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The 2012 election was the most expensive in history, but there remain some gaping holes in our knowledge about who paid for what. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to add more transparency in future elections, but it won't happen without a fight.

The SEC proposal would require publicly traded companies to disclose all of their political contributions. And that would force companies to decide, in effect, if being linked to a candidate or partisan position is worth the impact political advocacy might have on its bottom line. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is vowing to fight the effort to tighten disclosure rules.

SuperPACs And 'Social Welfare' Groups

The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations to give unlimited contributions to superPACs, but relatively few public companies have done so, perhaps because political action committees must disclose their donors.

Watchdog groups think some public corporations have contributed to tax-exempt groups that fall under the 501(c) section of the tax code. These groups can engage in political activity — as long as they say their primary purpose is educational — and do not have to disclose their donors. Yet these "social welfare" groups include big political players, ranging from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to President Obama's Organizing for Action.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Crossroads GPS spent more than $70 million in 2012. Organizing for Action, which grew out of Obama's 2012 campaign, was formed after the election cycle. Its founders have pledged to refuse corporate contributions and disclose a list of donors.

Most corporations also belong to 501(c)(6) organizations, like trade associations and chambers of commerce, which can engage in political activity. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $35.7 million in 2012 — and it's now leading the charge against the SEC's petition. Altogether, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates these tax-exempt groups spent at least $300 million in the 2012 election cycle.

If the SEC does propose the new rule — an action it could take as early as next week — it would start a process that would include a comment period and public meetings. Enacting the rule also could spur legal action from opponents.

Voluntary Transparency

A study of the 2012 election cycle shows that many companies already are making at least some donations public, perhaps due to increased pressure from activists and shareholders.

The Center for Political Accountability has been tracking voluntary disclosure by corporations since 2003. For the past two years, the group has compiled a ranking called the CPA-Zicklin Index, which found that 58 percent of the top 200 companies in the S&P 500 voluntarily disclosed some information about their political spending, and 85 percent of companies studied over two years improved their scores for political disclosure and accountability.

Center for Political Accountability President Bruce Freed said that disclosure and accountability policies have become mainstream corporate governance practices. "When we did the index in 2011, we were really, frankly, quite surprised at the results — really pleasantly surprised — when we found that there were companies that were adopting disclosure and accountability policies without having been engaged by investors," Freed said. "They were doing it on their own."

However, the group also found that 59 percent of companies did not disclose any information about payments to trade associations, and 75 percent did not disclose any contributions to tax-exempt social welfare groups.

The Center for Responsive Politics has reported that some companies, including PepsiCo and Koch Industries, have lobbied against the SEC proposal during the first quarter of 2013. But Freed has found that other corporate representatives are frustrated by the varied patchwork of voluntary disclosures.

"I know from discussions with companies that there are a growing number of companies that will say privately, yes, we would like to see a rule because they see uniformity as in their self-interest," Freed said. "It means that companies would be operating on a level playing field here."

Kara Brandeisky is an intern on NPR's Washington Desk.

The 2012 election was the most expensive in history, but there remain some gaping holes in our knowledge about who paid for what. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to add more transparency in future elections, but it won't happen without a fight.

The SEC proposal would require publicly traded companies to disclose all of their political contributions. And that would force companies to decide, in effect, if being linked to a candidate or partisan position is worth the impact political advocacy might have on its bottom line. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is vowing to fight the effort to tighten disclosure rules.

SuperPACs And 'Social Welfare' Groups

The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations to give unlimited contributions to superPACs, but relatively few public companies have done so, perhaps because political action committees must disclose their donors.

Watchdog groups think some public corporations have contributed to tax-exempt groups that fall under the 501(c) section of the tax code. These groups can engage in political activity — as long as they say their primary purpose is educational — and do not have to disclose their donors. Yet these "social welfare" groups include big political players, ranging from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to President Obama's Organizing for Action.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Crossroads GPS spent more than $70 million in 2012. Organizing for Action, which grew out of Obama's 2012 campaign, was formed after the election cycle. Its founders have pledged to refuse corporate contributions and disclose a list of donors.

Most corporations also belong to 501(c)(6) organizations, like trade associations and chambers of commerce, which can engage in political activity. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $35.7 million in 2012 — and it's now leading the charge against the SEC's petition. Altogether, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates these tax-exempt groups spent at least $300 million in the 2012 election cycle.

If the SEC does propose the new rule — an action it could take as early as next week — it would start a process that would include a comment period and public meetings. Enacting the rule also could spur legal action from opponents.

Voluntary Transparency

A study of the 2012 election cycle shows that many companies already are making at least some donations public, perhaps due to increased pressure from activists and shareholders.

The Center for Political Accountability has been tracking voluntary disclosure by corporations since 2003. For the past two years, the group has compiled a ranking called the CPA-Zicklin Index, which found that 58 percent of the top 200 companies in the S&P 500 voluntarily disclosed some information about their political spending, and 85 percent of companies studied over two years improved their scores for political disclosure and accountability.

Center for Political Accountability President Bruce Freed said that disclosure and accountability policies have become mainstream corporate governance practices. "When we did the index in 2011, we were really, frankly, quite surprised at the results — really pleasantly surprised — when we found that there were companies that were adopting disclosure and accountability policies without having been engaged by investors," Freed said. "They were doing it on their own."

However, the group also found that 59 percent of companies did not disclose any information about payments to trade associations, and 75 percent did not disclose any contributions to tax-exempt social welfare groups.

The Center for Responsive Politics has reported that some companies, including PepsiCo and Koch Industries, have lobbied against the SEC proposal during the first quarter of 2013. But Freed has found that other corporate representatives are frustrated by the varied patchwork of voluntary disclosures.

"I know from discussions with companies that there are a growing number of companies that will say privately, yes, we would like to see a rule because they see uniformity as in their self-interest," Freed said. "It means that companies would be operating on a level playing field here."

Kara Brandeisky is an intern on NPR's Washington Desk.

The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated Friday morning.

That's modest growth, and was below the 3.2 percent pace economists had expected to hear about. But growth was up substantially from fourth-quarter 2012, when the economy expanded at a scant 0.4 percent annual rate.

The agency will issue revised estimates of first-quarter growth in each of the next two months, so the figure could change. The agency initially reported, for example, that gross domestic product shrank at a 0.1 percent annual rate in fourth-quarter 2012. Then it said there was 0.1 percent growth. On its third swing at the figures, it came up with the 0.4 percent estimate. The figures shift as more information comes in.

We'll have more from the report and reactions to it as the morning continues.

Update at 8:55 a.m. ET. Not Much Real Change?

According to MarketWatch:

"The acceleration in growth in the early stages of the year stood in sharp contrast to the paltry 0.4% increase in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012. Yet the underlying strength of demand for U.S.-made goods and services was actually weaker in the first quarter. So-called real final sales rose just 1.5% — matching the smallest increase in two years.

"The softness in demand suggests little change in the overall pace of U.S. growth once unusual factors are stripped out. The economy has been expanding at about a 2% clip for the past two years."

The Tribune Co., emerging from bankruptcy and looking to reshape itself, is now considering the sale of all its newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and five other regional newspapers. It's still very early in the sale process; although the newspaper unit has been valued at $623 million, significant debts are also attached, and Tribune has signaled that it reserves the right not to sell if there isn't a worthy bid.

Possible buyers of those papers include David and Charles Koch, billionaire brothers from Kansas. The Koch brothers' vast holdings include huge investments in energy, manufacturing and commodities, but they're known these days for their politics.

Matt Welch is the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine. David Koch sits on its parent foundation, though Welch says he thinks they've never met. "Charles and David Koch have been for the last 40, 40-plus years the most significant backers of libertarian-based organizations and philanthropies in the country," Welch says. "It's not even close. It is Charles and David Koch 100, everybody else 2."

David Koch — the younger one, at 72 — ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party's ticket in 1980. More recently, the Koch brothers raised millions to elect Tea Party candidates and other Republicans, and raised even more for ads opposing President Obama's re-election last year. As a result, they have become a target of liberals like Rachel Maddow, who said on her MSNBC show: "You really can't get away from the Koch brothers. They're becoming way too ubiquitous. Their names pop up in every scummy scandal, one after another."

Whether one thinks Maddow was being fair or not, the Koch brothers are dogged by their strong political identity. Welch says that identity could be a handicap in the Tribune newsrooms. In a former life, he was an assistant editorial pages editor at the Los Angeles Times, the largest Tribune paper. He says the Kochs would face a challenge: "It would be such a culture clash, inevitably, between them and the newsroom there that it would be kind of open conflict there for a long time," Welch says. "I would have a hard time imagining how they calm that down in a productive way."

Two people with close ties to Tribune confirm the brothers' fancy has now turned to the company's newspapers, which can be obtained for far less money than they would have cost a decade ago. James O'Shea became editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times after a long career at the Chicago Tribune, where he rose to become managing editor. He is also author of The Deal from Hell, a book about real estate mogul Sam Zell's disastrous $8.2 billion acquisition of the Tribune Co. Zell loaded the company with roughly $13 billion of debt, and ultimately landed it in bankruptcy during the recession.

