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In the raging 1970s, New York City was dangerous, broke and at times on fire.

Latinos in the city were taking to the streets, running for office and carving out artistic spaces. "Latino" at the time in New York meant "Puerto Rican."

Photojournalist Bolivar Arellano immigrated to the city in '71, and remembers a vivid introduction to the Young Lords, a militant organization that advocated for Puerto Rican independence.

"Viva Puerto Rico libre!" Arellano heard a man shout next to a police officer. "Long live free Puerto Rico," was not a sentiment the officer shared. The man was hit with a baton after each declaration — six times, Arellano says.

"Blood was coming to his face, and that's when I said, Puerto Rico has to be beautiful for this guy to resist that beating," Arellano says. "So that was my encounter with the Puerto Rican community. Since then, I'm still with them."

This self-described activist-photojournalist chronicled the Latino community for El Diario-La Prensa, which also aimed to tell the stories the English-language press wasn't covering.

The Spanish-language daily is marking its centennial this year and is placing 5,000 archival images in Columbia University's care for preservation. Twenty of Arellano's black-and-white photos from the 1970s are now on display at the university.

"The Raging '70s" exhibit, which opened this month, positions vibrant musicians against militant activists – applause alongside protest chants. Celia Cruz on stage at Madison Square Garden. Alleged robbers in police cars after a blackout. Drug-dealing in public space. A re-creation of daily life on the Lower East Side for a film, a pig roasting in the foreground.

This has not been an easy month for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas — who learned the political ropes working for Sebelius' father-in-law, then a Kansas congressman — called for her to step down over the debut of HealthCare.gov, the problem-plagued website where people are supposed to apply for coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Invited on the usually friendly-to-Democrats The Daily Show, Sebelius was lampooned by host Jon Stewart, who challenged her to a race of sorts: "I'm going to try and download every movie ever made, and you're going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we'll see which happens first."

And while she was able to laugh off Stewart's opening gag, Sebelius had trouble clearly explaining why, if businesses have been given an extra year to implement Obamacare, individuals shouldn't have the same delay.

Sebelius served six years as the Democratic governor of largely Republican Kansas. She is the daughter of the late Ohio Gov. John Gilligan. University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis says she remains popular at home, despite the hits she's been taking in Washington:

"This hasn't been an easy time for her. The Obamacare rollout has clearly been problematic; she pretty much got roasted on Jon Stewart; but she's been a loyal soldier to Barack Obama and I think she truly believes that Obamacare is in the best interest of the country."

Andy Ricker is passionate about changing how Americans think about Thai food. So passionate that he was willing to go deep into debt for it.

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Fish sauce — that funky, flavor-enhancing fermented condiment — is part of what gives Southeast Asian cooking its distinctive taste. But it turns out, this cornerstone of Eastern cooking actually has a long history on another continent: Europe. And it goes all the way back to the Roman Empire.

Like Asian fish sauces, the Roman version was made by layering fish and salt until it ferments. There are versions made with whole fish, and some with just the blood and guts. Some food historians argue that "garum" referred to one version, and "liquamen" another, while others maintain different terms were popular in different times and places. The current convention is to use garum as a common term for all ancient fish sauces.

Italian archaeologist Claudio Giardino studies the early roots of garum, the Roman version of fish sauce. He cites mention of garum in Roman literature from the 3rd and 4th century B.C., and remains of factories producing garum even earlier. The fish bones remaining at a garum factory in Pompeii even led to a more precise dating of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Giardino notes that garum was popular throughout the Roman Empire.

"According [to] the Roman writers, a good bottle of garum could cost something like $500 of today," he says. "But you can also have garum for slaves that is extremely cheap. So it is exactly like wine."

Remains of garum factories have been excavated from Spain to Portugal to northern Africa. Some of these factories appear to have employed upwards of 50 people.

And this fish sauce became an integral part of Roman cuisine. Food historian Sally Grainger has recreated recipes from antiquity that used garum both as a general salt substitute and as the basis of dips and sauces. "After the fish sauce is made, it was then turned into compound sauces — with honey, with wine, with vinegar, with other herbs, with oil."

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Last year, the U.S. government took Apple to court, charging that the company illegally drove up the price of e-books. This summer, Apple lost the case.

In France, just the opposite is happening. The French government has accused Amazon of trying to push the price of physical books too low.

Limiting discounts on books is one of the ways that France is trying to ensure the survival of its independent booksellers.

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It's All Politics

5 Questions Kathleen Sebelius Must Answer

Twitter announced today that it plans on selling 70 million shares at $17 to $20 each, during its initial public offering.

Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal did the math and it means that the company is looking to raise about $1.4 billion and values itself at about $11 billion at the high end. This is the biggest tech IPO since Facebook went public in May of 2012.

Bloomberg reports:

"'They're picking a slightly lower valuation to ensure that the IPO goes up on the first day of trading,' Francis Gaskins, president of IPODesktop.com, said in an interview. 'I would definitely buy them in the offering at this valuation.'

"The six-year-old short-messaging site, which draws more than 230 million monthly active users and has transformed the way people communicate, is taking advantage of renewed appetite for social-media stocks to sell a 13 percent stake. While the company has more than doubled revenue annually, it hasn't yet turned a profit and the pace of user gains is slowing. Still, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo is betting the service's popularity on mobile phones will help lure advertisers."

It may not officially have a candidate to back quite yet, but for months Ready for Hillary has been revving up for 2016. Now, the superPAC has earned the support of a prominent Democratic donor.

Billionaire investor George Soros on Thursday joined the group, which is encouraging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run for president, as a co-chairman of its national finance council. He also contributed $25,000 — the cap Ready for Hillary voluntarily set on individual donations — even though superPACs may raise unlimited funds.

