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There are more than 4 million American families living under the poverty line today that are led by a single mother. Katrina Gilbert is one of those moms.

Gilbert is a certified nursing assistant in Tennessee. To support her three children, she sometimes works seven days a week at a nursing home. But at $10 an hour, her paycheck doesn't go very far.

HBO followed her for a year for its upcoming documentary, Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert. The film airs Monday and will also be available online.

For Tell Me More's year-long series marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Gilbert spoke to host Michel Martin about the film and the challenges she faces in her day-to-day life.

It's hard to see crippling sanctions at a modern shopping mall in north Tehran — the shops are stocked, the cafes are full. The latest western electronics – even iPhones and iPads, are available for those who can afford it.

But talk to middle class Iranians and you hear dire stories. The say they suffered as prices on almost everything rose dramatically for two years. International sanctions fueled skyrocketing inflation, estimated at 45 percent. Practically, that means that necessities – bread, rice, soap – got more expensive every month.

In a small neighborhood shop, a baker fills a machine with dough that pops out loaves of hot bread. Sanctions changed the way Iranians shop, says a customer, who doesn't give her name. Whatever the price, she says, you still have to buy the basics.

"Some things are expensive, but they are necessary and needed," she says. "The unnecessary things we ignore."

Iran's economy has been badly damaged over the past two years. International sanctions froze oil assets and isolated Iranian banks, which shut off most official international trade. Iran's currency lost 80 percent of its value, says economist Saeed Laylaz.

"We are in a catastrophe, disaster situation at the moment," Laylaz says.

Since January, when a six-month nuclear deal took effect with the easing of some sanctions, there's a slight economic revival, he says.

"Inflation, from 45 percent to 27 percent almost," Laylaz says.

Parallels

'Waiting For Godot' Strikes A Chord In Tehran

The United States announced its intention on Friday of relinquishing its remaining control of the Internet.

In a statement, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration said it wants to relinquish its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICAAN is a kind of cooperative that includes a wide array of companies and people, as well as more than 100 governments. One of the key functions overseen by the U.S. is the assignment of domain names. (Think of .com or .org.)

"The timing is right to start the transition process," Lawrence E. Strickling, the assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, said in a statement. "We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan."

NPR's Steve Henn tells our Newscast unit that the world community has been calling for this handover for a while. But the current revelations over spying by the National Security Agency has led to louder calls.

"The announcement by the Commerce Department Friday that it would relinquish its oversight role of ICANN was widely viewed as a response to that criticism," Steve reports. "Administration officials have said any new governance structure for ICANN should be transparent and free from any hint of government interference."

The Commerce Department adds that it was always the intention of the United States to hand over these responsibilities to the global community.

The Wall Street Journal adds:

"The impact of the change remains unclear, because the Commerce Department's day-to-day role in overseeing the contract with Icann is largely clerical. However, other nations have suggested the U.S. can still use its current authority to block certain websites for reasons like copyright infringement or having links to known terrorists. One goal of transitioning Icann to nongovernmental oversight would be to provide more transparency to all nations into how the Internet's root structure operates.

"Until 1998, the functions were managed by Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, one of the early pioneers of the World Wide Web. Upon Postel's death in 1998, the Commerce Department issued a contract to Icann to take over those functions, making Icann the primary body in charge of setting policy for Internet domains and addresses."

Commercial aviation pilots tell NPR that they would have "no idea" how to disable all the systems designed to automatically communicate with ground stations, though they could probably figure it out from checklists and other documentation available aboard the aircraft.

Aircraft such as the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand a week ago are equipped with transponders, which give their position to air traffic control. The transponders can be switched off with a flick of a switch. But modern planes like the 777 have two other systems as well: Cockpit radios and a text-based system known as Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, which can be used to send messages or information about the plane.

But the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and the ACARS may have been shut down as well.

Turning off the radios and ACARS would be more difficult. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel spoke with commercial pilots, including two who have flown Boeing 777s similar to Flight MH370, which vanished 239 people aboard. He says the pilots tell him that those systems are "pretty hard-wired into a modern aircraft.

"They said you'd have to go through big checklists, you'd have to possibly pull circuit breakers if you wanted to deactivate [all the communications equipment]," Brumfiel tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block.

"So, to do this, you'd have to have some degree of premeditation and a lot of knowledge of the aircraft," he says.

Even without those systems, the plane's satellite antenna appears to have kept communicating for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to providers, there was apparently no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

Meanwhile, a U.S. government official who is being updated on progress of the investigation into the plane's disappearance says the working theory remains "air piracy," an umbrella term which could mean that either the pilot or someone else commandeered the aircraft.

NPR's Tom Bowman reports that a U.S. official says familiar with the investigation say that U.S. government agencies are working with their Indian counterparts to take a close look at radar data to see if the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, as one theory suggests.

Bowman says Malaysia has asked the U.S. Navy to send the destroyer USS Kidd to the Andaman Sea to patrol and a P-3 Orion anti-submarine plane has searched west of the Malaysian peninsula to roughly the island of Sri Lanka, a distance of about 1,000 linear miles. The Navy is now sending a more another aircraft, a P-8, that has more surface search radar, to the Bay of Bengal, after Malaysia requested a search in that area.

Two pieces of information are troubling: the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and ACARS may have been shut down as well.

Even without those systems, the plane's satellite antenna appears to have kept communicating for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to providers, there was apparently no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

Meanwhile, a U.S. government official who is being updated on progress of the investigation into the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 over the Gulf of Thailand says the "working theory" remains "air piracy," an umbrella term which could mean that either the pilot or someone else commandeered the aircraft.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel spoke with commercial pilots, including two who have flown Boeing 777s similar to MH370, who say those systems are "pretty hard-wired into a modern aircraft."

