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It has been a good week for economic news. Here's a quick rundown of the positive signs: Home prices showed their best gains in seven years. Consumer confidence hit a five-year high. The stock market set a new record. All just this week.

"We're seeing progress," President Obama said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, "and the economy is starting to pick up steam. The gears are starting to turn again, and we're getting some traction."

You could tell from the tone of his voice that he was leading up to a "but."

"But the thing is, the way we measure our progress as a country is not just where the stock market is," the president added.

He went on to say that too many people in the middle class are still struggling. And that pivot — from glass half-full to glass half-empty — captures the tricky dance a president must do at a time like this.

"I think the American people very much can understand that things are improving," says Gene Sperling, who directs the White House's National Economic Council. "But they also understand they're not good enough. So I don't think there's many people out there who think that the United States Congress should be declaring 'mission accomplished' right now."

That reference to Congress is important. The White House has a long list of economic boosters it wants Congress to deploy — from building new infrastructure to rolling back the budget cuts known as the sequester. The administration's problem is that the better the economic news gets, the less pressure Congress feels to act.

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Russian media has hinted that Moscow could speed up delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Syria if the U.S. and its allies decide to impose a no-fly zone to aid rebels there. Meanwhile, a Russian airplane maker says Syria is discussing the purchase of additional MiG-29 fighters.

A Russian arms industry source quoted by Interfax news agency says Moscow could hasten delivery of the S-300 to Syria, even though the missiles would still take months to arrive.

"Regarding the deliveries of the S-300, they can begin no earlier than the autumn," the source told Interfax. "Technically it's possible, but much will depend on how the situation develops in the region and the position of Western countries."

Reuters also reports that Moscow plans to fulfill a 2007 contract with Syria to deliver 10 MiG-29 fighters. The MiG aircraft maker says a deal is being discussed for the purchase of about 10 more of the fighter jets. Presumably such a contract would take months, perhaps years, to fulfill.

The talk of arms shipments to Damascas comes at an inopportune time. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports that Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have struggled to turn a new page in relations between the former Cold War rivals.

This week, Lavrov described as "odious" a U.S. co-sponsored resolution criticizing Syria at the United Nations Human Rights Council. He also said President Obama's hint that a no-fly zone might be considered had ruined the atmosphere for Syrian peace talks. Lavrov urged the U.S. to persuade Syrian opposition figures to drop demands for Assad to step down.

Meanwhile, Kerry has criticized Russian's talk of arming the regime with advanced missiles that he says threaten Israel.

The S-300 missiles comprise Russia's top-of-the-line long-range air defense system, Robert Hewson, editor of IHS Jane's air-launched weapons, tells NPR.

"It is a feared and potentially very capable system so it adds a whole new layer of complexity to anyone who is planning to be flying over downtown Damascus," he says.

Frank Deford puts aside his gripes this week to pay tribute to the poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, first published in the San Francisco Examiner 125 years ago June 3.

The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey could get but a whack at that —
We'd put up even money, now, with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey's getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped —
"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one," the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
"Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted someone on the stand;
And its likely they'd a-killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, "Strike two."

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Get recipes for Rhubarb-Quinoa Salad, Strawberry-Rhubarb Hand Pies, Rhubarb Scones, Rhubarb Compote and A Boozy (Or Not) Rhubarb Cocktail.

The anomaly looks like a line or scar in what otherwise is a fairly smooth area.

TIGHAR concedes that:

"Maybe the anomaly is a coral feature that just happens to give a sonar return unlike any other coral feature on the entire reef slope. Maybe it's a sunken fishing boat that isn't mentioned in any of the historical literature. Maybe it's the boat nobody knows about that that brought the castaway nobody missed who died at the Seven Site."

It might come as a surprise that for centuries the French have been sans a term for "French kiss."

But, voila! The newest edition of the Petit Robert 2014 dictionary has rectified that with a new verb — "galocher," meaning "to kiss with tongues." It's a clever derivation of la galoche, a word for an ice-skating boot, and so evokes the idea of sliding around the ice — or the lips and tongue.

According to Time magazine, the term French kiss is "commonly attributed to American soldiers returning from World War I, who apparently picked up the technique from the more sexually adventurous French nationals they canoodled with abroad."

It would, of course, have been downright gauche to have adopted the American term, but even though the French didn't have an exact word all to themselves, it "never stopped us from doing it," says Laurence Laporte of the Robert publishing house.

Besides, there have always been more circuitous ways of getting to the point.

"We always had many expressions to describe 'French-kissing,' like 'kissing at length in the mouth,' but it's true, we've never had one single word," Laporte told The Associated Press.

Still, The Washington Post offers up a caveat:

"As Francophones know all too well, however, it takes quite a lot more than that to get a word into the standard dialect: the Academie Francaise, the 378-year-old regulator of the French language, jealously guards the official dictionary against made-up words and foreign incursions, and there's no mention of 'galocher' in there."

Sometimes the most powerful and transformative technologies emerge by accident, an unintended consequence of other developments. When this happens, the scope and power of the new technology can't be fully appreciated until after we have embedded it in our culture.

Big Data is all that and much, much more.

By now we all recognize the many revolutions of the Internet. But who could have known back in the 1960s that getting a few hulking mainframe computers to swap digital spit could lead to the Facebooked/Googled/e-banking/YouTubed world we inhabit today? But as head spinning as it all has been, simmering within the Internet upheaval bubbles another possibility that has slowly been taking shape. For now, it's called Big Data. If it lives up to its promise (or peril), it will rework the architecture of human experience in ways we simply cannot imagine.

And because our urban centers have always been engines of information, there is likely no nexus of human culture more susceptible to Big Data's hurricane winds than Big Cities.

By now, of course, you may be wondering if there's really something going on or if Big Data is just this year's overheated hype. The answer to that question is a definitive NOT HYPE and the reason can be summed up in two words: Digital Breadcrumbs.

For years now we have all been dropping digital breadcrumbs — electronic markers in 1s and 0s — spread across the wired world. From cell-phone locations to grocery store shopping choices to Facebook posts, we are leaving a record of our life that is out there to be followed by anyone with the resources and the time.

And it's not just us.

Every function of our culture is generating reams of numbers that flow into the data sphere: from the monthly billing records of public utilities to the traffic data recorded by municipal street sensors, it's all getting recorded and most of it is getting electronically archived.

If you want a physical representation of Big Data, consider this: to store all the information humanity created in just one year you'd need 80 billion 16-GB iPhones. That's enough iPhones to create a ring circling the Earth 100 times.

The premise of Big Data is deceptively simple: hidden in all that information lies a hyper-resolution map of the world's behavior in space and time. It's a representation of human life and the natural world with a fidelity we have never had before. Think of those movies where a character can stop time and then walk around poking at people and objects frozen in action. Now give that character X-ray microscopic eyes and you begin to get a feel for what Big Data allows.

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We are standing in front of a huge bank of screens, in the middle of which is a glowing map that changes focus depending on what the dozens of controllers are looking at.

The room looks like something straight out of a NASA shuttle launch. The men and women manning the floor are dressed in identical white jumpsuits. With a flick of a mouse, they scroll through dozens of streaming video images coming into the center.

This is Rio de Janeiro in real time.

"This whole building is based on technology and integration," said Pedro Junqueira, the chief executive officer of the Rio Operations Center.

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Only a few years ago, even large commercial vessels wouldn't take on the ice-bound Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific via the Canadian north — but climate change has changed all that.

Now, a group of hearty adventurers hopes to be the first to row the 1,900-mile route this summer.

"Several people have kayaked it [a section at a time] over several years. But no one has ever done this under human power in a single season. Not even close," Kevin Vallely, who is heading up the rowing team, told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

Vallely has completed his last shakedown cruise and plans to set off at the beginning of July from Inuvik in northern Canada with three crew mates in a custom-built, 23-foot rowboat. They expect to take 75 days to reach their eastern destination, the town of Pond Inlet. Along the way they're bracing for encounters with dangerous ice, storms and polar bears, not to mention the psychological challenge of four men in a small boat in those difficult circumstances.

"We have guns" as a precaution against polar bears, Vallely tells The Globe and Mail. "But we'll have rubber bullets and bear bangers ... we don't want to kill a bear."

The newspaper says Vallely, "who has done numerous wilderness treks over the past 20 years, said if your physical conditioning is just right, body fitness peaks during a long journey and then slowly deteriorates."

