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In 1998, John Curtis and David Wikiera adopted a son from Vietnam and named him John Wikiera.

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The president's $3.77 trillion fiscal 2014 budget plan is expansive. But the part getting the most attention is his proposal to change the way the government calculates inflation using a measure known in economics-speak as chained CPI.

Following Script: Much of the initial reaction was predictable. Liberal Democrats hate the idea, because it amounts to a gradual cut in Social Security benefits over time. President Obama made it very clear in his remarks that these were "ideas championed by Republican leaders in Congress."

"I don't believe that all these ideas are optimal, but I am willing to accept them as a compromise," Obama added, after releasing his budget proposal on Wednesday.

As expected, many Republicans praised the president's willingness to go there. In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., described it as "an olive branch."

And the response was similarly positive from Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "He's putting a Democratic third-rail issue on the table," said King. "It could be the basis for the beginning of the process."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, even implied the president wasn't going far enough, describing chained CPI and the president's proposed trims to Medicare as "modest reforms."

Out Of Left Field: So, it was a bit of a surprise when the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — charged with getting Republicans elected to the House — blasted the president's plan as hurtful to the elderly.

"His budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

He went on to describe the president as "trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors, and I just think it's not the right way to go."

It's All Politics

On Message: Budget Votes May Matter ... In 2014

Let us now ponder the exquisite status of Tiger Woods, who has clawed back to the top of the charts thereby to proclaim, with the help of his Nike mouthpiece, that his ragged and raw past few years never really happened because — ta-da –– as his ad says: "Winning takes care of everything."

And yes, indeed, he is No. 1 in the rankings again. And, too, he has a beautiful new girlfriend, although, of course, I will not mention her name here, so as not to be a member of what he calls the "stalkerazzi."

And yet, that is why his position is so much more intriguing than ever. Really, you see, Tiger only stands perched at the juncture of exhilaration and peril.

We do so love comebacks. In recent years it's even become de rigueur in many sports to anoint the "Comeback Player of the Year," along with MVPs and other top dogs. Comebacks are official now.

For some reason we proclaim the nonsense that there are no second acts in American lives, but, in contradiction, we live by the studied belief that we are a nation of second chances. Not comeback kids, but comeback grown-ups.

In a real sense, though, Tiger has set himself up for greater possible frustration –– for, in his sport, being No. 1 is really secondary. It's like a team winning the regular season but failing in the playoffs.

No, in golf, winning one of the four major tournaments is the accepted measure of greatness –– all the more so for Woods, who has not won a major in almost five years, and whose sublime goal was to win the most majors ever.

How tantalizing it must be for him at this moment. He comes to the Masters, to a familiar course that suits him, hot and confident. Perfect.

The Two-Way

Tiger Woods Back On Top: Bay Hill Win Catapults Him To No. 1

Get recipes for Preserved Lemons, Chicken With Preserved Lemon And Green Olives, Root Vegetable Couscous With Preserved Lemon and Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette.

The president's $3.77 trillion fiscal 2014 budget plan is expansive. But the part getting the most attention is his proposal to change the way the government calculates inflation using a measure known in economics-speak as chained CPI.

Following Script: Much of the initial reaction was predictable. Liberal Democrats hate the idea, because it amounts to a gradual cut in Social Security benefits over time. President Obama made it very clear in his remarks that these were "ideas championed by Republican leaders in Congress."

"I don't believe that all these ideas are optimal, but I am willing to accept them as a compromise," Obama added, after releasing his budget proposal on Wednesday.

As expected, many Republicans praised the president's willingness to go there. In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., described it as "an olive branch."

And the response was similarly positive from Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "He's putting a Democratic third-rail issue on the table," said King. "It could be the basis for the beginning of the process."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, even implied the president wasn't going far enough, describing chained CPI and the president's proposed trims to Medicare as "modest reforms."

Out Of Left Field: So, it was a bit of a surprise when the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — charged with getting Republicans elected to the House — blasted the president's plan as hurtful to the elderly.

"His budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

He went on to describe the president as "trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors, and I just think it's not the right way to go."

It's All Politics

On Message: Budget Votes May Matter ... In 2014

The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting in the Democratic stronghold of Hollywood this week — part of an effort to broaden the party's appeal.

So far, there are sharp divisions among RNC delegates about the future direction of the GOP. But there's general agreement that the party isn't effectively communicating its message.

At a sometimes raucous afternoon meeting Wednesday, speaker after speaker walked up to the microphone and made pleas about the future of the GOP. "We need to multiply, not divide," one said. Another urged the party to be more welcoming to newcomers.

When it was Ada Fisher's turn, she had a very pointed message: "Look around the room. There are only three of us who are black in this room."

During an interview after the meeting adjourned, Fisher, North Carolina's national committeewoman, brought it up again. She said one of the biggest problems with the Republican Party today is that it's letting everyone else define it.

Fisher said historically the GOP had a strong record on civil rights, and it should highlight that. But she says Republicans today also shouldn't compromise on their core principles.

"I don't want the party to be 'Democratic lite' — to try to emulate everything that the Democrats have done," she said. "We have to stand for something. We stand for individual responsibility. We stand for free enterprise. We live for these kind of things."

Becoming "Democratic lite" is a prominent concern being uttered during breaks in the halls and in closed-door strategy sessions in Hollywood this week. The spring meeting is the first major gathering of party activists since RNC Chairman Reince Priebus unveiled his harsh post-game assessment of the 2012 election.

Priebus' "Growth and Opportunity" report calls for expanding the GOP's tent to include more women and minorities, and to be more inclusive of gays and lesbians. Several prominent social conservative groups sent Priebus a harshly worded letter this week saying Republicans owe many of their successes to faith-based values voters. And they threatened to leave the party.

It's safe to say Priebus also irritated some people here.

"It's a little bit taking it on the chin for the Romney campaign. The Romney campaign fumbled the ball, I think, and so give credit to Reince for kind of taking it on the chin for them," said Curly Haugland, an RNC national committeeman from North Dakota.

"We don't need to single out a particular ethnic group or a particular voting bloc and try to do a focus-group-tested message, we just need to be honest about our principles and stand behind them," Haugland added.

The Priebus report cites focus groups calling the GOP "out of touch" and "the party of stuffy old men."

"I'm an older woman, but I'm not stuffy," said Linda Ackerman, an RNC delegate from California. "I honestly do not understand why people think that the Republicans are the country club people, the wealthy people. I can tell you, I'm an average American."

Ackerman says her son is unemployed. She's a manager at a water utility in Orange County.

Orange County was once one of the country's biggest Republican strongholds, but Democrats have made some gains there lately.

"The demographics — obviously they're changing dramatically, and again I think we did not keep up with how quickly things were changing," Ackerman said.

To win in Orange County or anywhere else, Ackerman said, Republicans are going to have to bring their message into communities they may not have traditionally been in, even if it's uncomfortable for some.

In 1998, John Curtis and David Wikeira adopted a son from Vietnam and named him John Wikeira.

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The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting in the Democratic stronghold of Hollywood this week — part of an effort to broaden the party's appeal.

So far, there are sharp divisions among RNC delegates about the future direction of the GOP. But there's general agreement that the party isn't effectively communicating its message.

At a sometimes raucous afternoon meeting Wednesday, speaker after speaker walked up to the microphone and made pleas about the future of the GOP. "We need to multiply, not divide," one said. Another urged the party to be more welcoming to newcomers.

When it was Ada Fisher's turn, she had a very pointed message: "Look around the room. There are only three of us who are black in this room."

During an interview after the meeting adjourned, Fisher, North Carolina's national committeewoman, brought it up again. She said one of the biggest problems with the Republican Party today is that it's letting everyone else define it.

Fisher said historically the GOP had a strong record on civil rights, and it should highlight that. But she says Republicans today also shouldn't compromise on their core principles.

"I don't want the party to be 'Democratic lite' — to try to emulate everything that the Democrats have done," she said. "We have to stand for something. We stand for individual responsibility. We stand for free enterprise. We live for these kind of things."

Becoming "Democratic lite" is a prominent concern being uttered during breaks in the halls and in closed-door strategy sessions in Hollywood this week. The spring meeting is the first major gathering of party activists since RNC Chairman Reince Priebus unveiled his harsh post-game assessment of the 2012 election.

Priebus' "Growth and Opportunity" report calls for expanding the GOP's tent to include more women and minorities, and to be more inclusive of gays and lesbians. Several prominent social conservative groups sent Priebus a harshly worded letter this week saying Republicans owe many of their successes to faith-based values voters. And they threatened to leave the party.

It's safe to say Priebus also irritated some people here.

"It's a little bit taking it on the chin for the Romney campaign. The Romney campaign fumbled the ball, I think, and so give credit to Reince for kind of taking it on the chin for them," said Curly Haugland, an RNC national committeeman from North Dakota.

