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It appears that it's just a matter of days before it becomes official that Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate's top Republican, will be primaried by a Louisville businessman with Tea Party backing.

The news that Matthew Bevin, owner of a bell-manufacturing company and an investment company executive, intends to soon announce his effort to oust McConnell, is interesting because it appears to place McConnell in something of a bind.

As Senate minority leader, McConnell has seen his role as at times negotiating compromises with Democrats in order to break impasses, something he has done repeatedly in the past two years. Most recently, there was the fiscal-cliff deal at the start of the year that McConnell negotiated with Vice President Biden that allowed tax rates to rise on individuals with more than $400,000 in annual taxable income. It was a compromise because President Obama had sought a much lower threshold.

It's that role as a compromiser, however, long part of the unwritten job description of Senate leaders in the majority and minority, that has gotten McConnell in trouble with those conservatives who find any compromise with Democrats anathema. They couldn't care less that McConnell is a fan of fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, who as an antebellum senator became earned the sobriquet The Great Compromiser.

Despite the negative feelings many conservatives have about compromise, there will still be situations that require it. For instance, Congressional Republicans will need to negotiate with President Obama and Democratic lawmakers later this year on the debt ceiling and federal budget.

And therein lies the problem for McConnell. How will he be able to compromise without inflaming the already inflamed Tea Party Republicans who support Bevin's expected challenge?

One possibility is that McConnell repeats as many times as possible the scenario that just occurred, with the just concluded negotiations to end the GOP filibuster of seven of Obama's executive branch appointments.

McConnell let Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to lead those negotiations while the Kentuckian tried to keep his distance, a move that theoretically would allow him to maintain some plausible deniability as he wades into his primary fight. It was a kind of "leading from behind."

Of course, plausible deniability only works when those in the know allow you to keep up the pretense. That didn't work out so well for McConnell in the filibuster fight, since McCain and fellow Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Kentucky testily outed McConnell.

Despite that, McCain is apparently still willing to play a similar role in future inter-party negotiations. And McConnell, presumably, would still try to stay in the background.

"What other choice is there [for McConnell]?" said Richard A. Baker, who served as the Senate's first official historian between 1975 and 2009 and is co-author of "The American Senate. An Insider's History."

"You can sign your death warrant now or sign it later. It's a real tough situation," Baker says.

"In earlier days (the early 1950s) [party] leaders got knocked off because they were viewed as not coming back to the state often enough. They had gone Washington, so to speak. That was the reason that they were vulnerable.

"Now, of course, in the era of instant communications, that's not a problem anymore. [The problem is] being caught between political factions. It's two separate tracks, being the party leader and being the representative of your state in the Senate. And here's the classic example of where those tracks are running at cross purposes. It's a rock and a hard place for sure."

The McConnell described in Baker's book, however, comes across as a shrewd political strategist and tactician. Robert Bennett, a former Republican Senate colleague of McConnell's who was himself primaried out of the Senate by a Tea Party challenger, is quoted in Baker's book as calling the Kentuckian "the best political mind" in the chamber.

Which leads Baker to say that if anyone can navigate the treacherous waters facing the Senate minority leader, it's McConnell. "I would put my money on him to do that," he says. "Whether it's possible to do in the scope of larger things we'll know later. But he would be the guy for the challenge."

We've been looking at working conditions in Bangladesh where the collapse in April of a building that housed garment factories killed more than 1,000 people.

But Bangladesh isn't the only country where conditions in garment factories have come under criticism. The same industry has expanded dramatically in Cambodia in recent years, and a report from the U.N.'s International Labor Organization says compliance on key workplace issues needs to be improved. That's a reversal for a country that was once lauded as a model in the developing world.

Here's more: "This report demonstrates that improvements are not being made in many areas including fire safety, child labor, and worker safety and health."

The report noted "impressive improvements" in the 10 years following the signing of the 1999 U.S.-Cambodian trade agreements, but reversals over the past few years.

The Better Factories Cambodia report was released last week, and it notes that "some of this deterioration may be attributed to the rapid growth of the industry."

The report follows the death in May of two workers at a shoe warehouse south of the capital, Phnom Penh.

Like Bangladesh, Cambodia's low labor costs make it an attractive destination for Western retailers. Here's more about the industry from the Wall Street Journal:

"Cambodia exploded onto the global garment scene in the 1990s. Development specialists saw the sector as a major growth opportunity for the country, which had only recently emerged from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which according to some estimates left 1.7 million people dead during the late 1970s.