"They said you'd have to go through big checklists, you'd have to possibly pull circuit breakers if you wanted to deactivate [transponders]," Brumfiel tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block.

"So, to do this, you'd have to have some degree of premeditation and a lot of knowledge of the aircraft," he says.

As the Two-Way reports, a week after a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the mystery has bred more theories that hard data.

But two pieces of information are troubling: the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and a system called ACARS, which can communicate text and basic information about the plane's performance in flight, kept communicating with satellites for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says of the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to satellite provider Inmarsat, there was no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

NPR's Tom Bowman reports that a U.S. official says familiar with the investigation say that U.S. government agencies are working with their Indian counterparts to take a close look at radar data to see if the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, as one theory suggests.

Bowman says Malaysia has asked the U.S. Navy to send the destroyer USS Kidd to the Andaman Sea to patrol and a P-3 Orion anti-submarine plane has searched west of the Malaysian peninsula to roughly the island of Sri Lanka, a distance of about 1,000 linear miles. The Navy is now sending a more another aircraft, a P-8, that has more surface search radar, to the Bay of Bengal, after Malaysia requested a search in that area.

UBS, which was fined $1.5 billion in 2012 for what regulators said was "routine and widespread" rigging of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, has been censured for trying to do the same thing with Hong Kong's benchmark rate between 2006 and 2009.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Chinese territory's de facto central bank, says as part of a lengthy investigation, it "found 100 chat messages in which UBS traders made requests to make submissions at a certain level. However, it added that the requests had had no impact on the setting of rates," The Financial Times reports.

The newspaper says:

"Hong Kong launched an investigation into potential rigging of Hibor in 2013 at the height of the scandal over banks' manipulation of the London interbank and other global rates, which govern the returns of more than $350tn of fixed income and derivative products.

"The Hong Kong Monetary Authority said it had examined more than 31m messages from nine banks involved in the fixing of Hibor between 2005 and 2012."

"'The HKMA found evidence of misconduct in the submission of Hibor rates by only one bank, and no evidence of collusion between these banks to rig the Hibor fixing,' it said."

While Crimeans prepare to vote Sunday on whether to join the Russian Federation, Secretary of State John Kerry is in London for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

As NPR's Ari Shapiro tells our Newscast Desk, Kerry is looking for a way to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine.

The BBC adds that Kerry is expected to warn Lavrov "that the disputed referendum being held in Crimea in two days and Russia's military intervention there could trigger concerted U.S. and EU sanctions."

Indeed, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reported on Thursday, Kerry says that if Russia doesn't help resolve the crisis, "there will be a very serious series of steps Monday in Europe" and the U.S.

Those steps could include economic sanctions and additional travel restrictions on any officials believed to have been responsible for Russian intervention in Ukraine.

On Morning Edition, NPR's Gregory Warner reported from Crimea about the scene there in advance of Sunday's vote. He reports having seen dozens of armored personnel carriers, fuel supply trucks and military satellite systems near the region's border with the rest of Ukraine.

Gregory notes that Crimeans will be asked to vote on two questions Sunday: whether to join the Russian Federation; or whether to stay part of Ukraine but revert to an earlier constitution that gave them even more autonomy and the chance for dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship.

Also on Morning Edition, NPR's Peter Kenyon reported about the concerns that Crimea's Tatars have over the pro-Russian sentiment in the region.

Need a refresher on what this crisis is all about?

As we've previously said, Crimea has been the focus of attention as the ripple effects of the protests that led to last month's ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych have spread.

Summing up the history and importance of Crimea to Russia and Ukraine isn't possible in just a few sentences, of course. The Parallels blog, though, has published several posts that contain considerable context:

— Crimea: 3 Things To Know About Ukraine's Latest Hot Spot

— Crimea: A Gift To Ukraine Becomes A Political Flash Point

— Why Ukraine Is Such A Big Deal For Russia

We've recapped what set off months of protest in Kiev and ultimately led to Yanukovych's dismissal by his nation's parliament last month this way:

"The protests were sparked in part by the president's rejection of a pending trade treaty with the European Union and his embrace of more aid from Russia. Protesters were also drawn into the streets to demonstrate against government corruption."

It's taken several years, but in many parts of the country, home prices are nearly back to where they were at the peak. In places like Florida, where the housing recession hit hard, home prices rose last year by one-fifth or more.

A major factor in the price rise is hedge funds, private equity firms and other large investors. They've moved aggressively into the residential market over the past two years, buying tens of thousands of distressed properties, often at bargain prices.

Some analysts are worried that those bulk purchases will leave middle-class buyers out in the cold.

One place where investors have been very active is Florida's Palm Beach County. Jeff Lichtenstein is a real estate agent there, and he's busy. He's listing and selling homes at a pace reminiscent of the go-go days of the last real estate boom back in 2005 and 2006. "I have 19 or 20 under contract right now, which is the most I've had at any given time," he says.

Lichtenstein is currently showing a home he has listed in PGA National, a resort and residential development with more than 5,000 homes. It's a community of palm trees, lakes, golf courses and manicured lawns.

"This was built in '92 or '93. Three bedrooms, three baths," he explains as he shows off the house, which has a back patio looking out onto a golf course. "The view is what people come here to Florida for."

