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Other bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill may be collapsing around them, but a cadre of Democratic and Republican women serving on the Senate and House Armed Services committees are leveraging their historic clout to respond together to the sexual assault crisis engulfing the U.S. military.

In a Thursday gathering notable not just for its composition but for what it signaled about the direction of two of the oldest and most powerful panels in Congress, 16 legislators from both parties — just two of them men — sat in the White House with top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to talk about the path forward on the issue.

Four other top women in the Obama administration also attended. They were Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's chief of staff; Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to the president; Liz Sherwood-Randall, White House coordinator for Defense Policy, National Security Staff; and Lynn Rosenthal, White House adviser on violence against women.

One Republican participant, speaking on background, characterized the meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room just across from the Oval Office, as a "huge sign that President Obama has taken a zero-tolerance approach to the crisis."

Those in attendance included Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana.

"The response," one participant said of the sexual assault crisis, "is going to be led by a brigade of women from across political boundaries.

"It was amazing to be at that table," she said. "We're passionate about this, and women are going to get it done."

Other participants characterized the meeting as an open discussion that focused on addressing two issues — creating a "safety zone" for the reporting of sexual assault so those affected won't fear retribution, and addressing the military's system of prosecuting allegations of rape and other sexual assaults.

Much of the current heat around the issue was generated by a Pentagon survey released this week that estimated that 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted last year.

The issue, of course, is as old as the military itself, but the record number of women serving on Congress' armed services committees — seven on the Senate panel, a dozen on the House committee — has given heft and urgency to the response.

Gillibrand, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, plans to introduce legislation next week that would shift control of prosecutorial decisions from military commanders to military prosecutors. Top military brass have already begun pushing back on the proposal.

Her bill would also prevent commanders from changing — either reversing or dismissing — verdicts in sexual assault cases.

There has already been a slew of legislation sponsored by female members of Congress, including:

— a House bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California and Republican Rep. Joe Heck of Nevada, that would amend the Uniform Code of Military Justice to prohibit sexual acts and sexual contact between military instructors including drill instructors and recruiting commanders and their trainees;

— a Senate bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a member of the Judiciary Committee, and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, that among its aims would require commanding offers who receive a report of a sexual assault to act on it within 24 hours and would prohibit convicted sexual offenders from enlisting or being commissioned in the armed forces;

— a Senate bill, co-sponsored by Ayotte and Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, that would create a special counsel for victims of sexual assault committed by a member of the armed forces;

— a House bill, co-sponsored by Walorski and Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez of California, that would require an investigation of allegations of "retaliatory personnel actions" taken against military personnel who have made a report of sexual assault.

Saying that it was wrong, insensitive and inappropriate, a top official from the Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday to conservative groups that were singled out for additional IRS scrutiny during the 2012 campaign.

The Associated Press writes that Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association:

"That the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out."

Update at 10:15 a.m. ET, May 10. Search Ends, Investigation Continues:

The search is over for an Australian couple who went overboard Wednesday from the Carnival Spirit cruise ship as it sailed in waters off New South Wales, Australia, The Associated Press reports.

That word comes as the cruise company said its ship "had higher railings than required to prevent accidental falls," the wire service adds.

The missing passengers have been identified as "paramedic Paul Rossington, 30, and his 26-year-old girlfriend Kristen Schroder, both of the town of Barraba in New South Wales state," the AP says. It isn't known if they fell or jumped. But The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting about one theory being investigated: That Rossington may have been "valiantly trying to save his girlfriend when they both went overboard."

Our original post — "Rescuers Say Slim Chance For Couple Lost From Cruise Ship":

Officials were not optimistic that an air-and-sea rescue effort would be successful in finding two passengers who went overboard from the Carnival Spirit cruise ship on in Australian waters.

Reuters reports that the passengers, apparently a couple, went overboard on Wednesday but that they were not discovered missing until the following day when the ship docked in Sydney harbor after a South Pacific tour.

The news agency said search-and-rescue planes and boats were scouring a 500 square mile area off Australia's eastern coastline looking for the pair.

"I must be honest, our hopes are fading because of the length of time but we are going full throttle to try find them," NSW Police Marine Area Commander Mark Hutchings told Sky News television on Friday according to Reuters. Hutchings said the couple had gone off the ship "one after the other", but it was unclear whether they had jumped or fallen by accident.

The Associated Press reports:

"New South Wales police say surveillance camera footage showed that the couple — a 30-year-old man and a 26-year-old woman whose names have not been released — fell from the ship's mid deck Wednesday night.

Hutchings was quoted by The Australian as saying a review of the images:

" ... indicated the pair went overboard from a deck about halfway up the ship's side, but [Hutchings] added it was too early to say whether they jumped or fell overboard. He did not rule out the possibility of a suicide pact."

The Internet has managed to disrupt many industries, from publishing to music. So why not lending?

Google is teaming up with the nation's largest peer-to-peer lender. The search and tech giant is investing $125 million in Lending Club, which gets borrowers and lenders together outside the conventional banking system. Google's move and the actions of other big players reflect a growing interest in peer-to-peer lending.

Chanda Lugere works for a bank, but when she wanted a loan to consolidate her credit card debt, which carried a high interest rate, the bank didn't have much to offer. She tried other banks, but even with her excellent credit score she got nowhere.

So Lugere, who's in her 30s, went online seeking alternatives. She found Lending Club.

"I went ahead and applied for the loan and I was able to get it funded in one week. And my rate was 6 percent. So it's half of what I had been paying. I thought it was a really great experience from beginning to end — really easy, you apply online and they gave you status updates."

Both Lending Club and its much smaller rival, a company called Prosper, have been around for several years. But lately things have really taken off at both companies.

"Last year we facilitated about $800 million in loans and we are planning on $2 billion this year," says Renaud Laplanche, the CEO of Lending Club.

The system works like this: Investors put up the money to fund the loans; typically they'll have pieces of hundreds, even thousands of loans which are ranked according to risk. An investor's rate of return will vary accordingly.

Laplanche says investors make a nice profit, but consumers still get lower rates than they would with a conventional lender because peer-to-peer lending operates like a marketplace.

"It is a more direct funding process between the investors and the borrowers," he says. "There's no branch network. Everything happens online and it is really powered by technology and the Internet. And we use technology to lower cost."

In the industry's early days, most of the money for loans came from individual investors. But today — and this is a big change — large institutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds have put up a lot of the cash.

"That is about one simple thing and it's called yield," says Peter Renton, who blogs and teaches courses about investing in peer-to-peer, or P2P, lending. In recent years, he says, institutional investors have had a hard time finding good fixed-income investments. But P2P lending can offer that. And with more institutional money flowing in, the lenders can make more loans.

(Renton invests some of his own money in these P2P loans and when he directs investors to Lending Club and Prosper he gets referral fees.)

So, what about Google's investment? It's not putting money into loans but is making an investment in Lending Club itself. Neither company is saying exactly what it plans to do. But Renton and others speculate that Google sees synergies between Lending Club and Google Wallet, the company's virtual payment system. Imagine, for example, Google's own credit card or perhaps an instant big-ticket loan.

"If you can hook up a loan institution who is really innovative that can get something happening quickly, there is the potential that Google Wallet could hook up with Lending Club and you could go buy a car on your cellphone," Renton says.

Indeed Lending Club's Laplanche has grand ambitions: He wants to make small-business loans, student loans, car loans, even mortgage loans. For him, the multitrillion-dollar market for consumer credit is a giant opportunity.

"It's really one of the few large markets that has not been fully transformed by the Internet, so we believe we can become the mainstream alternative to the banking system," Laplanche says.

