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It was an "auntie" that left that lipstick mark on his collar, President Obama explained Tuesday evening at the start of a White House event marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

"I do not want to be in trouble with Michelle," he joked. And to the anonymous off-camera auntie of one attendee, he added: "That's why I'm calling you out." The White House has a 6+ minutes long video of his remarks. His explanation comes in the first minute. CBS News has a shorter version focusing on the lipstick comments here.

According to the president, the lipstick was a very visible sign of the warmth he was greeted with at the reception.

China's infamous bureaucracy has bedeviled people for ages, but in recent years, daily life in some major Chinese cities has become far more efficient.

For instance, when I worked in Beijing in the 1990s, many reporters had drivers. It wasn't because they didn't drive, but because they needed someone to deal with China's crippling bureaucracy.

I had a man named Old Zhao, who would drive around for days to pay our office bills at various government utility offices. Zhao would sit in line for hours, often only to be abused by functionaries.

I left China in 2002 and returned two years ago to work as NPR's correspondent in Shanghai. These days, I just walk across the street with my bills and pay them at a 24-hour convenience store. It takes about three minutes, and the clerks are unfailingly polite.

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Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with the murder of 16 Afghan villagers in one of the worst atrocities of the American-led war in that country, will plead guilty as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty, his attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Bales' attorney, John Henry Browne, says his client was "crazed" and "broken" in March 2012 when he entered a village in southern Kandahar province and opened fire on sleeping Afghan civilians. He said Bales would plead guilty next week.

The AP writes:

"The Army had been trying to have Bales executed, and Afghan villagers have demanded it. In interviews with the AP in Kandahar last month, relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty.

...

Any plea deal must be approved by the judge as well as the commanding general at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Bales is being held. A plea hearing is set for June 5, said Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, an Army spokesman. He said he could not immediately provide other details."

Here's a question: If you go to the movies and the scheduled showtime is, say, 7:30, when do you actually expect the movie to start? If you said 7:30, you go to very unusual screenings. If you said 7:45, you're closer to what many experience. If you said 7:50, you're still in range: there's often some advertising other than trailers, the limit for trailer length is two and a half minutes, and theaters sometimes run seven or eight trailers. Eight would add up to 20 minutes.

Theater owners are antsy about the long delays and the complaints they get from patrons, and they're asking for a change, writer Pamela McClintock tells NPR's Renee Montagne on Thursday's Morning Edition.

McClintock recently wrote a piece in The Hollywood Reporter about the disagreement, in which theater owners have asked movie studios to shorten the length of trailers from two and a half minutes down to two. The reason? In their current form, theater owners argue, they both take up too much time and give away too much plot.

McClintock says the dispute could end in a couple of ways. The guidelines are voluntary anyway (and imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America, not theater owners), but certainly, the studios could choose to go along with the change, or with some change.

But studios are nervous that if there's no agreement, theater owners might just start refusing to play trailers at all unless they comply with the two-minute guideline. And even with the power of YouTube and other online outlets where trailers are seen, putting a trailer in a theater is still considered an enormously important part of marketing a film.

This entire area tends to be one of delicate negotiation, since theaters, after all, have their own reasons for wanting to help market films — especially in ways that make them look like great theater experiences. At the same time, going to the movies is expensive, and blockbusters seem to be getting longer all the time (even Star Trek Into Darkness is well over two hours long, and The Avengers was almost two and a half). Theater owners understandably want to make the experience more pleasant, and if that means fewer trailers, they just might be willing.