The home is listed for $499,000, a bit below what it would have sold for at the peak, Lichtenstein says. But in Florida, Arizona, Las Vegas and parts of California, prices are rising fast. In South Florida, home prices climbed 21 percent last year.

Big-Money Investors, Buying To Rent

Homes, especially foreclosures and short sales, are being snapped up as soon as they go on the market, mostly by large investment groups. Companies like the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital and Starwood Property Trust have spent billions over the past two years buying homes across the country and putting them on the rental market.

Business

Marching Into Spring, Realtors' Hopes Rise

Think of the budget plan released Tuesday by President Obama as a magic wand. If he could wave it and make every line come true, how would the U.S. economy look?

Like this:

Wealthier Americans would be paying more in taxes, while poorer ones would be getting new tax credits. More roads would be under construction and scientists would be receiving more funding. Smokers would be paying more in taxes to allow four-year-olds to attend preschool.

Obama's focus is on job creation, job training and education — and he would pay for changes by imposing higher taxes.

But Republicans don't see a magic wand. They view the White House budget as a club that will beat down the economy with heavier taxes.

The Obama plan "would demand that families pay more, so Washington can spend more," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday in a statement. "Republicans believe in a different vision."

On Monday, Ryan released a report suggesting that the government eliminate funding for many poverty programs he says have failed.

So are the two economic visions really so different? How?

Alan Viard, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former staff economist for the George W. Bush administration, said he does see immense differences between Obama's and Ryan's fiscal plans.

In effect, Obama would tweak the budget to try to shrink income disparities. But Ryan, he says, would radically change the budget by instituting structural changes in taxes, anti-poverty programs and entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

In that sense, Obama's plan could be seen as a less dramatic approach in that it would stay closer to the country's existing path, Viard says. "There's nothing 'socialist' in Obama's budget. It's a commitment to the status quo, with minor changes that he would consider improvements."

It tilts the economy more in the direction of taxing the rich to help the poor in the short term, he adds, but without changing big entitlement programs for the long term.

Obama Budget: A Blueprint With Little Chance Of Passage

When Congress passed a farm bill earlier this year, it expected to save $8.6 billion over 10 years by tightening what many say is a loophole in the food stamp, or SNAP, program. But it's not going to happen.

You see, Congress left states an opening to avoid the cuts. And so far, nearly half of the states participating have decided to take that option – a move that could erase the promised savings.

So many states are rebelling against the cuts that House Speaker John Boehner is urging his fellow members of Congress to act.

"Since the passage of the farm bill, states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing up people for food stamps," Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters Thursday. "And so I would hope that the House would act to try to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing."

The cuts were related to a program known as "heat and eat." In the past, it had allowed the participating states to give low-income residents as little as $1 a year in home heating aid so they'd qualify for more food stamps.

States said it made the program easier to administer and got help to those who needed it. But the maneuver was called a loophole by both Republicans and Democrats. So last month, Congress agreed to raise the amount of utility assistance states would have to pay to trigger the provision — to more than $20 a year.

The idea was that many of the states that use "heat and eat" would decide it wasn't worth their while. The expected result? Some 850,000 food stamp recipients would have their benefits cut an average $90 a month, which is where the savings would come in.

Turns out, Congress was wrong.

The Salt

See How Food Stamp Cuts Are Hitting Across The U.S.

There are more than 4 million American families living under the poverty line today that are led by a single mother. Katrina Gilbert is one of those moms.

Gilbert is a certified nursing assistant in Tennessee. To support her three children, she sometimes works seven days a week at a nursing home. But at $10 an hour, her paycheck doesn't go very far.

HBO followed her for a year for its upcoming documentary, Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert. The film airs Monday and will also be available online.

For Tell Me More's year-long series marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Gilbert spoke to host Michel Martin about the film and the challenges she faces in her day-to-day life.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg published an open letter on Thursday in which he takes the White House to task over "the behavior of the U.S. government."

While he does not say so explicitly, Zuckerberg is clearly referring to the reports of widespread surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency.

Zuckerberg, 29, who has built the world's most successful social network, writes that the Internet works because companies like Facebook strive to make it secure. He adds:

"We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world.

"This is why I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government.

"The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they're doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

"I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform."

1. That green spear on your plate wanted to be a fern.

Botanically speaking, asparagus is an oddity among vegetables. First of all, farmers only plant a new asparagus crop every 10 or 15 years, and they don't start with seeds. Instead, farmers plant "crowns," which are the roots of 1-year-old asparagus plants. Those roots will grow underground, year after year, and every spring, when the weather gets warm, the roots will send up green spears. If the spears aren't harvested, they will turn into big and bushy ferns.

2. Asparagus spears grow ridiculously fast.

Scott Walker, president of the world's biggest asparagus seed company (Walker Brothers, of Pittsgrove, N.J.), says that he's heard that on really hot days, asparagus can grow an inch per hour. But he's never actually measured them. During harvest season, farmers struggle to stay ahead of the growing spears. Each field has to be harvested every day, and sometimes even twice a day.

"I remember one year, it went from cold to hot, and it looked like the hair on a dog's back out there in the field. It was everywhere, and we could not keep up," Walker says.

After about six or eight weeks, farmers stop harvesting and let them grow wild. The plant needs to grow into a fern to capture energy from the sun and store it in the root for the next growing season.

Asparagus Time lapse from Adam Gregory on Vimeo.

Le Week-End

Director: Roger Michell

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Running time: 93 minutes

Rated R for language and some sexual content.

With members of the House and Senate scrapping over a Ukraine aid bill, Republicans say a magic bullet could break the logjam.