"He brings a lot of prestige as a progressive donor who has supported grass-roots causes for decades," Ready for Hillary spokesman Seth Bringman said.

Soros had flown relatively under the radar during the last two presidential election cycles. He became a well-known political figure in the 2004 campaign, when he gave nearly $24 million to groups opposing President George W. Bush.

However, Soros has since still been a reliable Democratic benefactor. In 2012, he gave around $2.8 million to four Democratic-leaning superPACs — including $1 million to Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama group, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Other Ready for Hillary national finance council co-chairmen include Texas attorneys Steve and Amber Mostyn and the co-founder of the clothing line Esprit, Susie Tompkins Buell, all of whom are major Democratic donors. The council, whose members include those who have given at least $5,000 to the superPAC, is scheduled to meet in New York City on Nov. 12.

Ready for Hillary raised $1.25 million in the first half of the year. But it's unclear how much the group has brought in since then, as its next campaign finance report isn't due until January.

As the group waits for Clinton to make her decision, it has been mobilizing support for former Democratic National Committee chairman and Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe in the Nov. 5 Virginia gubernatorial election.

Bringman said Ready for Hillary also plans to help get out the vote for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio, whom Clinton endorsed, and to be active in 2014 midterm races where Clinton chooses to throw her support behind a candidate.

Although Clinton hasn't publicly stated her opinion of Ready for Hillary, former aides in President Bill Clinton's White House, such as Harold Ickes and Craig Smith, have been advising the group.

Clinton has yet to announce her intentions for the 2016 presidential race. She has hit the speaking circuit over the past few months and has a new book set for release next year.

A subcontractor that built a portion of the HealthCare.gov website that's now working relatively well is being promoted to oversee a thorough revamping of the glitch-prone portal, which will be done by the end of next month, the White House says.

QSSI will apparently replace Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the lead role. It's charged with identifying problems and prioritizing fixes, Jeffrey Zients, who is in charge of fixing the website, said in a briefing on Friday.

"By the end of November, the vast majority of consumers will be able to successfully and smoothly enroll through healthcare.gov," he said.

Healthcare.gov – the online entry point for uninsured Americans to get coverage under the Affordable Care Act - has turned into an obstacle for people trying to purchase coverage.

Zients told reporters that currently about 90 percent of the website's users are able to set up an account but "as few as 3 in 10 are getting through the process."

He said that a team of "leading managers and programmers" drawn from government and the private sector assessed the problem with the portal and determined "it is fixable."

Reuters says QSSI "produced the federal data hub and a software tool for creating online consumer accounts, which was at the center of early logjam problems."

A subcontractor that built a portion of the HealthCare.gov website that's now working relatively well is being promoted to oversee a thorough revamping of the glitch-prone portal, which will be done by the end of next month, the White House says.

QSSI will apparently replace Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the lead role. It's charged with identifying problems and prioritizing fixes, Jeffrey Zients, who is in charge of fixing the website, said in a briefing on Friday.

"By the end of November, the vast majority of consumers will be able to successfully and smoothly enroll through healthcare.gov," he said.

Healthcare.gov – the online entry point for uninsured Americans to get coverage under the Affordable Care Act - has turned into an obstacle for people trying to purchase coverage.

Zients told reporters that currently about 90 percent of the website's users are able to set up an account but "as few as 3 in 10 are getting through the process."

He said that a team of "leading managers and programmers" drawn from government and the private sector assessed the problem with the portal and determined "it is fixable."

Reuters says QSSI "produced the federal data hub and a software tool for creating online consumer accounts, which was at the center of early logjam problems."

It's All Politics

5 Questions Kathleen Sebelius Must Answer

The Counselor

Director: Ridley Scott

Genre: Crime drama

Running Time: 117 minutes

Rated R for graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language

With: Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt

It all started in 1968 at a pet shop called Fish 'N' Cheeps in New York's Greenwich Village. On the way to a Jimi Hendrix concert, Patricia Wright and her husband dashed into the shop to escape heavy rain. There, a two-pound ball of fur from the Amazon captured their attention. A few weeks and $40 later, this owl monkey became their pet; later on they acquired a female as well.

At the time, next to nothing was known of the social lives of nocturnal owl monkeys in the wild. Driven by intense curiosity about what she was observing in the monkey pair, especially the male Herbie's enthusiastic paternal care when the female Kendra gave birth, Wright decided she would become the first to explore those wild lives. Her memoir High Moon Over The Amazon, published last week, describes how she made that happen.

When I read the book, I was struck by the underlying message. Like many other anthropologists, I had read and taught her work on lemur behavior and conservation in Madagascar, and celebrated her being named a MacArthur "genius" Fellow in 1989. But the back story I hadn't known — the tale of Wright's struggle early on as a single mother without a Ph.D. to be taken seriously by male academics and granting agencies.

It's a story that may speak clearly to students, perhaps most of all to girls and young women who are seized by a fierce desire to observe and help save the natural world.

I enjoyed High Moon for its blend of adventure and science, and for the questions it raises about what credentials are needed to be taken seriously as a scientist. We are primates who love a good story; the power of Wright's story lays in showing how curiosity and persistence are fundamental keys to pursuing a life in science.

So, I invited Pat Wright to join me in conversation about the book via email. I hope you enjoy the exchange.

Fans of the reclusive J.D. Salinger are in their element these days. The writer, who died in 2010, is the subject of a recent documentary and companion biography; there's word that five Salinger works will be published for the first time, starting in 2015; and now, the Morgan Library in New York is showing never-before displayed letters that a 20-something Salinger wrote, from 1941 to 1943, to a young admirer in Toronto.

