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Microsoft Corp. is expected to announce new Surface tablet computers, including a version with a smaller screen to compete with Google's Nexus 7 and Apple's iPad Mini.

The company has an announcement event scheduled in New York on Monday.

It comes about a month before Microsoft releases an update to its Windows 8 operating system on Oct. 17. Among other things, Windows 8.1 will be usable on smaller touch screens, which have become popular because they are cheaper and easier to carry. The previous version of Windows 8 was limited to tablets with 10-inch to 12-inch screens.

The new Surface tablets could also get lighter and thinner thanks to a processing chip that uses less energy and doesn't require a fan. Known as Haswell, the chip is already used in laptops from Apple, Samsung, Dell and other companies. Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air with Haswell gets up to 12 hours of use, compared with seven hours before.

Microsoft began selling Surface tablets last October, but sales have been slow. The company shipped about a million tablets in the first three months of 2013, according to research firm IDC. That includes about 260,000 of the slimmed-down RT version of Surface and 750,000 of the Pro version, which is compatible with older Windows programs. The shipments gave Microsoft a meager 2 percent share of the tablet market in the first quarter. By the second quarter, Microsoft tablets dropped out of IDC's Top 5.

Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., absorbed a $900 million charge in the April-June period to account for its expected losses from the Surface RT after it slashed prices to stimulate demand. The $150 cut brought the price of the Surface RT with 32 gigabytes of memory to $349. The Surface has a 10.1-inch screen measured diagonally. The RT version is 1.5 pounds. The Pro version is 2 pounds and starts at $799, $100 less than it was at launch.

Microsoft has manufactured devices before, such as its Xbox gaming console. In selling the Surface, the company became a competitor to its many manufacturing partners, which rely on its Windows operating system to power their machines. Microsoft is trying hard to succeed in tablets because personal computer sales are falling.

While there have been signs of a recovery, Graves says their benefits have not yet reached the bottom of the economic ladder.

"The recovery for many people has looked very different. The jobs that are coming back are some of the lowest paying jobs," she says.

Many jobs created since the end of the recession are in retail and food services and often do not pay enough to support families. Middle-income jobs that were once lifelines out of poverty have become more scarce, making it even more difficult for groups with some of the highest rates of poverty, including Latinos, African-Americans and single mothers.

Graves says in today's economy, having a job doesn't necessarily mean you're not scraping by.

"Even when women are working full-time, they may still be in poverty," she explains. "Even as the economy is doing better, women are not doing better."

Waiting In Line

In a suburban industrial park in Gaithersburg, Md., just outside the nation's capital, workers push a stacked cart full of snacks and produce through the Manna Food Center, a local distribution site for food donations where Yelba Mojica meets daily with struggling families.

"People that have never needed the food are coming to [Manna Food Center] and [asking], 'What do I have to do to qualify?' " Mojica says. "You see a lot of different people. You know, you see all walks of life who have never needed it in the past and all of a sudden, they do."

Judith Prado, a bus driver and single mother of three, never imagined waiting in line at a food pantry — until nine months ago, when her hours at work were cut and she had to choose between gas for her car or food for her family.

Al-Shabab, the Somali group that has claimed responsibility for the attack on a Nairobi mall, began as a group fighting inside its homeland. But it has evolved into an al-Qaida affiliate that draws members from other countries and views Somalia as a front in the war against the West.

Here are some key things to know about the group:

Who Are Al-Shabab?

Al-Shabab, or the Youth, is a Somali Islamist group that the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization.

The group grew out of the two decades of turmoil in Somalia following the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1991. By 2006, the Somali Council of Islamic Courts, the group to which al-Shabab was allied, controlled much of the southern portion of the country.

The council then set its sights on Somalia's weak transitional government. This deeply concerned Ethiopia, which backed the transitional government. Ethiopia sent in troops, defeated the council and took control of Mogadishu.

This was a turning point for al-Shabab.

