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The crows freaked out. The dogs howled. And just as the sun was beginning to set, a second earthquake struck Nepal.

Animals react to earthquakes before they strike. People react after they hit. And in Nepal, Tuesday's 7.3 magnitude earthquake, coming almost three weeks after the April 25 quake, prompted a primal response.

The Two-Way

Nepal Update: Quake's Death Toll Rises; U.S. Chopper Still Missing

Parallels

Nepali Village Struggles To Recover From Earthquake

"You could hear chunks of buildings just falling," says Cindy Stein, director of global programs at the Real Medicine Foundation, speaking from Nepal. "People were saying this prayer you say when you're dying. A lot of the people around us were volunteers [from Nepal] and their families were not with them. The women were hysterical."

The prayer Stein is talking about is a Buddhist chant usually heard only during funerals, says Venerable Metteyya Sakyaputta, a monk in his 20s from Lumbini, Nepal. At that moment, everyone, fearing the end of their lives, was chanting. He and other volunteers had been working with Stein to gather supplies for remote villages and nunneries when the earthquake struck.

"It was a very powerful experience, and just seeing the panic and chaos was heart-wrenching," Sakyaputta says. "It had been more than two weeks [since the initial earthquake] and people were just trying to get back to their lives. I could see they were on the verge of their nerves."

Traffic came to a complete halt and people ran into the streets of Kathmandu, panicking. Half an hour later, yet another quake hit. This one registered 6.3. Tremors continued throughout the night and into the next day.

The second wave of earthquakes came just as the country was starting to transition into the rebuilding phase, Stein says.

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Cindy Stein, from the nonprofit Real Medicine Foundation, was working in Kathmandu when the second earthquake struck. Courtesy of Real Medicine Foundation hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Real Medicine Foundation

Cindy Stein, from the nonprofit Real Medicine Foundation, was working in Kathmandu when the second earthquake struck.

Courtesy of Real Medicine Foundation

The situation is even more difficult than before, she tells Goats and Soda. Procuring helicopters remains a challenge, and many roads that had been cleared in the past two weeks are now blocked again.

Oxfam America, which has about 100 mostly Nepalese volunteers already on the ground, plans on getting more help to Nepal. The group has 35 tons of equipment — including tents, water and sanitation supplies — to deliver by truck, says Darius Teeter, vice president of program. That will be even harder because of new landslides.

"We are in a race against time [with] monsoon season coming in June," he says. "We're adding more people, not subtracting."

But the first thing the agency did, he says, was to send local volunteers home to check on their families.

"The second earthquake has increased the already desperate need [for permanent housing]," says Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International.

"We're really focused on the long-term rebuilding of communities," he says. "Our volunteers are out there helping families clear rubble and salvage any materials that can be used for rebuilding."

Goats and Soda

Virtual Volunteers Use Twitter And Facebook To Make Maps Of Nepal

Community members have also stepped up for search and rescue efforts. "It's a hard job," Stein says. "We had Matteya and other monk leaders bring them snacks. And we told [the local volunteers], 'If this is what you want to do you need to be committed because we're going to be here for a while.' "

Even those who didn't have training.

"We had some friends within the Nepalese mountain biking communities who just sort of stopped what they were doing," she says. The professional cyclists used their mountain bikes to deliver supplies to hard-to-reach areas. Families shared what food and other household items they had gathered from their homes with others.

"We realized after an hour [of] continuous tremors that it was going to be dark soon and nobody was going to sleep inside," Stein says. People were camping out in open spaces all over Kathmandu. She and her team decided to set up a camp in an open field at the Nepal Academy that would shelter nearly 350 people. The majority, she says, are families who were too afraid to sleep at home.

They needed food but the local supermarket was closed for repairs and guarded by security. Stein says she didn't know what to expect as she approached the guards to let her in. "I went up to them and asked nicely, that there is a camp and we needed supplies," she says. "We were just going to get in and grab some things."

The guards were amazing, she beams. "We had a big pot to make tea, and we had biscuits and noodles."

People are extremely hopeful, Stein says, but not naive. They're frustrated with the government, and they want assistance from the outside. But ultimately, she says, they want to be the ones to rebuild their country.

relief efforts

Nepal

Earthquake

Here's a map of a system of roads that links the suburbs within a city. The map shows the travel time in minutes at 7:00 a.m. on each section of road.

Question: Julio lives in Silver, Maria lives in Lincoln and Don lives in Nobel. They want to meet in a suburb on the map. No one wants to travel for more than 15 minutes. Where could they meet?

