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Tesla Motors, the American maker of luxury electric cars, has been riding a wave of good publicity.

Its Model S sedan (base priced at $62,400, after federal tax credits) was just named Motor Trend Car of the Year. Reviewers at Consumer Reports gave the lithium-ion battery powered vehicle a rave.

And the company, headed by billionaire innovator Elon Musk, 41, posted a profit for the first time in its 10-year history — powered in part by zero-emission environmental credits.

But Tesla also finds itself, and its business model, under sustained attack by a formidable foe: the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington with a strong network of state chapters.

The dealers say they have no quibble with the quality and allure of Tesla's products. What they object to is the Palo Alto-based manufacturer's efforts to sell the electric car directly to consumers rather than through independently owned dealer franchises.

Tesla's model is often compared to the one used by consumer electronics giant Apple.

"We want to cut out the middleman," says Diarmuid O'Connell, vice president for business development at Tesla. "We're a bad fit for the dealer system."

The dealers' response?

"Buying an iPad is not buying a car," says David Hyatt of the national association, which, along with member chapters, has taken their franchise fight to the courts and to state legislatures across the nation.

It's a battle between a deep-pocketed interest group, which last year contributed more than $3.2 million to candidates, and a fearless entrepreneur.

And it's just heating up.

Battles Emerge State By State

A bill being considered in North Carolina, where there are currently 80 Teslas on the road and another 60 expected, would prevent the company from selling vehicles online. In Virginia, the state denied the company a dealer license to open a store.

Texas lawmakers are expected to ignore an effort by Tesla to gain an exception to strict franchise laws that prohibit factory-owned dealerships. Last year, there were only 43 registered Teslas in the state.

In both Massachusetts and New York, legal efforts by franchise dealers to block Tesla's efforts were rejected — including attempts to shut down three Tesla stores and two service centers in New York.

Wrote New York Supreme Court Justice Raymond J. Elliott III: "Dealers cannot utilize the Franchised Dealer Act as a means to sue their competitors."

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NPR's Susan Stamberg reads an excerpt of one of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. She reads Plum Baby by Carmiel Banasky of Portland, Ore. You can read the full story below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

There isn't enough time in this world to grow your own tree. That tree is a plum baby still, never mind it's tall as the house those men are taking from us. It grew up with me. I say this to Mama Lee as she rests her hand on my shoulder like another shoulder. She nods and nods some more. She's been nodding all day like she's got two weights, one in her chin and the other in back of her skull that can't lie at rest.

We're standing in the yard facing the house in the dewy grass. The house is as old as Mama Lee's mama who died before I was born.

Now that old house is humming under the weight of those repo men inside doing their business. That tree's hardly done growing. We watch as two men lug out our sofa.

Mama Lee opens her mouth before she speaks but sticks her tongue to her upper teeth, preparing her words before she lets them loose, little fishes from a hand. "Your father should've sold the lumber yard. I told him. Should've sold it."

I pick up a stick and throw it straight up in the air but it doesn't fall on me.

"Who needs lumber anymore? No one's building," Mama Lee says.

I say, "Do they own the plum tree now? If they own the house?"

"I told them," she says.

"I'm going to take it if it's all the same to you."

She looks at me then. "You going to dig it up with your bare hands, hmm?"

"There's a shovel not packed yet."

Mama Lee's got a mean laugh. "And what do you plan to do with a tree? Hmm? When you got no yard?"

I pick another stick and throw it up and hope it hits her head, but it sinks behind us.

I leave her questions and walk on over to my big baby plum tree. I touch its rough trunk.

The bark is bone-brittle. It got hit by a freeze last winter and didn't give us much fruit, like it knew what was coming. Around the trunk, on the other side where the repo men can't see, there's a handful of fallen plums. Sitting in the shade like someone put them there for me to find. They're rotting and sending up that sweet smell and have a look like they've been rolled through petrol. In the shade I pick two and weigh them, one in each hand. They're mushy, but not lost.

No one's watching. I slip the plums into my skirt pockets and feel them against my legs, wet.

Once, when I was eight, I kept a roadkill raccoon under my bed for a week. I heard full moons can wake the dead.

The British Foreign Office is happy to assist its citizens, but officials want to make clear that there are some requests they won't fulfill.

Such as supplying Olympic tickets or doing a background check on that Swedish woman you met online.

Those are just a few of the "often good natured" but distracting requests that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) says it received over the past year, according to a press release issued on Thursday.

Some others that no doubt provided stodgy British bureaucrats with some much-needed levity:

— A man who required hospital treatment in Cambodia when a monkey dislodged a stone that hit him demanded help getting compensation and wanted assurance that it would not happen again.

— A man asked FCO staff in Rome to translate a phrase for a tattoo that he wanted.

— A woman requested that consular staff in Tel Aviv order her husband to get fit and eat healthily so that they could have children.

— A man asked the Consulate in Montreal for information to settle a 1,000 wager on the color of the British passport.

— A number of British Consulates have been asked to book hotels or to advise on where to watch the football.

"FCO staff help many thousands of British nationals facing serious difficulties around the world every year," says Mark Simmonds, minister of consular affairs. "We also receive over a million inquiries each year, so it is important that people understand what we can and cannot do to support them when they are abroad.

"We are not in a position to help people make travel arrangements or social plans, but we do help those who face real problems abroad. These can include victims of crime, bereaved families who have lost a loved one abroad or Britons who have been arrested or detained," Simmonds says.

"We aim to continue to focus on supporting those who really need our help in the coming year," he says.

Venezuelans may be used to a dearth of medicine, milk and sugar, but there's a new shortage that's, shall we say, a bit more problematic: toilet paper.

The government of socialist President Nicolas Maduro announced this week that it would import 50 million rolls of toilet paper to meet the growing demand.

"We will saturate the market so the people will be calm," Commerce Minister Alejandro Fleming told the official AVN news agency.

But it appears that the people aren't very calm: The Associated Press reported Thursday that Venezuelans scrambled to stock up on the precious commodity.

"Even at my age, I've never seen this," 70-year-old Maria Rojas told the AP.

Another woman, Maria Perez, who walked out of a supermarket in downtown Caracas with several rolls, told the agency: "Here there's a shortage of everything — butter, sugar, flour" — but "there always used to be toilet paper."

But Fleming, the commerce minister, blamed the shortage on excessive demand caused by "a media campaign."

The shortages in Venezuela come despite its vast oil wealth; OPEC estimates the country has the largest oil reserves in the world. The late President Hugo Chavez used the country's oil revenue to act on his socialist vision, which benefited the country's poorest people. But some of his policies have hurt the economy.

Here's more from the AP:

"Economists say Venezuela's shortages of some consumer products stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government's controls on foreign currency. Many factories operate at half capacity because the currency controls make it hard for them to pay for imported parts and materials. Business leaders say some companies verge on bankruptcy because they cannot extend lines of credit with foreign suppliers."

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

Amazon faces a grilling from members of Britain's Parliament over its extremely low U.K. corporate tax payments, Reuters reported Friday. As NPR noted on Thursday, Amazon has the subject of intense scrutiny after it was revealed that the Internet retailer's U.K. unit paid only slightly more in taxes than it received in government grants because its sales are routed through Luxembourg. But investigations by The Guardian and Reuters found evidence that Amazon should be subject to a higher U.K. tax rate. Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, told Reuters, "We need to very urgently call back Amazon to question them around what you've uncovered; to look at that in relation to what they actually told us when they gave evidence to us and of course if they were economical with the truth or not totally honest in their evidence to us last time, that is a very serious thing."

The Nation magazine and AARP both announced this week they are launching ebook lines. The Nation's ebook publishing imprint, "ebook Nation," will kick off with State of the Union, National Essays, a collection of essays by the late Gore Vidal. Meanwhile, AARP has teamed up with RosettaBooks for a series of original ebooks on such topics as "caregiving, brain health, and driver safety," according to MediaBistro. Digital imprints are becoming increasingly common, particularly for media organizations – The New York Times and The Washington Post, for example, publish their own ebooks.

Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel spices up The New York Times' usually bland "By the Book" series: "I love Jane Austen because she's so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph."

Anne Applebaum argues that Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In is actually nothing new: "This is not a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi. It belongs in the business section."

And, last but not least, Jen Doll reports on the dire state of the apostrophe for The Atlantic Wire: "The apostrophe has been forgotten or purposely left behind in an increasing array of words."