"We don't need to single out a particular ethnic group or a particular voting bloc and try to do a focus-group-tested message, we just need to be honest about our principles and stand behind them," Haugland added.

The Priebus report cites focus groups calling the GOP "out of touch" and "the party of stuffy old men."

"I'm an older woman, but I'm not stuffy," said Linda Ackerman, an RNC delegate from California. "I honestly do not understand why people think that the Republicans are the country club people, the wealthy people. I can tell you, I'm an average American."

Ackerman says her son is unemployed. She's a manager at a water utility in Orange County.

Orange County was once one of the country's biggest Republican strongholds, but Democrats have made some gains there lately.

"The demographics — obviously they're changing dramatically, and again I think we did not keep up with how quickly things were changing," Ackerman said.

To win in Orange County or anywhere else, Ackerman said, Republicans are going to have to bring their message into communities they may not have traditionally been in, even if it's uncomfortable for some.

The history of science is filled with obscure and bizarre substances. Despite all that we have learned in the past 400 years, the trend continues. Perhaps it's unavoidable, being the way we figure things out. We need to find some apparently weird stuff — playing a game of cat and mouse with Nature — in order to make sense of what's out there.

With time, most strange substances disappear as we understand what is going on. But, hard as we try, we always seem to be surrounded by some unknown material. It is a fog that doesn't ever seem to fully dissipate.

Philip Pullman used this to spectacular effect in his fictional trilogy His Dark Materials. Remarkably, it seems that reality is even weirder than fiction.

Some brief case studies may be useful. In 1667, the German alchemist and physician Johan Joachim Becher, trying to understand combustion, proposed that things burned because they liberated their "phlogiston"; without it, a substance wouldn't burn. Becher's hypothesis was doubted when experiments showed that certain metals gained weight when they burned, something hard to reconcile with losing stuff. Soon, speculations abounded. Perhaps phlogiston was lighter than air; or perhaps it had negative (!) weight.

This kind of wild hypothesizing is not rare in science: when an idea begins to fail, people try to save it with all that they've got. Who knows? Maybe a new law of Nature is hiding behind the conundrum? Only time and experimental exposure lead to the elimination or modification of the idea.

Combustion was finally understood in 1783 by the great chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Through a series of brilliant experiments, Lavoisier demonstrated that combustion needed oxygen. Furthermore, the total mass of the reagents in any chemical reaction remains constant: "in all operations of art and Nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment."

However, confused as to the nature of heat, Lavoisier proposed yet another strange substance: the "caloric." Things cooled down because caloric flowed from hot to cold. To obey his law of mass conservation, Lavoisier had to assume that caloric had no mass, being a kind of ether endowed with the ability to flow. Wrong, but quite useful as a temporary explanatory device. Only by the middle of the 19th century was the caloric was abandoned.

Heat was understood as a form of motion, an agitation of matter.

There are many more examples, such as the luminiferous aether, the medium that was to support the waving of light through space. That was discarded, not without much pain, after Einstein's theory of special relativity of 1905. There is also the Higgs field, the entity responsible for giving mass to all particles of matter but light itself, discovered last July at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This one is probably going to stay with us. No one said that there aren't strange things in the cosmos.

We continue to live in a Universe filled with strange stuff. Recently, the cosmic recipe was revised, somewhat, with new data coming from the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft.

The matter we are made of — you know, the chemical elements that appear in the periodic table, all made of protons, neutrons and electrons — is an absolute minority of the matter that makes up the Universe, coming in at only 4.8 percent of the total.

Of the rest, we know much less. There are two main components: dark matter (coming in at 25.6 percent of all matter) and dark energy (coming in at 69.9 percent). These numbers are from the Planck's team data, using a combined best fit with other observations.

His Dark Materials indeed. "Dark" here means that we can't see them. More precisely, they don't emit radiation in any frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can probe. They are not made of anything we know. We detect their presence through their gravitational effects on "ordinary" matter, the stuff that we see in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Dark energy pulls on the Universe as a whole. Actually, it pushes on the Universe as a whole, making it expand much faster than we had anticipated.

Last week, excitement mounted as the first results from the giant Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a detector mounted on the International space Station, were announced. Nobel-prize winner Sam Ting's brainchild, the AMS is a detector that collects rogue particles flying through space known as cosmic rays.

Theorists have speculated that an excess flux of positrons, the antimatter cousins of the electrons, could indicate that dark matter particles are annihilating each other. Well, it appears that exactly such extra flux, which had been hinted at by previous experiments, was indeed found by the AMS. According to Ting, "over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin."

A more mundane explanation for the extra flux of positrons would be rapidly-rotating neutron stars (pulsars) distributed across the galactic plane. We should find out soon, hopefully resolving a mystery that has been with us since the early 1930s. That's when the Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky first conjectured that a cloak of dark matter surrounded clusters of galaxies. We know that something does hover around galaxies since it causes a distortion in the geometry of space that we can see, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

If AMS verifies that the positrons do come from the annihilation of dark matter particles, it would confirm the existence of a new kind of matter, one that contributes about five times as much as atoms to the cosmic recipe. If this is the case, it would be hard to discard dark matter as just another kind of phlogiston. Dark materials, it appears, exist and in luxurious abundance.

The president's $3.77 trillion fiscal 2014 budget plan is expansive. But the part getting the most attention is his proposal to change the way the government calculates inflation using a measure known in economics-speak as chained CPI.

Following Script: Much of the initial reaction was predictable. Liberal Democrats hate the idea, because it amounts to a gradual cut in Social Security benefits over time. President Obama made it very clear in his remarks that these were "ideas championed by Republican leaders in Congress."

"I don't believe that all these ideas are optimal, but I am willing to accept them as a compromise," Obama added, after releasing his budget proposal on Wednesday.

As expected, many Republicans praised the president's willingness to go there. In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., described it as "an olive branch."

And the response was similarly positive from Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "He's putting a Democratic third-rail issue on the table," said King. "It could be the basis for the beginning of the process."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, even implied the president wasn't going far enough, describing chained CPI and the president's proposed trims to Medicare as "modest reforms."

Out Of Left Field: So, it was a bit of a surprise when the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — charged with getting Republicans elected to the House — blasted the president's plan as hurtful to the elderly.

"His budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

He went on to describe the president as "trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors, and I just think it's not the right way to go."

It's All Politics

On Message: Budget Votes May Matter ... In 2014

Now it's time to say goodbye to former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. The singer, dancer and actress died April 8 at the age of 70, having battled multiple sclerosis for more than two decades.

Throughout her career, she was devoted to Walt Disney, who famously discovered her during a Swan Lake dance recital when she was just 12 years old.

She was the only Mouseketeer Disney himself hand-picked to be on the TV show he launched in 1955 — The Mickey Mouse Club. Wearing mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a sweater emblazoned with her name, Annette became wildly popular among baby boomers with teenage crushes.

When the original Mickey Mouse Club ended in 1959, Funicello was also the only Mouseketeer to remain under contract to the studio.

The actress wanted to Americanize her Italian-American name, but Disney told her not to — a decision that helped her continue to get roles for years, as she told WHYY's Fresh Air.

"People probably should have forgotten me, and I was so lucky that they never did," she said. "I think it was the name Funicello that stuck in their mind."

Starting in 1962, Funicello moved from strictly kiddie fare to teen roles when she teamed with Frankie Avalon for a string of musical bikini-party movies, including Bikini Beach, Muscle Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo.

Even then, though, she sought advice from the man others called "Uncle Walt" — though she could never bring herself to be that informal.

"Mr. Disney read the scripts, and he thought they were good clean fun," she told NPR in 1993. "And he told me to go out and have a good time."

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The film on Syria's Alawite community isn't finished yet, but filmmaker Nidal Hassan's favorite scenes are beginning to take shape.

It opens with fireworks on New Year's Eve in Tartous, Syria. "May God preserve the president for us," one young man yells in a reference to Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Situated on the Mediterranean coast, Tartous is a resort town, with a port and a Russian naval base. Roughly three-quarters of the people in Tartous are Alawites, like Assad and his late father, who have run the country for more than 40 years. The Assad rule has greatly benefited the Alawite minority in Syria, yet life in Tartous is not all that great.

Hassan grew up in Tartous, a town he loves and one he says is full of strange characters. He spent a year there with unprecedented access documenting the Alawite community, who have remained loyal to Assad during Syria's uprising and civil war, which is now more than 2 years old.

A Mix Of Characters

One of his favorite characters is a man who lives in a shack on the beach and rents lounge chairs to weekend visitors.

The beach man is deeply tanned, with long hair, a straw hat and a seashell necklace. He's drinking the local liquor, arak.

"Our place is so beautiful, it's like an apple," the beach man says. "People want to take a bite. But inside it's rotten with worms, bribes and corruption."

The beach man does not blame Assad for these troubles, though.

