on interest rates created lots of winners and losers. But before sorting them out, let's first look at what happened:

Policymakers for the central bank met this week and concluded that the U.S. economy is still weak enough to need their help. They said they recognize that the country has seen "improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions," but they added that the Fed still has to tamp down interest rates as officials "await more evidence that progress will be sustained."

Their decision stunned most economists, who believed Fed officials were ready to switch gears away from the long-standing policy of restraining interest rates. The low-rate strategy has been in place throughout the Great Recession and slow recovery.

But many experts say it's time for a change. They think the economy is strong enough to allow interest rates to start to return to historical norms.

Back in June, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself suggested such a switch would come by year's end.

But since then, interest rates on mortgages have been ratcheting up on their own — in anticipation of the coming change. Ditto for interest rates on Treasury securities.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, Bernanke and his fellow policymakers sprang their surprise. After taking a harder look at the most recent information, they decided not to change course after all.

They are worried that congressional Republicans and the White House might have another big showdown this fall, which could rattle markets. And Fed officials don't like seeing the latest higher mortgage rates, which have been scaring off some potential homebuyers.

"The tightening of financial conditions observed in recent months, if sustained, could slow the pace of improvement in the economy and the labor market," the Fed officials said in a statement.

So for the time being, the Fed will not back off its strategy of buying $85 billion a month in bonds to push down on long-term interest rates. It could still taper those purchases by year's end if the policymakers think conditions have changed, but for now, the low-rate strategy is firmly in place.

As a result, these groups cheered the Fed announcement:

Homebuyers and sellers. Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates, which jumped from about 3.5 percent in April to around 4.5 percent recently, are more likely now to halt their upward march. That may prompt more people to get into the homebuying market.

Stock owners. Shares become more valuable when investors can't get much of a return from interest payments on insured securities. So stock prices shot to record highs as of Wednesday's close.

Gold owners. The price of gold surged more than 4 percent to about $1,360. The hike came because gold gets more attractive in times of economic uncertainty and inflation. Some people believe the Fed's current policies eventually will lead to inflation.

And these groups found little to celebrate:

Gas guzzlers. The price of oil — just like gold — rose on inflation fears. By late afternoon, U.S. crude had risen more than $3 per barrel to a high of $108.49.

Conservative savers. If you like to keep your money in very safe securities, your interest income will stay depressed. For example, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 2.71 percent after the announcement, down from 2.90 percent.

Job seekers. Not that you needed anyone to tell you this, but the Fed said the economic outlook is not great. It sees growth of 2.3 percent at best this year, down from its earlier forecast of growth as strong as 2.6 percent.

Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was among several political prisoners released by Tehran on Wednesday, just days ahead of a visit by Iran's newly elected moderate president to the United Nations in New York.

Sotoudeh, who had been held since 2010, was one of eight women and three men released, according to the BBC. Reformist politician Mohsen Aminzadeh was also among the prisoners freed.

"I am free from prison today, and I am glad, but I am worried for my friends in prison," Sotoudeh told CNN by telephone from Tehran, adding that she was "free forever," not on temporary release, and planned to resume her legal career.

In January, Sotoudeh, 50, was temporarily released, but apparently detained again later. She first ran into trouble with Iranian authorities for defending political activists and journalists, and "highlighting the execution of juveniles in her country," The Guardian reports.

Sotoudeh had gone on hunger strikes in 2010 and 2012 to protest the conditions of her detention.

Aminzadeh served under President Mohammad Khatami as deputy foreign minister from 1997-2005. Later, he headed the opposition coalition and was arrested amid protests in 2009 over alleged vote rigging by then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In July, Aminzadeh, who suffers from heart disease, was hospitalized.

Reuters says that former Deputy Minister of Commerce Feizollah Arabsorkhi was also released.

The news agency said the number of prisoners released on Wednesday was not immediately clear, but the BBC put the number at 11.

As House Republican leaders acquiesce to their Tea Party faction and tie a government spending renewal to the defunding of Obamacare, don't look for much cheering from the Senate minority leader's office.

That's because what had largely been House Speaker John Boehner's problem now becomes Kentucky GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell's problem — at least for the next steps of this drama.

The federal government will shut down Oct. 1 unless Congress passes another continuing resolution authorizing further spending. Dozens of Republican lawmakers — led by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, and helped by the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political committee founded by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — insist that any such resolution also take away money to implement President Obama's signature health care law.

After initially resisting such a plan, Boehner agreed Wednesday to package the two ideas together and send them to the Democratic-controlled Senate — where it's all but certain to die.