American gourmets and lovers of Italian food products, your days as food smugglers are over.

No more stuffing your suitcases with delicacies bought in Italy, hoping the sniffer dogs at JFK or other American airports won't detect the banned-in-the-USA foodstuffs inside your luggage.

In the U.S., they're called cured meats, the French say charcuterie and in Italy, the word for cured-pork products is salumi.

Starting May 28, a four-decades-old ban on the import of many Italian salumi will be lifted.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that the Italian regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont, and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are free of swine vesicular disease. Imports of pork products from those areas, says the USDA, present a low risk of introducing the disease into the U.S. The disease was first detected in the 1960s and can survive cooking and even long curing.

Up to now, only a few Italian pork products were approved for import to the U.S.: prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as mortadella — which was also banned until 2000.

Starting soon, as long as they receive USDA approval, hundreds of artisanal products will arrive on American tables. It's not yet clear, however, what standards the producers will have to meet and what the costs will be. But even without a ban, Italian cured meat producers must pay hefty fees as part of the process of getting certified for importation.

For centuries, Italians have been making some of the highest-quality cured meats in Europe. It's time to start learning some of their names: sopressata, a slow-cured dried pork, similar in appearance to salami; pancetta, bacon made from the pork belly, but unlike the American variety, which is smoked, Italian pancetta is cured in salt and spices; coppa or capocollo, made from pork shoulder or neck and seasoned with wine, salt and spice.

What's the secret behind the high quality of Italian salumi?

Many say it's the quality of the pigs, the climate where they're raised and what they're fed.

Every Italian region and province, and even many towns have their own distinctive salumi, many of them celebrated in weeklong folk festivals. There are fans of Coppa Piacentina or those who swear by Coppa di Parma; there's an infinite variety of salamis — from Brianza, Vicenza, Cremona and many more, spiced with garlic, juniper and myrtle berries, fennel and red wine.

One of the delicacies that may soon reach U.S. shores is salame di Felino, named after the small town of the same name near Parma.

According to the website prosciuttopedia, salame di Felino traces its origins to the Middle Ages. The oldest pictorial representation is found in the Parma Baptistery, where one can see two salamis draped over a saucepan. And in 1905, the wording "Salame di Felino" was officially included in the dictionary of the Italian language.

Enlarge image i

The candidates have spent a record amount of money. They've stumped hard in a city that isn't easy to campaign in — 470 square miles sliced up into neighborhoods divided by a web of freeways.

Yet despite nearly $20 million in spending in the March primary alone, turnout is expected to be low next Tuesday in Los Angeles when voters go to the polls to pick a new mayor to replace the term-limited Antonio Villaraigosa.

As a result, City Councilman Eric Garcetti and his opponent, City Controller Wendy Greuel, are engaged in an all-out blitz for votes across the sprawling city.

With a recent poll showing a tightening in the nonpartisan race between the two Democrats, who had similar records while serving together on the City Council, Garcetti and Greuel have been eager to court South LA's influential African-American and Hispanic vote.

"Welcome. Buenos dias," Garcetti said, as he shook hands with attendees before a forum one night this week in Watts.

Both smiled and swayed to the gospel music inside the historic Macedonia Baptist Church as the event was beginning.

After a few minutes of singing, as Hispanic voters tried on their headphones to listen to translation, it was down to business.

"Tonight we are gathered in Watts because Watts is one of those places in our city that has been left out, forgotten and forsaken," decried the church's pastor, Shane Scott, who introduced Garcetti and Greuel to the audience.

Both are seen as outsiders in neighborhoods like this. Garcetti represents Hollywood on the City Council, and Greuel hails from the suburban, and predominantly white, San Fernando Valley.

But Garcetti has Mexican heritage and has picked up key endorsements from Hispanic leaders. For her part, Greuel often talks about working for popular former Mayor Tom Bradley and President Bill Clinton, as she mentioned during the forum.

"It is about jobs," Greuel said. "President Clinton the other day said at an event ... when I introduced him that there's no better social program than a good job."

Business Vs. Labor

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David Beckham, who starred for Manchester United, Real Madrid and England's national team before heading to the United States and Paris, is retiring. The news was confirmed Thursday by England's Football Association.

The midfielder played his first game for Manchester United in 1992 and eventually rose to become captain of England's international team for more than 50 games, including several World Cup tournaments. He appeared in 115 matches for the squad.

The site of the English national squad posted these comments from Beckham, on his retirement:

"I feel now is the right time to finish my career, playing at the highest level.

"I want to thank all my team-mates, the great managers that I had the pleasure of learning from. I also want to thank the fans who have all supported me and given me the strength to succeed.

"If you had told me as a young boy I would have played for and won trophies with my boyhood club Manchester United, proudly captained and played for my country over 100 times and lined up for some of the biggest clubs in the world, I would have told you it was a fantasy."

"I'm fortunate to have realised those dreams."

After a long bumpy ride that started five years ago, the domestic airline industry seems to be pulling up and smoothing out.

The number of passengers planning to fly this summer will tick up 1 percent from 2012, climbing back to the highest level since 2008, an industry group said Thursday.

This week, Google, already a leader in mapping, created more space between itself and its competitors by more deeply mining the data users provide the company when using its various services.

At the Google developers' conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps, crowed about the company's mapping app for the iPhone — and couldn't quite stop himself from taking a dig at Apple.

"People called it sleek, simple, beautiful, and let's not forget, accurate," he said.

The company unveiled a new Google Maps with a number of new features: a clearer user interface; social recommendations; maps that are tailor-made for the searches and habits of an individual user; maps that highlight all the museums in a city after you search for one; maps that identify your favorite places and make them landmarks on the map that you see.

If you frequent a certain restaurant in San Francisco, for example, Google will take note and attempt to find similar places to highlight when you search for a restaurant in, say, Austin, Texas, or Prague.

When I opened up the new Google Maps on my computer, the first thing I saw in the upper left-hand corner were three pre-populated addresses: one was for my daughters' school, one was for our house (it was labeled "Home") and one was for the house we used to live in.

It is clear from the very first moment using the new Google Maps that this map is made just for me. But it also was another disconcerting reminder of how much information about me and my family is being captured and stored and analyzed by Google every day.

Enlarge image i

American gourmets and lovers of Italian food products, your days as food smugglers as over.

No more stuffing your suitcases with delicacies bought in Italy, hoping the sniffer dogs at JFK or other American airports won't detect the banned-in-the-USA foodstuffs inside your luggage.

In the U.S., they're called cured meats, the French say charcuterie and in Italy, the word for cured-pork products is salumi.

Starting May 28, a four-decades-old ban on the import of many Italian salumi will be lifted.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that the Italian regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont, and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are free of swine vesicular disease. Imports of pork products from those areas, says USDA, present a low risk of introducing the disease into the U.S. The disease was first detected in the 1960s and can survive cooking and even long curing.

Up to now, only few Italian pork products were approved for import to the U.S.: prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as mortadella — which was also banned until 2000.

Starting soon, as long as they receive USDA approval, hundreds of artisanal products will arrive on American tables. However, it's not yet clear what standards the producers will have to meet and what the costs will be. But even without a ban, Italian cured meat producers must pay hefty fees as part of the process of getting certified for importation.

For centuries, Italians have been making some of the highest-quality cured meats in Europe. It's time to start learning some of their names: sopressata, a slow-cured dried pork, similar in appearance to salami; pancetta, bacon made from the pork belly, but unlike the American variety, which is smoked, Italian pancetta is cured in salt and spices. Coppa or capocollo, made from pork shoulder or neck and seasoned with wine, salt and spice.

What's the secret behind the high quality of Italian salumi?

Many say it's the quality of the pigs, the climate where they're raised and what they're fed.

Every Italian region and province, and even many towns have their own distinctive salumi, many of them celebrated in week-long folk festivals. There are fans of Coppa Piacentina or those who swear by Coppa di Parma; there's an infinite variety of salamis — from Brianza, Vicenza, Cremona and many more, spiced with garlic, juniper and myrtle berries, fennel and red wine.

One of the delicacies that may soon reach U.S. shores is salame di Felino, named after the small town of the same name near Parma.

According to the website prosciuttopedia, salame di Felino traces its origins to the Middle Ages. The oldest pictorial representation is found in the Parma Baptistery, where one can see two salamis draped over a saucepan. And in 1905, the wording "Salame di Felino" was officially included in the dictionary of the Italian language.