It has nothing to do with the former Soviet republic, its ability to withstand Russia's military intervention in Crimea, or this weekend's referendum in the Ukrainian territory.

It has everything to do with conservatives' fury at the IRS, which they say has waged a partisan, and unconstitutional, war against President Obama's opponents.

First, there was the grindingly slow, intrusive scrutiny the agency gave to Tea Party and other groups seeking tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. The IRS gave similar treatment to liberal groups, though not nearly as many of them. And then, last year, the IRS proposed new rules that would make it harder for groups to veer from their social welfare missions into electoral politics. Conservatives call it a vendetta targeting them. Then again, liberal 501(c)(4)s are against the proposed rules, too.

This matters — to American politicians if not beleaguered Ukrainians — because social welfare groups are the hot item in campaign finance; they get to raise unlimited contributions from donors they don't have to disclose. So far, conservatives have a big advantage in this realm of secretly funded politics.

But back to Ukraine. The financial package for Ukraine itself has strong support in Congress. But Democrats want to add another element, boosting the lending power of the International Monetary Fund. Many Republicans never liked the IMF, but they might be persuaded to go along on the bill if it also includes a provision forcing the IRS to stop work on its new regulations.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday, "To get it passed on the floor, the (c)(4) issue is going to have to be dealt with."

He said House Speaker John Boehner is "not going to bring it up on the House floor unless the (c)(4) issue is dealt with. But then maybe those tied together is what pulls through the IMF piece."

It may also be what pulls through the Ukraine aid, which was the original point.

1. That green spear on your plate wanted to be a fern.

Botanically speaking, asparagus is an oddity among vegetables. First of all, farmers only plant a new asparagus crop every 10 or 15 years, and they don't start with seeds. Instead, farmers plant "crowns," which are the roots of 1-year-old asparagus plants. Those roots will grow underground, year after year, and every spring, when the weather gets warm, the roots will send up green spears. If the spears aren't harvested, they will turn into big and bushy ferns.

2. Asparagus spears grow ridiculously fast.

Scott Walker, president of the world's biggest asparagus seed company (Walker Brothers, of Pittsgrove, N.J.), says that he's heard that on really hot days, asparagus can grow an inch per hour. But he's never actually measured them. During harvest season, farmers struggle to stay ahead of the growing spears. Each field has to be harvested every day, and sometimes even twice a day.

"I remember one year, it went from cold to hot, and it looked like the hair on a dog's back out there in the field. It was everywhere, and we could not keep up," Walker says.

After about six or eight weeks, farmers stop harvesting and let them grow wild. The plant needs to grow into a fern to capture energy from the sun and store it in the root for the next growing season.

Asparagus Time lapse from Adam Gregory on Vimeo.

Many of us have those friends who insist that they're coffee connoisseurs and drink exclusively drip brews. But really, there aren't many academic programs that train people in the taste and science of coffee.

That might all change soon. The University of California, Davis, recently founded a Coffee Center dedicated to the study of the world of java. This week, the center held its first research conference.

"There aren't a lot of things that so many people consume several times a day, every day," says J. Bruce German, who directs of the Foods for Health Institute at Davis. But given how much coffee people all over the world chug, there's a surprising lack of academic research on the topic, German says.

There's a lot we still don't fully understand about coffee, German says. What's the best way to treat the beans while they're still green? What's the most environmentally friendly way to roast them? And why are we so obsessed with how it smells?

And since the university is already well known for its winemaking and beer brewing programs, German says coffee seems like a natural next step.

The idea grew out of a seminar called "Design of Coffee," developed by two professors in the chemical engineering department.

Explore NPR's Coffee Week Stories

Speed-reading all rage. Suddenly many speed-reading apps. Spritz. Spreeder. Others.

Some inspired by method RSVP — rapid serial visual presentation.

"Rather than read words

from left to right,"

says Marc Slater, managing director of Spreeder parent company eReflect.

"RSVP

allows

users

to

read

the

words

quickly.

A few at a time."

Prose, Cons

Speed-reading has fans. And detractors.

But maybe we've got it wrong. Maybe it's not about reading faster. But writing faster.

Speed-writing.

For speed-readers.

Only essential ideas. Omit extra words. Few prepositions, fewer articles. Boil down.

Why make readers work harder? Make writers do heavy lifting. Decide important things. Write those.

Quick History

Americans have been intrigued by speed-reading for a long time. Back in the 1930s, researchers were exploring systems to help people read faster. At Stanford University, according to the New York Times in 1934, researchers took photos of people's eye movements, then taught participants new methods of reading in phrases — not words — and using a sort of metronome to increase reading speed.

In the late 1940s, the University of Virginia's Reading Clinic devised a new method of speed-reading, using vertical lines and an alarm clock. "There are two ways to read: microscopically — which is the old way — and telescopically," professor Ullin Leavell, the center's director, told the Los Angeles Times in 1949. "Today we are attempting simply to develop an individual to see a thought unit, instead of individual parts."

Some fast thinkers — Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, for example — were natural born speed-readers, according to the website of the late speed-reading pioneer Evelyn Wood. From the moment she opened her Reading Dynamics school in Washington in 1959, the LA Times reports, her name was synonymous with readingreallyfast.

Fast-Forward

Now RSVP the new rage.

Readers "less likely to subvocalize — say the words in their head as they read — when using RSVP," Marc Slater says.

This increases reading speed "because saying words in your head is often the slowest link in the reading chain."

Speed reading "not usually appropriate for reading difficult content or abstract concepts," Marc says.

"In these cases, it is understanding that limits comprehension, not the rate of input."