" 'Obviously you have to train enough that you don't get injured [by the exertion of the expedition]. But you don't want to train too much, because if you go into it Tour de France fit, in a couple of weeks you would be fried,' he said. 'So you go into it fit, but not crazy fit, and you build up and you get really strong about half-way through. And then you slowly start to fall apart. By the end you want to be tired, happy to be done, but not completely baked.' "

Americans do love their bacon, but is that romance a national security issue?

Maybe.

This week, China's biggest pork producer announced plans to buy Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa wants a national security review by an interagency panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS.

"To have a Chinese food company controlling a major U.S. meat supplier, without shareholder accountability, is a bit concerning," said Grassley, whose home state is a top pork producer.

Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International Holdings doesn't object to Grassley's demand. In fact, the company is seeking a review of its planned acquisition of Smithfield, the biggest hog and pork producer in the world.

By asking upfront for a CFIUS examination, Shuanghui may be able to build trust with U.S. officials and avoid angering Congress or the White House, said Timothy Keeler, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who specializes in CFIUS filings.

"Technically, the review is always a voluntary process," Keeler said. But companies that try to dodge it may risk drawing even tougher congressional scrutiny, which could discourage investors and scuttle a deal. "For any significant deal, it's prudent to go forward with a CFIUS review," he said.

So what is CFIUS, and why does it have a say in the $4.72 billion cash deal that would mark the biggest-ever Chinese takeover of a U.S. company?

CFIUS may not be a household name, but it has played a significant role in shaping foreign investments in this country for nearly four decades.

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Update at 7:12 p.m. ET Recall Fails

The Associated Press reports that organizers of a petition to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio fell short of Thursday's deadline to collect 335,000 signatures.

Our original post:

Once again, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is at the center of political and legal controversies. Once again, it appears he will survive.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Arpaio, who is the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., had violated the civil rights of Latinos by engaging in racial profiling. Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America," denies the charge and intends to appeal.

The ruling, however, offered fresh impetus to a campaign to recall Arpaio, who was elected to a fifth term last November. But organizers are not expected to meet today's deadline for gathering 335,000 signatures on recall petitions.

"That isn't going to fly," says Mike Hellon, a former state GOP chairman, dismissing the chances.

His opponents made a mistake in targeting Arpaio right after the election, says Michael O'Neil, a pollster based in Tempe.

"This court finding would have been perfect — they could have said, 'This is documentation of what we've been saying all along,' " O'Neil says. "But because they jumped the gun going after him prematurely, I don't see anything that dislodges him as a force."

Focus On Immigration

Arpaio has been at the center of a number of controversies, such as skepticism over the legitimacy of President Obama's birth certificate.

But he's best known for enforcing immigration laws strictly — or overzealously, depending on your point of view.

"All of the efforts to take him out of office have failed for one basic reason," says Robert Blendu, a former Republican state senator from Maricopa County. "He stands up and says my job is to enforce the law. If you don't like the law, change it."

Arpaio's critics say he's actually broken the law. Not only did he lose a civil suit last week, but the Justice Department also filed suit last year, alleging civil rights violations.

Political Shifts

Aside from the legal questions, the reality on the ground is that the politics of immigration are changing in Arizona.

Former Senate President Russell Pearce, who sponsored the state's 2010 law requiring local law enforcement to check the legal status of immigrants, was recalled by voters in 2011 and lost in his comeback attempt last year. (Much but not all of the 2010 law was struck down by the Supreme Court last year.)

Andrew Thomas, a former Maricopa County attorney who was another prominent supporter of strict immigration enforcement and sometimes represented Arpaio, was disbarred last year. He intends to run for governor in 2014.

"Arizona has changed in that no longer do we see any advantage in being the central focal point in immigration enforcement," says Joseph Garcia, communications director for the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University.

Garcia says it's no accident that both of Arizona's U.S. senators — Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake — are members of the "Gang of Eight" seeking to rewrite federal immigration law to allow people in the country illegally to earn citizenship eventually.

"It's part of the effort to change the image of Arizona from harsh and anti-immigrant," Garcia says, "and therefore anti-Latino."

Changes Still Brewing

The reason is obvious. All over the country, politicians are taking Hispanics into greater account as their share of the electorate grows rapidly.

That's an especially powerful dynamic in a place like Arizona, one of 13 states where people of color make up more than 40 percent of the population. This year, Hispanics made up a majority of schoolchildren in the state for the first time. Hispanics are expected to compose 1 out of every 4 voters in the state by 2030.

But 2030 is a ways off. The full impact of these demographic changes is not yet being felt. Many adult Hispanics in Arizona are not citizens, while many more are still too young to vote.

"The demographics clearly are moving in the direction of a more mainstream, moderate body politic," says Hellon, the former state GOP chairman, "but that hasn't translated yet into major changes on Election Day."

The state is still Republican — and so is Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and by far Arizona's most populous jurisdiction. Arpaio spent millions holding onto a local office by a bare majority last November — but he did win.

The question is whether he will ever seek another term, now that he's in his 80s.

"Whether he runs again is kind of problematic at this point," Hellon says, "but my guess is he'll hang on until the end."

A bill that would overhaul the nation's immigration laws is headed to the Senate floor early next month, where it will need all the friends it can get to pass. The measure would give the estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally a path to citizenship, as well as tighten border protections.

The bill has split organized labor. Unions with workers likely to benefit from the proposed changes, including the farm workers' union, support the measure. But the public employee unions that represent immigration workers are expressing concern and, in some cases, vocally opposing the law.

The many proposed changes are causing some trepidation among the workers who are on the front lines of the issue — for instance, the agents at the border-crossing stations. Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents those agents, says U.S. Customs and Border Protection is already understaffed and underfunded.

"The idea that it could be stretched thinner to cover any new responsibilities would really just be irresponsible for the country," she says.

Kelley says her union has not taken a formal position on the Senate measure, and hopes lawmakers will address her concerns.

But other unions representing immigration workers have been far more confrontational.

Probably the most prominent opponent among organized labor is Chris Crane, the head of the 7,600-member union that represents deportation agents, officers and employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's announcement Wednesday that she won't seek a fifth term unleashed a torrent of tweets and blog posts on the left lampooning the short-lived 2012 presidential candidate.

Yet the response — her retirement effectively dominated the news cycle — provided a glimpse of Bachmann's impact on Washington.

While she amassed a fat portfolio of missteps and fabrications since her 2006 election, the political provocateur and conservative Christian also secured a place in political history by riding the Tea Party wave early, and parlaying an unrepentant, cable-ready persona and House seat to national conspicuousness.

Even detractors allow that her audacity helped open the door for conservative female candidates and for new Republican Tea Party favorites, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and, to some extent, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

And she established herself as a fundraising juggernaut, raising nearly $15 million for her win-by-a-whisker race in 2012 against Democrat Jim Graves. He spent about $2.3 million in a race that was nationalized by her polarizing politics.

"She was definitely a presence," says conservative blogger Dan Riehl, who added that he chose to "ignore most of the calamity, the gaffes" that have punctuated her political career.

"She was a voice against the Republican establishment, a thorn in its side," he says. "In certain ways, she was an iconic figure — effective just because she was there ... She was kicking on the door early and was isolated. You have some people benefiting from the heat she took."

It wasn't her effectiveness as a legislator that propelled Bachmann's national profile: She rated as a House backbencher during her time on Capitol Hill. But she founded the House Tea Party Caucus, became a face of the emerging movement, and made "repeal Obamacare" her clarion call, thus guaranteeing a role on the national stage.

"Congresswoman Bachmann was able to skillfully use the media, particularly cable media, to articulate a very conservative message, and articulate opposition to the Obama administration in ways that went well beyond that of mainstream Republicans," says Kathryn Pearson, an American politics expert and associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

"She did not do a lot legislatively; it wasn't her focus," Pearson says, "but she gave voice to Tea Party members and made life difficult for her party's leadership."

Bachmann, who in 2011 gave the first televised Tea Party response to a presidential State of the Union address, proved impervious to persistent scolding by fact-checking organizations for misstatements and her often tenuous grasp of facts.

She won national notoriety with her sharp rhetoric on cable television news shows, where she once observed that Obama may have "anti-American views." Tax burdens? In her view, they were comparable to the Holocaust. She also asserted that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made taxpayers foot the bill for a $100,000 in-flight bar tab — another claim that was proven false.