"Taking advantage of cheap labor, factories sprouted up in Phnom Penh residential areas as well as on farmland and rice paddies on the outskirts. There are 462 export factories now, said Ken Loo, secretary-general of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia. That is up from 185 exporting factories in 2001, he said, citing his earliest records.

"But the rapid growth was accompanied by complaints of sweatshop conditions. As activists called for a solution, U.S. officials negotiated a 1999 trade deal with Cambodia. Washington offered to expand access to the American market — which had quotas on garment imports — if Cambodian firms improved labor standards."

Already known as "the world's most endangered feline species," the Iberian lynx is headed to extinction in the wild within the next five decades, an international team of researchers warn in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions," they write.

The problem, they say, is that climate change has reduced the availability of the cats' "main prey, the European rabbit," CBS News reports.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Iberian lynx could become "the first cat species to become extinct for at least 2,000 years. ... In the early 19th century the Iberian lynx was found in Spain, Portugal and Southern France. It has steadily declined since then, falling to the dangerously low levels today."

The researchers estimate there are "only an estimated 250 individuals surviving in the wild." That's up slightly from a decade ago thanks to "habitat management, reduction of destructive human activity and, more recently, reintroducing the lynx into suitable areas where they have lived in recent history."

But, they warn, "ongoing conservation strategies could buy just a few decades before the species goes extinct."

"The species is extremely vulnerable to shifts in habitat quality or to changes in the abundance of their rabbit prey due to climate change," says Professor Barry Brook, Chair of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide, in a statement released by the researchers.

What do the researchers recommend? They say: "A carefully planned reintroduction program, accounting for the effects of climate change, prey abundance and habitat connectivity, could avert extinction of the lynx this century." They also suggest putting some of the cats in "higher latitude and higher altitude regions on the Iberian Peninsula" where the climate should be more hospitable.

So much fascinating tech and culture news, so little time. But we certainly think you should see the journalism that's catching our curiosity each week, so each Friday we'll round up the week that was — the work that appeared in this blog, and from our fellow technology writers and observers at other organizations.

ICYMI

In case you missed it ... here on All Tech, Steve Henn wrote about the clever ways that developers are hacking Google Glass to do what Google doesn't want them to do. Martin Kaste reported on the troves of data that law enforcement has captured, and in many cases, saved, about our license plates and our whereabouts. Our weekly innovation pick was Smart Bedding, which purports to keep your top sheet from bunching up while you sleep. We revisited a spring study about online ranters — it turns out that online outrage makes you feel worse in the long run.

On our airwaves, All Things Considered featured several pieces about the rush to digitize medical records and one of the companies behind electronic records.

The Big Conversations

The larger tech conversations this week focused on phone payment plans (more on that later) and the future of television viewing, with Netflix making history by garnering Emmy nods for its original programming and sparking questions about the end of consumer relationships with cable, aka, cord-cutting. "Google is freshly rumored to be pursuing the same kind of deals in order to 'stream traditional TV programming' across the Internet. Google, however, has sought these kinds of deals before and failed, so there's no guarantee the company will succeed this time," writes The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan, in a smart piece called "The Tyranny of Traditional TV."

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are now all offering installment plans for their mobile phone customers. The analyses on these new upgrade plans are almost all negative. Some sample headlines: "Smartphone Upgrade Plans Are A Bad Deal," "Make it stop: Verizon's Edge phone upgrade program is just as bad as AT&T's," and "Verizon and AT&T early upgrade plans are steaming hot piles of rip-off."

Wired compared the three plans Friday morning.

What's Catching Our Eye

In no particular order:

The New York Times: How Googling Unmasks Child Abuse

Fascinating research on how Google searches for certain terms that are a proxy cry for help.

The Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner on Reddit

The popular online community is growing up and grappling with what to do about some darker subreddits that give hateful, misogynistic, racist sentiments a home.

Atlantic Wire: Tumblr's Gaping Security Hole

If you're a Tumblr user, you probably got the notice midweek: Tumblr asked all users of its iPhone and iPad app to change their password and download an update to fix a major security glitch. "It's such a huge and egregious error," Kevin O'Brien, an enterprise solutions architect for CloudLock, told the Atlantic Wire.

TechCrunch: Google Brings Street View to the Eiffel Tower

An elegant experience. I think I had more fun visiting the Eiffel Tower from my desk than when I actually visited the Paris icon. Those darn tourists everywhere ...