"Poor Bashar," he says, calling the president by his first name. "His hair became white."

Middle East

A Defection Hints At Cracks Among Syria's Alawites

Get recipes for Preserved Lemons, Chicken With Preserved Lemon And Green Olives, Root Vegetable Couscous With Preserved Lemon and Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette.

In the early going, It's a Disaster has the snap of a witty social commentary, like something Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale) might have done on the cheap earlier in his career. Berger is a strong, crisp writer who establishes these characters and their tribal dynamic without breaking much of a sweat.

But then the film takes a nasty little turn when word of dirty bombs detonated nearby — and in cities across the United States — has the assembled malcontents believing they've only got a few hours before the radiation kills them. As the double-whammy title suggests, it was a disaster before the bombs hit, and it's a whole other kind of a disaster now.

As in last year's uneven dramedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the imminent apocalypse inspires people to behave in radically different ways: Buck and Lexi are inclined toward plane-going-down sex, Pete and Emma consider reconciliation, Hedy homebrews her own Ecstasy, Shane frets about the rogue nation responsible for the attack — and poor Glenn and Tracy, just on their third date, are still in the getting-to-know-you phase. There's good reason for all of them to behave the way they do, and Berger delights in bouncing their neuroses off one another like players in a lively stage farce.

It's a Disaster doesn't end gracefully; a late-breaking twist makes sense only as a means to wind this zany scenario down without its turning into The Road. But for most of the way, it's clever and smartly proportioned, with the action confined to one well-exploited location and gags about love, the curdling of long-term friendships and petty social mores popping off everywhere.

The best — and worst — that could be said of the film is that it doesn't need that looming apocalypse. These characters are detonating plenty of dirty bombs on their own.

There were 346,000 first-time claims for unemployment benefits, down 42,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration reports.

Meanwhile, the "4-week moving average" of claims was 358,000, up by 3,000 from the previous week's 355,000. That measure smooths out some of the volatility in the numbers.

After recent reports that were disappointing — including last week's news that employers added only 88,000 jobs to their payrolls in March — Thursday's data on jobless claims were a positive switch.

Bloomberg News says the decline in claims was more than forecast and could be a sign that some things that tend to cause unusual swings in data, including holidays such as Easter, have worked their way through the numbers.

"The spike in claims was temporary," Brian Jones, a senior U.S. economist at Societe Generale in New York, tells Bloomberg. "Claims will continue to come down. Things are getting better."

As Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez thought in grandiose terms, and his country's vast oil riches enabled him to act on his vision. But Chavez died before he had to deal with the flaws in his model, and some hard choices await his successor.

Key to Chavez's notion of "21st Century Socialism" was the redistribution of Venezuela's oil earnings. The country's oil reserves — estimated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to be the largest in the world — are worth tens of billions of dollars a year in potential revenue.

During his presidency, Chavez diverted much of that potential wealth to Venezuelan consumers in the form of cheap gasoline (18 cents per gallon or less). He propped up the Castro regime in Cuba, and he offered Venezuelan oil on highly preferential terms to 18 Caribbean and Latin American countries through an energy alliance he called PetroCaribe.

Oil production in Venezuela declined sharply under the Chavez administration, however, largely due to inadequate investment in the energy infrastructure, inefficiencies in oil industry management, and the replacement of skilled oil technicians and managers with political loyalists.

PetroCaribe Initiative

The drop in oil production — more than 7 percent just in the first quarter of 2013 — is severe enough to call into question whether the Chavista oil welfare programs can be sustained. For the Caribbean and Latin American countries that have been benefiting from the PetroCaribe program, it is a time of great anxiety.

Chavez saw the energy alliance as a way to free the member states from U.S. energy imperialism.

"There's no one who can slow our ever-faster march toward our great historical goals," he said, defining PetroCaribe as "energy unity."

For poor countries, the PetroCaribe deal was irresistible. Typically, they had to pay cash for only half the oil they received. The rest they got on credit, financed over 25 years at 1 percent. Among those who eagerly signed up for the program was Haiti.

“ In reality, PDVSA makes money from only a small proportion of the oil it produces. Now, can that continue? I don't think so.

As the world waits for what's expected to be another ballistic missile test by North Korea sometime in the next few days, NPR's Frank Langfitt reports there's reason to think that tensions on the Korean Peninsula might soon ease.

On Morning Edition, Frank passed along analysis from Daniel Pinkston, who focuses on North Korea for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization "committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict."

Pinkston says that once the U.S. and South Korean militaries conclude their joint exercises later this month, North Korea "will probably claim victory. ... They will say that 'look, the Americans were really going to invade us. They were preparing for it and they ran away scared because of our nuclear deterrent [and] our great commander. ... Now we can celebrate.' "

As Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez thought in grandiose terms, and his country's vast oil riches enabled him to act on his vision. But Chavez died before he had to deal with the flaws in his model, and some hard choices await his successor.

Key to Chavez's notion of "21st Century Socialism" was the redistribution of Venezuela's oil earnings. The country's oil reserves — estimated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to be the largest in the world — are worth tens of billions of dollars a year in potential revenue.

During his presidency, Chavez diverted much of that potential wealth to Venezuelan consumers in the form of cheap gasoline (18 cents per gallon or less). He propped up the Castro regime in Cuba, and he offered Venezuelan oil on highly preferential terms to 18 Caribbean and Latin American countries through an energy alliance he called PetroCaribe.

Oil production in Venezuela declined sharply under the Chavez administration, however, largely due to inadequate investment in the energy infrastructure, inefficiencies in oil industry management, and the replacement of skilled oil technicians and managers with political loyalists.

PetroCaribe Initiative

The drop in oil production — more than 7 percent just in the first quarter of 2013 — is severe enough to call into question whether the Chavista oil welfare programs can be sustained. For the Caribbean and Latin American countries that have been benefiting from the PetroCaribe program, it is a time of great anxiety.

Chavez saw the energy alliance as a way to free the member states from U.S. energy imperialism.

"There's no one who can slow our ever-faster march toward our great historical goals," he said, defining PetroCaribe as "energy unity."

For poor countries, the PetroCaribe deal was irresistible. Typically, they had to pay cash for only half the oil they received. The rest they got on credit, financed over 25 years at 1 percent. Among those who eagerly signed up for the program was Haiti.

“ In reality, PDVSA makes money from only a small proportion of the oil it produces. Now, can that continue? I don't think so.

The man whose research led to the world's first test-tube baby more than three decades ago, has died at age 87.

Robert Edwards, who later won the Nobel Prize, began experimenting with in vitro fertilization, or IVF, in the late 1960s. His work, controversial at the time, eventually led to the birth of the world's first "test tube baby," Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978.

Since then, IVF has resulted in about 5 million babies worldwide, according to the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In 2010, Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and was knighted the following year.

Brown, now 34, told the BBC that she had "always regarded Robert Edwards as like a grandfather."

The work he pioneered along with surgeon Patrick Steptoe, "has brought happiness and joy to millions of people all over the world by enabling them to have children," Brown said. Steptoe died in 1988.

The Associated Press quoted the University of Cambridge, where Edwards was a professor, as saying he passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home just outside Cambridge.

IVF, which joins a human egg and sperm in the laboratory before transferring the resulting embryo back into the womb, sparked enormous controversy after the birth of Brown was announced to the world. Brown's mother had been unable to conceive naturally due to complications from a blockage in her fallopian tubes.

Dr. Peter Braude, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Kings College London, who was at Cambridge when Edwards and Steptoe were developing IVF, called Edwards "an extraordinary scientist."

"There was such hysteria around the kind of work he was doing," Braude told The Associated Press. He said Edwards had halted his research for two years as he sought "to work out what the right thing to do was, whether he should continue or whether he was out on a limb."

"I think people now understand that [Edwards] only had the best motivation," he told the AP. "There are few biologists that have done something so practical and made a huge difference for the entire world."

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

New York City agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street for the destruction of books during a November 2011 police raid on Zuccotti Park. In a settlement Tuesday, the city agreed to pay the protesters and their lawyers over $230,000. The city also gave an almost-apology: "Defendants acknowledge and believe it is unfortunate that, during the course of clearing Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, books were damaged so as to render them unusable, and additional books are unaccounted for."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings author Maya Angelou spoke to The Daily Beast in an interview published Wednesday: "I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me. English is a beautiful language, don't you think?"

Jack Kerouac's online dating profile, from the Barnes & Noble books blog: "On a typical Friday night I am...probably off fuming and screamin' in a mountain nook, experiencing wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm."

"Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time." — from a new short story by San Miguel author T.C. Boyle in The New Yorker.

Last week, Google sold Frommer's Travel Guides back to Arthur Frommer after buying it less than a year ago. But according to paidContent, it kept all of the social media data.

Melville House laments that the media has declared the following bookish things dead this week: books, brick-and-mortar book stores, online book stores, the American Author, travel guides and cursive.

As Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez thought in grandiose terms, and his country's vast oil riches enabled him to act on his vision. But Chavez died before he had to deal with the flaws in his model, and some hard choices await his successor.

Key to Chavez's notion of "21st Century Socialism" was the redistribution of Venezuela's oil earnings. The country's oil reserves — estimated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to be the largest in the world — are worth tens of billions of dollars a year in potential revenue.

During his presidency, Chavez diverted much of that potential wealth to Venezuelan consumers in the form of cheap gasoline (18 cents per gallon or less). He propped up the Castro regime in Cuba, and he offered Venezuelan oil on highly preferential terms to 18 Caribbean and Latin American countries through an energy alliance he called PetroCaribe.

Oil production in Venezuela declined sharply under the Chavez administration, however, largely due to inadequate investment in the energy infrastructure, inefficiencies in oil industry management, and the replacement of skilled oil technicians and managers with political loyalists.

PetroCaribe Initiative

The drop in oil production — more than 7 percent just in the first quarter of 2013 — is severe enough to call into question whether the Chavista oil welfare programs can be sustained. For the Caribbean and Latin American countries that have been benefiting from the PetroCaribe program, it is a time of great anxiety.

Chavez saw the energy alliance as a way to free the member states from U.S. energy imperialism.

"There's no one who can slow our ever-faster march toward our great historical goals," he said, defining PetroCaribe as "energy unity."

For poor countries, the PetroCaribe deal was irresistible. Typically, they had to pay cash for only half the oil they received. The rest they got on credit, financed over 25 years at 1 percent. Among those who eagerly signed up for the program was Haiti.

“ In reality, PDVSA makes money from only a small proportion of the oil it produces. Now, can that continue? I don't think so.

Rand Paul going to one of the top historically black colleges in the U.S. and trying to school students on who founded the NAACP?

Priceless.

Rand Paul going to one of the top historically black colleges in the U.S. and trying to make a case for his Republican Party as a historic and continuing defender of the civil rights of African-Americans?

Not boring.

And, judging from the reaction the Kentucky senator received Wednesday at Washington's Howard University, less than persuasive.

"I'm happy that he came, that he reached out," said Howard grad Dawn Hay, 29. "But it felt like a plea."

And there were times it felt insulting, she said, if not intentionally.

Paul, a libertarian considered a potential 2016 presidential contender, forgot the name of the first popularly elected African-American senator in the U.S., who just happened to be Howard graduate Edward Brooke, a Republican who represented Massachusetts in the 1960s and '70s.

And he drew groans and guffaws when he asked those in the crowded auditorium if they knew that black Republicans founded the NAACP in the early 1900s.

"We know our history," Hay said of Paul's question. "This is now; that was in the past."

That illustrated Paul's significant hurdle Wednesday, making an intellectually defensible case to a largely black audience for the party of Lincoln that since the 1960s has been perceived by some as hostile to African-Americans.

He acknowledged it.

"How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?" he said, speaking with the aid of a teleprompter.

One of the many questions he took after the speech suggested one contemporary reason: Why, one Howard senior asked, have Republicans been aggressively pursuing more restrictive voting laws?

Paul, whose speech was briefly interrupted by hecklers who were forcibly removed, turned the question to literacy tests that Southern Democrats imposed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He asked how anyone could liken current efforts to require that citizens present photo identification at polling places with "the horror of what happened in the South."

Paul asserted that he has never wavered in his support for the Civil Rights Act, though in past interviews, and on Wednesday, he expressed squeamishness with extending protections beyond "public domains" and to the private sector.

While his retelling of the civil rights movement through the lens of a dated Republicanism felt clangorous, Paul drew more sympathy and occasional applause when he turned to his own pet issues — support for school choice, noninterventionist foreign policy, counseling instead of prison for first-time drug offenders, and opposition to federal minimum sentencing guidelines.

"Some argue, with evidence, that our drug laws are biased — that they are the new Jim Crow," he said. "But to simply be against them for that reason misses a larger point. They are unfair to everyone, largely because of the one-size-fits-all federal mandatory sentences."

And, finally, he made his case for "free markets," dinging Democrats a la Mitt Romney as the party of giveaways that have not benefited African-Americans in the long run.

"Democrats still promise unlimited federal assistance, and Republicans promise free markets, low taxes and less regulations that we believe will create more jobs," he said, noting that poverty in recent years has become more entrenched, and black unemployment is double that of whites.

It was an interesting outing for Paul, and one that Hay, the Howard graduate, said will encourage her to "pay more attention" to him.

Chinedu Okpala, 21, a senior economics major at Howard, said that Paul didn't choose "the most appropriate, most effective message" in rehashing Republican history that dates way back in time.

But he acknowledged the first-term senator's challenge.

"African-Americans are born with hatred of everything outside the Democratic Party, with very closed eyes," said Okpala, who is African-American. "At least he put in the effort and came here, and that counts for something."

For the first time in 14 years, Hugo Chavez is not on the ballot for a presidential election in Venezuela that set for Sunday. The firebrand leftist died last month after a long fight with cancer.

Pollsters say the sympathy vote and the state's huge resources will translate into a big victory for Chavez's hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro.

Still, the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, is mounting an all-out fight for a chance to lead the oil-rich nation out of socialism.

In the gritty streets of Caracas, the capital, the crowds have been as big as ever for the young, energetic Capriles.

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"Comics," a wise newspaper features editor once opined, back when the Earth had not yet cooled and icthyosaurs swam the turbid seas, "Aren't Just For Kids Anymore."

Her fellow editors, incredulous, seized upon this audacious truth. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!," they intoned, seized with an evangelical fervor. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" Their cry rang out throughout the land, in metropolitan dailies and weekly newsmagazines, in pennysavers and morning heralds and advocates and argusi. Sometime in the late Mesozoic, it was taken up by a new breed of editors who appended to it a prefix that testified to their surpassing wit and insight.

"Pow!" they said. "Zap!" they said. "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!"

But then the day came when those words lost their power. When suddenly the truth they contained was no longer audacious, but self-evident. Flatly, mundanely, dully so.

And so it went for years. There were comics for and about kids. There were comics for and about adults. And some of those comics for and about adults were about very very sexy adults. And some of those comics for and about adults were about very very violent adults.

Saga, the hugely successful Image comic written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples, is a comic for adults, about adults to whom many sexy things happen, and many violent things happen.

We have told you, in this space, that is a good comic — no, a great comic — for adults to enjoy. Witty, warm, hugely imaginative, sad, funny, gorgeous to look at, ingeniously plotted, with something to say about love and marriage and honor and robots with televisions for heads.

On Tuesday, writer Brian K. Vaughan said Apple would not be allowing Saga #12, which goes on sale today, to be downloaded via iPad and iPhone. The reason, according to Vaughan: "two postage-sized images of gay sex."

This, of course, simply posed an inconvenience to a relatively small number of people. As Vaughan pointed out, there were several workarounds available to those who normally read Saga on Apple devices:

1) Head over to your friendly neighborhood comics shop and pick up a physical copy of our issue that you can have and hold forever.

2) While you're at it, don't forget to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps protect retailers who are brave enough to carry work that some in their communities might consider offensive. You can find signed copies of Saga at the CBLDF site right now.

3) Download the issue directly through sites like https://comics.imagecomics.com or on your non-Apple smartphone or tablet.

4) If all else fails, you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple's iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.

Like almost everything in the Texas, the construction industry in the Lone Star State is big. One in every 13 workers here is employed in the state's $54 billion-per-year construction industry.

Homebuilding and commercial construction may be an economic driver for the state, but it's also an industry riddled with hazards. Years of illegal immigration have pushed wages down, and accidents and wage fraud are common. Of the nearly 1 million workers laboring in construction here, approximately half are undocumented.

Many of those workers have been in the U.S. for years, even decades. This critical mass of eager, mostly Hispanic workers means it's possible for a family from New York or California to move to Texas and buy a brand new, five-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot home for $160,000.

Just how cheap is the cheap labor in Texas? Sometimes, it's free. Guillermo Perez, 41, is undocumented and has been working commercial construction jobs in Austin for 13 years.

"[The employer] said he didn't have the money to pay me and he owed me $1,200," Perez says of one job. "I told him that I'm going to the Texas Workforce Commission, which I did. Then after that, he came back two weeks later and paid me."

Perez is brave. Undocumented workers are usually too afraid to complain to Texas authorities, even when they go home with empty pockets. And they almost never talk to reporters.

Widespread Wage Theft

The economic collapse of 2008 brought with it an onslaught of wage theft, according to the Austin-based Workers Defense Project. At the end of the week, construction workers sometimes walk away with $4 or $5 an hour, sometimes less, sometimes nothing.

"Ninety percent of the people who come to our organization have come because they've been robbed of their wages," says Cristina Tzintzun, the Workers Defense Project executive director.