That penchant for hyperbole, if not out-right falsity, made her ubiquitous in the cable TV arena but tarnished her reputation as a serious political player and made a wide swath of her home state Republicans cringe.

"To the degree that she was a laughingstock — that's not good when you're a Republican in Minnesota," says Sarah Janecek, a GOP activist and founder of Politics in Minnesota, a state public affairs news service.

Bachmann wasn't always good for national Republicans either, as the party attempted to broaden its appeal. She proved to be a reliable villain for Democrats, who often used her over-the-top comments to fuel their own direct-mail fundraising efforts.

"She was a polarizing figure and has drawn a lot of fire, and made some missteps," says Riehl, the conservative blogger. "The Tea Party movement, however, in some ways, has moved ahead of her now, grown beyond her, and is not as handcuffed to the social right."

"That's important going forward," Riehl says.

Even so, Bachmann's improbable, audacious run for the presidential nomination in 2012 still resonates with Riehl and other Republicans.

She wasn't the first conservative bomb-thrower from the House to run for president, but she proved a more viable candidate than any other before her campaign fizzled prior to the Iowa caucuses.

"Say what you want, but she was a woman making her way into an all-boys' club, and because she was on the right, she didn't have women's groups rallying around her," Riehl says. "She was there on her own."

Says Janecek: "Love her or hate her, Michele Bachmann did herself proud. She was the only woman at the podium during those [presidential] debates, she looked like a million bucks, and she had something to say."

"When Michele decided she wanted something," says Janecek, who first interviewed Bachmann when she ran for the state Senate, "It was balls to the wall."

Now, with her presidential campaign activity under investigation and facing another tough challenge by Graves, Bachmann decided another term is not something she wants.

To her fans, she remains a singular and steadfast figure.

"Michele Bachmann was someone who ran on principles and lives those principles," says Jake Duesenberg, who heads the East Metro Tea Party organization that reaches into her district.

Bachmann gave her detractors a lot of material, he says, but earlier this month 400 people turned out to see her at a local Tea Party gathering.

"She packed the house," Duesenberg says. "You can say this or that about how she messages, but she stood up for free markets, fiscal responsibility and respect for the Constitution."

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

APP has sold billions of dollars' worth of paper products to Staples, Disney and other big U.S. corporations. But environmental groups have accused APP of causing deforestation, destroying the habitat of Sumatran tigers and orangutans, and trampling on the rights of forest dwellers.

Asril Amran is the head of a nearby village. He says that the plantations have ruined the local environment.

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Dan Kennedy is a writer at heart, but if you ask him what he's versed in, you're bound to get a myriad of answers. The author and host of The Moth podcast spent some time fighting fires, so he knows a thing or two about wildland fire suppression tools. He's also held a marketing gig at a major record label, which inspired his bestselling memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. So when we asked Kennedy what he'd like to be quizzed on, he didn't respond with something broad like TV or movies — try "terrestrial and aquatic insects that trout eat to survive."

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When it comes to reining in health care spending, it still seems like each hospital administrator thinks the guy at the other hospital should do it.

Hospitals are still racing to offer expensive new technology — even when it hasn't been proved to work better than cheaper approaches. Case in point: proton beam therapy, a high-tech radiation treatment for cancer.

The local government in Washington, D.C., is on the verge of approving two proton beam facilities at a total cost of $153 million. The centers would be owned by the two dominant hospital systems in the area: Johns Hopkins Medicine and MedStar Health.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Proton Treatment Center is already being built 40 miles away in downtown Baltimore.

Both Hopkins and Medstar have been pleading their cases before a local health department committee that grants hospitals the right to build new buildings and services. (Hopkins' documents are here, and MedStar's are here.)

And both health systems argue that the nearest proton therapy centers are too far away for Washington residents to use.

"We believe that this therapy is absolutely necessary, but we also think that it's appropriate to be applied to certain types of cancer with certain treatments and not everything," says Chip Davis, president of Sibley Memorial Hospital, where the Hopkins proton center would be built. The center would open in 2017 and would generate a projected $15.8 million in profits by 2019.

But not everyone agrees with Davis that more proton therapy centers are needed. "Neither [Hopkins nor MedStar] should be building," says Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former health care adviser to the Obama administration who is now at the University of Pennsylvania. "We don't have evidence that there's a need for them in terms of medical care. They're simply done to generate profits."

The higher costs of proton services ultimately trickle down to taxpayers, employers and consumers in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

"It's hard to bend the cost curve when you're spending a lot of money," says Emanuel. "These are tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment for interventions that do not improve survival, improve quality of life, decrease side effects or save money."

There are already 11 proton therapy centers in the U.S., and the Maryland Proton Treatment Center in Baltimore is one of 17 more on the way.

The Baltimore facility is a giant cement-encased building the size of a football field, with a price tag of more than $200 million. It's being funded by for-profit developer Advanced Particle Therapy. At its heart sits a 90-ton piece of equipment called a cyclotron, which accelerates protons until they're whizzing around at two-thirds the speed of light.

The stream of protons is then directed at a tumor, delivering a blast of radiation. The idea is that the proton beam is so focused that only the tumor gets irradiated, protecting the surrounding tissues and minimizing side effects.

Baltimore's treatment center will be staffed by physicians from the University of Maryland. Radiation oncologist Minesh Mehta, who will direct the center, says he's hopeful that the technology could be used to treat up to a quarter of all cancers.

"At the end of the day, when I face a patient and I tell a patient I can treat you with technology that will treat less of your normal tissue with radiation you don't need versus more radiation to the tissue that should not be radiated, which would you like to choose?" Mehta says. "The vast majority of patients will choose the technology that gives less radiation to their tissues."

Studies suggest that proton therapy may be helpful for children who have brain and spinal tumors, protecting fragile developing organs that are near the cancer and preventing future developmental delays and secondary tumors. But childhood cancers are rare, and there's not much clinical evidence that proton therapy is better than standard radiation for most other cancers.

The particular proton technology used at the Maryland center, something called spot scanning, hasn't undergone any randomized clinical trials at all, Mehta acknowledges.

Nonetheless, he says the center will treat about 200 patients a day, at a cost twice that of standard radiation. The group, he suggests, includes patients with prostate, lung, abdominal and other cancers. Mehta estimates that 90 percent of the patients treated at the center will be adults, and up to 35 percent will be prostate cancer cases.

A study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in December, however, found that prostate cancer patients who received proton therapy fared no better than those with standard radiation treatment, despite substantially higher costs.

"It's hard to find a lot of children with brain cancers you can treat with the device, but you can find millions of men with prostate cancer," says Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. And because the centers cost so much to build and operate, a high patient volume is the only way they can afford to stay in business.

But the University of Maryland's Mehta argues the studies that show disappointing results for prostate cancer are based on flawed data and don't reflect the true value of proton therapy.

Doctors at the University of Maryland say their proton center is more than enough for all the patients living around Washington and Baltimore. They've even invited specialists from both Hopkins and MedStar to practice there.

That's unlikely to happen. A committee in Washington has recommended that both proposed centers be allowed to proceed. A final decision from the agency director is expected soon.

In 2004, Peter Obetz was in the middle of a divorce when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

"Food would get stuck down my throat, and it got worse and worse, so I met with my doctor. I had a tumor on my esophagus wall," says Peter, 48, during a visit to StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo.

His doctor told him surgery carried a 10 percent risk of death. "I remember telling the doc, 'You mean to tell me like one guy on my softball team isn't going to make it?' There's 10 guys on the team. He said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it. We can either do the surgery tomorrow or we can wait till Tuesday.' "

That's when he called his best friend, Jeff Jarrett, 52, who told him he needed to get the surgery as soon as possible. "I spent the day with your parents. And the surgeon met with us just after the surgery was completed and drew a graph," Jeff says. The graph showed Peter's percentages of survival over time.

"It started out at 90 percent on the day of the surgery and fell to 15 percent after five years," Jeff says. "That was my scariest moment — that there was only a 15 percent chance that I was going to have my best friend with me five years from now. The next day, you'd caught your mother with that little graph that the doctor had drawn and she wouldn't show it to you. And so I'd come in, and you said, 'I want you to sit down and tell me everything. So I did.' "

"I remember saying, 'I'm toast,' " Peter says.