For Salinger buffs, this is like a glimpse of the holy grail: seven letters and two postcards, mostly typed, two handwritten. Salinger's handwriting is slanted and spiky.

"He's writing quickly. He may have been writing this in a bar," says curator Declan Kiely. "The thing that jumps out at me is the way he forms 'I.' "

In a sea of cursives, Salinger prints his "I" — it looks like the Roman numeral one. He makes a strong vertical line and two horizontals.

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On what the Republican majority in the House wanted to achieve during the recent government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis

What they wanted was the repeal and abolition of Obamacare ... the whole reason that this insurgency took over at the time of the shutdown and at the time of the debt ceiling was over Obamacare. Had it only been about the budget I think it would have been resolvable much earlier on.

And I think the veterans, the establishment so-called, the cocktail-swilling RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] of which I have now become appointed an honorary member by the Tea Party types — if you've been around here you know that this wasn't going to work. If you control one house of Congress you cannot abolish something like Obamacare, no matter how much pressure you apply.

On the reaction to his 2011 column saying it would be counter-constitutional to use a House majority as a governing authority

Negative ... major negative, the same way I've gotten a hugely negative reaction to my opposition to the tactic of some Republicans to shut down the government or threaten to and threaten the debt ceiling over Obamacare. I mean, it's not that I think they are literally anti-constitutional. You can be a blocking element — that is exactly what Madison intended — they liked gridlock. But it's designed for minorities to be able to block, but not for minorities to be able to govern.

On a recent column urging Republicans to give up the shutdown but press the president on the debt ceiling

More On Charles Krauthammer

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Poking At The President: Thorns In Obama's Side

Web Extra

Fans of the reclusive J.D. Salinger are in their element these days. The writer, who died in 2010, is the subject of a recent documentary and companion biography; there's word that five Salinger works will be published for the first time, starting in 2015; and now, the Morgan Library in New York is showing never-before displayed letters that a 20-something Salinger wrote, from 1941 to 1943, to a young admirer in Toronto.

For Salinger buffs, this is like a glimpse of the holy grail: seven letters and two postcards, mostly typed, two handwritten. Salinger's handwriting is slanted and spiky.

"He's writing quickly. He may have been writing this in a bar," says curator Declan Kiely. "The thing that jumps out at me is the way he forms 'I.' "

In a sea of cursives, Salinger prints his "I" — it looks like the Roman numeral one. He makes a strong vertical line and two horizontals.

Enlarge image i

President Obama is putting former CEO Jeff Zients in charge of the "tech surge" — the administration's emergency effort to fix the Web portal at the heart of the federal government's new health care market. But what about the contractors that built the system? What's their responsibility?

You may have never heard of CGI, but it's the Canadian information technology company that had the biggest piece of the project. In its hometown of Montreal, it's a big deal.

The company "got started a number of years ago with a couple of guys from Quebec City who didn't even speak English," says Karl Moore, a business professor at Montreal's McGill University who knows the company well.

"They've gone from those humble roots, moved to Montreal, and then started to grow. And they grew a lot through acquisition," he says.

CGI is now Canada's biggest tech company, and it sells IT services around the world. Moore says the company has a good reputation. But there have been some problems. Just last year, the province of Ontario fired CGI for failing to deliver a health care-related IT project on time.

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A 3-year-old girl born in Mississippi with HIV acquired from her mother during pregnancy remains free of detectable virus at least 18 months after she stopped taking antiviral pills.

New results on this child, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, appear to green-light a study in the advanced planning stages in which researchers around the world will try to replicate her successful treatment in other infected newborns.

And it means that the Mississippi girl still can be considered possibly or even probably cured of HIV infection — only the second person in the world with that lucky distinction. The first is Timothy Ray Brown, a 47-year-old American man apparently cured by a bone marrow transplant he received in Berlin a half-dozen years ago.

This new report addresses many of the questions raised earlier this year when disclosure of the Mississippi child's case was called a possible game-changer in the long search for an HIV cure.

"There was some very healthy skepticism," Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, tells Shots. She's part of the team that has been exhaustively testing the toddler's blood and considering every possible explanation for her apparently HIV-free state.

Luzuriaga is confident the latest tests prove that the child was truly infected with HIV at the time of her birth – not merely carrying remnants of free-floating virus or infected blood cells transferred before birth from her mother, as some skeptics wondered.

Shots - Health News

Scientists Report First Cure Of HIV In A Child, Say It's A Game-Changer

"Please Release Him."

That was the simple but startling front-page headline on Wednesday in New Express, a cutting-edge newspaper based in China's southern city of Guangzhou. "Him" is Chen Yongzhou, one of the paper's investigative journalists who New Express says was taken away by police after reporting "problems with the accounts" at Zoomlion Heavy Industries."

Bloomberg reports that Chen's May 27 story on construction-equipment maker Zoomlion "accused the company of improperly accounting for sales, forcing Zoomlion to halt trading of its shares in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The company has denied it falsified sales."

Zoomlion filed a complaint against Chen with local police last week, and he was detained for "damage to business reputation," on Oct. 18, media reports said.

The arrest of Chen comes as China has sought to crackdown on what it has described as online rumors and false news.

Radio Free Asia calls the move by New Express "unprecedented" and notes:

"While all Chinese newspapers are tightly controlled by the propaganda department of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, some continue to push the limits set down for them, in particular through investigative reporting of alleged corruption."

How badly did the recent fiscal fight go for the GOP?

Here's one hint: prominent Republican pollster Bill McInturff opens his "after action report" on the government shutdown with a quote from Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu on the skills needed in picking the terrain of battle: "He who knows them not, nor practices them, will surely be defeated."