The organization has co-authored a report with the University of Texas, Austin, that examines working conditions in the Texas construction industry. For more than a year, WDP staff and University of Texas faculty canvassed Texas construction sites, surveying hundreds of workers and gathering information about pay, benefits, working conditions and employment and residency status.

Cheated workers keep working, Tzintzun says, because contractors dangle wages like bait from one week to another, paying just enough to keep everybody on the hook.

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The U.S. Postal Service has backed off a plan to halt Saturday mail delivery, saying that Congress has forced it to continue the service despite massive cost overruns.

In a statement released Wednesday, the USPS Board of Governors said that restrictive language included in the Continuing Resolution that keeps the government operating in lieu of a budget, keeps it from going ahead with the plan.

In February, the Postal Service announced that it would end regular mail delivery on Saturdays beginning on August 5 in an effort to stanch the red ink in its budget. It planned to continue package deliveries on Saturday.

The Postal Service board says Congress "has left ... no choice but to delay implementation" of the five-day-a-week plan for mail delivery.

In 2012, the Postal Service lost a record $15 billion, pushing it toward insolvency.

According to The New York Times, "The agency's financial reports show that mail volume continues to decline as Americans increasingly turn to electronic forms of communication. Total mail volume was 159.9 billion pieces, down 5 percent from 168.3 billion pieces a last year. Operating revenue was $65.2 billion, down from $65.7 billion over the same period."

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

Pamela Paul has been named editor of The New York Times Book Review. She'll replace Sam Tanenhaus, who is "taking on a new assignment as a writer at large," according to a Times memo. Paul began as children's book editor in 2011 and is the current features editor. The Oxford American asked Tanenhaus in a 2009 interview, "[W]hat line have you published during your reign ... that has given you the most pleasure?" and he answered, "I've mentioned, or dropped, many big name contributors. I left out Kinky Friedman, author of the single most memorable lead written in my five-plus years at The New York Times Book Review. Here it is (from November 28, 2004): 'There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.' "

David Axelrod, the formerly mustachioed former Obama strategist, is writing a memoir, his publisher announced Tuesday. Penguin Press said in a statement, "Over the past 30 years as a journalist, political consultant and senior adviser to the President, David Axelrod has had a front row seat to our political process at every level." An anonymous source told The New York Times that "the book had bids at least as high as $1.5 million."

Jason Merkoski, one of the original creators of the Kindle, compared Amazon to "the mean stepmother in a fairy tale" during an interview with The New York Times. He added, "I think we've made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words."

The Interestings author Meg Wolitzer talks about gender bias in a Salon interview: "If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book. Serious books with 'dreamy' covers — many with women in water, floating or swimming, as though what's contained within is a kind of dreamy inessential thing — the covers themselves are off-putting." It's territory familiar from her brilliant 2012 New York Times essay.

American Dream Machine author Matthew Specktor explains the purpose of literature to Interview magazine: "to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones."

My earliest memory of code switching is at Pizza Hut, back when Pizza Huts were sit-down restaurants with salad bars and garlic bread. (Like any daughter of immigrants, most of my memories involve food.) My mom and dad would speak with the waiters in English, ordering our pan-crust pizzas and Pepsi products, but we used Mandarin at the table. Our Mandarin was our secret code.

It was only at restaurants, malls or school events that I ever heard my mother use English. My mom spoke to my brother and me exclusively in Mandarin since we were born, even though we were born in suburban St. Louis. My dad switched between English and Chinese with ease, but the memories of my artist-turned-diplomat mom and the early lessons she taught me — be it how to mix paints or bathe my cocker spaniel, or the importance of generosity — they all exist in Chinese.

Despite being a free spirit who raised us without many hard rules, mom insisted on our Mandarin use. "I let Sesame Street teach you English," my mom reminds me. (Thanks, public media!)

Growing up, dropping into Mandarin with Mom was so normal that nothing stands out about it in my mind. What became notable as I got older was her halting relationship with English. N's are a real trip-up for her; she likes to pronounce the letter N like "un" rather than "en," so I could tell she had to repeat or explain herself any time she needed to spell her name to make appointments. When we went to the mall together as a child, I noticed the makeup counter ladies didn't engage my mom like they did the other moms, and I wondered if she was getting left out of other mom-related groups, too.

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

Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minster and "Iron Lady" who died on Monday, authorized a biography to be published after her death. Written by Charles Moore, it will be published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin UK. Allen Lane said in a statement: "The biography was commissioned in 1997 on the understanding that it would not be published during Baroness Thatcher's lifetime. Charles Moore was given full access to Baroness Thatcher's private papers and interviewed her extensively." The book, titled Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning, will be published "immediately following her funeral" next week.

On a related note, let's all take a moment to remember the time Thatcher publicly spanked Christopher Hitchens. From Hitchens' "On Spanking," in the London Review of Books: "I stooped lower, with an odd sense of having lost all independent volition. Having arranged matters to her entire satisfaction, she produced from behind her back a rolled-up Parliamentary order-paper and struck — no, she thwacked — me on the behind. I reattained the perpendicular with some difficulty. 'Naughty boy,' she sang out over her shoulder as she flounced away. Nothing that happened to the country in the next dozen years surprised me in the least."

Victoria Beale takes down Paulo Coelho in a vicious essay for The New Republic titled, "The Gospel of Success: Paulo Coelho's Vapid Philosophy": "If you've absorbed any of Coelho's incredible commercial success, without actually reading the 65-year-old, Brazilian author, it's genuinely shocking to realize just how shoddy and lightweight his books are, how obvious and well-trodden their revelations." That is what Coelho gets for writing things like this in his latest book: "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books, tells New York Magazine about phrases he'd like to ban from his magazine: "Even more insidious and common is in terms of, a fine phrase if you are talking about mathematical equations or economic functions in which specific 'terms' are defined, but it is just loose and woolly when you say things like 'in terms of culture,' for which there are simply no clear terms."

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.

When President Obama on Wednesday unveils his blueprint for the government's 2014 budget, he'll offer lots of ideas for changes in taxes and spending.

But the proposal likely to grab the most attention will be the one dealing with cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Many economists would applaud a change in the way Social Security officials measure inflation, but many older Americans may hiss, fearing a new formula will cut their benefits.

If Congress were to approve it, the change would directly affect the wallets of current — as well as future — recipients of Social Security.

So what is this different formula? Here are some answers about the politically charged proposal that would affect nearly all Americans who are — or plan to be — retired.

How does the Social Security Administration calculate inflation now?

Government officials know that rising consumer prices can erode the buying power of Social Security checks. So each year, they consider whether to provide a cost-of-living adjustment to keep incomes in line with consumer prices.

Their annual decision is based on any changes in prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, prepared by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. As this year began, the nearly 62 million Americans receiving Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits saw their checks go up by 1.7 percent to keep pace with the rise in the CPI.

Is the CPI a good measure of inflation?

Many economists say the CPI is not a good way to measure what people actually are spending at the store because it doesn't take into account the common-sense decisions routinely made by shoppers.

For example, if the price of blueberries were to go up, you might not buy them. Instead, you'll pick up the strawberries that are on sale. When the price of beef is high, you'll get the pork roast. The thing that matters to your budget is the total cost you pay for all of your groceries when you get to the checkout register, not what any one item costs separately.

So how would the White House change the measure for determining any cost-of-living adjustments?

Assuming that Obama does what political pundits predict, he will propose that Social Security administrators start using a different inflation measure, known as the "chained CPI." The Bureau of Labor Statistics invented this measure in 2002 to reflect how people react to price increases by using substitution, such as switching from expensive beef to cheaper pork.

What would it mean for Social Security recipients if the administration were to use the chained CPI measure to calculate benefits?

Economists say it would restrain the growth in cost-of-living-adjustments. At first, the changes would seem small because the chained CPI is usually only about a 0.25 percentage point lower than the CPI. In other words, if the CPI were to rise 2 percent, the chained CPI would show a 1.75 percent increase.

But the trimmed growth in benefits would compound over time and save the government a lot of money over coming years. In fact, the change would save Social Security nearly $130 billion in just the first decade, the Obama administration estimates.

Of course, if the government were to start putting smaller raises into Social Security checks, then recipients would be getting less money in their pockets. "It's much more than a technical fix; it is a reduction in benefits," Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR.

So why would Obama support this change? Don't Democrats always go to the mat to protect Social Security?

Typically, Democrats vigorously defend the existing structure for Social Security, and a number of them are strongly opposed to switching to the chained CPI.

But many lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — are worried that the coming waves of retiring baby boomers will put too great of a financial strain on the system that supports retirees. They are looking for ways to reduce the cost of Social Security without radically restructuring the popular program.

And Obama has said he wants to reduce federal deficit spending by nearly $2 trillion over the coming decade.