"Your mom had said that to the surgeon. The surgeon said, 'No, he's lightly brown. He's not toast,' " Jeff says.

Cancer was a wake-up call Peter says he may have needed. "I was in a job where I was miserable, and it gave me the permission to leave," he says. "I went from making a lot of money to making very little and being happier."

He sold his big house and moved to an apartment. Not long after he moved, a unit downstairs opened up and Jeff moved in. "The only time usually that you live right next door to your best friend is when you're a kid because often your next-door neighbor is by default your best friend," Peter says.

"Exactly. Second-graders aren't that picky," Jeff says.

"When I think of every aspect of my life: My marriage has changed, my job has changed, where I live has changed. Our friendship is really the only thing that's constant," Peter says. "That's probably the greatest gift that you could've given me."

"When you were sick, everybody wanted to say, 'Peter, I love you so much, I'm so grateful for our friendship,' " Jeff says. "But I feel so lucky that if anything would have happened to you, there was never any ambiguity about how you feel about me or I feel about you. I love you very, very much."

"I love you too, man."

Peter's been cancer-free since 2009.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

It might come as a surprise that for centuries the French have been sans a term for "French kiss."

But, viola! The newest edition of the Petit Robert 2014 dictionary has rectified that with a new verb — "galocher," meaning "to kiss with tongues." It's a clever derivation of la galoche, a word for an ice-skating boot, and so evokes the idea of sliding around the ice — or the lips and tongue.

According to Time magazine, the term French kiss is "commonly attributed to American soldiers returning from World War I, who apparently picked up the technique from the more sexually adventurous French nationals they canoodled with abroad."

It would, of course, have been downright gauche to have adopted the American term, but even though the French didn't have an exact word all to themselves, it "never stopped us from doing it," says Laurence Laporte of the Robert publishing house.

Besides, there have always been more circuitous ways of getting to the point.

"We always had many expressions to describe 'French-kissing,' like 'kissing at length in the mouth,' but it's true, we've never had one single word," Laporte told The Associated Press.

Still, The Washington Post offers up a caveat:

"As Francophones know all too well, however, it takes quite a lot more than that to get a word into the standard dialect: the Academie Francaise, the 378-year-old regulator of the French language, jealously guards the official dictionary against made-up words and foreign incursions, and there's no mention of 'galocher' in there."

In the 1995 Richard Linklater film, Before Sunrise, a young American man named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a young Frenchwoman named Celine (Julie Delpy) meet on a train from Budapest. Intrigued by one another, they get off the train together in Vienna and spend the night wandering the city, talking and falling in love, before they both return to their respective lives in their respective countries.

They are reunited in the 2004 film Before Sunset when Jesse, who has come to Paris to promote his best-selling novel based on the night he spent with Celine in Vienna, spots Celine at a reading, and the two again spend time together walking and talking. At the end of the film the audience is left wondering whether they'll leave their partners (to whom they are both unhappily attached) and couple up with each other.

In Linklater's latest look at Jesse and Celine, Before Midnight, we get an answer to that question: They do. And it's no fairy tale. The film catches the couple at a tense moment in their relationship, as the daily grind of life gets in the way of intimacy and communication. The script for this film — as well as for the other two — is a collaborative effort among Linklater, Hawke and Delpy, and Hawke says that, when it comes to the idea of love, Before Midnight looks at a different side of it than the earlier movies examined.

“ We needed to try to address the harder, more difficult aspects of daily life and what it means when you get what you want, and what you do with what you want when you have it, and do you still want it?

Xie Peng, a 36-year-old Chinese graphic novelist, spent six years working on his first book, Darkness Outside the Night. It's been praised by China's first Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, as inspiring people on how to deal with life.

It's a psychological journey into the world of young Chinese: a world of competition, stress and anxiety, but not necessarily one of politics. His characters, children of the one-child generation, are anxious and alienated.

It's a world Xie knows well: He works 12 hours a day as a computer-games animator; overtime work eats up his weekends. Financial pressures bear down on him, since he married recently and bought an apartment.

Darkness is a collaboration between Xie, also known as Eliparvic Xie, who drew the pictures, and Hong Kong-based writer Duncan Jepson, who contributed the words.

"It's kind of like a Sibelius tone poem, but it was very visual. It was about anxiety; it was about frustration," Jepson says. "It was, at the same time, about seeking something better, something beautiful, something more human."

In the middle of the night a few weeks ago, 15-year-old Yusra Hammed watched Israeli soldiers arrest her brother Tareq. Two years older than Yusra, Tareq Hammed was among several Palestinian teenagers taken into custody that night, accused of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in their village, Silwad, in the occupied West Bank.

While he was being detained, his mother described him as a patriot.

"He wanted so badly to do as same what his father did, to defend his country," Suhaila Hammed said, sitting on a tawny gold couch in their home in Silwad.

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You knew this one was coming.

Earlier this month, we told you about a U.N. report that makes the case for insects to improve global food security: They're cheap, plentiful and environmentally sustainable. Now, the coming of the 17-year cicadas provides East Coast Americans, for whom bug eating is considered novel at best, with an opportunity to try local insect cuisine.

If you're willing to try cicada cookery, there's a book to guide your way, as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports Wednesday on All Things Considered. Cicada-licious, published in 2004 and available for free online, features recipes for cicada dumplings, tacos and chocolate-covered cicadas.

Author Jenna Jadin tells Yuki that, before cooking, you should break off the legs and wings — "they kind of tear off pretty easily."

"Then rinse them off," Jadin says, to "make sure all the soil bacteria is off of them."

Back when cicadas infested Chicago in 2007, freelance food writer David Hammond also gave the critters a culinary go. "My goal was to get them right as they were coming out of the ground," he tells NPR. "Young. Veal, if you will. Ha ha."

He realizes Western diners might be put off or grossed out by the idea of eating bugs — but weird is all relative, he notes. (After all, 2 billion people already eat bugs, mostly in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia.)

"Cheese is the grossest thing in the world," Hammond says. "You know, it's rotten milk. You eat rotten milk? That's disgusting! Yeah, well, we love it."

Then there's the fact that — hate to break it to you — you've probably already eaten bugs without realizing it.

"Insects are a part of all processed foods," Jadin writes in her cookbook, "from bread to tomato ketchup — it's impossible to keep mass-produced food 100% insect-free. There are regulations stating the maximum amount of bug bits that food can contain and still be fit for human consumption."

Sit back and digest that for a second.

But of course, the big question is: How do they taste? Word on the street is that cicadas are kind of nutty or kind of like asparagus.

Jadin cooked up a batch of the noisy, red-eyed bugs for our intrepid reporter to sample: candied with brown sugar and seasoned with Sriracha, then baked in the oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. The verdict?

"It's kind of like caramel popcorn," Yuki tells us.

You can hear Yuki's story on All Things Considered.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with the murder of 16 Afghan villagers in one of the worst atrocities of the American-led war in that country, will plead guilty as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty, his attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Bales' attorney, John Henry Browne, says his client was "crazed" and "broken" in March 2012 when he entered a village in southern Kandahar province and opened fire on sleeping Afghan civilians. He said Bales would plead guilty next week.

The AP writes:

"The Army had been trying to have Bales executed, and Afghan villagers have demanded it. In interviews with the AP in Kandahar last month, relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty.

...

Any plea deal must be approved by the judge as well as the commanding general at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Bales is being held. A plea hearing is set for June 5, said Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, an Army spokesman. He said he could not immediately provide other details."

Police in France say that a 21-year-old Muslim convert who confessed to stabbing a French soldier was apparently motivated by his religious beliefs, in an eerie echo of an attack last week in London, in which a British serviceman was killed.

Pvt. Cedric Cordiez, 25, was approached from the back and stabbed in the neck at a shopping mall in a suburb of Paris on Saturday. He was treated at a military hospital and released on Monday, officials said.

The New York Times reports that Paris public prosecutor Francois Molins on Wednesday announced the arrest of Alexandre Dhaussy, 21, who authorities say confessed to the crime. Molins said investigators believe that Dhaussy had "acted in the name of his religious ideology."

Molins said authorities were treating the attack as a terrorist act, and that Dhaussy had been caught on surveillance video apparently saying a prayer minutes before stabbing Cordiez.

