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Ten years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, NPR is taking a look back, revisiting people and places first encountered during the war. In 2006, NPR aired a story about a 9-year-old girl who loved her father so much, she wrote him letters to take to work with him. Even after he died, in a carjacking that appeared to have a sectarian motive, she still wrote to him.

We expected to find the angry, grief-stricken girl who had pounded her fists and thrown herself into the mud when she first heard her father was killed, back in 2006.

Instead we found a poised, tall, gazelle of a young lady. Now 16, Guffran says she spends most of her time studying.

Her father had hoped she would become a doctor. But the teenage Guffran has a different plan.

"I like science, I like physics, but I don't like chemistry," she says. "And medical [school], it's all about chemistry, and I don't like it."

Guffran says she wants to be another kind of doctor, a Ph.D. in English, which she insists on speaking with us. Her dream is to teach English language and literature at a university — and maybe to be a writer.

"I like to write, I love to write. And when I feel bad or feel sadness, I catch my paper and my pen and write what I feel," she says.

Moving To A New City

About a year after her father's death, Guffran and her mother and brother moved to the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. They now live with an uncle and his family. They have exactly one room for studying, eating, receiving guests and sleeping.

The uncle controls everything they do.

"When we want to rent a house, my uncle doesn't allow us," Guffran says.

“ When my mother and aunt start crying, I move to another room and start writing letters, and cry deep inside as I write. ... I feel my heart will break when I remember him.

Last year, Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was greeted by adoring crowds during triumphant tours of Asia, the U.S. and Europe. She eclipsed President Thein Sein, who remained in Burma, as the country is also known, and managed a series of domestic crises.

This week, Suu Kyi for the first time found herself the object of popular protests at home, while Thein Sein basked in the welcome of dignitaries on a state visit to New Zealand.

The stunning role reversal suggests that Suu Kyi's transition from prisoner of conscience to presidential hopeful in 2015 has reached a new and difficult phase.

"If this trend continues, we're looking at the end of Aung San Suu Kyi as we know her: a political leader with massive political appeal," warns Maung Zarni, a Malaysia-based Burmese academic, who has become disillusioned by her cooperation with the current regime. "The popular perception can turn against even someone like her very quickly."

Suu Kyi went to northwest Burma this week to explain a report by a parliamentary committee that she now chairs.

The report recommends that the Letpadaung copper mine, which has support from Chinese investors, should continue operating, despite damaging the environment and producing few jobs for the local economy. The investors are a Burmese military-run conglomerate, and a subsidiary of one of China's largest weapons manufacturers.

The report found that police were responsible for an attack that injured more than 100 Buddhist monks and other protesters. Yet the parliamentary committee did not recommend any punishment for the police.

A Call To End Protests

Suu Kyi told the residents to end their protests, and said Burma could not risk alienating foreign investors, especially China.

Pictures show Suu Kyi looking dejectedly out of her car window at protesters weeping and shouting out their disapproval of her and her committee's report.

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Asia

With Honors Awaiting, Aung San Suu Kyi Visits U.S.

And the Bushes just keep on coming.

In recent memory, there was George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States. Then there was George W. Bush, 43rd president. And now there's John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, who may want to become the 45th president.

Jeb is sending mixed signals: Tonight he is a keynote speaker at a Conservative Political Action Conference dinner, but he has asked that his name be removed from CPAC's 2016 presidential straw poll.

Does Jeb have what it takes to be the next president of the United States?

Similarities with his presidential father and presidential brother are noteworthy. All three of these Bushes grew up with the base, the backing and the burden of a prominent family. Success in life was more or less presumed for these men, and intense competitiveness was a given.

Despite their various differences, all three Bushes have: supported lower taxes on business, personal income and investment income; sought lighter regulatory burdens on business; been aggressive on national security issues and supported the Pentagon and its priorities.

So is there some sort of How to Be President checklist somewhere in the Bush house — pasted on the refrigerator or tacked on the mudroom door? Probably not. But if there were, it might look like this:

Canadian officials are investigating an incident in which a driverless van traveled across the runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, at the same time an Air Canada flight was landing late Monday night. After the plane's pilots reportedly ignored commands to pull up, the jet "narrowly missed" the van, investigators say.

From the CBC:

"An initial Transport Canada incident report posted online Tuesday said that Air Canada Flight 178, an Embraer 190 jet, was finishing its flight at 11:39 p.m. ET when ground radar detected an object on the runway.... The object on the runway turned out to be an unoccupied Sunwing Airlines cargo van with keys in the ignition, in gear, with its lights and orange airport beacon on. The Air Canada crew said they never saw the van."

About Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships with others, with ourselves, with it. Described as the "Margaret Mead of digital culture," Turkle is currently focusing on the world of social media and sociable robots. In her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis are confronting us with a moment of temptation.

Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection. But Turkle suggests that digital technology is still in its infancy and there is ample time for us to reshape how we build it and use it. She is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Pope Francis, in his first audience with the cardinals since becoming head of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, praised his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and urged the evangelization of the church's message.

Francis said of Benedict, who served as pontiff for eight years before his historic resignation last month, that he "lit a flame in the depths of our hearts that will continue to burn because it is fueled by his prayers."

On his first full day as pope Thursday, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires called on the cardinals "to find new ways to bring evangelization to the ends of the Earth" and cautioned against giving into pessimism — "that bitterness that the devil offers us every day."

The 76-year-old pontiff, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, encouraged the prelates — many in their 60s and 70s — to pass their wisdom to younger members of the church. "Like good wine, [it] gets better with the years. Let's give the young the wisdom of life."

Meanwhile, the Rev. Francisco Jalics, a Jesuit priest who was abducted along with fellow priest Orlando Yorio by Argentina's military during the country's so-called "dirty war," says he and Yorio reconciled with Bergoglio, who was accused at the time of having not done enough to prevent the kidnapping.

According to The Associated Press:

Bergoglio has said he told the priests to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio, who is now dead, later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work.

'It was only years later that we had the opportunity to talk with Father Bergoglio ... to discuss the events,' Jalics said Friday in his first known comments about the kidnapping, which occurred when the new pope was the leader of Argentina's Jesuits.

The next Republican presidential primary is so far off that some of those attending the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday could be spotted wearing stickers for two potential candidates: Rand Paul and Marco Rubio.

It's just too early to choose.

Mike Demkiw, a Syracuse University political science major and College Republican, sported stickers for both men on his lapels. He was spotted stuck in a human traffic jam of GOP activists outside a convention center ballroom after Rubio, the senator from Florida, and Paul, the senator from Kentucky, had given speeches.

"I was leaning toward Rubio coming in. I do like Rand Paul, though. I do think that moving forward with the GOP, both of them are going to be titans," Demkiw said. "And I think they'll definitely run in 2016."

"They're young. Unlike people like [Arizona Sen.] John McCain and [South Carolina Sen.] Lindsey Graham, they really embrace the conservative movement," he said. "They embrace the Constitution, which I think is an important thing, which many of our leaders these days have strayed away from."

Coming off the 2012 election, which was disappointing, to say the least, to many of these activists, Demkiw is like many at CPAC, trying to figure out who can best return the party to White House power while upholding conservative principles.

The three-day conference being held this year just outside the nation's capital isn't necessarily the best predictor of which Republican politician will ultimately appeal to a large enough part of the electorate to become president. But CPAC does provide a sense of who most excites the conservative activists essential to winning caucuses and primaries in places like Iowa and South Carolina.

Based on the first day, Rubio and Paul were both capable of generating thrills from activists, through a potent combination of charisma and red meat.

As smooth a speaker as exists in American politics today, Rubio made an effort to contrast himself with 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney of the infamous "47 percent." Rubio talked about, in sympathetic tones, average Americans who he said often find themselves trapped between two ideological extremes.

"They look at the political process, whether it's fair or not. And what many of them see is one side fighting for the people who have made it, and all the other side does is fight for government policies to protect the people who are struggling. And they don't want to take anything away from anybody, the vast majority of Americans in the hard-working middle class. They don't want to take away from people who have made it; they don't want to hurt the people who are trying. But they wonder who's fighting for them."

That wasn't the red meat, which came later. Talking of a "struggling" Florida couple living in a small apartment, the husband working unloading trucks and the wife as a dental office receptionist, Rubio said: "They're not freeloaders. They're not liberals."

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Canadian officials are investigating an incident in which a driverless van traveled across the runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, at the same time an Air Canada flight was landing late Monday night. After the plane's pilots reportedly ignored commands to pull up, the jet "narrowly missed" the van, investigators say.