White House spokesman Jay Carney has told reporters that to achieve that fiscal goal, Obama would include the inflation-calculation change in his budget — but only if that concession were paired with higher tax revenues, particularly for the wealthy. And Obama wants special protections written into the law for the oldest and poorest seniors.

"It's not the president's ideal approach, but it is a serious compromise proposition that demonstrates that he wants to get things done" in terms of reaching a compromise with deficit hawks, Carney said.

Obama's new budget, which is subject to congressional debate and approval, would take effect Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

Would the chained CPI measure only be used to cut benefits?

No, it could be used to boost revenues as well. That's because many parts of the federal tax code, such as tax brackets and standard deductions, are adjusted annually for inflation, based on the CPI reading. But the White House wants to use the alternative benchmark. Using the chained CPI when setting the tax code would raise an additional $124 billion of tax revenue through 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Bitcoin, the digital currency that trades outside the control of central banks and international borders, reached new heights Tuesday, surpassing the $200 mark for the first time. That level comes just five days after bitcoin approached $150, a development that Mt.Gox, the largest exchange service for the currency, deemed to be "epic."

Bitcoin's rise has been sharp. It was only two months ago that exchange rates put a single bitcoin's value at around $20.

Because the digital currency's new gains have coincided with deep economic uncertainty in Cyprus, Spain, and elsewhere, some have suggested that a "bubble" was being created. As fears over inflation and even steep withdrawal fees rose, experts said, so did bitcoin. And if those fears waned, so would the currency's value.

But Jon Matonis of the Bitcoin Foundation tells Der Spiegel that he doesn't believe the connection is as direct as people think.

"Most transactions are still coming from affluent regions, like the United States and Northern Europe," he says. "What we are seeing is not a Cyprus bubble."

At Mt.Gox, which says it conducts more than 420,000 bitcoin trades each month, the digital currency didn't just plateau at the $200 mark. It plowed past it Tuesday, hitting a high of $240. As Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub points out, that volatility is also linked to the currency's small size.

Bitcoin's popularity has also been linked to activities some governments may disapprove of, or seek to tax. NPR reported on its role in online gambling earlier this year. And a New York Times story this week also noted bitcoin's acceptance by Silk Road, a website often "used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics."

Bitcoin's growth has led to changes at Mt.Gox, which announced last month that it would limit the maximum amount of monthly withdrawals to between $50,000 and $500,000, depending on customers' "verified" or "trusted" status.

Whatever the cause, bitcoin's gains have translated into new wealth for people who bought into it since it was created in 2009. The currency is released at a very steady rate — "roughly every 10 minutes 25 new bitcoins come into circulation," as NPR's Steve Henn reported last week.

Its adherents say that regular pace, and the fact that there is only a finite number of bitcoins, make it an attractive alternative to government-backed currencies. Just over half of the 21 million bitcoins in existence have so far been released.

And the currency is gaining wide attention, with TechCrunch explaining how to "mine" bitcoins, and Forbes offering four reasons bitcoin is worth studying. Back in 2011, NPR's Planet Money team acquired some bitcoins, in an experiment that ended when robbers looted the virtual bank that had been holding the currency.

One "miner," Chris Koss, has his entire life savings in bitcoins — something he recently told Steve Henn has brought big gains, as well as worries over how long the boom will continue.

Its steep rise has made some folks wistful for the bitcoins they frittered away on, well, fritters — some cafes and bars in the U.S. and Europe accept bitcoins. And others have felt new pangs of regret for bitcoins they lost when a hard-drive suffered a catastrophic failure.

That's the case for Stefan Thomas, a programmer who tells Der Spiegel, "I once lost 7,000 bitcoins, because I had forgotten to make a backup copy."

If Thomas had held onto those bitcoins, they would be worth around $1.4 million today.

Bitcoin, the digital currency that trades outside the control of central banks and international borders, reached new heights Tuesday, surpassing the $200 mark for the first time. That level comes just five days after bitcoin approached $150, a development that Mt.Gox, the largest exchange service for the currency, deemed to be "epic."

Bitcoin's rise has been sharp. It was only two months ago that exchange rates put a single bitcoin's value at around $20.

Because the digital currency's new gains have coincided with deep economic uncertainty in Cyprus, Spain, and elsewhere, some have suggested that a "bubble" was being created. As fears over inflation and even steep withdrawal fees rose, experts said, so did bitcoin. And if those fears waned, so would the currency's value.

But Jon Matonis of the Bitcoin Foundation tells Der Spiegel that he doesn't believe the connection is as direct as people think.

"Most transactions are still coming from affluent regions, like the United States and Northern Europe," he says. "What we are seeing is not a Cyprus bubble."

At Mt.Gox, which says it conducts more than 420,000 bitcoin trades each month, the digital currency didn't just plateau at the $200 mark. It plowed past it Tuesday, hitting a high of $240. As Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub points out, that volatility is also linked to the currency's small size.

Bitcoin's popularity has also been linked to activities some governments may disapprove of, or seek to tax. NPR reported on its role in online gambling earlier this year. And a New York Times story this week also noted bitcoin's acceptance by Silk Road, a website often "used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics."

Bitcoin's growth has led to changes at Mt.Gox, which announced last month that it would limit the maximum amount of monthly withdrawals to between $50,000 and $500,000, depending on customers' "verified" or "trusted" status.

Whatever the cause, bitcoin's gains have translated into new wealth for people who bought into it since it was created in 2009. The currency is released at a very steady rate — "roughly every 10 minutes 25 new bitcoins come into circulation," as NPR's Steve Henn reported last week.

Its adherents say that regular pace, and the fact that there is only a finite number of bitcoins, make it an attractive alternative to government-backed currencies. Just over half of the 21 million bitcoins in existence have so far been released.

And the currency is gaining wide attention, with TechCrunch explaining how to "mine" bitcoins, and Forbes offering four reasons bitcoin is worth studying. Back in 2011, NPR's Planet Money team acquired some bitcoins, in an experiment that ended when robbers looted the virtual bank that had been holding the currency.

One "miner," Chris Koss, has his entire life savings in bitcoins — something he recently told Steve Henn has brought big gains, as well as worries over how long the boom will continue.

Its steep rise has made some folks wistful for the bitcoins they frittered away on, well, fritters — some cafes and bars in the U.S. and Europe accept bitcoins. And others have felt new pangs of regret for bitcoins they lost when a hard-drive suffered a catastrophic failure.

That's the case for Stefan Thomas, a programmer who tells Der Spiegel, "I once lost 7,000 bitcoins, because I had forgotten to make a backup copy."

If Thomas had held onto those bitcoins, they would be worth around $1.4 million today.

There were more ominous-sounding words from North Korea on Tuesday. Pyongyang warned tourists and foreign companies in South Korea to leave for their own safety because a nuclear war may be imminent.

It was the latest in a string of threats in recent days.

From Seoul, NPR's Frank Langfitt tells Morning Edition and our Newscast Desk that most South Koreans view what's being said by the North as bluster and a negotiating tactic.

"People here think the verbal attacks are designed to bolster North Korea's new, inexperienced leader, Kim Jong Un, as he tries to develop support at home," Frank reports.

One man at a coffee shop in Seoul told Frank that after decades of such rhetoric he is "immune to this ... I'm not scared of them at all." And according to Frank, there are no signs of nervousness in the South Korean capital. You would see "more panic in Washington, D.C., before a snowstorm," he said on Morning Edition.

South Korea's Yonhap News Agency adds that "North Korea's attempt to incite fears of war among foreigners in South Korea won't work, Seoul's presidential spokeswoman said Tuesday. ... Kim Haing said the warning is seen as psychological warfare."

Which Japanese-manufactured car is the world's most popular vehicle? Maybe none of them. It might just be the Ford Focus.

More than a million Focus models were sold worldwide last year, with Toyota's Corolla coming in second. Next was Ford's top-selling F-Series pickup, sold almost exclusively in the U.S. and Canada, according to the marketing firm R.L. Polk.

Still, there's one caveat. As The Wall Street Journal points out:

"Last fall, Ford made a similar claim using IHS Automotive data and courted some umbrage from Toyota, which calls its Corolla other names in different countries, including an Auris in Europe.

"So Ford is careful to say the Focus is the best-selling 'nameplate' for any vehicle in the world. The Focus compact is sold globally and has started to pick up steam in China, padding Ford's lead over the Corolla name."

Congress returns from a two-week recess amid reports that a gun deal in the Senate may have gained late momentum; a focus on immigration to include a rally on Capitol Hill; and a budget proposal from President Obama that already has some in his own party fuming.

Here's what's happening on key issues this week:

Guns
Obama travels to Connecticut on Monday to keep the focus on gun control in the state where, nearly four months ago, 20 young children and six educators were massacred. Last week, the Connecticut Legislature passed tough new state gun restrictions, a measure signed into law by Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy.

