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The 11.7 million Americans searching for work got discouraging news Friday morning when the Labor Department said employers created only 88,000 jobs in March. The weak job growth comes at the same time benefits for the long-term unemployed are shrinking.

The smaller-than-expected increase in payrolls was a big disappointment, coming after a long stretch of much better results. Over the past year, employment growth has averaged 169,000 jobs a month.

April 5, 2013

This week, optimists had no trouble finding fresh evidence to suggest that the housing market is recovering.

On Thursday, they learned from a Realtors' report that existing home sales hit the highest level in more than 3 years. And earlier this week, a Commerce Department report showed homebuilding permits have been rising at the quickest pace since June 2008.

But not everyone is convinced that the sector's momentum has staying power. Skeptics point to reasons why the housing sector might falter, just as it has several times over the past six years.

If the optimists and pessimists had to face off in front of a judge, these are the exhibits they might enter as evidence:

The Optimists' Case

Your honor, don't be blinded by years of bad news. Look at these recent statistics:

— Home prices rose by more than 7 percent last year, according to the widely respected S&P/Case-Shiller Index.

— Builders have been hiring again, adding workers at a pace of 30,000 a month over the past five months.

— The Federal Reserve plans to hold interest rates at historically low levels for a long time, making homes more affordable.

— The number of underwater borrowers, i.e., those whose mortgages exceed the value of their homes, fell by almost 4 million last year to 7 million, according to JPMorgan Securities.

Economy

For Some Ready To Buy, A Good Home Is Hard To Find

Few things indicate a president no longer needs to worry about re-election more than his willingness to ignite an intraparty firestorm.

President Obama's decision to include in the budget proposal he's scheduled to unveil Wednesday a less generous way to calculate Social Security cost-of-living increases may be the clearest sign yet that his name will not again be on a presidential ballot.

Obama made a proposal during a 2011 budget showdown to cut Social Security and Medicare — but that was during a face-off with Republicans over whether they'd even agree to raise the debt ceiling. And he didn't provide many details on the cuts.

That pressure-packed moment, which ultimately led to a downgrade in the nation's credit rating, was the impetus for that offer of a "grand bargain" compromise.

Obama may not have the same pressure as then to offer up cuts to the nation's premiere social safety net programs. But he has.

It's the kind of in-your-face move that had he proposed it during his first term, Obama might have demoralized and angered enough Democrats to have hurt his re-election chances. It might even have spurred a primary challenge.

Now safely in a second term he won by promising a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction of tax increases and spending cuts, Obama is providing more details.

The decision to go on record as favoring the less generous chained-CPI method for calculating Social Security benefit increases echoes negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff at the end of 2012. At that time, Obama reportedly offered House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, a similar deal: Reduce Social Security spending from a revised method of calculating cost-of-living increases.

The so-called chained CPI approach works on the assumption that when prices rise on certain products and services, consumers respond by choosing less pricey substitutes. The bottom line is that such an approach would often lead to lower cost-of-living increases for those receiving Social Security benefits.

White House officials who gave journalists a preview of Obama's fiscal priorities said the fiscal 2014 budget proposal incorporates chained CPI and proposes that wealthier beneficiaries pay more of their Medicare costs.

His budget, which is really little more than a statement of his fiscal vision — and now takes its place alongside competing versions from Senate Democrats and House Republicans — puts Obama at odds with many of his political supporters, whose statements were filled with their sense of betrayal.

From the liberal group MoveOn.org's Executive Director Anna Galland:

"Millions of MoveOn members did not work night and day to put President Obama into office so that he could propose policies that would hurt some of our most vulnerable people. Just as we fought and defeated President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, we will mobilize and stop this attempt to diminish the vital guarantee of Social Security."

Automatic federal budget cuts that kicked in March 1 have had little initial impact in many parts of the government. For a few programs, however, the effect has been real and painful, as the government begins cutting $85 billion from its spending through the end of September.

Many of the earliest signs of the cuts are being seen on the local level, in state programs like education that rely in part on federal dollars.

By law, furloughs for most federal employees could not begin before April, so it's still early in the process. President Obama is taking a 5 percent pay cut, voluntarily returning $20,000 of his $400,000 annual salary to the U.S. Treasury in solidarity with furloughed federal workers. New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and a top deputy are taking cuts as well.

Congress stepped in to ease the pain a bit for the Defense Department, but its looming cuts remain deep.

A half-dozen NPR reporters spoke to Morning Edition about what they're seeing so far in the areas they cover. Here's a look at some things we do know, a month into sequestration:

To kick off Season 2 of Ask Me Another, we invited one of America's most trusted names in therapy onto the show — sex therapy, that is. Dr. Ruth Westheimer may be best known for having pioneered frank and open discussion about sex. Since her late-night radio show, "Sexually Speaking," debuted over three decades ago, Dr. Ruth has been dispensing honest, compassionate advice over the airwaves, television, and now, the Internet.

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

The American Library Association and Barnes & Noble were among the groups named by conservative group Morality in Media in its "Dirty Dozen List" of "the top 12 facilitators of porn." The list states that the ALA encourages libraries to have unfiltered computers, and that the bookstore chain "is a major supplier of adult pornography and child erotica." The top spot, however, went to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for "refus[ing] to enforce existing federal obscenity laws."

Squirreled away in a recent Wall Street Journal article about a concert DVD by singer Alanis Morissette was this revelation: "She's focused at the moment on writing a book, which she calls 'transpersonal psychology meets autobiography, with a little humor thrown in, I hope.' "

The latest "Mysteries of the Vernacular" installment — charming video etymologies of English words — locates the word "clue" in the Minotaur's maze and Chaucer's England.

A new book by comedian Cleo Rocos, The Power of Positive Drinking, which comes out in May, claims that she and Queen singer Freddie Mercury sneaked Princess Diana into a gay bar in the 1980s by disguising her as a male model.

In The Guardian, John Dugdale takes apart "campus fiction," and, in particular, Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed: "Oates's bizarre, sprawling novel, in which the devil comes to Princeton in 1905, is especially saturated with other books, ranging from vampire and Stephen King shockers to the prototypical tale of a don driven mad, Goethe's Faust. Like other recent campus concoctions, it suggests a moratorium has long been overdue."

Jacob Harris, senior software architect at The New York Times, has developed an algorithm to find accidental haikus in the paper, from the mundane: "The one thing to be / careful about / is trimming the broccoli rabe," to the poetic: "The buzzing of a / thousand bees in the tiny / curled pearl of an ear."

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein ruled Monday on the most important question facing Stockton, Calif. — whether it could enter into federal bankruptcy protection.

Klein agreed that the city is, in fact, broke.

But he didn't decide the question of whether the city must renegotiate its pension obligations, as some of its creditors had hoped.

"He did put off for another day the question of whether the pension holders would have to be part of any debt reduction solution," says Robert G. Flanders Jr., who was the state receiver appointed to oversee the troubled finances of Central Falls, R.I.