McInturff then goes on to catalogue the woes the party has suffered over the previous month. "Defunding" President Obama's health care law, the original goal of the showdown, actually got less popular over time. Voter sentiment shifted to support Democrats for Congress. And approval ratings for Republicans have plummeted — to below 30 percent, nationally.

"There's no question that the Republican Party brand and the public perception of Congress are at historic lows," McInturff said in an interview with NPR.

McInturff is the Republican half of the bipartisan polling team for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, but this report was done for his clients and colleagues. He said it was drawn from those joint polls, but that he also used some data from Gallup polling.

One section titled "Why it happened" features bar graphs showing the ideological range of the House over time, from most liberal to most conservative. In 1982, 344 of the 435 members fell between a broad swath bounded by "most liberal Republican" and "most conservative Democrat." Three decades later, that number has shrunk to just 11 members.

McInturff also points to a lack of "long-term" institutional knowledge in Congress –- 47 percent of the House and 44 percent of the Senate have only been in office since the start of the Obama administration five years ago.

By further way of explanation for the push to get rid of Obama's signature achievement, McInturff has a page titled "Understanding the world through the view of Republican members of Congress in their districts." While in the country as a whole, Obama's approval rating is within a few points of his disapproval, in the 233 Republican districts Obama's numbers are 37 approve to 57 percent disapprove. And while the nation as a whole prefers a Democratic-controlled Congress by nearly double digits, the exact opposite is true in the Republican districts.

This helps explain one of McInturff's forecasts for the coming months: "Do not expect much change in how Congress functions and the level of likely paralysis that continues to lay ahead."

Another of McInturff's predictions offers some comfort to Republicans worried about the possible consequences of the government shutdown: "The significant shifts in attitude today are not a predictor, though, of whether the shutdown will end up truly impacting the 2014 election."

There is, after all, more than a full year between now and Election Day 2014.

"In America, the big story of today is rarely the big story a year from now. Whether it be the impeachment votes against President Clinton in 1999 that everyone presumed would be hugely consequential in the next election, the Democrats not voting for the use of force in the two Iraq wars — all of these were perceived at the time to be game changers for the next election, and none of them mattered," McInturff said, pointing out that over the past two months, the story of the day has moved from Syria to the shutdown to the health care law's web site. "By next October, there will be national events, world events — there will be things of such consequence that it is very unlikely that the October campaigns of 2014 are going to be dealing with what happened in the shutdown of 2013."

S.V. Dte edits politics and campaign finance coverage for NPR's Washington Desk.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Mary Catherine Hilkert, a Catholic theologian, a professor at Notre Dame and a Dominican Sister of Peace, believes that people can find love, mercy and union with God after death. In her eyes, however, the concept of hell is far less definitive.

As part of All Things Considered's series on the concept of life after death, Hilkert spoke with host Robert Siegel about her perspectives on heaven and hell, why she thinks of banquets when she imagines the afterlife and why people hold such strong beliefs about what happens when life ends.

As a commentator, Frank Deford gets a lot of suggestions about prominent subjects that he should take to task. Usually, he has already sounded off on these suggested topics, and most of them are cut and dried, with nothing new to add. But here, Deford takes on 12 of these familiar issues — this time with brief updates.

Among them: a Washington Redskins name change; high school football games on national TV; hockey fights; Pete Rose and the Baseball Hall of Fame; tackle football for young boys; and the tradition of pouring Gatorade on winning coaches. On the latter, when teams win, skip the coach dunk, and think of something new. Please. Thank you.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's quick take on these and other issues.

Growing up, Barbara Handelsman often felt out of step with her family.

"When I was really little, I thought my sister always had all the power because she was pudgy and cute, where I had all elbows and knees," Barbara says. "I was so shy. I had no idea how to be the popular kid, and so I felt incompetent when it came to trying to be an A+ anything."

When she was 80, Barbara visited StoryCorps in Ann Arbor, Mich., with her 20-year-old grandson Aaron, who says her feelings of isolation came as news to him. "I didn't realize that you felt that way so often. I can identify, but I've always had you," he says.

"You know, I have lots of people in my family who think I am OK," Barbara tells him. "But, there's something about me that they would rather fix. But my experience with you is that I'm always perfectly free to be me."

Aaron and Barbara often went on adventures together, he says, and she introduced him to "the freedom to not worry about saying or doing something others would consider to be foolish."

"I remember we were climbing through the forest, and there's this yellow tape that said Do Not Enter. You know, the mischievous side of me really wanted to do that, and you came right along with me," he says. "That was the first time I'd ever been encouraged by an adult to cross a border. I think we bring out the best in each other in a lot of ways."

Barbara's advice to her grandson: Be yourself. "Don't let any adult ever convince you that you should be somebody else. Don't let them try to give you a cheerful personality if that's not who you are. Be who you are," she says.

Barbara passed away two years after this interview was recorded.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon.

Click on the audio link above to hear Barbara's story.

Iran's justice minister says a convicted drug smuggler who survived an attempted execution by hanging earlier this month shouldn't go back to the gallows.

As we reported last week, the 37-year-old man, identified as Alireza M, was found alive in the morgue by his family following a 12-minute hanging. After the incident, an Iranian judge reportedly said Alireza would hang again once he had recovered from the botched execution.

Now, Iran's ISNA news agency quotes Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying that going ahead with a second execution attempt would have "[negative] repercussions for Iran's image," according to the BBC.

However, as the BBC notes, "The government has no direct control over the judiciary which has to decide whether a second execution takes place."

Amnesty International has condemned the "horrific prospect" of a second execution attempt for the man.