O'Shea says readers and even some journalists in those cities, burnt out after years of ownership tumult, newsroom strife and bankruptcy, may prove open to a bid by the Koch brothers. "I think with the Koch brothers, people will probably look at it and say, 'Well, OK. Here are people with a lot of money, and maybe they'll invest in the place,' " O'Shea says. " 'And maybe they'll have ideas about how we diversify our revenue base and get away from this heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on advertising.' "

Yet O'Shea says journalists at Tribune papers initially said much the same about Zell. And O'Shea says he wonders whether the Kochs really view the papers as a financial investment — or a political one. "I don't think anybody's going to object too much if the Koch brothers buy the Chicago Tribune and [have] a libertarian, right-wing editorial page," O'Shea says.

Changes to the editorial page might not spark objections, but O'Shea and other journalists question how the brothers would treat news coverage. The Koch brothers set up the site Kochfacts.com to take on press coverage they don't like, and several reporters told NPR they had felt the sting of coordinated campaigns to harass them. Take David Sassoon, the publisher of Inside Climate News, a small, not-for-profit news outfit that just won a Pulitzer Prize. A few years ago, it published a series of pieces on the possible winners and losers were the Keystone XL pipeline to be built from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.

"We wrote a story saying [the Koch brothers are] positioned to be winners if the pipeline is built, because it will lead to higher prices for tar sands and a boom in general that will lift all boats," says Sassoon.

The Kochs pressured the Reuters news agency to stop distributing articles from Sassoon's site, though they identified no specific mistakes to correct. The brothers took out ads against Sassoon on Facebook and Google, too. "They used my photograph in these ads," Sassoon says. "They used my name in these ads. And really came after us in a way that I have really never experienced before."

A spokeswoman for the Kochs, Missy Cohlmia, says they "respect the independence" of the Tribune papers, though she did not confirm the brothers' interest in buying them.

The Koch brothers are not the only magnates with an eye on the Tribune's publications. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is particularly interested in the L.A. Times, and his executives are exploring the implications of making a bid. Federal regulations bar cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market, and News Corp. already owns two TV stations in Los Angeles. That's a challenge, but not an impossible one: The company has previously obtained waivers to exempt their stations and newspapers in New York City from those same cross-ownership regulations.

Meanwhile, Doug Manchester and Aaron Kushner, the new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Orange County Register, respectively, have also expressed an interest in acquiring the L.A. Times. So has the Los Angeles billionaire and developer Eli Broad, a political liberal who has been a major benefactor in Southern California. And billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has snatched up many smaller newspapers, has indicated he is intrigued by the prospect of buying Tribune's Allentown, Pa., Morning Call.

But the Kochs may have an advantage in making a bid: They could easily afford to acquire the entire newspaper division, even given the accompanying debts, estimated at more than $1 billion. Tribune's current owners would prefer to sell the papers as a single unit. And while other potential suitors have stronger ties to journalism, money might speak louder than experience. The Tribune Co.'s primary current owners are two investment funds and a bank; none has any emotional investment in these historic newspaper titles being held by people with a journalistic background.

If the Koch brothers were to buy the Tribune papers and put their stamp on the editorial pages, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented. Several papers in the Tribune family have histories of conservative-leaning political engagement. Perhaps most notably, before 1960, the family that owned the L.A. Times propelled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to office. Reason magazine's Matt Welch asks, why shouldn't the Kochs? "I mean, the L.A. Times were the Republican kingmakers of California — and therefore at least of the country — for nearly a century," Welch says. "It's incredible, that history."

Tribune is to send out formal documents to potential buyers next month.

Wolfe, Cockrell and the rest of the team got a couple of Nexus smartphones from Amazon. They added extras, like plus-sized batteries and a powerful transmitter. They put it all in a metal case about the size of a Kleenex box. But the phones were still ordinary smartphones; they still had games on them. "We played around with Angry Birds on the ground," Wolfe says.

The PhoneSats hitched a ride on the very first flight of a commercial rocket called Antares, which NASA hopes will soon be resupplying the International Space Station.

"Within the first orbit after being released from the launch vehicle, we started receiving signals," Cockrell says. The signals from the satellites, which are named "Alexander," "Graham" and "Bell," are actually picked up by ham radio operators all over the world, who send them to the team at NASA Ames. The team is now in the process of using the small data packets to piece together photos taken by the different PhoneSats' cameras.

The achievement could mark big changes in the satellite business. Peter Platzer, CEO of NanoSatisfi, a startup company that's about to launch a small satellite into space using money raised on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, sees a world in which satellites aren't owned solely by powerful corporations and governments.

“ I think whenever you create this flexible platform that you let people program and decide what their own use is, it becomes really, really hard to predict where the combined genius of mankind will lead that platform.

Dying on the job continues at a steady pace according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The fatal injury rate for American workers dropped slightly in 2011 — the most recent year with reported numbers — from 3.6 to 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

But 4,693 men, women and teenagers died at work. That's three more than the total number of lives lost on the job in 2010.

BLS says it's the third-lowest death toll since counting began in 1992. Worker safety groups find no comfort in the report, though. It comes as they and the Labor Department prepare to mark Workers Memorial Day on Sunday.

"These deaths were largely preventable," says Tom O'Connor, executive director of National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), an advocacy group formed by organized labor and workers safety advocates. "Simply by following proven safety practices and complying with [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, many of these more than 4,600 deaths could have been avoided."

COSH has just released its own report on workplace deaths, which focuses on specific industries and incidents.

O'Connor blames companies that "decry regulations and emphasize profits over safety."

The vast majority of deaths involve white men in private industry. Nearly 2,000 died in "transportation incidents," including traffic accidents. Close to 10 percent of the workers killed were victims of workplace homicides. Notoriously dangerous work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting took 566 lives — 24.9 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. The most deaths for any single industry were in construction, with 738. That was 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

The BLS report now lists fatalities among contractors and that's a first, according to a story by Jim Morris from the Center for Public Integrity. O'Connor told Morris that "the total death toll is far greater than what we see from a handful of catastrophic incidents. It seems that the public just sort of accepts that as a risk of going to work."

Workers Memorial Day events include the placement of empty and well-worn work boots to symbolize the lives lost at work, groups of spouses and children holding photos of loves ones, and readings of the names of victims.

Last week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that seeks tougher penalties for employers when willful and egregious behavior results in workers deaths. Senate Democrats introduced a similar measure last month.

"The fact remains that penalties for harming workers are often the cost of doing business for some employers," said Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "Congress needs to work together to increase these outdated penalties and give real teeth to the law so that workers and communities can remain safe while trying to make a living."

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., cited a recent NPR series, Buried in Grain, in announcing support for the Senate's version of PAWA.

"Whether working on a factory floor, on an oil rig, or in a grain bin, our workers and their families need to know that they will be safe and protected at the workplace," said Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

PAWA failed to gain enough support in Congress in the past in the face of industry opposition and congressional resistance to expanded government regulation.

Rescue workers are still hoping to find survivors from the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that has killed more than 300 people and left hundreds missing.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of the missing have clashed with police, blaming authorities for the catastrophe at Rana Plaza in Savar, an industrial suburb of the capital, Dhaka.

"Some people are still alive under the rubble and we are hoping to rescue them," deputy fire services director Mizanur Rahman told Reuters.

The news agency quoted a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as saying that she had ordered the arrest of the owners of the building and of the five factories that occupied it.

According to Army spokesman Shahinur Islam, the death toll had reached 304 and H. T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister, said it could exceed 350, Reuters said.

Speaking to NPR, Anbarasan Ethirajan, a Bangladesh-based reporter for the BBC, says rescuers have been using "cranes, diggers and even bare hands."

The factory complex, which reportedly supplies major retailers in the United States and Europe, showed signs that something was wrong the day before the structure suddenly crashed to the ground. Ethirajan says workers had reported cracks in the walls and floor.

Survivors and officials told Ethirajan that when the owner of the building was informed, "he said 'no need to worry about the safety,' [that] they can go back to work on the next day."

One of the garment workers who survived the collapse told Ethirajan that they were told Tuesday "if they didn't go back to work, they might lose their wages."

But employees at a bank on the first floor did not report for work Wednesday because they feared for their safety, he said.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas are protesting over the collapse and poor safety standards, according to the AP.

Garment makers in the building include at least two that claim to supply Western retail outlets.

The Associated Press reports:

"Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them. Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production."

At a time when so many major American news organizations are cutting back, foreign news agencies are beefing up their presence abroad and in the U.S. One of the biggest new players arrives from China and, more likely than not, can be found on a television set near you.

CCTV, or China Central Television, is owned by the Chinese government. With more than 40 channels in China and an offshoot in the U.S., the broadcaster has been highly profitable for the country's ruling Communist Party, which is liking profits a lot these days.

Navigating Two Media Traditions

CCTV America Business News Anchor Phillip T.K. Yin was born and raised in the U.S. by parents who emigrated from mainland China. Yin used to work in investment and for CNBC and Bloomberg. He says he is mindful of the tension between the American tradition of an independent press and Chinese expectations that the media serve the state. And yet, he says, CCTV America has broadcast interviews involving allegations of major computer hacking incidents originating in China — hardly a flattering story.

"It's changing very quickly," Yin says. "I can tell you even from the time that we came onboard here to where we are today, we've changed a lot. We're covering stories from sometimes very controversial angles."