It's possible that, as Stockton draws up its plans for getting its financial house back in order, it will revisit its pension obligations, though the city has been reluctant to do so.

Klein did not force the city's hand in this regard, though he made it clear this could remain an issue going forward.

"The pension question may be presented in a number of different ways," says James Spiotto, a municipal bankruptcy attorney in Chicago. "Why rule on something you don't absolutely have to rule on?"

Millions At Stake

Like many other cities, counties and states, Stockton's pension fund is millions of dollars in the hole. Typically, pension obligations have been held sacrosanct, even as bondholders and other creditors lose money in bankruptcy proceedings.

As is the case with most other California localities, Stockton's pensions are managed by the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the country.

Gone Bust

The biggest municipal Chapter 9 bankruptcies in the U.S., and the approximate debt.

Jefferson County, Ala. (filed 2011) — $4,200,000,000

Orange County, Calif. (filed 1994) — $1,974,000,000

Stockton, Calif. (filed 2012) — $1,032,000,000

San Bernardino, Calif. (filed 2012) — $492,000,000

Vallejo, Calif. (filed 2008) — $175,000,000

— James Spiotto of Chapman and Cutler LLC

Polio is on the verge of being eliminated. Last year there were just over 200 cases of polio, and they occurred in just two remote parts of the world — northern Nigeria and the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border region.

A new $5.5 billion plan being pushed by the World Health Organization strives to eliminate polio entirely, phase out vaccination campaigns and secure polio vaccine stockpiles in case the virus somehow manages to re-emerge.

If the effort is successful, polio would be just the second disease in human history, after smallpox, to be eliminated by medical science.

"We've never been so close to eradication as we are now," says Hamid Jafari, the director of Global Polio Eradication at WHO.

A quarter of a century ago there were roughly 300,000 polio cases a year worldwide. By 2011 that number had dropped to 650, and last year it was down to 223.

The new Global Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan aims to bring the number of new wild polio cases down to zero by 2015 and eradicate the virus entirely by 2018. It targets "wild" polio from normal transmission and the handful of so-called "vaccine-derived" cases, which are caused by the vaccine.

The plan calls for an orchestrated global transition from the oral vaccine, which contains live polio virus (and thus can cause "vaccine-derived" polio paralysis), to an injected vaccine made from dead virus.

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Spaniards wary of trusting their life savings to their country's shaky banking system can now buy a mattress that has an armored safe equipped with a keypad combination lock hidden in one end.

The new product, Caja de ahorros Micolchon — Spanish for "My Mattress Safe" — went on sale three weeks ago, several months after the European Union approved loans of up to $130 billion to bail out troubled Spanish banks.

It's the brainchild of Paco Santos, who was laid off from Spain's biggest mattress manufacturer three years ago and has since started his own company, Descanso Santos Suenos, or DeSS. Reached by telephone at his offices in Salamanca, the 57-year-old salesman assured NPR that My Mattress Safe is no April Fool's Day joke.

"We're completely serious! And we've sold many, many of these mattresses," Santos said, declining to give specific sales figures.

But customers will need some savings up front. My Mattress Safe retails for about $1,120. The company also sells bed frames, conventional mattresses and bed coverings.

"I had a hunch that this new product would sell," Santos said. "You see, we've got big economic problems in Spain, and people have really lost confidence in the banks."

With the help of a son who works in public relations, Santos has launched a website and produced several YouTube videos in Spanish to market his special mattresses.

As a young man, after being in the military, Klein got a scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris and started doing abstract painting. He was influenced by the artist Fernand Leger.

"He didn't talk arty-farty," says Klein. "He would say, 'That is cool, that is strong, keep it up.' And that's it. No fancy-schmancy art talk." Leger told him: "Get out of the galleries. Look at buildings; go out onto the street."

And yet, she says, "I felt lucky compared to other women at that time." Women were banned from continuing their education during Taliban rule. But some, like Farzana, found ways to keep studying. She would carry books under her burqa and attended what she calls an "underground school" with about 300 other students in a residential area of Kabul.

When U.S.-led forces ended Taliban rule in 2001, Wahidy was able to attend high school. A friend encouraged her to apply for a photojournalism program, knowing that she had hopes of sharing her experiences with the world.

"Day by day, as I started learning about photography, I fell more in love with it," she says. "There was a huge need for women photographers in Afghanistan."

Arguments are often heard against big (read: expensive) scientific projects, especially those without an immediate pay off. "Why spend so much money building this machine or spacecraft, when there are so many pressing social issues we must deal with?"

On top of that, there are often political pressures that come into play with big science. Representatives and senators seek to place projects in their constituency, or work to fend off the loss of a project past its prime. The result is that big projects are often spread across different states and contractors, creating a complex web of competing — and often conflicting — interests.

A painful example of somewhat recent vintage was the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). Construction of this behemoth particle collider in Waxahachie, Texas, was called off in 1993 after an expenditure of about $2 billion. Had it gone through, the SSC would have achieved energies about three times as large as those that the Higgs-boson-finding Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will achieve at full blast.

Based on recent results at the LHC, which will be stretched to the max to explore the properties of the Higgs boson, colliding energies three times as large would have been very useful indeed. Although much more data is to be gotten, especially after next year's LHC energy boost, a factor of three in collision energy would have helped clear up what may become a murky situation.

The fact is that good science needs both small and big science.

Over the past 400 years, men and women have built a unique body of knowledge that has deeply transformed humanity. Based on the formulation and subsequent empirical validation of hypotheses, the scientific method amounts to a process that allows for ever-more-accurate descriptions of natural phenomena: from Newton's gravity to Einstein's relativity, from simple mechanics to quantum mechanics, from Darwinian natural selection to genetics, this accumulation of knowledge led inevitably to the technologies that define our lives.

These scientific advances — and corresponding changes in our worldview — didn't happen by chance. Scientific ideas, even when beautiful and compelling, are only useful while not proved wrong or incomplete. There are no final explanations; only those that work within what we can test. As technology advances, these tests become more refined. This increase in precision allows scientists to find cracks in their explanations. And it is from these cracks that new ideas and theories emerge.

Without the constant drive to refine technologies, to go beyond current limitations, we are unable to test new ideas. Consequently, our knowledge of the world stagnates.

The Hubble Space Telescope, the Martian rovers, the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Kepler mission — searching for other Earths around our cosmic neighborhood, the Human Genome Project, are all big science projects that have captured the public imagination worldwide; and all are absolutely essential to the advancement of science.

Big science should never take away funds slated for relevant social projects. But it needn't be a "this or that" kind of Solomonic choice. It can be a "this and that," as long as our priorities are focused on the right targets. There are many ways to slice the federal budget pie. The choices are ours, through those we elect to represent our opinions in Washington.

If we stop asking the kinds of questions that only big science can answer and concentrate only on the immediate, the pragmatic and the cheap, we will be impoverishing ourselves, choosing to look at the world with incurable shortsightedness. A society that stops trying to answer big questions goes into retrograde motion; and deprives itself of so much of the wonderment that comes from the search for answers.