From the CBC:

"An initial Transport Canada incident report posted online Tuesday said that Air Canada Flight 178, an Embraer 190 jet, was finishing its flight at 11:39 p.m. ET when ground radar detected an object on the runway.... The object on the runway turned out to be an unoccupied Sunwing Airlines cargo van with keys in the ignition, in gear, with its lights and orange airport beacon on. The Air Canada crew said they never saw the van."

There's a diplomatic spat brewing between India and Italy over the trial of two Italian marines charged with killing two Indian fishermen last year.

India's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the Italian ambassador not to leave the country after Rome refused to let the marines return to India to stand trial for the killings. The court had earlier allowed the marines to return to Italy to vote in last month's national elections after Ambassador Daniele Mancini assured Indian authorities that they would return by March 22 to stand trial. Earlier this week, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that won't happen. The Indian court has given Mancini until March 18 to respond.

Here's the background to the story, from The Associated Press:

"The marines, Massimilian Latorre and Salvatore Girone, were part of a military security team aboard a cargo ship when they opened fire on a fishing boat in February last year, killing the two fishermen. The marines said they mistook the boat for a pirate craft.

"Italy maintains that the shooting occurred in international waters and that Rome should have jurisdiction. India says the ship was in Indian territorial waters."

And the Bushes just keep on coming.

In recent memory, there was George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States. Then there was George W. Bush, 43rd president. And now there's John Ellis "Jeb" Bush who may want to become the 45th president.

Jeb is sending mixed signals: Tonight he is a keynote speaker at a Conservative Political Action Conference dinner, but he has asked that his name be removed from CPAC's 2016 presidential straw poll.

Does Jeb have what it takes to be the next President of the United States?

Similarities with his presidential father and presidential brother are noteworthy. All three of these Bushes grew up with the base, the backing and the burden of a prominent family. Success in life was more or less presumed for these men, and intense competitiveness was a given.

Despite their various differences, all three Bushes have: supported lower taxes on business, personal income and investment income; sought lighter regulatory burdens on business; been aggressive on national security issues and supported the Pentagon and its priorities.

So is there some sort of How To Be President checklist somewhere in the Bush house– pasted on the refrigerator or tacked on the mudroom door? Probably not. But if there were, it might look like this:

Pope Francis, in his first audience with the cardinals since becoming head of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, praised his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and urged the evangelization of the Church's message.

Francis said of Benedict, who served as pontiff for eight years before his historic resignation last month, that he "lit a flame in the depths of our hearts that will continue to burn because it is fueled by his prayers".

On his first full day as pope on Thursday, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires called on the cardinals "to find new ways to bring evangelization to the ends of the Earth" and cautioned against giving into pessimism — "that bitterness that the devil offers us every day."

The 76-year-old pontiff, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, encouraged the prelates — many in their 60s and 70s — to pass their wisdom to younger members of the church. "Like good wine [it] gets better with the years. Let's give the young the wisdom of life."

Meanwhile, the Rev. Francisco Jalics, a Jesuit priest who was abducted along with fellow priest Orlando Yorio by Argentina's military during the country's so-called "dirty war," says that he and Yorio reconciled with Bergoglio, who was accused at the time for not having done enough for to prevent the kidnapping.

According to The Associated Press:

Bergoglio has said he told the priests to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio, who is now dead, later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work.

'It was only years later that we had the opportunity to talk with Father Bergoglio ... to discuss the events,' Jalics said Friday in his first known comments about the kidnapping, which occurred when the new pope was the leader of Argentina's Jesuits.

For the past month, management at Carnival Cruise Line has been in a nearly constant state of damage control.

In the past week alone, three of the cruise line's giant floating playgrounds have experienced embarrassing malfunctions that have at least inconvenienced, if not angered many passengers.

Here's the latest status report: On Saturday, Carnival Elation had to be escorted by tug because of a problem in its steering system. Since Wednesday, Carnival Dream has experienced power interruptions at the island of St. Maarten, stranding more than 4,000 passengers. And now, Carnival Legend is limping home to Tampa at reduced speed because of an issue with one of its propulsion units.

All this, of course, follows by barely a month the so-called 'cruise from Hell' aboard the Carnival Triumph after an engine room fire left the vessel adrift in the Gulf of Mexico with 4,200 passengers aboard.

Christopher Muller, of Boston University's School of Hospitality, tells CNN that the latest wave of issues at Carnival appear to be a management problem.

"They are doing something wrong with preventative maintenance," he says. "Carnival has so many working ships that to say the fleet is in distress is maybe a little bit broad, but clearly something is not right."

Carnival has blamed the problems aboard the Carnival Dream, docked in St. Maarteen, on a malfunction that occurred in the ship's emergency diesel generator during a routine safety test.

"At no time did the ship lose power and the ship's propulsion systems and primary power sources were not impacted," Carnival said on its website. "However, for a period of time last night, there were interruptions to the elevators and restroom services. Toilets and elevators are currently working, and have been since about 12:30am."

On Friday, the cruise company announced that 12 commercial planes would take the Carnival Dream 4,363 passengers back to Orlando – the closest major airport.

The Carnival Legend's problems, though at sea not in port, appear to be more in the way of an inconvenience. One of the ship's two Azipods, a directional propulsion unit, was experiencing an unspecified "technical issue" which has forced the ship to reduce its speed.

Even before the latest problems, questions have been raised about the cruise industry in general and specifically Carnival, the largest line in the industry.

The 266th pope, and the first ever from Latin America, has one lung, rides the subway, reads Dostoevsky and has been described as both a moral compass and a silent accomplice to Argentina's former Dirty War leaders.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 76, the archbishop of Buenos Aires who took the name Francis, appeals to both the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church for his orthodox views on social issues and to more progressive forces for his longstanding advocacy for the poor.

As an Argentine, Bergoglio could help the church win back the faithful in Latin America. The region is home to more than 40 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, but many people have gravitated toward evangelical Christianity and other faiths.

"Bergoglio is a simple man and humble man," said Bishop Eugenio Lira, secretary-general of the Mexican Episcopal Conference. "He is the first pope from Latin America, which fills us with happiness, emotion and hope."

A Latin American Celebration

Many Argentines celebrated. In a speech Wednesday, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, never a big fan of Bergoglio, urged the new pope to try to unite people of different religions. "We wish him all the luck in the world," she said.

There was joy all across the continent.

In Colombia, the Bogota daily El Tiempo printed an extra edition. In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa declared on his Twitter account: "We are living in unprecedented times. Viva Francisco!"

Then there was Venezuela, where interim President Nicolas Maduro suggested — with a straight face — that Hugo Chavez, his predecessor who died last week, may have influenced the decision from the great beyond.

Bergoglio was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires to Italian immigrants. His father was a railroad worker, and his mother was a homemaker. He lost a lung to an infection when he was in his early 20s, and to this day he speaks in a soft voice.

He initially studied chemical engineering but later entered the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1969. In the seminary, he taught literature, psychology and philosophy and soon took over as head of the Jesuit order in Argentina.

By the 1980s, many Jesuits were gravitating toward liberation theology, which holds that religious faith is expressed through helping the poor and by working for political and social change. But Bergoglio believed Jesuits should stick to their traditional roles as parish leaders and chaplains and steer clear of community activism.

Argentina's 'Dirty War'

At the time, Argentina was in the grip of a military dictatorship that carried out a "Dirty War" in which 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines — including a handful of priests — were killed or disappeared. The Catholic Church was widely condemned for supporting the regime, which ruled from 1976 to 1983.

"Even the execution of other men of the cloth did nothing to shake the support [for the dictatorship] of senior clerics, including representatives of the Holy See," Hugh O'Shaughnessy wrote in The Guardian in a column about the Argentine church and the Dirty War.

In fact, an Argentine lawyer in 2005 filed a complaint charging Bergoglio with involvement in the 1976 kidnapping of two liberal Jesuit priests, an episode recounted in the book El Silencio, or "The Silence," by Argentine investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky.

Bergoglio has long denied any involvement in that case.

After he was appointed archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, he did take the symbolic step of insisting that Catholic officials in Argentina wear garments symbolizing penance for sins committed by clergy during the dictatorship.

During Argentina's financial crisis in 2001 and 2002, Bergoglio delivered homilies that denounced the country's corrupt politicians who played a major role in fomenting the economic meltdown. He also mediated talks among politicians, union leaders and citizens groups, helping to keep a lid on violent street protests.

More recently, he has become a fierce advocate for the downtrodden in Latin America — a region with one of the largest gaps between rich and poor — and for the victims of HIV/AIDS.

Argentines are often stereotyped as arrogant, but Bergoglio eschews the perks of his lofty position. He often takes the bus or the subway to work.