What are the chances that McConnell will be able to pull together the needed votes to prevent Democrats from stripping the Obamacare language out and sending the bill back to the House? Given that a number of Republican senators have already called the linkage strategy a bad idea, probably not so good.

Remember, when Cruz and Lee were circulating their letter promising not to vote for any spending bill that did not "defund" Obamacare, McConnell would not sign it.

All of which means that if and when the Senate eventually passes a "clean CR" back to the House, it could be framed as a failure by McConnell to be an effective enough or conservative enough leader by someone so inclined to see it that way. Someone like, say, Matt Bevin, McConnell's challenger in next year's Republican primary election.

S.V. Dte is the congressional editor on NPR's Washington Desk.

Actor Dean Norris took to Twitter the other day. "Missed last night's Breaking Bad," he wrote. "Heard it was intense. Filmed several alternate versions. Can't wait to see what they used."

Please note: There's a spoiler farther down this page.

Norris plays — played? — a drug enforcement agent on the acclaimed AMC series, which wraps for good after just two more episodes. His character's brother-in-law is a chemistry teacher with cancer who, at the series' outset, gets into cooking methamphetamine to pay for his treatment.

But even as Breaking Bad began to wind down, Norris kept busy on Under the Dome, a summer sci-fi show based on a Stephen King novel. His character, Big Jim Rennie, is a small-town politician who takes control after the town is cut off — literally, by a giant dome that suddenly materializes above it — from the outside world.

Norris tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that "having played a morally constrained character for five to six years with Hank, it's nice to play a character who's less morally constrained [on Under the Dome]."

During the 2012 presidential race, Republican Mitt Romney was mocked by President Obama during a debate for calling Russia — and not al-Qaida — the "number one geopolitical foe" of the United States.

But a new Gallup poll released Wednesday shows perhaps some belated support for the Romney view: More Americans see Russia as unfriendly or an enemy — as opposed to friendly or an ally — for the first time since at least 1999.

According to the survey, 50 percent of Americans consider Russia unfriendly or an enemy, while 44 percent think the country is friendly or an ally. (Specifically, 34 percent called it unfriendly, 16 percent an enemy, 31 percent friendly, and 13 percent an ally.)

The last time Gallup posed this question, in 2006, 73 percent of those polled called Russia friendly or an ally, compared to just 20 percent who saw it as unfriendly or an enemy.

Gallup's most recent poll was conducted Sunday and Monday, not long after Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op-ed in The New York Times critical of Obama's foreign policy approach, his speech to the American people on Syria, and the idea of American exceptionalism.

Putin continues to stand by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, and he recently granted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum in Russia. But he also assisted the U.S. in reaching a deal to require Syria to surrender its chemical weapon stockpile.

The poll found that 54 percent of Americans view Putin unfavorably, and 19 percent hold a favorable view. The last time Gallup asked Americans their opinion of Putin — 10 years ago — 38 percent had a favorable impression of the Russian leader, with 28 percent unfavorable.

In the most recent poll, 72 percent of respondents said they approved of the Syria plan that Putin helped broker, which calls for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons to an international body. Eighteen percent of Americans disapproved of the deal, which interrupted Obama's call for congressional approval for a military strike on Syria

During the 2012 presidential race, Republican Mitt Romney was mocked by President Obama during a debate for calling Russia — and not al-Qaida — the "number one geopolitical foe" of the United States.

But a new Gallup poll released Wednesday shows perhaps some belated support for the Romney view: More Americans see Russia as unfriendly or an enemy — as opposed to friendly or an ally — for the first time since at least 1999.

According to the survey, 50 percent of Americans consider Russia unfriendly or an enemy, while 44 percent think the country is friendly or an ally. (Specifically, 34 percent called it unfriendly, 16 percent an enemy, 31 percent friendly, and 13 percent an ally.)

The last time Gallup posed this question, in 2006, 73 percent of those polled called Russia friendly or an ally, compared to just 20 percent who saw it as unfriendly or an enemy.

Gallup's most recent poll was conducted Sunday and Monday, not long after Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op-ed in The New York Times critical of Obama's foreign policy approach, his speech to the American people on Syria, and the idea of American exceptionalism.

Putin continues to stand by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, and he recently granted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum in Russia. But he also assisted the U.S. in reaching a deal to require Syria to surrender its chemical weapon stockpile.

The poll found that 54 percent of Americans view Putin unfavorably, and 19 percent hold a favorable view. The last time Gallup asked Americans their opinion of Putin — 10 years ago — 38 percent had a favorable impression of the Russian leader, with 28 percent unfavorable.