Pyramids and cathedrals weren't cheap either, but they generated awe, knowledge and, yes, revenue. They still do. In our age, we have giant particle accelerators and space telescopes, our monuments erected to the pursuit of knowledge and its technological offspring. How far we go depends on how far we set our goals.

The ample bodies of the women are carved from a ruddy colored quartz; the samovar is of clear crystal.

"And they're sitting across from each other, there's a table between them, floating on the water," Nash continues. "It's made of petrified wood so that it looks like a wooden table."

The Konovalenko sculptures aren't studded with gems, like a Faberge egg — they are gems, big chunks of semiprecious stone.

In the 1950s, Konovalenko was a young set designer at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky ballet theater. He discovered gem carving when he had to make a malachite box as a prop for a ballet called The Stone Flower.

According to his widow, Anna, he fell in love with the art and began to use it in daring ways.

Konovalenko had his first big public exhibition in 1973, and people loved it, she says, except for a certain Communist Party official. "The main person of Communist Party of St. Petersburg ... became angry not to be invited to opening of exhibit, and he started to try to put my husband in jail," she says.

Among other things, she says, her husband was accused of making fun of the Soviet people.

Konovalenko was eventually forced to give his entire collection to the State Geological Museum and to take a job creating sculptures that were often given as gifts to visiting dignitaries.

In 1981, the Konovalenkos got a chance to immigrate to the United States, and they took it.

From then until his death in 1989, Konovalenko produced dozens of works, some 20 of which are now in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

For all their masterful workmanship and exquisite materials, the pieces are broad and bold, essentially caricatures of Russian types: Cossacks, drinkers, warriors and country folk — even a czar's henchman, who might have been a forerunner of the feared KGB.

Anna Konovalenko scoffs at the charge that the sculptor was making fun of his subjects.

"He was very interesting, very artistic person — like actor ... because everything [he did] he had in mind a certain person who [he] met during his lifetime," she says.

Nash, the Denver curator, says he thinks the result rises above folk art or caricature.

"I see it as fine art. There's no other way to interpret it. The genius of Konovalenko's gem carving is evident in each and every piece he created," he says.

Nash thinks Konovalenko's background in the theater contributed to the dynamic, theatrical quality of his pieces.

Nash and photographer Rick Wicker hope to document as many of the sculptures as possible in the United States and Russia for a book on Konovalenko's work.

After bad news about late 2012 — that the U.S. economy shrank a bit in the fourth quarter — there's modestly good news about early 2013:

Private employers added an estimated 192,000 jobs to their payrolls in January, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report. That would be above the estimated 185,000 jobs they added in December.

"Would be" are two key words in that sentence, by the way. ADP also said today that it has revised downward by 30,000 its estimate of job growth in December. It initially said employers added 215,000 jobs. So treat its January figure as a preliminary estimate.

We'll hear much more about the January employment picture on Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics is due to release its figures on the month's unemployment rate and payroll growth. Reuters says that economists expect BLS will say that public and private employers added 160,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate held steady at 7.8 percent. The BLS and ADP estimates on jobs are based on different surveys of employers, which partly explains why they do not quite match up — but do tend to agree on the general trend.

Ben also travels to Michigan, tracking the story from a different direction. He interviews a retired police officer (Brendan Gleeson) who worked on the bank-robbery case. Ben also pursues the ex-cop's daughter (Brit Marling), a law student who initially thinks the reporter has a romantic interest in her — perhaps because he sort of does.

A high-profile cast like this one can be a distraction, but Redford neatly uses the familiar faces to conjure the '70s. Old photos of some of them, including Redford with a mustache that can only be called groovy, instantly evoke the era. The technique recalls The Limey, a '90s film that used '60s footage of star Terence Stamp — and was scripted by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote this movie.

Films that take '70s revolutionaries seriously, common in Europe, are rare in the U.S. So it's no surprise when the personal ultimately trumps the political. The movie doesn't entirely dodge New Left views: Sarandon does a fine job with a speech in which Sharon expresses her willingness to do it all again, but "smarter."

But Sharon abandoned the clandestine life because of her kids, and Redford's '70s flashback ultimately becomes — like such predecessors as Running on Empty and German director Christian Petzold's The State I Am In — a parenting parable. There's even a hint of the stolen-kid thriller Gone Baby Gone in a fairly predictable plot twist.

Before settling into such comfortable territory, however, the movie is propulsive and involving. If The Company You Keep is far from radical, it's pretty audacious by the standards of counterrevolutionary Hollywood.

But among all the swooshing camera moves and hairline cuts and hypersaturated pops of color, there are actual actors giving wonderfully watchable performances. McAvoy plays Simon as a guy who's half lost lamb, half conniving fox, and even if you don't much care which side wins, he's fun to watch.

Yet Trance really belongs to Dawson and Cassel. When Dawson's Elizabeth steps onto the scene, you may be instantly convinced — without the aid of hypnosis, even — that she's surely the most effective hypnotist on the planet. She's an erotic, dangerous presence, with a voice that's a silky purr, soothing and persuasive — if she blew in your ear, you'd follow her anywhere.

And Cassel, who has proven his genius at playing complex baddies (in Jean-Francois Richet's Mesrine movies) and charming psychos (in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method), is a supremely romantic presence here. His Franck is no good, mind you, but there's a sea of longing behind the calculation in his eyes. Cassel carves warmth out of an ice block of coldness.

Boyle may be sleepwalking — speed-sleepwalking, maybe — through Trance. But he's awake and alive when it comes to knowing what his actors can do. They're the movie's humming current, delivering just the right jolts to make sure we're fully awake.

But Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at the University of Bristol involved in the research, says no one expected much when they set their computers to search through one hundred years of books that had been digitized by Google.

"We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time."

Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says. "The clarity of some of the patterns was surprising to all of us, I think."

With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says, the patterns are easy to see. "The '20s were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."

But then came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century.

"In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bentley says.

He found that interesting because the books the computers searched in the Google database included an incredibly wide range of topics. They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.

"It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books, and it's just kind of creeping in."

Which brings us to the most surprising finding of the study: We think of modern culture — and often ourselves — as more emotionally open than people in the past. We live in a world of reality television and blogs and Facebook — it feels like feelings are everywhere, displayed to a degree that they never were before. But according to this research, that's not so.

"Generally speaking, the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness and joy and anger and disgust and surprise.

In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.

So what does this tell us? Should we trust it? Could it be that our own sense of ourselves, and how emotionally open we are, is somehow wrong? Bentley says he has no explanation. "We were just so surprised at this result that we just wanted to publish it to show people," he says. "It's such a fascinating thing; I'm excited just to hear other people's interpretations of this data."

"Certainly the general strategy is a really promising way for us to think about emotions in history," says James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has also done language studies on big databases like this. But such analyses are complicated, he says, and it may still be "a little early to know" whether the use of emotional words has actually declined.