"The nature of the incident, the fact it took place three days after [the London attack], and the prayer just before the act lead us to believe he acted on the basis of religious ideology and that his desire was to attack a representative of the state," Molins said at a news conference. "It seems clear the intent was to kill."

The Times says that Dhaussy had been known to authorities since 2009, "when he was submitted to an identity check for praying in the street."

The newborn boy whose rescue from a sewer pipe in eastern China drew attention around the world earlier this week has been released from a hospital and is now in the care of his mother's family, according to media reports from Beijing.

There's also word that the mother will not be facing any charges. According to The Associated Press:

"The mother had initially raised the alarm about the baby when he got stuck Saturday in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom of a residential building. But she had cleaned the room of signs of a fresh birth and did not initially come forward as the mother, officials have been quoted as saying.

"She admitted she was the mother two days later when confronted by police who had found baby toys and blood-stained tissues in her apartment, the reports said.

"Police later concluded that the incident was an accident and that the woman did not initially come forward because she was frightened, but that she later started telling the truth, the Jinhua Evening News and a Pujiang county propaganda official said."

Last year when New Orleans' main paper, The Times-Picayune laid off dozens of newspaper employees and cut its circulation to three times a week, residents were shocked.

Sharron Morrow and her friends had bonded over the morning paper at a local coffee shop for the past 20 years.

"I've stopped my subscription, and I mourn the paper almost every day," she says.

Shifting Media Players

Newspaper circulation has been rapidly declining all over the country. Advertising revenue has plummeted while online revenue has been making small gains. The The Times-Picayune re-branded itself as The Times-Picayune NOLA.com, representative of its new Web-centered focus.

Multimillionaire John Georges was one of the local movers and shakers furious at the Times-Picayune's changes. He tried to buy the company, but the New York-based owners refused to sell it, so Georges decided to start his own daily paper.

He bought The Advocate, a daily paper based 80 miles away in Baton Rouge, and launched a New Orleans edition.

"We fought the Battle of New Orleans once before; some think we are going to fight it again in the newspaper," he says.

To lead the charge, Georges hired Dan Shea, a managing editor laid off from The Times-Picayune during cutbacks. In the weeks since his hiring, a slew of prize-winning reporters have jumped from The Times-Picayune to The Advocate. Shea says subscriptions in New Orleans are growing.

Enlarge image i

Police in France say that a 21-year-old Muslim convert who confessed to stabbing a French soldier was apparently motivated by his religious beliefs, in an eerie echo of an attack last week in London, in which a British serviceman was killed.

Pvt. Cedric Cordiez, 25, was approached from the back and stabbed in the neck at a shopping mall in a suburb of Paris on Saturday. He was treated at a military hospital and released on Monday, officials said.

The New York Times reports that Paris public prosecutor Francois Molins on Wednesday announced the arrest of Alexandre Dhaussy, 21, who authorities say confessed to the crime. Molins said investigators believe that Dhaussy had "acted in the name of his religious ideology."

Molins said authorities were treating the attack as a terrorist act, and that Dhaussy had been caught on surveillance video apparently saying a prayer minutes before stabbing Cordiez.

"The nature of the incident, the fact it took place three days after [the London attack], and the prayer just before the act lead us to believe he acted on the basis of religious ideology and that his desire was to attack a representative of the state," Molins said at a news conference. "It seems clear the intent was to kill."

The Times says that Dhaussy had been known to authorities since 2009, "when he was submitted to an identity check for praying in the street."

In the middle of the night a few weeks ago, 15-year-old Yusra Hammed watched Israeli soldiers arrest her brother Tareq. Two years older than Yusra, Tareq Hammed was among several Palestinian teenagers taken into custody that night, accused of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in their village, Silwad, in the occupied West Bank.

While he was being detained, his mother described him as a patriot.

"He wanted so badly to do as same what his father did, to defend his country," Suhaila Hammed said, sitting on a tawny gold couch in their home in Silwad.

Enlarge image i

See The Dances

Watch the Joffrey Ballet perform dances originally performed by the Ballets Russes.

'The Rite of Spring'

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's announcement Wednesday that she won't seek a fifth term unleashed a torrent of tweets and blog posts on the left lampooning the short-lived 2012 presidential candidate.

Yet the response - her retirement effectively dominated the news cycle - provided a glimpse of Bachmann's impact on Washington.

While she amassed a fat portfolio of missteps and fabrications since her 2006 election, the political provocateur and conservative Christian also secured a place in political history by riding the Tea Party wave early, and parlaying an unrepentant, cable-ready persona and House seat to national conspicuity.

Even detractors allow that her audacity helped open the door for conservative female candidates and for new Republican Tea Party favorites, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and, to some extent, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

And she established herself as a fundraising juggernaut, raising nearly $15 million for her win-by-a-whisker race in 2012 against Democrat Jim Graves. He spent about $2.3 million in a race that was nationalized by her polarizing politics.

"She was definitely a presence," says conservative blogger Dan Riehl, who added that he chose to "ignore most of the calamity, the gaffes" that have punctuated her political career.

"She was a voice against the Republican establishment, a thorn in its side," he says. "In certain ways, she was an iconic figure - effective just because she was there...She was kicking on the door early, and was isolated. You have some people benefiting from the heat she took."

It wasn't her effectiveness as a legislator that propelled Bachmann's national profile: She rated as a House back bencher during her time on Capitol Hill. But she founded the House Tea Party Caucus, became a face of the emerging movement, and made "repeal Obamacare" her clarion call, thus guaranteeing a role on the national stage.

"Congresswoman Bachmann was able to skillfully use the media, particularly cable media, to articulate a very conservative message, and articulate opposition to the Obama administration in ways that went well beyond that of mainstream Republicans," says Kathryn Pearson, an American politics expert and associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

"She did not do a lot legislatively, it wasn't her focus," Pearson says, "but she gave voice to Tea Party members, and made life difficult for her party's leadership."

Bachmann, who in 2011 gave the first televised Tea Party response to a presidential State of the Union address, proved impervious to persistent scolding by fact-checking organizations for misstatements and her often tenuous grasp of facts.

She won national notoriety with her sharp rhetoric on cable television news shows, where she once observed that Obama may have "anti-American views." Tax burdens? In her view, they were comparable to the Holocaust. She also asserted that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made taxpayers foot the bill for a $100,000 in-flight bar tab - another claim that was proven false.

That penchant for hyperbole, if not out-right falsity, made her ubiquitous in the cable TV arena but tarnished her reputation as a serious political player and made a wide swath of her home state Republicans cringe.

"To the degree that she was a laughingstock - that's not good when you're a Republican in Minnesota," says Sarah Janecek, a GOP activist and founder of Politics in Minnesota, a state public affairs news service.

Bachmann wasn't always good for national Republicans either, as the party attempted to broaden its appeal. She proved to be a reliable villain for Democrats, who often used her over-the-top comments to fuel their own direct mail fundraising efforts.

"She was a polarizing figure, and has drawn a lot of fire, and made some missteps," Riehl, the conservative blogger, says. "The Tea Party movement, however, in some ways, has moved ahead of her now, grown beyond her, and is not as handcuffed to the social right."

"That's important going forward," he said

Even so, Bachmann's improbable, audacious run for the presidential nomination in 2012 still resonates with Riehl and other Republicans.

She wasn't the first conservative bomb-thrower from the House to run for president, but she proved a more viable candidate than any other before her campaign fizzled prior to the Iowa caucuses.

"Say what you want, but she was a woman making her way into an all boys' club, and because she was on the right, she didn't have women's groups rallying around her," he said. "She was there on her own."

Says Janecek: "Love her or hate her, Michele Bachmann did herself proud. She was the only woman at the podium during those [presidential] debates, she looked like a million bucks and she had something to say."

"When Michele decided she wanted something," says Janecek, who first interviewed Bachmann when she ran for the state Senate, "It was balls to the wall."

Now, with her presidential campaign activity under investigation and facing another tough challenge by Graves, Bachmann decided another term is not something she wants.

To her fans, she remains a singular and steadfast figure.

"Michele Bachmann was someone who ran on principles and lives those principles," says Jake Duesenberg, who heads the East Metro Tea Party organization that reaches into her district.

Bachmann gave her detractors a lot of material, he said, but earlier this month 400 people turned out to see her at a local Tea Party gathering.

"She packed the house," Duesenberg said. "You can say this or that about how she messages, but she stood up for free markets, fiscal responsibility, and respect for the Constitution."

Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, says he will step down to return to Princeton to resume his post as a professor of economics.

Krueger, who has served as CEA chairman for the past two years, will return to Princeton in time for the beginning of the fall term. The Associated Press quotes a source familiar with the situation as saying Jason Furman, who served in President Obama's 2008 campaign, will be tapped as a replacement.

"Alan was the driving force behind many of the economic policies that I have proposed that will grow our economy and create middle-class jobs," the president said in a statement on Tuesday. "And while we have more work to do, today our economy is improving – thanks, in no small part, to Alan's efforts."

Kreuger called his experience with CEA, "one of the highest privileges of my life."

More than 30 million Americans experience significant hearing loss, but only a third of them get hearing aids.

There are a lot of reasons why someone who needs a hearing aid won't get one: Some think their hearing loss is not that bad, others are too embarrassed to use them, and many people say they are just not worth the price.

Hearing aids cost an average of $1,500 per ear for a basic model, and unlike most technology, their price has not dropped over time.

What is worse: Most insurance companies do not pay for the devices. Even Medicare does not cover hearing aids — and the Affordable Care Act will not change that.

Some businesses see the hearing aid market as an opportunity. Costco has opened hearing aid centers in discount warehouses all over the country. Other companies have started selling their own brands of the devices directly online.

Ross Porter, the founder of online retailer Embrace Hearing, says hearing aids are only expensive because audiologists and distributors charge steep markups on them.

But Virginia Ramachandran, an audiologist with the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, says it is unwise to buy a hearing aid for the first time online. She says the device might be fine, but you will not know how to use it correctly.

"If someone gave you a laptop computer, and you have never used one before, you would not know how to turn it on, you would not know what programs or how to use them," she says.

Shots - Health News

Listen Up To Smarter, Smaller Hearing Aids

The Salt

Wear 'Em, Chuck 'Em, Float 'Em: 10 Things To Do With Twinkies

A century ago, when fiery steel mills were roaring to life in Youngstown, Ohio, builders were racing to put up homes, storefronts, barbershops and more.

Today, many of those buildings sit empty and rotting. With the mills mostly gone and the population down 60 percent from 1960, to just 67,000, the city needs millions of dollars to tear down roughly 4,000 vacant structures.

This year, they may get help. It's possible that what's under the city could be converted into cash to help clear away what's on top. The city is hoping to generate demolition funds by leasing parks, rights of way and other public lands to companies drilling for oil and natural gas.

Youngstown sits atop shale formations that may contain largely untapped reserves of fossil fuels. By using hydraulic fracturing — or "fracking" — techniques, energy companies can recover oil and gas and make money. But they need access to land to set up drilling operations.

The 'Frackmolishing' Plan

Last fall, the city council agreed to seek bids for mineral rights on city-owned parcels, which collectively add up to several hundred acres. As early as this summer, Youngstown officials plan to consider lease proposals for $5,000 to $7,500 an acre, plus signing bonuses.

DeMaine Kitchen, chief of staff for Youngstown Mayor Charles Sammarone, is a proponent of this plan, which some refer to as "frackmolishing." Kitchen, who is running for mayor to succeed the out-going Sammarone, says old buildings must be cleared away to make room for growth.

"It's more than just tearing down everything," Kitchen said. "It's what you can build up."

He wants to replace decayed buildings with vibrant neighborhoods and businesses.

"If we had the money, I would like to create these, like promise neighborhoods, where you give special incentives to people to move into these neighborhoods," he said. "Or you create research parks or technology parks."

Environmental Concerns

But because of concerns about potential environmental damage, some residents are opposed to fracking, which can generate huge amounts of toxic wastewater.

Putting fracking operations on park land "is a ludicrous idea," said Lynn Anderson, a Youngstown resident and anti-fracking activist. The chemicals used in fracking water "are very hazardous. We've got kids here with asthma; we don't need this process," she said.

Fracking opponents believe Youngstown, which has a thriving high-tech business incubator downtown, may be able to generate enough new wealth to spur urban renewal without turning to drilling for cash.

Around the Nation

There's Oil On Them Thar Campuses!

In most states, the power to draw lines for political districts rests with legislators. In recent years, California voters have tried to make the process less political by taking it out of lawmakers' hands. But not everyone is happy with how things are turning out.

To understand redistricting in California, consider this: Over a 10-year period beginning in 2000, there were 255 congressional races, and only one seat — that's right, one seat — changed parties.

So in 2008 and 2010, voters approved two propositions to give the job of redrawing political district lines to a nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission.

"It was created in response to the redistricting plan that was drawn 10 years ago, which was drawn by the Legislature and everybody agreed was drawn to protect sitting incumbents," says Eric McGhee, a redistricting guru at the Public Policy Institute of California.

The new Citizens Redistricting Commission comprised five Democrats, five Republicans and four independents. The commission held 34 public hearings and heard testimony from 2,700 people. In August 2011, new political district maps were unveiled at a news conference.

At the time, Vincent Barabba, then the chairman of the commission, said: "The maps that we adopted today did not consider incumbents, potential candidates and political party registration in drawing the districts."

But if voters thought the commission could take politics out of redistricting, they were wrong.

Just a few minutes later in that same news conference, a Republican commissioner, Michael Ward, said the new maps were "fundamentally flawed as a result of a tainted political process. This commission made decisions based on political motives."

The new maps appeared to favor Democrats in races for the state Assembly, state Senate and Congress.

Democrats said the new district lines merely reflected demographic changes that already had shaded California blue.

The GOP eventually filed four legal challenges against the new district lines, but the courts rejected them all. Among their arguments, Republicans insisted that areas in California that were traditionally Republican strongholds had higher growth rates than Democratic districts, and that should have produced more Republican seats.

But Barabba, also a Republican, didn't buy it.

"The problem was, although the growth did take place in those areas, it was by people who were coming in, both Hispanics and Asians, who are less likely to vote on the Republican side of the ticket," he said.

Barabba says if you want evidence that the commission didn't favor Democrats, just look at the redrawn 30th Congressional District in Southern California's San Fernando Valley.

Thanks to redistricting and the end of partisan primaries, the race pitted two Democratic incumbents against each other — former political allies Howard Berman and Brad Sherman. Both congressmen had similar voting records. But their campaign was nasty and personal. One night before a shrieking college crowd, the candidates got nose to nose.

"You wanna get into this?" Sherman yelled as he grabbed Berman by the shoulder.

But after their theatrics, Sherman won that race largely because he had inherited many of the voters from his old district in the newly redrawn 30th.

By election time, the impact of the redistricting process was clear: Democrats won two-thirds majorities in the state Assembly and Senate. They also picked up four additional congressional seats.

For California Republicans, redistricting is still a bitter pill.

"The election results showed that the actual seats were too difficult for Republicans to win," says former state Republican Party chief Tom Del Beccaro, "and you can make the argument that how they were drawn up was wrong, that commission process was corrupted. And I think the results of the election show that we should have done everything we could to fight for better lines."

But increasing partisan competition was never part of the commission's charge. Its job was to draw compact districts of equal population size, ensure minority representation and, if possible, not divide cities and counties.

The Public Policy Institute's McGhee says voters shouldn't be surprised with the way things turned out.

"In modern politics, Democrats and Republicans don't tend to live in the same places. It's hard to draw those competitive seats," McGhee says. "So it's not hard to see how somebody could be disappointed in the outcome. But I think if you had set your expectations in a realistic way, they actually probably exceeded what could be expected."

The bottom line, says McGhee, is that the independent Citizens Redistricting Commission drew up new district lines in a process that was far more open to the public than when the job was done by lawmakers.

Members of Congress are back in their home states this week for a Memorial Day recess. It's a chance to talk with constituents about what could become the year's biggest legislative story: the push on Capitol Hill to fix what Democrats and Republicans alike agree is a broken immigration system.

A bill proposed by the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators, to revamp the nation's immigration rules passed out of committee last week and will soon be brought before the Democratic-led Senate. Less clear, though, is where the issue is headed in the GOP-controlled House.

A Senate Truce

The Senate chamber lately has become an even more partisan battlefield than usual, with verbal fights breaking out daily over stalled presidential nominations and a budget stuck in limbo. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is threatening to rewrite the Senate's filibuster rules to break the logjam.