Enlarge image i

American gourmets and lovers of Italian food products, your days as food smugglers as over.

No more stuffing your suitcases with delicacies bought in Italy, hoping the sniffer dogs at JFK or other American airports won't detect the banned-in-the-USA foodstuffs inside your luggage.

In the U.S., they're called cured meats, the French say charcuterie and in Italy, the word for cured-pork products is salumi.

Starting May 28, a four-decades-old ban on the import of many Italian salumi will be lifted.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that the Italian regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont, and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are free of swine vesicular disease. Imports of pork products from those areas, says USDA, present a low risk of introducing the disease into the U.S. The disease was first detected in the 1960s and can survive cooking and even long curing.

Up to now, only few Italian pork products were approved for import to the U.S.: prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as mortadella — which was also banned until 2000.

Starting soon, as long as they receive USDA approval, hundreds of artisanal products will arrive on American tables. However, it's not yet clear what standards the producers will have to meet and what the costs will be. But even without a ban, Italian cured meat producers must pay hefty fees as part of the process of getting certified for importation.

For centuries, Italians have been making some of the highest-quality cured meats in Europe. It's time to start learning some of their names: sopressata, a slow-cured dried pork, similar in appearance to salami; pancetta, bacon made from the pork belly, but unlike the American variety, which is smoked, Italian pancetta is cured in salt and spices. Coppa or capocollo, made from pork shoulder or neck and seasoned with wine, salt and spice.

What's the secret behind the high quality of Italian salumi?

Many say it's the quality of the pigs, the climate where they're raised and what they're fed.

Every Italian region and province, and even many towns have their own distinctive salumi, many of them celebrated in week-long folk festivals. There are fans of Coppa Piacentina or those who swear by Coppa di Parma; there's an infinite variety of salamis — from Brianza, Vicenza, Cremona and many more, spiced with garlic, juniper and myrtle berries, fennel and red wine.

One of the delicacies that may soon reach U.S. shores is salame di Felino, named after the small town of the same name near Parma.

According to the website prosciuttopedia, salame di Felino traces its origins to the Middle Ages. The oldest pictorial representation is found in the Parma Baptistery, where one can see two salamis draped over a saucepan. And in 1905, the wording "Salame di Felino" was officially included in the dictionary of the Italian language.

Enlarge image i

Home grocery delivery sounds like a frill for people too lazy to schlep to the store. But having food delivered can be more environmentally friendly than driving to the store, researchers say.

Having groceries delivered can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half, compared to driving to the store, according to a new study. That's because the delivery truck offers the equivalent of a "shared ride" for the food.

"It's like a bus for groceries," says Anne Goodchild, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study. "Overwhelmingly, it's more efficient to be sharing a vehicle, even if it's a little larger."

Goodchild studies logistics and freight transportation. She also gets her groceries delivered. "As a working mother, it's another trip I don't have to make while my kids are awake," she says. But, she admits, "I felt sort of lazy and indulgent to be ordering my groceries this way."

By combining her knowledge of freight transport and data on commuter habits, Goodchild and her colleagues were able to calculate just how efficient it is to put the groceries on the "bus," using neighborhoods in Seattle and randomly choosing households as potential customers. Pretty darned efficient, it turns out.

Home food delivery trucks, they found, produce 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than having the same households drive to the store. The variation is based on how close people live to the store, the number of people in the neighborhood getting food delivered and the efficiency of the truck's route.

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: How Do You Get Support?

A couple generations ago, when older Americans retired they could rely on pension plans to support them. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many companies switched their retirement plans over to 401(k) accounts. The security of workers' retirement savings suddenly became subject to the vagaries of the stock market.

Read Robert Hiltonsmith's Research

Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work And Fueling Inequality

A couple generations ago, when older Americans retired they could rely on pension plans to support them. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many companies switched their retirement plans over to 401(k) accounts. The security of workers' retirement savings suddenly became subject to the vagaries of the stock market.

Read Robert Hiltonsmith's Research

Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work And Fueling Inequality

Billionaire investment legend Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has had its credit rating lowered from AA+ to AA by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services.

In a statement, S&P says that even though Berkshire Hathaway has an "excellent business profile," the lower credit rating "better reflects our view of BRK's dependence on its core insurance operations for most of its dividend income." (S&P's statement is posted on its website; but you have to register to view it.)

S&P also notes that "management succession" factors into its thinking. As The Financial Times (registration required) notes:

"Mr. Buffett has said he and Berkshire's board have decided who will follow him as chief executive, but they have chosen not to make it public. The company intends to split the chairman and chief executive role that Mr Buffett plays, with his son serving as non-executive chairman."

Wal-Mart says it has drafted its own plan for improving safety at garment factories in Bangladesh rather than join other Western retailers in a legally binding agreement to pay for improved conditions for workers in the South Asian country.

The announcement by the world's largest retailer comes nearly three weeks after the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka that killed more than 1,100 people. The New York Times on Wednesday reported that a Wal-Mart contractor from Canada produced jeans at one of the factories in the collapsed complex.

Wal-Mart said it would not join H&M, the parent company of Zara, Benetton, Marks & Spencer and other European labels in an agreement to conduct independent inspections and to help pay for safety upgrades at factories where they manufacture clothing.

Instead, Wal-Mart has said it will "conduct in-depth safety inspections at 100 percent" of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh and publicize the results on its website.

"Walmart believes its safety plan meets or exceeds" the plan put forth by other manufacturers, the company said in a statement Tuesday, adding that the retailer "will get results more quickly."

The Times reports:

"Wal-Mart promised to stop production immediately at factories if urgent safety problems were uncovered and to notify factory owners and government authorities of improvements. But the company ... stopped short of committing to help underwrite the improvements — one of the crucial aspects of the Bangladesh safety agreement adopted by European companies."

Revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted some conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny have put a spotlight on a part of the tax code increasingly popular with political groups: section 501(c)(4).

But what's the benefit for organizations to get approved for 501(c)(4) status?

The Mississippi Tea Party, a volunteer organization, first applied for tax-exempt status in 2010. Julia Hodges, a spokeswoman for the group, says its biggest activity is keeping track of the Mississippi Legislature's actions.

Hodges says that members usually pass the hat to raise funds. But the group decided to apply to the IRS for tax-exempt status in case it did attract donors, to keep their names private.

"That was the main gist — we wanted to protect those and keep them out of the way," Hodges says.

Two years after the Mississippi Tea Party first applied, after much back and forth, the group still hadn't received an approval from the IRS, and so it gave up. Hodges says the group just got tired of the time it took to answer the many questions the IRS posed.

"After a while, it's just like, 'Why are they nitpicking on us?' That's what we felt like — just little things, they wanted to know all these answers and you felt like you were being nitpicked," she says.

The 501(c)(4) status the Mississippi Tea Party and the other groups flagged by the IRS were seeking was created for so-called social welfare groups. That designation does allow for some political activity. The status is not to be confused with 501(c)(3) charities, says David Sands, a CPA with the New York firm Buchbinder Tunick.

"Basically, any contributions you do give to the charity would be entitled to a tax deduction on an individual's personal return," Sands says about 501(c)(3) organizations. "A contribution to a 501(c)(4) organization is not tax deductible by an individual."

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The Arab world was aflame in March 2011. Longtime rulers in Tunisia and Egypt had been toppled. NATO was poised to attack Libyan government forces. The Syrian uprising was just beginning. And on the small island nation of Bahrain, the government was cracking down on pro-democracy protesters.

Across Bahrain, protest leaders were rounded up and some were quickly tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. The writing was on the wall for the leaders of the movement, including Ali Abdulemam.

He was perhaps the country's most prominent online activist. More than a decade earlier, he had founded the first online forum critical of the Bahraini government, Bahrain Online.

Abdulemam, who went into hiding at that time, made his first public appearance in more than two years when he showed up at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway on Wednesday. He sat down with me and his friend, fellow activist Nasser Weddady, and recalled this nightmarish period.

Back in 2011, Weddady was watching the crackdown from afar in Boston and was worried about his friend.

"I began to see the telltale signs," Weddady says. "My first concern was to get in touch with Ali, first of all to make sure he wasn't detained and then to warn him. I called frantically in the middle of the night and basically told him, 'Ali, get the hell out of Dodge. They are coming for everybody.' But since then I've learned that this warning didn't sink in with him."