In the most recent poll, 72 percent of respondents said they approved of the Syria plan that Putin helped broker, which calls for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons to an international body. Eighteen percent of Americans disapproved of the deal, which interrupted Obama's call for congressional approval for a military strike on Syria

If you are trying to buy a home, you just got good news: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it is not going to try to drive up long-term interest rates just yet.

Stock investors are happy for you. They like cheap mortgages too because a robust housing market creates jobs. To celebrate, they bought more shares, sending the Dow Jones industrial average up 147.21 to an all-time high of 15,676.94.

Unfortunately, if you are a retiree who wants a higher return on your savings in the bank — well, sorry. The interest paid to you will be meager.

In fact, the Fed's surprising announcement on interest rates created lots of winners and losers. But before sorting them out, let's first look at what happened:

Policymakers for the central bank met this week and concluded that the U.S. economy is still weak enough to need their help. They said they recognize that the country has seen "improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions," but they added that the Fed still has to tamp down interest rates as officials "await more evidence that progress will be sustained."

Their decision stunned most economists, who believed Fed officials were ready to switch gears away from the long-standing policy of restraining interest rates. The low-rate strategy has been in place throughout the Great Recession and slow recovery.

But many experts say it's time for a change. They think the economy is strong enough to allow interest rates to start to return to historical norms.

Back in June, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself suggested such a switch would come by year's end.

But since then, interest rates on mortgages have been ratcheting up on their own — in anticipation of the coming change. Ditto for interest rates on Treasury securities.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, Bernanke and his fellow policymakers sprang their surprise. After taking a harder look at the most recent information, they decided not to change course after all.

They are worried that congressional Republicans and the White House might have another big showdown this fall, which could rattle markets. And Fed officials don't like seeing the latest higher mortgage rates, which have been scaring off some potential homebuyers.

"The tightening of financial conditions observed in recent months, if sustained, could slow the pace of improvement in the economy and the labor market," the Fed officials said in a statement.

So for the time being, the Fed will not back off its strategy of buying $85 billion a month in bonds to push down on long-term interest rates. It could still taper those purchases by year's end if the policymakers think conditions have changed, but for now, the low-rate strategy is firmly in place.

As a result, these groups cheered the Fed announcement:

Homebuyers and sellers. Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates, which jumped from about 3.5 percent in April to around 4.5 percent recently, are more likely now to halt their upward march. That may prompt more people to get into the homebuying market.

Stock owners. Shares become more valuable when investors can't get much of a return from interest payments on insured securities. So stock prices shot to record highs as of Wednesday's close.

Gold owners. The price of gold surged more than 4 percent to about $1,360. The hike came because gold gets more attractive in times of economic uncertainty and inflation. Some people believe the Fed's current policies eventually will lead to inflation.

And these groups found little to celebrate:

Gas guzzlers. The price of oil — just like gold — rose on inflation fears. By late afternoon, U.S. crude had risen more than $3 per barrel to a high of $108.49.

Conservative savers. If you like to keep your money in very safe securities, your interest income will stay depressed. For example, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 2.71 percent after the announcement, down from 2.90 percent.

Job seekers. Not that you needed anyone to tell you this, but the Fed said the economic outlook is not great. It sees growth of 2.3 percent at best this year, down from its earlier forecast of growth as strong as 2.6 percent.

Americans who count themselves among the "nones" — as in atheists, agnostics or those of no definite religious affiliation — have launched a new political action committee.

The goal? To support the election of like-minded lawmakers or, at a minimum, candidates committed to upholding the constitutional separation between church and state.

"The Freethought Equality Fund will work to elect the nones... in addition to those who will work for our rights so we can finally have the representation in Congress we deserve," said Maggie Ardiente of the American Humanist Association, at a Washington news conference Wednesday where the new PAC was rolled out.

Besides giving the growing percentage of Americans who identify as "nones" an opportunity to elect more candidate who share their values, the new political action committee's creators hope it will help stiffen the backbones of lawmakers who they believe are too afraid to openly state their skepticism and doubts about the existence of a divine author of the universe.

"We already know of more than two dozen closeted atheists serving in Congress today." Ardiente said. "The fact that they're in the closet about their non-belief says a lot about why this PAC is greatly needed. The time to come out is now and the Freethought Equality Fund will help make it happen."

Humanists believe cultural trends are ever more favoring them. The percentage of Americans identifying as non-religious has grown to about 20 percent of the population.