Still, Pennebaker thinks this method — mining vast amounts of written language — is incredibly promising.

For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally.

"One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."

For years, psychologists like Pennebaker have worried that self report does not always accurately reflect what's going on with someone, and physiological measures are hard to get.

That's why this language analysis seems so promising to him — as a new window that might offer a different, maybe even more objective, view into our culture. Because, he says, it's difficult for people today to guess the emotions of people of different times.

"Our current emotional state completely biases our memories of the past and our expectations for the future," Pennebaker says. "And, using these language samples, we are able to peg how people are feeling over time. That's what I love about it as a historical marker, so we can get a sense of how groups of people — or entire cultures — might have felt 10 years ago, or 100 years ago."

It's a kind of emotional archaeology, from traces left behind by words.

China's demand for natural resources is being felt in a big way in Cambodia.

Illegal logging and economic land concessions are threatening Cambodia's dwindling forests, which now echo the sound of chainsaws.

Prey Lang forest — an eight-hour journey north and east of the capital, Phnom Penh — is one of the forests where illegal loggers see money signs on the trees.

Supply And Demand

"It's just like in the United States in the 1960s, when every single redwood tree was a target for illegal logger[s]," says Suwanna Gauntlett, head of the Phnom Penh office of Wildlife Alliance. "It's the same thing in Cambodia. It's a natural resource worth a lot of money."

And many people with money — particularly China's growing middle class — are eager to spend it on luxury hardwood furniture, says Tracy Farrell of Conservation International.

"You also have the fact that other countries have been culling or reducing the extraction of their own luxury wood," Farrell says. "Thailand has been becoming much more strict about illegal wood leaking out of their country, so that puts the pressure on the countries that are less strict. ... Laos and Cambodia are really, really struggling."

Both Conservation International and Wildlife Alliance have been working with Cambodia's government to protect some forests. Those efforts have been hugely successful in slowing the rate of forest decline there, but without this protection, Gauntlett says, it would be a different case.

“ Six months — six to eight months. It'd [the forest] all be gone. It would be wiped out, believe me.

Within 10 days of Miguel Diaz-Canel's big promotion to vice president of Cuba in February, he was already being tapped as a stand-in for reticent, 81-year-old President Raul Castro. It was Diaz-Canel, not Raul or Fidel Castro, who gave Cuba's first public condolences when the communist government lost its best friend and benefactor, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

"We're saddened, but more determined than ever," Diaz-Canel said in a speech broadcast on national television. "Our tears will be worthless if they don't come with a commitment to carry on the beloved leader's vision."

Diaz-Canel's appointment makes him the designated successor to Fidel and Raul — and has put him on the Cuban equivalent of a media blitz. It's the first step in what appears to be a carefully orchestrated campaign to ready the island for an uncertain post-Castro future.

Relatively Young And Unconventional

Cubans are now wondering what sort of vision Diaz-Canel will have for their country. The island has been under the stern hand of Fidel and Raul Castro since 1959, and the vast majority of Cubans, like Diaz-Canel himself, have never lived under another leader.

“ He was known in Villa Clara because he used to sit down and drink beer and talk in the streets.

The shack's uneven and lumpy floor is made of hard-packed dirt. There is no indoor plumbing, and the nine residents shared a hole in the ground for their toilet.

"If it rains for like two or three days in a row, the water gets into my house," Keng, 39, says through an interpreter. "When it's flooded, the water level is high, above my ankle." Keng says her family had been living there for five years, and they were desperate to move to a better home.

But if they had walked into a regular bank in Cambodia, or just about any country in the world, and asked for a mortgage to buy a nicer house, executives mostly likely would have turned them away.

Keng and her husband both work. She makes and then sells rice soup at a street stall, while her husband sells clothes at another stall. But they don't meet one of the crucial requirements for getting a mortgage: They don't receive salary slips or other financial documents, so they don't have what bankers call "verifiable income."

Late last year, Keng heard about an unusual bank called First Finance, which was designed specifically to give mortgages to low-income people like her. She and her family could already imagine the new home they wanted to buy: a two-story house with indoor plumbing. It would cost about $20,000.

"I have always wanted to live in a nice, beautiful house, but with my business, with my small, very small business like this, I never expected I can afford to buy a house," Keng says.

A New Kind Of Bank For A Changing Country

The First Finance mortgage program in Cambodia was the brainchild of Talmage Payne, a 45-year-old American. His parents worked as eye doctors in Nigeria, so he grew up wanting to help low-income people in poor countries. When Payne graduated from college in the early 1990s, he moved to Cambodia to work with the refugees of the fighting between the government and Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

There were 158,000 more jobs on private employers' payrolls in March than in February, the latest ADP National Employment Report estimates.

The gain was less than economists expected, Reuters reports. They thought ADP would say there had been a 200,000-jobs increase.

Along with the data from last month, ADP also revised its figures for February and January. There was good and bad news in those changes:

— "February's [previously reported] gain of 198,000 jobs was revised up by 39,000 to 237,000."

— "January's [previously reported] 215,000 gain was revised down by 38,000 to 177,000."

Get recipes for Reata's Jalapeno-Cheddar Grits, Southern Shrimp And Grits, Pecan Grits Pie, Jen's Copycat Georgia Grits And Bits Pancakes (Or Waffles) and (above) Bacon And Cheddar Cheese Grits Casserole.

Adding some details to an initiative he announced during his latest State of the Union address, President Obama on Tuesday said that federal agencies plan to spend $100 million to jump start an effort to map the human brain. It's research that could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment and prevention of brain disorders.

As All Things Considered has reported:

Successful government research, Obama noted during Tuesday morning's White House announcement, has "changed our lives in ways we could never imagine" — leading to the development of computer chips, global positioning technology, the Internet and other technologies.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is "the next great American project," Obama said.

He predicted the knowledge gained in the project "will be transformative."

"We have the chance to improve the lives of not just millions, but billions of people," the president added.

According to the White House, the president's 2014 budget will include about $100 million of research done by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Science Foundation.

All Things Considered plans to have more on the BRAIN project later today. Click here to find an NPR station that broadcasts or streams the show.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein ruled Monday on the most important question facing Stockton, Calif. — whether it could enter into federal bankruptcy protection.

Klein agreed that the city is, in fact, broke.

But he didn't decide the question of whether the city must renegotiate its pension obligations, as some of its creditors had hoped.

"He did put off for another day the question of whether the pension holders would have to be part of any debt reduction solution," says Robert G. Flanders Jr., who was the state receiver appointed to oversee the troubled finances of Central Falls, R.I.

It's possible that, as Stockton draws up its plans for getting its financial house back in order, it will revisit its pension obligations, though the city has been reluctant to do so.

Klein did not force the city's hand in this regard, though he made it clear this could remain an issue going forward.