Across the table, Abdulemam smiles somewhat uncomfortably. "Well, it was 3 a.m.," he says with a laugh. "Nasser woke me up; he called many times until I woke up. He told me they were raiding houses and you needed to get into hiding. I tried to explain to him, in the street it's martial law, no one can go out. It was dark outside, no light at all. He just couldn't listen; he just kept saying, 'You have to get out now.' So I said, 'I'll see what I can do.' Then I continued sleeping."

Going Underground

By next morning, though, Abdulemam realized the gravity of the situation. "When I woke up, I read the news that they raided the houses of most of the activists. So it wasn't hard to expect them to come for me in the next few hours or days."

"That night, I slept in another house," Abdulemam continues. "The next morning I got the news that they raided my house. They turned it upside down. And then I made some contact to find a safer place."

When Abdulemam arrived at that safe house, he had no idea that he would remain in complete hiding for more than two years.

For months, friends and colleagues searched for Ali to no avail. The government sentenced him to 15 years in jail in absentia. No one, including his family, knew what had happened to him. Abdulemam was off the grid.

Maintaining complete silence was difficult. The hardest part, he says, was being unable to help friends and colleagues as the government crackdown continued.

"It wasn't easy," Abdulemam says. "It's like a heavy stone on my chest; I cannot breathe."

A Major Crackdown

The crackdown continued after Abdulemam went into hiding. Several leaders of the opposition movement were arrested, tortured and given life sentences in jail. At least two of his friends were tortured to death by police, he says. Doctors who assisted injured protesters were fired and even arrested, according to human rights groups.

An independent commission documented 46 deaths and more than 500 cases of torture at the hands of the government. Government critics say no meaningful reforms have been undertaken despite the report.

Abdulemam eventually managed to reach out to Weddady and make what he described as "very, very restricted contact" with him.

"I got a message, without saying his name," Weddady explains. "I immediately understood who this was, but my biggest fear was that I was talking to somebody under arrest, and that this was a way to further dig him deeper into a hole. So through our exchange, there were coded references to things that only the two of us would know. I was finally certain this was Ali Abdulemam."

For months, Weddady kept Abdulemam's secret to himself, giving no hint of what he knew. "Mutual friends would come to me and ask for news," he says. "'What's up with Ali?' they'd say. And the hardest thing was to look at them and say, 'I dunno.' "

Weddady discreetly began making contacts to see if anyone could help get him out of Bahrain. U.S. government officials were sympathetic, he says, but they told him that Bahrain was a sovereign country and Ali was a citizen of Bahrain, so there was little they could do.

A Rescue Plan

Weddady eventually made contact with Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation. Halvorssen decided he would organize a rescue effort — and a bold one at that.

Taking a cue from the movie Argo, he put together a camera crew that would film a fake documentary in Bahrain. Just before leaving the country, Abdulemam would swap places with a lookalike member of the crew and, if all went well, he would escape.

The plan was within weeks of implementation when Weddady lost contact with Abdulemam.

"At one point, communication stopped," Weddady says. "I went bananas."

Little did he know at the time that yet another group of activists had agreed to smuggle Abdulemam out of the country. Neither of them would go into details about how the actual escape transpired — they're both concerned it could compromise other activists from making similar escapes — but other news outlets including The Atlantic have reported that it involved hiding in a secret compartment inside a car and driving across the causeway that links Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.

After several harrowing days, Abdulemam made it to London, where the British government granted him political asylum. One of the first calls he made was to his friend Weddady.

"After a few days I was able to communicate with him," Abdulemam says. "I had a feeling that they were working on something, but I didn't know what it was. But he was with me from the beginning, so he should be the first one to know that I made it out."

Meanwhile, Abdulemam made another phone call: to his wife and three children, who he hadn't seen in two years. He's now working to bring them to Britain.

"Hopefully we'll be reunited very soon," he says.

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: How Do You Get Support?

On a sunny spring day in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia province, Afghan officials and U.S. troops and civilians gather inside the ancient mud fort in the center of Forward Operating Base Gardez. They're attending a ceremony marking the formal end of the work of the provincial reconstruction team, or PRT.

“ You stay too long and inadvertently you smother the capacity that you're trying to build up.

When 23-year-old Solomon "Sully" Omar felt the music scene in his native Denver wasn't giving him what he was looking for, he made a radical move. He headed for Kabul, capital of the war-torn country his parents had fled decades ago.

"I came here to continue my education and at the same see what's in the music scene here and bring some of the skills and abilities that I have to the music scene," says Omar.

Omar is a member of District Unknown, a full-on metal band whose performance was one of the highlights of the recent Sound Central Festival of alternative music and arts in Kabul. More than 30 bands performed over four days during the third annual event.

And if you can imagine it, District Unknown's sweat-inducing set had the hundreds of Afghan spectators on their feet.

Enlarge image i

People often ask me how I got interested in science. I wish I could answer that I had a mentor when I was a child, that a biologist or a physicist visited my school when I was in third grade and transformed my life. But that's not what happened to me and, sadly, not what happens to the vast majority of children.

There are, of course, exceptions, but the fact is that STEM professionals (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) rarely visit schools, public or private, to speak about what they do and why they do it. The majority don't even volunteer to speak at their own children's schools, something I find absurd.

My own interest in science was a happy accident, something that came from inside, a sort of innate urgency to find out how the world works and how we can better relate to Nature.

I had the good fortune to spend summers at my grandparents' house in the mountains not far from Rio de Janeiro. It was a lush and dramatic setting, with highly eroded peaks covered in tufts of tropical forest. Darwin — during his voyage on the HMS Beagle — was enchanted by similar terrain. I recall asking my father, a dentist, how could rock — being so hard — become so sculpted.

"Time does it, a time so vast that it would be like a swallow taking a sip every day to empty a whole ocean," he once said.

I collected rocks and insects in those mountains. I hunted bats (the vampire kind!), fished, hiked, ran away from poisonous snakes, went up countless trees and explored thick jungles with a machete in hand. My exposure to Nature was direct; it was part of my childhood.

Only later, when I started science classes in school, did I begin to understand that there was a method perfectly suited to studying the world and its creatures, a method that could become a career, a way of life.

At 13 I knew I would do something related to science or engineering. And this without ever talking to, or even seeing, a single scientist! My inspiration, as with the vast majority of children everywhere, came from books, TV shows and family. Ask yourself: what percentage of children under 13 have ever seen or listened to a scientist in person? I don't have a number, but I imagine it is appallingly small.

I think this has to change, that every school, public or private, should have a program bringing in STEM professionals once or twice a year to talk about their research and their professional lives. How does a mathematician make a living? What does a biologist do? These visits should include graduate students, from astronomy to zoology.

Granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and NASA are now requiring some sort of outreach as part of their funding packages, which is great. Still, there should be a much stronger partnership between schools, universities, research centers and industry to increase the exposure of young students to a life in the sciences.

Picture 20 fourth graders watching a visual presentation that captures the stunning world of particle accelerators! How about the importance of chemistry in our everyday lives, or the budding reality of robotics, how to build satellites, detect black holes and exoplanets or decode a genome? Face-to-face encounters help drive home the fact that science pretty much defines the world in which we live.

I often go to schools in the United States and Brazil, speaking with students of all ages. I see their eyes brighten when I talk about how huge the universe is, how there is a giant black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, the prospects for life beyond Earth and why the Higgs boson interesting. Even teenagers make an effort to listen, their curiosity piqued by the possibility of a future that sometimes sounds impossible.

In a recent meeting of the American Physical Society, where I serve as a general councillor, we discussed a report on the need for better-prepared high school teachers. The number of universities preparing science teachers across the country needs to grow significantly. Regional centers in physics and science education should be created as part of an overall effort to promote a sharp improvement in pedagogy. In short, there are pressing needs in both number and quality when it comes to teaching science in the U.S.

But let's not overlook a very simple step that we can take right now, without delay: scientists, engineers and mathematicians can volunteer to share their professional experiences with schools in their neighborhoods. A couple of visits a year — a few hours of time — could inspire thousands to pursue a life in the sciences and impact our collective future.

Walmart says it has drafted its own plan for improving safety at garment factories in Bangladesh rather than join other Western retailers in a legally binding agreement to pay for improved conditions for workers in the South Asian country.