Of course, the flipside is that the vast majority of Americans still subscribe to religion. Despite setbacks, like the ban on prayer in public-school classrooms or the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision in which a federal court determined that intelligent design could not be taught as science to public-school students, those who like their government with a lot of religion have had many victories. Among them: getting "In God We Trust" added to U.S. currency and the wall of the House chamber, and "under God" attached to the Pledge of Allegiance.

The uphill slog to elect a more secular Congress has to start somewhere, so the new PAC's creators have chosen to begin by supporting five congressional candidates. The group includes two sitting House members: Representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Rush Holt of New Jersey, both Democrats.

While their first endorsement list has a decidedly Democratic Party tilt, the PAC's organizers hope to support Republicans, too.

"We're actively looking for all candidates regardless of their affiliation who will protect the separation of church and state and defend civil liberties," said the ironically named Bishop McNeil, the Freethought Equality Fund PAC's coordinator. "[But] based on our 2013 scorecard that we just completed, there are currently no Republicans in the House that would fit that."

Health, cultural assimilation and language are some of the top concerns on the minds of a group of Latino parents, social media influencers and regular contributors to Tell Me More. Health was something first lady Michelle Obama highlighted in July, when she addressed the National Council of La Raza, the nation's leading Hispanic civil rights organization.

"Right now, nearly 40 percent of Hispanic children in this country are overweight or obese," the first lady said. "Nearly 50 percent are on track to develop diabetes, a disease that is already far too common in so many of our communities. So, while food might be love, the truth is that we are 'loving' ourselves and our kids to death."

A National Council of La Raza study, America's Future: Latino Child Well-Being in Numbers and Trends, published in 2010, found that "children's success in school is ... closely tied to their parents' ability to speak English. Limited English proficiency can limit job opportunities, earnings, access to health care, and the ability of parents to interact with the school system or help their children with homework." Language proficiency in English is a particular challenge to some recent and first-generation immigrants. But for families who have been in the United States for many generations, instilling a sense of connection to their heritage through language can be a challenge as well.

Host Michel Martin invited a group of Latino parents to join a special edition of Tell Me More's weekly parenting round table, and here are some of the thoughts they shared.

Resa Barillas, mother of a 2-year-old son, on the difficulty of choosing the right foods

"With other Latinos and the culture here in America as a whole, really terrible foods are so cheap and easily available and convenient, that it's easy to choose those kind of foods, instead of whole, nutritious foods that are more nourishing and better for our bodies."

Aracely Panameno, mother of a 24-year-old daughter, on why she felt it was important for her daughter to learn Spanish

"It was very important for me for her to learn Spanish, and because I knew that she was in a societal environment where the pressure was going to be anglophone, I insisted that she be bilingual."

NPR reporter Felix Contreras, dad of two boys aged 9 and 12, on whether he has had "the talk" that many black parents feel they have to have with their sons

"Honestly, that never crossed my mind to have that kind of talk. Now certainly, with my oldest, he's going to be 13 next month ... he's very socially aware of inequities and the way things work in the world. And he's conscious of his own Latino and Italian heritage. ... So he sees things a little differently than I think his peers do. So he's conscious and aware of how people can treat people differently sometimes."

For more photos from the live show, look at the album on Tell Me More's Facebook page.

After 117 years, sports has finally made it to the big time, when, starting next Tuesday, a sports company will be included in the Dow Jones averages.

The Dow Jones, of course, has always preferred very serious corporations –– your banks, your automotives, your insurers. OK, the movies were allowed in 1932 with the inclusion of Loews, and Walt Disney was brought on board in 1991, but sports was never considered substantial enough for an industrial average until now when Nike has been ordained.

Yes, Dow Jones has the swoosh.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

For the past few weeks, the culinary arts students at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., have been working with some less-than-seasoned sous chefs.

One of them, Clinton Piper, may look like a pro in his chef's whites, but he's struggling to work a whisk through some batter. "I know nothing about baking," he says.

Luckily, he's got other qualifications. Piper is a fourth-year medical student at Tulane University School of Medicine, and he's here for a short rotation through a new program designed to educate med students and chefs-in-training about nutrition.

The Salt

No Bitter Pill: Doctors Prescribe Fruits And Veggies

On Saturday, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was surveying scenes of destruction caused by massive flooding in the Boulder area. He found a dramatic way to help.

His helicopter stopped to pick up two groups of people who had been stranded by the storms.

The Democrat was quick to applaud GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, who was riding with him, for spotting the residents, as well as his pilot for having the skill to make pinpoint landings.