Extreme example: "You might read about a really difficult concept in one paragraph and think about it for a week before you truly understand it."

Speed-reading, Marc says, "definitely won't help in cases like that."

And speed-writing?

Jury out.

The Protojournalist: Experimental storytelling for the LURVers – Listeners, Users, Readers, Viewers – of NPR. @NPRtpj

Web Extra

We don't know a whole lot about the upcoming season of Orange Is The New Black, but Netflix put out three images today that might give you something to at least chew on. It certainly appears that we'll be picking up where we left off, in a very immediate sense.

i i

"Their original take on this is from the woman's point-of-view, which is rather different from the experiences of reading the book or seeing the movie, because she created this story from Francesca Johnson's point of view, not Robert Kincaid's."

If one company has experience in adapting films to the stage, it's Disney — it hit pay dirt with The Lion King, but flopped with The Little Mermaid and Tarzan. The Hollywood behemoth has now turned to its 1992 animated film, Aladdin, as the source of a new stage show.

Creating flying carpets isn't too hard to do these days on Broadway, but making a blue genie who magically morphs into different shapes and sizes might prove a bit more difficult. On top of that, the character was voiced by Robin Williams.

Director Casey Nicholaw says the film only had four and a half songs — the stage version has been fleshed out with songs the original writers — Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman — wrote, but didn't make the movie. He says Disney has been very supportive of these, and other changes.

"It's their property, you know, so they're protective of it, in a good way," Nicholaw says with a laugh. "They're completely encouraging about taking it and making it theatrical, as opposed to, 'We just want to put the movie onstage.' You know? They're saying, 'let's make it theater-worthy.'"

i i

On a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C., David Wise is opening a century-old iron gate in front of an old, boarded-up brick building.

Wise is an investigator for the Government Accountability Office, the government's watchdog group. His mission is to figure out why the government owns so many buildings, like this one, that it doesn't use.

i i

President Obama's planned move to expand the pool of the nation's employees covered by overtime pay laws was hailed Wednesday by Democrats as key to their midterm election strategy.

And it was just as predictably criticized by conservatives as an overreach by a president who recently characterized income inequality as the "defining challenge of our time."

The president plans to exercise his executive authority on Thursday, leapfrogging Congress to direct the Labor Department to come up with guidelines that would set a new, higher income threshold at which employers are required to pay overtime.

Under current law, only workers earning $455 per week or less are eligible for overtime pay, though two states — California and New York — have independently raised their overtime minimums.

"Working- and middle-class people are not just feeling pressed, but really squeezed," says Mike Lux, a co-founder of Progressive Strategies, a Washington-based political consulting firm. "In that environment, populism tends to rise."

"In terms of the fall campaign, we are building a whole message around helping middle-class folks raise their wages, raise their incomes and make their lives a little better," Lux says. "This executive order, as well as the president's executive order on minimum wages paid by federal contractors, makes a huge difference politically."

Marc Freedman, who heads the labor law policy shop for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, predicted dire consequences blooming from the wage and overtime changes — and linked the problems to the president's health care legislation.

"Changing the rules for overtime eligibility will, just like increasing the minimum wage, make employees more expensive and will force employers to look for ways to cover these increased costs," he said in a statement.

"Similar to minimum wage, these changes in overtime rules will fall most harshly on small and medium-sized businesses already trying to figure out the impact of Obamacare on them," he said.

Obama in early February bypassed Congress and signed an executive order increasing to $10.10 per hour minimum wages government contractors are required to pay as of 2015.

He has also called for an increase in the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 over three years, and for indexing future increases to inflation. His executive moves are seen as part of his State of the Union promise of a "year of action" that would include vigorous use of his presidential authority.

"Wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do," he said in that January speech.

A White House official speaking on background Wednesday said the president is making his move on overtime pay at a time when "one of the linchpins of the middle class, the overtime rules that establish the 40-hour work week, have been eroded."

The administration estimates that millions of salaried workers in lower-paying jobs, ranging from office assistants to fast food workers, can be expected to work up to 50 or 60 hours a week without seeing any overtime pay.

A $250 per week threshold for overtime pay eligibility was originally established in 1975 by the Labor Department, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, for "white collar" employees; it was increased by the Bush administration in 2004 to its current $455 level. The White House argues that, adjusted for inflation, that threshold for workers today, overwhelmingly not white collar workers, would be $553.

"This should be the central focus of the fall campaign for Democrats," Lux says, characterizing the president's action on income as appealing to swing voters and the party base.

"These issues play directly to the pocketbooks of white working-class voters," he said, "and really helps us excite the base, turn out the base."

Prominent Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who counts among his clients Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, says "playing around the edges" with wage policy "is not going to address the problem of anemic upward mobility."

"The ticket to upward mobility is expanded middle-class jobs, expanded training for those middle-class jobs," Ayres says, "and making changes in government policy to allow those jobs to be created and to flourish."

At the progressive National Partnership for Women and Families, president Debra Ness hailed Obama's move as a big step for "women and working families."

"Coercive overtime is a huge problem in this country," Ness said in a statement. "When this happens, workers, families, communities and, ultimately, our economy suffer."

A new Bloomberg National Poll suggests that while Americans have decidedly mixed feelings about the president, 69 percent of those polled last week support proposals that would raise the minimum wage.

But there's a caveat, says pollster Ann Selzer, who conducted the survey: the minimum wage is not a wedge issue for voters surveyed, at least "not at this point in the game."

"It's still a theoretical thing," says the Des Moines-based Selzer. "The middle class may start feeling that the Democrats are paying attention to them and doing something if it shows up in their paycheck."