The announcement by the world's largest retailer comes nearly three weeks after the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka that killed more than 1,100 people. The New York Times on Wednesday reported that a Walmart contractor from Canada produced jeans at one of the factories in the collapsed complex.

Walmart said it would not join H&M, the parent company of Zara, Benetton, Marks & Spencer and other European labels in an agreement to conduct independent inspections and to help pay for safety upgrades at factories where they manufacture clothing.

Instead, Walmart has said it will "conduct in-depth safety inspections at 100 percent" of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh and publicize the results on its website.

"Walmart believes its safety plan meets or exceeds" the plan put forth by other manufacturers, the company said in a statement Tuesday, adding that the retailer "will get results more quickly."

The Times reports:

"Wal-Mart promised to stop production immediately at factories if urgent safety problems were uncovered and to notify factory owners and government authorities of improvements. But the company ... stopped short of committing to help underwrite the improvements — one of the crucial aspects of the Bangladesh safety agreement adopted by European companies."

The Arab world was aflame in March 2011. Longtime rulers in Tunisia and Egypt had been toppled. NATO was poised to attack Libyan government forces. The Syrian uprising was just beginning. And on the small island nation of Bahrain, the government was cracking down on pro-democracy protesters.

Across Bahrain, protest leaders were rounded up and some were quickly tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. The writing was on the wall for the leaders of the movement, including Ali Abdulemam.

He was perhaps the country's most prominent online activist. More than a decade earlier, he had founded the first online forum critical of the Bahraini government, Bahrain Online.

Abdulemam, who went into hiding at that time, made his first public appearance in more than two years when he showed up at the Oslo Freedom Forum on Wednesday. He sat down with me and his friend, fellow activist Nasser Weddady, and recalled this nightmarish period.

Back in 2011, Weddady was watching the crackdown from afar in Boston, and was worried about his friend.

"I began to see the telltale signs," Weddady explains. "My first concern was to get in touch with Ali, first of all to make sure he wasn't detained, and then to warn him. I called frantically in the middle of the night and basically told him, 'Ali, get the hell out of Dodge. They are coming for everybody.' But since then I've learned that this warning didn't sink in with him."

Across the table, Abdulemam smiles somewhat uncomfortably. "Well, it was 3 a.m.," he says with a laugh. "Nasser woke me up – he called many times until I woke up. He told me they were raiding houses and you needed to get into hiding. I tried to explain to him, in the street it's martial law – no one can go out. It was dark outside, no light at all. He just couldn't listen; he just kept saying, 'You have to get out now.' So I said, 'I'll see what I can do.' Then I continued sleeping."

Going Underground

By next morning, though, Abdulemam realized the gravity of the situation. "When I woke up, I read the news that they raided the houses of most of the activists. So it wasn't hard to expect them to come for me in the next few hours or days."

"That night, I slept in another house," Abdulemam continues. "The next morning I got the news that they raided my house. They turned it upside down. And then I made some contact to find a safer place."

When Abdulemam arrived at that safe house, he had no idea that he would remain in complete hiding for more than two years.

For months, friends and colleagues searched for Ali to no avail. The government sentenced him to 15 years in jail in absentia. No one, including his family, knew what had happened to him. Abdulemam was off the grid.

Maintaining complete silence was difficult. The hardest part, he says, was being unable to help friends and colleagues as the government crackdown continued.

"It wasn't easy," Abdulemam says. "It's like a heavy stone on my chest - I cannot breathe."

A Major Crackdown

The crackdown continued after Abdulemam went into hiding. Several leaders of the opposition movement were arrested, tortured and given life sentences in jail. At least two of his friends were tortured to death by police, he says. Doctors who assisted injured protesters were fired and even arrested, according to human rights groups.

An independent commission documented 46 deaths and more than 500 cases of torture at the hands of the government. Government critics say no meaningful reforms have been undertaken despite the report.

Meanwhile, Abdulemam eventually managed to reach out to Weddady and make what he described as "very, very restricted contact" with him.

"I got a message, without saying his name," Weddady explains. "I immediately understood who this was, but my biggest fear was that I was talking to somebody under arrest, and that this was a way to further dig him deeper into a hole. So through our exchange, there were coded references to things that only the two of us would know. I was finally certain this was Ali Abdulemam."

For months, Weddady kept Abdulemam's secret to himself, giving no hint of what he knew. "Mutual friends would come to me and ask for news," he says. "'What's up with Ali?' they'd say. And the hardest thing was to look at them and say, 'I dunno.'"

Weddady discreetly began making contacts to see if anyone could help get him out of Bahrain. U.S. government officials were sympathetic, he says, but they told him that Bahrain is a sovereign country and Ali is a citizen of Bahrain, so there was little they could do.

A Rescue Plan

Nasser eventually made contact with Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation. Halvorssn decided he would organize a rescue effort – and a bold one at that.

Taking a cue from the movie Argo, he put together a camera crew that would film a fake documentary in Bahrain. Just before leaving the country, Abdulemam would swap places with a lookalike member of the crew and, if all went well, he would escape.

The plan was within weeks of implementation when Weddady lost contact with Abdulemam.

"At one point, communication stopped – I went bananas," Weddady explains.

Little did he know at the time that yet another group of activists had agreed to smuggle Abdulemam out of the country. Neither of them would go into details of how the actual escape transpired – they're both concerned it could compromise other activists from making similar escapes – but other news outlets including The Atlantic have reported that it involved hiding in a secret compartment inside a car and driving across the causeway that links Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.

After several harrowing days, Abdulemam made it to London, where the British government granted him political asylum. And one of the first calls he made was to his friend Weddady.

"After a few days I was able to communicate with him," he says. "I had a feeling that they were working on something, but I didn't know what it was. But he was with me from the beginning, so he should be the first one to know that I made it out."

Meanwhile, Abdulemam made another phone call: to his wife and three children, who he hadn't seen in two years. He's now working to bring them to Britain.

"Hopefully we'll be reunited very soon," he says.

Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: How Do You Get Support?

Get recipes for Banana Crepe Cake With Yogurt And Walnut Butterscotch (above), Butterscotch Ice Cream, Chocolate Lovers' Butterscotch Chiffon Tart, Butterscotch And Black Pepper Carrots and Butterscotch Pudding.

Get recipes for Banana Crepe Cake With Yogurt And Walnut Butterscotch (above), Butterscotch Ice Cream, Chocolate Lovers' Butterscotch Chiffon Tart, Butterscotch And Black Pepper Carrots and Butterscotch Pudding.

A construction crew in search of gravel to use as road filler used its backhoes to level one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids.

"It's a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said of the destruction at the 2,300-year-old Nohmul pyramid, located in the Orange Walk/Corozal area.

"It's like being punched in the stomach. It's just so horrendous," Awe said Monday of the destruction thought to have occurred last week.

"There is absolutely no way that they would not know that these are Maya mounds," John Moore, also of the Belize Institute, said.

The BBC says only a "small core" of the pyramid was left standing. It said prosecutors were considering criminal charges against the construction company.

Awe noted the ironic tragedy that the swift destruction of the pyramid with modern equipment came after "ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools ... and carried this material on their heads."

"It's mind-boggling," he said.

According to Past Horizons, the pyramid had already been damaged by a road crew in 1940:

"... one structure was partially demolished to provide road material for the San Pablo to Douglas highway. At least three burial chambers were uncovered during its demolition and while some of the contents were recovered by the authorities, most were either smashed or looted."

The webpage Google.ps used to read "Google: Palestinian Territories." On May 1, the company quietly changed that regional search page to say "Google: Palestine."

Google didn't announce the name change, but it didn't have to. In a place where small gestures can carry great symbolism, Palestinians noticed right away.

"Everybody knows about it and they screenshot [and] post on Facebook: 'Yay Google, thank you,' " says Mohammad Kumboz, a 22-year-old graphic designer and computer programmer who lives in the Gaza Strip.

Kumboz knows having Google call Gaza and the West Bank Palestine isn't as official as the United Nations perhaps.

The U.N, over Israeli and U.S. objections, upgraded the Palestinians to a non-member observer state last fall. But Kumboz says that to him, Google's move is more meaningful.

"Google means a lot to us," he says. "[No day passes] without using Google."

That might be especially true for Kumboz.