But Hickenlooper was still the one who got the credit in the headlines.

It's always this way with disasters. People don't expect governors to personally lead rescue missions, but they do expect them to take charge and rise rhetorically to the occasion.

"It's sort of like a leadership pop quiz," says Andrew Reeves, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied disaster relief politics.

When political executives — governors, mayors, presidents — rise to the occasion, they're heroes. If they don't, it can imperil both their reelection chances and their broader agenda.

Christie Comes Through

In 2010, Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was lambasted for staying at Disney World for a family holiday trip after the state had been hit by a massive snowstorm.

That's all forgotten now. Christie has won plaudits not only for his response to Superstorm Sandy last year, but for a boardwalk fire last week.

To deal with the latter, he canceled another Florida trip scheduled to celebrate his wife's 50th birthday. On Tuesday, the Newark Star-Ledger called him the "master of disaster," saying he "thrived amid chaos."

"One of the things Christie has been masterful at is having it appear that everything is being done by him," says John Weingart, a political scientist at Rutgers University. "He pulls it off and seems to be knowledgeable and in charge."

Governors TCB

People know that politicians aren't responsible for fires and floods, Reeves says, but when disaster strikes there's a natural tendency to punish the incumbent for things going wrong.

Governors can erase those bad feelings through their performance — offering words of comfort and resilience, directing personnel and equipment where they're most needed, securing federal funds.

Hickenlooper has been doing all these things in Colorado, saying that while roads and bridges may be broken, "our spirits aren't broken," and insisting that $5 million in federal funds is just a down payment.

A stalwart response can burnish a politician's image for the rest of his tenure. That certainly was the case in Florida, where former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush's hurricane preparation and response efforts enhanced his image and popularity. And that has been true for Christie, who has not shied from using imagery of Sandy's aftermath in his reelection campaign this fall.

His Democratic opponent, Barbara Buono, in fact, complains that the state's recovery ad campaign — "Stronger Than the Storm" — has provided an unfair boost to Christie's reelection effort.

Some Have Blown It

Most governors didn't run for office thinking about how they would handle a natural disaster. They may have been more concerned about education or tax cuts or their own career advancement.

Once in office, it's easy to forget about the possibility of an emergency when day-to-day burdens are so time-consuming. But they have to be ready to step up to the challenges presented by a crisis, or forever be seen as having missed the moment.

"I've thought long and hard about Katrina — you know, could I have done something differently," George W. Bush said during his last press conference as president, referring to his administration's much-criticized hurricane response in New Orleans in 2005.

A number of mayors have been bedeviled politically when their cities were snarled by snowstorms. During his congressional reelection campaign last fall, Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island was still being criticized by his opponent for his handling of a snowstorm as mayor of Providence five years earlier.

Other mayors have lost their reelection campaigns largely due to their handling of snowstorms, perhaps still most famously Michael Bilandic of Chicago, back in 1979.

"Bilandic was the ultimate example of a very fine man, a very bright man, who was overwhelmed by the job and got hit by the snow and was unprepared," says Paul Green, a longtime observer of Chicago politics at Roosevelt University. "When someone gets to executive office, you've got to step up and you can't hide."

Responders at the Veterans Crisis Line work to help veterans through their darkest hours. The Department of Veterans Affairs runs the hotline, the only national line dedicated to helping veterans in crisis.

A report in February was the most comprehensive to date from the VA on veterans and suicide. As of that publication, the Crisis Line had made approximately 26,000 rescues of actively suicidal veterans.

Four hotline employees share their experiences with StoryCorps for its Military Voices Initiative.

"I have post-traumatic stress disorder from my years of deployment in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And when I came to the hotline, when a vet said they were having a flashback, I knew exactly what they were talking about.

"I remember a young gentleman, he was in the middle of a flashback, and had boarded himself inside his living room. He had three young children — they were sleeping upstairs. I had heard in the background that something had clicked, and I asked him if he had a weapon. He said he did. He was really anxious and incoherent, but, you know, after a little bit of finagling around, he did agree to attend treatment.

"I remember, after that phone call, being a little jerky and nervous — going outside, smoking a couple of cigarettes. And then just coming back in and doing my job again."

Nelson Peck, 66, trainer and administrative support

"The hotline by far is the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. I was a combat veteran with the United States Marines in Vietnam. I had PTSD as well, and what I started to realize was my PTSD was triggered by survivor guilt. I never understood why I survived. And being with the hotline has really given me the answer. I was meant to survive to do this, so other veterans could survive."

Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Yasmina Guerda.

Armed drones have become a prominent feature of U.S. counterterrorism efforts around the globe. The unmanned aerial vehicles are regularly used to surveil and strike targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and are now being used in similar efforts in Yemen and Somalia.

Some argue that drones are highly effective tools in conflict situations. Drones can conduct long-term surveillance, and when combined with other forms of intelligence, supporters argue, can identify individual targets with a high degree of precision, thereby minimizing harm to civilians. And, because they are unmanned, they can be controlled from great distances, posing little physical risk to their American operators.

More From The Debate

That's the reasoning behind the Fox ads promoting Dads, which premieres Tuesday night. (Short version: Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green as two guys who run a videogame company and deal with their embarrassing dads, played by Martin Mull and Peter Riegert.)

The Fox promo crows about the reviews that point out that the show is kinda racist (it's also kinda sexist, though that's gotten considerably less play). And the reason Fox is pushing that angle is that that's all there is. There's genuinely no reason to watch this show other than to be titillated with the idea that you're watching something naughty that offends other people. The seductive pitch here is that other people are stodgy and lame, but that you, however, are so cool, so modern, so down, so unsafe, so bad-ass, so beyond political correctness that you will look at two white dudes making their Asian employee do a "sexy Asian schoolgirl" routine and think, "See, I can take it. Why? Because I'm pretty edgy. I'm pretty alternative."

Honestly, if you don't think of it as controversial, Dads is just recycled from a gazillion other shows about how funny it is when old people walk around naked, use the bathroom, or otherwise act embarrassing. If it weren't attached to Seth MacFarlane's name as executive producer and it didn't have jokes about Asians and Jews and Latinas and you saw it out of context, you'd assume it was a tentative foray into comedy by some obscure, underfunded basic cable channel that's never made scripted television before. Or maybe a basic cable channel run by a sturdy consumer brand without an actual creative arm.

The non-racist version of Dads, relying on the actual quality of the jokes, would be what you'd expect to see from, say, the first comedy produced in-house by Frito-Lay, where the sons and the dads solve their problems over a big bag of Tostitos.

So if you don't want to fret over the idea that Dads is offensive, then don't. But do me a favor: don't give it extra points for the fact that other people think it's offensive. Don't tee-hee over putting one over on people who don't like racist jokes. If you don't want to avoid it because of how it treats Asians, Latinas, Jews, or Puerto Ricans, then don't watch it for that reason. Walk up to it with no preconceived notions, don't assume watching it is a rebellious act, and see whether the jokes are of the quality you expect from the things on which you spend your time.

(Spoiler alert: they are not.)

There's news this week that shipbuilder STX Finland will close what it describes as "the world's leading ferry builder," a yard where the company also built small cruise ships, ice breakers and naval craft.

The company blamed economic conditions for the closure of the Rauma Shipyard. Work from there will be shifted to the company's facility in Turku. About 700 people will lose their jobs.

"The anticipated volume of future demand is not enough to sustain two shipyards at STX Finland," the company said in a statement. "The Turku Shipyard is able to build all types of vessels. The restructuring will not limit the company's offering or reduce the volume of its operations."

A Global Problem

The troubles at STX Finland mirror much of what's happening in the global shipbuilding industry.

The company is a subsidiary of South Korea's STX Pan Ocean, which itself filed for bankruptcy in June. At the time, the company said a "combination of a sharp decline in freight rates, a delayed industry recovery, oversupply of ships due to an increased production at Chinese shipyards and higher fuel costs drove up debt and squeezed margins."

The problems aren't confined to South Korea, the world's second-largest shipbuilder.

Quartz reported in July about the difficulties faced by China's Rongsheng Heavy Industries, China's largest private shipbuilder. Here's more:

"China's shipbuilding industry as a whole is suffering a divergence of supply and demand— new orders fell 23% at the end of May from a year earlier and the ships that are being sold have fallen in price. To compound problems further, an ongoing liquidity crisis has diminished access to loans, squeezing shipbuilders even more."

There's news this week that shipbuilder STX Finland will close what it describes as "the world's leading ferry builder," a yard where the company also built small cruise ships, ice breakers and naval craft.

The company blamed economic conditions for the closure of the Rauma Shipyard. Work from there will be shifted to the company's facility in Turku. About 700 people will lose their jobs.

"The anticipated volume of future demand is not enough to sustain two shipyards at STX Finland," the company said in a statement. "The Turku Shipyard is able to build all types of vessels. The restructuring will not limit the company's offering or reduce the volume of its operations."

