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There are about a dozen reasons I really wanted to love Alpha House, an original comedy series about four U.S. senators sharing a home on Capitol Hill. It premieres on Amazon — yes, Amazon — on Friday.

The biggest reason: often-underrated star John Goodman, playing a politician up for re-election who knows exactly what voters value in a legislator:

"Two undefeated seasons, 11 conference titles, two national championships," says Goodman's Gil John Biggs, who's coasted from a star basketball-coaching career right into a plum Senate seat. Biggs works hard to avoid hard work; there's no perk he's beneath taking, no contributor he won't schmooze, and he's breezed past token opponents in every election.

Until now.

"Guess who just announced he's running now?" Biggs' wife and adviser screeches in a later scene. "(Duke basketball coach) Digger Mancusi....You're in a real race now, darlin'."

As Biggs slams his phone against a nearby wall in frustration, it's obvious he's suddenly living his worst nightmare: An opponent with a better coaching record.

Biggs faces this horror while living in a house with three other Republican senators: a philandering Latino legislator from Florida, an ethically challenged African-American from Pennsylvania and a possibly closeted gay man from Nevada. The setup is inspired by an actual house owned by Democratic U.S. Rep. George Miller.

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China announced Friday that it was loosening its decades-old one-child policy and abolish its system of "re-education through labor" camps.

In order to have a second child, one parent would have to be an only child under the new rules. Previously, both of the parents had to be only children in order to have a second child.

The new birth policy is intended to promote "long-term balanced development of the population in China," according to the Communist Party announcement, which was reported by China's official Xinhua news agency.

China, the world's most populous country, introduced the one-child policy in the 1970s to combat a rise in population. But the policy has resulted in gender imbalance, with more men than women.

NPR's Frank Langfitt tells Morning Edition that the change means "another 10 million people would be able to have a second child."

But, he adds, "half would maybe do that — because, you know, raising a child in China is now very expensive. So not everybody really wants a second child, particularly in urban areas."

Frank notes that the policy has been unpopular for years, but there may be a more practical reason for the easing of rules: demographics.

"China's labor is peaking and state demographers have actually been talking to the central government for years begging them to change the policy and they say, 'We're going to head into a real labor shortage coming up because of the policy,' " Frank says.

Re-Education Camps

The Communist Party also said it would abolish "re-education through labor" camps in an effort to protect human rights.

Frank notes that this policy was first announced in January. He says the camps, which go back to the 1950s, are hated.

"They allow cops literally to just take people and put them away for 18 months in a labor camp with no charges, no lawyer, no judge, and the public has been really turning against this," he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep.

The party also said it would reduce the number of crimes subject to the death penalty "step by step."

China has already significantly reduced the number of people executed each year. As we told you on Weekend Edition Sunday, an estimated 3,000 people were put to death in China last year. That number is down from an average of 15,000 a year in the 1990s.

"The decision, approved by the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee on Tuesday, was seen as a detailed reform roadmap for China in the coming decades," Xinhua reported.

The party's document said China will also work to ban the extraction of confessions through torture and physical abuse.

After admitting to smoking crack, to buying illegal drugs and to more than once being in a drunken stupor, it would seem like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford couldn't say anything else that would really shock anyone.

Well ...

Responding to a new Toronto Globe And Mail report about lewd comments he allegedly made to a woman and other alleged misdeeds of his, Ford denied he'd said those things. Then he went on — using a crude 5-letter word for a woman's genitalia — to say he can get "more than enough ... at home."

Now, we know that some commenters will take us to task for not reprinting the mayor's exact words. If you wish to read them and watch him say them, click this link to the Toronto Star.

And yes, we realize it's somewhat odd to write about such comments without repeating them. Given that Ford is the mayor of Canada's largest city, they're newsworthy. So we wanted to note what happened. But we also wanted to do so while giving everyone a choice about whether they really want to read them or not.

Click here if you want to see NPR's position on "offensive language."

For the last week or so, France has been deep in debate, wondering if there's a resurgence of an old, colonial racism, or if people have just become more tolerant of bigots.

The questions stem from a series of race-based taunts against Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who is black. Many of the statements seem to stem from Taubira's championing of the country's gay marriage legalization, which was signed into law in May.

But things took a nasty turn about a month ago: A politician from the far right National Front party posted a photo of Taubira next to a monkey on a Facebook page.

Then a group gathered to protest the gay marriage law was caught yelling, "Monkey, go eat your banana!" The video circulated widely on YouTube.

"The issue is not about the small minority of people who are deeply racist in France," says Louis Georges Tin, head of an umbrella group of French black associations. "The issue is about the majority. Is the majority indifferent to this situation? Or is the majority against racism?"

Some blame the racist outbreak on a resurgence of the far right. Others say years of hostile, anti-immigrant talk from former President Nicolas Sarkozy has made people numb to it all.

A recent survey showed the number of French who consider themselves not at all racist (44 percent) is lower than ever. Many say it's the government's fault for not defending Taubira more forcefully.

"When you see kids waving bananas and such racist acts multiplying, it's unbelievable," says Harlem Desir, general secretary of the ruling Socialist party, speaking in French. "I haven't seen anything like this in 30 years. This is not France. We have to stand up to racism like this."

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The government in Canada's Quebec province has proposed a "secularism charter" that would, among other things, ban government workers from wearing religious symbols.

A similar debate played out in France nearly a decade ago and has now traveled across the Atlantic to the French-speaking Canadian province.

Here's more from Al-Jazeera:

"Formerly called the 'Charter of Quebec values,' the secularism charter known as Bill 60 would ban state employees from wearing clothing or displaying objects 'that overtly indicate a religious affiliation.' This includes headscarves, yarmulkes, turbans, or 'larger-than-average' crucifixes. ...

"The charter also bans public employees and customers receiving government services from covering their faces. While the regulations will go into force one year after the charter becomes law — with a five-year transition period in some cases — new employees of public institutions would be required to adapt to the charter immediately upon being hired."

As the young U.S. senator takes the oath to become president, he sets out to fix an economy struggling with rising unemployment, slumping profits and depressed stock prices.

He knows the deep recession could prevent him from advancing his broader domestic and diplomatic agenda. Yes — all true for President Obama.

But that's what John F. Kennedy faced as well. On his frosty Inauguration Day in January 1961, Kennedy had to start fulfilling his campaign pledge to "get America moving again." Like Obama, he would need to win over a deeply skeptical business community.

The similarities mostly end right there.

Since taking office, Obama has struggled with the aftermath of a global financial crisis and a home foreclosure meltdown. Even after nearly five years in office, he presides over an economy stuck with a 7.3 percent unemployment rate and a disappointing growth rate well below 3 percent.

In contrast, Kennedy enjoyed a nearly miraculous economic turnaround. At the time of his death in November 1963, an employment boom was beginning. Stocks were soaring, swept up in the emerging "go-go" era on Wall Street — a time when investors were falling in love with mutual funds and conglomerates.

So, what exactly did Kennedy do? And as the nation marks the half-century anniversary of his assassination, do the experts credit him with having a lasting economic legacy?

Most historians say Kennedy's long-term economic impact was profound but complicated. Virtually all agree that in the short run, his policies did contribute to that golden era of the mid-1960s when the United States was enjoying one of the most robust economic expansions in history.

By 1966 — the year that might have been the fifth of his presidency had he lived — Kennedy would have been presiding over an economy growing at a rate of 6.6 percent and an unemployment rate falling to just 3.8 percent.

Related NPR Stories

Politics

'It Takes A Crisis': How '73 Embargo Fueled Change In U.S.

Laura Lane met Paquita Williams, a New York City subway conductor, when their train was stopped underground for two hours. Generally, Paquita says, most passengers are nice, but "there's times if the train breaks down, people think that's my fault."

With the power out, Paquita walked the length of the train, comforting nervous passengers. That made a real impression on Laura. "You really made everybody on that train connect," Laura says. "We all started talking with each other like human beings. And we left the train and somebody was like, 'Let's do this again tomorrow morning.' "

Putting people at ease is important to Paquita, a single foster mom who's worked for the New York transit system for 15 years. On a dental visit years ago, she recalls, she was afraid and asked the dentist to hold her hand for comfort. He refused, and the memory has always stuck with her. "That's why I do what I do with my passengers," she says. "I want you to know that if you need me to hold your hand, I'm there."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher

For the last week or so, France has been deep in debate, wondering if there's a resurgence of an old, colonial racism, or if people have just become more tolerant of bigots.

The questions stem from a series of race-based taunts against Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who is black. Many of the statements seem to stem from Taubira's championing of the country's gay marriage legalization, which was signed into law in May.

But things took a nasty turn about a month ago: A politician from the far right National Front party posted a photo of Taubira next to a monkey on a Facebook page.

Then a group gathered to protest the gay marriage law was caught yelling, "Monkey, go eat your banana!" The video circulated widely on YouTube.

"The issue is not about the small minority of people who are deeply racist in France," says Louis Georges Tin, head of an umbrella group of French black associations. "The issue is about the majority. Is the majority indifferent to this situation? Or is the majority against racism?"

Some blame the racist outbreak on a resurgence of the far right. Others say years of hostile, anti-immigrant talk from former President Nicolas Sarkozy has made people numb to it all.

A recent survey showed the number of French who consider themselves not at all racist (44 percent) is lower than ever. Many say it's the government's fault for not defending Taubira more forcefully.