"He never dresses like a cardinal," Gregory James Venables, a close friend of Bergoglio's and head of the Anglican Church in southern South America, said in a 2005 interview with this reporter. "It's not to be scruffy. But that's his character. He is very, very, very humble."

Still, Bergoglio's socially conservative side could prevent the Catholic Church from moving away from unpopular positions that have driven many away from the faith. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception and has called adoption by gay people a form of discrimination against children.

Unlike John Paul II, who was famous for his globetrotting, Bergoglio is said to dislike travel. And some Argentines complain that his weak voice makes his sermons hard to hear.

John Otis, who is based in Bogota, Colombia, covers Latin America for GlobalPost.

The new boom in natural gas from shale has changed the energy economy of the United States. But there's another giant reservoir of natural gas that lies under the ocean floor that, theoretically, could dwarf the shale boom.

No one had tapped this gas from the seabed until this week, when Japanese engineers pulled some up through a well from under the Pacific. The gas at issue here is called methane hydrate. Methane is natural gas; hydrate means there's water in it. In this case, the molecules of gas are trapped inside a sort of cage of water molecules.

Few people have actually seen methane hydrates, but Ann Cook, a geophysicist at Ohio State University, is one of the few.

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Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in which the justices unanimously ruled that defendants facing substantial jail time deserved legal representation in state courts, even if they couldn't afford to pay for it.

The ruling came in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter convicted of breaking and entering after he was forced to defend himself. His handwritten appeal made it to the high court, and the decision in his favor became a rallying cry for the idea of equal justice.

But a half-century after Gideon v. Wainwright, many lawyers say the system for providing defense attorneys for the poor is in crisis.

One of those lawyers is Norman Lefstein, who started working for poor criminal defendants in Washington, D.C., a few months after the Gideon ruling on March 18, 1963.

"It is a vital constitutional right," Lefstein says. "It distinguishes us as a country. I happen to believe that the quality of justice in our courts says a lot about the kind of society we are."

A Case's Consequences

Lefstein devoted his career to the idea that people facing jail or prison time need lawyers. But he's troubled by what he sees and hears today, like a call he got from a defense lawyer for poor people in a Northeastern state.

"In my judgment, his caseload was absurd," says Lefstein, who's written widely on indigent defense issues. "I mean, just try to imagine simultaneously representing competently over 300 clients. And he was in an impossible situation."

Those caseloads can have some pretty bad consequences, says University of Georgia law professor Erica Hashimoto.

"There are a lot of stories of what are called meet 'em and plead 'em lawyers — lawyers who show up at the courthouse and represent the defendant for about five minutes, where they tell the client, 'You have to plead guilty,' " Hashimoto says.

Before Hashimoto became a law professor, she was a federal public defender. Those programs — designed for the federal courts and paid for with federal money — generally work much better than the patchwork of state defense systems. But now, with across-the-board federal budget cuts and a $38 million shortfall, even those federal public defenders are taking a beating. Some are facing furloughs of up to a month or more.

“ We know that felony defendants in urban areas for the most part are represented by counsel. We don't know the same about felony defendants in rural areas, and we have virtually no information on misdemeanor defendants.

On how they would pass the hours driving to the grocery store and back through the Nevada desert

"My mom especially was a terrific BS-er. She told tons of stories, especially because where we lived was so remote, was so far away. We [had] to drive — when I was really young, before southern Nevada kind of exploded in population — we had to drive for maybe two-and-a-half hours to go to the grocery store. Really we had to drive ... to Las Vegas and back to get groceries or hardware or really anything you needed, so my mom would often, she would talk the entire trip, and what she would tell us were stories about what we were seeing. She was sort of an amateur geologist and natural historian, and she would tell us all about how a certain mountain range was formed or how everything we were seeing was once under the ocean ... and so there were her stories.

"And then there were also — my mom and my dad and then later my stepdad, they were in recovery, they were recovering alcoholics — and so AA was a big part of our lives, and on these trips we would either be talking to each other and telling stories or listening to these tapes, these AA tapes, these speaker tapes where people tell their stories about how they hit rock bottom and how they got sober and sort of what they've learned, and you can imagine those are pretty gritty stories."

On her father, Paul Watkins, and his 1979 memoir My Life with Charles Manson

"For me, having not really known my dad at all — he died when I was so young — that I had never really had access to an entire dimension to him. ... I'd never really had access to his flaws or his mistakes. You know, no one really says to a kid, 'Your dad was a decent man, but he did some shady stuff. He lured young girls to the Manson family, where they were tremendously exploited.' That wasn't a narrative that was available to me from my family members, and rightfully so. I don't resent them that. But the book and the Manson materials gave me this whole other dimension to him, and it made him more real than he'd ever been."

On fitting the prospecting history of the West into her stories

"You can't really write a book about ... the West without the gold rush, because without the gold rush you wouldn't have had the silver rush, and without the silver rush we would probably just still have a Nevada-shaped hole in our country, because Nevada would be of no interest to anyone, likely. Maybe we would start blowing up nuclear weapons in it eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. ... In a way, we haven't really gotten over the gold rush, which was a lie even when it was happening, and that kind of instability of history is something that has always really fascinated me. A lot of the characters are, you know, kind of internalizing this John Wayne masculinity, this mythic, rugged individual, and really suffering for it."

On writing the book in the wake of her mother's death and leaving the West for the first time

“ I don't want to romanticize the experiences of people who are living in rural communities or poor communities — which Pahrump is — or the desert. Our dominant cultural narrative totally devalues all three of those things: rural, poor and desert.

Once known as the most beautiful avenue in the world, some Parisians fear the Champs Elysees is starting to look like any American shopping mall as high rents and global chains steadily change its appearance.

"We just try to keep a sort of diversity on the Champs Elysees, with the cinemas, with restaurants, with cafes and shops," says Deputy Mayor Lynn Cohen Solal. "We don't think the laws of the natural market, the free market, make for a good Champs Elysees."

Cohen Solal says the Champs Elysees is being transformed by those skyrocketing rents. A Qatari firm recently bought the Virgin Megastore building and is doubling the rent. She says foreign investors now see the Champs Elysees as a place for real estate speculation.

Many French regard it as a horrible fate for an avenue that is not only a symbol of Paris, but a reflection of the French nation itself.

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

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.

When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.

Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.

In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.

Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")

You can now enjamb your tweets.

Dunkin' Donuts is changing its recipes — though you may not notice much difference the next time you bite into a cruller. In response to pressure from one of New York's top elected officials, the company recently announced that it will set a goal of using only 100 percent sustainable palm oil in making its donuts.

The change is the result of a campaign by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who oversees the state's public pension fund. He's also a critic of palm oil, which is often used for frying donuts. It's harvested mainly in Asia, and its production has caused serious deforestation in Malaysia and especially in Indonesia, as tropical forests are chopped down to make room for oil palm plantations.

"The destruction of those rainforests in that area is going to have an impact on the climate issue," DiNapoli says.

Cutting down trees displaces wildlife, and it also releases the carbon stored in trunks and soils — a problem made worse in Indonesia and Malaysia, where plantations are often set up on carbon-rich peatland. Over time, the carbon in that exposed peat escapes into the atmosphere. All of that has sent greenhouse gas emissions soaring in Indonesia, the world's leading supplier of palm oil.

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When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to end full-time work-from-home arrangements at her company, a cultural firestorm ignited. But it was just the latest step in Mayer's effort to transform Yahoo's culture.

When the company was founded in the 1990s, it was one of the most exciting places to work in Silicon Valley. Those days are over; Yahoo has fallen woefully behind in the talent wars and now is trying to catch up.

When you walk through Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus during lunchtime, it can feel a little bit like you're taking a college tour on a pleasant day.

There are folks playing beach volleyball in a sand pit outside the cafeteria. There are soccer games across the street — even a pick-up Frisbee game.

And while the free food inside the cafeteria is a lot nicer than the fare at most universities, the tables might take you back. Actually, the tables' length and design look like those in high school cafeterias.

"Why? Because when you put them back-to-back, people walk down between the chairs, they bump into each other — it's actually called a 'Google bump' — and you go, 'Hey!' and you sit down and talk," says John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University and workplace consultant.

He says none of this is by accident; it's called "serendipitous interaction" and it's all by design.

Google has spent a lot of time studying what makes workplaces innovative and casual interactions are important. Sullivan lists three factors to make that set companies apart: learning by interaction, collaborations and fun. "Most people just don't get that," he says.

The volleyball and Frisbee — even the length of the lines inside the cafeteria — are designed to make sure Google employees talk to others they don't necessarily work with.

Sullivan says they even measure the length of the cafeteria line. "Why? Because if there is no line you won't talk to anyone, you won't interact," he says.