CCTV America has its home in a new building just two blocks from the White House, in the heart of Washington, and it's carried by cable providers in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, among other big cities.

At one point, CCTV America had a larger reach in the U.S. than Al-Jazeera America did, at least until the Qatari channel acquired Current TV earlier this year.

Joining A Larger Media 'Dynamic'

So what are the Chinese doing in the U.S.? Jim Laurie, a former foreign correspondent for ABC News and NBC News, is now a lead consultant for CCTV America. (Executives in China declined to speak to NPR for this story.)

"We see what the British have done; what CNN has done for years. We need to be part of that," Laurie says Chinese executives told him. "China is a big power; the state broadcaster is a big company. We want to be part of that dynamic."

Laurie also knows about another dynamic — one familiar to reporters who have worked in China over the years. In 1989, he witnessed China's bloody crackdown on the student protest movement.

"I've been arrested in China. I've covered demonstrations in which film was confiscated," he says. "On June 4, [1989,] I was there for the Tiananmen massacre. So yeah, it was a pretty heavy time."

Laurie acknowledges CCTV America is unlikely to air an interview with the Dalai Lama's criticisms of the Chinese regime. And yet more than two decades after Tiananmen, he says a new generation of government and media officials is out to increase international commerce as well as the free flow of information back and forth, especially about business.

Still On The Party's 'Short Leash'

Orville Schell, a veteran journalist and founder of the website ChinaFile, sees a somewhat different dynamic at work: the Chinese state seeking to exercise soft power, a way to project influence through ideas and culture rather than the display of military might.

"This fixation on soft power arises from their deep and abiding insecurity and sense of not being respected and of being hectored and bullied by the world over the last century and a half," he says.

According to Ying Zhu, a professor of media culture at City University of New York's College of Staten Island, the network has sought to incorporate Western journalism standards by sheer force of numbers, hiring dozens of staffers from ABC, Bloomberg, CNN, the BBC and similar outlets. But, she says, there's one catch.

The Two-Way

China's Broadcast Of Drug Lord's Final Hours Sparks Controversy

Ahmed Fahad is a savior on a hot day. Yelling "Ice cream, ice cream!" in Arabic, the Palestinian man carries a Styrofoam cooler through tangled traffic at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. I roll down my window to signal to him but taste the sting of dissipating tear gas instead.

Enlarge image i

Ahmed Fahad is a savior on a hot day. Yelling "Ice cream, ice cream!" in Arabic, the Palestinian man carries a Styrofoam cooler through tangled traffic at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. I roll down my window to signal to him but taste the sting of dissipating tear gas instead.

Enlarge image i

Wolfe, Cockrell and the rest of the team got a couple of Nexus smartphones from Amazon. They added extras, like plus-sized batteries and a powerful transmitter. They put it all in a metal case about the size of a Kleenex box. But the phones were still ordinary smartphones; they still had games on them. "We played around with Angry Birds on the ground," Wolfe says.

The PhoneSats hitched a ride on the very first flight of a commercial rocket called Antares, which NASA hopes will soon be resupplying the International Space Station.

"Within the first orbit after being released from the launch vehicle, we started receiving signals," Cockrell says. The signals from the satellites, which are named "Alexander," "Graham" and "Bell," are actually picked up by ham radio operators all over the world, who send them to the team at NASA Ames. The team is now in the process of using the small data packets to piece together photos taken by the different PhoneSats' cameras.

The achievement could mark big changes in the satellite business. Peter Platzer, CEO of NanoSatisfi, a startup company that's about to launch a small satellite into space using money raised on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, sees a world in which satellites aren't owned solely by powerful corporations and governments.

“ I think whenever you create this flexible platform that you let people program and decide what their own use is, it becomes really, really hard to predict where the combined genius of mankind will lead that platform.

The U.S. Congress — a body not exactly known for its swift feet — raced Friday to complete legislation to help travelers avoid delays at airports.

The House voted 361-41 to approve legislation that the Senate passed without objection late Thursday. The bill gives the Federal Aviation Administration more spending flexibility to cut its budget while avoiding furloughs of air traffic controllers.

President Obama plans to sign the legislation to help quickly end the disruptions tied to thin staffing of air traffic control towers.

Elected officials reacted with extraordinary speed to the growing industry and consumer anger over flight delays, especially in the Northeast. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association says it compiled FAA data showing that from Sunday through Wednesday of this week, air carriers experienced 8,804 flight delays, compared with 2,795 delays in the same Sunday-through-Wednesday period in April 2012.

Compounding Problems

It's never easy to precisely identify the cause of delays because often they result from some combination of weather, staffing levels and operational glitches. For example, delays caused by a thunderstorm can be exacerbated by a shortage of controllers to help get flights back on track after the storm ends. Exactly which of the resulting delays can be attributed to the storm alone or to the staffing levels can be a matter of debate.

But aviation experts say that without question, a big reason for the tripling in delays this week was the reduction in the number of on-duty controllers.

"Obviously, traffic patterns and weather patterns change day to day," said Doug Church, a spokesman for the controllers union. But the surge in delays reflects the reduction in controllers, he said.

"Not only is staffing causing delays in a large part, but also delays due to weather are worsened because of the [lack of] staffing," he said.

Church gave this example: At one point Thursday, O'Hare International Airport in Chicago was accepting 72 planes per hour, down from its normal 114, because of reduced staffing. But the airport was also operating under a cloud cover that prevented controllers from performing visual approaches to the airport.

He says that the delays increased because the control tower did not have enough staff to perform concurrent instrument-landing-system approaches.

Aviation consultant Michael Boyd, head of Boyd Group International, said that delays "absolutely" jumped because of the staffing levels and in fact "the delays were even worse than we know."

That's because flight delays cascade through the system, he said. For example, a flight may get held up in New York, and that delay gets attributed to the staffing troubles. But then that flight arrives late to its destination, causing delays at that airport, yet the subsequent delays won't get linked directly to the furloughs, Boyd said.

Airline Profits Threatened

All of that has left airline executives fuming because they already are struggling to keep their companies solvent, Boyd said. "They were worried they wouldn't make any money this year," he said.

The problem with delays began on Sunday when the FAA started decreasing the ranks of controllers to stay within the reduced budget that took effect March 1. That's the date when congressionally mandated, automatic spending cuts began kicking in under the so-called sequestration process.

The FAA said Congress left it with no choice but to furlough 47,000 workers for up to 11 unpaid days each between now and the fiscal year's end on Sept. 30. Those furloughs included nearly 15,000 flight controllers and other workers needed to keep flights moving on time.

With fewer controllers on duty, the FAA said it had to decrease the number of departures and landings, particularly during peak periods. Those "traffic management" changes led to thousands of flight delays, especially in regions with crowded airspace, like the New York City area.

Doubts Among Republicans

Many Republicans complained that the White House was having the FAA make cuts that inflicted the most pain on travelers to drum up opposition to budget cuts. For example, Republican Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said in a statement that the FAA had the power "to reduce costs elsewhere, such as contracts, travel, supplies, and consultants, or to apply furloughs in a manner that better protects the most critical air-traffic-control facilities."

Nicholas Calio, who heads the aviation industry trade group named Airlines For America, labeled the furloughs "unjust, unnecessary and completely irresponsible."

But FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a Senate committee earlier this month that the automatic spending cuts left the agency with no spending flexibility.

The new legislation allows the FAA to shift $253 million around among accounts to provide the spending flexibility to end the controller furloughs.

'A Temporary Band-Aid'

White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement that the legislation will help travelers, "but ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless across the board cuts."

The airlines cheered the congressional action. "The winners here are the customers who will be spared from lengthy and needless delays," Calio said.

But some Democrats objected, saying Congress should be ending the entire sequestration, not just giving the FAA a way to work around a portion of it. On the floor of the House, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said he opposed the bill. "We ought not to be mitigating the sequester's effect on just one segment, when children, the sick, our military and many other groups who will be impacted by this irresponsible policy are left unhelped."

NPR's Matt Stiles and Tamara Keith contributed to this report.

Ahmed Fahad is a savior on a hot day. Yelling "Ice cream, ice cream!" in Arabic, the Palestinian man carries a Styrofoam cooler through tangled traffic at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. I roll down my window to signal to him but taste the sting of dissipating tear gas instead.

Enlarge image i

Polio isn't going easily into the dustbin of history.

The world needs to push it in, throw down the lid and then keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't escape.

That's the gist of a new plan released Thursday by the World Health Organization and other foundations at a vaccine meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

It's a six-year, $5.5 billion program, and its goal is to wipe out polio for good.

The plan calls for attacking the remaining pockets of polio in the last endemic countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — with mass immunization campaigns. It would boost polio surveillance globally and set up systems to respond rapidly in case outbreaks do occur.

At the same time, the new Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan lays out a strategy to switch to an injectable vaccine instead of the ubiquitous oral vaccine. The latter is cheap and easy, but it contains a live virus, which in very rare instances can cause polio.

The road map also looks at how to contain existing samples of the virus in laboratories and how to secure stockpiles of the vaccine in case polio somehow comes back.

Global health leaders who have been going after polio for decades believe they're finally on the verge of crushing it.

