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For the average school kid, weighty, wonky topics like conservation, climate change and the circular economy might sound off-putting, if not downright dull. Yet Christiane Dorion has sold millions of children's books about these very concepts.

The trick? She never mentions them. "You can teach anything to children if you pitch it at the right level and use the right words," said the U.K.-based author.

Dorion distills hefty environmental concepts into bite-sized, kid-friendly explanations. Along the way, whimsical pop-up spreads — complete with pull-tabs, flaps and booklets ­­— engage even the shortest attention spans. Her books, written for 7- to 12-year-olds, tackle a variety of environmental and earth science topics, like how the weather works and how we make and discard everyday products from T-shirts to cheeseburgers.

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A new law in Bolivia allows children as young as ten to work legally, and has led to sharp criticism from many international human rights groups, who note that it goes against a United Nation convention setting a minimum age of 14.

But supporters of the legislation say that the law guarantees legal protections and fair wages for children, who have been working regardless of laws against it.

A 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Labor reported that more than 20 percent of Bolivians between the ages of 7 and 14 worked, while a U.N. agency reported a figure nearly three times that high in 2008, according to the Associated Press. Both reports note that Bolivian children work in some of the country's most dangerous working conditions.

NPR reporter Sara Shahriari spoke with NPR's Renee Montagne about the complicated situation that led to this controversial law, and the reactions in Bolivia and around the world.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is under fire for signing off on a building plan that allows a new luxury high-rise on Manhattan's western edge to have a separate entrance for low-income residents.

About 20 percent of the units in the 33-story tower will be reserved for low- and middle-income residents. But all the affordable units will be grouped in one area, and those tenants will have to enter through a separate door.

"This developer must go back, seal the one door and make it so all residents go through the same door," City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal said. "It's a disgrace."

U.S.

Lack Of Affordable Housing Puts The Squeeze On Poor Families

New Jersey used to be known as "the nation's medicine chest," but over the last two decades, many of the state's pharmaceutical industry jobs have dried up or moved elsewhere and left millions of square feet of office space, warehouses and laboratories sitting empty.

One of those sites is the 116-acre corporate campus of the Swiss drug maker Roche in Nutley, N.J. There are dozens of buildings on this campus, 10 miles west of midtown Manhattan. In fact, there are enough bio and chem labs, offices and auditoriums to fill up the entire Empire State Building. But since December, all of that space — 2 million square feet of it — has been vacant, the laboratories dark and the sidewalks deserted.

"When this was a thriving site, this sidewalk would have been busy with folks walking up and down," says Darien Wilson, one of just 38 Roche employees still working at the site as the company tries to sell the property. "We had great amenities for people, like on-site childcare, you had dinners to-go where you could order food by lunch and take it home with you if you were working late. We had dry cleaning," he says.

Five years ago, Roche acquired Genentech, moved its management to San Francisco and started to slowly withdraw from New Jersey. That's a pretty typical story for what's been happening in the state. In the last 20 years, New Jersey went from having more than 20 percent of U.S. pharma manufacturing jobs to less than 10 percent.

"Essentially, every time there's a merger or one company acquires another company, there's a reduction in force, and there's been furious mergers and acquisitions in the pharma industry, particularly over the past 10 years," says James Hughes, dean of the school of public policy at Rutgers.

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