"When you see kids waving bananas and such racist acts multiplying, it's unbelievable," says Harlem Desir, general secretary of the ruling Socialist party, speaking in French. "I haven't seen anything like this in 30 years. This is not France. We have to stand up to racism like this."

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At a few U.S. airports, travelers have a new option besides paying for long-term parking or finding a ride. A service named FlightCar allows them to leave their car in the company's lot — and rent it out while they're away.

In exchange, the travelers get a ride to their terminal and, after their return, a check for the use of their vehicle. FlightCar just opened its third location, at Los Angeles International Airport, Wednesday.

The company was founded by two teenagers, Kevin Petrovic, 19, and Rujul Zaparde, 18, who tell member station KPCC that they're delaying college to give their new business a chance.

"At any moment there's something like 360,000 cars in long-term parking lots in the top 30 U.S. airports," Zaparde tells KPCC's Ben Bergman. "That's very inefficient."

The pair say they got the idea of letting other people use those cars from Airbnb, which allows private individuals to rent rooms or entire homes over the Internet.

"Among the investors are Airbnb's founders, along with Ryan Seacrest and Ashton Kutcher," as Ben reports.

FlightCar says it pays an average of $30 for a five-day rental. But that rate can go higher. A luxury car that's only a few years old can earn 20 cents a mile for its owner. Mileage is limited to 75 miles a day. If it's not rented, the car's owner has still avoided paying for parking.

After dropping off a vehicle, travelers are taken to their terminal in a black town car. As for insurance, the vehicles are covered under a policy that will pay up to $1 million in liabilities or damages.

Before an owner returns, their car is washed and vacuumed. As Ben notes in his report, some negative online reviews have emerged in which people complain of finding food in their car, or having trouble being reimbursed for damages. Petrovic and Zaparde say they're trying to make sure those incidents aren't repeated.

Ben spoke to two customers who say they're happy with the service.

"To me, the great value of this is that before I learned about FlightCar, I was paying to park at the airport $15-$18 a day," Walt French, 65, says.

After returning from a recent trip to China, French said, "I got a check a couple hours ago for $111" for the use of his Acura.

FlightCar opened its first location in San Francisco in February. Boston followed soon after.

San Francisco officials have filed a lawsuit against the company, saying it breaks the rules for car-rental companies at the city's airport. Among other things, those rules call for the airport to be paid a transaction fee and a cut of the profits. The founders maintain that FlightCar is a peer-to-peer car-sharing service.

"I think anytime you do something really innovative in a market you are going to run up against opposition," Petrovic said.

You can find more stories about the emerging "sharing economy" at NPR's All Tech Considered blog, as well as on the sharing economy series page. To respond to any of these stories, just email, leave a comment, or tweet.

As the young U.S. senator takes the oath to become president, he sets out to fix an economy struggling with rising unemployment, slumping profits and depressed stock prices.

He knows the deep recession could prevent him from advancing his broader domestic and diplomatic agenda. Yes — all true for President Obama.

But that's what John F. Kennedy faced as well. On his frosty Inauguration Day in January 1961, Kennedy had to start fulfilling his campaign pledge to "get America moving again." Like Obama, he would need to win over a deeply skeptical business community.

The similarities mostly end right there.

Since taking office, Obama has struggled with the aftermath of a global financial crisis and a home foreclosure meltdown. Even after nearly five years in office, he presides over an economy stuck with a 7.3 percent unemployment rate and a disappointing growth rate well below 3 percent.

In contrast, Kennedy enjoyed a nearly miraculous economic turnaround. At the time of his death in November 1963, an employment boom was beginning. Stocks were soaring, swept up in the emerging "go-go" era on Wall Street — a time when investors were falling in love with mutual funds and conglomerates.

So, what exactly did Kennedy do? And as the nation marks the half-century anniversary of his assassination, do the experts credit him with having a lasting economic legacy?

Most historians say Kennedy's long-term economic impact was profound but complicated. Virtually all agree that in the short run, his policies did contribute to that golden era of the mid-1960s when the United States was enjoying one of the most robust economic expansions in history.

By 1966 — the year that might have been the fifth of his presidency had he lived — Kennedy would have been presiding over an economy growing at a rate of 6.6 percent and an unemployment rate falling to just 3.8 percent.

Related NPR Stories

Politics

'It Takes A Crisis': How '73 Embargo Fueled Change In U.S.

It's only been hours since Kmart announced its Black Friday plan — to remain open for 41 hours in a row beginning early on Thanksgiving Day. But online critics are throwing a red light on the plan, with some calling the company a Grinch for its aggressive approach to the start of the Christmas shopping season.

"Everybody thinks your executives are horrible people," a man named Christopher Sweet wrote on Kmart's Facebook page. Another critic, Ted Talevski, appealed to the workers: "This is a message to all Kmart employees! Do not go to work on Thanksgiving Day!"

Responding to the negative feedback, Kmart says that it will try to staff its stores with seasonal workers to accommodate employees who want to be with friends and relatives.

Amber Camp, who says she works at Kmart, said via Facebook that her bosses "are planning on all the employees to have some time so we can actually spend time with our families on Thanksgiving."

The criticisms began flowing soon after Sears, Kmart's parent company, announced that the stores that long promoted "blue light specials" will be open from 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to 11 p.m. Friday night.

Sears stores will work a less aggressive schedule, opening from 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving night to 10 p.m. Friday.

"Kmart has opened at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving for the past three years," reports CNN Money, where we spotted the story about the backlash. "Last year, however, stores closed for a few hours at 4 p.m. to let shoppers and employees get to their Thanksgiving dinners."

The company's social media team repeatedly issued responses to the criticisms on Facebook, saying, "We understand many associates want to spend time with their families during the holiday. With this in mind Kmart stores do their very best to staff with seasonal associates and those who are needed to work holidays."

One person offered their own response to a similar statement on Twitter, saying, "yes, that's what the companies I worked for told us too, however we had no choice in the matter and I doubt your associates do either."

But some defended the move, saying that many retail employees would be happy to earn overtime. And others say they aren't bothered by the plan.

"Nobody is physically forcing employees to work at Kmart if they don't like the scheduling," one Facebook comment read.

As the young U.S. senator takes the oath to become president, he sets out to fix an economy struggling with rising unemployment, slumping profits and depressed stock prices.

He knows the deep recession could prevent him from advancing his broader domestic and diplomatic agenda. Yes — all true for President Obama.

But that's what John F. Kennedy faced as well. On his frosty Inauguration Day in January 1961, Kennedy had to start fulfilling his campaign pledge to "get America moving again." Like Obama, he would need to win over a deeply skeptical business community.

The similarities mostly end right there.

Since taking office, Obama has struggled with the aftermath of a global financial crisis and a home foreclosure meltdown. Even after nearly five years in office, he presides over an economy stuck with a 7.3 percent unemployment rate and a disappointing growth rate well below 3 percent.

In contrast, Kennedy enjoyed a nearly miraculous economic turnaround. At the time of his death in November 1963, an employment boom was beginning. Stocks were soaring, swept up in the emerging "go-go" era on Wall Street — a time when investors were falling in love with mutual funds and conglomerates.

So, what exactly did Kennedy do? And as the nation marks the half-century anniversary of his assassination, do the experts credit him with having a lasting economic legacy?

Most historians say Kennedy's long-term economic impact was profound, but complicated. Virtually all agree that in the short run, his policies did contribute to that golden era of the mid-1960s when the United States was enjoying one of the most robust economic expansions in history.

By 1966 — the year that might have been the fifth of his presidency had he lived — Kennedy would have been presiding over an economy growing at a rate of 6.6 percent and an unemployment rate falling to just 3.8 percent.

Related NPR Stories

Politics

'It Takes A Crisis': How '73 Embargo Fueled Change In U.S.

When you think of recycling, you probably think of cans, plastic bottles and newspapers. Well, think a little bigger.

There are businesses devoted to recycling metal, paper, plastic, oil, textiles, cell phones, computers, motors, batteries, Christmas lights, cars and more. The hidden world of globalized recycling and reclamation, and its impact on the environment and the global economy, is the subject of the new book Junkyard Planet by journalist Adam Minter.

From the start, airline analysts had been predicting that an antitrust lawsuit would not stop the $11 billion deal to combine US Airways and American Airlines.

They saw the suit, filed in August, as a government negotiating tactic, not a deal-breaker.

Turns out, they were right: On Tuesday, the Justice Department said that rather than go to trial, it has settled the case. The two carriers are now free to combine and create the world's largest airline, but they must make room for low-cost competitors at seven airports.

Both the airline executives and many antitrust experts agreed that all's well that ends well.

"We couldn't be happier with the settlement," US Airways CEO Doug Parker said on a conference call with journalists.

"It's a win for consumers," Boston College Associate Law Professor Brian Quinn said. "The government identified a number of markets where the merger would have eliminated all competition" on many routes once American and US Airways combined.

"Freeing up those slots creates an opportunity for competitors," he said.

In a conference call, Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer said forcing carriers to surrender slots can help consumers. He pointed to Southwest Airlines' entry into Newark Liberty International Airport in 2010. Because United and Continental divested themselves of some prime airport real estate when they merged, Southwest was able to acquire 36 divested slots at Newark. Air fares subsequently fell more than 10 percent on nonstop flights alone, he said.