"The only military force willing to resist the Ethiopians following the collapse of the ... [council], al Shabab was able to play on deep-seated Somali antipathy toward Ethiopia to recruit thousands of nationalist volunteers," wrote Rob Wise of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The National Counterterrorism Center notes the group continued its violent tactics in southern and central Somalia, where it held large swaths of territory.

But, it said, its "insurgency has been challenged over the past year by in-fighting and military pressure that has liberated key towns from al-Shabaab."

That military pressure comes in the form of a U.N.-backed African Union force that includes troops from Kenya and Uganda.

Nonetheless, said Mary Harper, the BBC's Africa editor and author of Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State, al-Shabab "still has the capacity to strike not just in Somalia, which it does regularly, but also across Somalia's borders."

What Does The Group Want?

The BBC's Harper told NPR's Tell Me More that the group's ideology has evolved since it "basically imploded" a few months ago. One faction wanted to keep the fighting inside Somalia; the other had global ambitions.

The latter faction is now dominant, Harper says, and therefore she was not surprised that its first major attack was outside Somalia.

The National Counterterrorism Center noted that the group isn't "centralized or monolithic" in its agenda or goals.

"Most of its fighters are predominantly interested in the nationalistic battle against the [transitional government] and not supportive of global jihad," it said.

Why Attack Kenya?

Kenyan troops entered Somalia in 2011, resulting in a loss of key territory for al-Shabab. The group had warned that it would target Kenya.

"The attack at Westgate Mall is just a very tiny fraction of what Muslims in Somalia experience at the hands of Kenyan invaders," al-Shabab said on Twitter.

In 2010, al-Shabab also took credit for two bombings in Uganda — which has also contributed to the AU force — killing more than 70 people.

As NPR's Frank Langfitt noted in his series from Somalia in 2010, al-Shabab's ideology was gaining ground among Somali refugees in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, which is known as Little Mogadishu.

"The intelligence we have, we know there are elements sympathetic to al-Shabab," George Saitoti, head of Kenyan Internal Security, told Frank at the time. "And there may be some of them [al-Shabab operatives] around here."

U.S. Links

NPR's Dina Temple-Raston has reported on a "jihadi pipeline" for recruiting and sending Somali-Americans to the battlefields of Somalia. The head of Britain's MI-5 also warned of Britons training in al-Shabab camps.

The potential reach of the group was underscored by Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who told NPR this in an interview Sunday: "They don't have borders. Somalia might be where they have training centers or bomb-making factories or things like that, but, you know, the top leadership of Shabab, including those who have been killed recently ... was American citizens, British citizens who are the leading figures in the leadership of al-Shabab."

There are unconfirmed reports that some of the militants involved in the Westlake Mall siege were foreign nationals.

Further Reading

Dina's series The Somali-Minneapolis Terrorist Axis

Frank's series Containing Chaos: Somalia Today

Global Post on Al-Qaida In Africa

Sales of its new iPhone 5s and 5c models have surpassed other iPhone releases and exceeded initial supply, Apple says. The company says it has sold 9 million of the phones since their launch on Friday and that "many online orders" will ship in coming weeks.

"This is our best iPhone launch yetmore than nine million new iPhones solda new record for first weekend sales," Apple CEO Tim Cook says, in a news release Monday. He adds that "while we've sold out of our initial supply of iPhone 5s, stores continue to receive new iPhone shipments regularly."

As Apple notes, the phones went on sale Friday in the United States as well as in many parts of Europe and Asia, including China. That was a departure from previous releases, in which American consumers were able to buy their smartphones weeks or even months ahead of the international market.

The news led Apple to brighten its own predictions for sales in the current financial quarter, which ends this month.

As Reuters reports:

"Apple tweaked its financial forecast to reflect the higher sales, an unusual move for the company. It said revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter would be near the high end of its previous forecast of $34 billion to $37 billion."