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The newborn boy whose rescue from a sewer pipe in eastern China drew attention around the world earlier this week has been released from a hospital and is now in the care of his mother's family, according to media reports from Beijing.

There's also word that the mother will not be facing any charges. According to The Associated Press:

"The mother had initially raised the alarm about the baby when he got stuck Saturday in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom of a residential building. But she had cleaned the room of signs of a fresh birth and did not initially come forward as the mother, officials have been quoted as saying.

"She admitted she was the mother two days later when confronted by police who had found baby toys and blood-stained tissues in her apartment, the reports said.

"Police later concluded that the incident was an accident and that the woman did not initially come forward because she was frightened, but that she later started telling the truth, the Jinhua Evening News and a Pujiang county propaganda official said."

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

APP has sold billions of dollars' worth of paper products to Staples, Disney and other big U.S. corporations. But environmental groups have accused APP of causing deforestation, destroying the habitat of Sumatran tigers and orangutans, and trampling on the rights of forest dwellers.

Asril Amran is the head of a nearby village. He says that the plantations have ruined the local environment.

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Dan Kennedy is a writer at heart, but if you ask him what he's versed in, you're bound to get a myriad of answers. The author and host of The Moth podcast spent some time fighting fires, so he knows a thing or two about wildland fire suppression tools. He's also held a marketing gig at a major record label, which inspired his bestselling memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. So when we asked Kennedy what he'd like to be quizzed on, he didn't respond with something broad like TV or movies — try "terrestrial and aquatic insects that trout eat to survive."

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President Obama will surround himself with college students at the White House on Friday and warn that the cost of student loans is about to go up.

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. Obama has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would let the cost of student loans go up and down with the market.

If the alarm bells over rising student loan rates sound familiar, that's because we went through this very same exercise last year. Back then, the president went on a barnstorming tour of college campuses, warning that a doubling of interest rates would cost the average student borrower $1,000 for each year of college over the life of his loan.

"I'll do a quick poll. This may be unscientific," he said. "How many people can afford to pay an extra $1,000 right now?"

Eventually, Congress agreed to keep rates where they were — at 3.4 percent for one more year. That year is almost up, and students again face the prospect of rates doubling to 6.8 percent July 1. Obama is urging Congress on Friday to block that increase.

Tobin Van Ostern, who's with the campus arm of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, says students will make the case themselves when they descend on Washington next week.

"All day, we'll have people going in and out of Congress buildings, meeting with senators and bringing their personal stories and experiences directly to those who have the ability to keep interest rates low," he says.

Van Ostern says lawmakers do seem to have learned a lesson from last year's showdown. No one is eager to see rates double overnight.

"Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to do something about student loan interest rates to keep them low and affordable for borrowers," he says.

The president and congressional Republicans have offered different plans to do that, though they both start the same way: tying rates on student loans to the interest on a 10-year Treasury note. That rate's expected to be about 2.5 percent next year, climbing to just over 5 percent in 2018.

Under the GOP plan, a student who borrows money next year could see his interest rate rise every year after that, like an adjustable mortgage. In contrast, the president's plan would let students lock in rates for the life of their loan.

Beth Akers of the Brookings Institution says she thinks students might like that predictability.

"It simplifies the math they need to do when they're considering going to college," she says.

On the other hand, Akers gives the Republicans credit for setting an upper limit on interest rates of 8.5 percent. There's no such cap in the president's plan.

"I do think that a cap makes sense, because in a period of economic expansion, where we do have interest rates rising rapidly, we wouldn't want to see less college-going among students who are on the margin of being able to afford to go to college," she says.

Lower-income students would continue to get a break under the president's plan, with interest rates 2 percentage points lower than others are paying. Under the GOP plan, Van Ostern of the Center for American Progress notes, all students would pay the same rate.

"In reality, that ends up meaning that lower-income folks pay a little bit more, and then it will save people who are middle- or upper-income folks some money," he says.

Compared to some other fights in Washington, these differences don't seem insurmountable. But unless lawmakers and the White House can agree on the details quickly, Van Ostern says another temporary stopgap measure may be necessary.

"July First is not far away, which is the deadline when these interest rates will double," he says. :And so if we can't come up with a long-term plan by then and time is ticking, then we certainly need to at least pass a short-term extension of current interest rates to give folks in Congress more time to figure out how to deal with it long term."

The whole idea behind the switch to market rates is to take some of the politics out of the student loan business. For now, though, it's clear that politics is still standing in the way.