But David Schehr, who follows banking and investment services at the research firm Gartner, says P2P lenders won't be putting conventional banks out of business anytime soon.

"They're growing, they're growing steadily, but realize they're growing off a very small base," he says. "Their total volume of lending might be what a small two- or three-branch community bank does in a year."

And he says it can take a long time for consumers to change their behavior when it comes to banking.

Eight people in New York have been charged as part of what prosecutors say was a global ring of cybercriminals who stole $45 million by hacking into prepaid credit card accounts and then using the data to get cash from thousands of ATMs around the world.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch described the alleged scheme as "a massive 21st century bank heist that reached across the Internet and stretched around the globe. In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet."

Prosecutors say the eight suspects being charged, one of whom is now dead, were the New York cell of the operation that involved people in 26 countries.

Here's how the scam allegedly worked:

— Criminal hackers accessed computers handling transactions of prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit cards issued to customers in the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

— Once inside the system, the criminals harvested PINs and erased withdrawal limits on the cards.

— So-called cashers or mules encoded magnetic stripe cards, such as gift cards, with the stolen data so that ATMs would accept them.

— Using the stolen PINs, the cashers coordinated a time to make hundreds or thousands of large withdrawals en masse.

What isn't immediately clear is how prosecutors think everything was coordinated and how everyone allegedly got paid.

Those charged are Jael Mejia Collado, Joan Luis Minier Lara, Evan Jose Pea, Jose Familia Reyes, Elvis Rafael Rodriguez, Emir Yasser Yeje and Chung Yu-Holguin, all residents of Yonkers, N.Y. The eighth defendant, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pea, also known as "Prime" and "Albertico," was reportedly murdered on April 27 in the Dominican Republic.

According to Wired:

"The gang first struck December 22 when hackers targeted a credit card processor that handled transactions for prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued to customers of the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC, or RAKBANK, in the United Arab Emirates. They handed off the stolen card data to cashers in 20 countries who withdrew $5 million in cash in more than 4,500 ATM withdrawals.

"The eight charged in New York ... were responsible for allegedly siphoning at least $2.8 million from more than 750 Manhattan ATMs in 2.5 hours.

"The second round of the operation struck on February 19, beginning around 3pm and continuing until 1:30 the next morning. It targeted another bank card processor that handled transactions for the Bank of Muscat in Oman. Within 10 hours, cashers in 24 countries had made about 36,000 ATM withdrawals totaling about $40 million."

Ambassador Robert Ford, the State Department's point man on Syrian policy, crossed into northern Syria on Wednesday. The secret visit was confirmed by Syrian activists at the media office at the Bab al-Salama crossing on the Turkish frontier.

Ford met with the head of the Aleppo military council, Abdul Jabbar Okaidi, who thanked him for the shipment of nonlethal aid. Seven trucks transported some 65,000 MREs, or meals ready to eat, the U.S. military's battlefield rations. Syrian activists posted a video of the aid delivery.

Ford has made similar high-profile diplomatic gestures. As U.S. ambassador to Syria, he traveled to the protest town of Hama in 2011 and enraged the Syrian government for traveling outside Damascus without permission from the Syrian Foreign Ministry.

The MRE shipment is part of an additional $10 million aid package. The U.S. announced in April that it would funnel $123 million in nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition.

The MRE delivery is also part of a policy to support Gen. Salim Idriss, elected to head the Supreme Military Command in December. Idriss, a defected general and a German-trained electronics professor, is considered a moderate. He's the key officer to build a functioning fighting force now backed by an international coalition that includes the U.S., Turkey and Arab allies.

Ford's visit appears to be a signal of support for Idriss, tapped by the U.S. to be the conduit for aid to the rebels, but the general continues to press for more direct military support. Earlier this week, the Syrian military recaptured the strategic southern town of Khirbet Ghazaleh, on the highway to Jordan.

The military council under Idriss' command failed to supply weapons to the rebel defenders. Arms shipments have stopped for more than 30 days, Idriss told NPR in an interview in Amman, Jordan. Idriss was bitter about the defeat. Without weapons, we can't fight, he said. He thanked the U.S. government for the MREs. "That is very good," he said. "But weapons and ammunition are the tools that we need on the battlefield."

Fans of women's sports often maintain that female athletics get short shrift from the media, so it had to be something of a surprise gift when ESPN presented the start of the WNBA's draft live.

This happened as it was announced that after two abject failures in the past decade, yet another professional soccer league for women will dare venture forth in the United States.

Not to excuse the media, but the reality is that most attention is given to team sports, where there is an identity with the community –– and, by extension, with the local newspapers and broadcast outlets. Pick up any sports section, and most of it will be jammed with box scores from the various leagues. And the men have the leagues.

In counterpoint, most attention to women's athletics has, historically, been devoted to individual sports –– and often as not to the prettier stars. This dates back to the innocent so-called "America's Girl," Helen Wills, in tennis almost a century ago.

Figure skating, where appearance is more important than any other sport, has been the natural catch basin for popularity in winter Olympic years. Figure skating is a terribly demanding discipline, but it is to sports what the red carpet is to show business. Nevertheless, that sustained attention to pulchritude aside, it does not help right now that American fans of both genders are especially provincial, and that in tennis and golf and figure skating foreigners dominate.

Still, I think the sisterhood has to look more into the mirror. In the post-Title IX era, as girls have flooded into athletics, there has been no comparable explosion by female spectators. It's all very comforting to blame media men for a lack of coverage, but if more women buy tickets to watch female athletes play, then more coverage will follow.

This may be only anecdotal, but I have noticed that in small-town newspapers and on community websites, female high school and college sports seem to get a commensurate amount of attention with their male jocks. The imbalance of coverage is so much more at the top, where commerce matters.

Women's soccer may have the best chance, for the U.S. female stars seem to have been as popular as our men on the pitch. But with the new National Women's Soccer League, and also especially with the WNBA and college basketball, success ultimately will surely be determined by whether female fans will support female athletes in their pocketbooks.

And, oh, yes, for basketball in particular, there should be a coordinated effort to get Las Vegas to run a line on women's games. I'm not being facetious. Hey, Vegas makes a line on American Idol. Anything you can bet on gets more attention. The bookmakers, ladies, may be more important than the editors.

Sometimes, though, a little well-placed gimmickry is exactly what's needed. At the outset of the upcoming documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks — which sounds dry as dust, right? — director Alex Gibney shows us not stolen documents but what looks like the Milky Way: a starry firmament of tiny dots that swirl and coalesce and then swirl away again. It's a visual motif he uses throughout the film, a representation of the flow of information on the Internet, and though it's completely made up, it's tremendously effective in suggesting how impossible to control that information is once it's out there on the Web.

So you won't hear me argue for reining directors in. Well, maybe Michael Bay, a little. But not someone like Luhrmann, who in Gatsby employs a lot of the same tricks he used successfully in Moulin Rouge. As he told NPR's Scott Simon quite persuasively this past weekend, everything he did was a deliberate, thought-through choice, from the 3-D to the rap songs.

For some people, it will doubtless work swimmingly. And even though I'm less enthusiastic about it, I also know this won't be the last screen word on Fitzgerald's words. There've been five film Gatsbys already — the first of them silent and in black and white.

And with film techniques forever changing, maybe someday — maybe with holograms — someone will figure out how to make this great (and supposedly unfilmable) American novel into the great American film.

President Obama in recent weeks has twice threatened to veto legislation before Congress. Don't hold your breath that it will happen.

It's not that Obama isn't sincerely troubled by bills regarding debt repayment and online privacy. Actually vetoing legislation, though, no longer seems to be part of the equation — in part because so few bills actually make it to the president's desk.