With national minimum wage changes requiring an act of Congress, the administration, as Selzer says, is looking for "arrows in the quiver to bolster the middle class."

The administration looks to be using the executive move on overtime as an arrow designed to potentially create a paycheck effect that will actually move voters when they head to the polls in November.

"This is consistent with the economic populist stance the Democrats are driving in a pretty unfavorable environment for them," says Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic writer and commentator. "They realize they not only have to motivate their base but also mitigate the damage of white, noncollege voters who are going to be their weakness."

"Whether it works or not, we'll see," he says.

The Obama administration's push to put income inequality atop the domestic political agenda has another battlefront.

According to The New York Times, the president "this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated."

The Wall Street Journal says that Obama "is expected to order a rule change this week that would require employers to pay overtime to a larger number of salaried workers, two people familiar with the matter said."

The announcement is expected to be made on Thursday. Obama would direct the Labor Department to make the rules changes.

"The directive is meant to help salaried workers, such as fast-food shift supervisors or convenience store managers, who may be expected to work more than 40 hours a week without receiving overtime pay," The Associated Press writes. "For example, the Labor Department could raise the pay threshold for workers covered by overtime rules. Currently, salaried workers who make more than $455 per week are exempt from overtime."

As the Times adds:

"Obama's decision to use his executive authority to change the nation's overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president's economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25. ...

"Obama's authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. [President George W.] Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress."

Our headline from last night could very well be repeated today:

"Confusion Reigns Over Missing Jet's Final Location"

In fact, to say things are confusing might even be an understatement.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board disappeared Saturday while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. That much seems to be known for sure.

It's also being reported that authorities say the last message from the plane's cockpit was "all right, roger that," when air traffic controllers in Malaysia handed the flight off to controllers in Vietnam. After that, authorities have said, there was no communication of any type.

But as today's other reports underscore, little else can be said with any certainty:

— Was It Or Wasn't It Off Course? "A senior Malaysian air force official on Tuesday told CNN that after the plane lost all communications around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, it still showed up on radar for more than an hour longer. Before it vanished altogether, the plane apparently turned away from its intended destination and traveled hundreds of miles off course, the official said. It was last detected, according to the official, near Pulau Perak, a very small island in the Straits of Malacca, the body of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra."

That account matches comments attributed by the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian to Gen. Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, chief of Malaysia's air force. But — and here's a prime example of the confusion surrounding this story — he later denied saying that radar had tracked the plane to the Straits of Malacca.

According to Reuters, "Indonesia and Thailand, which lie on either side of the northern part of the Malacca Strait, have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace."

— But, The Search Continues To Widen. Though Rodzali is now denying he said that military radar had tracked the plane to a point about 200 miles west of its intended route, the search for the jet "expanded on Wednesday to cover a swathe of Southeast Asia, from the South China Sea to India's territorial waters, with authorities no closer to explaining what happened to the plane or the 239 people on board," Reuters writes.

So, even though Rodzali says he didn't tell the newspaper that there's radar evidence showing the jet flew over the Straits of Malacca, the search includes that area.

Meanwhile, there's this news from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "Vietnam sent a crew today to search the Vung Tau area in the nation's southeast after a person said he [had] spotted what appeared to be a plane on fire and sent an e-mail to government officials. Earlier this week, an aircraft had alerted Hong Kong air traffic controllers about sighting metal debris in the sea near Vung Tau, Vietnam's Civil Aviation Authority had said."

This morning's bottom line: We don't know much more than we did last night, and we may not know much more for some time.

As The Guardian says:

"Finding missing aircraft can take days or months; unraveling what went wrong can take years."

On a cold, blustery day at Port Elizabeth in New Jersey, one of several massive cranes whirs along a rail high above the pier, picks up a heavy container from a ship's deck and loads it on a waiting truck back on land. The truck drives away, another arrives and the whole process starts again.

It's a scene played out every day along America's coasts as massive container ships from across the globe pull into deep-water seaports, waiting to be unloaded. The ships are enormous — some 10 stories high and several football fields long.

Mark Hanafee, director for safety at the terminal, says no one on the pier knows for sure what's inside them.

"We know the contents of anything that's hazardous, but general cargo we don't know. It could be chicken, clothes, auto parts, anything, computers, televisions," Hanafee says. "We're an import society. We import everything."

Chris Koch, president of the World Shipping Council, says demand for cheaper goods over the past couple of decades has driven the shipping industry. He points to Walmart, which he says brings in more than 360,000 of the 40-foot cargo containers each year.

"If you add all that up, that's probably a line of trucks that is somewhere close to 4,000 miles long. That's a lot of cargo," he says.

“ We're an import society. We import everything.

Libya's prime minister lost a vote of confidence and has been dismissed after his government was unable to stop a North Korean-flagged tanker from loading oil at a rebel-held port and reportedly breaking through a naval blockade.

Ali Zeidan was replaced temporarily by the country's defense minister, Abdallah al-Thinni, parliamentary spokesman Omar Hmeidan said.

Reuters reports that Libya's navy opened fire on the tanker as it tried to leave Sidra, one of three ports that has been in the hands of separatist forces since August.

NPR's Leila Fadel reports that:

"The militia bypassed the central government and made its first oil sale last weekend.

"Meanwhile militias that support the [central government] are reportedly mobilizing to take back control of the ports."

From its earliest days as America's homegrown whiskey elixir, Kentucky Bourbon has been traveling on boats.