While some states have taken action to toughen and, in some instances, loosen gun restrictions since the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown, Conn., Congress remains slowed by its own processes and the competing political pressure of interest groups.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported Monday that despite opposition from the NRA, "fresh Republican support" could allow a bipartisan agreement on a measure to expand federal background checks for gun buyers. The idea has overwhelming public support in polling, and would close a loophole in current law that requires no such check for sales at gun shows.

The idea was considered an important but relatively middle-of-the-road proposal among post-Newtown calls for a new ban on assault weapons and a bullet limit in ammunition clips. But over time, support in Congress failed to materialize sufficiently to assure much of anything would become law. Now, background checks might form the framework of any deal on Capitol Hill. The Post reports:

"In a move that could draw other Republicans as well as Democrats from conservative states who have not yet backed Obama's agenda, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), a key Democratic broker, has spent the past few days crafting the framework of a possible deal with Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.).

"Manchin and Toomey are developing a measure to require background checks for all gun purchases except sales between close family members and some hunters, which addresses concerns of some conservatives."

If this is President Obama's "make-or-break week on guns," as Politico declares, then it starts with considerable confusion about where things stand regarding the likelihood of passing new gun control laws.

NPR's Ailsa Chang reported over the weekend that as the Senate prepared to begin voting on Democratic-sponsored gun measures:

"Senate staffers say a bipartisan agreement has yet to be reached on universal background checks. That snarl may end up delaying a vote on gun legislation for another week, as lobbyists on both sides of the debate use the extra time to keep the pressure on."

In November, Razan Shalab Al-Sham, the daughter of a wealthy Syrian family, led the way to the Syrian farming village of Khirbet al-Joz to deliver an unusual kind of aid: police uniforms. A cold winter rain turned the frontier forest between southern Turkey and Syria into a muddy march up a mountain ridge along a smugglers' trail. She climbed the mountain to make the delivery herself.

Delivering police uniforms was a critical mission for Al-Sham— a symbol of what she wants Syria to become: a democratic country, with a civilian police force. At the police station, she handed out blue jackets and trousers to local rebels.

"The most important thing is, he will change from a soldier to civil police uniform," she said as the rebels shed their camouflage and donned the new uniforms.

The war in Syria has destroyed towns and villages, torn families apart, driven millions out of the country and displaced millions more. But the revolt has also transformed some Syrians, propelling them into roles they never imagined. For Al-Sham, 26, the revolt has become a personal revolution.

Her journey began in the city of Homs, where she planned on teaching English literature, to southern Turkey, where she now distributes aid, promotes democracy and advises governments, including the U.S.

The one thing the war has not changed is her dress sense. Even on a muddy mountain trail, she's got bling: jingly jewelry, knee-high leather boots; her hair is covered with a stylish scarf. Her laugh is still girlish, but she delivers — and that counts with the war-hardened rebels in this devastated village.

A Return Visit

Al-Sham recently returned to the same area after convincing the Italian government to donate more police uniforms and fund a field hospital.

On her aid mission to Khirbet al-Joz, the rebels have been transformed. Dressed in police blue, they invite Al-Sham to stand with them for pictures.

It's unusual for a young, unmarried woman to hang out with rebels in a conservative farming village. It's even more unusual for Al-Sham, who is from one of the wealthiest families in Syria.

"In all my life, I didn't feel that I should care about poor people, or help them, or stay in their villages," she says. "This is the first time for me. When the revolution started, I entered [a] village."

Enlarge image i

Margaret Thatcher, the iconic former British prime minister, died Monday at age 87 after suffering a stroke. Although she was a towering presence on the world stage in the 1980s, often standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow conservative President Ronald Reagan, some people may have forgotten her contributions.

We decided to highlight five things you ought to know about her:

She helped break the glass ceiling in politics.

At a time when many people thought social progress for women could only come from the political left, conservative Thatcher showed otherwise. She not only became Britain's first female prime minister but also earned a reputation for being as tough as, if not tougher than, any man in the job.

In 1973, during her time as secretary of education, Thatcher said: "I don't think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime."

Within six years, the sometimes pugnacious Thatcher had proved herself wrong.

And despite her conservatism, Thatcher didn't shy away from occasionally taking sides on the gender issue: "In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman," she said.

To be sure, some have questioned her contribution. Guardian columnist Michele Hanson called Thatcher's rise "an achievement of sorts" for women but says that overall, she "set feminism back by setting such a bad example of a woman in power."

She was one of Britain's longest-serving prime ministers.

Thatcher's 11 years and 209 days in office makes her the longest-serving premier of the 20th century and the longest continuously serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century.

She was an inspiration to American conservatives.

With pithy axioms often delivered as revealed wisdom, Thatcher helped crystallize the ideals of the American right. Among the often-quoted favorites: "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

Her rise, says Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, came at a time when "a lot of conservatives in the United States thought Europe is lost [to socialism] and America is next."

"She has shown and continues to show that if you stick to the principles of individual freedom and free markets, you can overcome the naysayers," says Luke Coffey, who was an adviser to the British government before becoming a Margaret Thatcher Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The relationship between Reagan and Thatcher blossomed in the 1980s, drawing the two countries closer.

"They were really working off the same playbook," Brooks says.

She helped solidify a lasting U.S.-British partnership.

When Britain went to war against Argentina in 1982 to reclaim the occupied Falkland Islands, the United States stood by London in a renewed display of the "special relationship" between the two countries. Although the U.S. and U.K. enjoyed a close alliance in World War II, that relationship had frayed at the edges in the intervening years. The personal bond between Thatcher and Reagan helped burnish it.

As we reported earlier:

"The touchstone event that came to symbolize the new relationship came in 1982, when Argentina's military junta occupied the Falkland Islands, a British territory that Buenos Aires claimed as its own.

"Thatcher responded militarily, and the U.S. backed her.

" 'Thatcher has said that without help from the U.S., including U.S. Sidewinder [anti-aircraft] missiles, Britain would not have been able to liberate the Falklands,' Coffey says."

The film on Syria's Alawite community isn't finished yet, but filmmaker Nidal Hassan's favorite scenes are beginning to take shape.

It opens with fireworks on New Year's Eve in Tartous, Syria. "May God preserve the president for us," one young man yells in a reference to Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Situated on the Mediterranean coast, Tartous is a resort town, with a port and a Russian naval base. Roughly three-quarters of the people in Tartous are Alawites, like Assad and his late father, who have run the country for more than 40 years. The Assad rule has greatly benefited the Alawite minority in Syria, yet life in Tartous is not all that great.

Hassan grew up in Tartous, a town he loves and one he says is full of strange characters. He spent a year there with unprecedented access documenting the Alawite community, who have remained loyal to Assad during Syria's uprising and civil war, which is now more than 2 years old.

A Mix Of Characters

One of his favorite characters is a man who lives in a shack on the beach and rents lounge chairs to weekend visitors.

The beach man is deeply tanned, with long hair, a straw hat and a seashell necklace. He's drinking the local liquor, arak.

"Our place is so beautiful, it's like an apple," the beach man says. "People want to take a bite. But inside it's rotten with worms, bribes and corruption."

The beach man does not blame Assad for these troubles, though.

"Poor Bashar," he says, calling the president by his first name. "His hair became white."

Middle East

A Defection Hints At Cracks Among Syria's Alawites

British Prime Minister David Cameron's office announced Tuesday morning that "Lady Thatcher's funeral service will take place on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 at St Paul's Cathedral."

The "Iron Lady" — former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — died Monday in London following a stroke. She was 87.

According to the BBC, the funeral ceremony will include "full military honors." Both Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, plan to attend. It will be a "ceremonial" service like those held for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother in recent decades. That's "one rung down from a state funeral," the BBC adds.

According to USA Today, state funerals are normally "reserved for members of the royal family ... [though] the last state funeral held in the United Kingdom was in 1965 following the death of Sir Winston Churchill."

Thatcher was a controversial leader. During her 11 years as prime minister (1979-90) she teamed with President Reagan to stand up against communism. But she also broke Britain's trade union movement — angering many — and led her nation into a short war with Argentina over the Falklands.

There were some arrests and injuries at "celebrations" of her death Monday night in Britain, the BBC says.

Some of our earlier coverage:

— Margaret Thatcher: A Remembrance

— 5 Things To Know About Margaret Thatcher

— Britain's Thatcher An Unlikely Icon For American Conservatives

— Thatcher Authorized A Posthumous Biography

There were more ominous sounding words from North Korea on Tuesday. It warned tourists and foreign companies in South Korea to leave for their own safety because a nuclear war may be imminent.

It was the latest in a string of threats in recent days.

From Seoul, NPR's Frank Langfitt tells Morning Edition and our Newscast Desk that most South Koreans view what's being said by the North as bluster and a negotiating tactic.

"People here think the verbal attacks are designed to bolster North Korea's new, inexperienced leader, Kim Jong Un, as he tries to develop support at home," Frank reports.