Mathematics: Charts

CD SALES OECD hide caption

itoggle caption OECD

In January, the new CDs of the bands 4U2Rock and The Kicking Kangaroos were released. In February, the CDs of the bands No One's Darling and The Metalfolkies followed. The following graph shows the sales of the bands' CDs from January to June.

Question: In which month did the band No One's Darling sell more CDs than the band The Kicking Kangaroos for the first time?

A) No month

B) March

C) April

D) May

Financial Literacy: Shares

GRAPHING SHARES OECD hide caption

itoggle caption OECD

Question: Which statements about the graph are true:

The best month to buy the shares was September: True or false?

The share priced increased by about 50 percent over the year: True of false?

Goats and Soda

Take A New Test Aimed At The World's English-Language Learners

Answers: Park or Silver; April; first statement is true, second is false

For more questions, take a look at the sample test.

Education

Senate leaders were all smiles Wednesday after they broke a 24-hour impasse and announced they had reached a deal on how to move forward on a fast-track trade negotiating bill. That legislation would give the president expedited authority to enter into a trade agreement with Pacific Rim countries, otherwise known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

But how senators will vote on this bill depends largely on how they feel about TPP. And there's one problem.

"I bet that none of my colleagues have read the entire document. I would bet that most of them haven't even spent a couple hours looking at it," said Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has acknowledged he has yet to read every single page of the trade agreement.

Because, as Brown explained, even if a member of Congress were to hunker down and pore over a draft trade agreement hundreds of pages long, filled with technical jargon and confusing cross-references –- what good would it do? Just sitting down and reading the agreement isn't going to make its content sink in.

And the White House isn't letting senators to do much else than sit down and read.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, seen here speaking about the trade bill Tuesday, told NPR "I bet that none of my colleagues have read the entire document. I would bet that most of them haven't even spent a couple hours looking at it." Brown acknowledged he has yet to read every single page of the trade agreement. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Alex Wong/Getty Images

To study the draft TPP language, senators have to go to the basement of the Capitol and enter a secured, sound-proof room. There, they surrender their cell phones and other mobile devices, and sit under the watchful gaze of an official from the U.S. Trade Representative's office while they peruse the pages. Any notes taken inside the room must be left in the room.

Only aides with high-level security clearances can accompany lawmakers. Members of Congress can't ask outside industry experts or lawyers to analyze the language. They can't talk to the public about what they read. And Brown says there's no computer inside the secret room to look something up when there's confusion. You just consult the USTR official.

"There is more access in most cases to CIA and Defense Department and Iran sanctions documents — better access to congressional staff and others — than for this trade agreement," said Brown.

The White House defends the restrictions, pointing out that 12 countries are still negotiating a sensitive trade agreement and publicizing trade terms before they're finalized could make bargaining more awkward.

It's a reasonable point, says Robert Mnookin, who heads the negotiation program at Harvard Law School.

"The representatives of the parties have to be able to explore a variety of options just to see what might be feasible before they ultimately make a deal. That kind of exploration becomes next to impossible if you have to do it in public," said Mnookin. "In private, people can explore and tentatively make concessions, which if they publicly made, would get shot down before you really had a chance to explore what you might be given in return for some compromise."

The White House points out the final TPP language will be made public 60 days before the president signs the agreement. But by then, negotiations will be over and changes to the language can't be made. And the Senate is set to vote very soon on a bill that forces lawmakers to give up their rights to amend the agreement.

There's a long-running truth on Capitol Hill that lawmakers rarely read the bills they vote on. But Brown says this is different. The White House is making it considerably harder for lawmakers to discuss or analyze a trade agreement that is key to how they will vote on the fast-track bill.

"That's why people are so troubled about this agreement. It really begs the question — the secrecy begs the question — what's in this agreement that we don't really understand or know about?" Brown said.

The secret hallway

I asked Brown to show me where inside the Capitol the secret TPP room was and he led me down a spiral staircase to metal double doors in the basement, each emblazoned with a sign that read "No public or media beyond this point."

Then he dashed off to a meeting, and I stood there, fighting the temptation to yank one of the doors open.

Within seconds, the doors abruptly parted on their own. A baffled-looking man with gray hair and spectacles poked his head out. A camera was slung around his neck. I saw Capitol Hill press credentials on his chest.

A member of the media had made it into the Secret Hallway!

"How did you get in there?" I asked. "It says no public or media beyond this point!"

Turns out he had wandered into the hallway by way of a back hallway that is totally accessible to the public.

What? After all this secrecy fuss, it's that easy? I wondered how close I could get to this so-called secret TPP language.