In 2011, there were 650 polio cases reported worldwide. Last year that number dropped down to 223. This year, so far there have been fewer than 20.

Chasing Down Polio

President Obama has been hosting a series of visitors from the Middle East, and all of them have been urging the U.S. to get more involved in Syria.

They have included the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, whose country has been arming rebel forces in Syria. Obama wants to see such aid go to moderates — but that requires more cooperation with partners like Qatar. Problem is, they don't always see eye to eye.

Qatar was already an important U.S. partner in the region when the Arab uprisings began, and the small, wealthy Gulf nation saw a new opportunity to gain influence when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, says Tamara Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

"One of the consequences of the fall of Mubarak is that the U.S. lost in a way its central diplomatic partner in the Arab world," Wittes says. "In many ways, the Qataris stepped up to play that role, in the Arab League, for example, on Libya and then on Syria."

Impression Of Qatar 'Taking Sides'

This was a time when the U.S. wanted others to take the lead. But there were risks in that approach, says Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of the center's Gulf and Energy Policy Program.

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The 2012 election was the most expensive in history, but there remain some gaping holes in our knowledge about who paid for what. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to add more transparency in future elections, but it won't happen without a fight.

The SEC proposal would require publicly traded companies to disclose all of their political contributions. And that would force companies to decide, in effect, if being linked to a candidate or partisan position is worth the impact political advocacy might have on its bottom line. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is vowing to fight the effort to tighten disclosure rules.

SuperPACs And 'Social Welfare' Groups

The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations to give unlimited contributions to superPACs, but relatively few public companies have done so, perhaps because political action committees must disclose their donors.

Watchdog groups think some public corporations have contributed to tax-exempt groups that fall under the 501(c) section of the tax code. These groups can engage in political activity — as long as they say their primary purpose is educational — and do not have to disclose their donors. Yet these "social welfare" groups include big political players, ranging from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to President Obama's Organizing for Action.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Crossroads GPS spent more than $70 million in 2012. Organizing for Action, which grew out of Obama's 2012 campaign, was formed after the election cycle. Its founders have pledged to refuse corporate contributions and disclose a list of donors.

Most corporations also belong to 501(c)(6) organizations, like trade associations and chambers of commerce, which can engage in political activity. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $35.7 million in 2012 — and it's now leading the charge against the SEC's petition. Altogether, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates these tax-exempt groups spent at least $300 million in the 2012 election cycle.

If the SEC does propose the new rule — an action it could take as early as next week — it would start a process that would include a comment period and public meetings. Enacting the rule also could spur legal action from opponents.

Voluntary Transparency

A study of the 2012 election cycle shows that many companies already are making at least some donations public, perhaps due to increased pressure from activists and shareholders.

The Center for Political Accountability has been tracking voluntary disclosure by corporations since 2003. For the past two years, the group has compiled a ranking called the CPA-Zicklin Index, which found that 58 percent of the top 200 companies in the S&P 500 voluntarily disclosed some information about their political spending, and 85 percent of companies studied over two years improved their scores for political disclosure and accountability.

Center for Political Accountability President Bruce Freed said that disclosure and accountability policies have become mainstream corporate governance practices. "When we did the index in 2011, we were really, frankly, quite surprised at the results — really pleasantly surprised — when we found that there were companies that were adopting disclosure and accountability policies without having been engaged by investors," Freed said. "They were doing it on their own."

However, the group also found that 59 percent of companies did not disclose any information about payments to trade associations, and 75 percent did not disclose any contributions to tax-exempt social welfare groups.

The Center for Responsive Politics has reported that some companies, including PepsiCo and Koch Industries, have lobbied against the SEC proposal during the first quarter of 2013. But Freed has found that other corporate representatives are frustrated by the varied patchwork of voluntary disclosures.

"I know from discussions with companies that there are a growing number of companies that will say privately, yes, we would like to see a rule because they see uniformity as in their self-interest," Freed said. "It means that companies would be operating on a level playing field here."

Kara Brandeisky is an intern on NPR's Washington Desk.

The bidding hasn't closed yet, but a charity auction of a cup of coffee shared with Apple CEO Tim Cook has already attracted offers of more than $600,000 — more than 10 times its estimated value of $50,000. Cook is one of several celebrities taking part in the auction, which benefits the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

The coffee klatch, currently valued at $605,000, will take place at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California. And the price may rise even higher — the auction closes on Tuesday, May 14.

According to the auction's terms, the bidder who wins the chance to meet Cook for coffee will have one year to align schedules with the man who was on Time magazine's short list for Person of the Year in 2012. The winner may bring a guest to the meeting, which will last between 30 minutes and one hour.

We do not know what kind of coffee the Apple cafeteria serves. Perhaps they use the famously expensive "poop" coffees, in which the beans are collected after they've passed through the digestive systems of an animal — such as a civet (as we've reported on NPR), or an elephant. There is no word on whether refills are free.

The high price of a one-hour coffee session with Cook made us curious about how that compares to what the Apple CEO makes as an hourly rate. So we embarked on an exercise of (notoriously unreliable, we warn you) journalism math.

In 2012, Cook reportedly received a total compensation of $4.17 million, according to Bloomberg. That means that if he worked 40 hours a week — something that's far from a guarantee, but we need a ballpark figure — Cook made $2,004.81 an hour.

To calculate that figure, we used the widely accepted standard of 2,080 work-hours per year. Which means that if every one of Cook's hours were valued as highly as this coffee chat, he would earn more than $1,258,400,000 — yes, more than $1.25 billion — in a year.

As of Saturday morning, having coffee with Cook is the only experience in the RFK Center auction at the Charity Buzz website that's priced at more than $10,000. Other offerings include a week's stay at a California resort, and a chance to share screen time with actor Chris Hemsworth in a Michael Mann film.

Coffee has been on our minds here at NPR lately — see our stories from Coffee Week.

Kal Penn has a pretty unusual resume: He has starred in Harold and Kumar, the most successful series of stoner movies made in the past decade; and has served in the White House as the Obama administration's liaison to youth. Now he's hosting a new show, The Big Brain Theory, on the Discovery Channel.

We've invited him to play a game called "Ahhh! Get It Off Me!" You might be surprised to learn you're not alone in your body — there's a whole colony of bacteria and other critters called a "microbiome" living there. We're going to ask Penn three questions about our little unseen friends.

President Obama has been hosting a series of visitors from the Middle East, and all of them have been urging the U.S. to get more involved in Syria.

They have included the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, whose country has been arming rebel forces in Syria. Obama wants to see such aid go to moderates — but that requires more cooperation with partners like Qatar. Problem is, they don't always see eye to eye.

Qatar was already an important U.S. partner in the region when the Arab uprisings began, and the small, wealthy Gulf nation saw a new opportunity to gain influence when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, says Tamara Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

"One of the consequences in the fall of Mubarak is that the U.S. lost in a way its central diplomatic partner in the Arab world," Wittes says. "In many ways, the Qataris stepped up to play that role, in the Arab League, for example, on Libya and then on Syria."

Impression Of Qatar 'Taking Sides'

This was a time when the U.S. wanted others to take the lead. But there were risks in that approach, says Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of the center's Gulf and Energy Policy Program.

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Mass shootings, bus crashes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks — we've gotten adept at talking about these things. Act of God or act of man, they're all horrific. At least that was the word you kept hearing from politicians and newscasters describing the Boston bombings and the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas.

That may not strike you as surprising — the events were horrific, weren't they? But it's actually a new way of describing things. "Horrific" is an old word; it turns up in Thackeray and Melville. But until recent times it was rare and literary. It didn't start to take off until a few decades ago, and it's been on a tear ever since — 10 times as common now as it was in 1970. Words sometimes catch on that way, like a pair of boots you've had in the back of the closet for years until one morning you pull them out and start wearing them every day.

But why now? I wondered if it had to do with the bleaching of "horrible." Milton used "horrible" for the dungeons of hell; now we use it for bad hairdos. But "horrific" doesn't mean the same thing as "horrible" or "horrifying" — it's not just a fancy word for "scary." The way it's used now, "horrific" doesn't describe events themselves so much as the reaction they evoke. Horrific sights are the ones that transfix and repel us at the same time. I asked a friend what he thought the word meant, and he sent me a link to a photo that appeared last month after the University of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware suffered a gruesome leg fracture during an NCAA game. It showed three of his teammates at courtside. The one in the middle had his arms around the other two and was gaping at the injury in wide-eyed horror. The one on his right had turned away, his face twisted in anguish. The one on his left was staring ashenly up into space. Those are the three faces of the horrific: We gawk, pull back convulsively, and finally turn away shaken.

“ Those are the three faces of the horrific: We gawk, pull back convulsively, and finally turn away shaken."

Polio isn't going easily into the dustbin of history.

The world needs to push it in, throw down the lid and then keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't escape.

That's the gist of a new plan released Thursday by the World Health Organization and other foundations at a vaccine meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

It's a six-year, $5.5 billion program, and its goal is to wipe out polio for good.

The plan calls for attacking the remaining pockets of polio in the last endemic countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — with mass immunization campaigns. It would boost polio surveillance globally and set up systems to respond rapidly in case outbreaks do occur.

