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Immigrant and farm worker rights groups came from Los Angeles to Bakersfield, Calif. by the bus load this week. Bakersfield, in the state's Central Valley, is farm country, and immigration is a complex issue here.

The groups were converging on the home of the third-most powerful Republican in the House, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.

Activists across the country are targeting a number of Republican members of Congress this summer, trying to pressure the House to take up the immigration reform bill passed in the Senate.

In Bakersfield, the protesters caravaned through the normally sleepy downtown, then held a rally and a march in the 100-degree heat to McCarthy's field office.

Maria Barajas, a 19-year-old recent graduate of Bakersfield High, welcomed the reinforcements.

"We've been coming here for the past, I'd say six months," she says.

Unlike the other protesters, Barajas wasn't holding a sign or beating a drum. She was just standing in a blue cap and gown.

"I want citizenship in order to go to a university."

Barajas moved to Bakersfield from Mexico with her parents when she was a little girl. The big farms here that produce much of the nation's fresh produce have long relied on immigrant labor — much of it illegal. Today Latinos make up half of Bakersfield's population.

Mayor Harvey Hall stood side by side with farm worker rights activists on stage at a rally earlier that day. "Our country needs a vibrant, strong and stable agricultural work force that is treated with dignity and respect," he told the crowd.

Hall is a Republican. In fact you'll find a lot of conservatives here who not only favor immigration reform, but also take a sympathetic tone when talking about people who are here illegally. Take Dean Haddock, who chairs the Kern County GOP.

"I don't want to really call it amnesty," Haddock says. "But if we come to a situation where we say, 'Look, we're glad you're here, we know you're here and we know you have needs and we know you've also produced and provided for our economy ... '"

Haddock wants to see a comprehensive immigration bill pass Congress. But he also says that the flow of illegal immigrants has to stop. The county has high unemployment, and a struggling economy. He says Bakersfield can't afford it anymore.

"The one thing that most Republicans, at least here in this area, see as the fix is securing the border," Haddock says. "Then we can go ahead and do all the other things of taking care of the people that we care about."

Make no mistake, Bakersfield and Kern County are still some of the reddest places in America. And unlike some congressional districts deeper into California's Central Valley, the area has a diverse economy, including Edwards Air Force Base and a big oil industry.

Bakersfield also has an influential Tea Party movement. Right now, McCarthy is getting just as much pressure from anti-immigration groups.

An ad running on local TV, paid for by a group called Californians for Population Stabilization, is one example. "Bakersfield Congressman Kevin McCarthy wants to bring in more immigrant workers to take jobs," the ad states. "He's even talking about legalizing 11 million illegal aliens making it easier for them to take jobs too."

While he's opposed to taking up the Senate's version of immigration reform, McCarthy does favor a step-by-step approach. That makes sense to Gene Tackett, a former Kern County supervisor turned political consultant. He says as House Majority Whip, McCarthy must fall in line with the Speaker.

"He may privately be working on that," Tackett says. "But he's not in a position to be able to push that because he's a soldier in this battle. He's not the general."

And anyway Tackett, a Democrat, says McCarthy's seat is safe, whether immigration reform passes or not.

McCarthy was in the Middle East and un-reachable this week while the pro-immigrant groups were marching to his office. Barajas says he has yet to speak to protesters. She has "deferred-action" status, which allows children who were brought here illegally to live and work in the United States for two years without the threat of deportation. Barajas says that's not good enough.

"I want to be a surgeon one day and what's the point of having this certificate, this degree that says I'm graduated, but I don't even have the citizenship to be out there and do what I want to do?"

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Retiring in 2013 after 32 years as a member of the House of Representatives, Barney Frank took on his greatest challenge yet: joining Ask Me Another at the Wilbur Theatre in downtown Boston for an evening of trivia.

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China says it plans to phase out the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners, ending a controversial practice that reportedly supplies most of the country's transplant patients.

Huang Jiefu, a surgeon and former deputy health minister who is in charge of organ transplants, said that from November, China would scale back and eliminate the harvesting of inmate organs. Huang says it will be replaced by a nationwide voluntary donor system.

For years, Beijing denied that it routinely took organs from executed prisoners before finally acknowledging it a few years ago. The practice is widely regarded as unethical and has been a black eye for the Chinese medical establishment.

Although the number of executed prisoners is a state secret in China, human rights groups estimate that the country executes thousands of people each year.

The New York Times reports:

"By the end of 2012, about 64 percent of transplanted organs in China came from executed prisoners; the ratio has dipped to under 54 percent so far this year, according to figures provided by Mr. Huang."

Popular soft drinks, sports cars and other brands appear surreptitiously placed in the worlds of our favorite TV shows and films all the time. Soon enough, we may see them name-dropped in our books, too.

To help imagine some egregious-yet-hilarious examples of this, we invited a prolific writer to Ask Me Another: award-winning young adult author Lois Lowry. Lowry joins forces with a fellow book-loving contestant to play "Product Placement," a game in which they must combine the titles of famous literary works with the names of household products and companies.

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