All Tech Considered

Does Working From Home Work? It Helps If You Like Your Teammates

Following a circuitous route from Saudi Arabia up through Turkey or Jordan and then crossing a lawless border, hundreds of young Saudis are secretly making their way into Syria to join groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, GlobalPost has learned.

With the tacit approval from the House of Saud and financial support from wealthy Saudi elites, the young men take up arms in what Saudi clerics have called a "jihad," or "holy war," against the Assad regime.

Based on a month of reporting in the region and in Washington, more than a dozen sources have confirmed that wealthy Saudis, as well as the government, are arming some Syrian rebel groups. Saudi and Syrian sources confirm that hundreds of Saudis are joining the rebels, but the government denies any sponsoring role.

Foreign Fighters

The Saudis are part of an inflow of Sunni fighters from Libya, Tunisia and Jordan, according to Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"Most of the foreigners are fighting with al-Nusra or Ahrar al-Sham," both extremist groups, Zelin said.

Sunni extremist fighters are now part of a vicious civil war that has killed an estimated 70,000 people and created more than a million refugees.

The Saudis hope to weaken their regional competitor Iran, a Shiite theocracy that is backing Assad. Saudi officials also hope to divert simmering political unrest at home by encouraging young protesters to instead fight in Syria, according to Saudi government critics.

The government seeks to "diffuse domestic pressure by recruiting young kids to join in another proxy war in the region," said Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani, a human rights activist and economics professor at the Institute of Diplomatic Studies in Riyadh. They are joining ultraconservative groups who "definitely are against democracy and human rights. The ramifications could be quite serious in the whole region."

Road To Syria

In one documented case, a Saudi judge encouraged young anti-government protesters to fight in Syria rather than face punishment at home. Mohammed al-Talq, 22, was arrested and found guilty of participating in a demonstration in the north-central Saudi city of Buraidah.

After giving 19 young men suspended sentences, the judge called the defendants into his private chambers and gave them a long lecture about the need to fight Shiite Muslims in Syria, according to Mohammed's father, Abdurrahman al-Talq.

"You should save all your energy and fight against the real enemy, the Shia, and not fight inside Saudi Arabia," said the father, quoting the judge. "The judge gave them a reason to go to Syria."

Within weeks, 11 of the 19 protesters left to join the rebels. In December 2012, Mohammed al-Talq was killed in Syria. His father filed a formal complaint against the judge late last year, but said he has received no response.

Saudi Arabia shares no border with Syria, so young fighters such as Mohammed must travel through Turkey or Jordan.

Those without criminal records can fly as tourists to Istanbul. Those convicted of crimes or on government watch lists cannot travel without official Ministry of Interior permission. Critics say the government allows such militants to depart with a wink and a nod. Then they sneak across the Jordanian border into southern Syria.

Saudi Money

The young militants are sometimes funded by rich Saudis. They acquire black market AK-47s and cross at night along the now porous Syrian borders, according to a local journalist.

Sami Hamwi, the pseudonym of an exiled Syrian journalist who regularly reports from inside the country, has carefully observed the flow of the Saudi fighters to Syria. He told GlobalPost that groups of three to five Saudis often join Jabhat al-Nusra, a prominent rebel faction the United States says has links to al-Qaida.

Many Syrians "like the fact that Saudis come with a lot of money," Hamwi said. "Civil society activists do not like foreign fighters. They think they will cause more trouble."

The term "civil society activists" refers to the largely secular, progressive Syrians who led the initial stage of the Syrian uprising but who have since been eclipsed by the armed militias.

Saudi officials deny that the government encourages youth to fight in Syria. But they also admit they have no control over people who legally leave the country and later join the rebels.

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Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, gave his first speech as pope Wednesday on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. Here is a transcript of his speech, which was made in Italian, according to Vatican Radio.

Brothers and sisters, good evening.

You all know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother Cardinals have come almost to the ends of the Earth to get him ... but here we are. I thank you for the welcome that has come from the diocesan community of Rome.

First of all, I would say a prayer: Pray for our Bishop Emeritus Benedict XVI ... Let us all pray together for him, that the Lord bless him and Our Lady protect him.

Our Father ...

Hail Mary ...

Glory to the Father ...

And now let us begin this journey, the Bishop and people, this journey of the Church of Rome, which presides in charity over all the Churches, a journey of brotherhood in love, of mutual trust. Let us always pray for one another. Let us pray for the whole world that there might be a great sense of brotherhood. My hope is that this journey of the Church that we begin today, together with help of my Cardinal Vicar, be fruitful for the evangelization of this beautiful city.

And now I would like to give the blessing, but first I want to ask you a favor. Before the bishop blesses the people, I ask that you would pray to the Lord to bless me — the prayer of the people for their Bishop. Let us say this prayer — your prayer for me — in silence. ...

I will now give my blessing to you and to the whole world, to all men and women of good will.

Brothers and sisters, I am leaving you. Thank you for your welcome. Pray for me and I will be with you again soon.

We will see one another soon.

Tomorrow I want to go to pray the Madonna, that she may protect Rome.

Good night and sleep well!

In the ongoing Washington budget battles, one word gets more of a workout than most: balanced.

This single word illustrates the vast distance between the parties. Democrats and Republicans are working from very different definitions of the term in discussing their budget proposals being unveiled this week.

What Democrats are saying: A balanced budget is deficit reduction through a mix of tax increases and spending cuts. As in: we want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit.

What Democrats aren't saying: Although a Democratic budget would strike a balance between tax increases and spending cuts — $975 billion of each over 10 years in the plan — it would not eliminate the deficit. That's not the goal of Democrats. Their goal is to stabilize the deficit so that the debt isn't growing faster than the economy. But as President Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, he's not chasing "a balanced budget just for the sake of balance." Instead, the president said his goal is "how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we're gonna be bringin' in more revenue. If we've controlled spending and we've got a smart entitlement package, then potentially what you have is balance."

What Republicans are saying: A balanced budget is a budget that cuts spending to match revenues, thus eliminating the deficit. As in: our budget balances in 10 years.

What Republicans aren't saying: The House Republican plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., projects a balanced budget in a decade thanks to an improving economy and — notably — tax increases and Medicare savings Republicans decry. For instance, while the GOP House budget proposal calls for the repeal of the president's health care law, it counts on $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade that Obamacare would bring in, as well as the $760 billion in Medicare savings that Ryan campaigned against when he was the vice presidential nominee.

What neither side is saying: They know their "balanced" budgets are dead on arrival. The Democratic version is expected to pass only in the Democratically-controlled Senate; the Republican version is expected to pass only in the GOP-controlled House. But neither of these vision documents will actually guide federal policy or government spending. They are markers, position papers, political documents complete with numbers and graphs. If you're an optimist hoping for a big deficit reduction deal, they're opening offers on the path to a grand bargain. If you're a pessimist or maybe just a realist, they're a sign of the intractable differences between the parties and proof that we'll keep stumbling from one man-made fiscal crisis to the next.

On Message is an occasional feature exploring the language of Washington. Tamara Keith is NPR congressional correspondent.

In the ongoing Washington budget battles, one word gets more of a workout than most: balanced.

This single word illustrates the vast distance between the parties. Democrats and Republicans are working from very different definitions of the term in discussing their budget proposals being unveiled this week.

What Democrats are saying: A balanced budget is deficit reduction through a mix of tax increases and spending cuts. As in: we want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit.

What Democrats aren't saying: Although a Democratic budget would strike a balance between tax increases and spending cuts — $975 billion of each over 10 years in the plan — it would not eliminate the deficit. That's not the goal of Democrats. Their goal is to stabilize the deficit so that the debt isn't growing faster than the economy. But as President Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, he's not chasing "a balanced budget just for the sake of balance." Instead, the president said his goal is "how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we're gonna be bringin' in more revenue. If we've controlled spending and we've got a smart entitlement package, then potentially what you have is balance."

What Republicans are saying: A balanced budget is a budget that cuts spending to match revenues, thus eliminating the deficit. As in: our budget balances in 10 years.

What Republicans aren't saying: The House Republican plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., projects a balanced budget in a decade thanks to an improving economy and — notably — tax increases and Medicare savings Republicans decry. For instance, while the GOP House budget proposal calls for the repeal of the president's health care law, it counts on $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade that Obamacare would bring in, as well as the $760 billion in Medicare savings that Ryan campaigned against when he was the vice presidential nominee.