In more than four years in office, Obama has issued a grand total of two vetoes. That's a lot fewer than some of his recent predecessors. In fact, it's the lowest total since Martin Van Buren, who left office in 1841.

By comparison, George H.W. Bush exercised his veto authority 44 times during his single term, while Bill Clinton took out his veto pen 37 times.

The veto gives presidents enormous sway over legislation. They can stop bills dead that they don't like because it takes two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override a veto, which rarely happens.

"You can coerce cooperation out of Congress," says Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution. "As long as Congress prefers something to nothing, they have an incentive to be responsive to the presidential veto."

But there have been fewer vetoes to respond to in recent years. George W. Bush issued only a dozen vetoes, all in his second term. He had been the first president since John Quincy Adams to go an entire term without vetoing anything.

There are a number of reasons why the veto is becoming a forgotten part of the legislative process:

1. The White House Shapes Legislation Early

When a major bill is moving, it's now typically shepherded not by committee chairs, but by top chamber leaders. They consult with the administration early and often to make sure the president will sign off on the final product.

"If they're going to make an effort to pass anything, they want to get the White House involved," says Brendan Daly, a former aide to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. "There just aren't that many laws that are passing, and those that do pass need help from the White House."

Whether it's Obama trying to work things out with House Speaker John Boehner, or Vice President Joe Biden negotiating with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the administration makes its desires known while bills are still being shaped.

"The divide in Congress is so deep that they're not working through the [traditional] legislative process," says Ilona Nickels, a congressional scholar. "They're starting by talking to the White House to find out what is possible."

2. A Divided Congress Mitigates Veto Threats

Presidents typically veto more legislation when Congress is controlled by the other party. In the current situation, with Congress itself divided — the House is controlled by Republicans and the Senate is held by Democrats — Obama is going to see fewer bills to which he might object.

During the Congress that concluded in January, House Republicans on more than 30 occasions passed legislation to overturn, defund or dismantle the president's health care law. Obama would have been happy to veto any one of those bills, but the Senate never bothered with them.

For all the complaints from House Republicans that the Senate doesn't take up their bills, at least it spares them from having to worry about vetoes.

"The [Senate] Democrats are going to have some impact," Binder says. "They're not going to send a bill through the Senate that Obama's going to reject."

3. You Can't Veto What Doesn't Pass

Obama's smaller veto total has a lot to do with the lack of legislation coming out of Capitol Hill these days. The 112th Congress was by some measures among the least productive in history.

That Congress managed to pass fewer than 230 bills, the least in decades. Many of these had to do with naming U.S. Post Offices and the like.

"You have to have it on your desk before you can veto it," says Don Ritchie, the Senate's official historian.

4. Bills Have Gotten Bigger

With so few bills moving, the stakes are higher for the few pieces of major legislation that do pass.

This means the president has to think long and hard before rejecting significant legislation.

"Bills have gotten bigger," Ritchie says. "They bundle lots of issues, and the president is loath to veto parts of it."

In January, Obama signed a $633 billion defense authorization act despite having threatened to veto it, issuing a signing statement that said the need for the bill was "too great to ignore."

5. Presidents Object Only To Parts Of Bills

The statement gave Obama the chance to highlight and challenge parts of the law that prompted his veto threat, including policy toward prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

The use of signing statements has become a way for presidents to offer what amounts to a partial veto, saying they will direct agencies to disregard the provisions they don't like.

Ronald Reagan expanded the use of signing statements, according to the Congressional Research Service, but the practice gained notoriety during the presidency of George W. Bush, who challenged more than 1,000 provisions of law.

The American Bar Association complained that this amounted to a flouting of the constitutional separation of powers, but it may also act as a pressure valve encouraging presidents to sign bills they might otherwise veto.

"Basically, what Bush was doing was item-vetoing stuff," says Cary Covington, a University of Iowa political scientist. "Now, Obama's doing the same thing."

A cargo ship slammed into a dock in Genoa, Italy, on Wednesday, killing at least seven people and toppling the control tower at one of the country's busiest ports.

The Associated Press reports that divers had found seven bodies in the wreckage. Four others have been hospitalized and two were still unaccounted for, Luca Cari, a spokesman for the fire rescue teams at the scene, told The Associated Press.

The AP says the crash occurred around 11 p.m. Tuesday during a shift change in the control tower, as the cargo ship, the "Jolly Nero," was leaving port accompanied by tugboats.

Prosecutors said the captain of the vessel was being investigated for possible manslaughter.

Three witnesses billed as whistle-blowers appeared before a House committee Wednesday to challenge the Obama administration's explanation of what transpired on Sept. 11, 2012, as the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked and the ambassador and three others killed.

In testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya at the time of the attack, said he was frustrated when the military turned down his request for a Special Operations team to be deployed from Tripoli to the Benghazi consulate, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and the others were holed up and under assault.

Hicks said he spoke by telephone with Stevens shortly after armed men stormed the compound. "Greg, we're under attack," Stevens said, according to Hicks.

He described a 2 a.m. call from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the assault and amid confusion about the fate of Stevens: "She asked me what was going on and I briefed her on developments. Most of the conversation was about the search for Ambassador Stevens," Hicks said. "It was also about what we were going to do with our personnel in Benghazi and I told her we would need to evacuate, and she said that was the right thing to do."

An hour later, Hicks said, Libya's prime minister called. "I think it's the saddest phone call I've ever had in my life. He told me that Ambassador Stevens had passed away. I immediately telephoned Washington that news afterward."

Asked about remarks by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice days after the attack that attributed the violence to Muslim anger over a Youtube video denigrating Islam, Hicks said: "I was stunned. My jaw dropped. I was embarrassed."

Mark Thompson, the State Department's acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism, said he had urged deployment of an elite response team —known as FEST — but was rebuffed by the White House.

Eric Nordstrom, a former regional security officer in Libya, choked up as he insisted that all the details of the events surrounding the attack needed to be aired.

"It matters," he told the panel.

A report by an independent panel led by former top diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Gen. Mike Mullen has already concluded that there was "grossly" inadequate security at the mission as a result of managerial and leadership failures at the State Department, but Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators remain unsatisfied with those findings.

Update at 5:50 p.m. ET:

NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman says that some of Hicks testimony included new information — that four American Special Operations officers in Tripoli embassy wanted to head to Benghazi that night to help other responders.

"They were told no," Bowman says, according to Hicks. "He says they were furious."

Hicks said he was told it would take two to three hours to get U.S. jets to Benghazi from Italy, Bowman says.

"But [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. Martin Dempsey has already testified that it would have taken 20 hours for them to reach Benghazi," he says. "And military officials have already said the planes would have no good targets once they arrived."

Bowman says of Hicks' testimony: "It's his own view of what could have been done that night. But he's not a military official."

Federal workers say they don't have much to celebrate these days.

Furloughs began in April, exacerbating already low morale for many government agencies as budgets have tightened. Downsizing has meant more work for those who remain, and talk of further cuts has many worried about job security. This year is also the third that federal workers haven't received a pay increase, contributing to discontent.

Jenny Brown is in her 27th year as an examiner for the Internal Revenue Service, where she answers peoples' tax questions. The IRS is a major employer in Ogden, Utah, where Brown works, but her co-workers are getting fed up and leaving — and they aren't being replaced.

"We keep being told things like, 'Work smarter, not harder.' Or, 'Well, you're just going to have to do more with less,' " Brown says. "And there's only so much you can do."

As a result of understaffing, Brown says, wait times on the IRS hotline have quadrupled. And after more than an hour waiting on the phone, taxpayers get downright ornery.