Under the agreement, consumers will find new travel options at Boston Logan International, Chicago O'Hare International, Dallas Love Field, Los Angeles International, Miami International, New York's LaGuardia and Ronald Reagan Washington National.

"This settlement ensures airline passengers will see more competition on nonstop and connecting routes throughout the country," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

The settlement puts the merger back on track, pending final approval from the bankruptcy court overseeing the financial reorganization of AMR Corp., the parent company of American Airlines.

The Two-Way

Justice Reaches Deal To Allow American, US Airways Merger

This week on-air and online, the tech team is exploring the sharing economy. You'll find the stories on this blog and aggregated at this link, and we would love to hear your questions about the topic. Just email, leave a comment or tweet.

I didn't know Erin Kelly Myers when I first got into her car outside of NPR West in Culver City, Calif.

"I promise I'm a safe driver," she tells me. "Actually, I'm proud to say for 28 years without an accident, so tonight's definitely not the night, good sir. My car, Little Sexy, confirms that."

She's a driver for the ridesharing service Lyft. And yes, she's named her new Honda Accord "Little Sexy."

Lyft is a service that sets up everyday car owners with people who need rides. Users need a smartphone to download the app, a credit or debit card and a Facebook account. The app, which is available in 18 cities, suggests a donation when the ride is done. The passenger can choose to pay the donation or not. It's all done through the app.

The drivers and passengers can also screen each other before accepting the share, and at the end of the ride, they get to rate each other. Both build up a reputation over time.

Myers and I pick up Catalina Lee at her office after work and take her home.

As we drive across town, Lee explains that she's not just taking a rideshare home because she's tired. She does it to meet people with new points of view.

"I only mingle with a certain kind of group, and I don't really get to explore different ways people think. It's just interesting to hear about it," she says.

When you talk to Myers or her passengers, or people participating in food co-ops or other shared economies, their enthusiasm is not about the transactions, necessarily — it's about the community.

"I definitely feel like I'm a part of the fabric and the core of the city now like I never was before," Myers says.

The Sharing Economy Trend

In the last several years, the idea of sharing cars and bikes has begun to take hold in major American cities.

About three years ago was when the movement really took off. The country was coming out of the economic collapse. Smartphones were becoming mainstream. Your grandmother was getting on Facebook.

"There were many more business models emerging, many more entrants, a lot more investment money and a lot more disruption," says Susan Shaheen, who teaches and researches transportation at the University of California, Berkeley.

All Tech Considered

What's Mine Is Yours (For A Price) In The Sharing Economy

Janet Yellen cleared a key hurdle Thursday, as her confirmation hearing to become the next chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve went smoothly. There were only a few snags in roughly two hours of questions and discussions between Yellen and members of the Senate Banking Committee.

Many of the senators lauded Yellen's extensive experience, as well as her adherence to views they heard her discuss in private meetings on Capitol Hill in recent weeks.

Thursday's hearing (which is archived at C-SPAN) did not include a vote; such proceedings often spark follow-up questions that are asked separately of the nominee. If the panel gives Yellen its approval, as expected, the full Senate would vote on her confirmation.

Saying that Yellen "will eventually need five Republican votes for confirmation, because the reality of the modern Senate is that everything takes 60 votes," The New York Times says that Republicans' questions today suggests "those votes may not be so hard to round up."

Much of the hearing centered on the Fed's efforts to help the U.S. economy recover from the recent mortgage crisis. Republicans on the panel asked Yellen about the ongoing stimulus effort and whether it has helped the wealthy more than anyone else.

That view was put forth by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who said that, "in many ways, easy money is an elitist policy."

In her response, Yellen acknowledged that the policies have helped investors in the stock market. But she also said that low interest rates had aided a recovery in the U.S. housing market, calling it "broadly beneficial to all those Americans who own homes."

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said the stimulus policy, in which the U.S. government buys $85 billion in bonds and securities each month, has hurt savers by keeping interest rates near rock-bottom lows.

"Low interest rates harm savers, it's absolutely true," Yellen told him, noting that people on a fixed income often rely on financial instruments such as certificates of deposit that generate safe — but currently very low — rates of return.

But, she added, "We can't have normal rates unless the economy is normal. At the moment, we have a lot of saving, and not very much investment."

Some of the strongest views came from a Democrat, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. We've saved a video clip of that exchange on C-SPAN's website.

"The truth is, if the regulators had done their jobs and reined in the banks, we wouldn't need to be talking about quantitative easing," Warren said, "because we could have avoided the 2008 crisis altogether."

Warren went on to say she sees an imbalance in how the Fed handles its monetary and regulatory roles, with the former getting top priority at the expense of the latter.

She finished by asking Yellen, "Do you think that the Fed's lack of attention to regulatory and supervisory responsibilities helped lead to the crash of 2008?"

For a few seconds, the only sound in the chamber was the clicking of cameras. Then Yellen began her response, in which she stumbled a bit at first.

"You know, I think in the aftermath of the crisis, we've gone back and tried to look carefully at what we... what should have been done differently," she said. "And there have been important lessons learned."

Yellen noted that the Fed had revamped its supervisory practices, particularly in dealing with large banks.

"One of our top priorities now is ramping up our monitoring of the financial system as a whole, to detect financial stability risks," she said. "I think that's something that we weren't doing in an adequate basis before the crisis. And so we missed some of the important linkages whereby problems in mortgages would rebound through the financial system."

Warren closed her remarks by saying she hopes "very much" that Yellen is confirmed and that she would "help keep our financial system safe."

President Obama nominated Yellen in October to fill the post that current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke will vacate at the end of January. Yellen is currently the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Previously, she served as the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She also chaired President Clinton's White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Bernanke's role at the Fed will not end when he steps down. He was appointed as chairman of the board in 2006 and will remain on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System until his term in that post expires in 2020.

If confirmed by the Senate, Yellen will become the first woman to head the Federal Reserve. She would begin a four-year term as chairman; her term on the board would run for 14 years.

The New York Times, which live-blogged today's hearing, clarifies the claim of distinction that Yellen could make if she is elevated to the chairmanship. Noting tweets that have called Yellen the world's first female head of a central bank, the newspaper says that's not so.

"Ms. Yellen would certainly be the United States' first female central banker, and one of the most powerful women to serve in American government," The Times says. "But East Germany had a female central banker more than 50 years ago. And there are more than a dozen female central bankers currently serving, including Elvira Nabiullina of Russia, Zeti Akhtar Aziz of Malaysia and Linah Mohohlo of Botswana."

Perhaps you had never heard of Tacloban before last week's monster typhoon pummeled the provincial capital in the central Philippines.

Yet it has a rich history that includes Ferdinand Magellan's stop nearby in 1521 as his ship circumnavigated the globe, bringing with him Spaniards who would ultimately colonize and influence the Philippines for centuries.

U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously returned to the Philippines in World War II when he confidently strode ashore a beach near Tacloban in 1944. The statue honoring him survived the latest storm.

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The Republicans have dubbed them the "Obamacare Dozen," the 12 Democratic senators up for re-election in 2014, all of whom voted for the president's health care and insurance overhaul law.

In GOP world, each one of those senators managed to provide the "deciding vote" for the Affordable Care Act.

And each one, in the wake of the law's online rollout debacle, is in a "panic" — the GOP buzzword of the week — over its political implications.

That panic narrative is not baseless. It's undoubtedly playing out for already-vulnerable red state incumbents like Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Mark Begich in Alaska, who face an even steeper climb as antipathy toward the 2010 health care law grows with each stumble.

But what about Democratic senators like Kay Hagan in North Carolina, who just months ago was looking at a tough, but winnable campaign for a second term?

Or Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, a former governor whose strong summer poll numbers prompted this local news headline: "Can Anyone Beat Shaheen in 2014?"

New Hampshire Uncertainty

Panic may be too strong a word for Shaheen's state of mind. Indeed, that would probably be one of the last words anyone who knows the methodical, risk-averse politician would use to describe her, or her Obamacare strategy. That doesn't mean Shaheen hasn't moved to mitigate fallout.

"The health care law has never been popular in the state, but in the last month, Shaheen has been able to pivot very well," says political reporter and analyst James Pindell of New Hampshire's WMUR-TV.

Shaheen has said she'll propose legislation to extend the health insurance sign-up period, given the problems with online registration. It's an effort not supported by the White House, and one deemed unworkable by architects of the law.

But, Pindell says, it gives the appearance that there's distance between her, Obama and Senate Democratic leaders.

"Instead of having this thing around her neck," Pindell says, "in a classic Shaheen way, she's saying, 'I'm not changing my position, but I want to be more reasonable about this.'"

Former state Republican Chairman Fergus Cullen allows that Shaheen has "a bit more room to maneuver" than Pryor or Begich. He insists, however, that she is "as vulnerable as any other member who voted for Obamacare in the first place.

"Jeanne Shaheen is someone who has always put complete confidence in the government," Cullen says. "This has to give everyone pause."

But testing that vulnerability requires a viable opposing candidate, which Republicans haven't had since former Rep. Charlie Bass took a pass at running.

The two announced candidates are largely unknown statewide and poorly financed: a social conservative who drew 10 percent in a state GOP gubernatorial primary in 2010, and a former state senator whose pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and pro-carbon tax positions don't line up with the party's base.

That's why national Republicans have been urging former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who in 2012 lost a reelection bid to Democrat Elizabeth Warren, to come north to the Granite State and run.