What neither side is saying: They know their "balanced" budgets are dead on arrival. The Democratic version is expected to pass only in the Democratically-controlled Senate; the Republican version is expected to pass only in the GOP-controlled House. But neither of these vision documents will actually guide federal policy or government spending. They are markers, position papers, political documents complete with numbers and graphs. If you're an optimist hoping for a big deficit reduction deal, they're opening offers on the path to a grand bargain. If you're a pessimist or maybe just a realist, they're a sign of the intractable differences between the parties and proof that we'll keep stumbling from one man-made fiscal crisis to the next.

On Message is an occasional feature exploring the language of Washington. Tamara Keith is NPR congressional correspondent.

Three decades after giving the world The Number of the Beast, Iron Maiden is poised to release its latest work — and it's a beer. That's the latest from the Metal Injection website, whose "Bands and Booze" section makes it uniquely qualified to present such news.

The band collaborated with Robinsons, an English brewery with roots in the 19th century, to create what lead singer Bruce Dickinson calls "our special secret-squirrel recipe for Trooper Ale." Robinsons is also well-known for making ales such as Old Tom and Unicorn.

"As a fan of traditional English cask beer, I thought this could actually be something really exciting," Dickinson says in a video announcing the beer's pending release. "We could actually develop a proper, real, long-term beer."

By that, he seems to mean that the beer will be more than a limited-edition release. Dickinson says that when they were trying to figure out what to put on the beer's label, it seemed natural to use the title of the Maiden song "The Trooper."

"Music and beer are great treats for the senses in their own right," the brewery's Oliver Robinson says, "but the combination is very powerful."

The beer, described as having citrus notes and a blend of Cascade, Bobec, and Goldings hops, doesn't sport an amped-up alcohol percentage. Its website currently lists it at 4.7 percent alcohol by volume.

That prompted a commenter at Metal Injection to observe the alcohol level should be much higher — leading another reader, Colin James Salt, to respond that the proper strength would be "6.66%."

Following a circuitous route from Saudi Arabia up through Turkey or Jordan and then crossing a lawless border, hundreds of young Saudis are secretly making their way into Syria to join extremist groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, GlobalPost has learned.

With the tacit approval from the House of Saud, and financial support from wealthy Saudi elites, the young men take up arms in what Saudi clerics have called a "jihad," or "holy war" against the Assad regime.

Based on a month of reporting in the region and in Washington, more than a dozen sources have confirmed that wealthy Saudis, as well as the government, are arming some Syrian rebel groups. Saudi and Syrian sources confirm that hundreds of Saudis are joining the rebels, but the government denies any sponsoring role.

Foreign Fighters

The Saudis are part of an inflow of Sunni fighters from Libya, Tunisia and Jordan, according to Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"Most of the foreigners are fighting with al-Nusra or Ahrar al-Sham," both extremist groups, Zelin said.

Sunni extremist fighters are now part of a vicious civil war that has killed an estimated 70,000 people and created more than a million refugees.

The Saudis hope to weaken their regional competitor Iran, a Shiite theocracy that is backing Assad. Saudi officials also hope to divert simmering political unrest at home by encouraging young protesters to instead fight in Syria, according to Saudi government critics.

The government seeks to "diffuse domestic pressure by recruiting young kids to join in another proxy war in the region," said Mohammad Fahd al-Qahtani, a human rights activist and economics professor at the Institute of Diplomatic Studies in Riyadh. They are joining ultraconservative groups who "definitely are against democracy and human rights. The ramifications could be quite serious in the whole region."

Road To Syria

In one documented case, a Saudi judge encouraged young anti-government protesters to fight in Syria rather than face punishment at home. Twenty-two-year-old Mohammed al-Talq was arrested and found guilty of participating in a demonstration in the north-central Saudi city of Buraidah.

After giving 19 young men suspended sentences, the judge called the defendants into his private chambers and gave them a long lecture about the need to fight Shiite Muslims in Syria, according to Mohammed's father, Abdurrahman al-Talq.

"You should save all your energy and fight against the real enemy, the Shia, and not fight inside Saudi Arabia," said the father, quoting the judge. "The judge gave them a reason to go to Syria."

Within weeks, 11 of the 19 protesters left to join the rebels. In December 2012, Mohammed al-Talq was killed in Syria. His father filed a formal complaint against the judge late last year, but said he has received no response.

Saudi Arabia shares no border with Syria, so young fighters such as Mohammad must travel through Turkey or Jordan.

Those without criminal records can fly as tourists to Istanbul. Those convicted of crimes or on government watch lists cannot travel without official Ministry of Interior permission. Critics say the government allows such militants to depart with a wink and a nod. Then they sneak across the Jordanian border into southern Syria.

Saudi Money

The young militants are sometimes funded by rich Saudis. They acquire black market AK-47s and cross at night along the now porous Syrian borders, according to a local journalist.

Sami Hamwi, the pseudonym of an exiled Syrian journalist who regularly reports from inside the country, has carefully observed the flow of the Saudi fighters to Syria. He told GlobalPost that groups of three-to-five Saudis often join Jabhat al-Nusra, a prominent rebel faction the United States says has links to al-Qaida.

Many Syrians "like the fact that Saudis come with a lot of money," Hamwi said. "Civil society activists do not like foreign fighters. They think they will cause more trouble."

The term "civil society activists" refers to the largely secular, progressive Syrians who led the initial stage of the Syrian uprising but who have since been eclipsed by the armed militias.

Saudi officials deny that the government encourages youth to fight in Syria. But they also admit they have no control over people who legally leave the country and later join the rebels.

Enlarge image i

We inhabit a world of blinding technological change. New devices, new programs and new infrastructure rise up, dominate discourse and pass away before we even have time to comprehend their intent. But for all the change we've experienced, the the most profound transformation of the digital era is really just getting started. Welcome to the era of Big Data.

For the sake of clarity, let's recall what Big Data means. At the intersection of the Internet, digital recording technologies and a profusion of small-scale wireless sensors comes an exponential increase in stored data. We're recording information of every kind: tweets, engine temperatures, Facebook photos, stock trades, grocery store purchases. These data points pile up, billions upon billions, trillions upon trillions, recording our lives and the life of the world we inhabit. They are very, very valuable to people with the ability to see patterns in, and extract insight from, the blizzard of information blowing out of the cloud.

Ultimately, the promise of Big Data is the ability to understand (and control) a seemingly chaotic world on levels never before imagined. The dangers of Big Data stem from that very same promise. It's impact on society will be akin to the transformative effect of past technological revolutions.

All Tech Considered

Self-Tracking Apps To Help You 'Quantify' Yourself

In the 19th century, the Bowery Boys were a street gang that ruled that small section of Manhattan. In the 21st century, the Bowery Boys are two best friends — Tom Meyers and Greg Young — who record a do-it-yourself podcast with the same name.

Meyers and Young love to perform almost as much as they love New York City, and their show traces the unofficial history of the place. They record a few blocks from — you guessed it — the Bowery district.

Podcasts have been around for less than a decade, but in that short time, homemade shows have exploded. To date, "The Bowery Boys" has had more than 5 million downloads.

One episode is about Tin Pan Alley, on the Lower East Side, where 19th-century composers churned out sheet music to distribute across the country.

"Charles Harris wrote a song called 'After the Ball' in 1892," Young says in that show. "He was lucky enough to get a vaudevillian star by the name of May Erwin to perform the song in her show, and it would sell up to 10 million copies. I mean, could you imagine, like, a Lady Gaga song rolling out over six years? Rolling out throughout the country?"

The Bowery Boys' audience doesn't quite rival Lady Gaga's, but 20,000 listeners isn't too shabby. Still, Meyers and Young are the first to admit that they are not professionals.

"We bought Podcasting for Dummies," says Meyers, "partially to figure out what a podcast was, and also how to record these things."

The pair doesn't use fancy equipment, either.

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He's the richest man you've never heard of: Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish clothing chain Zara. He's a notorious recluse who is rumored to wear the same plain shirt every day, but his Zara empire has come to define the concept of fast fashion.

And now he's taken Warren Buffett's No. 3 spot on Forbes' billionaires list.

Ortega's rags-to-riches tale mirrors the fast growth of southern Europe in the past 30 years. But the difference in this story is that Zara shows no sign of crashing.

His Beginnings

Ortega built the world's biggest fashion company in a rainy, impoverished corner of northwest Spain — Galicia — where the 76-year-old has lived since he was a kid.

The son of a railway worker, Ortega went to work in a local shirt maker's shop at age 14 to help feed his family. Jose Martinez was Ortega's first colleague. He's 77 now and still works at that same shop called Gala.

Business

In Trendy World Of Fast Fashion, Styles Aren't Made To Last

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.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, will unveil his latest budget plan Tuesday morning — and as NPR's Tamara Keith told our Newscast Desk, he'll say it would bring the federal budget in balance by 2023.

