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Brazil is known for its music and distinctive dances, not necessarily for its paintings or photography. But that is changing. Not only are Brazilian artists now getting big play in major museums around the world, but something new is happening inside Brazil: There's a burgeoning appetite for art.

"It's booming, Brazilian art is booming," says Brazilian photographer Claudio Edinger, whose work was being exhibited at a recent photography art fair in Sao Paulo. A Rio de Janeiro native, Edinger lived for decades in the United States, but moved back to Brazil because his work sold more in his native country.

Edinger's pictures capture a country in flux: the bright lights of Rio at night; the soft folds of hammocks on a barge in the Amazon. He says the country is undergoing a transformation.

"Our references are all new, we are creating our references right now, so there are a world of things to do here that you don't find anywhere else," he says.

And, he adds with a wink: "Money makes art grow."

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There's big money in fantasy sports. Last year, alone, people paid $1.7 billion to play in fantasy leagues. With all that money sloshing around, a fantasy economy has sprung up, giving rise to real businesses. Here are four of them.

The Insurance Company

Henry Olszewski founded of Fantasy Sports Insurance in 2008 — the year the financial system nearly collapsed. And, more importantly, the year New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady suffered a serious hit to the knee.

Brady was out for the season. And fantasy-football managers who had drafted Brady were screwed.

"And it kind of just hit me," Olszewski says. "Could this be an opportunity to put together a program to cover fantasy team owners against these type of injuries?"

It could.

Olszewski's business sells insurance — real insurance — to fantasy team owners. Here's how it works. Say you're a fantasy manager and you're paying $100 to participate in a fantasy league. You can buy insurance from Olszewski for $10. Then, if your star player goes down for the season, Olszewski will pay you $100.

This season, he says, the big player fantasy owners are insuring against is Minnesota Vikings Running Back Adrian Peterson.

The Judge

Say it's late in the season. A manager of a team that's not in contention trades a great player in exchange for a weak player. "Everyone raises up their arms and says, 'Wait a minute, that's crazy," says Bill Green, founder and CEO of fantasydispute.com. In extreme cases, fantasy managers accuse each other of cutting side deals that are against the rules.

When this happens, Green will serve as a judge-for-hire: For $14.95 he'll step in and issue a ruling to resolve the dispute.

The Vault

LeagueSafe holds entry fees and manages payouts for fantasy leagues. And while the businesses we described above — the insurance company and the judge — are small, part-time operations, LeagueSafe is a full-blown business.

"We're up to 8 employees, and we've got several hundred thousand people using the product," Paul Charchian, the company's founder, told me.

LeagueSafe doesn't charge a fee — they profit off the float, by investing the money they hold during the season.

Bonus: Carchian is also the the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Because even fantasy sports companies have their own lobbying group -

The High-Speed League

FanDuel lets fantasy players have more fantasy.

In a typical fantasy league, managers draft teams and wait all season to figure out who won. Fanduel lets players compete against each other every week in football, and every day in other sports.

In 2009, the year the company launched, it paid out $100,000 to people using its service. Last year, they paid out $49 million. This year, they estimate they'll pay $135 million.

Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani has launched a charm offensive ahead of his visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.

There have been political prisoners released, tweets, letters exchanged with President Obama, a television interview and even an op-ed in The Washington Post.

The activity has raised the possibility of improved relations between the two countries, whose ties have been marked by mutual antipathy and mistrust since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

But as NPR's Greg Myre noted upon Rouhani's election in June, we've heard this story before – several times. Greg wrote:

"Ever since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has been in search of moderate Iranian leaders who could steer the country away from its hostile standoff with America.

"To cite one famous example, President Ronald Reagan's administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in the mid-1980s in the belief it could work with the country's 'moderate' elements even as Iran remained under the control of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini."

An appeals court in Texas has overturned the 2010 conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who had been found guilty of illegally funneling corporate money to Texas candidates during the 2002 campaign cycle.

DeLay, a Republican, had been out on bail while appealing his conviction and the three-year prison sentence he was handed afterward.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Thursday, the state's Third District Court of Appeals says "we conclude that the evidence presented does not support a conclusion that DeLay committed the crimes that were charged. ... The fundamental problem with the State's case was its failure to prove proceeds of criminal activity."

The court found that a political action committee DeLay created, which was at the center of the case, could accept donations from corporations and that the PAC "could lawfully transfer the corporate funds out of state." Therefore, the judges write, "the State failed to prove the 'applicable culpable mental states' for the donating corporations to support a finding of criminal intent by the corporations."

What's more, the appeals court says:

"There was no evidence that [the PAC] or RNSEC [the Republican National State Elections Committee] treated the corporate funds as anything but what they were, corporate funds with limited uses under campaign finance law. Rather, when viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the evidence showed an agreement to two legal monetary transfers: that [DeLay's PAC] transfer corporate money to RNSEC for use in other states and not in Texas in exchange for RNSEC transferring funds to Texas candidates out of a hard money account."