Brown, who has a New Hampshire vacation home, has been an increasingly familiar figure in the state. But he's been making scattershot appearances — and if he has a strategy for running, no one can figure out what it is, Cullen says.

Strategy or no, he's "the only option" for Republicans, Pindell says. "When Charlie Bass decided he was not going to run, Scott Brown stopped being a sideshow and became the last great hope of New Hampshire Republicans to beat Jeanne Shaheen."

Brown has until June to decide whether to run, so it could be months before Shaheen, who raised and spent more than $8.3 million in her 2008 win over Republican John E. Sununu, can truly test the political fallout from Obamacare.

North Carolina Freefall?

It looks increasingly like Kay Hagan won't have to wait that long.

A Public Policy Polling survey released this week showed Hagan's lead over a handful of potential Republican challengers disintegrating over the past several weeks.

The survey, which found that 69 percent of North Carolina voters say the Obamacare rollout hasn't been successful, had Hagan essentially in a dead heat with state House Speaker Thom Tillis, and Rand Paul-endorsed Greg Brannon, a doctor. She's also running barely ahead of the Rev. Mark Harris, and Heather Grant, a nurse.

In his analysis, Tom Jensen at PPP said that "early attack ads on Kay Hagan and the unpopular fallout of Obamacare" have taken a toll on her poll numbers.

Her approval rating among voters has remained consistent, Jensen said, but her disapproval rating has spiked from 39 percent to 49 percent since September — tracking closely with President Obama's numbers.

Hagan, along with Pryor, Begich and Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana have all endorsed Shaheen's bid to extend the enrollment deadline. And Hagan has taken a page from that playbook. This week she said she's seeking an independent study of what went wrong with the launch of the federal health care website.

"I'm leading a letter calling for a full investigation into the contracting process surrounding Healthcare.gov," she told reporters Tuesday. "Taxpayers are owed a full and a transparent accounting of how the vendors contracted to build this site failed to launch this site successfully."

Kenneth Fernandez, poll director at North Carolina's Elon University, says that Hagan still enjoys the advantage of incumbency, and money — for now.

"This is a purple state, and whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, there is going to be a lot of outside money coming in," says Fernandez, who adds he believes that Speaker Tillis will emerge the GOP nominee.

The Obamacare issue will hurt Hagan, Fernandez says, but it's worth noting that her Republican counterpart in the Senate, Richard Burr, has seen his numbers worsen along with hers as the public sours on Congress in general, and on Republicans, too.

Fernandez says he'll have new Elon poll results late next week.

North Carolina Democratic strategist Gary Pearce, writing Wednesday on the blog "Talking About Politics," repeated a warning that politicians who try to hedge their bets are rarely successful, and offered this advice to Hagan:

"Remain calm. Step away from the ledge. Repeat after me: 'This website mess needs to be fixed. But we'd also better fix our health care mess. If we don't, it will bankrupt our nation and every family in it. What's the Republicans' plan?' "

The hardest thing to do in politics, Pearce says, is to under-react.

Meanwhile, political analyst Charlie Cook has kept Hagan's race rated as "leans Democrat," with Shaheen's as still a "likely Democrat" win.

For now.

For the first time in nearly a century, Mexico is considering letting foreigners own land outright along the coast and near international borders. Right now, only Mexicans can hold the title to land in the so-called restricted zone. The president and many lawmakers want to relax the ownership laws in hopes of spurring a wave of foreign investment in the country.

But others are crying foul and reviving nationalistic fears of foreign invasion and domination that incited enactment of the law so many years ago.

American Ron Hess and his girlfriend are among those applauding the proposed change. They used to live in the Northern California town of Paradise. But Hess says his new home on the beach outside Rosarito, Mexico, is the real paradise.

"We just are elated; we just love it down here," he says. "The people are so friendly, the coastal environment, the climate, the beauty, you just can't put it into words."

Hess says his pension goes twice as far in Rosarito — less than 30 miles south of San Diego — as it did in the U.S. The only problem is he doesn't own the title outright to his new beloved home.

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A team appointed by President Obama to review U.S. spying policies in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency programs has delivered an interim report to the White House.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an email to news organizations that the review group "has orally provided their interim report to the White House, with their final report due by Dec. 15." She said the results would be made public "in some way" once the finished review is submitted.

NPR's Ari Shapiro reports the panel was appointed in early August after months of leaks about U.S. electronic surveillance from Snowden. The president asked five intelligence experts to examine U.S. surveillance policies and make recommendations about "how best to balance security needs against privacy concerns," Shapiro says. He adds:

"At the White House, the panel briefed Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco, along with National Security Council staffers."

The Justice Department has reached a deal that will allow for the merger of American and US Airways, opening the door to the creation of the world's largest airline.

The merger still needs final approval from a bankruptcy court.

The U.S. had hoped to block the merger arguing that it would result in less competition and higher prices for consumers.

Under the deal announced Tuesday, American and US Airways have agreed to "divest slots and gates at key constrained airports across the country to low cost carrier airlines (LCCs) in order to enhance system-wide competition in the airline industry resulting in more choices and more competitive airfares for consumers."

In a press release, the Justice Department said the agreement will increase the presence of low cost airlines at Boston Logan International, Chicago O'Hare International, Dallas Love Field, Los Angeles International, Miami International, New York LaGuardia International and Ronald Reagan Washington National.

"This agreement has the potential to shift the landscape of the airline industry," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. "By guaranteeing a bigger foothold for low-cost carriers at key U.S. airports, this settlement ensures airline passengers will see more competition on nonstop and connecting routes throughout the country."

American said in a press release that it also agreed to keep its hubs in Charlotte, New York (Kennedy), Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago (O'Hare), Philadelphia and Phoenix operating at historical levels for three years.

"Completion of the merger remains subject to the approval of the settlements by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, and certain other conditions," American said. "The companies now expect to complete the merger in December 2013."

Lashkar Gah is the capital of the volatile province that alone grows half of Afghanistan's opium poppy. Cultivation here grew by 34 percent over last year.

On Fridays, hundreds of men gather at the bazaar along the Helmand River, the lifeblood of this arid province. Vendors sell everything from livestock to boxes of artisanal medicine.

There's no sign of poppy here. In fact, the farmers we talk to like 26-year-old Khairullah, who goes by one name, say they are actually too poor to grow it.

"It requires a lot of effort to grow, and you have to wait a long time to harvest," he says.

Khariullah says he barely gets by growing legal crops and he can't afford the extra labor and risk to cultivate poppy. Others here agree, adding that poppy is the main source of insecurity. But, it's not hard to find farmers who do grow it.

We drive across the city and down a quiet residential street of tan brick compounds. We stop and 27-year-old Abdullah hops in the car. It's not safe to visit his village, so he came to the city to meet us.

Abdullah says his family has been farming opium poppies for more than 20 years. He says they can't make a living any other way.

"The major source of income for people in Helmand is opium," he says.

Abdullah says his family grows about 150 pounds and make about $9,000 a year, which is four times what they can make from any other crop.

"We understand that opium is bad," he says. "All drugs are bad. But, it's difficult for us seeing a neighbor with a new car when we are riding bicycles. So, we have to do this to have a better life."

Abdullah admits it's a gamble. One year, he had a crop that was chest-high and ready for harvesting. He went to town one morning, and when he came home, the field had been leveled by the government workers eradicating opium poppies.

Abdullah, who is attending law school and hopes to someday get out of the poppy business, says this year's harvest was excellent.

A United Nations report released Wednesday confirms Abdullah's assessment. The report said opium poppy cultivation hit a record level this year despite the ongoing efforts by Western countries and the Afghan government to reduce production and find alternatives for farmers.

Few Options For Farmers

About six miles outside of Lashkar Gah, past brown fields and mud houses, is the government compound of Nad Ali district.

Fifteen Afghan farmers with creased, leathery faces sit in the meeting hall. Sharifullah, who also gives only one name, says that in addition to corn, cotton, and potatoes, they also grow opium, which the farmers don't hesitate to admit in front of government officials.

"That is because for the rest of our product we have no market," he says. "We can't export [our crops] and get a good price for them. We can't even sustain our families."

Sharifullah says they don't grow opium in the district, but rather on the outskirts in the desert.

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More than 106,000 Americans selected health plans in the first reporting period of open enrollment for the new health insurance marketplace, according to data released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services.

That number is only "about 20 percent of the government's October target," as NPR's Scott Horsley reports for our Newscast unit.

Less than 27,000 people used the federal HealthCare.gov site to select a plan. The overall number includes enrollments made via federal and state marketplaces from Oct. 1 to Nov. 2, the agency says.

"To date, 106,185 persons have selected a Marketplace plan — this includes 79,391 in [state-based marketplaces] and 26,794 in [federally facilitated marketplaces]," according to the report. "An additional 975,407 persons who have been determined eligible have not yet selected a plan through the Marketplace."

The means less than a quarter of those who chose plans did so through the federal site. But Health and Human Services officials say they're optimistic about future growth.

"The promise of quality, affordable coverage is increasingly becoming reality for this first wave of applicants to the Health Insurance Marketplaces," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement accompanying the release of the data.

"We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months," she added, noting strong interest in the plans and promising more improvements to the federal HealthCare.gov website.

The report highlights four numbers:

846,184 applications have been completed.

1,509,883 people are included in those completed applications.

396,261 individuals have been determined or assessed eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program.

106,185 people have selected insurance plans for 2014.