"[After] having gone through the whole ordeal already once, merely underlines the cruelty and inhumanity of the death penalty," Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa Program director Philip Luther said last week.

Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world.

Every now and then, my random wanderings through file photos from the previous 24 hours bring me to something that makes me pause.

This is apparently the menu from an event referred to in the photo captions as Christina Hendricks Toasts Johnnie Walker Platinum. (It is at least a list of food posted there.) The event was held at the Santa Monica Museum Of Art on Tuesday night.

Here's where a simple photo makes me realize my utter lack of sophistication. I have no idea how to interpret this menu. Is each line a course? Is this just a list of stuff? Are they alternatives? I'm intrigued.

In case you're having trouble reading it, let's go over it.

Venison

Hey, I know what that is!

Pine gelee

Like ... "pine," the tree? Pine ... Jell-O, basically?

Blackberry beet-blueberry meringue

It's either this or "blackberry beet" followed by "blueberry meringue." Either one sounds like a waste of perfectly good blackberries, blueberries and meringue.

Cocoa coffee soil

I recently read it wasn't a real cool foodie menu if there wasn't something fashioned as dirt, so there you go.

Hen of the woods butternut squash (or possibly hen of the woods and butternut squash)

At first, I was like, "Hey, I'm no dummy. Chickens don't live in the woods, food people!" But then I learned that hen of the woods is a mushroom. So do NOT order the chicken that lives in the woods. They will laugh at you.

Crab yuzu kosho

Yuzo kosho is Japanese hot sauce; I am assuming it goes with the crab.

Brussel sprout

Check! I mean, it's brussel sprouts, but at least it's not brussel sprout dirt.

Apple

ANOTHER THING I RECOGNIZE.

Masago

I had no idea what this is. I figured it was something inoffensive, sitting there at the end of the line after the apple. It's fish eggs. Burn on me.

Halibut mascarpone onion jam profiterole candied lemon gelee romaine aioli snap pea blue lake (maybe blue lake rabbit?)

I know most of these words; I have no idea how they go together, except that the menu suggests there's such a thing as "romaine aioli," which would imply that romaine lettuce is some sort of flavoring, which, if true, might mean I'm eating the wrong romaine lettuce.

Rabbit, potato...

Yes, yes...

Poblano hooks puree

What is "poblano hooks puree"? Seriously. Does a poblano pepper have a hook? Is it the very tip of the pepper? Is it the stem? Is there something else called "hooks" that you can eat?

Apple

Hello, old friend.

Sopiapillas

To my knowledge, this is a misspelling and shouldn't have the first "i," in which case I know what this is, too. It belongs to the great tradition of fried dough, which I'd much rather have than lettuce aioli, but whatever. Shout-out to state fairs everywhere, even if in this case it's the state of extreme privilege.

Romano bean-dried cherry ... quail?

Do these go all together? Is the bean alone? Is the cherry alone? Are beans mixed with cherries and then combined with a bird?

Deviled egg puree

Wait, a deviled egg already is mostly a puree. Are you just adding the whites? Isn't it just ground up hard boiled eggs, then?

Pinquinto bean

Kyoho grape

Corn nuts

[record scratch]

Candied peanut-beet crepe ... maybe?

Again with the beets with these people.

Pear

Pear skin sorbet

Okay, what? Not pear sorbet, just the skin? Ground up skins, where all the bitterness is?

cajeta

A sweet thing made from goat's milk.

buttermilk vanilla panna cotta

Hey, anybody who's seen Top Chef is not surprised by this at all, except that it always seems to be a dish people get eliminated for. This one was probably better.

Black sesame steamed cake

Having recently had some black sesame ice cream, this mostly just makes me hungry.

Olive oil parfait

You know, I made it almost all the way to the end without letting my tiny mind simply say, "Ew," but ... olive oil parfait? Of what? Please don't say "ice cream."

Lime curd

Yum!

Blackberry

Such a good word, floating so randomly.

Green tea (twice)

I'm guessing the last thing is actually blackberry-green tea, and then there's regular green tea? Or else they give you two cups of green tea.

Pop rocks

And there it is. This menu just dropped the mic.

Cuba will end the two-currency system it has used for nearly 20 years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has used either American currency or a peso that's pegged to the dollar alongside its national peso.

The monetary unification will phase out a system that has become a symbol of exclusivity and foreign wealth. Many products that are imported into the country can only be bought with the dollar-based convertible peso. But most Cubans are paid in the standard peso, which is worth only a fraction of the other currency.

"The policy exacerbated the creation of a two-tier class system in Cuba which divided privileged Cubans with access to the lucrative tourist and foreign-trade sectors from those working in the local economy," the BBC reports, "all-too-visibly contradicting Cuba's supposedly egalitarian society."

Cuba's Central Bank says it will continue to back both the convertible peso, or CUC, and the Cuban peso, or CUP, when it begins the process of unifying the two currencies. The bank says the change will make it easier to calculate labor costs and other statistics, along with making Cuba's economic system more efficient.

No dates have been released for the plan, which has the backing of President Ral Castro. The change was announced in an official guideline published in the Communist state's Granma newspaper.

The hottest hot seat in Washington is the one occupied by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose office confirmed Monday she'll testify about the Internet disaster that is HealthCare.gov, the Affordable Care Act website.

It's not yet clear when she'll go before Congress, but it won't be soon enough for the Republicans who are calling for her resignation. Sebelius originally declined to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday, saying she had a scheduling conflict.

Many Democrats are also fuming at the shambolic roll out of the federal health exchange website, which isn't just an embarrassment to the administration but a threat to President Obama's legacy.