Ryan's previous proposal, he said, would balance the budget in 20 years. How has he cut 10 years off that time? The "fiscal cliff" deal reached as 2012 turned into 2013 "raises $600 billion in tax revenue over the next decade," Tamara reported, "and Ryan is including that in his new budget."

"Otherwise," she added, "Ryan has telegraphed that his new plan will include many of the same cuts as past GOP budgets, most notably it would convert Medicare into a premium support program."

On the op/ed pages of The Wall Street Journal today, Ryan makes his case for the new plan.

"How do we do it?" he writes. "We stop spending money the government doesn't have. ... Our budget matches spending with income. Under our proposal, the government spends no more than it collects in revenue — or 19.1% of gross domestic product each year. As a result, we'll spend $4.6 trillion less over the next decade. ...

"Our opponents will shout austerity, but let's put this in perspective. On the current path, we'll spend $46 trillion over the next 10 years. Under our proposal, we'll spend $41 trillion. On the current path, spending will increase by 5% each year. Under our proposal, it will increase by 3.4%. Because the U.S. economy will grow faster than spending, the budget will balance by 2023, and debt held by the public will drop to just over half the size of the economy."

When she got out of college and moved to New York, Elizabeth Cline liked to shop at vintage-clothing stores. They were the kinds of places tucked away on side streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where a lot of hunting and a little luck might reward you with a great, inexpensive cocktail dress that no one else had.

Then she discovered the world of "fast fashion" — chains like Forever 21, H&M and Zara — and it redefined her whole notion of bargain shopping.

"The products are very, very cheap," says Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. "The design is pretty attractive. And if you walk into the store, I think, for a lot of consumers, it's virtually impossible to walk out empty-handed."

“ You see some products and it's just garbage. It's just crap, and you sort of fold it up and you think, yeah, you're going to wear it Saturday night to your party — and then it's literally going to fall apart.

Days after news spread that Danish restaurant Noma, three-time winner of Restaurant magazine's "World's Best Restaurant" title, was blamed for a norovirus outbreak in which dozens of diners fell ill, the restaurant has issued a public response and sought to clarify its handling of the situation.

And while noroviruses are "perhaps the perfect human pathogens," as The Journal of Infectious Diseases reports, it also seems that Noma could have spared some of its diners from the pathogens if its staff had read emails from health inspectors. Once it received the message that patrons were falling ill, the restaurant closed for two days to address the issue.

As we reported Friday, Denmark's food agency, Fdevarestyrelsen, says that a Noma staff member spread the illness, resulting in more than 60 patrons suffering from diarrhea and nausea.

While The Copenhagen Post reported that 67 people became ill, the restaurant and the Danish food safety agency agree the number is 63. Noma says it regrets the incident, and it has been "in direct contact" with customers who ate at the restaurant in the time in question, between Feb. 12 and Feb. 16.

According to the official inspection report, a Noma employee became nauseous on the night of Friday, Feb. 15, after work. The restaurant says the staff member "was a carrier and did not show any symptoms of the virus" — something we take to refer to the worker's time on the clock. The restaurant's management say they've long had a policy in place that requires sick employees to stay home.

A day earlier, on Thursday, Feb. 14, the agency had sent an email to Noma informing it that its diners were reporting serious health problems. But the restaurant acknowledges that it didn't read its mail that day.

Noting that members of its staff come from all over the world, Noma said that "unfortunately there was a slight delay as the email was picked up initially by a non-Danish speaking member of the team and wasn't responded to until Monday after the weekend service."

In its report, the food agency says that Noma has pledged to have an employee who speaks both English and Danish to read its mail. The restaurant has also posted the final report on its exterior, along with providing a prominent link on its website.

While the official report noted that there was no hot water for employees to wash their hands in the kitchen's prep area, Noma clarifies that it has four sinks on the two floors of its kitchen, and one of those — in the prep area — lacked hot water. We noted in our original post that the restaurant quickly had a plumber fix that sink.

But as alert readers of our original post noted, washing hands with hot water is in itself not sufficient to rid a kitchen of norovirus. The inspection report cited the restaurant's work to disinfect its kitchen with chlorine and to throw away all food that had been handled. Noma says it closed for two days so it could reset its kitchen.

"As a precaution the kitchen and restaurant have been deep cleaned several times following Health Inspection guidelines," chef Rene Redzepi wrote on Noma's website. "This has been done on top of the overall cleaning, which takes place several times a day."

Noma also says it has tested staff members for norovirus and has been in touch with its customers.

"When the first results came in, indicating norovirus, guests were informed and offered either to return as our guests or to be fully refunded," a statement from the restaurant reads. "We are delighted that many guests have already accepted the offer to return to noma."

The restaurant, which became a hit for its creative reimagining of Nordic cuisine, received a warning from the Danish food agency. A check of the restaurant's online reservations calendar finds that it is in its normal state: completely booked.

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 province.

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 President 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 that Pakistani presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar "brushed aside" U.S. concerns and pressures.

Babar was quoted as saying the project is 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 stage is now set for the opening act of one of the more spectacular and intriguing theatrical dramas on the planet: the election of a pope.

In Rome, TV camera crews have set up their positions on big platforms overlooking St. Peter's Square and the Vatican, where the secretive process will begin Tuesday.

Bookies are raking in bets, even though veteran Vatican watchers insist that no obvious front-runner has emerged from a wide field of possible candidates to replace Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years.

After a tsunami of scandals about clerical sex abuse and cover-ups, Vatican mismanagement and corruption — and more besides — this is the Roman Catholic Church's chance to generate some positive headlines as attention focuses on the mysterious workings of what's known as the conclave.

Conclave — from the Latin for "with a key" — is a historic term that refers to the fact that the cardinals charged with the task of electing a new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics will do so locked within the Vatican.

Most of the 115 "cardinal electors" will be housed in two-room suites in a guesthouse run by nuns. The accommodation is, by all accounts, modest — three- rather than five-star.

On hand is a team of cooks, doctors (the average age of this group of cardinals is 72), priests (to take confession) and technicians to enforce a communications blackout, both in the guesthouse and the Sistine Chapel, where the balloting takes place. The Vatican is determined to prevent any outside interference — or news leaking out from a tweeting cleric.

"The phone doesn't work, the TV doesn't work. They have no e-mail, they have no Internet, they have no cellphones," says Father Thomas J. Reese of the National Catholic Reporter, who is an authority on the workings of the conclave.

On Tuesday morning, the "cardinal electors" will celebrate Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. Then, mid-afternoon, they walk into the Sistine Chapel in procession while singing prayers, and take their places.

Within the chapel, the scene must surely be stunning — a throng of cardinals, wearing blood-red robes, sashes and crucifixes beneath the pulsating blue, silver and gold hues of the Renaissance frescoes that adorn the Sistine's vaulted ceiling.

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."

A.L. Kennedy's latest novel is The Blue Book.

I've read He Died With His Eyes Open twice. I don't know if I could stand to read it again. Like all of Derek Raymond's work, it has a remarkable and disturbing physicality.

This book was the first of what came to be known as the Factory series. Its protagonist is an unnamed detective in London's Metropolitan Police. He will never rise above sergeant and works in the most despised branch of "the Factory": Unexplained Deaths.

He loathes criminals and his fellow police with equal passion. His world is a nightmare of shed blood and compromise, sexual distress and annihilated victims. He moves through his days — and, more often, nights — racked by his outrage at the sins of others and at his own failings. He pursues cases that no one else would find worthwhile, plunging like an intoxicated author into the lives of others until he can taste them, move under their skins.

Raymond's narratives press against somewhere unusual in your brain; they penetrate and interfere, putting you in touch with levels of intensity and disintegration that seem to combine literary achievement with medical intervention. His characters are both unlikely and horribly real. They live, like his narratives, in places you don't want to visit, places that threaten you through the small hours from the bleak ends of streets.

In short, this book is a virtuoso assault and a crime novel like few others. It listens while the detective investigates the brutal murder of the derelict alcoholic, Charles Staniland — a failure, a nobody. In doing so, it thumbs through souls, finds human nature entirely wanting and resurrects Staniland's broken life: his former gentility and his fall into drink, poverty, manual labor and self-degradation among London's criminal classes. Listening obsessively to Staniland's diary, which he recorded on tape, we join the detective in learning of a broken world and broken killers.

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. In He Died With His Eyes Open, Raymond (whose real name was Robert Cook) fed on every misstep he had taken in his own life, and delivered both the startling prose and the commercial success his previous darkly knowing and beautiful books had never achieved. Raymond had already been multiply divorced and had embraced the scorchingly downward trajectory that took him from an Eton education to London's criminal underbelly, semi-destitution and scraping by as a manual laborer.