At the same time, the new Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan lays out a strategy to switch to an injectable vaccine instead of the ubiquitous oral vaccine. The latter is cheap and easy, but it contains a live virus, which in very rare instances can cause polio.

The road map also looks at how to contain existing samples of the virus in laboratories and how to secure stockpiles of the vaccine in case polio somehow comes back.

Global health leaders who have been going after polio for decades believe they're finally on the verge of crushing it.

In 2011, there were 650 polio cases reported worldwide. Last year that number dropped down to 223. This year, so far there have been fewer than 20.

Chasing Down Polio

Monday kicks off US VegWeek 2013, a campaign by Compassion Over Killing that invites people to go vegetarian for a week "to explore a wide variety of meat-free foods and discover the many benefits of vegetarian eating—for our health, the planet, and animals."

VegWeek got its start in 2009, with Maryland state Sen. Jamie Raskin (D) committing to a week of meat-free dining. This year dozens of other legislators and community leaders are following suit, with representatives from Arizona, Texas, and California, among others, making 7-day VegPledges to go veggie from April 22-28.

Sen. Raskin's week-long pledge has stretched to years, a move that he describes as aligning his morals with his menu. But achieving this alignment is a struggle for many omnivores. On the one hand, they don't enjoy harming animals. But on the other, they do enjoy the taste of meat. These inconsistent beliefs lead to what psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian call a meat paradox: "people simultaneously dislike hurting animals and like eating meat."

One response to this paradox is that of Sen. Raskin: change your menu to match your morals by embracing a vegetarian or vegan diet. [Full disclosure: I'm also vegetarian.] But another response is to change your moral or factual beliefs in a way that renders meat eating less problematic. If you believe that cows are essentially mindless, for example, then eating them and supporting factory farming might not be quite so objectionable. Right?

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that people do adapt their morals to their menu, whether or not they realize they're doing so. In a 2010 study by Loughnan, Haslam and Bastian, for example, meat-eating university students were randomly assigned to consume either beef jerky or cashew nuts. In a subsequent task — presented as unrelated — participants indicated which of 27 animals (snails, cows, gorillas, etc.) they felt "morally obligated to show concern for."

The researchers reasoned that eating beef jerky would force participants to confront the meat paradox head on, leading to greater cognitive dissonance and the denial of moral status to non-human animals. That's precisely what they found. The beef-eaters identified an average of 13.5 of the 27 animals as worthy of moral concern; the cashew-eaters came in at a significantly higher 17.3.

Additional research has found that people ascribe a more impoverished mental life to cows and to sheep when they're told that they will later be eating beef or lamb. The same is true when people learn that particular cows and sheep will "be taken to an abattoir, killed, butchered, and sent to supermarkets as meat products for humans."

Researchers have also found that animals categorized as food are ascribed reduced capacity to suffer, whether or not humans are responsible for the killing. And that's not all. Another study reports that omnivores are less likely than vegetarians to attribute emotions like love, hope, and melancholy to (edible) pigs, but not to dogs.

Two of the leaders in this field of research, Nick Haslam and Brock Bastian, were kind enough to correspond with me by e-mail about their findings. Haslam explained how this work emerged from more general questions about human judgments and social groups:

My colleagues and I had been pursuing a line of research on dehumanization and were thinking about different groups that might be denied human qualities. We realized that this process of denial might occur with non-human targets. You couldn't say that a non-human animal had been "dehumanized", of course, but you could say that it had been distanced from humanity by a process that's directly analogous to dehumanization: denying that animal emotions, thoughts, and moral worth. Sure enough, we found that people were especially likely to deny human-like qualities to animals that they eat, and that they deny animals these qualities especially when they contemplate eating them or are in the process of eating them. This pattern is just what you see in the dehumanization of social groups: we view some other people as less than human and do this especially when we aggress against them.

New York City is notoriously crowded, and it's only getting more so. The city estimates it will have 1 million more people by the year 2030, many of them single. Where to place all these newcomers is a major challenge.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced plans to put up an experimental building of micro-apartments that could be replicated throughout the city. And the Museum of the City of New York is looking at ways to make better use of the city's housing stock.

Walk around the back of a house in Queens and you'll find a dingy basement apartment no bigger than 600 square feet. Twenty-seven-year-old Hrishikesh, a cabdriver from Bangladesh, lives there with three other men — for $300 each.

Hrishikesh, who didn't want his last name used, says he likes having the company of the other men, but it gets really crowded. The men have to sleep in shifts: two people sleeping, two people working.

Small But Illegal Spaces

This neighborhood is filled with illegal apartments like this, carved out of basements and attics. Donald Albrecht, a curator for the Museum of the City of New York, says many are firetraps.

"Oftentimes, a small wall will be built," he says. "And this is a problem when if there's a fire, the fire department comes and discovers a wall that they don't think would normally be there. So it's illegal, it's uncomfortable and it's unsafe."

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Will history judge George W. Bush more kindly than his contemporaries have?

The man himself seems fairly indifferent.

"I don't think he really cares much at all, to be honest with you," says Kevin Sullivan, who served as White House communications director during Bush's second term. "I think he cares very little about where his approval rating stands today, compared to 2005 or 2008."

His supporters care. With the opening of his presidential library and museum Thursday in Dallas, they have been making the case that he will be like a latter-day Harry S. Truman — derided as he left office, but seen as a success later on.

"The perspective of history will treat Bush better than Bush is being treated now," says former GOP Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who served as House speaker for much of Bush's tenure.

Many historians are skeptical, saying they doubt that Bush's accomplishments will be held in higher regard in years to come than they do now.

Given the 43rd president's record on transparency, meanwhile, they say the opening of Bush's library won't do the single most important thing that might revive his reputation — give them any kind of early look at the still-classified documents it holds.

Ready For Rehab

Recent ex-presidents have tended to be viewed more kindly after leaving office than during their terms. Here's a look at how four former presidents have fared.

Bill Clinton — Up

Average approval rating in office: 55 percent

Average rating after leaving: 60 percent

Impeachment and the pardons scandal have mostly been forgotten. Democrats view him as a hero, while most Americans think back fondly on a presidency that offered both peace and prosperity.

George H.W. Bush — Up

Average approval rating in office: 61 percent

Average rating after leaving: 66 percent

The first President Bush was unable to win re-election but has since garnered credit for managing the end of the Cold War and for a controversial budget deal that helped erase the federal deficit.

Ronald Reagan — Up

Average approval rating in office: 53 percent

Average rating after leaving: 64 percent

Reagan has become almost the patron saint of the modern GOP, and even many of those who criticized him during his presidency retrospectively admire his achievement in staring down the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter — Mixed

Average approval rating in office: 46 percent

Average rating after leaving: 56 percent

By fighting disease, building homes and monitoring elections, Carter reshaped the job of ex-president. Although his approval rating has risen, memories of his actual presidency haven't grown rosy, and he remains controversial with more recent positions on issues such as Israel and Palestinian statehood.

— Alan Greenblatt; polling data from Gallup report published April 25.

This may not add up to quite what you think, though. With the kidnapping of an American professor in the opening scene in Lahore, The Reluctant Fundamentalist positions itself as a thriller. Yet it's framed as a teahouse conversation between Changez and Bobby (Liev Schreiber), an American journalist with his own conflicts of loyalty and belief. As a student protest against a repressive Pakistani government gathers steam around the two men, heavily monitored by the CIA, it's Bobby who must listen to Changez's story — all of it, the young Pakistani insists.

With author Hamid's help, Nair and her co-screenwriter, William Wheeler, have ironed out some crucial ambiguities in the novel's account of the uneasy relationship between the two men. In the book, the identities of both remain tantalizingly undefined; in the movie we learn early on that Bobby is an ambivalent CIA operative, torn between his sympathy for the protest movement and his growing conviction that the United States has a role to play in the war-torn region.

The changes work fine for dramatic purposes, and Nair adroitly manages the tension between talk and action. Darting back and forth in time and place, between Lahore and New York (Atlanta, actually, but you'd never know) she unfolds a tale of a man trying to find home in two key global cities, each with a vibrant culture of its own.

Nair likes to have fun even when her material is somber, and for this movie she deploys a rich palette and a multi-culti but mostly kitsch-free score that fuses old and new with a lovely Sufi devotional piece, and is peppered with Pakistani pop. She indulges her sensual side with a wedding, as well as a cheeky turn by Pakistani singer Meesha Shafi as Changez's America-obsessed sister.

Who is Changez? "I am a lover of America," he tells Bobby as he begins and ends his story. Yet he also loves his birthplace with equal fervor and critical scrutiny, and suggests the two countries have more in common than meets the eye. The word "fundamental" pops up just twice, once from the mouth of Changez's go-for-broke capitalist boss, and again from a newly radicalized Changez.

Like Hamid, Nair sees more hope than threat in the fractured identities that increasingly dominate our fluid world. But she won't go all the way with him to disturb our media-fed pieties. When Changez recounts his immediate response on seeing the planes plow into the World Trade Center, Bobby is shocked. I was too.

Yet in context, this is less an assertion of malice or callousness than a surge of reflexive anger toward a nation that has rewarded his efforts to become a model citizen with only the most contingent acceptance. Attention must be paid — so it's a pity that at the end, in a departure from Hamid's enigmatic restraint, The Reluctant Fundamentalist collapses in a heap of wool-gathering humanism that feels warm to the touch, yet fatally hedges its political bets.