He is part of Gaza Sky Geeks, an incubator for nascent IT businesses. It was started by Mercy Corps and is funded by a $900,000 grant from Google's charitable arm. So far, Kumboz has developed a game, called Mighty Cow, in which players help save a rather sweet-looking cow from the butcher's knife.

Google started funding the IT training program in Gaza a couple years ago after a chance meeting with Andy Dwonch. Dwonch is Mercy Corps' director of social innovations and previously ran Mercy Corps' work in the West Bank and Gaza.

"From the very beginning I thought there could be some potential partnership, but I really frankly didn't understand what made Google tick," Dwonch says. "I didn't necessarily understand what they were interested in."

Ultimately, Google's foundation funded a two-year program of training and support for Palestinians in Gaza who wanted to start their own Web businesses or learn skills to hire themselves out as programmers to companies anywhere.

Google has offices in a Tel Aviv skyscraper and just off the beach in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. Google employs a couple hundred Israeli engineers and looks for Israeli companies to buy. Google knows the territory, but Israel's Foreign Ministry thinks the company is misguided in its latest move.

"Google can do anything they want. They're not a diplomatic entity so they can do Google La-la Land if they want to and that's fine," says Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. "Still, the question remains, this is a highly sensitive international politics issue, so what made Google decide they wanted to take a position on this?"

Google wouldn't talk about this, but the company put out a statement saying it was following the lead of the United Nations and other international organizations. It also provided several examples of other name changes.

Israel's deputy foreign minister sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, saying Google's move could hurt peace negotiations.

"I can tell you that it has no diplomatic meaning, and it hasn't," says Palmor. "But if people on the Palestinian side believe that they can get anything they want through unilateral steps by international bodies, well in that case they will be more reluctant to talk to Israel."

Ordinary Palestinians don't get to make that call. But as boys laugh and play online shooter games in an Internet caf in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the West Bank, caf owner Johnnie Skafi says Google pulled his "would-be nation" one more step up the ladder.

"Palestinian Territories means under the occupation," Skafi says. "Palestine [means] without occupation. That's what I think is the difference."

Lanny J. Davis, a former special counsel for President Clinton, is a man who knows something about managing a White House crisis. And he isn't exactly impressed by how President Obama's aides have handled the fallout from numerous crises, from Solyndra to Benghazi and now with the Internal Revenue Service controversy.

"Honestly, I voted for Obama. I support his policies," said Davis, who was a special counsel during Clinton's second term and has his own Washington firm that, among other things, handles messaging when things fly apart for his clients.

"His crisis-management communications team is absent without leave. Ever since we lost the message on health care, I've wondered if there's anybody there trying to get out in front on the facts. And I haven't seen any evidence" of it, he said.

For Davis, whose latest book is Crisis Tales: Five Rules for Coping with Crises in Business, Politics, and Life, the Obama administration has fallen into a predictable pattern. It goes into a defensive crouch in which its first instinct appears to be minimizing any political damage.

Most White Houses do this to a greater or lesser degree. But Obama may have created his own problems by setting higher expectations early on by claiming his would be the most transparent administration ever.

Only after the moment has passed where a more proactive approach might have saved the day does the ever-cautious Obama White House provide additional information, according to Davis.

Take the growing controversy over the IRS's targeting of conservative social-welfare organizations.

"This is very, very serious," said Davis, who views it as distinct from the Benghazi fallout, which he believes is "Washington politics at its worst."

The IRS story, he said, by contrast goes to the heart of government abuse of power.

"The president of the United States should hold a press conference and commit to a full 100 percent investigation in concert with the Republican leadership of the House and say, 'I want to have on my desk the list of anybody who recommended doing this. In the government, in the White House, or anywhere else.' "

Obama, during a joint Monday news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, said it would be "outrageous" if the IRS did what it's accused of.

That description, said Davis, is already "one day too late" and isn't the full-throated response he would expect to see after the IRS revelation.

Davis doesn't limit his disappointment to just the president. He faults other top Democrats, namely Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, for not acting with more assertively.

"The Democrats have to own this. They are mishandling this," Davis said. "They should get out in front by denouncing this behavior, calling for a full investigation, cooperating with the Republicans so they don't own the issue. It's called pre-emption. And the best crisis management advice is called doing the right thing."

A bill making its way through the Louisiana Legislature would let Cajun citizens celebrate their ancestry by customizing their driver's license, adding the phrase "I'm a Cajun" below their photograph.

It would cost $5 to add the message; the money would go toward "scholarships distributed by the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, a program promoting French language and culture in the state," reports NOLA.com.

The Senate has already approved the bill; it's headed to the House now, after the he House Committee on Transportation, Highways and Public Works unanimously supported the change Monday.

A similar bill in the House would create a license plate bearing the message "I'm Cajun .... and proud." It also includes an "I'm Creole" option.

Both measures are aimed at shoring up funding for CODOFIL, especially its "La Fondation Louisiane for the Escadrille Louisiane" scholarship program.

As the Houma Today website explains, "During last year's regular session, Gov. Bobby Jindal cut $100,000 from CODOFIL, saying in his official veto message that the program 'has been adequately funded.'"

In their current states, neither of the two bills seem to include requirements for proving ancestry or other connections to the culture being celebrated.

"There is a certain sense of uniqueness about Louisiana that people fall in love with," Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle tells NOLA.com. He added that the new ID would be "a way to identity and create a little bit of pride."

The possibility of Cajun IDs was welcome news to readers commenting on the NOLA story. One of them even inspired our headline for this post. Another simply wrote, "A little comic relief from yesterday's news. Gotta love it."

"Mistakes were made, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan motivation," the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service writes in USA Today's op-ed pages.

In his first public comments on the growing controversy over the extra scrutiny the agency admits it gave in recent years to conservative groups' applications for tax-exempt status, Steven Miller says:

— "We are — and will continue to be — dedicated to reviewing all applications for tax-exempt status in an impartial manner."

— "There was a shortcut taken in our processes to determine which groups needed additional review. The mistakes we made were due to the absence of a sufficient process for working the increase in cases and a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made."

One shortcut, as has been reported, included singling out groups that wrote the words "tea party" or "patriot" in applications for tax-exempt status.

Organizations are eligible for tax-exempt status if they are "social welfare groups," NPR's Brian Naylor reported on Morning Edition. But they are not eligible for that status if they engage in a substantial amount of political activity.

According to Brian, "The IRS sent long and complex questionnaires to the targeted groups asking for information on everything from its social media presence to its donors." The extra attention delayed some of the groups' applications and added to their legal bills.

Miller became the IRS's acting commissioner last November, succeeding Douglas Shulman. In his permanent role as deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, the IRS says, "Miller provides direction and oversight for all major decisions affecting the four taxpayer-focused IRS Divisions: Wage and Investment, Large Business and International, Small Business/Self-Employed, and Tax Exempt and Government Entities."

Miller could have alerted Congress to what the IRS had been doing last summer. The Associated Press writes that "Monday, the IRS said Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny."

On July 25 of last year, Miller testified before the oversight subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. According to a transcript of that hearing, GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas said, "I have been contacted by several of the groups in my district. And they feel like they are being harassed. I don't have any evidence that that is the case. But they feel like they have been harassed and feel like the IRS is threatening them with some kind of action or audit."

Marchant asked about the questions the IRS was asking such groups to answer in order to prove their right to be exempt from taxes.

Miller did not mention that some conservative groups were getting extra scrutiny from IRS career staff at one of the agency's offices in Cincinnati, where such work had been centralized. He said, in part, that many of the groups applying for tax-exempt status "are very small organizations and they are not quite sure what the rules are, and so we are working with them to ensure that they understand what the rules are. It is my hope that some of the noise that we heard earlier this year has abated as we continue to work through these cases."

At another point during the hearing, Miller said of the groups applying for tax-exempt status that "some come in and they are doing things that either are close to the line, impermissible, unclear as to which of those two that they might be and those may take a longer time still, and they will be referred to specialists in Cincinnati and elsewhere that will take a look to justify it and see whether or not the organization qualifies as a public charity."

On Monday, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called on Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and President Obama to "demand the IRS commissioner's resignation, effective immediately."

Update at 11:45 a.m. ET. McConnell Calls On Administration To Stop "Stonewalling":

"With Congress preparing to hold hearings on the IRS's holding conservative groups to extra scrutiny," Reuters reports, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday that he is "calling on the president to make available, completely and without restriction, everyone who can answer the questions we have as to what was going on at the IRS, who knew about it, and how high it went."