We rounded the corner, and he led me through a carpeted hallway, past Senate meeting rooms and staffers, all the way to a non-descript door marked "Exit." I pushed open the door and found myself in a long, long hallway that looked nothing like the rest of the Capitol. No marble floors. No paintings. No plush carpets. Just fluorescent light, bright white walls and a low ceiling.

The Secret Hallway.

Here's a photo.

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The Secret Hallway Ailsa Chang/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Ailsa Chang/NPR

The Secret Hallway

Ailsa Chang/NPR

But sorry, that's as far as I got — before a Capitol Hill police officer who heard my heels clicking on the floor kindly asked me to leave.

Foreign policy is becoming a big issue in the 2016 election. For the first time in years, some polls show as many voters concerned about foreign affairs as domestic issues.

And for Republican voters it's the No. 1 issue.

GOP candidates have been talking a lot about foreign policy and national security on the campaign trail, bashing the president and his former secretary of state for what they say is a disastrous and incoherent approach to the rest of the world. To a person, they promise that if they are elected they'd be tougher, kill more bad guys, and give more support to the U.S.'s allies. But this new focus on foreign policy raises some questions for the leading Republican candidates. Here are a few:

1. For Jeb Bush: What exactly does "Being Your Own Man" mean?

This was a rough week for Bush. First, he said if he knew then what we know now about Iraq he would have done the same thing that his brother did and go to war. But then he said he misheard the question and, given another chance to answer it, he tried to clarify matters by saying, well, he didn't know what he would do. And besides, Bush said, that was a "hypothetical."

On Wednesday, a man in Reno, Nev., where Bush was campaigning, helpfully pointed out to him that running for president IS hypothetical, as in, "If I was President I'd...."

Bush's difficulty separating himself from the least popular aspects of his brother's legacy prompted a chorus of responses from his Republican rivals. Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Ben Carson and Rand Paul have all said if they knew then what we all know now about the non-existent "weapons of mass destruction," they would NOT have gone to war. And Bush's wobbly answer to a question he had to know would come up caused much head scratching among his supporters. Was it family loyalty? Or stubbornness? Or, since its been the 13 years since he last ran for office, was Bush just plain rusty?

2. For Marco Rubio: When will he go beyond the boilerplate?

The Florida senator claims to have the deepest foreign-policy experience of anyone in the GOP. In the four years he's been in the Senate, he's served on the Foreign Relations and the Intelligence committees. But his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York Wednesday, laying out what he called "a doctrine for the exercise of American influence in the world," Rubio didn't go much beyond mainstream GOP hawkish rhetoric. He is comfortable answering questions on the subjects, but, so far, he's been largely non committal on some of the specifics.

It's hard to imagine any of the Republicans, or even Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, arguing with Rubio's "three pillars" — adequately fund the U.S. military, use American power to protect U.S. economic interests, and reinforce our alliances while advancing the rights of religious minorities and women. Rubio didn't explain, however, what he'd do if it was America's allies who were persecuting women, or what kind of power he'd use to protect U.S. economic interests in "airspace , cyberspace, or outer space." So far, despite his own proclamations of foreign-policy depth, it hasn't yet helped him achieve the stature he seeks — even within the GOP foreign-policy establishment.

3. For Scott Walker: When will you graduate from foreign policy 101?

Like the other governors in the race, Walker has a disadvantage, because he hasn't been directly involved in foreign policy, other than promoting Wisconsin cheese overseas. Walker has other formidable strengths as a candidate, but even he admits foreign policy isn't at the top of that list.

Walker got pummeled for saying that fighting union protesters in Wisconsin was good preparation for fighting the Islamic State militant group. And he's now made two trips abroad — one to London, where he got tangled up in comments about evolution and punted on questions of foreign policy, and, on a recent trip to Israel, he avoided the press altogether.

After some missteps, he's been getting tutored by Republican foreign-policy experts. But in a nomination battle where foreign policy will play a larger-than-usual role Walker needs to keep hitting the briefing books and show he's mastered them.

4. For the eventual nominee: What if Rand Paul is right?

Paul is the exception to the new Republican hawkishness. He says it's time for a president who shows some reluctance to intervene overseas. And he's posing this question to his rivals for the nomination: "Is it a good idea to go into the middle east, topple a government and hope that something better rises out of the chaos, because recent history seems to show that you know what, we're not getting something better, we're getting something worse?"

The other candidates think Republican primary voters are ready for a muscular, more interventionist foreign policy, and recent polls suggest they're right. But that may not be true in a general election, where voters may be more open to Paul's "reluctant interventionist" approach. It might be hard for the eventual GOP nominee to transition to a light touch after months of saber rattling.

2016 Presidential Race

Scott Walker

Jeb Bush

Marco Rubio

Republicans