He knew the broken world. In the first book of the Factory series, his love of the absolute, particularly the negative absolute, seems to be fully released in a torrent of densely poetic and disturbing fiction. He Died With His Eyes Open has, among other qualities, the shine of authorial delight, a sense of wild unleashing.

You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

About Round 10

Challenge: Leave A Message After The Beep

Get recipes for Whole-Wheat Fettuccine With Savoy Cabbage, Cream And Caraway Seeds, Heartland Brisket and James Beard's Seed Cake.

"There is no such thing as humane meat." This conclusion was drawn by Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA, in an opinion piece published last week in The Huffington Post.

Newkirk's point of view is not new (Farm Sanctuary's Bruce Friedrich has called humane meat "a contradiction in terms"). Still, it's a position that sounds extreme to many people.

Now a challenge: stop here, go back to Newkirk's post, and (if you haven't already) read the whole thing. Suspend any desire to argue back emotionally. Just read and think.

OK. How did you do? Did you make it through to the end — calmly?

Newkirk, herself, isn't always calm. Some of the rhetoric is incendiary ("animal slavery") or overgeneralized (people who stop eating animals "truly won't miss a thing except ill health"). I can tell you that I, for one, am occasionally overwhelmed by cravings for chicken pot pie!

More seriously, Newkirk aims her manifesto at the horrors of factory farming. Yet she sweeps up in her absolutist's net a lot of good people, including those who make their living on small farms.

On some small farms, chickens, pigs and other animals live largely in the fresh air, surrounded by the "family and friends" that Newkirk mentions in her piece. Yes, most of them are then slaughtered for the table. But isn't there humane practice on these farms, including the method of slaughter?

I asked Newkirk why she didn't distinguish between factory farms and small farms. On Monday, she told me in an email message that yes, "small farms are much better," but continued:

Invariably they are still inhumane at some level. Even on the smallest of farms (I grew up on one for some years) there will be mistreatment with animals seen as commodities, separation from others, frightening transport, the smells of slaughter before them, and definitely some horrible procedures, such as castration without even a painkiller.

Recently I had the honor of speaking at the Origin of Life conference organized by the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. It was an exciting and humbling experience.

Being a relative newcomer to this research area, I suddenly found myself surrounded by some of the giants of the field. What better way to learn than from the experts themselves? Although one of those giants (Steve Benner) did say that "when it comes to the origin of life, there are no experts."

This message was teased out by others at the meeting, as well. Not only is there no consensus yet on how life might have started on Earth, there is not even any agreement on where it started. Hypotheses presented at the meeting included:

life was brought to Earth from outer space by meteorites

life started around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor

life originated in shallow volcanic/sulfuric rock pools

life first appeared on the clay surfaced ocean shores exposed to tidal wet-dry cycles

life came into being at sub-freezing temperatures on a snowball Earth

Equally varied were the topics of the many presentations at the gathering. They included: pure geochemistry and biochemistry (including various hypotheses about which elements were likely to have been abundant on the early Earth); the limits of life as we know it now (in terms of temperature, pH, pressure, salinity, etc.); attempts at reconstructing (aspects of) the last universal common ancestor (LUCA); the RNA world (a hotly debated topic); protein evolution and functionality; computer simulations of chemical systems; and even a purely information-based approach, in the tradition of earlier giants like Alan Turing and John von Neumann.

My own talk was on a formal framework for studying the emergence and evolution of autocatalytic sets, largely based on the original ideas of 13.7's own Stuart Kauffman (a giant who, unfortunately, could not be at the conference himself).

What also became clear at the Princeton meeting, however, is that, despite the current lack of consensus on how or where life started, there is a growing optimism that the problem will actually be solved in the near future. Estimates range anywhere from 10 to 50 years from now. No one seemed to doubt that the answer is within reach.

Indeed, the maelstrom of theory and research represented at the conference is showing signs of coalescing into a clear way forward. More and more of the gaps and details are filling in with each year that passes. And in the process we are learning ever more about life in general, not just its origin.

Some of the research even leads to new technologies. For example, the work of David Deamer (another giant!) has led to the development of a $900 mobile-phone-sized DNA sequencer that plugs into the USB port of your laptop. And, of course, great medical advances are likely to flow from our deeper understanding of life's origin and its early evolution.

Despite the prevalent optimism, it was also clear that we still have significant hurdles to overcome. Which reminds me of a wonderful anecdote Bill Martin (yet another giant) told the audience during his lecture. A few years ago, Bill had been one of several researchers invited to speak to the Pontifical Council on the origin of life. After he had explained to them how we — as scientists — are trying to understand how the (spontaneous) transition from pure chemistry to living cells might have happened, one of the cardinals asked him: "Wouldn't a little bit of God help there, Dr. Martin?"

Yes, science would be a lot easier if we were allowed to simply insert "a little bit of God" here and there. But then it would also be a lot less interesting and exciting, no?

As NPR's Louisa Lim reported Monday on Morning Edition, a week of inflamed rhetoric from North Korea — including talk of a preemptive nuclear strike on the U.S. — is being followed by word that the North has carried through on its threat to annul the 1953 armistice that ended open warfare on the peninsula and has stopped answering calls on the telephone hotline to the South.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and South Korean militaries have begun their annual joint military drills — exercises that the North views as provocative. Tensions, always high on the Korean peninsula, have been ratcheted up even further.

Here's more from Louisa's report:

South Korean news is headlining Operation Key Resolve: war games involving 13,000 U.S. and South Korean soldiers. Every year, it's a time of tension. But this year, the North seems to be acting on its threats. A hotline between the South and North rang unanswered today. And Pyongyang's state mouthpiece is warning the ceasefire that ended the Korean war is now invalid.

A South Korean official reportedly told parliament that unilateral cancellation isn't legally binding. Pyongyang has made that threat half-a-dozen times before. But this time the context is different.

In the 1940s and '50s, Tadd Dameron worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Miles Davis to Artie Shaw, Count Basie to John Coltrane. Everything Dameron touched had one thing in common, says Paul Combs, author of Dameronia: The Life and Work of Tadd Dameron.

"A penchant for lyricism," Combs says. "Almost everything that he writes has a very lyrical grace to it."

Facebook is redesigning its front page. The News Feed — which is what Facebook's roughly 1 billion users see when they log on to the site — will be rolling out a radical new look over the coming months.

The changes are meant to increase user engagement on the site, make it easier to navigate on mobile phones and provide even more highly targeted advertising.

But any big change also creates a precarious moment in the life of a social network.

Remember Friendster? It was the first social network to achieve large-scale success. Founded in 2002 — before Facebook or MySpace — Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google back when that kind of money still turned heads.

At its peak, it had more than 100 million members. Then in 2009 it made some changes to its site, and suddenly Friendster collapsed.

"There was a point where it was really the most important social network," says David Garcia, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

He analyzed data from Friendster collected during its death throes and has come to some interesting conclusions about what makes an enormous online network vulnerable. In Friendster's case, it began with a specific trigger.

"There was a change in the user interface, plus there was the alternative of Facebook," Garcia says.

Friendster's redesigned site was awkward to use and unfamiliar, and some dedicated users left. With each new defection, the site became less useful to the people who remained behind.

"If most of your friends have left the community, you will leave it, too," Garcia says.

Every time a friend on your network bolts, a network becomes less valuable to you. Your calculus changes.

Garcia's autopsy starts with a simple assumption: When the costs associated with being on a social network begin to outweigh the benefits, you'll leave.

And what's true for Friendster in 2009, Garcia says, is probably still true for Facebook today.

I ask Ian Fisher, whom I met at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., what would cause him to leave a social network, to cancel his account, delete his photos and abandon it?

"About two years ago, I canceled my Facebook account for about a year," Fisher says. "I did that because I was reading so many articles about privacy concerns on Facebook, and I was spending so much of my time on there and realizing I was getting essentially nothing out of it that was good for me."

In 2010, changes in Facebook's privacy policies led lots of people to leave the network. Unlike Friendster, it didn't collapse.

It turns out, the vulnerability of a social network to the kind of mass defection hinges on how people use the network.

If most people use it to keep in touch with just one or two friends, then when one of those friends leaves, you're more likely to leave, too. But if you have 1,000 connections, the network is more resilient.

And in Fisher's case, a few years after he left Facebook, he decided to go back "because there were people that I didn't know how to get a hold of, but there were my sort of peripheral acquaintances that I didn't get a chance to connect with quite as much. I am still trying to decide whether it's worth it or not. I'm not totally convinced that it is."

It is for now — maybe just to share pictures of his new baby.