"The pension question may be presented in a number of different ways," says James Spiotto, a municipal bankruptcy attorney in Chicago. "Why rule on something you don't absolutely have to rule on?"

Millions At Stake

Like many other cities, counties and states, Stockton's pension fund is millions of dollars in the hole. Typically, pension obligations have been held sacrosanct, even as bondholders and other creditors lose money in bankruptcy proceedings.

As is the case with most other California localities, Stockton's pensions are managed by the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the country.

Gone Bust

The biggest municipal Chapter 9 bankruptcies in the U.S., and the approximate debt.

Jefferson County, Ala. (filed 2011) — $4,200,000,000

Orange County, Calif. (filed 1994) — $1,974,000,000

Stockton, Calif. (filed 2012) — $1,032,000,000

San Bernardino, Calif. (filed 2012) — $492,000,000

Vallejo, Calif. (filed 2008) — $175,000,000

— James Spiotto of Chapman and Cutler LLC

President Obama is trying to regain some traction for federal gun control measures by visiting states that are moving forward on their own.

On Wednesday, the president speaks in Colorado, where lawmakers recently passed a series of bills requiring background checks for all gun purchases and limiting the size of ammunition clips.

Obama would like to see similar measures adopted nationwide. But if Colorado serves as an inspiration for the president, it also provides a cautionary tale.

The Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., has re-opened with a new name and a new supply of action flicks. But residents here haven't forgotten last summer's massacre, in which a gunman opened fire during a late-night screening of a Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding nearly 60 others.

This week, prosecutors announced plans to seek the death penalty for the alleged gunman James Holmes. Colorado lawmakers also responded to the shooting with new gun control laws.

State lawmaker Rhonda Fields represents the Aurora neighborhood where the movie shooting took place.

"I could only imagine what it was like sitting in that theater, about ready to see something that you were anticipating and then, you know, it's just a life-changing event," she says.

The Aurora shooting also re-opened personal wounds for Fields. Seven years earlier, her son was shot to death, shortly after he graduated from Colorado State University.

"His car and him and his fianc were riddled with an assault rifle. So I understand the violence and how murder is just a horrible thing when someone is suddenly taken away from you," she says.

Fields became an advocate for gun control. And this year she found plenty of company in Colorado's Democratic House and Senate. The Senate president says lawmakers were "forced" to act after the mass shootings in Aurora and later at a Connecticut elementary school.

President Obama has been counting on that same public outrage to advance gun control bills nationwide.

"This is our best chance in more than a decade to take common-sense steps that will save lives," he said at the White House last week.

Obama warned that even though polls show strong support for universal background checks and other gun control measures, they face powerful opposition from the gun lobby.

That's also true here in Colorado, where Dudley Brown runs an organization called Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. His office in the small town of Windsor is located near a river named for the gunpowder French trappers once stored there.

"This is a very western state with traditional western values," he says. "And citizens had to have firearms for self defense and right now that's still the case."

Brown complains universal background checks are just a step towards identifying gun owners so the government can seize their weapons, and he calls the 15-bullet limit on ammunition clips arbitrary. He's promising political payback in next year's election that could cost Colorado Democrats their majorities.

"I liken it to the proverbial hunting season," Brown says. "We tell gun owners, there's a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats."

Similar threats have had a powerful effect in Washington, where universal background checks now face an uphill battle. Here in Colorado, state Representative Fields says she has no regrets.

"I just feel like it was the right thing to do," she says. It was the right thing to do for public safety. And if I get recalled because of it, I still think that I was on the right side of history."

Fields says she has a message for the president and Congress: Don't give up.

Tina Brown, editor of the Daily Beast and Newsweek, joins NPR's Steve Inskeep again for an occasional feature Morning Edition likes to call Word of Mouth. She tells us what she's been reading and gives us recommendations.

This month, as Brown prepares for her annual Women of the World Summit in New York City, her reading suggestions address just that: the role of women in the developing world.

The Two-Way

Malala, Pakistani Teen Shot For Demanding An Education, Heads To School In U.K.

It being the start of baseball season, that means we've been inundated by predictions — who'll win the divisions and the pennants and the World Series? We know two things on this subject. In every sport, at the start of the season, the experts are bound and determined to make these long-range predictions. And second, they are invariably wrong.

In baseball, there is always one other long-term prediction, namely that baseball is dying. The non-baseball experts have been bleating this for years, because, they say, baseball is too slow and doesn't appeal to young people. Of course, the young people it wasn't supposed to appeal to when baseball first allegedly started dying are now old people buying tickets and taking young people to games, but so it goes.

In fact, yes, baseball is too slow for its own good — please, make the pitcher pitch! — and yes, baseball lacks the appealing lyric brutality of football, but its very deliberate, cerebral nature quite fascinates a significant enough population. All the back-and-forth games — football, soccer, basketball, hockey and so forth — are quick studies. Baseball takes more work to appreciate. And all right, yes, the sappy father-and-son baseball poetry has been beaten to death. Still, baseball is more family-style. Hey, it's the good old summertime. It's every day, not life-and-death. Baseball's simply more comfortable than other sports, and for a lot of people, that ain't so bad.

The larger point, I believe, is that by now all our popular team games are so deeply ingrained in our culture that they're here to stay for as far as the eye can see. Look at hockey. No matter how many times the owners call off the season, hockey fans come crawling back on their knees, smiles on their faces, more loyal than ever.

The Picture Show

Finding Beauty In A Baseball, After The Last Pitch

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first U.N. treaty to regulate the estimated $60 billion global arms trade on Tuesday.

The goal of the Arms Trade Treaty, which the U.N. has sought for over a decade according to the Associated Press, is to keep illicit weapons out of the hands of terrorists, insurgent fighters and organized crime.

The vote on the treaty was 154 to 3, with 23 abstentions.

Iran, Syria and North Korea voted against the treaty, the same three nations that blocked the treaty's adoption at a negotiating conference last Thursday.

The 23 countries that abstained included a handful of Latin American nations, as well as Russia, one of the largest arms exporters. Russian envoy to the United Nations Vitaly I. Churkin said his country had misgivings about what he called ambiguities in the treaty, reports the Times, including how terms like genocide would be defined.

The New York Times had more detail on the treaty:

"The treaty would require states exporting conventional weapons to develop criteria that would link exports to avoiding human-rights abuses, terrorism and organized crime. It would also ban shipments if they were deemed harmful to women and children. Countries that join the treaty would have to report publicly on sales every year, exposing the process to levels of transparency that rights groups hope will strictly limit illicit weapons deals."

New York State Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat, was led from his Queens home in handcuffs Tuesday morning after being arrested for allegedly trying to buy his way on to the Republican ticket in this year's New York City mayoral election.

Also arrested Tuesday: City Councilman Daniel Halloran, a Republican, and four other local politicians (also Republicans) from the New York metropolitan area, who stand accused of conspiring with Smith.