When she does testify, here are five questions Sebelius will almost certainly get:

What did she know and when did she know it?

This is a Washington classic, a staple of any investigatory effort. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House committee holding Thursday's hearing, has signaled that he wants to know why Sebelius and others told lawmakers the federal government would be ready to go on Oct. 1 when that was far from true.

"Top administration officials repeatedly testified everything was on track, but the broad technological failures reveal that was not the case," Upton said in a news release. "Either the administration was not ready for launch, or it was not up to the job."

How many people have actually "enrolled" in health insurance through the health exchanges?

HHS on Sunday said there were "nearly a half million applications for coverage." But that's a vague number, as is the definition of enrollment. To some, it means submitting an application; to others, it means actually paying for insurance. The administration has been notably reticent about providing details. Which is why the Republican National Committee is trying to pry them out through a Freedom of Information Act request. Expect plenty of questions from House Republicans seeking hard numbers.

How can anyone trust that the problems will be fixed in time when past Obama administration assurances proved so wrong?

The Affordable Care Act's open enrollment period is scheduled to end Dec. 15. In a speech Monday that defended the law while also expressing frustration with the website, Obama said: "We are doing everything we can possibly do to get the websites working better, faster, sooner. We got people working overtime, 24/7, to boost capacity and address the problems."

Still, experts question whether the website can be made to function as well as it needs to in the remaining time. Expect much skepticism about any assurances Sebelius gives.

Do the problems with Obamacare support delaying the individual mandate for a year?

This is likely to be a major line of questioning for Sebelius from Republicans. Obama previewed her likely response when he said that Obamacare is "not just a website" — his point being that the law itself is working just fine, and the flaws of one component aren't enough to delay it. Sebelius is likely to be forced to repeatedly push back against this line of questioning.

Given the scope of the problem, shouldn't she resign?

This is also likely to be a recurring theme during the hearing. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., a longtime acquaintance, has called for her resignation, as have Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and several House members.

Sebelius has shown no signs that she is considering stepping down and was prominently seated in the front row for Obama's Monday speech. If Sebelius, a holdover from the first term, did step down, it would not only give Obamacare's Republican opponents their biggest trophy yet but would also create more turbulence at a critical moment for the law. So it's unlikely to happen. But that won't stop Republicans from repeatedly posing the question.

The nation's jobless rate ticked down to 7.2 percent in September from 7.3 percent in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.

But just 148,000 were added to public and private payrolls. That's below the 180,000 economists expected. It's yet another sign that job growth remains soft.

We added much more from the report, as well as reactions to it, as the morning continued.

Update at 10:10 a.m. ET. "Solid" Job Growth, But Things Likely Got Worse In October, White House Says:

"While job growth remained solid in September, there is no question that the focus of policy should be on how to achieve a faster pace of job growth by increasing certainty and investing in jobs, rather than the self-inflicted wounds of the past several weeks that increased uncertainty and inhibited job growth," writes Jason Furman, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. He adds that "today's delayed report describes the economy more than a month ago. More recent indicators suggest the labor market worsened in the month of October."

Furman's reference to "self-inflicted wounds" is about what the White House views as the misguided move by some conservative Republicans to force a partial shutdown of the government. Earlier, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued his own statement that blames Obama administration's policies for the economy's troubles.

Update at 9:40 a.m. ET. Stocks Rise At Opening:

Figuring out why the stock market does what it does is never easy. But since stocks were up modestly after the opening bell in New York, it would seem that the employment report did not shock Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal says the early thinking appears to be that relatively weak news on the jobs front means the Federal Reserve won't be moving to scale back on the stimulus it's been giving the economy until next year. And at least some investors seem to like the idea of more money coming into the economy via the Fed's bond-buying program.

Update at 9:15 a.m. ET. Boehner Sees A "Troubled Economy":

"Today's report shows the president has more than a troubled website to fix — he has a troubled economy, weakened by years of failed 'stimulus' policies and excessive red tape," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says in a statement emailed to reporters. "Add the higher costs and rising premiums of ObamaCare on top of disappointing jobs numbers and underwhelming wage growth, and you have a recipe for economic stagnation."

The White House typically posts its analysis of the jobs report on its blog. We'll add a highlight when it's available.

Update at 9:10 a.m. ET. If Job Growth Was Slow, Why Did The Unemployment Rate Edge Down?

Economists remind us every month that the BLS news is really two reports combined into one. The jobs figures come from surveys of public and private employers. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, comes from a survey of households.

The data from households show that the number of adults who said they were working grew by 133,000. At the same time, the number who reported being unemployed fell by 61,000. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who were said to be participating in the labor force (either because they were working or looking for work) held steady at 63.2 percent.

All those numbers basically point to the same conclusion: the households survey signals that there was little change in the situation — but that there was just enough to nudge down the jobless rate.

Update at 9 a.m. ET. Figures Are From Before The Shutdown, So Revisions Are Likely:

"The September payroll figure reflects the pay period that includes the 12th of the month, two weeks prior to the federal shutdown," Bloomberg News notes. It adds that "today's report doesn't include any late responses from employers, indicating the figures will be subject to revision as is typical each month."

Since the shutdown hurt businesses that deal with the government or depend on it being opened, it's unlikely the revisions would be to the upside.

Update at 8:57 a.m. ET. News Could Convince Fed To Hold Off:

As The Wall Street Journal writes, the Federal Reserve "surprised some investors by not starting a pullback in its $85 billion-a-month bond buying program after its September meeting. The central bank is not expected to make any changes until it can assess the full effects of the 16-day government shutdown and debt-ceiling fight on the broader economy. But a weakening jobs picture could force it to push out this date out further."