But researchers say Facebook still needs to be cautious. When you are tweaking a social network, even one as big and successful as Facebook, you don't want to scare off too many people at one time — or you could create a cascading exodus that is difficult to stop.

And that may be why Facebook is rolling out its latest update very, very slowly.

On Gene Kelly's famous dance scene in Singin' in the Rain, and her early studio experiences

"He had a 103 fever when he was doing that. He was sick as a dog. And the worst part of this is that the set was really outside. ... I can't imagine how he didn't end up, really, with pneumonia.

"But I have to tell you that I visited the set every single day. I did maybe, oh, a week and a half's worth of work on that show. But I visited all the sets every single day. Well, I didn't have that much to do. So I would get all dressed up every morning and go to the studio, go through those famous gates where Jack Nicholson once told me he used to wait for me. He didn't know who I was, but he said, 'You were sooo sexy' ... you know, with that leer of his. And he said, 'You wore these very tight white dresses and you were always very tanned, and I would wait for you.' And he said, 'You'd give me heart attacks.' [Laughs] I kind of liked hearing that."

On playing ethnic roles

[LANGUAGE ADVISORY: The following quote contains language some might find offensive.]

"I became the house ethnic. And that meant I had to play anything that was not American. So I became this Gypsy girl, or I was a Polynesian girl, or I was an Egyptian girl. And finally I decided that by playing all these roles, I should have some kind of accent, but of course I had no idea what these people sounded like so I made up my own, and I now call it the universal ethnic accent. The funny part of it is that all my ethnic characters that I played all sounded exactly the same!

"It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful — I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning. And I began to feel more and more and more diminished. I was already very unsure of myself anyway, because when I was a very young girl in New York City I ran into an awful lot of racial bias, and I got called some pretty nasty names, like 'spic' and — all the words you heard in West Side Story came directly from the streets — 'garlic mouth,' 'pierced ear.' So by the time I was doing those kind of roles — for a living, practically, in Hollywood — I was beginning to feel pretty bad about myself."

Enlarge image i

The American conservative movement has its homecoming this week: the Conservative Political Action Conference, where everyone from politicians to peddlers is out to inspire the faithful.

Last year, one of the headline speakers was former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who harked back to the second-ever CPAC in 1975, when Ronald Reagan laid out a vision for a conservative Republican Party.

She invoked his image of a banner of bold colors, not pale pastels.

"And ever since then, CPAC has been the rally for conservative action, and that's why I am glad to be here today with all of you conservative activists," she said.

Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which puts on CPAC, said the group had trouble meeting demand last year at a Washington convention hotel.

"Only about half of the people who wanted to watch the more popular speakers in the main ballroom were actually able to get in," he says.

This year's conference is in a new, bigger hotel down the Potomac River in Maryland. Despite last November's depressing election returns, Cardenas says that CPAC attendance will barely dip.

Nearly 10,000 people are expected, including more than 2,000 carrying media credentials, in the three-day event that starts Thursday.

Cardenas says more than half of the early registrants are under 25.

The run-up to CPAC is often marked by controversy about who's invited and who's not. Many of last year's presidential primary candidates will be there this week. So will Mitt Romney, the 2012 presidential nominee.

Cardenas notes the agenda is rich in names that are being bandied about for next time.

"Just about everyone who may be a potential candidate for president in 2016 will be there in attendance," he says. The list includes Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others.

It's All Politics

Christie's Post-Sandy Remarks About House GOP Behind Non-Invite To CPAC

Times were different in 1996 when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, former President Bill Clinton writes in today's Washington Post.

"In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction," Clinton says. Supporters of the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, thought its passage would head off a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But now, Clinton says, he believes DOMA is "incompatible with our Constitution." As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the act's constitutionality, he is making the case that it discriminates against "same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia [but] are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples."

As NPR's Nina Totenberg has reported:

"The test case that the Supreme Court said it will review involves a New York couple, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, who had been together for 42 years prior to their marriage in 2007. When Spyer died, however, the federal government, acting under DOMA, required Windsor to pay $363,000 in estate taxes that she would not have owed if her spouse had been of the opposite sex. ...

"Windsor won in the lower courts. Indeed, in the past couple of years, 10 courts, with judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, have ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional."

March 11, 2011, is a day that Kenichi Togawa will never forget. He was taking a break from his job at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant when the ground started to shake. "The earthquake was very big, and also very long," he says. It scattered desks like Lego bricks and brought down ceiling paneling.

After making sure co-workers were accounted for, Kenichi, like other nonessential workers at the plant, headed for home to check on his family. The Togawas lived in the seaside village of Namie, about six miles from the reactors. Kenichi left work by car, but he soon abandoned it. A tsunami sparked by the earthquake had wiped out roads near the coast, and those that remained were clogged with people hurrying home. He walked for miles, all the while unsure whether his wife and three children were OK.

He felt "a huge relief," he says, when he arrived home to find his family safe. But the Togawas' troubles were just beginning. After a fitful night, sleeping together in their living room, they were awakened in the early morning by a siren, warning them to evacuate. When Kenichi went out to recover his abandoned car, he was greeted by soldiers in gas masks. The family threw what they could into the car and fled.

Hours later, the Unit One reactor at the nuclear plant exploded, spreading radioactivity across Fukushima. The Togawas will likely never be able to live in their old home again.

Enlarge image i

Brooks explains that Baxter is a robot that learns, versus robots designed to do specific tasks, like ones that might be seen on an automotive production line.

Brooks says that as oil becomes more expensive and the cost of shipping products manufactured abroad increases, Baxter is the kind of tool that could help bring factory jobs back by increasing productivity on the production line.

As The Washington Post's Cecilia Kang notes, Baxter is one of a new generation of robots being deployed by U.S. companies:

"General Electric has developed spiderlike robots to climb and maintain tall wind turbines. Kiva Systems, a company bought by Amazon.com, has orange ottoman-shaped robots that sweep across warehouse floors, pull products off shelves and deliver them for packaging. Some hospitals have begun employing robots that can move room to room to dispense medicines to patients or deliver the advice of a doctor who is not on site."

Facebook is redesigning its front page. The News Feed — which is what Facebook's roughly 1 billion users see when they log on to the site — will be rolling out a radical new look over the coming months.

The changes are meant to increase user engagement on the site, make it easier to navigate on mobile phones and provide even more highly targeted advertising.

But any big change also creates a precarious moment in the life of a social network.

Remember Friendster? It was the first social network to achieve large-scale success. Founded in 2002 — before Facebook or MySpace — Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google back when that kind of money still turned heads.

At its peak, it had more than 100 million members. Then in 2009 it made some changes to its site, and suddenly Friendster collapsed.

"There was a point where it was really the most important social network," says David Garcia, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

He analyzed data from Friendster collected during its death throes and has come to some interesting conclusions about what makes an enormous online network vulnerable. In Friendster's case, it began with a specific trigger.

"There was a change in the user interface, plus there was the alternative of Facebook," Garcia says.

Friendster's redesigned site was awkward to use and unfamiliar, and some dedicated users left. With each new defection, the site became less useful to the people who remained behind.

"If most of your friends have left the community, you will leave it, too," Garcia says.

Every time a friend on your network bolts, a network becomes less valuable to you. Your calculus changes.

Garcia's autopsy starts with a simple assumption: When the costs associated with being on a social network begin to outweigh the benefits, you'll leave.

And what's true for Friendster in 2009, Garcia says, is probably still true for Facebook today.

I ask Ian Fisher, whom I met at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., what would cause him to leave a social network, to cancel his account, delete his photos and abandon it?

"About two years ago, I canceled my Facebook account for about a year," Fisher says. "I did that because I was reading so many articles about privacy concerns on Facebook, and I was spending so much of my time on there and realizing I was getting essentially nothing out of it that was good for me."

In 2010, changes in Facebook's privacy policies led lots of people to leave the network. Unlike Friendster, it didn't collapse.

It turns out, the vulnerability of a social network to the kind of mass defection hinges on how people use the network.

If most people use it to keep in touch with just one or two friends, then when one of those friends leaves, you're more likely to leave, too. But if you have 1,000 connections, the network is more resilient.

And in Fisher's case, a few years after he left Facebook, he decided to go back "because there were people that I didn't know how to get a hold of, but there were my sort of peripheral acquaintances that I didn't get a chance to connect with quite as much. I am still trying to decide whether it's worth it or not. I'm not totally convinced that it is."

It is for now — maybe just to share pictures of his new baby.

But researchers say Facebook still needs to be cautious. When you are tweaking a social network, even one as big and successful as Facebook, you don't want to scare off too many people at one time — or you could create a cascading exodus that is difficult to stop.

And that may be why Facebook is rolling out its latest update very, very slowly.