A Global Problem

The troubles at STX Finland mirror much of what's happening in the global shipbuilding industry.

The company is a subsidiary of South Korea's STX Pan Ocean, which itself filed for bankruptcy in June. At the time, the company said a "combination of a sharp decline in freight rates, a delayed industry recovery, oversupply of ships due to an increased production at Chinese shipyards and higher fuel costs drove up debt and squeezed margins."

The problems aren't confined to South Korea, the world's second-largest shipbuilder.

Quartz reported in July about the difficulties faced by China's Rongsheng Heavy Industries, China's largest private shipbuilder. Here's more:

"China's shipbuilding industry as a whole is suffering a divergence of supply and demand— new orders fell 23% at the end of May from a year earlier and the ships that are being sold have fallen in price. To compound problems further, an ongoing liquidity crisis has diminished access to loans, squeezing shipbuilders even more."

For sportswriters the fattest target has always been the America's Cup. It's too easy. It's like all those political writers who make fun of vice presidents and think they're being original. Sportswriters have been going har-de-har-har about the America's Cup even long before one of their wags said it was like watching paint dry. Or like watching grass grow. One or the other. Maybe both.

But while America's Cup yachts can gracefully skim above water at better than 40 mph, Frank Deford says when he looks back at the seven seas in 2013 he'll remember 64-year-old Diana Nyad "plowing, all by herself, freestyle, through 100 miles of surf from Havana to Key West."

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

Authorities are set to slap banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a massive fine over the bank's huge trading losses in London last year, confirms NPR's Jim Zarroli.

Though details of the deal are still pending, several reports put the amount at more than $700 million. It comes on the heels of the bank's having recently paid $410 million to settle charges that it manipulated energy markets.

The current settlement revolves around an investigation from across the federal government and the globe over trading losses, first announced in May, that have ballooned to more than $6 billion. Regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency allege that JPMorgan had inadequate risk controls in place when traders made complex derivative bets that ultimately led to the losses.

Last month, two traders were charged with covering up the losses. The U.K. trader who placed the bad bets, Bruno Iksil, became known as the "London Whale" because of the large size of the trades he made for the company's London office. Iksil is now cooperating with authorities and is likely to avoid prosecution.

The settlement will include fines from the SEC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial regulator, will impose its own fine. And even then, JPMorgan most likely won't see closure on this issue. The New York Times has more:

"The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that oversees the market in which the losses occurred, has balked at joining the broader settlement announcement, the people briefed on the matter said. The agency has focused on whether JPMorgan, by amassing an outsize trading position so large that it distorted the market for financial contracts known as derivatives, 'manipulated' that market.

"By potentially striking out on its own, the C.F.T.C. has frustrated JPMorgan's efforts to move beyond the trading losses, the people briefed on the matter said. Those efforts to settle were born out of a recent federal crackdown on the bank."

Authorities are set to slap banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a massive fine over the bank's huge trading losses in London last year, confirms NPR's Jim Zarroli.

Though details of the deal are still pending, several reports put the amount at more than $700 million. It comes on the heels of the bank's having recently paid $410 million to settle charges that it manipulated energy markets.

The current settlement revolves around an investigation from across the federal government and the globe over trading losses, first announced in May, that have ballooned to more than $6 billion. Regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency allege that JPMorgan had inadequate risk controls in place when traders made complex derivative bets that ultimately led to the losses.

Last month, two traders were charged with covering up the losses. The U.K. trader who placed the bad bets, Bruno Iksil, became known as the "London Whale" because of the large size of the trades he made for the company's London office. Iksil is now cooperating with authorities and is likely to avoid prosecution.

The settlement will include fines from the SEC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial regulator, will impose its own fine. And even then, JPMorgan most likely won't see closure on this issue. The New York Times has more:

"The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that oversees the market in which the losses occurred, has balked at joining the broader settlement announcement, the people briefed on the matter said. The agency has focused on whether JPMorgan, by amassing an outsize trading position so large that it distorted the market for financial contracts known as derivatives, 'manipulated' that market.

"By potentially striking out on its own, the C.F.T.C. has frustrated JPMorgan's efforts to move beyond the trading losses, the people briefed on the matter said. Those efforts to settle were born out of a recent federal crackdown on the bank."

New York City Democrats breathed a sigh of relief late Monday morning when Bill Thompson conceded the mayoral primary to Bill de Blasio, avoiding what could have been a nasty intraparty battle.