The timing of the data's release came as something of a surprise; officials had said they would not be released until later this week. It came on the same day Rep. Darrell Issa led a House oversight committee hearing on the problems that plagued the HealthCare.gov site and the effort to improve it.

At that hearing, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said that "the system has been comfortably handling, at present," about 20,000 to 25,000 current users.

The HHS report also included broad statistics on traffic to marketplace websites, citing 26,876,527 unique visitors to state and federal websites. And 3,158,436 people got in touch with state and federal call centers that were set up to help people navigate the system created by the Affordable Care Act, according to the report.

The agency notes that the 106,185 figure "is 1.5 percent of the estimated enrollees at the end of the 2014 open enrollment period," citing a Congressional Budget Office estimate from May.

Scotland Yard says it believes a British spy whose naked, decomposing body was found padlocked inside a gym bag in a bathtub three years ago, probably died accidentally.

Gareth Williams, 31, was working for Britain's MI6 spy agency when his body was found at his home in August 2010.

Last May, a coroner concluded that Williams was probably murdered, but on Wednesday London Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt told reporters that the death was "most probably ... an accident."

"I'm convinced that Gareth's death was in no way linked to his work," Hewitt said.

Reuters says that at the time his death was revealed, Williams' "spy background and the fact that expensive, unworn women's clothes were found at his flat provoked a wide range of 'weird and wonderful' theories."

The news agency says:

"The remains of the maths prodigy were found curled up inside a zipped and padlocked red hold-all at the London flat — an intelligence service 'safe house' — close to MI6's headquarters."

Hunger can make people emotional, that's for sure. Some people get "hangry" when their blood sugar levels drop and their irritability rises. Others get greedy.

But new research suggests that we may have another, innate response to hunger: a desire to share what we have with others.

Researchers Lene Aarw and Michael Bang Petersen, both in the department of political science and government at Aarhus University in Denmark, wanted to explore the possibility that we are evolutionarily wired to want to share food. Their logic? Back in the days before we had a reliable food supply, communities often shared food in situations of temporary hunger.

The researchers also had a hunch that biological impulses — like hunger — may influence our political opinions.

So in a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, they tested these ideas with an experiment involving 104 university students in Denmark. The students refrained from eating or drinking for four hours. They then were given soft drinks to drink: Half got soft drinks with carbohydrates, while the other half got drinks with an artificial sweetener. After that, the researchers asked the students six questions about social welfare.

They found that the students who had gotten the artificial sweeteners — and thus had lower blood glucose levels and more hunger — expressed stronger support for social welfare.

But when they gave the hungry people actual money, they did not share more — apparently, the researchers concluded, hunger increased people's sense of moral obligation, but it didn't necessarily spur them on to concrete action.

Now to be clear, Aarw and Petersen's intention was to explore the biological basis of how political attitudes are formed.

"There's so much focus on traditional forms of rationality, and mainly, economic incentives," Aarw tells The Salt. "Our findings provide a new understanding of how there are biological impulses underlying our opinions."

So does this suggest that affluent countries, where people are more likely to be overfed than underfed, are less likely to support social welfare? No, says Aarw.

"I don't think we can really say something about that," she says. "But it would be highly relevant to look more into it."

Indeed, this is a new area of evolutionary psychology that Aarw and Petersen have helped to crack open, but there's a whole lot more to learn about how hunger affects our emotions and our actions.

A team appointed by President Obama to review U.S. spying policies in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations has delivered an interim report to the White House.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an email to news organizations Bloomberg the review group "has orally provided their interim report to the White House, with their final report due by Dec. 15." She said the results would be made public "in some way" once the finished review is submitted.

NPR's Ari Shapiro says the panel was appointed in early August after months of leaks about U.S. electronic surveillance from whistleblower Snowden. The president asked five intelligence experts to examine U.S. surveillance policies and make recommendations about "how best to balance security needs against privacy concerns."

"At the White House, the panel briefed Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice and counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, along with National Security Council staffers."

The Justice Department has reached a deal that will allow for the merger of American and US Airways, opening the door to the creation of the world's largest airline.

The merger still needs final approval from a bankruptcy court.

The U.S. had hoped to block the merger arguing that it would result in less competition and higher prices for consumers.

Under the deal announced Tuesday, American and US Airways have agreed to "divest slots and gates at key constrained airports across the country to low cost carrier airlines (LCCs) in order to enhance system-wide competition in the airline industry resulting in more choices and more competitive airfares for consumers."

In a press release, the Justice Department said the agreement will increase the presence of low cost airlines at Boston Logan International, Chicago O'Hare International, Dallas Love Field, Los Angeles International, Miami International, New York LaGuardia International and Ronald Reagan Washington National.

"This agreement has the potential to shift the landscape of the airline industry," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. "By guaranteeing a bigger foothold for low-cost carriers at key U.S. airports, this settlement ensures airline passengers will see more competition on nonstop and connecting routes throughout the country."

American said in a press release that it also agreed to keep its hubs in Charlotte, New York (Kennedy), Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago (O'Hare), Philadelphia and Phoenix operating at historical levels for three years.

"Completion of the merger remains subject to the approval of the settlements by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, and certain other conditions," American said. "The companies now expect to complete the merger in December 2013."

The woman whose smiling face adorned the HealthCare.gov website in the first days after its launch has stepped forward to tearfully address those who she say cyberbullied her as they took potshots at the Obama administration's troubled online health care exchange.

Breaking News

If at first you don't succeed, try again.

That's the message from the White House on Tuesday, with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) asking more than 275,000 people who tried and failed to sign up for health plans on the stalled HealthCare.gov website to give it another shot.

As NPR's Julie Rovner reports that the first of several waves of email invitations are going out to people who could not complete registration and therefore were unable to sign up for health insurance in the first weeks of the Affordable Care Act's enrollment period.

Rovner says: "Health officials apparently are satisfied enough with the website's operations that they are ready to welcome back those who failed to complete the enrollment process during the difficult early days and weeks."

"We want to make sure we are inviting individuals to come back into the system and that their experience will be a positive one," Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for CMS said.

Officials still say they are track to get the site working for the vast majority of users by the end of this month.

Bloomberg reports:

"High participation is critical to the success of the 2010 health law and its promise of making medical coverage an affordable possibility for at least 25 million uninsured people. While there was an early U.S. goal of about 800,000 sign-ups nationally for the first two months, officials have recently said they anticipate lower initial enrollment that will increase over time.

The Department of Health and Human Services is set to report data this week for the federal insurance marketplace serving 36 states and for the 14 state-run exchanges.

About 49,100 people have enrolled at 12 state sites, consultant Avalere Health said yesterday in a study based on news reports. About 40,000 to 50,000 more have signed up through the federal exchange, the Wall Street Journal reported. Website flaws and the slow start may hurt the overhaul's long-term prospects, said Avalere Chief Executive Officer Dan Mendelson."

It's been more than two decades since the former Soviet Union broke apart, and to the dismay of Russia, many of the 15 former Soviet republics have spun away from Moscow's orbit.

Now Ukraine — with 46 million people — has a chance to say goodbye to its Soviet past and align itself both economically and culturally with the European Union.

Outside the former Karl Marx Chocolate Works, semi-trucks are ready to deliver loads of candy sold throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The factory, in a shabby industrial neighborhood of Kiev, now belongs to Roshen, a giant Ukrainian company with about 3,000 workers and more than $1 billion in business a year.

Inside the factory it is bright, modern and scrupulously clean. Workers in lab coats and hospital-style hair bonnets monitor machines that wrap individual chocolates in foil, with a neat twist at each end.

The glittering treats that tumble off the assembly line were popular in Russia, accounting for 5 percent of the market. That is until Russia's consumer protection agency banned them. The Russians claim they found a hazardous chemical in the chocolate, but no other country has reported any problem.

The timing of the ban has raised suspicions. Ukraine must decide whether to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union this month. Roshen's owner, Petro Poroshenko, is a strong supporter.

"Our opportunity to sign an association agreement with the European Union is just the gate of possibilities, and [it happens] once in several decades," Poroshenko says.

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The United Nations elected 14 members to the Humans Rights Council on Tuesday, but some of the picks are seen as controversial.

Among them are Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, which Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, says don't reach the high standards that council members should have. She points out that Beijing and Moscow have yet to respond to 13 requests for visits by human rights inspectors, some dating back to 2006.

"They're not allowing the very council they sit on to do its job effectively," Hick says. "States like China and Russia are powerful states that exercise their power in a way to influence others at the council, as well as make it very hard to engage on issues that they don't want reviewed."

She says although the U.S. did not allow private interviews with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, China and Russia stand out in the sheer number of unmet requests. She also cites cases such as Russia's anti-gay legislation and China arresting human rights activists and dissidents, and says such countries should not have run unopposed for the council.

"They waltzed into their seats," Hicks says. "That Russia is able to run unopposed is a real travesty."

U.N. Humans Rights Council members can serve for six years before standing for reelection. China, Russia and Saudi Arabia have all served for the past six years, and they ran unopposed to retain their seats, which are organized by region.

None of the countries' respective U.N. missions responded to interview requests by deadline, but Wang Min, deputy permanent representative of China, told Radio Television Hong Kong that China's re-election "fully shows that the international community acknowledges China's huge achievements in upholding human rights."

The new members start serving January 1 next year.