The Sequester: Cuts And Consequences

If you want to see the Fourth of July parade in your little hometown, you should book your flight now. Otherwise, you may have to drive there, or watch a video of the floats via an old friend's smartphone.

That's because air service — especially to smaller markets — is shrinking as airlines merge to boost profits, according to a study released Wednesday.

"The nation's small- and medium-sized airports have been disproportionally affected by these reductions in service," the report from MIT's International Center for Air Transportation concluded.

U.S. Airline Departures (2007-2012)

Between 2007 through 2012, U.S. carriers cut domestic flights by 14 percent, but smaller airports saw even bigger cuts.

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling could have his more than 24-year prison sentence reduced by as many as 10 years under a deal announced Wednesday by the Justice Department.

The agreement with Skilling's lawyers, which still needs the approval of a federal judge, would reduce the former Enron chief's sentence to between 14 and 17 1/2 years.

"Today's agreement will put an end to the legal battles surrounding this case," Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement. "Mr. Skilling will no longer be permitted to challenge his conviction for one of the most notorious frauds in American history, and victims of his crime will finally receive the more than $40 million in restitution they are owed."

Skilling was sentenced in 2006 for his role in the collapse of the energy trading giant, a collapse that cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in people's retirement. NPR's Wade Goodwyn reported last month on the agreement that was under consideration at the time:

"For many, 24 years in prison for Skilling seemed exactly right. But a lot has changed since then. Wall Street's stunning collapse and Bernie Madoff's brazen thievery cast a new light on Skilling's acts. And then there was the sentence of Enron's Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow. Fastow was the mastermind behind the so-called off-balance-sheet partnerships, and he stole millions from Enron.

"Yet because he testified against Jeff Skilling and Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, Fastow served just six years and is now out of prison. For some, that's cast doubt on the fairness of Skilling's serving four times Fastow's sentence. Most important, on appeal, Skilling's conviction has endured some battering in the federal courts.

"In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously nullified Skilling's honest services fraud conviction, ruling there was no bribe or kickback to Skilling. An appeals court subsequently upheld Skilling's convictions on other counts but said his sentence must be reduced."

It's been more than eight decades since Show Boat — the seminal masterpiece of the American musical theater — premiered on a stage in Washington, D.C. Now the sprawling classic is back, in a lush production put on by the Washington National Opera.

Based on Edna Ferber's epic best-selling novel, Show Boat was nothing like the frothy musicals and scantily clad Broadway revues of its time. Sure, the story is about a traveling showboat that plays to audiences along the Mississippi River, but the plot focuses on serious subjects: racial injustice, alcoholism, abandonment.

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Assistant U.S. Attorney General Ignacia Moreno, the point person at the Justice Department for prosecuting environmental crimes, says she will leave government service next month.

Moreno, the first Latina to lead the department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in November 2009. Her tenure spanned one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010. Eleven men died in that firestorm. The Justice Department extracted a record $1 billion civil penalty from Transocean, the rig owner, earlier this year. And a civil trial continues in New Orleans over other environmental damages.

"To date, we have already achieved significant resolutions for liability in the Gulf," Moreno said in an exit interview with NPR. "We are focused on holding those responsible accountable to the fullest extent of the law."

The unit also successfully defended Obama administration regulations of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, winning a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year.

But veterans of the environmental unit worried it had lost some prestige by ceding ground in the massive Gulf oil spill case to the Justice Department's criminal division, which led a federal task force and prosecuted giant BP and several individual employees in connection with the disaster.

"However it looks on the outside, we have all worked very closely together ... in making sure we do right by the people of the Gulf," Moreno said.

Moreno plans to spend the summer with her 12-year-old son before looking for opportunities in the private sector.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has won election to the House, redeeming his political career after it was derailed by scandal four years ago.

Sanford, a Republican, defeated Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch on Tuesday in the state's 1st Congressional District. Colbert Busch is the sister of political satirist Stephen Colbert. The seat was left vacant in December when Gov. Nikki Haley picked Rep. Tim Scott to replace Jim DeMint in the Senate.

With 71 percent of the precincts reporting, Sanford has 54 percent of the vote and The Associated Press has called the race for him.

While governor in 2009, Sanford disappeared for five days, telling his staff that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He later admitted he'd been in Argentina with his mistress.

The ensuing scandal destroyed his marriage and nearly destroyed his political career. Although he hung on until the end of his term, he paid $74,000 in ethics fines.

Sanford's five-month campaign reclaimed the seat he held for three terms in the 1990s.

The New York Times reports that Colbert Busch had briefly led Sanford in early polling, "buoying hopes among some voters that a Democrat would, for the first time in 30 years, represent the coastal district that includes Charleston."

It's pretty much a truism in American political history: If the president is not running again and the vice president wants his party's nomination, it's his for the asking.

That was the case in 1960, with President Eisenhower term-limited and Vice President Richard Nixon's path to the GOP nomination unimpeded.

It was also true in 1968, when President Johnson decided not to run again and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination despite not having entered a single primary. The quests of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy ended in assassination in Los Angeles and violence in Chicago, but considering the way things were back in '68, Humphrey may have had the nomination locked up from the beginning.

And while the situations were not exactly the same, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000 and Walter Mondale, a former vice president, in 1984 had built-in advantages within the party that helped them get their respective party's nominations.

Just as the conventional wisdom says Biden wants to run in 2016, the same C.W. says Clinton is running as well. While handicapping a presidential race three years in advance is foolhardy, and while nobody wins the nomination because of conventional wisdom, by nearly every measure it seems like the Democratic nomination is hers for the taking. Yes, we did say the same thing two cycles ago, when she was the odds-on favorite for 2008 only to be overtaken by Obama in a classic battle that went down to the wire. But now, the argument goes, it's "her turn." She made the gallant attempt in '08 and served loyally as Obama's secretary of state for the next four years, and now it's time for her to be rewarded for her efforts. Her approval numbers are sky high, far better than they were in 2007-08, and are consistently higher than Biden's. As Obama broke a glass ceiling with his 2008 election, so would Clinton in 2016.

I just paused and checked the calendar — yes, it's only May of 2013 — and reminded myself that there is a silliness to all of this. Biden may not run. Clinton may not run. A lot may happen before we get to 2016 (ya think?). Heck, they may even cancel the election.

My only point is that yes, it is a rarity for a sitting vice president to be denied the nomination if he wants it. As incumbent V.P.s, Nixon, Humphrey, Bush Sr. and Gore all led their party into November. Now we are approaching the likelihood that another sitting vice president hopes to do the same. But this time the odds don't look good.

Sanford Surge in Carolina? Public Policy Polling, the Democratic-leaning firm that showed Elizabeth Colbert Busch up nine points over Mark Sanford two weeks ago, now shows the special election in South Carolina's First Congressional District "too close to call." But PPP's findings clearly indicate Sanford with the momentum: the former Republican governor leads 47-46 percent.

"Sanford has gotten back into the race by nationalizing it and painting Colbert Busch as a liberal. A plurality of voters in the district- 47%- say they think Colbert Busch is a liberal compared to 43% who characterize her as ideologically 'about right.' Colbert Busch's favorability rating has dropped a net 19 points compared to 2 weeks ago, from +25 then at 56/31 to +6 now at 50/44. ...

If SC-1 voters went to the polls on Tuesday and voted for the candidate they personally liked better, Colbert Busch would be the definite winner. That's why Sanford's campaign has tried to shift the focus toward national Democrats who are unpopular in the district, and that's been a key in helping him to make this race competitive again. ...

