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Retail sales rose 0.5 percent in December from November, the Census Bureau says. That may be a sign that as 2012 ended consumers were still in a shopping mood even as lawmakers in Washington struggled to keep the federal government from going over the so-called fiscal cliff.

Bloomberg News says the better-than-expected sales figure, which is adjusted to hopefully smooth out the effects of the holidays and show the "real" growth, is a sign that consumers were looking "beyond the year-end budget battle among U.S. lawmakers."

"Consumers continue to spend at a decent pace," Russell Price, senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Inc. in Detroit, told Bloomberg.

Such spending is critical: Consumers purchase about 70 percent of the goods and services companies produce.

For the year, retail sales were up 5.2 percent.

Also this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wholesale prices declined 0.2 percent in December from November and were up just 1.3 percent for the year.

On this fourth day of French military operations aimed at routing Islamist militants in Mali, the al-Qaida-linked rebels are "vowing to drag France into a long and brutal ground war," Reuters reports.

"France has opened the gates of hell for all the French. She has fallen into a trap which is much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia," a spokesman for the MUJWA Islamist group told Europe 1 radio, the wire service writes.

Another militant spokesman, France 24 reports, told Agence France Presse that "France has attacked Islam. We will strike at the heart of France." On where the attacks might take place, he said, "everywhere. In Bamako, in Africa and in Europe."

According to Reuters: "Launching a counter-attack far to the southwest of recent fighting, the Islamists clashed fiercely with government forces on Monday in the central town of Diabaly, residents and Malian military sources said."

The news service quotes French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian as saying the insurgents have taken control of the town, but that French and Malian forces were hoping to push the rebels out again.

Sunday, as we reported, French officials said military operations had stopped the militants' advance. Islamists have been pushing to take control of Mali for more than a year and it's feared they will use the African nation as a base to launch terrorist operations elsewhere. They have also been destroying centuries-old historical sites.

France has, The New York Times adds, "called a meeting of the United Nations Security Council for Monday."

NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, who is monitoring the story from Senegal, tells our Newscast Desk that as the French airstrikes and other actions continue, "Mali awaits the arrival of an African force to help try to dislodge the insurgents."

Unusually, the pollution is getting headline treatment on local news bulletins and in the domestic media. This is in stark contrast to the situation in previous years, when pollution was rarely acknowledged, let alone reported. Since the beginning of the year, the government has been releasing hourly pollution readings for 74 Chinese cities, almost half of which are now showing severe pollution.

"There's been clarity as to the severity of the problem, there's more frequent disclosure of information, but what remains to be seen is whether more aggressive action will be taken to solve the problem," says Alex Wang, an expert of Chinese environmental law at the University of California, Berkeley, law school.

This follows intense public pressure on the issue, driven by the fact that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing operates its own pollution monitor, releasing hourly figures by Twitter. In the past two years, citizens noticed large discrepancies between the official Chinese figures and the U.S. ones, and began to question whether the Chinese statistics had been fudged or falsified.

"In theory, with the greater transparency, that's harder to do — the falsification or cheating the data," says Alex Wang. "What will be interesting to see going forward is that now that they've become more transparent — releasing hourly data and so forth — does it actually force the regulators to take regulatory action?"

Beijing is taking emergency action: shutting down some building sites and polluting factories temporarily and taking almost a third of official cars off the road. It's also vowing to cut air pollution by 15 percent over the next three years.

But the surrounding provinces are actually stepping up coal consumption, dooming such pledges, according to Greenpeace's Zhou Rong.

"It's not going to work if Beijing city does the mitigation work alone," she says. "If the surrounding areas don't do the same work, Beijing will never get better air quality."

A study by Greenpeace and Beijing University focusing on four Chinese cities estimates the number of people dying prematurely from air pollution is close to three times that killed by traffic accidents.

Monday morning, Beijing's main children's hospital was packed to overflowing, with rows of infants hooked up to drips in the corridors outside the emergency clinic, and queues of patients waiting to see doctors. According to official media, recently this hospital has seen 9,000 patients per day, a third of them with respiratory diseases.

"Of course it's connected to the pollution," says Louise Huang, who's here with her 18-month-old son. He started getting sick the first day of the smog, even though she hasn't dared open the windows or go outside. "This must get better," she tells me. "I can't imagine how we'd live if it got worse."

"There are too many cars on the streets, too many factories," says Wang Ying, whose baby is suffering respiratory problems. When asked whether she worries about the world her child will inherit, she replies, "Of course I'm scared."

In the Chinese media, there's been some soul-searching about why the problem has been so intense. The China Daily took the country's rapid urbanization process to task, commenting in an editorial, "The air quality in big cities could have been better had more attention been paid to the density of high rises, had more trees been planted in proportion to the number of residential areas, and had the number of cars been strictly controlled."

Meanwhile, the Global Times has been pointing out China's role as the global factory and the "biggest construction site in the world."

"Seventy percent of global iron and steel, and about half of the world's cement is produced in China," it says in an editorial. "Against this backdrop, it is impossible for China to be as clean as the West."

Among local people, there are fears for the future. One song circulating online includes the lyrics, "I live in this smog, I don't want to die in this smog." This environmental crisis risks dragging down economic growth, and given growing public dissatisfaction, it could yet become a political problem for China's new leaders.

Pilkey says there's a lot of him in the Captain Underpants series. He says he remembers what it was like to be a kid who got in trouble for his pranks. He also remembers what it was like to be a struggling reader. "I remember every kid in the class would have to stand up and read a chapter from our history book or something. And whenever it was my turn, everyone would just kind of groan, like 'Ugh, Pilkey's reading again.' And it just took me so long to get through it. I had all these really negative associations with reading. I just hated it," he says.

So he wanted to make a children's book that even kids like him would find irresistible. But some grown-ups, true to form, think it's inappropriate for the heroes of a children's book to be such troublemakers. George and Harold are big-time pranksters. They draw a comic strip in which they turn their mean principal into the superhero Captain Underpants who wears nothing but a red cape and underwear. This, and other bad-boy behavior, has landed Captain Underpants on the American Library Association's "Hit List," the annual top 10 list of most-complained about books. Pat Scales, chair of the ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee, says, "The No. 1 complaint is — this is kind of funny — nudity. I guess because the superhero has on jockey shorts. [Also] vulgar language, and they feel that kids are being taught not to obey authority."

In the books, the principal hates George and Harold's comic strip. Some parents have problems with it too, not for the content, but for all the misspellings. "Laugh" is spelled "laff." "Trouble" is spelled "trubbel." Rex Exnicios, 7, from New Orleans says that really bugs his mom. "She gets really mad ... She just says, 'That's misspelled,' and then says, 'This is how you actually spell it,' and then she spells it," he says.

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