Fine Art

Dead Bees, Nail Clippings And Priceless Art In Warhol's 'Time Capsules'

Rapper and producer Sean "Diddy" Combs, director Robert Rodriguez, and basketball legend Magic Johnson each now has his own new cable TV networks. Their channels were part of a merger deal Comcast made with the FCC to give a shot to new networks owned by African Americans, Latinos and others.

Last month, Combs threw on his classic Puff Daddy alias to welcome millennial viewers to his new music network, Revolt.

"This is really happening, people," the rapper said at the launch. "A boy from Harlem is really standing on a stoop in Brooklyn launching a network worldwide. The revolution is now being televised."

Next month, Rodriguez will introduce young English-speaking Latinos to El Rey, on which he's partnered with Spanish-language network Univision to produce an action-packed lineup, including a new Latino James Bond-style series.

"El Rey is going to be the king of content," he says. "Iconic, addictive, exciting, visceral television."

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

The U.S. Postal Service has made a deal with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. For now, delivery will be limited to Los Angeles and New York, but the service is expected to expand into cities such as Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix next year. Neither Amazon nor the USPS has released details of the deal, which USA Today notes, is "a welcome new source of revenue for the financially struggling U.S. Postal Service, which has been trying tap into the growth of online shopping." The New York Times reports: "For the Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, first-class mail delivery, particularly on Saturdays, is often a money loser, whereas package delivery is profitable." The USPS has previously floated a number of ideas – such as eliminating Saturday mail delivery — past Congress to try to cut costs, but most have been returned to sender.

Malala Yousafzai's book I Am Malala has been banned in Pakistan's private schools "because it carries the content which is against our country's ideology and Islamic values," the chairman of All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, Kashif Mirza, told the AFP. The group represents 40,000 private schools across the country. Yousafzai drew international attention to Pakistan's educational system after the Taliban shot her in the head last year for advocating education rights for women. The AP writes that "conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan that her shooting was staged to create an icon for the west to embrace," and Mirza said, "Through this book, she became a tool in the hands of the Western powers." Parts of the book deemed objectionable include a mild defense of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses: Yousafzai cites her father, who thinks the book is "offensive to Islam but believes strongly in the freedom of speech."

Parul Sehgal on the re-issue of Jonathan Franzen's first novel: "Some books ought to be allowed to molder in peace." (Franzen doesn't like it either — he told The Paris Review that it was written by "a 25-year-old with a very compromised sense of masculinity.") On a related note, Franzen rendered himself approximately 100 million times more likeable by citing Harriet the Spy as a literary influence in this EW interview.

After a fierce 10-publisher bidding war, Knopf bought Garth Risk Hallberg's debut novel, City on Fire, for almost $2 million. A relatively little-known author, Hallberg has published short fiction in small literary magazines and a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family.

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

White Girls, by Hilton Als. The titular white girls in Als' gorgeous, maddening collection of essays are often not white girls at all — they include Malcolm X, Michael Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, and the rapper Eminem. He writes, "I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love." For Als, this is true but also not true. We are all the same except when we are not the same, and Als does an expert job at teasing out the difference.

A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O'Connor. The author is one of Als' most fully-realized "white girls," a writer and a pious Catholic who, as he puts it, "describes, never preaches." This week, a prayer journal O'Connor kept in her early twenties will be published for the first time. Unsolemn, sometimes miserable, occasionally funny, and always beautiful, it illustrates what Als calls "the uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and profane, the shit and the stars." O'Connor writes, "I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted." It's impossible not to find the whole thing exalted, from her fear of hell to her genuine spiritual agony after overindulging in "Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought."

This Veterans Day, considers these lines from the preface to Fire And Forget, a collection of short stories by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

On the one hand, we want to remind you ... of what happened ... and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there's nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind. No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we'll carry with us forever.

Good morning, fellow political junkies.

It's Veteran's Day 2013. Our deepest thanks to those who've worn the nation's uniform both home and abroad and made countless sacrifices to serve it with courage and integrity.

The House returns this week from a recess. Its Republican leaders will waste little time placing Democrats on the defensive and positioning the GOP as coming to the rescue of those beleaguered individuals who have received notices that their health plans were cancelled. The GOP-controlled House plans to vote this week on the Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013.

Congressional budget negotiations also resume this week. The negotiators appear to be focusing on replacing some of the across-the-board sequester cuts with more thoughtful spending cuts. They have a Dec. 13 deadline to reach an agreement.

With that, here are some of the more interesting recent pieces of news or analysis with political implications that caught my eye this morning.

House Republican leaders have distributed a playbook to their members on how to best exploit the Affordable Care Act's troubles, particularly President Obama's by now infamous "You can keep it" pledge, reports Roll Call's Matt Fuller. Meanwhile, House Democratic staffers will meet with White House aides in an effort to find administrative fixes for the law, writes Emma Dumain of the same publication.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did 80 percent of a full Ginsburg, doing four of five of the Sunday news shows. While Christie professed to be focused on his job as the newly re-elected Republican governor of a traditionally blue New Jersey, Christie, and the journalists interviewing him, all knew that the 2016 presidential race, was why he was Sunday's top attraction. The Star-Ledger's Brent Johnson and Tom Wright-Piersanti report on his appearances.

Dozens of veterans programs have been trimmed under the sequestration budget cuts with more reductions expected and feared by veterans' advocates, reports David Francis for the Fiscal Times.

Phillip Carter and David Barno write that the military could help veterans by seizing opportunities to close the military/civilian divide. Some possibilities: allowing more civilians on bases and placing some bases closer to large population centers.

A video of the physical transformation of homeless veteran James Wolf has gone viral and for good reason. It's riveting.

Is the reason the U.S. government so dysfunctional because the Constitution is outmoded and needs a complete rewrite? That's the conversation National Journal's Alex Seitz-Wald's hopes start with his recent, thought-provoking piece.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren continues to be touted by some Democrats as the anti-Hillary Clinton 2016 candidate, writes Noam Scheiber in the New Republic. Some Democrats say she more accurately reflects the party's core ideology than Clinton. And that's despite Warren signing the letter from women Democratic senators urging the former secretary of state to run.

A conservative white Republican left the impression in his campaign literature that he was African American, thereby won enough black votes to land a seat on the Houston Community College System board long held by black member, reports Doug Miller of KHOU 11 News. It's a tactic long used by relatively obscure candidates of racial or ethnic backgrounds different than their would-be constituents.

Midterm elections are still a year off, but the scramble to gain a political edge at the polls is already well underway on Capitol Hill.

Bills are brought up and votes taken not so much in hopes they will prevail, but rather to send a political message. In the Senate, both parties are at it.

When the Senate reconvenes Tuesday, it will be voting to break a GOP filibuster of the nomination of Georgetown University law professor Nina Pillard — one of three people President Obama named to fill vacancies on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Senate Republicans recently filibustered another woman nominated to that court, Patricia Millett, and they promise to do the same with Pillard.

Democrats say there's a simple explanation: Republicans are blocking highly qualified women from serving on that court.

"Do we have to get women elected to the United States Senate to get women on the Judiciary Committee to get women on the courts?" asked Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state. "Because our colleagues aren't going to help us do that?"

Last week, Senate Democrats, with support from 10 Republicans, voted to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Thirty-two Republicans voted no, including Indiana Sen. Dan Coats.

The measure, he said, had a clear political objective.

"Same point that's made with a lot of bills that come up: Put the other party on the defensive," he said.

Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed to confirm that. He lamented to reporters that House Speaker John Boehner had no plans to take up the nondiscrimination bill, despite polls that show more than 4 out of 5 Americans support it.

"I'm flabbergasted as [to] why they're stopping everything the American people want," Reid said.

Another thing more than 80 percent of Americans say they want is to increase the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, says his party last Thursday discussed raising the minimum wage to around $10 an hour and then indexing it to inflation.

Durbin says it's about sending working families a message: Democrats can help them.

"It's more than a message vote. It appears that there are so many nonstarters for Speaker Boehner, you just wonder, where are the starters?" Durbin said. "If you can't help working families who are struggling paycheck to paycheck to get by in America, then where are your priorities? What is important?"

Durbin admits he knows of no Senate Republicans who would vote to raise the minimum wage.

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey said it's clear why Democrats are raising the issue.

"It's a populist measure," he said. "They think they can probably score some political points, but it's very bad policy and it would, if it were to pass, it would actually exacerbate a terribly high unemployment rate that we already have."

But Senate Democrats are not the only ones trying to force tough votes on their opponents.

Last week at the Capitol, National Right to Life Committee President Carol Tobias was on hand as South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who's seeking re-election, introduced a bill already passed by the House. It would ban all abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy except in cases of incest or when the mother's life is at risk.

"We're choosing today to speak up for all babies at 20 weeks and try to create legal protections under the theory that if you can feel pain, the government should protect you from being destroyed by an abortion, which I imagine would be a very painful way to die," Graham said.

Supporters cite recent polling showing nearly two-thirds of Americans agree with them. Still, last week on the Senate floor, Washington state's other Democratic senator, Patty Murray, called this bill co-sponsored by 33 Republicans "blatantly political."

"This extreme unconstitutional abortion ban is an absolute nonstarter," she said. "It is going nowhere in the Senate, and those Republicans know it."

But they also know any vote on the bill could leave some Democrats seeking re-election in a tough spot — just like the votes Democrats are forcing Republicans to take in these pre-election days.

The teacher glances back and forth from her black tablet to the students in front of her as she runs through an English lesson.