The other key development in this race over the last two weeks is that Republicans are returning to the electorate. On our last poll, conducted right after the trespassing charges against Sanford became public, we found that the likely electorate had voted for Mitt Romney by only 5 points in a district that he actually won by 18. That suggested many Republican voters were depressed and planning to stay home. On our final poll we find an electorate that's Romney +13- that's still more Democratic than the turnout from last fall, but it's a lot better for Sanford than it was a couple weeks ago."

When Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last year, the software giant billed the new operating system as one of the most critical releases in its history. The system would bridge the gap between personal computers and the fast-growing mobile world of tablets and smartphones.

But this week, the company sent signals that it might soon alter Windows 8 to address some early criticism of the operating system.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Tami Reller, head of marketing and finance for the Windows business said "key elements" of the flagship product will be changed and rolled back when the company releases an update — which was code named Blue — later this year.

The Financial Times played this as a major concession a, calling it a "U-turn," and implied that Microsoft was backing away from the touch-centric user interface that really defined the new operating system and was supposed to take the company into the next generation of computing to help it compete in a world in love with the tablet.

Analysts compared the apparent turn around to the New Coke debacle in the 1980s, and within hours Microsoft issued a statement saying the FT got the story wrong.

Clearly this wasn't the story Microsoft was trying to tell. They wanted to trumpet the fact that more than 100 million copies of this operating system had been sold. That's a big impressive number, but it comes at a time when PC sales are falling and some manufacturers are blaming Microsoft for that.

Windows 8 has been criticized by many who found the software's new touch-centric user interface difficult to navigate on a desktop. Microsoft has been trying to respond to those critics, and it's likely some key features — like the start button — which disappeared from Windows 8, will be back.

The next update is certain to make this latest version of windows more familiar and easier to use it on a desktop. Microsoft says it will release that update to developers this June.

Microsoft isn't backing away from tablets, however, and this software's touch interface isn't going to disappear. In fact, the update will also feature changes that the company says will make the operating system easier to use on smaller tablets.

Apple CEO Tim Cook famously compared Microsoft's attempt to create one OS for both desktops and tables akin to trying to merge a refrigerator and a toaster. Obviously, a tablet and a PC are pretty different, and you use them is differently.

Microsoft expected its tablets to be an attractive alternative to an iPad for executives and road warriors who wanted something that worked for movies and books or on a plane, but also had all tools to do real work.

The bigger problem for Microsoft is that more and more people are wondering why they need a desktop PC for in the first place.

Most of what you need a desktop PC for you can do pretty well on a tablet: answer email, surf the web and even writing or mixing a radio story are all things you cold do on an iPad.

Desktop PCs and laptops are generally still much more powerful machines than your tablet. Many of us have computers that 20 years ago would have passed for supercomputers. They are powerful enough to run facial recognition programs or produce animated movies, but we're just using them to do mundane things on the Internet.

There hasn't been a boom in creative software that would inspire people to buy these machines besides high-end gaming. For many people who buy them though, it just kind of sits there and its potential goes largely untapped.

Microsoft has tried to address that with the creation of the Windows Store, but there aren't as many apps there yet as the company originally hoped. They also are not really the kinds of programs that set a PC apart.

If Microsoft is to reclaim its former glory, it needs a healthy developer eco-system that helps answer this question: What can I do with a PC that I just can't on a tablet?

The immigration overhaul bill before the Senate would provide, among other things, more visas for migrant farm workers and high-tech workers, and a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

One thing it would not provide is help for same-sex couples in which one partner is an American and one foreign-born. For heterosexual couples, a foreign-born spouse automatically qualifies for a green card and many of the benefits of citizenship. Not so with gay and lesbian couples.

Some Democrats hope to change that with an amendment.

What's At Stake

On a perfect spring evening in a suburban Maryland park, Liora Moriel and Susan Kirshner are watching their 9-year-old twins at baseball practice.

Moriel was born in Israel 64 years ago and would like to retire in the not too distant future from her teaching job at the University of Maryland. But she has a temporary visa, not a green card. Kirshner, her partner of 27 years and a federal employee, says her benefits don't cover Moriel.

"For us, the issue is largely going to focus around Liora's ability to retire and maintain the kinds of social services that she will need as a retired person, even though she's been living and working in this country and contributing and paying taxes — that's all at stake," Kirshner says. "Our ability to stay here together as a family is in jeopardy if this bill doesn't pass."

The bill is actually an amendment to the immigration overhaul that has been proposed by the so-called Gang of Eight senators — four Republicans and four Democrats.

Steve Ralls of the group Immigration Equality says it would give same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexuals.

"As most people understand, when an American citizen marries a spouse from abroad, that spouse is then eligible for a green card here in the United States," Ralls says. "For gay and lesbian couples, that option is not available. Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government has been unable to confer immigration benefits to the partners of American citizens."

But the Defense of Marriage Act is before the Supreme Court, and the issue could become moot if the justices decide to overturn the law. Backers of the amendment are unwilling, however, to place their bets on the court ruling in their favor.

Immigration Equality estimates some 35,000 to 40,000 gay and lesbian couples are affected.

'Hard Enough To Do As Is'

But support for the amendment is tenuous. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes it. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and Gang of Eight member, says approving the amendment could spell doom for the entire immigration bill.

"This issue is so complicated. The immigration issue has so many land mines and pitfalls that it's going to be hard enough to do as is," he told the website Buzzfeed in February. "I think if that issue becomes the central issue in the debate, it's just going to make it harder to get it done because there's going to be a lot of strong feelings about it on both sides."

House Republicans, already balking at the immigration measure, are thought to be even less likely to support it if it confers rights to same-sex couples. Backers of the amendment also worry that not all Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are onboard.

Still, Moriel says she's optimistic.

"Both of us were quite active in the gay-rights movement in Israel, and we always said that, you know, the United States was our beacon," she says. "I think all over the world, people think that way and to then realize that Israel is far ahead of the United States on this issue in sexuality, it's quite strange."

Amendment backers will be closely watching the Senate Judiciary Committee to see whether Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., formally files the measure for consideration by Tuesday afternoon's deadline.

It's strange to find a Fried Peanut Butter and Banana sandwich, famous as Elvis Presley's favorite, on a restaurant menu, given its effect on Elvis. It's like finding a store selling an Isadora Duncan commemorative scarf.

Nonetheless, freelance radio producer Melissa LaCasse and I decided to try the one offered by The Breslin in New York, listed as "fried peanut butter & banana sandwich with bourbon & vanilla."

Melissa: How many of these do you sell?
Server: About four a day. Mostly at brunch. People think they're a hangover cure.
Peter: Or they're still drunk.
Peter: The fried part is essential. Because like castor beans, peanut butter and banana is not lethal in its natural state.
Melissa: I'm conflicted about this sandwich. On one hand it's so good, but on the other hand it's so very bad. It's like that guy who gets all the ladies but just doesn't deserve to.
Peter: Yeah ... as I eat it, I'm overwhelmed by the conviction that I can somehow change it.
Melissa: Back when I was single, I used to change the contact info of this kind of guy — the alluring bad boy — in my phone to read "no" when the call came in. If this sandwich were a guy, it would be a definite "no" in the phone.
Peter: It would be great if the server had the same function. "I'd like the fried peanut butter and —" "NO!"
Melissa: Thank yuh veruh much ...
Peter: I thought you didn't like Elvis.
Melissa: I don't. I'm just talking that way because my mouth is stuck together.

[The verdict: Incredibly delicious. Sweet and fried and salty and great, with a strong aroma of bourbon and vanilla.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me.

On China's increasingly irreverent social media, some people tried to look on the bright side and suggested that Shanghai's river had essentially become a giant bowl of pork soup.