That would infuriate the Republican minority and possibly doom any chance of bipartisan cooperation. But Reid says he's putting all that off until the Senate finishes the immigration overhaul — the one thing Democrats and Republicans do seem able to work on together.

"I'm going to do nothing to interfere with immigration," Reid says. "It is important for our country, and I admire the bipartisan nature of what happened with the Gang of Eight. It's exemplary of what we should do around here on everything."

But fierce opponents of the immigration bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants are preparing a series of poison-pill amendments. Leading that effort is Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose amendments almost all failed in committee.

"I think they would have a considerably better chance of passing on the floor than in the Judiciary Committee," Sessions says.

It's All Politics

Fears Of Killing Immigration Bill Doomed Same-Sex Amendment

One year after Facebook's troubled initial public offering, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday that it has "charged Nasdaq with securities laws violations resulting from its poor systems and decision-making ... [and that] Nasdaq has agreed to settle the SEC's charges by paying a $10 million penalty."

According to the SEC, that is the largest such penalty ever paid by one of the stock exchanges.

The agency says that:

There are times when the kindness of a gesture is undermined by its ostentatious nature — when the fancier your method of approaching another human being, the less it appears to be about them and the more it appears to be about you.

This is the risk inherent in any marriage proposal that winds up on YouTube. No matter how charming — and some are really, really charming and ooze genuine love and affection — when you seem to be begging for your proposal to go viral, it can take on a sense of being external rather than internal, performative rather than intimate.

But what often saves proposal videos from maudlin distastefulness is that they have goofiness, but they also have heft: you're often looking at people who love each other very much, whose families and friends are participating in some extravagant overflow of affection. They represent the culmination of something important, and that mitigates their tendency to feel like stunts.

With high school students perhaps concerned that they're missing out on the fun because it's a tiny bit early to get engaged, there seems to be an uptick in recent years in extravagant (and widely shared) prom proposals. Yes, that's prom proposals.

Now look: when I was a rosy-cheeked girl back in the time of butter churning and the building of the transcontinental railroad, we didn't refer to asking someone to the prom as "proposing." There was no such thing as a "prom proposal," as far as I knew, because being asked to the prom basically involved a dialogue that either went something like "Did you want to go to the prom with me?" "Yeah" (for singles) or "We should think about getting our prom tickets" "Yeah" (for couples). If a girl had said, "My boyfriend proposed to me for the prom," we would have had no idea what that even meant, I think.

I generally believe that the so-called "younger generation" at any given moment is just as smart, good, interesting, engaged, bright, and wise (for their age) as any other generation was. And I believe that now. And I don't believe they're being ruined by their phones or the internet or whatever is this week's THEY'RE BEING RUINED! candidate.

Having said that, I cannot tell a lie: I think their propensity for extravagant prom asks, which they call — ack ack — "promposals," is ... weird. And probably not a good idea.

First of all, I'm not sure all girls find this experience pleasurable. This girl looks a tiny bit mortified, and the song is too short (you couldn't even write the "Chapter One" parts, guy?), and bow ties with t-shirts smacks of lack of effort.

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

A short letter from the (amply mustachioed, possibly imperialist) English author Rudyard Kipling is up for auction. Addressed to an unknown woman, the letter says, referring to a portion of The Jungle Book, that "a little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils. In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."

For the online magazine xoJane, editor/writer Heather Alexander describes accidentally cutting off part of novelist Donna Tartt's ear.

The Sportswriter author Richard Ford writes about William Faulkner for The Threepenny Review: "It seems to me now — and it seemed to me in 1979, and also back to 1964, when I read it first — that Absalom, Absalom! ought to be a thousand pages long, so full is it of everything in the world."

Knopf announced on Tuesday that the next Bridget Jones novel, out on Oct. 15, will be called Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. No word yet on which boy.

The New York Times reports that flash sales help sell e-books. What will they discover next ... coupons?

For The Paris Review, Christina Thompson writes about reaching for a poem by W.H. Auden for comfort during her mother's illness: "I sat there for I don't know how many hours, drifting in and out of exhaustion and anxiety, and at some point a fragment of poetry came into my mind. 'Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm ...' " Thompson is editor of the Harvard Review and author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.

Boston Globe reporters Scott Helman and Jenna Russell will write a book about the Boston Marathon bombings, Dutton announced on Tuesday. According to the press release, "With the resources of The Boston Globe, the book will provide an unprecedented level of detail and insight, including what went on behind-the-scenes as the police and FBI faced several profoundly challenging situations."

Traveling to Damascus gives you a view of Syria's war turned inside out.

The international community talks of arming Syria's rebels against President Bashar Assad, but in the capital many people still hope the rebels will lose.

That's the thinking we found around a Muslim shrine in Damascus, a tribute to the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. She lived centuries ago, but a Damascus doctor we met speaks of her in the present tense.

"We love Sayida Zeinab," he says. "We like Sayida Zeinab. We respect Sayida Zeinab."

We wanted to visit, so the doctor offered to guide us there. We arranged to meet beside the highway leading toward the shrine. He leaned into our car window to talk, though like many people here he asked us not to use his name.

Sayida Zeinab is holy to all Muslims, though the Shiite sect maintains the shrine, which is in a Shiite neighborhood. The doctor says it's surrounded by many guards, out of fear that Sunni extremist rebels will destroy it.

"They do not believe in shrines. The terrorists have Wahhabian ideas," he says of the Wahabbis, followers of an especially austere brand of Islam.

Assad's government has relentlessly said the rebels are foreign terrorists. There is no evidence that all the Sunni rebel groups oppose Shiites, though it is clear that some are extremist Sunnis. Fear of them has bound Shiites and other minority groups to Assad's regime.

The shrine is in an area of heavy fighting, but the doctor says he's never missed a day of work at a hospital nearby.

"I have been working in Sayida Zeinab for 25 years as a doctor," he says.

Parallels

In Damascus, A View Of Syria's War Turned Inside Out

Sixteen million men and women served in uniform during World War II. Today, 1.2 million are still alive, but hundreds of those vets are dying every day. In honor of Memorial Day, NPR's All Things Considered is remembering some of the veterans who have died this year.

"Tad Nagaki was a gentle, quiet farmer," says Mary Previte, a retired New Jersey legislator and former captive of the Japanese during World War II. That quiet farmer, who did extraordinary things, died in April at the age of 93 at his grandson's Colorado home.

With her siblings and separated from her missionary parents, Previte spent nearly three years in the harsh conditions of a prison camp in China during the war.

Tadashi "Tad" Nagaki was among her rescuers. Previte was 12 at the time and never forgot him. More than a half-century after the war, she tracked Nagaki down and learned more about his life.

Nagaki, a Japanese-American, grew up on a family farm in Alliance, Neb. After the war, he went back to Alliance to farm corn, beans and sugar beets.

Enlarge image i

Members of Congress are back in their home states this week for a Memorial Day recess. It's a chance to talk with constituents about what could become the year's biggest legislative story: the push on Capitol Hill to fix what Democrats and Republicans alike agree is a broken immigration system.

A bill proposed by the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators, to revamp the nation's immigration rules passed out of committee last week and will soon be brought before the Democratic-led Senate. Less clear, though, is where the issue is headed in the GOP-controlled House.

A Senate Truce

The Senate chamber lately has become an even more partisan battlefield than usual, with verbal fights breaking out daily over stalled presidential nominations and a budget stuck in limbo. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is threatening to rewrite the Senate's filibuster rules to break the logjam.

That would infuriate the Republican minority and possibly doom any chance of bipartisan cooperation. But Reid says he's putting all that off until the Senate finishes the immigration overhaul — the one thing Democrats and Republicans do seem able to work on together.

"I'm going to do nothing to interfere with immigration," Reid says. "It is important for our country, and I admire the bipartisan nature of what happened with the Gang of Eight. It's exemplary of what we should do around here on everything."

But fierce opponents of the immigration bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants are preparing a series of poison-pill amendments. Leading that effort is Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose amendments almost all failed in committee.

"I think they would have a considerably better chance of passing on the floor than in the Judiciary Committee," Sessions says.

It's All Politics

Fears Of Killing Immigration Bill Doomed Same-Sex Amendment

Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, says he will step down to return to Princeton to resume his post as a professor of economics.

Krueger, who has served as CEA chairman for the past two years, will return to Princeton in time for the beginning of the fall term. The Associated Press quotes a source familiar with the situation as saying Jason Furman, who served in President Obama's 2008 campaign, will be tapped as a replacement.

