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Spaniards wary of trusting their life savings to their country's shaky banking system can now buy a mattress that has an armored safe equipped with a keypad combination lock hidden in one end.

The new product, Caja de ahorros Micolchon — Spanish for "My Mattress Safe" — went on sale three weeks ago, several months after the European Union approved loans of up to $130 billion to bail out troubled Spanish banks.

It's the brainchild of Paco Santos, who was laid off from Spain's biggest mattress manufacturer three years ago and has since started his own company, Descanso Santos Suenos, or DeSS. Reached by telephone at his offices in Salamanca, the 57-year-old salesman assured NPR that My Mattress Safe is no April Fool's Day joke.

"We're completely serious! And we've sold many, many of these mattresses," Santos said, declining to give specific sales figures.

But customers will need some savings up front. My Mattress Safe retails for about $1,120. The company also sells bed frames, conventional mattresses and bed coverings.

"I had a hunch that this new product would sell," Santos said. "You see, we've got big economic problems in Spain, and people have really lost confidence in the banks."

With the help of a son who works in public relations, Santos has launched a website and produced several YouTube videos in Spanish to market his special mattresses.

Health plan deductibles keep getting higher — the proportion of workers with a deductible that topped $1,000 for single coverage nearly tripled in the past five years, to 34 percent.

Since high-deductible plans often mean you pay more out of pocket for medical care, it might seem like a no brainer to sign up for a plan that links to a health savings account so you can sock away money tax free to cover your medical expenses. But there are good reasons to think twice before making that choice.

In order to get the tax advantages of a health savings account, the health plan it's linked to has to meet certain criteria. In 2013, for instance, an HSA-qualified plan has to have a deductible of at least $1,250 for single coverage and $2,500 for family coverage, and the maximum out-of-pocket limits can be no higher than $6,250 and $12,500, respectively, for single and family coverage.

But HSA-qualified plans have other limitations that consumers often aren't aware of. For one thing, even though the Affordable Care Act allows parents to keep their adult children on their policies until they reach age 26, they can't use funds from their HSA to pay for the child's care after age 24. That's because "dependent" is defined differently for HSA purposes than it is under the ACA provisions that extend dependent coverage to adult children.

In addition, except for preventive care, which is generally covered at 100 percent and is not subject to the deductible, consumers in an HSA-qualified plan may be on the hook for the entire cost of medical care, including doctor visits, medications, tests and treatments, until they reach their deductible. (They'll be charged the negotiated rate their insurer has agreed to pay providers for services, however, not the "rack" rate paid by the uninsured.)

Regular high-deductible plans, on the other hand, offer many more options. In addition to covering preventive care at 100 percent, some function like traditional plans, requiring only a copayment for doctor visits and medicines even before the deductible is met. Or they may offer a limited number of doctor visits with a copayment before people meet their deductible, says Carrie McLean, senior manager of customer care at eHealthInsurance.com, an online vendor.

Consumers need to evaluate the full spectrum of costs and benefits for HSA plans, but the advantages may have nothing to do with medical expenses, she advises. "The true benefit you get from these accounts is because you're putting money away and you get that tax [savings]," says McLean.

The government-controlled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, which needed a $116 billion federal bailout after the housing bubble burst in 2007, said Tuesday that it earned a record $7.6 billion in fourth-quarter 2012 and $17.2 billion for the year.

That allowed it to pay $11.6 billion in dividends to the U.S. Treasury Department last year, Fannie Mae says. Since 2008, it has "paid taxpayers $35.6 billion in dividends." Looking ahead, "we expect our earnings to remain strong over the next few years," Timothy Mayopoulos, president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Bloomberg News writes that:

"Washington-based Fannie Mae and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and package them into securities on which they guarantee payments of principal and interest. The two companies have drawn $187.5 billion from Treasury and have sent back more than $60 billion in the form of dividends, which count as a return on the government's investment and not as a repayment.

"Under the terms of an agreement with Treasury that went into effect this year, the enterprises will be allowed to retain only $3 billion in net worth. Any profits beyond that amount will go to taxpayers."

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

The American Library Association and Barnes & Noble were among the groups named by conservative group Morality in Media in its "Dirty Dozen List" of "the top 12 facilitators of porn." The list states that the ALA encourages libraries to have unfiltered computers, and that the bookstore chain "is a major supplier of adult pornography and child erotica." The top spot, however, went to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for "refus[ing] to enforce existing federal obscenity laws."

Squirreled away in a recent Wall Street Journal article about a concert DVD by singer Alanis Morissette was this revelation: "She's focused at the moment on writing a book, which she calls 'transpersonal psychology meets autobiography, with a little humor thrown in, I hope.' "

The latest "Mysteries of the Vernacular" installment — charming video etymologies of English words — locates the word "clue" in the Minotaur's maze and Chaucer's England.

A new book by comedian Cleo Rocos, The Power of Positive Drinking, which comes out in May, claims that she and Queen singer Freddie Mercury sneaked Princess Diana into a gay bar in the 1980s by disguising her as a male model.

In The Guardian, John Dugdale takes apart "campus fiction," and, in particular, Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed: "Oates's bizarre, sprawling novel, in which the devil comes to Princeton in 1905, is especially saturated with other books, ranging from vampire and Stephen King shockers to the prototypical tale of a don driven mad, Goethe's Faust. Like other recent campus concoctions, it suggests a moratorium has long been overdue."

Jacob Harris, senior software architect at The New York Times, has developed an algorithm to find accidental haikus in the paper, from the mundane: "The one thing to be / careful about / is trimming the broccoli rabe," to the poetic: "The buzzing of a / thousand bees in the tiny / curled pearl of an ear."