The New York Times writes that:

According to New York's Daily News, Halloran was to allegedly receive $20,500 in exchange for supporting Smith's bid for the GOP nomination, while two other officials were to allegedly receive "$40,000 in bribes with a promise of $40,000 more."

The state senator's lawyer, Gerald Shargel, tells the Times that Smith "is a dedicated and highly respected public servant and he steadfastly denies these charges."

The 56-year-old Smith, according to his official biography, first won election to the state senate in 2000. He was the state senate's president pro tempore when Democrats controlled the chamber in 2008-10. In recent years, though, he has often been at odds with his fellow Democrats.

Current Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) is prevented from seeking a fourth term. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is thought to be the leading contender for the Democratic nomination. The Republican frontrunner, according to the Daily News, is Joe Lhota. He was a deputy mayor during the administration of Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Tesla Motors, the car company on a mission to change the auto industry, announced late Sunday that it's finally turning a profit this quarter.

The company said it will deliver 4,750 of its flagship Model S, its much-lauded four-door, luxury sports sedan. That amount exceeds its earlier estimates of 4,500 cars sold this quarter.

This is good news for the freshman carmaker, whose profits some posited might have been negatively affected by a harsh review in the New York Times, a review Tesla CEO Elon Musk said was full of lies.

In a cryptic followup tweet to the announcement, Musk also said the company will have big news Tuesday:

To be clear, Tesla is in California, so it is not April Fool's yet! Also, some may differ, but imo the Tues news is arguably more important.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2013

A decision by India's Supreme Court to reject Novartis AG's bid to patent a version of one cancer drug could lead to more exports of cheap medicine from that country to "poor people across the developing world," the BBC writes.

NPR's Julie McCarthy tells our Newscast Desk that the ruling, announced Monday, ends a six-year legal battle that has been closely watched by pharmaceutical firms, humanitarian aid organizations and generic drug manufacturers.

She adds that:

"The case highlights the cost difference between foreign pharmaceutical firms looking to protect their investments and local generic competitors copying and selling drugs for a fraction of their original cost. Novartis' drug, known as Glivec, was a breakthrough treatment in the 1990s for leukemia. It costs about $2,500 a month. The generic version: a couple hundred dollars. When the Swiss drug-maker sought a new patent, Indian officials said it was not changed enough to qualify as a new drug."

Last year, a federal program called the Earned Income Tax Credit took about $60 billion from wealthier Americans and gave it to the working poor. And here's the surprising thing: This redistribution of wealth has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

"This program worked," says Richard Burkhauser, an economist at Cornell University and the American Enterprise Institute. "And there's not a hell of a lot of these programs where you can see the tremendous change in the behavior of people in exactly the way that all of us hoped it would happen."

When he says it worked, he means it helped single mothers on welfare find work and get out of poverty.

In the 1930s, in the early days of welfare, many of the women who received it were widows. Americans didn't think single mothers should have to work, so the government paid them to stay home. But by the '90s, the idea of paying people not to work seemed backwards to many Americans. If moms want to get paid, many thought, they should get a job.

The Earned Income Tax Credit started as a small program in the 1970s and was expanded under President Reagan. But it was President Clinton who turned the program into what it is today — one that effectively gives low-wage working parents a big bonus. For some workers making around $15,000 a year, that bonus can now reach nearly $6,000. As the name suggests, the money is paid out like a tax refund, when workers file their income taxes.

Mirian Ochoa was on food stamps, in debt from a divorce and caring for a son in special ed. On her long commute to work, she remembers going past McDonald's every day and smelling the french fries but telling herself, "You have to say no, because I have to pay my rent."

The first year she got the credit, Ochoa received $3,000. Over the years, she says, the credit allowed her to pay off debts, get an associate's degree in accounting, get off of food stamps, and move to a better school district for her son. "I found an apartment there, and I changed my son's life," she says.

This gets to one feature of the credit that economists love — something that goes back to Milton Friedman, one of the most influential conservative economists of the 20th century. He argued that, rather than creating lots of targeted programs for poor people, the government should simply give them money and let them decide how to spend it — even if, like Mirian Ochoa, they sometimes spend $1,000 to take their son to Disney World and Universal Studios.

Her son's favorite part was the Incredible Hulk roller coaster. "He's small, little fat boy, and running and saying, 'Mother, come with me, do the ride,' " she says. I say 'No, it's too much, I cannot do it. But go! Go!' "

To Ochoa, this was money well-spent. Her ex-husband had promised the trip to her son but never came through. And she says taking him was a key moment in his life. Now he's in college, studying graphic design in Orlando, Fla.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is not perfect. It doesn't help people who can't get work. Some people game the system. Others are eligible but never collect. But while most programs to help the poor are constantly under the magnifying glass, this one has expanded every decade since the 1970s. Encouraging poor people to work and giving them a boost for keeping at it remains relatively uncontroversial. For now.

Last month, we reported on a company called ReDigi that's basically a digital version of a used record store. You can sell them your old mp3s, and you can buy "used" mp3s that other people have sold.

Capitol Records sued ReDigi for copyright infringement. Their complaint alleged that "ReDigi makes and assists its users in making systematic, repeated and unauthorized reproductions and distributions of Plaintiffs copyrighted sound recordings."

ReDigi argued that what it does is perfectly legal under the "first sale" doctrine.

The company says that you own the songs, and you should be able to resell them just like you can a physical CD. It says its technology can ensure compliance with copyright law, first by verifying that you legally own a song, and then by removing all traces of the song from your computer and synced devices once you decide to sell it.

A judge in New York disagreed. He just ruled in favor of Capitol:

The novel question presented in this action is whether a digital music file, lawfully made and purchased, may be resold by its owner through ReDigi under the first sale doctrine. The Court determines that it cannot.

...the Court concludes that ReDigi's service infringes Capitol's reproduction rights under any description of the technology. ReDigi stresses that it "migrates" a file from a user's computer to its Cloud Locker, so that the same file is transferred to the ReDigi server and no copying occurs. However, even if that were the case, the fact that a file has moved from one material object – the user's computer – to another – the ReDigi server – means that a reproduction has occurred. Similarly, when a ReDigi user downloads a new purchase from the ReDigi website to her computer, yet another reproduction is created. It is beside the point that the original phonorecord no longer exists. It matters only that a new phonorecord has been created.

A small herd of European bison will soon be released in Germany's most densely populated state, the first time in nearly three centuries that these bison — known as wisents — will roam freely in Western Europe.

The project is the brainchild of Prince Richard of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. He owns more than 30,000 acres, much of it covered in Norwegian spruce and beech trees in North Rhine-Westphalia.

For the 78-year-old logging magnate, the planned April release of the bull, five cows and two calves will fulfill a decade-old dream.

But the aristocrat's neighbors aren't all thrilled about his plan to release wisents, which have been living in an enclosure on his property for three years. They are slightly taller than their American cousins and weigh up to a ton. Questions remain about who will foot the bill if the European bison damage property or injure someone.