Soon afterward, another, far more serious meat problem emerged in this city of 23 million. The H7N9 virus showed up in live fowl in Shanghai's fresh meat and produce markets. The government shut down live poultry sellers and killed more than 100,000 chickens, ducks and other birds. One apartment complex downtown even penned off a handful of black swans, warning residents to keep their distance just in case.

The virus has killed 13 people in Shanghai, home to nearly half of all the fatal cases in China. Scientists say so far, the virus appears to be transmitted from birds to people, and there's no clear evidence of sustainable human-to-human transmission, which could spark a pandemic.

Some city restaurants, including a Sichuanese place where I order Kung Pao Chicken, stopped serving chicken, but many others continue to stock it. On May 1, a national holiday, a KFC on Nanjing Road, Shanghai's main shopping street, was jammed at lunch time.

The Salt

Shanghai's Dead Pigs: Search For Answers Turns Up Denials

On the types of schools that are particularly trapped in an economic bind

"Most small, private liberal arts colleges in general. I mean, if you look at a map of the country, most of the private colleges in the U.S. are in the Midwest and the Rust Belt and the Northeast, where all the population growth, especially of 18-year-olds, [is in] the South and Southwest. And so part of the problem is that they're having a hard time just attracting students, because students have to fly halfway across the country to pay $50,000 for a degree that they're not quite sure what they're going to do with."

On what higher education will look like in the future

"I still think that colleges are still going to exist — physical college campuses are still going to exist for those who want it. What will be different, however, is that you're going to have many more players in the system. [For example] if you decide to take a MOOC [Massive Online Open Course] ... and you want to transfer credit ... MOOCs might provide a piece of a person's education.

"This idea of competency-based education, which I think is perhaps the most disruptive force potentially entering higher education — so, right now we measure learning by time spent in a seat. They test you on the way in, they see what you know, and you basically focus on what you don't know. What I think the disruption will be is that some students could finish in 2 1/2 years. There's nothing really magic about 120 credits in four years. It's just tradition."

College Comparison Tool

Jeff Selingo and The Chronicle of Higher Education developed this website to allow students and parents to compare colleges' costs, graduation rates and graduate salaries.

College Reality Check

There's been a buzz of activity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta since scientists got their first samples of a new bird flu virus from China four weeks ago.

Already they've prepared "seed strains" of the virus, called H7N9, and distributed them to vaccine manufacturers so the companies can grow them up and make them into experimental flu vaccine.

They've also come up with a new diagnostic test for H7N9 that the Food and Drug Administration has approved on an emergency basis.

Shots - Health News

What's In A Flu Name? Hs And Ns Tell A Tale

Fans of women's sports often maintain that female athletics get short shrift from the media, so it had to be something of a surprise gift when ESPN presented the start of the WNBA's draft live.

This happened as it was announced that after two abject failures in the past decade, yet another professional soccer league for women will dare venture forth in the United States.

Not to excuse the media, but the reality is that most attention is given to team sports, where there is an identity with the community –– and, by extension, with the local newspapers and broadcast outlets. Pick up any sports section, and most of it will be jammed with box scores from the various leagues. And the men have the leagues.

In counterpoint, most attention to women's athletics has, historically, been devoted to individual sports –– and often as not to the prettier stars. This dates back to the innocent so-called "America's Girl," Helen Wills, in tennis almost a century ago.

Figure skating, where appearance is more important than any other sport, has been the natural catch basin for popularity in winter Olympic years. Figure skating is a terribly demanding discipline, but it is to sports what the red carpet is to show business. Nevertheless, that sustained attention to pulchritude aside, it does not help right now that American fans of both genders are especially provincial, and that in tennis and golf and figure skating foreigners dominate.

Still, I think the sisterhood has to look more into the mirror. In the post-Title IX era, as girls have flooded into athletics, there has been no comparable explosion by female spectators. It's all very comforting to blame media men for a lack of coverage, but if more women buy tickets to watch female athletes play, then more coverage will follow.

This may be only anecdotal, but I have noticed that in small-town newspapers and on community websites, female high school and college sports seem to get a commensurate amount of attention with their male jocks. The imbalance of coverage is so much more at the top, where commerce matters.

Women's soccer may have the best chance, for the U.S. female stars seem to have been as popular as our men on the pitch. But with the new National Women's Soccer League, and also especially with the WNBA and college basketball, success ultimately will surely be determined by whether female fans will support female athletes in their pocketbooks.

And, oh, yes, for basketball in particular, there should be a coordinated effort to get Las Vegas to run a line on women's games. I'm not being facetious. Hey, Vegas makes a line on American Idol. Anything you can bet on gets more attention. The bookmakers, ladies, may be more important than the editors.

That big immigration bill working its way through the Senate would let in lots more highly skilled workers on temporary visas. But there's a catch.

The bill says all employers who want to hire workers on these H-1B visas:

... would be required to advertise on an Internet website maintained by the Department of Labor and offer the job to any U.S. worker who applies and is equally or better qualified than the immigrants ... sought...

The words "grossed out" evoke enough of a watery 1980s vibe that they need to be saved for the times when they really apply: movie scenes where somebody sticks something in somebody else's eye, sewage spills, and so forth.

Having said that, it was hard not to be grossed out by a story in Sunday's New York Times about Vinny Bruzzese, an entrepreneur who offers "script evaluation" services, meaning that for $20,000, he'll compare a draft movie script to existing movie scripts to tell you whether your movie will make money. It's supposed to be some kind of Moneyball for movies, taking out the squishy stuff (art!) and focusing on the important stuff (money!), which, if you're a studio head, might make a certain amount of sense.

Bruzzese hands down proclamations based on his statistical analysis of what's gone before. "Targeting demon" movies, he says, make more money than "summoned demon" movies. Some superheroes are more successful than others.

And, in perhaps the most perplexing moment in the article, Bruzzese says that you shouldn't have a bowling scene in your movie, because bowling scenes tend to show up in flops.

It's easy to be highly suspicious of Bruzzese's methods in terms of their ability to do what he says they will do. Statistics are tricky things, and his conclusions don't really seem to make all that much sense. Bowling scenes tend to show up in flops, so take out the bowling scene? Assuming that there's a large enough sample size of movies with bowling scenes in them to draw any conclusions at all, isn't it likely that bowling scenes pop up in kinds of movies that don't do well, meaning you solve nothing by leaving out a bowling scene that you would be a natural fit? Taking out, or leaving out, the bowling scene only matters if you think the movies that have flopped with bowling sequences in them would have made more money without them, all other things being equal.

Furthermore, he would obviously miss the mark with anything genuinely new and different, some of which will make money. Would he have predicted Jaws? Star Wars? Bridesmaids? Tyler Perry?

In other words, there's the strong possibility that what he's doing isn't worth as much as he says it is, because it isn't fully predictive and it certainly isn't adequate to transform money pits into moneymakers. (If it were, one suspects he could charge a heck of a lot more than $20,000 for it.)

But I'm not sure what he's doing is any more hostile to art than what's already happening. We already know studios try to predict how much money a movie will make, and we already know that they often do that by trying to replicate existing successes. It's not as if his business model is to argue for financial concerns over artistic ones. His business model is making the financial calculations more precise. Where studios put those financial considerations relative to artistic considerations is on them, not on him.

And this is aside from the question of whether it's really wrong to want movies to make money in a business like the making of large studio films, in which everybody expects to get paid, including mortified screenwriters.

The Times quotes Ol Parker, who wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, as saying that script evaluation like this is "the enemy of creativity" and will lead to "increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road." But if you're looking for an enemy of creativity, even assuming a zero-sum game where looking for financial success can only harm the art, is the enemy script evaluation, which is a method of guessing at how much a movie will make, or is it the decision at the studio level to care only about how much the movie will make? Do we believe that Oz The Great And Powerful, reported to be one of the films made with the help of script evaluation, wasn't a financial calculation until Bruzzese came along? Or that otherwise, nobody would have tried to guess how much money it would make?