"No more stonewalling, no more incomplete answers, no more misleading responses, no holding back witnesses, no matter how senior their current or former positions — we need full transparency and cooperation," McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Under the fluorescent lights of the boxing ring, the boy could barely see out beyond the elastic ropes that surrounded the fighting stage. The crowd and the festival that pressed in around him were shadowy outlines. But the boy could hear them.

"Chai Lorlam, 9 years old, 22.9 kilograms [just under 50 pounds]," the announcer said.

Chai could hear his trainer shouting last-minute reminders about the basics of technique. He could hear the excited laughter of other kids his age, who had squeezed their way to the front of the spectators after ditching carnival rides and balloon dart-throwing games and fried rice-cake stands to watch his fight. And he could hear the gamblers — the gamblers who shouted "Two to one — blue!" "Three to one — red!" They were betting on the odds he'd win the fight.

Chai knew he had to win the fight.

There was the reputation of his gym to uphold, and all the fighters and trainers who had become like family to him — there was the pride of his community to defend — many of whom he knew to be in the crowd.

Child boxing in Thailand, known as muay thai, is a tradition that lives because it is a business. The child boxers bring prize money back to their families. And Chai's village and trainers, yelling advice and pushing up against the barricades of the ring, did not come just to cheer for him. They came to bet on him.

The tradition of child boxing has brought Thailand the ire of human rights activists, who see it as dangerous. But in Isaan, the northeastern and poorest region of Thailand, child boxing is a way of life.

It provides income to families that would otherwise have to rely on their rice paddies, athletic discipline in a place where drugs and gangs are rampant, and a way out of poverty for some children with few options.

Muay thai is sometimes called the "art of eight limbs" for a distinct style that uses the knees, elbows, fists and feet as striking points. It has been practiced as an art form and fighting technique in Thailand since the 12th century.

As the noise multiplied around him, Chai bowed obediently toward his trainer, and turned toward his opponent. They already knew each other. It was the third time the 9-year-olds had met in the ring, and this match was the tiebreaker.

There's another way television is moving online. Starting Tuesday, ABC will let viewers in New York and Philadelphia watch their local stations over the Internet. But this is not a way to cut your cable bill.

NPR's Dan Bobkoff discusses the change with All Things Considered co-host Audie Cornish.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, whose long-running television show dispensed advice on life and relationships to her viewers, has died in New York at age 85, according to her publicist.

She died on Monday of natural causes, Sanford Brokaw said.

Brothers, who was a pioneer of the television advice show, first gained fame as a winning contestant on the television game show "The $64,000 Question" in 1955, becoming the only woman ever to win the top prize. The AP says:

"She memorized 20 volumes of a boxing encyclopedia — and, with that as her subject, became the only woman and the second person to ever win the show's top prize.

Brothers tried her luck again on the superseding "$64,000 Challenge," answering each question correctly and earning the dubious distinction as one of the biggest winners in the history of television quiz shows. She later denied any knowledge of cheating, and during a 1959 hearing in the quiz show scandal, a producer exonerated her of involvement."

"... I laid there for probably five minutes, then the entire night just erupted into automatic gunfire. My first initial thought is that we were being re-kidnapped by another group, or maybe it was al-Shabab [the Islamic military group in Somalia] — that was always the eminent threat, and then I knew there was no hope for survival if it was al-Shabab. And I just, I laid there and I prayed and I also just said, like, 'I can't survive another kidnapping. I've already learned this group... I'm so tired, I can't, I can't do this any more.'

"The next thing I know somebody pulls the blanket from my face and then I hear a man say my name. You know, I haven't heard anybody say my name in so long. And then he says, 'We're the American military , and we're here to save you, we're here to take you home. You're safe now.' And I ... was just in so much shock I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. The American military, they knew I was here? Americans are here? I'm not alone? One of them just scoops me up, I mean, like a movie, and just, you know, runs across the desert with me to a safe place, and they quickly give me medication and at one point form a ring around us because they weren't sure if the premises was completely safe."

On how she responded when a Navy SEAL asked if she'd forgotten anything at the camp

Buchanan: "I can't believe I did this, but I had a small little powder bag that they had let me keep, and inside I had restolen from them a ring that my mom had made and I thought, 'I can't leave it here in the desert.' [Her mother had recently died.]

"And so I ask him to go back and get the bag for me. And I mean, these men are just, they're incredible. He goes back out, into a war zone basically, to go get my ring. And then he comes back with the bag."

On being reunited at a base in Italy, where military personnel told them to take things slow

Buchanan: "Our first meeting was one hour. I don't think either one of us could have handled any more.

Landemalm: "No. No, it was — I mean, inside of yourself you want to talk about everything. But I think that [in] one hour you are able to kind of relay the main message that you love each other and that whatever has happened during these 93 days we have the rest of our lives to talk about it. "

NPR Coverage Of The Kidnapping

The Two-Way

In Daring Raid, Navy SEALs Free 2 Aid Workers From Somali Kidnappers

Five years after the massive Wenchuan quake in China's Sichuan province left about 90,000 dead and missing, allegations are surfacing that corruption and official wrongdoing have plagued the five-year-long quake reconstruction effort.

The official press is full of praise for how "all Chinese have a reason to be proud of what the concerted efforts of the entire nation achieved in creating a new life for the survivors."

But an NPR investigation shows that behind the impressive facade the old problems still exist.

The New 'Tofu-Dregs' Construction?

At first glance, the new town of Beichuan is an impressive achievement: neat rows of modern six-story houses, a town center with bicycle paths and leisure facilities including a huge sports center with an outdoor swimming pool. This purpose-built town is on flat ground, 15 miles from the devastated old town, where a full two-thirds of the population — about 21,000 people — died, many of them crushed beneath shoddily constructed buildings nicknamed "tofu-dregs construction" that crumbled and collapsed in the quake.

Enlarge image i

We use Google to search for just about everything, so we've invited Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to play a game called "Try Googling that, Bigshot." We'll ask him three questions about things that cannot be found.

Schmidt, who served as Google CEO for 10 years, is the co-author of the new book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.

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

Barnes & Noble stock shot up 24 percent in trading Thursday amid rumors that Microsoft is interesting in buying all of Nook Media's digital assets. The website TechCrunch has reported that it obtained internal documents stating that Microsoft plans to offer $1 billion for Nook's tablets and ebooks, the flailing rivals to Amazon's Kindle. Microsoft already owns a sizable stake in Nook. It isn't clear yet whether Microsoft has made a formal offer to Barnes & Noble, or whether the bookseller has responded.

Michael Kammen on Jack Kerouac for the Los Angeles Review of Books: "He liked low-lifes better than the high life and spent many more days down-and-out than on a roll."

Tim Parks describes the translator's urge to interpret, instead of translate in an essay for The New York Review of Books: "In short, there is a tension between reader and text that the translator experiences in a special way because, rewriting the text in his own language, he has to allow that tension to happen again for a new group of readers."

Open Culture posts rare footage of a grumpy-looking William Faulkner, who in 1952 allowed a documentary crew to film him in Oxford, Miss., re-enacting various events in his life, including a speech at his daughter's high school graduation.

Alex Jung considers Virginia Woolf, camp and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books: "I have often thought that if I were ever a drag queen, and more specifically that if I were ever a drag queen who was a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race, I would play Virginia Woolf ..."

Google Glass isn't even for sale yet, but it's already facing backlash.

There have been articles in the Atlantic and Wired mocking techies who have a pair, and even Saturday Night Live got in on the jabbing at the technology.

The New York Times ran a front-page story about Google Glass and privacy, and the gadget has been banned from a bar in Seattle and casinos in Las Vegas.

But for the earnest Googlers who helped create Glass, and the enthusiastic techies who already have their hands on a pair, all this hate can be a little bewildering. Most of the people who I've talked to who have a fancy eye wear just love it.

"Just taking a hike on a Sunday, I've been blown away by taking pictures and taking video," said Javier Echeverria.

Mary Lambert got cooking instructions using Glass. "The friend who I was doing it with could see what I was doing and was like 'no no no, that's all wrong,' which was really helpful and I didn't expect it," she says.

Right now, Goggle Glass might be the world's worst spy camera; if you go out in public with one on you are guaranteed to attract attention. Still, the idea of techies mounting a tiny screen and a little camera to their faces makes millions of people uncomfortable.