In fact, boats were a key reason why Kentucky became the king of bourbon. In the late 1700s, trade depended on rivers, and distillers in the state had a big advantage: the Ohio River. They'd load their barrels onto flatboats on the Ohio, which flowed into the Mississippi, taking their golden liquor as far down as New Orleans.

Back then, placing barrels on boats was a necessity. These days, it's become a novelty: Eighth-generation Kentucky bourbon distiller Trey Zoeller is using the motion of the ocean to produce bottles worth $200 each.

"We're going back to how bourbon was initially aged," Zoeller tells The Salt. "The color and flavor came from the rocking on the water. Bourbon was loaded on to ships in Kentucky, and by the time it travelled to the people buying it, the flavor improved."

Bourbon is a family legacy for Zoeller. His great-great-great grandmother was among the first female distillers and his father, Chet, is a bourbon scholar. Zoeller has been in the artisanal whiskey business since the 1990s with his Jefferson's Bourbon. Five years ago, Zoeller was celebrating his birthday on a friend's boat off the coast of Costa Rica. As two Kentucky boys are wont to do, they were raising glasses full of bourbon. That's when Zoeller got the idea to send barrels of bourbon out to sea.

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The Conservative Political Action Conference ended in Washington Saturday, after giving Sen. Rand Paul a second consecutive victory in the presidential straw poll that's seen as an indicator of how Republicans see their leaders.

From Politico:

"The Kentucky senator received 31 percent, far ahead of second place Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who received 11 percent. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson finished third with 9 percent, ahead of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who received 8 percent.

"The announcement came at the end of the group's annual three-day confab. Organizers said that 2,459 attendees voted on computer kiosks.

"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tied for fifth place, with 7 percent."

The extremists now committing a wave of attacks in Iraq's Anbar province are better trained, funded and equipped than the al-Qaida-linked groups American soldiers battled there, says Brett McGurk, one of the State Department's top officials for Iraq.

The militants, who have drawn strength amid the war in Syria over the border, have taken over parts of Anbar over the last three months.

McGurk says that between 300 and 500 fighters have set up a defensive perimeter around the city of Fallujah, where American soldiers fought some of the fiercest battles of the war. They are armed with high-velocity sniper rifles.

Speaking last week on the sidelines of a conference in northern Iraq, McGurk says they don't have same iron control over the rest of the province. But still the militants have driven out more than 400,000 people since January. And their operations aren't confined to Anbar province. The group has become increasingly and lethally active again across Iraq.

"A key data point are suicide bombers, because suicide bombers – we know that they consider them their most precious (in a very perverse way) and their most strategic resource — they are now able to deploy about 30 to 40 suicide bombers a month here in Iraq," McGurk says.

That's contributing to a horrifying spike in the number of violent deaths. So what's the plan? McGurk says that the Iraqi government has undertaken to employ 10,000 of the tribesmen of Anbar in the security forces. These Sunni tribes complain of neglect by the Shiite-led government and some have even supported the militants. There's also a police training program.

Will that be enough? Zaid al-Ali, who recently published a book, The Struggle for Iraq's Future, says that the problems are broader than that. In Sunni-dominated places like Anbar, they won't be solved by security measures alone. He thinks that chronic unemployment also needs to be addressed, and more importantly, entrenched sectarian practices by the security forces. Detention without charge and torture are far more common in places like Anbar, he says, which feeds hatred of the government.

"It's been a major issue because there is a lot of abuse of detainees in Iraq, and there are a lot of cases – this is not a secret, everyone knows about this – there are a lot of cases of people being detained for no reason, or very long periods of time, without access to attorneys, without access to judges, without access to any type of recourse, and that really needs to change extremely urgently," al-Ali says.

Al-Ali also says that endemic corruption is feeding insecurity. He says that crooked purchasing practices mean that ineffective bomb detectors are widely used, and al-Qaida-linked groups have infiltrated the police and army.

"It's as a result of four, five years incompetence and corruption in the security sector, and it's going to be very hard to overturn at this stage," he says.

All eyes are on Iraqi elections, which are due to happen at the end of April. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has built his political legitimacy on his ability to maintain a modicum of security in Iraq. As he pushes for a third term, such security remains in short supply.

There's always a risk in flying, but the phase in which a plane is cruising at high altitude is widely considered to be safe. And that's what makes the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 so confounding.

"Whatever happened happened quickly and resulted in a catastrophic departure from the air," Mark Rosenker, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board who is now a consultant with CBS news, told NPR's Melissa Block.

There have been a number of cases in which planes have fallen from the sky — from factors that include catastrophic failure and sabotage. As Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot who runs the popular Ask The Pilot website, writes:

"All we know for sure is that a plane went down with no warning or communication from the crew. That the crash did not happen during takeoff or landing — the phases of flight when most accident occur — somewhat limits the possibilities, but numerous possibilities remain. The culprit could be anything from sabotage to an inflight fire to a catastrophic structural failure of some kind — or, as is so common in airline catastrophes, some combination or compounding of human error and/or mechanical malfunction."

What do an eccentric British detective, a cut-throat Washington pol and a bunch of nerds at Caltech have in common?

They are characters in some of the most popular foreign TV shows in China.

Over the past five years, The Big Bang Theory alone has been streamed more than 1.3 billion times. To appreciate how much some young Chinese love the BBC series, Sherlock, step inside 221B Baker Street. That's Holmes' fictitious address in London as well as the name of a caf that opened last year in Shanghai's former French Concession.

Good luck, though, finding a table.