"Very good," she announces as reads the directions from the tablet. "Give them a super-cheer," she continues and the students shout in unison "Super!"

The e-reader not only delivers the lesson script to the teachers, but it also acts as an electronic time sheet, grade book and supervisor. The tablet tracks what time the teacher arrives, what time she leaves, and how long she spends on every lesson.

The administrative side of the entire school can be run off a smartphone, says David Mwangi, the manager of a Bridge school in Nairobi. He can admit new students, submit test scores and send payroll time sheets back to Bridge's central office in Nairobi all from his cheap Chinese smartphone.

Tuition collection is also automated. Parents pay their monthly school fees through Kenya's mobile money system, M-Pesa, which allows people to transfer cash via text message.

'The Magic' Of Replication

The exact same lesson being taught in this classroom is being taught in every other sixth grade class at Bridge schools across the country, says Bridge co-founder Shannon May.

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

It also allows Bridge to rapidly expand and bring in more "customers."

That's Bridge's goal. Its target customers are the hundreds of millions of parents around the world who live on $2 day and yearn for better schools for their children.

To keep tuition costs low, Bridge depends on large class sizes. Their ideal class size is 40 to 50 kids, but the classes can get upward of 70 students.

Over the past four years, Bridge has grown to be the largest chain of private schools on the continent. And some advocates for universal education find this troubling.

There are other private schools across Africa seeking to teach the so-called poorest of the poor, but their models and size are quite different from those of Bridge.

Criticism Of Method

"If somebody suggested that kind of an educational model, in this country they would be laughed out of the educational community," says Ed Gragert, the U.S. director of the Global Campaign for Education, which advocates for increased access to education in the developing world.

"That's not how kids learn best," he says. "Kids learn by interacting with each other. It seems like we are going back for the sake of somebody making a profit to where a robot could teach that class."

He says, however, he does admire the rigor of the Bridge model. School is in session from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. five days a week. On Saturday, classes run from 9 until 4.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he can teach national Republicans an important lesson: if they want to appeal to voters beyond their traditional conservative base, they need to go to where those voters are.

As he made the rounds of Sunday's Washington talk shows, Christie explained his rationale to Fox News' Chris Wallace:

"You know, at the end of the day, Chris, here's what people in Washington, D.C., don't understand," he said. "If you want to win a vote by that kind of margin, if you want to attract the majority of the Hispanic vote, if you want to nearly triple your African-American vote, you need to show up. You need to go into those neighborhoods. You need to campaign in places.

"I'll give you a perfect example, Chris. I did a town hall meeting while I was governor about a year and a half ago in the city of Irvington, New Jersey, in Essex County. I got 4.7 percent of the vote there in 2009. There were more people in the church I did the town hall than voted for me in 2009. That's the way the Republican Party will make itself more relevant to a whole much broader group of folks. And the fact is, that's exactly what Ronald Reagan would have done — and did do — when he was campaigning for president."

Even taken together, the charges didn't seem to amount to that big a deal — just a matter of quoting a few factual statements and a Wikipedia passage without attributing them. But as Rand Paul discovered, the word "plagiarism" can still rouse people to steaming indignation. Samuel Johnson called plagiarism the most atrocious of literary crimes, and the word itself began as the name of a real crime. In Roman law, a plagiarius was someone who abducted a child or a slave — it's from "plaga," the Latin word for a net or a snare. That connection was first drawn by the first-century poet Martial, who accused a rival he called Fidentius of stealing his works in order to garner undeserved praise. Martial compared Fidentius to a man who wears a toupee, and others have depicted the plagiarist as somebody who "shines in stolen plumes."

The Two-Way

Book News: Rand Paul To Plagiarism Accusers: 'If Dueling Were Legal In Kentucky ...'

Allie Brosh's humorous, autobiographical blog, Hyperbole And A Half, has a huge following. In 2011, an editor of PC World included it in a list of the 10 funniest sites on the Internet, and this year, Advertising Age included Brosh in its annual list of the year's most influential and creative thinkers and doers.

That's pretty amazing considering that, as Brosh describes it, she lives like a recluse in her Bend, Ore., bedroom, where she writes stories about her life and illustrates them with brightly colored, intentionally crude drawings.

For food producers who sell directly to consumers, credit cards are both a blessing and a curse.

They're a way to do business with cashless customers, but 3 percent of every credit card sale is usually charged to the farmer as a transaction fee. That adds up in a high-volume, low-profit business like agriculture.

The extra fee has farmers looking for a solution to save money. A few are finding one in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency: digital money that doesn't exist in the physical world. There are almost 12 million bitcoins worldwide — worth about $4 billion — that can be sent to or received from anyone with a bitcoin wallet.

A bitcoin wallet, just like a home, has a unique address. For a farmer accepting bitcoin, customers with the currency would type in the amount to send (yes, the wallet is accessible through smartphones) to the farmer's wallet address and hit send.

One farm open to the idea is La Nay Ferme in Provo, Utah.

Owner Clinton Felsted says he began using bitcoin when a crew for the documentary Life on Bitcoin approached him about accepting the currency. Now he's working on a more user-friendly bitcoin payment method that should be up and running by February for consumers buying his fruits and vegetables.

It's the invisible nature of the currency, he says, that interested him.

"Taking money with you is a real risk and it's a real security problem," he tells The Salt. "With bitcoin you can take it anywhere with no risk. If I ever need my money I don't need to find an ATM machine."

But with few other businesses accepting bitcoin, Felsted converts it back into U.S. currency for a lower fee than he'd be charged accepting credit cards.

Bitcoin is most popular in the U.S., but farmers outside the U.S. are warming to it as well. One of the first to sell greens in exchange for virtual currency lives in Argentina.

Two years ago, organic farmer Santiago Zaz started the Tierra Buena Network to deliver produce to customers from his and his neighbors' farms. That got him interested in creating a website for online purchases.

With the help of his friend and software developer Nubis Bruno, they created one of the first produce-for-bitcoin websites, Tierra Buena. Bruno says to date a steady one in 10 sales comes in the form of bitcoin.

Just like Felstad converting his bitcoins in the U.S. dollars, Bruno says the farmers using the Tierra Buena site are converting it into Argentinean pesos.

Garrick Hileman with the London School of Economics, agrees that bitcoin makes sense for farmers reliant on credit card transactions for sales. Using bitcoins over credit, he says, equals to keeping that 3 percent revenue per sale otherwise lost.

And it could actually be more than that. Last week, one bitcoin was worth almost $240. Today it's worth $345.

A few big tech companies, like OkCupid and Foodler, accept bitcoin. But good luck paying utility bills or go mall shopping with it. The currency's volatility tends to scare big companies with more to lose than small companies, Hileman says.

"Small businesses can take the risk with an emerging alternative currency," he says.

The upcoming documentary Life On Bitcoin shows farmers at a Salt Lake City market willing to take a risk with bitcoin. In this YouTube video clip, many agree to accept it as payment right away. (A farmers market in San Diego accepts it, too.)

Philippines, Philippines Daily Inquirer

The devastation from Typhoon Haiyan could cost the Philippines economy $14 billion, according to one estimate.

"This will have a major punch on the fourth quarter GDP this year, but it will have its full impact lag into 2014," Joey Salceda, the governor of Albay province, a hard-hit area, said in a statement. He's also an economist who was recently elected chairman of the U.N. Green Climate Fund.

The numbers, he said, were based on Bloomberg estimates.

In a separate story, the newspaper reported that the regional economies of the areas worst affected by Haiyan (which is known as Yolanda in the Philippines) could shrink by as much as 8 percent next year. National economic growth could be hit by as much as 1 percent. Both those figures are preliminary estimates, the country's finance secretary said.

The Philippines economy has until recently bucked the regional slowdown, growing by 7.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Russia, Kommersant

Russia's Foreign Ministry has demanded an apology from Poland after rioters in Warsaw attacked the Russian Embassy.

The Foreign Ministry summoned Polish Ambassador Wojciech Zaionchkovskii over Monday night's March of Independence in which far-right protesters set fire to parked cars and threw fireworks in the center of Warsaw.

The Russian Embassy was among many targets. Rioters set fire to an empty booth at the fence around the embassy. They threw flares, stones and bottles at nearby parked cars, and onto the embassy ground and buildings.

Fifty people were arrested, and Polish officials condemned the rioters.

Russia accused Polish police of "passivity" during the incident.

The Polish Foreign Ministry expressed "deep regret" at the attack, which it blamed on ultra-nationalists.

Egypt, Ahram Online

An Egyptian soccer player is in trouble for displaying a four-fingered hand signal, which is associated with ousted President Mohammed Morsi, after scoring a goal on Sunday.

The Al-Ahly team said it would suspend striker Ahmed Abdel-Zaher for displaying the so-called Rabaa salute in Sunday's final of the African Champions League against South Africa's Orlando Pirates.

Al-Ahly said the striker would be left out of next month's FIFA Club World Cup in Morocco. He'll also be investigated by the Egyptian Football Association.

Egyptian Sports Minister Taher Abou-Zeid downplayed the incident Sunday, saying all that mattered was that Al-Ahly had won the African Championship.

On Tuesday, Abedel-Zaher's agent said the striker would apologize for flashing the symbol that expresses support for Morsi.

The ousted Egyptian president, who drew his support from the Muslim Brotherhood, was removed from office in a coup in July. Since then, the military-backed government has cracked down on his supporters.