He's not a very appealing character: he's quoted sniping about how "all screenwriters think their babies are beautiful" before positioning himself as the truth-teller who knows that "some babies are ugly." This is giving himself substantially too much credit. When screenwriters think their babies are beautiful, they rarely mean, "A statistical analysis would show that my script is similar in many respects to other films that have made large amounts of money!" What they mean is: "My art, man. My art." Which may have its own air of insufferability at times, and Bruzzese has surely encountered some of that. But he's talking about a measurement on a fundamentally different axis than writers are talking about. It doesn't necessarily mean he knows more than they do. When I say a baby is beautiful, after all, I'm not guessing how much people would pay for it.

Everybody here is right, in a depressing sort of way. The studios are right that if Bruzzese can do what he says he will do, that's a valuable service from the standpoint of maximizing profits. Writers are right that "I have a great new way to tell writers they have to take out a scene for reasons having nothing to do with quality" is not a sentiment that advances art. Bruzzese is right that writers are protective of their work.

Everybody wins. Everybody loses. Some terrific movies and some awful movies become hits. Some terrific movies and some awful movies lose so much money that everybody immediately starts trying to pretend they never happened. And on and on, whether this particular guy is running these calculations or not.

The Pentagon has for the first time fingered Beijing directly for cyberattacks against both U.S. government networks and commercial computers, calling the practice a "serious concern."

The new report says numerous U.S. diplomatic, economic and defense industry networks were hacked in 2012 at the direction of China's government and its military.

As NPR's Tom Bowman reports: "In previous reports, the Pentagon has linked computer attacks to China, but not its government."

In February, IT security consultancy Mandiant said it had traced hacking activity to the People's Liberation Army's Unit 61398, which it said had "systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations."

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ North America, which produces spy satellites, drones and software used by U.S. special forces, had been the target of Chinese hacking.

According to Bloomberg:

"In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China's military infiltrated QinetiQ's computers and compromised most if not all of the company's research. At one point, they logged into the company's network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed.

"Former CIA Director George Tenet was a director of the company from 2006 to 2008 and former Pentagon spy chief Stephen Cambone headed a major division. ...

" 'We found traces of the intruders in many of their divisions and across most of their product lines,' said Christopher Day, until February a senior vice president for Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)'s Terremark security division, which was hired twice by QinetiQ to investigate the break-ins. 'There was virtually no place we looked where we didn't find them.' "

[CAUTION: This is all about Sunday night's Mad Men. Obviously, if you haven't seen Sunday night's Mad Men and you still intend to, you might hold off.]

It's reductive to conclude that on far too many episodes of Mad Men, nothing happens. Of course something always happens: someone feels something, or learns something, or is locked in a continuous internal struggle with something. A dynamic continues to simmer, a memory comes to the surface, angels and demons battle for somebody's soul.

But it can feel a lot like nothing happens. It can feel like watching a lava lamp: it's an exploration of the line between mesmerizing and stultifying.

That's why, from time to time, it's great fun when all of a sudden, a lot of things happen, as they did in Sunday night's episode. At first, it looked like the episode would be about an SCDP public offering, and then it looked like it would be about Roger landing Chevy, and then it looked like it would be about Don losing Jaguar, and then it looked like it would be about Pete losing Vicks, and then all of a sudden it was about the merger of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and Cutler Gleason and Chaough. That's kind of interesting just because it's a merger, and then holy moly wait a second — that means Peggy is working with/for/around Don again.

Oh, and also: Pete and his father-in-law caught each other with prostitutes, Megan tried to put the va-voom back in her marriage (which she knows is in trouble, even if she doesn't know exactly why), Ted kissed Peggy, and Joan finally exploded over both the anger she feels at Don's eternally distant know-it-all-ism and the fact that she was put in the position of sleeping with a client to get an account. And Pete fell down the stairs, which was really just a metaphorical free beer for everyone who doesn't like Pete.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, in a couple of weeks, Bobby Kennedy is going to be assassinated. This euphoria, it is temporary.

When Mad Men is slow, it's really slow. Then when it gets moving but good, it's like Ocean's Eleven, with the jazzy score and the jaunty angles and the wisecracking. The last episode so purely of this kind was the third season finale, "Shut The Door. Have A Seat." In fact, in a direct callback, early on, this episode — called "For Immediate Release," which has precisely as many meanings as your tolerance for double entendre will tolerate — included Roger, deep into agency intrigue, saying to Don, "Shut the door." We should have known. We should have known!

As much as we all love a good lingering shot of a pained face, as much as we love a tiny conversation that seems to mean nothing and yet means everything, there is something to be said for sometimes — just sometimes — getting on with it already. Let's let Joan's obvious resentments come out. Let's see Pete act like the pitiable little weasel you know he is on the inside. Let's put Don and Peggy in a room again, have them clasp hands again, have him stupidly think he's getting it right by saying something gentler to her when, in fact, he's taken her fate from her hands and swallowed the agency where she was finally making a name for herself.

None of this rapid development means abandoning the character work that's been done in the last several episodes or the last several seasons. None of it means these people have suddenly become simple. After all, "Shut The Door. Have A Seat." was only the beginning (of the end) of Lane Pryce. It's fun to think about seeing Don and Peggy in the together again, but Don is running over Peggy just as much as he was running over Joan when he ditched Herb and Jaguar without talking to her. It took getting away from Don to bring out the Don in Peggy — it should occur to him that she might not want back into a power structure he's operating. And Joan? Joan is angry, really angry, because she gave up far more than she meant to and got far less than she thought she would. And perhaps because he's the only one from whom she expects more, she blames Don.

Don is different, but he's always the same. Don in this mode is smiling, active, vibrant, charismatic ... and still really bad at thinking about how the things he does are going to affect other people. He's cheating on Megan but happy to accept her energetic efforts to please. He's stomping all over the women he works with, and while he can barely bring himself to enjoy the company of his kids (as he told Megan last week while looking like a haggard old man), he grins from ear to ear at the chance to make a new car commercial and put one over on a bunch of bigger agencies.

Mad Men sometimes seems to be a show that remains inside a single dynamic, studying it until another comes along that's potentially more interesting, like it's crawling through a series of dioramas. But when it's time to move to the next one, it happens all at once, the same way Peggy suddenly up and quit — and she stayed gone, and she didn't undo it or change her mind. Now, we're on to the next, where the old Don Draper is the new Don Draper, or maybe it's the other way around.

Meet Tony Stark at the opening of Iron Man 3: insanely wealthy, possessed of every toy, and traumatized by an attack on New York that has left him restless, anxious, belligerent, and given to both hunker-down security measures and fate-tempting swagger. He declares his total lack of fear, then builds the fortress walls higher.

Let's step back.

The most important scenes in last summer's The Avengers took place between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers — Iron Man and Captain America, although their true identities are crossed over, such that the real beings involved are the man on one side and the superhero on the other. (This is how they acknowledge each other from their first meeting, even while they're both suited up: "Mr. Stark." "Cap.") Cap represents the most traditional ideas about American exceptionalism — there's a wonderfully economical exchange in which Black Widow warns Cap that Thor and Loki are "basically gods," and Cap says, "There's only one God, ma'am, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that." It's a line in which he manages to come out in favor of monotheism, chivalry, and machismo in 14 words, right before he jumps fearlessly out of a plane.