"Business has been very good since the premier of the third season," says Eric Zhang, the caf's twenty-seven-year-old owner. "People have to line up or make reservations in advance on Saturday and Sunday, otherwise they can't get a seat."

Like many young people here, Zhang grew up reading the detective classics by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, translated into Chinese. Zhang says his father is a detective and used to share murder, smuggling and arson cases with him.

"Actually, I aspired to be a policeman," says Zhang, "but I didn't pass the physical and opened a caf instead."

The caf – all wood and leather — is drenched in Sherlock paraphernalia. On the wall next to the bar are hand-written, Sherlock plot-lines. By the window sits a tableful of what is supposed to be Dr. Watson's medical equipment, including a microscope and old glass syringes retrieved from the basement of a Chinese hospital. On the bookshelves sit seemingly endless photos of Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Holmes in the series. Zhang explains the shrine-like treatment of the British actor.

Code Switch

To Play The Part, Actors Must Talk The Talk — In Chinese

The Conservative Political Action Conference ended in Washington Saturday, after giving Sen. Rand Paul a second consecutive victory in the presidential straw poll that's seen as an indicator of how Republicans see their leaders.

From Politico:

"The Kentucky senator received 31 percent, far ahead of second place Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who received 11 percent. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson finished third with 9 percent, ahead of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who received 8 percent.

"The announcement came at the end of the group's annual three-day confab. Organizers said that 2,459 attendees voted on computer kiosks.

"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tied for fifth place, with 7 percent."

Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.

After years of selling drugs and serving prison time in Detroit, 54-year-old Isaac Lott is now a site supervisor with the organization Reclaim Detroit. The group deconstructs abandoned homes to reclaim materials from them.

“ These last four years have been wonderful, wonderful for me. I've never been so comfortable in my own skin. Because they gave me an opportunity to really enhance my life. So I try to give back.

Another day of frantic searching has failed to uncover the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, as ships and aircraft combed over parts of the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea where the jetliner is suspected of crashing with 239 people aboard. And officials now say the plane may have diverted its path, perhaps in an attempt to turn back.

The flight's disappearance is a mystery that was deepened by revelations Saturday that two of the plane's passengers appeared to have used stolen passports to travel. And on Sunday, Malaysian transportation and military officials said that if radar data that indicate a change of course is accurate, the search area would need to be adjusted.

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Maureen O'Reilly beams with pride as she shows a visitor around Grafton, N.H., a town so small it doesn't even have a traffic light.

"Have a look at this," O'Reilly says, pointing to a postcard view of hilly rural New England. "How beautiful is this? It's really pretty in the fall, really, really pretty."

But behind the beautiful view, locals are dividing into opposing camps. About 50 libertarians have moved into Grafton from around the country, splitting the town over their push to shrink its government.

Grafton has an annual meeting called Deliberative Session. It's a big day for local politics. About 100 people cram into the firehouse, town officials sitting up front.

The goal is to debate the budget before it goes to a town-wide vote. But after the Pledge of Allegiance, things break down.

People argue over how to conduct the meeting. The moderator loses control. Police remove a man. After an hour, Skip Gorman is fed up.

"It's still a wonderful town and there's lots of camaraderie," Gorman says. "But there's a group of people who have moved here for the sole purpose of being obstructionist."

"I'm not here to obstruct anything," counters John Connell. "I will vote in favor of liberty and justice at every opportunity."

How did Grafton come to this? About 15 years ago, a prominent libertarian hatched the idea of moving libertarians to New Hampshire, with the hope of having a big impact in a small state. They called it the Free State Project, and a handful of Free Staters settled in Grafton because the town has no zoning ordinances.

O'Reilly was surprised by how quickly Free Staters started pushing their agenda.

"Almost seems as if they walked in the door and started running for office and hold positions," she says. "It's not the typical way someone who's a New Englander does things."

Free Staters say Grafton should withdraw from the school district, cut the $1 million budget by 30 percent over three years, and carve Grafton out as a "U.N.-free zone."

Tony Stelick, a Free Stater who lived in Poland under the boot of Stalinism, remembers a government that slowly gained more and more power. He says locals who oppose Free Staters are unwittingly voting themselves towards fascism.

"They don't know where they going," Stelick says. "I been there. I know where they going."

Even though Grafton has always had a libertarian streak, Free Staters are a minority and locals have mostly blocked their agenda. Still, Olson is confident they could shift the balance if they reach out to locals.

"I think most of the people in town are actually supportive of small government," he says.

Since Free Staters came to town, the real change in Grafton has been more emotional than political. Things have become divisive, and a little ugly. O'Reilly says she's thought about moving, leaving behind the beautiful views and the house her husband built.

"Yeah, that's what's hard," she says. "I would hate to ask him to do it. But if it goes the way they want it go, I don't want to live here."

On a sweltering August day in 2012, the mayor of a tiny Spanish town, fed up with the country's economic conditions, did something drastic. It was the height of the economic crisis and most Spanish politicians were away on summer vacation.

With dozens of supporters, Mayor Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo of Marinaleda marched into the local supermarket in a neighboring town.

"Aren't you all hungry? Let's go shopping!" he yelled as they piled food into metal carts. They walked out without paying, distributing everything to the poor.

Marinaleda, with a population of 2,700, sits in the southern Spanish region of Andaluca where unemployment tops 35 percent.

Several more times that summer Sanchez Gordillo led mass burglaries of area supermarkets, becoming a household name across Spain: the Robin Hood of Andaluca. Sporting a Che Guevara-style beard and a Palestinian scarf, the image of this 62-year-old mayor appears on t-shirts worn by Spanish hipsters.

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