The incident is the latest involving the Rabaa salute and an Egyptian athlete.

Last month, kung fu champion Mohamed Youseef was banned from representing his country's in the world championship after he wore a T-shirt with the symbol. On Sunday, he was banned from all competition for a year.

Brazil was the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery — it didn't happen until 1888 — and that meant that the final years of the practice were photographed.

This has given Brazil what may be the world's largest archive of photography of slavery, and a new exhibition in Sao Paulo is offering some new insights into the country's brutal past.

One image at the exhibition, for example, has been blown up to the size of a wall. "Things that you could never see, suddenly you see," says anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz, one of the curators of the new exhibition called Emancipation Inclusion and Exclusion.

In its original size and composition, the image from photographer Marc Ferrez, one of the most impressive photographers from 19th century Brazil, shows a wide shot of a group of slaves drying coffee in a field. Their faces are indistinct but the overall impression is one of order and calm. But once the picture is blown up, the expressions become distinct and details emerge. A female slave is breastfeeding a child in the field; clothes that look neat are seen to be tattered.

"Expanding the photos, we can see a lot of things we couldn't see and the state didn't want to see," Schwarcz says. "We do not want to show slaves only like victims."

Enlarge image i

Many Filipinos living in the United States are frantically trying to get in touch with loved ones in some of the areas hardest hit by the typhoon. California, with about a million Filipino immigrants, is the center for a large fundraising effort.

Los Angeles is home to one of the largest concentrations of Filipino immigrants in the U.S. Many across this city are glued to the local Asian TV stations' nightly news broadcasts. Some are turning their worry and stress into action, pounding the pavement to raise money for typhoon victims.

Caren Mempin is clutching a can full of coins and dollar bills, going from table to table at a fast food franchise from the Philippines called Chow King. It's in a bustling shopping mall home to other Filipino chains and a massive supermarket in L.A.'s Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Her pitch in Kigali isn't a hard one. The typhoon is on everyone's minds here and everyone wants to help. Like Mempin, so many people know friends or family affected.

"I just talked to my Mom and they said that they're all okay, but we have also relatives from Tacloban, especially my mom's brothers and sisters, they don't have any response so we're still waiting for that," she says.

Mempin was born in Tacloban, one of the hardest hit cities.

I'm always keeping in touch with my Mom, she's always crying about that, because my mom is very close to her family."

The Los Angeles area is home to an estimated 400,000 Filipinos. The first wave of immigrants to come in droves in the 1930s settled in what's now called Historic Filipino Town, about six miles south of the shopping mall, as the crow flies.

On Union Avenue is the modest, but well-kept Filipino Christian Church, the oldest Filipino church in the city. It's not much bigger than the apartment buildings it shares this quiet block with. Upstairs, in a small room, there are black trash bags full of donated clothes and other supplies.

"These are the part of the rummage sale," says pastor Einstein Cabalteja. He says they've raised close to $800 so far through the rummage sales and online donations to the church's website.

"We are not very rich, and we are not a very big congregation. We have on average 60 on a regular Sunday, so we're not really a big congregation but I believe our hearts are big," he says.

Cabalteja, who came to the U.S. and this church in 2006, says his heart aches. He wishes he could hand deliver these things.

"Here in America, we enjoy a lot of good things but back there, there are less fortunate people, I wish, I wish I could be there," he says.

For now, relief organizations say what's needed most is cash. Shipping food and other supplies is expensive and there's no guarantee it will land in the right people's hands.

Alex Montanaces, of the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, says as of late Monday, the group had raised about $50,000 for relief. Inspiring, he says.

In Filipino, we call it 'Bayanihan,' and it's like a sense of Filipinos like, the community coming together to help one another. So there's really a sense of Bayanihan spirit I think among the Filipino community here in this area.

Back at the shopping mall in Eagle Rock, people came to swap stories and check in with friends to see if they'd heard any more news.

For fundraiser Caren Mempin, no word yet on her extended family in Tacloban.

"Hopefully they're okay, because it's so sad when we cannot see and contact them," she says.

For now, while she waits, Mempin says she's praying.

The outcome in Virginia's governor's race this week seemed to illustrate anew the Democratic Party's grip on the women's vote, and the power of the abortion issue.

Even some Republicans argued that social conservative Ken Cuccinelli's defeat at the hands of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who won women by a 9-point margin, was another sign that the GOP's anti-abortion stance would continue to doom the party at the polls.

This was the sentiment expressed in a post-election column on Virginia's popular conservative blog Bearingdrift.com, by an activist using the pseudonym Alexis Rose Bank:

"The Republican Party needs a new strategy on abortion....abortion opponents have in no unclear terms been the single most significant cause of Republican losses in recent years..."

The writer may be partly right, but the analysis was flawed in one very basic way: Republicans aren't losing because women reject their anti-abortion stance. Polls consistently show that women, like the rest of the country, are divided on the issue.

They're losing because women, and other voters, perceive that Republicans are more extreme on the issue of abortion.

"The one thing that we always feel has to be put out there is that women, as a group, are not fundamentally pro-choice," says Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for People & the Press. "There is a remarkably small gender gap on the pro-choice issue.

"There is, however, a bigger gender gap on the politics of the issue than on abortion attitudes," Dimock says.

In that sense, the Virginia results do serve up an important abortion lesson for Republicans. It can be summarized in two words: "transvaginal ultrasound."

Position Vs. Extreme Position

On the same day Cuccinelli was losing purple Virginia, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes abortion, was winning re-election in deep blue New Jersey.

Here's how Christie has characterized his position on abortion: "I am pro-life," he said on NBC's Meet the Press in 2011. "I believe in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's my position, take it or leave it."

That's what John Sides characterizes as a "garden variety" Republican position on abortion, one that doesn't advocate overturning Roe v. Wade or move otherwise to the extreme of the issue.

Christie's position puts him "in the majority of opinion" on abortion, says Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, adding that Cuccinelli's position — he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest — "was a minority position."

That brings us to transvaginal ultrasounds. Cuccinelli, as the state's attorney general, supported a bill that would have made the invasive procedure mandatory for women considering undergoing an abortion in Virginia. That was ample fodder for McAuliffe's well-financed advertising campaign.

"Both sides are trying to find dimensions on this issue that they can get leverage out of," Sides says. "On the left, it can be vaginal ultrasounds; on the right, it could be 'partial birth' abortion.

"When a legal right to abortion is being seen as going too far, or when an attempt to restrict rights to abortion goes too far, that's where you'll see backlash," he says.

Research suggests that being associated with an extreme position on abortion, not being against abortion, is what hurts candidates like Cuccinelli — and Republicans Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Aiken in Missouri, both of whom saw their U.S. Senate hopes go up in flames in 2012 after extreme comments on pregnancy and abortion.

Numbers, Not Anecdotes

An analysis by Sides and Lynn Vavreck at UCLA found little voter movement on the abortion issue in the 2012 presidential race, even when controversy was bubbling around Mourdock, Aiken and others.

"Conservative attitudes on abortion among Republican-leaning women shored up their support for Romney," Sides and Vavreck wrote this week in an analysis for Bloomberg. "The abortion views of Democratic-leaning women shored up their support for Obama in roughly equal measure."

Both Sides and Dimock, of Pew, reiterate that while abortion is a more personal issue for many women, there is little gender gap on attitudes.

"Women are a little more likely than men to take the pro-choice position, but 7 points more likely to say Democrats represented their views," Dimock says, "and they are 10 points more likely than men to say it's an important issue to them."

Pew's polling shows that there is a perception among Americans — even moderate Republicans — that Democrats are closer to the people on the issue, with 55 percent saying the GOP is more extreme.

That comes with a caution, for both parties.

"Abortion itself is not always a black and white issue to a lot of Americans," Dimock says, noting that 57 percent of women Pew polled last election season said they supported legal abortion in "most cases." And 49 percent of Americans in an August Pew poll said that having an abortion was "morally wrong."

Republicans who oppose abortion can win, and have won. The problems arise when specific candidates promote positions that are beyond what mainstream voters — women and men — can accept.

Now that President Obama has apologized to those who've seen their health care plans canceled due to the Affordable Care Act, losses he pledged beforehand wouldn't happen, he joins the line of modern presidents who have had to look the American people in the eye and give their regrets.

Actually, Obama didn't so much look Americans in the eye as much as he did NBC News interviewer Chuck Todd. Predictably, the president's apology was rated unsatisfactory to many of his and Obamacare's critics. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, called it "halfhearted." And that was among the nice things critics said.

It's true that, as apologies go, the mea culpa was arguably weak tea. "And I am sorry that they — you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me," Obama said, creating an odd distancing between his administration's actions and their effect on the citizenry.

While it might be too much to expect a president to say: "I'm sorry my administration's policies really screwed these Americans," if Obama's formulation seemed off-key, it was because it was so circumspect and indirect.

In that, however, Obama isn't alone. Being president means never having to say you're sorry, at least not in a soulful, direct way that resonates with other humans.

Consider just a few examples from Obama's predecessors.

George W. Bush: After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and his administration's response proved to be singularly inept, Bush faced a crisis of confidence in his leadership, fueled by his memorable "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" and other impressions he left that he thought all was well.

Instead of gushing "I'm sorry" — which really wasn't his style, after all — Bush opted for the "I'm responsible" approach. Three weeks after the hurricane swamped New Orleans, Bush took advantage of a joint press conference with the then-Iraqi president to say:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."