Tough economic times and growing poverty in much of Europe are reviving a humble tradition that began some one hundred years ago in the Italian city of Naples. It's called caff sospeso — "suspended coffee": A customer pays in advance for a person who cannot afford a cup of coffee.

The Neapolitian writer Luciano de Crescenzo used the tradition as the title of one of his books, Caff sospeso: saggezza quotidiana in piccoli sorsi ("Suspended coffee, daily wisdom in small sips").

"It was a beautiful custom," he recalls. "When a person who had a break of good luck entered a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee, he didn't pay just for one, but for two cups, allowing someone less fortunate who entered later to have a cup of coffee for free."

The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the caf and asked, "is there anything suspended?" the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee ... for free.

It's an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn't show off, and the recipient doesn't have to show gratitude.

The writer says the tradition is part of the city's philosophy of life. "In other words, it was a cup of coffee," de Crescenzo says, "offered to the rest of humankind." It was a time, he adds, when there were more customers who were poor than those who were well-off.

It's fitting that the tradition started in Naples, a city that prides itself on having the best coffee in Italy. And in a country where the first coffee house in Europe opened in 1683 (in Venice), that is no small claim.

Before the likes of Gaggia and Cimbali started producing the modern commercial espresso machines, Italians made coffee at home on the stovetop with a coffee maker known as a Napoletana.

Naples and coffee are inseparable, but the caff sospeso tradition waned as Italy entered the boom years of post-war reconstruction and La Dolce Vita. For decades, the custom was confined mainly to the Christmas season.

Now, it's made a comeback. Two years ago, with the eurozone crisis already raging, unemployment rising and small businesses closing on a daily basis, more and more Italians could no longer afford the national beverage — an espresso or a cappuccino. (According to the International Coffee Organization, which represents 44 coffee exporting countries, Italian per capita annual consumption of coffee has dropped to 5.6 kilograms, the lowest level in the last six years.)

Then someone remembered the old Neapolitan custom. So several non-governmental organizations got together and — with the support of Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris –Dec.10 was formally declared "Suspended Coffee Day."

The practice is now spreading to other crisis-ravaged parts of Europe.

In Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest country, where several desperate people have set themselves on fire in recent months, more than 150 cafes have joined an initiative modeled on the Neapolitan "suspended coffee" tradition.

In crisis-wracked Spain, a young man from Barcelona, Gonzalo Sapina, in a few short weeks started a network called Cafes Pendientes ("pending coffees") and promoted the initiative among numerous coffee shops.

In France, several cafs now carry the logo "caf en attente" ("waiting coffee").

And there is even a site that lists establishments that have joined the "suspended coffee" initiative — the countries range from the U.K. and Ireland and Hungary to Australia and Canada.

The prepaid cup of coffee has become a symbol of grass-roots social solidarity at a time of mounting poverty in what, until recently, were affluent Western societies.

But now, back to Naples, where coffee is not a luxury but is considered, more or less, a basic human right.

And the variety is vast: You can order an espresso "ristretto" ("tightened", i.e. stronger); or an espresso "macchiato" ("stained", i.e. with a little milk); or an espresso "corretto" ("corrected", i.e. with a shot of grappa, cognac or sambuca).

There's only one iron-clad rule: Cappuccino — which takes its name from the white and beige colors of the Capuchin friars' habits — is exclusively a breakfast beverage, and must never, never be consumed after 11 a.m. (OK, let's say noon).

My husband and I recently attended a production of the Mozart Requiem at James Madison University's gorgeous Forbes Center for the Performing Arts. The stage was full. Conducted by Dr. Jo-Anne van der Vat-Chromy, sung by the JMU Chorale (in which our daughter is a soprano), with music by the JMU Chamber Orchestra, the work was masterful and moving.

Part of the Requiem's force derives from its fascinating origins and the fact that Mozart died at 35 while still composing it. But I think it's more that we, the audience, hear the music and the words — lux perpetua luceat eis, may perpetual light shine upon them — and feel the power of death. Our own vulnerability is exposed.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human

There were 339,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 16,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

The drop brought claims down to around their lowest level since early 2008, when the latest recession was just getting started and before the downturn got its grip on the economy.

Last week's decline is a positive sign. The Associated Press reminds readers that jobless claims "are a proxy for layoffs" and that when they drop, "it signals that companies are cutting fewer jobs." But the wire service adds that layoffs are only "half of the equation. Businesses also need to be confident enough in the economic outlook to step up hiring."

Recent indicators seem to show that most businesses aren't yet willing to boost hiring. In March, the government estimates, just 88,000 jobs were added to private and public payrolls.

Still, Reuters says the news on jobless claims offers "reassurance [that] the bottom is not falling out of the labor market despite signs of slower growth."

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

One of Maya Angelou's doctors said she is recovering at home in North Carolina after being hospitalized, according to The Associated Press. Angelou, a writer and poet best known for her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is 85. Angelou spoke to NPR's Rachel Martin last month about her relationship with her mother, her time working as a streetcar conductor and why she loves to make cream puffs.

Namara Smith writes about Bring Up The Bodies author Hilary Mantel in an essay for n+1 magazine: "Although the language is not archaic, it is often luxurious: someone's glance 'slides...like silk upon a stone'; hawks fall from the sky 'gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.' "

John Freeman, editor in chief of Granta, is leaving the literary magazine in July. Asked what he would do next, he responded in an email: "Teaching and writing ... I've had books stacking up in my head or on the paper that I've been meaning to write and am excited to have the time now to finally do it, much as I will miss the magazine." He was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition recently about Granta's Best of Young British Novelists issue.

According to a recent profile of novelist Claire Messud in New York Magazine, Christopher Hitchens once asked her, "Would it kill you to write something people actually want to read?"

Novelist (also, dachshund enthusiast and compulsive book-blurber) Gary Shteyngart is coming out with a memoir titled Little Failure in 2014, Random House announced Wednesday. Shteyngart said in a statement, "I've finally written a book that isn't a ribald satire and because it's actually based on my life, contains almost no sex whatsoever."

Jennifer Szalai challenges the literary world's disdain for Oprah's Book Club in a thoughtful New Yorker essay. "For literary purists, everything that Winfrey brings — the sales bump, the best-seller status, anything having to do with the word "popular" — no doubt signifies trouble rather than salvation, further proof of the irreconcilable gulf between mass culture and genuine art," she writes. "This is not to say that such suspicions are necessarily unfounded, but don't they also treat art as some fragile, defenseless object, prone to contamination from simply having too many people experience it, people who might appreciate it (or not) in their own way?"

One of those newly inverted performers is Patina Miller, a Tony-nominated actress, who plays the Leading Player — kind of the ringmaster of the story, in this version.

"I trained for the trapeze, and I've been hula-hooping a lot, but I've never moved and hula-hooped," Miller says wryly.

In fact, every one of the actors has been trained in circus skills. Andrea Martin, the former SCTV star and comic actress, does a show-stopping act, which I won't give away — but it truly is death-defying, Snider says.

"Circus is dangerous; you push physical limits, and it never gets undangerous," Snider says. "But [now I] have a 67-year-old woman, incredible performer, just saying, 'I wanna go out there and do this; I wanna make this happen' — and I am responsible for this. You really have to train methodically, and you have to be diligent and really calculate what moves are going to work for her body."

Schwartz admits that when Paulus first approached him with the circus idea, he was skeptical.

"I didn't really understand what she was driving at, particularly," Schwartz says. "Um, I thought, well you know, 'What's the difference? So somebody will be on a trapeze.' And I didn't quite understand how theatrical this could become, and how exciting."

"In early 1800, this guy who has inherited the remains of his grandfather's empire at the age of only 17 — he's kicked out. He takes refuge in British India, where the British tuck him away and give him a pension, realizing that this guy could be useful in the future."

On Britain's invasion of Afghanistan

"With the 'Great Game' [as it came to be called] building up between Britain and Russia, there's competition for Asia between these two European land-based empires. ... And they both realize, if you look at the map, that these two empires are going to converge somewhere in the middle in the Hindu Kush, in this unmapped, unknown territory in the middle of Asia.

"It's an absurd undertaking, because at this point the British and the Russians are still about 1,000 miles apart. Nonetheless, the British do this extraordinary, epic invasion of Afghanistan. They go around the sides of the Punjab, they go up the Indus ... They drag this artillery up mountainsides, and they actually get to Afghanistan. They hardly fight a battle, but they lose a quarter of their force to dehydration and bad planning and starvation, and it's this hellish march.

"But such is the surprise when they turn up in Afghanistan, the rulers of Kandahar flee. They take Kandahar without a shot being fired; Shah Shuja is installed in his old palace in Kabul. It looks as if it's a huge success. You have a whole winter when the British are just going shooting and ice skating and taking the foxhounds out for exercise ... Everyone seems to be happy."

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Author Interviews

Enshrined And Oft-Invoked, Simon Bolivar Lives On

Remember when Rand Paul held the Senate floor for 13 hours last month because of his concern that President Obama would use drones to target alleged terrorists on American soil?

That concern, apparently, does not always extend to alleged common criminals on American soil.