The Fed has been buying bonds to push money in to the economy and spur growth.

Update at 8:50 a.m. ET. Jobless Rate Lowest Since Late 2008:

At 7.2 percent, the unemployment rate is now the lowest since November 2008's 6.8 percent. The jobless rate is still about 3 percentage points above its recent low — the 4.4 percent of late 2006 and early 2007. The economy officially slipped into recession in December 2007 and didn't begin its slow recovery until June 2009. The unemployment rate's recent peak was 10 percent, in October 2009.

Update at 8:40 a.m. ET. Good And Bad News In The Revisions:

For the second report in a row, BLS sharply reduced its estimate of job growth in July. It initially thought employers had added 162,000 jobs to their payrolls that month. In a subsequent report, it pegged growth at 104,000 jobs. Tuesday, it said employers had added just 89,000 jobs in July.

But at the same time, BLS on Tuesday revised up its estimate of the job growth in August. Initially, it said there had been 169,000 jobs added. Now, it estimates there were 193,000 more people on payrolls.

If you find yourself sauntering down the runway wearing 40 pounds of chocolate, don't sweat it. Seriously – you might find yourself dripping on the audience.

So warns Fiona Bitmead, one of ten models who showed off edible chocolate creations Friday night at the Salon du Chocolate in London. Five handlers helping her get dressed.

"[I] had to worry about a dress melting on me!" she says. "I can't say I've ever wanted to eat the dresses I've worn down the catwalk before."

But as Tim Gunn might say, make it work!

Salon du Chocolat, not surprisingly, is a French creation. It's the world's largest chocolate fair open to the public, and it has been running for 19 years. This year, it will travel to 23 cities around the world, providing patrons a chance to taste and buy artisan and specialty chocolate. The salon hits New York in November.

Clad in little — and not so little — chocolate dresses, the models at the London event wore gowns, headpieces, bags and even a swimsuit all made of, or adorned with white, milk and the dark stuff.

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The nation's jobless rate ticked down to 7.2 percent in September from 7.3 percent in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.

But just 148,000 were added to public and private payrolls. That's below the 180,000 economists expected. It's yet another sign that job growth remains soft.

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

Update at 9 a.m. ET. Figures Are From Before The Shutdown, So Revisions Are Likely:

"The September payroll figure reflects the pay period that includes the 12th of the month, two weeks prior to the federal shutdown," Bloomberg News notes. It adds that "today's report doesn't include any late responses from employers, indicating the figures will be subject to revision as is typical each month."

Since the shutdown hurt businesses that deal with the government or depend on it being opened, it's unlikely the revisions would be to the upside.

Update at 8:57 a.m. ET. News Could Convince Fed To Hold Off:

As The Wall Street Journal writes, the Federal Reserve "surprised some investors by not starting a pullback in its $85 billion-a-month bond buying program after its September meeting. The central bank is not expected to make any changes until it can assess the full effects of the 16-day government shutdown and debt-ceiling fight on the broader economy. But a weakening jobs picture could force it to push out this date out further."

The Fed has been buying bonds to push money in to the economy and spur growth.

Update at 8:50 a.m. ET. Jobless Rate Lowest Since Late 2008:

At 7.2 percent, the unemployment rate is now the lowest since November 2008's 6.8 percent. The jobless rate is still about 3 percentage points above its recent low — the 4.4 percent of late 2006 and early 2007. The economy officially slipped into recession in December 2007 and didn't begin its slow recovery until June 2009. The unemployment rate's recent peak was 10 percent, in October 2009.

Update at 8:40 a.m. ET. Good And Bad News In The Revisions:

For the second report in a row, BLS sharply reduced its estimate of job growth in July. It initially thought employers had added 162,000 jobs to their payrolls that month. In a subsequent report, it pegged growth at 104,000 jobs. Tuesday, it said employers had added just 89,000 jobs in July.

But at the same time, BLS on Tuesday revised up its estimate of the job growth in August. Initially, it said there had been 169,000 jobs added. Now, it estimates there were 193,000 more people on payrolls.

The nation's jobless rate ticked down to 7.2 percent in September from 7.3 percent in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.

But just 148,000 were added to public and private payrolls. That's below the 180,000 economists expected. It's yet another sign that job growth remains soft.

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

Update at 9:10 a.m. ET. If Job Growth Was Slow, Why Did The Unemployment Rate Edge Down?

Economists remind us every month that the BLS news is really two reports combined into one. The jobs figures come from surveys of public and private employers. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, comes from a survey of households.

The data from households show that the number of adults who said they were working grew by 133,000. At the same time, the number who reported being unemployed fell by 61,000. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who were said to be participating in the labor force (either because they were working or looking for work) held steady at 63.2 percent.

All those numbers basically point to the same conclusion: the households survey signals that there was little change in the situation — but that there was just enough to nudge down the jobless rate.

Update at 9 a.m. ET. Figures Are From Before The Shutdown, So Revisions Are Likely:

"The September payroll figure reflects the pay period that includes the 12th of the month, two weeks prior to the federal shutdown," Bloomberg News notes. It adds that "today's report doesn't include any late responses from employers, indicating the figures will be subject to revision as is typical each month."

Since the shutdown hurt businesses that deal with the government or depend on it being opened, it's unlikely the revisions would be to the upside.

Update at 8:57 a.m. ET. News Could Convince Fed To Hold Off:

As The Wall Street Journal writes, the Federal Reserve "surprised some investors by not starting a pullback in its $85 billion-a-month bond buying program after its September meeting. The central bank is not expected to make any changes until it can assess the full effects of the 16-day government shutdown and debt-ceiling fight on the broader economy. But a weakening jobs picture could force it to push out this date out further."