"We were skeptical because we weren't given enough information," says Helmut Dreisbach, a cattle farmer and vice chairman of the Farmers' Association of Siegen-Wittgenstein. "How will the animals react? Will they stay in a particular area or will they move onto working farmland?"

Enlarge image i

But Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at the University of Bristol involved in the research, says that no one expected much when they set their computers to search through one hundred years of books that had been digitized by Google.

"We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time."

Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says. "The clarity of some of the patterns was surprising to all of us, I think."

With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says the patterns are easy to see. "The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."

But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century.

"In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.

Which he found interesting, because the books the computers searched in the Google database included an incredibly wide range of topics. They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.

"It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression, and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books and it's just kind of creeping in."

Which brings us to the most surprising finding of the study: We think of modern culture — and often ourselves — as more emotionally open than people in the past. We live in a world of reality television and blogs and Facebook — it feels like feelings are everywhere, displayed to a degree that they never were before. But according to this research, that's not so.

"Generally speaking the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness, and joy, and anger, and disgust and surprise.

In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.

So what does this tell us? Should we trust it? Could it be that our own sense of ourselves, and how emotionally open we are, is somehow wrong? Bentley says he has no explanation. "We were just so surprised at this result that we just wanted to publish it to show people," he says. "It's such a fascinating thing; I'm excited just to hear other people's interpretations of this data."

"Certainly the general strategy is a really promising way for us to think about emotions in history," says James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who has also done language studies on big databases like this. But such analyses are complicated, he says, and it may still be "a little early to know" whether the use of emotional words has actually declined.

Still, Pennebaker believes that this method — mining vast amounts of written language — is incredibly promising.

For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally.

"One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."

For years, psychologists like Pennebaker have worried that self report does not always accurately reflect what's going on with someone, and physiological measures are hard to get.

That's why this language analysis seems so promising to him – as a new window that might offer a different, maybe even more objective, view into our culture. Because, he says, it's difficult for people today to guess the emotions of people of different times.

"Our current emotional state completely biases our memories of the past and our expectations for the future," Pennebaker says. "And, using these language samples, we are able to peg how people are feeling over time. That's what I love about it as a historical marker. So we can get a sense of how groups of people— or entire cultures — might have felt ten years ago, or 100 years ago."

A kind of emotional archaeology, from traces left behind by words.

Tesla Motors, the car company on a mission to change the auto industry, announced late Sunday that it's finally turning a profit this quarter.

The company said it will deliver 4,750 of its flagship Model S, its much-lauded four-door, luxury sports sedan. That amount exceeds its earlier estimates of 4,500 cars sold this quarter.

This is good news for the freshman carmaker, whose profits some posited might have been negatively affected by a harsh review in the New York Times, a review Tesla CEO Elon Musk said was full of lies.

In a cryptic followup tweet to the announcement, Musk also said the company will have big news Tuesday:

To be clear, Tesla is in California, so it is not April Fool's yet! Also, some may differ, but imo the Tues news is arguably more important.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2013

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

Research from scholars at Aberystwyth University in the U.K. suggests that William Shakespeare was prosecuted for evading taxes and for hoarding grain during a famine and then reselling it at inflated prices. Jayne Archer, A co-author of the study, told The Sunday Times [paywall protected] that "there was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others' expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them." As many have pointed out, this gives new meaning to those lines from Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain."

A new biography of Derrida asks, "What would a biography of Jacques Derrida have to look like to be a Derridean biography?" File under: questions best left unanswered.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about Thomas Pynchon's novel V. for The New Yorker: "I advocate surrender to Pynchon; letting your mind toss on the wild currents of his language is a lot more enjoyable than treating his novels like puzzles, wondering where the pieces fit: Who is Rachel Owlglass? Why are we in Egypt?"

Proust's notebooks capture his exacting self-editing process.

Half of a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie complained about V.S. Naipaul to the London Evening Standard: "I've become very tired of this nonsense where he's supposed to be the best writer in the world. ... God bless him, I wish him well, but I think that just because you're an old man who's nasty doesn't mean that we shouldn't actually take your work apart." Her words weren't quite as cutting as those of Derek Walcott in his poem "The Mongoose": "I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is the story of the many lives of Ursula Todd, an Englishwoman who dies in dozens of ways in this inventive novel. It also made NPR's Scott Simon cry.

James Salter, as Katie Roiphe recently pointed out in Slate, is a literary powerhouse who very few people have heard of. His latest novel, All That Is, about a WWII veteran who returns home, just might fix that.

Interview Highlights

On his decision to take a role in Trance

"I got about 15 or 20 pages in, and I started to sense that something else was coming in the character and then something else did come. And then about every 10 pages, something else came. Until at the end, I was hunching at the bit, as we say in Scotland. ... It just means I was desperate ... I was hungry to play this part."

On his Olivier-nominated title role in a London revival of Macbeth

"Yeah, the Olivier Awards! We also got nominated for best revival. Go team! And we are over the moon, we are so proud.

"When I kick a door and I run on the stage, it's easy from that moment, but right now I'm sitting here going, 'How am I gonna do this tonight?' I feel like that quite a lot. But I probably find it more difficult doing this Macbeth than any of the action movies I've ever done.

"I've never been injured on an action movie. I've been injured playing this guy so much more than any action movie I've been on. ... Different things [happen] every night. Just as soon as I make myself safe by going, 'I won't do that again cause then I get a sword in my face,' something else happens and I put my shoulder out.

"We've all suffered in the cast. There's 15 of us in the cast, and we're all down to physio like twice a week having to get sports massages and all that, but that's kind of the joy of it. We've got a really brave, bold, violent, in-your-face scary production, and it's the kind of Macbeth I've always wanted to be in."

On his childhood in Glasgow

"I was brought up by my grandparents, so people go, 'Oh what was that like? That must have been hard!' And you go, 'No. It was just completely normal' because the new norm seems to be whatever you make of it, doesn't it? I grew up in a council estate called Drumchapel. I think you guys call them projects? ... I lived there until I was about 19.

"It's not like, I'm not doing it down; I love Drumchapel and I go back all the time but, yeah, it's not posh, do you know what I mean? And there are certainly rough aspects to it.

"I got my first professional acting gig when I was about 19. I went south during the summer vacation from college, and I did this production of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, but when I came back to my grandparents' house, they'd completely thrown out all of my stuff and redecorated my bedroom. So I moved out five days later. ... They maintain that they were gonna try and make me move out, but I took it that it was time to go."

On how he almost became a Catholic missionary

"About the age of 15 or so I did consider it, and specifically not just any old priest, I considered being a missionary, 'cause I thought the whole great romantic idea of going off to far-flung regions, and helping people and trying to do all that was not only a good thing to do and romantic thing to do, but quite an adventurous thing to do.

"So I thought about that, but then I did start getting more luck with girls about that time, and that sort of put the kibosh on wedding myself to God."

"Girls and adventure, and then acting kind of came along right at that moment as well, and so I am so, so thankful, especially since I turned my back on God, he has not punished me, thank you very much."