One man at a coffee shop in Seoul told Frank that after decades of such rhetoric he is "immune to this ... I'm not scared of them at all." And according to Frank, there are no signs of nervousness in the South Korean capital. You would see "more panic in Washington, D.C., before a snowstorm," he said on Morning Edition.

South Korea's Yonhap News Agency adds that "North Korea's attempt to incite fears of war among foreigners in South Korea won't work, Seoul's presidential spokeswoman said Tuesday. ... Kim Haing said the warning is seen as psychological warfare."

As an icon of the American conservative movement in the 1980s, it would have been difficult to find a more unlikely figure than Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday following a stroke.

Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, a full year and a half before Ronald Reagan became president. She hailed from a country seen as a hopeless bastion of socialism by conservatives, many of whom, like Reagan himself, were strongly invested in the idea of American exceptionalism.

At the end of the 1970s, "a lot of conservative intellectuals in the United States thought Europe is lost and that America is next," says Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Thatcher's voice came out of the wilderness and said, 'Freedom matters.' "

Her rise was equally improbable because of her gender. She was her country's first female prime minister, a possibility she publicly doubted just six years before occupying No. 10 Downing Street.

“ I think that it was a synergistic, wonderful coincidence that they were coming at the same set of ideas from arguably the two most important countries in the developed world.

The budget President Obama will send to Congress Wednesday is expected to include some $400 billion in reductions to Medicare and other health programs.

And if the word around Washington is correct, it may also include a proposal aimed at winning some bipartisan backing – by changing the way Medicare patients pay for their care.

But there have been previous efforts to streamline Medicare's antiquated system of deductibles and copayments. And none, so far, has been successful.

Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says having separate deductibles and co-insurance schemes for Medicare's parts A and B is an anachronism that dates back to the 1960s, when Medicare was created.

"That's been a legacy which has been very hard to change," he says, "because it requires an act of Congress, which requires agreement ... which tends not to be the case."

Currently, Medicare Part A, which covers hospital and skilled nursing home care, and Part B, which covers doctor and outpatient costs, have separate deductible and copayment schemes. This year the Part A hospital deductible is $1,184; the Part B outpatient deductible is $147.

Miller is one of many economists who say it would make much more sense to have a single, merged deductible of around $500. That, however, would likely make many patients pay more. That's because most Medicare patients aren't hospitalized in a given year, but they do almost all go to the doctor.

Under most of the proposals floating around, said Howard Bedlin, vice president for public policy and advocacy of the National Council on Aging, "about 30 million beneficiaries would end up paying more and about 2 million would end up paying less."

In exchange, however, says Miller, beneficiaries would likely get something they don't get now – "stop-loss" protection. That agreement for Medicare to cover all of a patient's medical costs after he or she reaches a specific threshold is something the program currently – and almost inexplicably – lacks.

"That's the world in which you need insurance," Miller says. "But Medicare traditionally doesn't have that type of structure."

Shots - Health News

The Hidden Costs Of Raising The Medicare Age

The film on Syria's Alawite community isn't finished yet, but filmmaker Nidal Hassan's favorite scenes are beginning to take shape.

It opens with fireworks on New Year's Eve in Tartous, Syria. "May god preserve the president for us," one young man yells in a reference to Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Situated on the Mediterranean coast, Tartous is a resort town, a town with a port and a Russian naval base. Roughly three-quarters of the people in Tartous are Alawites, like Assad and his later father, who have run the country for more than 40 years. The Assad rule has greatly benefited the Alawite minority in Syria, yet life in Tartous is not all that great.

Hassan grew up in Tartous, a town he loves and one he says is full of strange characters. He spent a year there with unprecedented access documenting the Alawite community that has remained loyal to Assad during Syria's uprising and civil war, which is now more than two years old.

A Mix Of Characters

One of his favorite characters is a man who lives in a shack on the beach and rents lounge chairs to weekend visitors.

The beach man is deeply tanned with long hair, a straw hat and a seashell necklace. He's drinking the local liquor, Arak.

"Our place is so beautiful, it's like an apple," the beach man says. "People want to take a bite. But inside it's rotten with worms, bribes and corruption."

The beach man does not blame Assad for these troubles though.

Middle East

Members Of Assad's Sect Break Ranks With Syrian Regime

Let's get dense. If we take all the atoms inside you, all roughly 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and squeeze away all the space inside, then, says physicist Brian Greene:

They are apartment towers in Hong Kong. Photographer Michael Wolf, who has lived there for decades, pushed his camera close, so all he shows are windows and walls; there's no street, no sky, no top, no bottom, no end. The overall effect is like staring at a frozen tidal wave of residential construction, overwhelming, yet empty. You know this place is crowded, but you don't see a soul ...

Enlarge image i

As an icon of the American conservative movement in the 1980s, it would have been difficult to find a more unlikely figure than Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday following a stroke.

Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, a full year and a half before Ronald Reagan became president. She hailed from a country seen as a hopeless bastion of socialism by conservatives, many of whom, like Reagan himself, were strongly invested in the idea of American exceptionalism.

At the end of the 1970s, "a lot of conservative intellectuals in the United States thought Europe is lost and that America is next," says Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Thatcher's voice came out of the wilderness and said, 'Freedom matters.' "

Her rise was equally improbable because of her gender. She was her country's first female prime minister, a possibility she publicly doubted just six years before occupying No. 10 Downing Street.

“ I think that it was a synergistic, wonderful coincidence that they were coming at the same set of ideas from arguably the two most important countries in the developed world.

As an icon of the American conservative movement in the 1980s, it would have been difficult to find a more unlikely figure than Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday following a stroke.

Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, a full year and a half before Ronald Reagan became president. She hailed from a country seen as a hopeless bastion of socialism by conservatives, many of whom, like Reagan himself, were strongly invested in the idea of American exceptionalism.

At the end of the 1970s, "a lot of conservative intellectuals in the United States thought Europe is lost and that America is next," says Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Thatcher's voice came out of the wilderness and said, 'Freedom matters.' "

Her rise was equally improbable because of her gender. She was her country's first female prime minister, a possibility she publicly doubted just six years before occupying No. 10 Downing Street.

“ I think that it was a synergistic, wonderful coincidence that they were coming at the same set of ideas from arguably the two most important countries in the developed world.

April is the cruelest month, according to one of the most famous poems in the English language. Perhaps to take the edge off of April, the Academy of American Poets chose it as the month to draw attention to the art and legacy of poetry — and the achievement of American poets.

We're celebrating this month by hearing from young poets about how they chose — or were chosen by — poetry, and why poetry — one of the oldest human art forms — still matters.

Poet Tracy K. Smith won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2012 collection Life on Mars; she also served as NPR's first NewsPoet, spending a day in the newsroom and writing about her experience there. She tells NPR's Scott Simon that poetry still has the power to change lives. "I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them."

Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton, and she says her students often start out exploring everyday, surface issues in their poetry, "which has to do with dorm life and college experience," she says, "but as we push forward into the semester and as they read more, they start to think about things that maybe take them out of their own points of view." Smith says she encourages her students to write "persona poems," in the voices of other people they may or may not know, "to see if the poem can be a way of teaching them about another kind of experience. But they also have, you know, a lot of poems that have to do with the things that never go away for us, like love or grief."

NewsPoet: Writing The Day In Verse

NewsPoet: Tracy K. Smith Writes The Day In Verse

The U.S. Senate was scheduled to begin voting on gun control measures this week when Congress returns from recess, but Senate staffers say a bipartisan agreement has yet to be reached on universal background checks. That snarl may end up delaying a vote on gun legislation for another week, as lobbyists on both sides of the debate use the extra time to keep the pressure on.

Gun control advocacy groups — such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America — have been popping into Senate offices all recess, just talking to staffers, but hoping their words might trickle up to the ears of lawmakers.

The group formed within days after the Newtown, Conn. shootings and most of the 80,000 members have never lobbied before in their lives.

"I certainly think that walking through the halls of Congress is a little intimidating," said member Cathi Geeslin. "But once you realize that they actually work for you, then it's not so scary."

Their recent target was Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. Warner is a senator of interest to both sides of the gun fight because he's a Democrat in a conservative state with a strong tradition of gun ownership.

The National Rifle Association had told its members to barrage Warner's office with calls that morning. When Moms Demand Action heard that, they launched a counter-offensive, clogging up Warner's phone lines so badly that calls were going straight to voicemail.

Later, several Moms members visited Warner to talk about universal background checks. It's the central issue bedeviling Democratic senators who are trying to get a bipartisan agreement before any gun bill hits the Senate floor.

Checks And Balances

The key Republican player is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has an "A" rating from the NRA. The common view is if he doesn't get on board, the background checks bill will fail. Coburn has said he's willing to expand background checks to private gun sales, but he doesn't want any records kept that would allow the government to keep track of who owns guns.

Gun control advocates call that a foolish position.

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