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Iran and Pakistan are moving closer to completion of a nearly 1,000-mile natural gas pipeline linking the two countries, despite U.S. objections that it could become a source of hard currency for Tehran in defiance of international sanctions.

Monday marks the beginning of construction on Pakistan's part of the pipeline, which will consist of a 485-mile run. Iran has already completed most of its 760-miles of the link, which will stretch from Assaluyeh along Iran's Persian Gulf coast to Nawabshah in Pakistan's Sindh Provence.

The pipeline is meant to help alleviate shortfalls in energy demand in Pakistan, where brownouts and blackouts occur daily.

In a live television broadcast Monday, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood side-by-side with his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari just inside the Iranian border.

Iran reportedly gave Pakistan a $500 million loan for the project, which is expected to cost Islamabad $1.5 billion.

"Today is a historic day. The gas pipeline project is the beginning of a great work," Ahmadinejad told assembled dignitaries from both countries.

"The Westerners have no right to make any obstacles in the way of the project," he added.

The U.S. has strenuously objected to the project, which Iran and Pakistan agreed to in 1995. According to the Pakistani media, U.S. Consul General Michael Dodman said in January that the U.S. would impose sanctions on Islamabad if the pipeline went ahead.

"If this deal is finalized for a proposed Iran-Pakistan pipeline, it would raise serious concerns under our Iran Sanctions Act. We've made that absolutely clear to our Pakistani counterparts," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said during a Washington news conference last week.

Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reports Pakistani presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar "brushed aside" U.S. concerns and pressures.

Babar was quoted as saying the project was only about energy requirements.

"The project will bring economic prosperity, provide better opportunities to the people and help defeat militancy," he told Dawn.

The pipeline was scheduled to begin operations in 2014, but delays have caused construction to fall behind.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are battling a bid by Amazon to claim new Internet domains such as ".book," ".author" and ".read." In complaints filed late last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the two groups call Amazon's concept "plainly anticompetitive" and "not in the public interest." Barnes & Noble also isn't happy about it.

Mindy Kaling is writing a follow-up to her 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Kaling, your cool big sister and the star of The Mindy Project, announced her plans last week to a crowd at a TV festival.

"Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own," writes Francine Prose in an essay about literary dreams for The New York Review of Books.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic languages, writes about the idea of the "female trickster" for The New Yorker: "Lady Gaga draws us out of our comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices. Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial characters. She may have the creativity of a trickster, but she is also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy's Blue Book is the weird and lovely story of a chance meeting of former con artist partners aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. And don't miss Kennedy's essay for NPR on Derek Raymond's crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open. She writes: "Derek Raymond, who died in 1994, has been described as the father of British noir. But he's far beyond noir. There probably isn't even a word for his kind of darkness."

The protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, has a rich imaginary inner life as the founder of the mysterious Inhumanity Museum.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which came out Monday, has generated an extraordinary amount of debate. NPR's Renee Montagne calls the book "something of a feminist call to arms." But others say Sandberg's view is too narrow — Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The Washington Post that "this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg's bottom line."

They were good old boys, never meaning no harm, making their way the only way they knew how — Bo and Luke Duke, the central characters on The Dukes of Hazzard, one of the biggest TV hits of the 1980s.

The show aired from 1979 to 1985, but it has lived on in syndication and become something of a cult phenomenon. And this weekend in central Georgia, thousands of fans are expected to turn out for a reunion with the show's surviving stars — and of course the General Lee, that iconic rebel-flagged Dodge Charger.

Actor James Best played the endearingly daft, irresistibly tongue-tied Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, who was always busy trying to catch the Duke boys in the act of making trouble. Best joined NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about what makes the show a lasting pleasure.

Everywhere you walk in downtown Austin, Texas, new names compete for the attention of the tens of thousands wandering the SXSW Interactive festival. Which of this year's emerging ideas and brands — MakerBot, Leap Motion, Geomagic — will break into mainstream consciousness? Here's a quick rundown of the conversation topics in coffee lines, and some notes on appearances and panels that caught our attention:

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