"If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him," Paul told Fox Fox Business Network on Tuesday. "But it's different if they want to come fly over your hot tub or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone and they want to watch your activities."

During his filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan in early March, Kentucky's junior senator argued that it was wrong to attack suspected terrorists if they weren't actually committing violence at that moment. "Now, there may be bad people who are driving in their car and there may be bad people sitting in cafes around the country. If there are, accuse them of a crime, arrest them and try them," Paul said then.

Paul has said he is considering a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. His Fox comment raised the ire of some of his libertarian supporters, and it was followed with a clarification of sorts:

"My comments last night left the mistaken impression that my position on drones had changed.

"Let me be clear: It has not. Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations. They may only be considered in extraordinary, lethal situations where there is an ongoing, imminent threat. I described that scenario previously during my Senate filibuster.

"Additionally, surveillance drones should only be used with warrants and specific targets.

"Fighting terrorism and capturing terrorists must be done while preserving our constitutional protections. This was demonstrated last week in Boston. As we all seek to prevent future tragedies, we must continue to bear this in mind."

S.V. Dte is the congressional editor on NPR's Washington Desk.

You think you're so smart. You think it's easy being the President of the United States. OK, pal — here's your chance.

One of the attractions of the new George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas — scheduled to be dedicated on Thursday — is Decision Points Theater, an interactive experience. The venue allows visitors to participate in a simplified simulation of the presidential decision-making process.

According to the New York Times, the theater works this way: An audience of up to two-dozen folks is confronted with a dire situation — such as the invasion of Iraq or Hurricane Katrina. They have four minutes to gather advice from video sources, then they vote on the appropriate action. After the pluralistic decision is revealed, a video of The Decider, former President Bush himself, explains the decision he made at the time.

It will be fascinating to see — over time — how members of the audience agree or disagree with Bush's historic decisions in this game-show approach to the presidency. From one angle, this is a cool tool for learning history. From another angle, it raises the question: Could an American president benefit from crowdsourcing?

Counting Marbles

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is also the author of the 2012 book — commissioned by the Finnish Parliament — Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making.

More On Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is defined as "trying to find a way of completing a task ... by asking a wide range of people or organizations if they can help, typically by using the Internet" ... (read more).

"We need some period of dry weather to help dry up the soil so producers can get out in the fields," says climatologist Pat Guinan, who has been forecasting the weather in Missouri for a quarter century. "Perhaps there may be some drier conditions, which will help. But right now, things are a little too wet across a good part of the state. And not only Missouri. Much of the Corn Belt is very wet. Especially from Iowa, over into Minnesota, parts of Wisconsin, Illinois and on into Indiana, we have some very wet conditions."

But even up until January, this moisture is what farmers had been hoping for. Last year's drought led to a 13 percent drop in corn production, which in turn led to tight corn stocks and increased competition for corn between ethanol plants and livestock producers. The shortfall is also hurting corn exports, which are now at a 40-year low.

"A good production year would mean there would be less competition and would improve margins," says Sterling Liddell, an agricultural economist with Rabo AgriFinance. "Especially in the cattle industry, which has suffered the most."

Last year's drought moved many farmers, including Gary Riedel, to increase the amount of crop insurance they carry. Peggy Smart, 77, also upped her coverage. Along with her family, she plants corn, soybeans and wheat on 6,000 acres of Missouri River bottomland in Tebbetts, Mo.

But nothing is planted yet. "We just don't have enough sunshine," she says.

Both Smart and Riedel are hoping to minimize the risks of bad weather by trying out drought- and flood-tolerant hybrid seeds this year. But first, they have to wait for the soil to dry out.

"It's just crazy that one year is one way and one is another," she says. "We don't have to go to Las Vegas to gamble, because farming is the biggest gamble there is."

Abbie Fentress Swanson reports from Missouri for Harvest Public Media, an agriculture-reporting project involving nine NPR member stations in the Midwest. For more stories about farm and food, check out Harvest Public Media.

Even al-Qaida gloats about what's possible under U.S. gun laws. In June 2011, a senior al-Qaida operative named Adam Gadahn released a video message rallying people to take advantage of opportunities those laws provide.

"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," Gadahn said, explaining "you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center" and buy a gun without a background check.

Then a faint smile crosses Gadahn's face. "So what are you waiting for?" he asks.

Under current laws, if a background check reveals your name is on the national terror watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.

Data from the Government Accountability Office show between 2004 and 2010, people on terror watch lists tried to buy guns and explosives more than 1,400 times. They succeeded in more than 90 percent of those cases, or 1,321 times.

"It's absurd that we allow people to buy unlimited AK-47s, AR-15s and Uzis, even if we feel they are too dangerous to be allowed on a plane, even after they've gone through a security check," said Jon Lowy, a lawyer for the Brady Campaign, a gun control group.

But Michael James Barton, a former White House counterterrorism official during the Bush administration, points out there's a lot more leeway to limit someone's right to get on a plane.

Related Stories

The Two-Way

Senate Rejects Expanded Background Checks For Gun Sales

"Before, a tree used to be an obstacle, and we'd just cut it down," he says. "Now, we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role, and it can coexist with our commercial coffee plantation."

Coffee plants that grow in the shade of trees produce fewer beans, but many people say those beans taste better. In addition, trees help reduce soil erosion and provide a home for wildlife.

Vasquez points at the ground, which is covered by a layer of dead, decaying leaves. "We used to pick all that up, bring it to one central point on the farm and then set it on fire," he says. "But now I know that if I leave it there, it will actually help improve soil fertility."

There also have been changes that I can't see: He's using fewer pesticides and recycling his trash.

Vasquez is enthusiastic about these changes, but they were not originally his idea.

They're the result of a long chain of decisions reaching all to way back to American consumers contemplating their many coffee options in the local Stop & Shop.

Several people who are part of that chain are also with me here on the farm.

Fair Trade? Rainforest Alliance? What's In A Coffee Certification

"Before, a tree used to be an obstacle, and we'd just cut it down," he says. "Now, we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role, and it can coexist with our commercial coffee plantation."

Coffee plants that grow in the shade of trees produce fewer beans, but many people say those beans taste better. In addition, trees help reduce soil erosion and provide a home for wildlife.

Vasquez points at the ground, which is covered by a layer of dead, decaying leaves. "We used to pick all that up, bring it to one central point on the farm and then set it on fire," he says. "But now I know that if I leave it there, it will actually help improve soil fertility."

There also have been changes that I can't see: He's using fewer pesticides and recycling his trash.

Vasquez is enthusiastic about these changes, but they were not originally his idea.

They're the result of a long chain of decisions reaching all to way back to American consumers contemplating their many coffee options in the local Stop & Shop.

Several people who are part of that chain are also with me here on the farm.

Fair Trade? Rainforest Alliance? What's In A Coffee Certification

When was the last time you met someone who didn't tell you they were "crazy busy"? It seems like everyone these days is overwhelmed. From the endless tasks of maintaining home and family life to the ever-accelerating pressures of the endlessly troubled, endlessly competitive economy, it seems that all of us are running ragged.

In this permanent state of hyperventilation, the issue for us all is not stopping to smell roses. It's not even noticing that there are roses right there in front of us. Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religion, hit the core of our problem when he wrote, "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive."

But how can we experience "being alive" in the midst of the crushing urgencies that make up modern life?

Well, it might seem strange, but one answer to that question is "science," at least science with a lowercase "s." Science, you see, is all about noticing. This is where it begins, with simple act of catching seeing the smallest detail as an opening to a wider world of wonder and awe. And here is the good news. You don't need a particle accelerator or well-equipped genetics lab in your basement to practice noticing (that would be science with a capital "S").

You already are a scientist. You have been since you were a kid playing with water in the tub, or screwing around in the backyard with dirt and sticks and stuff.

If you want to rebuild your inner-scientist-noticing-skills, the best place to begin is with a walk in the woods.

There are lots of reasons to take a walk in the woods. To get away from it all, clear your head, smell the fresh air. The problem, of course, is that even if we get ourselves into a park or a forest, we might still be so lost in our heads that we miss what's right in front of us. Practicing noticing, like a scientist, can change that by binding us to experience in ways that are thrilling, even in their ordinariness.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

How To See The World In A Grain Of Sand

Portland and Seattle may take coffee very seriously, but San Diego can boast a newspaper devoted entirely to coffee shops and all the news that's fit to print about them. John Rippo is the publisher of The Espresso, and he's convinced that coffee shops are the places to catch juicy moments of the human experience as they happen.

Inspired by European periodicals written for the cafe intelligentsia, Rippo curates local news in his monthly paper to inspire his fellow San Diego residents to social or political action.

But one of the most popular sections of the newspaper is somewhat lighter fare: Heard in the Houses, a coffee shop gossip column. For 16 years, Rippo has been writing these vignettes about fleeting moments inside San Diego's many coffeehouses. Most are humorous; some are poignant, he says.

To collect the stories, he visits the city's hundreds of coffee shops, observing people and eavesdropping on them.

"There are actually a few places that have wonderful acoustics, so if you sit in one corner, you can hear everything that's going on in the opposite corner," Rippo tells Morning Edition host David Greene.