Thompson, 60, made his announcement on the steps of New York's City Hall in lower Manhattan, flanked by de Blasio and New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

"I am proud to stand here today and support Bill de Blasio to be the next mayor of the city of New York," said Thompson, a centrist former city comptroller who finished a distant second in last week's nine-candidate primary.

Said de Blasio, 52, the city's public advocate: "There is nothing more beautiful than Democratic unity, and thank you for it."

He will face Republican nominee Joseph Lhota, former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, in the November race. De Blasio is attempting to become the first Democrat in two decades to win the mayor's office — in a city where registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, and where President Obama captured 81 percent of the vote in his 2012 re-election campaign.

Republican turned independent Michael Bloomberg is finishing up his third term, and has said he won't endorse a candidate to succeed him. Republican Rudy Giuliani served two terms prior to Bloomberg.

Thompson, who was the only African-American candidate in the primary, was making his second run for the mayoral nomination. He declined to immediately concede the race because de Blasio appeared to barely reach the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Thompson's decision triggered a Board of Elections review of voting machines over the weekend, and a recount that began Monday of about 78,000 paper ballots.

After Thompson's concession, de Blasio said that "if the people choose me, it will be my honor to turn to Bill regularly" for counsel.

But he quickly pivoted to Cuomo, standing directly behind him, as someone who "all of us Democrats have turned to for leadership, for guidance."

Cuomo, who had picked Lhota to run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — which he left at the end of 2012 — said he would endorse de Blasio and praised Thompson as "a man of substance," who chose to take a step back instead of forward for the betterment of the Democratic Party.

Authorities are set to slap banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a massive fine over the bank's huge trading losses in London last year, confirms NPR's Jim Zarroli.

Though details of the deal are still pending, several reports put the amount at more than $700 million. It comes on the heels of the bank's having recently paid $410 million to settle charges that it manipulated energy markets.

The current settlement revolves around an investigation from across the federal government and the globe over trading losses, first announced in May, that have ballooned to more than $6 billion. Regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency allege that JPMorgan had inadequate risk controls in place when traders made complex derivative bets that ultimately led to the losses.

Last month, two traders were charged with covering up the losses. The U.K. trader who placed the bad bets, Bruno Iksil, became known as the "London Whale" because of the large size of the trades he made for the company's London office. Iksil is now cooperating with authorities and is likely to avoid prosecution.

The settlement will include fines from the SEC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial regulator, will impose its own fine. And even then, JPMorgan most likely won't see closure on this issue. The New York Times has more:

"The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that oversees the market in which the losses occurred, has balked at joining the broader settlement announcement, the people briefed on the matter said. The agency has focused on whether JPMorgan, by amassing an outsize trading position so large that it distorted the market for financial contracts known as derivatives, 'manipulated' that market.

"By potentially striking out on its own, the C.F.T.C. has frustrated JPMorgan's efforts to move beyond the trading losses, the people briefed on the matter said. Those efforts to settle were born out of a recent federal crackdown on the bank."

Sometimes presidents have to make things up as they go along.

President Obama's decisions have had an improvisational air these past three weeks. His course on Syria kept shifting, at times seemingly guided by offhand remarks.

But the results are what count.

"If it works out in the end, the president's allowed to be uncertain," says Tim Naftali, a former director of the Nixon presidential library. "Oftentimes, the judgment you get during the crisis is not the judgment you get at the end."

There's still plenty of opportunity for problems to emerge when it comes to implementing the deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, announced Saturday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

No one has tried to dispose of weapons of mass destruction on such an accelerated timetable — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing civil war. Obama's critics note that this deal does nothing to drive Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the deal "an act of provocative weakness on America's part." In a statement, they wrote, "It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley."

“ If you get under the skin of most crises, they'd have this kind of ad hockery.

A line of men in black rain boots push trash carts through the alleys of Lahore, Pakistan. They stop at an open sewer along a neighborhood street and start to pull up shoes, bricks, plates and any other trash that might block the flow of wastewater.

Standing water is a prime breeding ground for mosquitoes. And the local government in Lahore is on a focused mission: Stop the spread of dengue fever by mosquitoes.

Two years ago, an estimated 20,000 people in and around the city of Lahore contracted the deadly tropical disease. This year, the region has recorded just a few dozen cases of dengue fever, which usually involves a high fever, horrible headache, and severe bone and joint pain.

What triggered the sharp decline in dengue cases? Fortuitous weather patterns may have helped to keep the mosquito population low. But many leaders also credit a mobile phone app — and the public health campaign that uses it.

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