On what his grandparents think about his career

"They're proud as punch. They're besides themselves at times, and I love that, I really do love that.

"Because I do remember, they were amazing when I was growing up. They would support me in anything I would do. They wouldn't perhaps do it with the conviction and enthusiasm that would make me believe that I thought that they thought that I had any talent, or that I deserved my place in the world as an actor.

"You know, they never told me, 'You can be whatever that you want to be' because I think they felt — and I feel — that that's a lie, nobody can be whatever they want to be. No kid can do whatever they want to do. It's a total lie, but they have the right to try to do whatever they want to do. That's their right, to aim to do whatever they want to do. And you know what? Life might kick you in the face, life might not let you do what you want to do, but they always taught me that, you know, 'Go for it! Yeah, you wanna do that? Go for it, son, you've gotta do it.'

"And that was really actually empowering because from a very early age I knew that, you know, that life was risky but you gotta take those risks."

On his remarkably successful career

"I don't know what I thought it was gonna be. Honest to God, I did a movie and a couple of little TV shows when I was 16, didn't do anything again, got into drama school. Then I started working pretty much immediately after drama school. I wasn't really aware of what was going on, and I still hadn't really decided that I was an actor. I hadn't sort of said to myself 'Right, this is the rest of my life,' because you can't, because they is still a big massive part of me saying, 'What if the work dries up tomorrow? Then I'm not an actor anymore,' you know?

So it wasn't really until probably making The Last King of Scotland in Uganda, going to one of those exotic places, going to one of those incredible other places, and really getting in — that was probably the moment when I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm actually doing this. I'm actually doing what it is that I was keen to do when I was 15 or 16, not necessarily being an actor, but I'm having the life that I kind of hoped I might have at one time. ... I thought, right, I better start treating this more seriously, not that I didn't treat the work seriously but I didn't really regard myself as someone who deserved my place in the industry.

Also that whole thing of people going, 'Your background doesn't suggest that you would make it here.' You look around and every single person, nearly every single person, anyway, is from a similar background. They're all from places, unlikely sources. Do you know what I mean? And that gave me great comfort, and I do feel like I have a place here, and at least I deserve it as much as anybody else, hopefully."

Maya Angelou has lived a life so expansive and extraordinary that, even after seven autobiographies, she still has more stories to tell. Her latest book, Mom & Me & Mom, explores her relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter. When Angelou was young, Baxter sent Angelou and her brother away to be raised by their grandmother; years later, she called them back to live with her again, the start of a sometimes fractious but eventually loving relationship.

Angelou says her familial relationships, particularly with her mother, have been crucial in defining her life. "I'm Maya Angelou — whatever that means to whomever it means — because my mother loved me, and my grandmother loved me, and my brother loved me," she says. "And they all told me I could do whatever I wanted to do."

Angelou has carried that tradition of strong familial bonds forward, saying, "I just really want to say that I dedicate this book to my son, who's the bravest, most courageous and most generous man I've ever known. My son, Guy Bailey Johnson."

Angelou joins NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about her reunion with her mother, a memorable mother-daughter confrontation and her career as a dancer.

There might be a prettier voice in the world than Aaron Neville's, but if there is, it belongs to a bird, and there's no way that bird looks as good in a leather jacket. Neville has sung duets with Aretha Franklin, has a bridge in India named after him, and has had his voice prescribed by British social workers to help people with depression. He has a new album called My True Story.

One of Neville's big hits was "Don't Know Much," so we've invited him to play a game called "I Do Know Much!" Three questions about Jeopardy! champions.

Nelson Mandela is breathing "without difficulty" after having a procedure to clear fluid in his lung area that was caused by pneumonia, the spokesman for South Africa's president said Saturday.

Mandela, the 94-year-old former president and anti-apartheid leader, had a recurrence of pneumonia, said presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj. South African officials had previously not specified that Mandela had pneumonia, saying instead that he had a lung infection.

Mandela's medical team reported that the increasingly frail ex-leader "had developed a pleural effusion which was tapped," Zuma's office said in a statement. "This has resulted in him now being able to breathe without difficulty. He continues to respond to treatment and is comfortable."

The president's office thanked all who have prayed for Mandela and his family and have sent messages of support.

Mandela was admitted to a hospital near midnight Wednesday night in the capital, Pretoria. It was his third trip to a hospital since December, when he was treated for a lung infection and also had a procedure to remove gallstones. Earlier this month, he spent a night in a hospital for what officials said was a scheduled medical test.

Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994 after elections were held, bringing an end to the system of white racist rule known as apartheid. He had spent 27 years in prison under the apartheid regime and after his release in 1990 was widely credited with averting even greater bloodshed by helping the country in the transition to democratic rule.

A final deal on an immigration overhaul is at hand but still incomplete, according to two of the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" senators collaborating on it.

On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona discussed a new agreement on a low-skilled worker program as a positive sign of progress, but both said there is more to be done.

That basic agreement was brokered Friday night between AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief Tom Donohue, clearing one of the last — and perhaps largest — hurdles between the Gang of Eight and a concrete immigration bill.

"We're much closer with labor and business agreeing on this guest-worker plan," Flake said. "But that doesn't mean we've crossed every 'I' or dotted every 'T' or vice versa."

The debate between the AFL-CIO and the Chamber had centered on wages for workers in the hotel, food service and construction industries, among others. "With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved," Schumer said.

But Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida was more cautious with his optimism, as The Washington Post reports, calling the deal "premature."

"In order to succeed, this process cannot be rushed or done in secret," said Rubio in a statement issued on Sunday.

Over the weekend, Rubio also sent a letter to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, asking that the committee take its time with the bill's markup.

The Associated Press cited an AFL-CIO fact sheet to describe the new "W" visa worker program, set to go into effect in April of 2015.

"In year one of the program, 20,000 workers would be allowed in; in year two, 35,000; in year three, 55,000; and in year four, 75,000. Ultimately the program would be capped at 200,000 workers a year, but the number of visas would fluctuate, depending on unemployment rates, job openings, employer demand and data collected by a new federal bureau pushed by the labor movement as an objective monitor of the market. One-third of all visas in any year would go to businesses with under 25 workers.

"A 'safety valve' would allow employers to exceed the cap if they can show need and pay premium wages, but any additional workers brought in would be subtracted from the following year's cap.

"The workers could move from employer to employer and would be able to petition for permanent residency after a year, and ultimately seek U.S. citizenship. Neither is possible for temporary workers now."

In Italy, there are no Easter egg hunts, no marshmallow Peeps and definitely no jelly beans.

Instead, there are chocolate eggs — massive, elaborately decorated, beautifully wrapped chocolate Easter eggs that now fill shop windows across the country. The sweet treats are considered Italians' food gift of choice at this time of year. And each one comes with a surprise tucked inside.

"You want something that really gives a big effect," says Rome-based food writer Elizabeth Minchilli.

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