Here's one vignette from the column that Rippo chose to share with us:

Early morning at New Break. A man settles into one of the seats looking out at the beach, sips his coffee, whips out an electric shaver, and starts shaving. A woman with a compact holds the mirror for him as locals watch with equal amounts of mystery and amusement.

"And on the other hand, the young Balkan nations were ... young, virile, full of future. And of course, part and parcel of those narratives was an acceptance of the vitality and the positive value of nationalism as a force that was going to carry the future before it, with ethnically homogeneous populations. And of course, Austria-Hungary was anything but that. It was not ethnically homogeneous; it had 11 official nationalities and a few more unofficial ones."

On Italy's 1911 seizure of Libya from the Ottoman Empire

"I was writing about the Italian assault on Libya in 2011, exactly 100 years after this war had taken place. And suddenly the newspapers were full of headlines saying 'Airstrikes on Libya,' you know, Bengazi, Homs, Tripoli and so on. And these were exactly the place names that were coming up in my reading at the time. It is an odd fact that just over 100 years ago, the Italians attacked Libya; it was an unprovoked attack. Libya at that time wasn't called Libya, it was actually three different provinces, but it was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it's the Italian attack on Libya that started this helter-skelter of opportunist assaults on the Ottoman patrimony that produces the two Balkan Wars and that make the First World War possible."

More On World War I

Poetry

WWI Poetry: On Veterans Day, The Words Of War

Now, most people might argue such favoritism is harmless, but Banaji and Greenwald think it might actually explain a lot about the modern United States, where vanishingly few people say they hold explicit prejudice toward others but wide disparities remain along class, race and gender lines.

Some 93 percent of Americans saw their mean net worth fall in first two years of the post-recession recovery, while the remaining 7 percent increased net worth by nearly a third, according to a new a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.

The upper 7 percent (8 million households) had net worth above $836,033 and the 93 percent (111 million households) represented households whose worth was at or below that. Not all households among the 93 percent saw a decline in net worth, but the average declined for that group. Pew says:

"From 2009 to 2011, the mean wealth of the 8 million households in the more affluent group rose to an estimated $3,173,895 from an estimated $2,476,244, while the mean wealth of the 111 million households in the less affluent group fell to an estimated $133,817 from an estimated $139,896.

These wide variances were driven by the fact that the stock and bond market rallied during the 2009 to 2011 period while the housing market remained flat."

If you really love your peaches and want to shake a tree, there's a map to help you find one. That goes for veggies, nuts, berries and hundreds of other edible plant species, too.

Avid foragers Caleb Philips and Ethan Welty launched an interactive map last month that identifies more than a half-million locations across the globe where fruits and veggies are free for the taking. The project, dubbed "Falling Fruit," pinpoints all sorts of tasty trees in public parks, lining city streets and even hanging over fences from the U.K. to New Zealand.

The map looks like a typical Google map. Foraging locations are pinned with dots. Zoom in and click on one, and up pops a box with a description of what tree or bush you can find there. The description often includes information on the best season to pluck the produce, the quality and yield of the plant, a link to the species profile on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website, and any additional advice on accessing the spot.

Enlarge image i

Following the Republican Party's losses in the 2012 elections, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what the party should do to improve its electoral fortunes.

More From The Debate

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, an influential red-state Democrat who helped craft Obamacare but bucked his party last week in voting against expanded background checks for gun sales, will retire in 2014, he announced Tuesday.

The chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, Baucus was expected to face a potentially tough race for a seventh term after four decades on Capitol Hill. He becomes the sixth Senate Democrat to announce his retirement, as Republicans look for an opportunity to retake Senate control in the midterm elections.

"Deciding not to run for re-election was an extremely difficult decision," Baucus said in a statement. "After thinking long and hard, I decided I want to focus the next year and a half on serving Montana unconstrained by the demands of a campaign."

The Washington Post had first reported the retirement, citing sources, and said that former Gov. Brian Schweitzer could seek the Democratic nomination.

Baucus was one of only four Democrats to vote against the bipartisan gun bill last week. All are from states that backed Republican Mitt Romney for president, and Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas face re-election next year. The fourth Democrat to vote against the measure, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, is in her first term.

While Montana voted overwhemingly for Romney, it has a history of electing Democrats to statewide seats. Schweitzer, a popular former two-term governor, would likely be a formidable opponent for any Republican. He told the Great Falls Tribune Tuesday that he would not rule out running.

The state's other senator, Democrat Jon Tester, won re-election last year, and Democrats have won three straight governor's races.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., chairman of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement:

"As Montana's Senior Senator and Chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus has shaped and guided legislation and policy affecting every American, and his service has been a benefit to all Montanans. He has been an invaluable leader in our caucus, and he will be sorely missed. Democrats have had a great deal of electoral success in Montana over the last decade, and I am confident that will continue."

While sales of existing homes dipped in March because of a tighter inventory, sales of newly built homes rose 1.5 percent from February and were up a whopping 18.5 percent from March 2012, the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development say.

According to Bloomberg News, the March sales results for new homes caps "the best quarter for the industry since 2008." They're also "more evidence the housing recovery will be sustained."

Bloomberg adds that:

"A dearth of existing properties is encouraging builders to undertake new projects that will keep fueling the economy. Mortgage rates close to record lows, higher home values and rising household formation are helping lay the groundwork for increased buyer traffic in 2013."

Portland and Seattle may take coffee very seriously, but San Diego can boast a newspaper devoted entirely to coffeeshops and all the news that's fit to print about them. John Rippo is the publisher of The Espresso, and he's convinced that coffeeshops are the place to catch juicy moments of the human experience, as they happen.

Inspired by European periodicals written for the cafe intelligentsia, Rippo curates local news in his monthly paper to inspire his fellow San Diego residents to social or political action.

But one of the most popular sections of the newspaper is somewhat lighter fare: Heard in the Houses, a coffeeshop gossip column. For 16 years, Rippo has been writing these vignettes about fleeting moments inside of San Diego's many coffeehouses. Most are humorous; some are poignant, he says.

To collect the stories, he visits the city's hundreds of coffeeshops, observing people and eavesdropping on them.

"There are actually a few places that have wonderful acoustics, so if you sit in one corner, you can hear everything that's going on in the opposite corner," says Rippo.

Here's one vignette from the column that Rippo chose to share with us:

Early morning at New Break. A man settles into one of the seats looking out at the beach, sips his coffee, whips out an electric shaver, and starts shaving. A woman with a compact holds the mirror for him as locals watch with equal amounts of mystery and amusement.

No sooner did the first reports emerge that the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were Chechen immigrants, than did that fact intrude into Washington's debate on immigration.

Opponents of immigration reform seized on the fact to raise doubts about efforts to change immigration laws to, in part, bring the estimated 12 million people now in the U.S. illegally out of limbo.

So a major question a week after the bombings was whether the Boston violence had slowed — or even derailed — momentum for the immigration overhaul. Early indications were that the legislative effort still appeared on track.

"I don't think there's been a change in the fundamental truth that the country needs this broad immigration reform and that there's a commitment from lawmakers in both parties to addressing it this year. That hasn't changed" because of Boston, said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration group. "Most responsible legislators are not only saying, "Let's look at all the facts,' but they're also saying. "Let's move forward.'"

White House spokesman Jay Carney sounded a similar note during his Monday briefing:

"Well, I think we agree with what some of the coauthors of the bill — including, I believe, Sens. McCain and Graham and Rubio — have said, which is that one of the positive effects and one of the reasons why we need comprehensive immigration reform is because it will enhance when implemented our national security. And it is another reason why we need to move forward with this very important bipartisan legislation. That is certainly our view."

Even Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who caused a stir by remarking last week that the immigration-overhaul effort had to now be considered with the attacks in mind, insisted he wasn't trying to stall or kill the effort.

In fact, one of the livelier moments at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Monday came when Grassley took exception to Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and Gang of Eight member, who accused some critics of using the tragedy to impede the legislation.

"The American people are overwhelmingly for immigration reform," Schumer said. "That's what every poll says. And they will not be satisfied with calls for delays and impediments towards the bill. I would say to my colleagues ... if you have ways to improve the bill, offer an amendment ... I say that particularly to those who are pointing to what happened, the terrible tragedy in Boston, as I would say, an excuse for not doing a bill or delaying a bill for many months or years."

"I never said that. I never said that," Grassley yelled at Schumer. The exchange caused Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the committee, to bang his gavel to regain order.

Like Grassley, Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, appeared to acknowledge the need to continue pursuing an overhaul, though he went further by calling for a pause until the implications of what happened in Boston are better understood. Paul wrote:

"Before Congress moves forward, some important national security questions must be addressed. I believe that any real comprehensive immigration reform must implement strong national security protections. The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system. If we don't use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs."

Another telling sign came from Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee. After an appearance in Chicago, Ryan told reporters, according to news reports, that the Boston attacks was an argument for, not against, revising the nation's laws sooner rather than later.

It was vital to know which individuals are in the country illegally for national security reasons, alone, he said. "If anything I would say this is an argument for modernizing our immigration laws," Ryan was quoted as saying.

Such national security arguments, the needs of the U.S. economy and the demographic changes that are making Hispanic voters an ever more important part of the electorate gave proponents of an immigration overhaul confidence that Boston wouldn't derail the present effort.