(Of course, one could reasonably ask how Cap thinks God does dress, given that Thor and Loki's long hair and flowing robes are actually pretty similar to traditional Judeo-Christian iconography, but Cap gets his point across: Thor and Loki dress silly. God dresses like ... well, a man.)

Stark represents a much newer mythology of American might: he gets his power from earned egotism, unchecked capitalism, and entrepreneurial genius. Cap's military-made respect for authority ("We have orders, we should follow them") impresses Stark not at all ("Following's not really my style"), and Cap in turn has no use for Stark's slick, wise-guy self-regard ("And you're all about style, aren't you?"). Cap's accusation in their climactic argument is that Stark is all weaponry and no character ("Take that off, [and] what are you?"); Stark's defense is that inside the suit, he apologizes for nothing, because he's hit all four fundamentals of the Successful American Man. He calls himself a "genius billionaire playboy philanthropist," meaning he has brains, money, women and respectability. Cap cares about the common good; Stark argues that the purity of his self-interest works just as well for everyone.

The ultimate resolution of the conflict in The Avengers is essentially a draw. The film posits that both can work and both are needed, as are Hulk's distilled fury and Thor's connection to everything otherworldly and ancient. But while the message might seem inexact, the ending is pure Joss Whedon: like all his hero stories, it moves to a rhythm of sacrifice and Pyrrhic victories, followed by a bruised effort to regroup. As we look at New York at the end of the film, after it is "saved," it's Cap who somberly says, "We won," and Stark who weakly says, "All right, yaaaay. All right, good job, guys." The city is devastated. A lot of people are dead.

The story of Iron Man 3 could have been told with no reference to the events The Avengers at all. Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) has come up with a classic medical MacGuffin: an intervention with theoretically therapeutic potential that becomes evil in the wrong hands. (See also: The Amazing Spider-Man, to name only one recent example.) Stark must find him and stop him. Alone, it's not much of a story.

What creates the film's complexity, though, are its continuing interest in the conflict from The Avengers and its use of Stark to say pretty provocative things about the American psyche. His panic attacks brought on by what he saw in battle – in fact, the words "New York" are nearly adequate to induce them – are crippling, he's building unmanned weapons he can't entirely control, and his conviction that he should speak fearlessly and invite whoever cares to confront him to do so is at odds with his fear that his vulnerabilities (and those of the people he loves) will be exposed. When the battle is brought home to him in a couple of ways, he confronts exactly what Cap asked him: "Take that off, what are you?"

Which, according to a strong undercurrent of our cultural conversation about old heroes versus new ones, is pretty much what a guy who fought in World War II might say about Google Glass.

Of course, Stark's mastery of the universe is signaled most of all by his extraordinary wealth. It is a given in American films about wealth that he who has nothing must rise (provided he's deserving) and he who has everything must fall (unless he's deserving). The original Iron Man is about Stark proving he's worthy of his wealth, which meant he could keep it. Here, in the film's middle section, Stark's arrogance — mixed with moments in which he was callous and cruel — takes him from a man who has everything to a man who, at least temporarily, has nothing.

If Tony Stark in The Avengers still had a dollop of our pre-recession, tech-bubble cockiness, this is the story where he is brought low and has to start over. Five minutes after he was using his fancy suit to fly, he is pulling it through the snow on a rope; his reliance on technology goes from blessing to burden in an instant. (And talk about tapping into the American psyche: what fells Tony Stark is that his battery runs out of juice.) The un-granting of powers is certainly a common superhero trope (it happens to Thor all the time), but it's a powerful image seeing Tony Stark lugging the body of Iron Man behind him.

And as he undertakes this battle, part of Stark's responsibility is to figure out who the actual enemy is. He's been told it's a terrorist called The Mandarin, a man with a topknot and a long beard who appears in videos to threaten the United States. But how this man is connected to Killian is initially difficult for Stark to parse, precisely because he's susceptible to certain ingrained ideas (which arise partly from experience) about what terror looks and feels like, and the idea that it might not be all that it appears doesn't come to him easily, despite how clever he both actually is and thinks he is.

Stark will eventually see his suits again. He will get his armor back. It's an Iron Man movie, after all. But there is a late scene that draws an unmistakable connection between the destruction of weapons and the advancement of patriotism — between a tentative and perhaps temporary retreat from super-militarism and a celebration of the Fourth of July. For all that Stark has accomplished, his biggest assets turn out to be a best friend in a polo shirt and jeans, the kindness of strangers, and a loving partner. His most important power is healing. His final acquired skill is trust, and his final act of faith is in others and in science.

The biggest difference between Stark and other superheroes, both in the Marvel universe and elsewhere, is that his goodness is not instinctive. Superman is reflexively good, Spider-Man spends his life making up for one weak moment, and Bruce Wayne often seems to be incidentally wealthy as a byproduct of his efforts to improve life for everyone. Cap was born good, Thor was born good, Bruce Banner was born good. They're certainly not perfect — crises of conscience arise over whether these guys want to get involved. "With great power comes great responsibility," and so forth.

But Stark, as Robert Downey, Jr. plays him, is a reflexively selfish, self-promoting, ego-driven person with a genuine tendency toward bluster and rudeness. What fascinates about him is that the power comes first and the decision to become good comes later. He was rich and powerful before he was decent, as the opening moments of this film make clear; he gives of himself by conscious choice, by teaching himself a kind of ethics that don't come naturally. He does it reluctantly, always for a complex combination of selfish and unselfish reasons. Until you hit him close to home, he'd always rather stay out of trouble.

He is, in many ways, the new Captain America. He is friends with the other one, of course — he came to respect Cap's brand of old-school good-doing, and was influenced by it. Steve Rogers, as the little guy who became the big guy, who went from weakling to protector and who is aghast at the idea of selfishness, still has an undeniable pull. But the biggest conversations we're having now? About balancing self-sacrifice and ego and capitalism, generosity and gadgetry, embracing other human beings versus shutting ourselves inside ever more advanced fortresses at every level from national security down to personal technology? It's pure Tony Stark.

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

Harper Lee is suing to recover royalties from her former literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who she claims tricked her into signing over the copyright to her novel To Kill A Mockingbird while she was recovering from a stroke in an assisted-living facility. The 87-year-old author regained the rights in 2012, but says Pinkus has still been collecting royalties. Cue the where's-Atticus-Finch-when-you-need-him jokes.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has apologized after suggesting that John Maynard Keynes' economic theories were influenced by the fact that he was gay and childless, and therefore was unconcerned with the welfare of future generations. He wrote, "First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes's wife Lydia miscarried." Ferguson tends to court controversy — his 2012 book Civilization: The West and the Rest was widely seen as an apology for Western colonialism.

"The discerning reader has long grown weary of dead and dying stereotypes of the modern African novel: Civil wars. Black magic. Vulture-stalked refugees." —Nigerian author A. Igoni Barrett, writing for NPR.org, on why Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah Is Not Obliged defies stereotypes.

The late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had advanced prostate cancer, according to a preliminary forensic test. Neruda's body was exhumed last month to determine whether he died from natural causes or, as has been alleged, was poisoned after a 1973 coup that overthrew his friend and ally, President Salvador Allende. More tests will be required to determine the actual cause of death.

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

In Ben Percy's Red Moon, the U.S. government comes into conflict with a repressed minority — the "lycans" (werewolves, essentially) — in a muddled metaphor for the U.S.'s fraught relationship with Arab-Americans, gays and blacks. Ultimately, Red Moon is an excellent monster novel, but a just-OK piece of social commentary.

Janet Malcolm's latest collection of essays, Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, includes, among more "serious" works, her great piece on the subtle brilliance of the "strange, complicated" and "transgressive" Gossip Girl books (like several other essays in the collection, you can also read it at The New Yorker).