The Fed has been buying bonds to push money in to the economy and spur growth.

Update at 8:50 a.m. ET. Jobless Rate Lowest Since Late 2008:

At 7.2 percent, the unemployment rate is now the lowest since November 2008's 6.8 percent. The jobless rate is still about 3 percentage points above its recent low — the 4.4 percent of late 2006 and early 2007. The economy officially slipped into recession in December 2007 and didn't begin its slow recovery until June 2009. The unemployment rate's recent peak was 10 percent, in October 2009.

Update at 8:40 a.m. ET. Good And Bad News In The Revisions:

For the second report in a row, BLS sharply reduced its estimate of job growth in July. It initially thought employers had added 162,000 jobs to their payrolls that month. In a subsequent report, it pegged growth at 104,000 jobs. Tuesday, it said employers had added just 89,000 jobs in July.

But at the same time, BLS on Tuesday revised up its estimate of the job growth in August. Initially, it said there had been 169,000 jobs added. Now, it estimates there were 193,000 more people on payrolls.

Five years after Ken Morganstern was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he sat down with his daughters Priya Morganstern and Bhavani Jaroff to talk about some of the memories he had left.

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The launch of a rocket carrying a record-breaking 29 satellites — originally set for early next month — will be delayed by a few weeks after the partial government shutdown halted preparations.

The Minotaur 1, operated by private space-launch firm Orbital Sciences Corp. had been slated for blast off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Nov. 4. Space.com reports:

"But just as preparations began to ramp up for the launch, managers had to order a work stoppage Oct. 1 because the government shutdown interrupted access to facilities on NASA property, including a satellite processing building, a rocket storage complex and the launch pad."

The launch of the Minotaur 1, which Space.com describes as "a fusion of decommissioned Minuteman missile stages and new commercial solid rocket motors," has been tentatively rescheduled for Nov. 19. Space.com says:

"The Minotaur 1 rocket will launch 29 satellites into low Earth orbit, setting a new record for the most payloads ever deployed from a single rocket.

The largest payload is a technology trailblazer named STPSat 3, an approximately 400-pound spacecraft hosting five experiments to test next-generation satellite components and measure the space environment.

Four dozen more satellites will launch stowed inside CubeSat deployment pods for release once the Minotaur's upper stage reaches orbit."

If you've flown across Nebraska, Kansas or western Texas on a clear day, you've seen them: geometrically arranged circles of green and brown on the landscape, typically half a mile in diameter. They're the result of pivot irrigation, in which long pipes-on-wheels rotate slowly around a central point, spreading water across corn fields.

Yet most of those fields are doomed. The water that nourishes them eventually will run low.

That water comes from a huge pool of underground water known as the Ogallala Aquifer, part of a larger system called the High Plains Aquifer. Scientists calculate that farmers are pulling water out of the aquifer about six times faster than rain or rivers can recharge it.

That can't go on forever. In some areas, wells have already gone dry. Yet families and entire towns depend on that flow of water for their survival.

In one small section of northwestern Kansas, farmers now have agreed to do something unprecedented. For the next five years, all the farmers in this area, covering 99 square miles, will pump 20 percent less water out of the ground.

It's a remarkable agreement, but it's also fragile. Whether it survives will depend, in large part, on whether other farmers follow their lead.

Hoxie, the small town where farmers have taken this bold step, is the kind of place where people keep track of how many children go to the town's school. It's a barometer of the town's health.

"When I was in high school, we had 36 to 42 in every class," says farmer Mitchell Baalman. "Now, these classes are down to 15. Ten to 15 in every class."

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There were 1.9 percent fewer existing homes sold in September than in August, the National Association of Realtors said Monday.

But the slip came after two months when sales were touching four-year highs and as mortgage rates were edging up. So there's a case to be made that a bit of a drop shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Also, sales in September were still 10.7 percent above the pace of the same month a year earlier — a sign that the housing sector's recovery hasn't been stopped in its tracks.

What's more, The Associated Press writes that "many economists expect home sales will remain healthy, especially now that [mortgage] rates have stabilized and remain near historically low levels."

We'll learn much more about how the economy fared in September when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its delayed monthly jobs report at 8:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday. As NPR's Marilyn Geewax has reported for us, the report's released was postponed by the partial government shutdown.

According to Reuters, economists expect to hear that there were 180,000 jobs added to payrolls in September and that the jobless rate was 7.3 percent. If they're right, that would mean the unemployment rate was unchanged from the month before and that job growth picked up just a bit from the initial August figure of 169,000.

Alexandra Chen, a specialist in childhood trauma, is on her way from the Lebanese capital Beirut to the southern town of Nabatiyeh, where she's running a workshop for teachers, child psychologists and sports coaches who are dealing with the Syrian children scarred by war in their homeland.

"All of the children have experienced trauma to varying degree," explains Chen, who works for Mercy Corps and is training a dozen new hires for her aid group.

Her intense five-day workshop is based on skills and techniques developed in other conflict zones, used for the first time here.

"They need to know enough to understand exactly what's going on in the brain of the children they are working with," Chen says of her trainees. Her course stresses the science of severe trauma, which can be toxic for the brain.

"The human memory remembers negative memories almost four times more strongly than positive ones," she says.

Some 2 million Syrian children have been displaced by the war and more than 1 million of them now refugees in neighboring countries. One of the biggest challenges for international aid agencies is healing the invisible scars of war in the youngest victims.

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All Is Lost

Director: J.C. Chandor

Genre: Action, drama

Running Time: 106 minutes

Rated PG-13 for brief strong language

With: Robert Redford

(Recommended)