According to Sarah Rottman Epps, a tech analyst at Forrester Research, that is why Google is rolling out Glass to the world slowly in stages.

"Google has been incredibly transparent ... with their Glass rollout," Epps says. "They realize that Google Glass will require shifting social norms to be accepted."

In that regard, the last few weeks have been rough for Google. If the company is going to turn this around the public's impression of this product they will need some help. Help form people like Sarah Hill.

Hill is a storyteller for the Veterans United Network, and also a volunteer for Veterans Virtual Tours. She wants to use Google Glass to take World War II vets on virtual tours of places they now may be too old or frail to visit in person.

"Places like the World War II memorial, Arlington National Cemetery [or] Pearl Harbor even," she says.

Hill is convinced that leading a virtual tour for veterans while wearing Google Glass would be completely different for them than showing the group just a DVD. She says it gives them the ability to ask questions and request certain sights and sounds, like the waves on the beaches of Normandy or the waterfalls at the World War II memorial.

"And when people ask those ... veterans, 'have you ever seen your memorial?' Before they pass away they can say, yes I did," she says.

Google's hoping that people like Hill could begin to help the public imagine the positive things they could do with the gadget.

Last week, Google they released a video of a Andrew Vanden Heuvel, a high school physics teacher from Grand Rapids, Mich., using Glass to go on a virtual field trip to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.

Sam Aybar wants to build an app to identify packaged foods that are free of the alergins that make his son sick. The app would use bar codes to create a list of safe products.

"I think Glass could be really helpful for five to ten million families in the United States that are dealing with food allergies," Aybar said.

For many tech enthusiasts, the upsides of Glass seem obvious.

"I've spent my life essentially helping to build the Internet, and this thing is the Internet in your field of vision," says web pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. "For me that's the big thing ... that's the killer app."

Andreessen, who founded Netscape, among other Internet properties, is now funding start-ups hoping to build apps on Glass.

But even in the Andreessen household, Glass has created controversy. He says his wife has likely wanted to rip them off and throw them out the window.

"I think she's been tempted to do that with almost every piece of gadgetry we own," he says.

And battles like that could determine if Google Glass becomes the next iPhone or has a fate more similar Apple's Newton.

Update at 6:10 p.m. ET: White House: IRS was 'Inappropriate':

White House press secretary Jay Carney called the IRS actions "inappropriate" and said they should be investigated.

Carney, speaking to reporters Friday afternoon, noted that the Internal Revenue Service is an independent agency with only two political appointees.

Here's our original post:

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."

With a haul of $45 million, it's being billed as possibly the biggest cyber-heist in history. But in reality, experts and authorities say, it was thousands of small but highly coordinated thefts.

As we reported on Thursday, federal prosecutors charged eight people with being the just New York cell of an operation that allegedly encompassed criminal cohorts in 26 countries.

The scheme, according to prosecutors, involved basically two parts:

First, hackers gained access to bank computers and downloaded prepaid debit card data while erasing their withdrawal limits.

Second, they passed the data to numerous "cashers" who cloned the cards and got to work withdrawing millions of dollars from ATMs.

Neither of those things by themselves is terribly unusual, but put them together and it's not quite so common, says Chuck Somers, vice president of core systems and ATM security at Diebold.

For instance, little more than a year ago, Visa and Mastercard were hacked, compromising up to 3 million accounts, Somers points out.

"It's quite possible that these hacks may have been inside jobs," says John Trobough, president of Narus, which handles cybersecurity for governments and commercial enterprises. It could be current or former employees, he says.

As for reproducing debit cards? It's just one component of so-called "skimming," devices are illegally attached to ATM card readers to record the information stored on the magnetic stripe. The cards are then duplicated.

"On a smaller scale, that's so common nowadays that it's barely newsworthy," Somers says.

"Most magnetic stripe cards can be converted to function as ATM cards because the format is an industry standard," says Trobough. "For example, you can use a hotel key as an ATM card if it is properly re-coded."

What's arguably more astounding than accomplishing both the hack and the cloning, is the coordination and the apparent clockwork precision with which the operation was carried out once thieves had cloned the cards.

According to the federal indictment, on one occasion the eight individuals in the New York cell siphoned "at least $2.8 million from more than 750 ATMs in 2.5 hours."

Let's do the math: If all eight were working together, they would have had to hit "at least" one ATM every 96 seconds, averaging $2,333 per withdrawal.

Somers agrees it was well-coordinated. "Does it sound doable? I have no reason to doubt it could be done," he says.

Tom Cross, director of computer security research at Lancope, tells American Public Media's Marketplace that he was surprised by "the coordination of the cash-out network" — in other words, the people running from ATM to ATM.

In an even larger tranche of the master theft, cashers elsewhere (we don't know how many) used 12 card accounts with the withdrawal limits deactivated and got $40 million in 36,000 transactions over a 10-hour period.

More math: That's one withdrawal averaging $1,111 every 10 seconds.

In this second case, it seems fair to assume that many duplicate cards might have been used to speed up the process.

The New York Times reports:

"Surveillance photos of one suspect at various ATMs showed the man's backpack getting heavier and heavier, [U.S. attorney in Brooklyn Loretta] Lynch said, comparing the series of thefts to the caper at the center of the movie Ocean's Eleven."

You might remember the story of the uproar earlier this year over a piece of art by the mysterious graffiti artist Banksy that disappeared from its home on a wall in north London and ended up on the auction block in Miami.

That auction was canceled, and residents of Haringey Borough, the area from which the mural disappeared, were jubilant, hoping that "Slave Labour," the Banksy mural, would be returned to its home. Unfortunately for them, that might not happen.

The stencil of a young boy sewing the Union Jack is the centerpiece of a June 2 exhibition in London, after which it will head to the U.S., where it is to be part of an "important private collection," according to the Sincura Group, which is organizing the exhibition and auction. In a statement, it adds: "The showing of this piece was the culmination of months of hard work and we simply wish to display it ... again [in] its home city before it disappears forever."

The statement notes that law enforcement authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have determined that the mural was removed legally.

It was initially reported that Sincura was auctioning the artwork, but the company noted that it was "making no financial gain from displaying this piece of art."

The Haringey Independent newspaper notes that the local council is working to get the artwork back.

In a statement, the head of the Trades Union Council for Haringey said:

"We appreciate that Sincura have made efforts to check that nothing illegal has taken place but it is a matter of business ethics. Banksy was certainly not asked before the work was removed let alone the people of Haringey in whose area he painted it. It should not be in private hands in the US, however it got there, but on display and not in Covent Garden but in Wood Green N22."

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.

On why she left the Senate

"It was a hard, cold reality that descended upon me in a very short period of time, actually, because I had been fully immersed in running for re-election for the better part of two years, and traveling the country and of course my state. So I was essentially in a good place organizationally and financially to win re-election, but I became concerned about the tenor in the Senate, and what would transpire over the next six years. And came to the regrettable conclusion that it might not change.

"So then I began thinking about my role, and how I could best contribute. Was it better to work on the outside to reaffirm the voices of those people who are so frustrated and want things to change and want their government to work? And I thought that that's where I could best contribute at this stage of my life."

On one of her book's recommendations: a five-day workweek for Congress

"Isn't that amazing? To work a five-day workweek? Because what happens is that, you know, on Mondays — at least in the Senate — Monday night we'd have what you'd call a bedcheck vote. Just to get, you know, the machinery of the Senate up and running so that we can start the committee process on Tuesday morning ...

"By Thursday, you know, jet fumes. The smell of jet fumes ... Everybody's heading home, wanting to know when they can adjourn on Thursday so they can leave. [This] very short version of a workweek; makes it very difficult to deal with complex issues. And basically they're not even getting the routine matters of business accomplished. We can't pass a budget! Which is preposterous."

On whether she's worried that the gridlock in the Senate can't be fixed

"I don't worry about that. I never think about what I can't do. No, absolutely not. It has to change, for the country. People deserve ... better representation. They deserve institutions that are going to solve problems. That means the president and the Congress have to work hand-in-glove and, override their political differences or their political ambitions for the sake of the country. There's never a point now where they put the politics behind them. I mean they're already talking about the 2016 presidential campaign! We just had an election. Can we now concentrate on the future of this country?"

Read an excerpt of Fighting for Common Ground