"Alan was the driving force behind many of the economic policies that I have proposed that will grow our economy and create middle-class jobs," the president said in a statement on Tuesday. "And while we have more work to do, today our economy is improving – thanks, in no small part, to Alan's efforts."

Kreuger called his experience with CEA, "one of the highest privileges of my life."

Wal-Mart Stores has agreed to pay $81 million in penalties as part of a guilty plea on criminal charges of improperly disposing of hazardous waste in California and Missouri.

Prosecutors said the violations occurred between 2003 and 2005 and included employees negligently dumping pollutants from stores into sanitation drains.

The Associated Press reports that the plea agreements announced Tuesday "end a nearly decade-old investigation involving more than 20 prosecutors and 32 environmental groups."

Reuters says "in one instance, according to an earlier court filing, investigators in April 2002 observed 'piles of multicolored unknown fertilizer type substances and torn sacks of ammonium sulfate' at one of the company's stores in California, after learning a child had been playing on a pile of 'yellowish colored powder' near the store's garden department."

Wal-Mart had agreed in 2010 to pay $27.6 million to settle with California authorities on similar charges and in 2012 it paid $1.25 million to Missouri.

"We have fixed the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said. "We are obviously happy that this is the final resolution."

Sixteen million men and women served in uniform during World War II. Today, 1.2 million are still alive, but hundreds of those vets are dying every day. In honor of Memorial Day, NPR's All Things Considered is remembering some of the veterans who have died this year.

"Tad Nagaki was a gentle, quiet farmer," says Mary Previte, a retired New Jersey legislator and former captive of the Japanese during World War II. That quiet farmer, who did extraordinary things, died in April at the age of 93 at his Colorado home.

With her siblings and separated from her missionary parents, Previte spent nearly three years in the harsh conditions of a prison camp in China during the war.

Tadashi "Tad" Nagaki was among her rescuers. Previte was 12 at the time and never forgot him. More than a half-century after the war, she tracked Nagaki down and learned more about his life.

Nagaki, a Japanese-American, grew up on a family farm in Alliance, Neb. After the war, he went back to Alliance to farm corn, beans and sugar beets.

Enlarge image i

City officials in Paris are experimenting with an unconventional way to keep urban lawns trimmed.

Agnes Masson used to be simply the director of the Paris city archives. Now, she's also a shepherdess of sorts, responsible for four black sheep munching the lush grass surrounding the gray archives building at the eastern edge of the city.

Masson says the ewes are efficient and easy to care for.

"We don't have to do anything — just look after them to see if the four of them are always together," Masson says. "They have to be all together; if one is out [of] the group, it seems she is a bit depressed."

The sheep are on loan from the city of Paris, which keeps livestock for agricultural schools. The sheep don't need gasoline, so they're ecological as well as cute to look at. The droppings from the sheep also encourage biodiversity by drawing insects, which in turn attract birds to the area.

Enlarge image i

The European Union plans to end its embargo on arming the Syrian opposition, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday.

The Associated Press reports: "Hague insisted that Britain had 'no immediate plans to send arms to Syria. It gives us flexibility to respond in the future if the situation continues to deteriorate.' "

The EU will continue its sanctions against Bashar Assad's government, which had been set to expire on June 1, Hague said.

"The decision came after lengthy talks in Brussels," the BBC reports. "Britain and France had been pressing to send weapons to what they call moderate opponents of President Assad. But other countries had opposed the move, saying it would only worsen the violence."

As we reported earlier, U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who supports arming the Syrian opposition, met with rebels on Monday after crossing into the country from Turkey.

Seriously, with E.W. Jackson in Virginia and Anthony Weiner in New York, what more do NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin need for their podcast? OK, maybe throw in the ongoing IRS controversy, Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth Amendment, an immigration deal coming out of Senate Judiciary and a new mayor in Los Angeles.

More than 30 million Americans experience significant hearing loss, but only a third of them gets hearing aids.

There are a lot of reasons why someone who needs a hearing aid won't get one: Some think their hearing loss is not that bad, others are too embarrassed to use them, and many people say they are just not worth the price.

A hearing aid costs an average of $1,500 per year for a basic model, and unlike most technology, their price has not dropped over time.

What is worse, most insurance companies do not pay for the devices. Even Medicare does not cover hearing aids — and the Affordable Care Act will not change that.

Some businesses see the hearing aid market as an opportunity. Costco has opened hearing aid centers in discount warehouses all over the country. Other companies have started selling their own brands of the devices directly online.

Ross Porter, the founder of online retailer Embrace Hearing, says that hearing aids are only expensive because audiologists and distributors charge steep markups on them.

But Virginia Ramachandran, an audiologist with the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, says it is unwise to buy a hearing aid for the first time online. She says the device might be fine, but you will not know how to use it correctly.

"If someone gave you a laptop computer, and you have never used one before, you would not know how to turn it on, you would not know what programs or how to use them," she says.

Shots - Health News

Listen Up To Smarter, Smaller Hearing Aids

In Los Angeles, the business of fashion is big. The apparel business employs as many as 45,000 workers in L.A. County, many of them immigrants.

Consequently, the garment is industry is worried about the outcome of the immigration debate and watching closely to see what happens.

'You Don't Have Another Choice'

One of heavyweights is American Apparel, which makes more than 40 million articles of clothing each year out of its factory near downtown L.A.

The clothing industry is notorious for employing illegal workers. American Apparel was forced to fire nearly one-third of its workforce — 1,800 employees — after an immigration crackdown in 2009.

Priscila Rios, a sewer for the company, recently got her green card.

"I was lucky to get my paperwork in three years, but there are so many people that used to work here and had to leave because of the same reason and they are still struggling every day just to find a decent job," she says.

Rios says she's worried about the dozens of friends and family who work at hidden sweatshops in and around Los Angeles where workers are often taken advantage of.

"And they just do it because they know your status. They know that you work there because you don't have another choice," Rios says. "And if we get immigration [reforms], those people will have to do what the law is requiring and then the people there won't have to be fighting for their rights."

An Easier Path

Many in the garment industry want to see a clearer and shorter path to legal status than the current bill provides. Peter Schey, an immigration lawyer who works for American Apparel, says a shorter path to citizenship would improve conditions in an industry that relies on immigrant labor.

"[It] would rapidly decrease the exploitation of the immigrant communities, and at the same time that you decrease the exploitation you also decrease the appetite or the desirability of employers to hire undocumented or temporary labor," he says.

Ilse Metchek, head of the California Fashion Association, says current immigration policy has contributed to a larger underground economy in Los Angeles.

"We have lost within the past three years over 5,000 employees in legitimate, legal factories," she says.

The new immigration bill offers a guest worker program for agricultural workers and other laborers, but there's no special carve-out for the garment industry or industrial workers, Metchek says.

"An industrial worker who has been here in this country working legitimately, paying taxes, should be able to have a green card or work permit to continue working," she says.

Metchek says the industry will suffer if there isn't an easier path for immigrant workers.

"You cannot take people out of the street and put them on a sewing machine and ask them to sew your shirt," she says. "There is training involved and that training is expensive. That fabric is $6 or $7 a yard. You're not let somebody just play around with it."

Metchek says if the new immigration bill doesn't protect those skilled workers, the industry will lose them or they will just go underground.

President Obama often tells audiences that he has waged his last campaign. But that's not exactly true.

The White House is gearing up for a massive campaign this summer that will cover all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. And the president's legacy may hinge on whether it succeeds or fails.

The Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," has been through more life-and-death cliffhangers than a season finale of Homeland. After squeaker votes in Congress and a 5-4 ruling upholding the law at the Supreme Court, now there's another big hurdle: getting uninsured people to buy health care when it becomes available Oct. 1.

When Obama delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College this month, his advice to the graduates — along with working hard and helping others — was to sign up for health insurance this fall.

"We've got to make sure everybody has good health in this country," he said. "It's not just good for you, it's good for this country. So you're going to have to spread the word to your fellow young people."

Reaching Out

David Simas, deputy senior adviser to the president, works in a quintessential West Wing office — a windowless basement room — where he oversees one of the top projects on the Obama agenda: implementing universal health coverage.

In the first year, the administration hopes to sign up 7 million people across the country. Simas says that will require TV ads, door knocking and lots of word of mouth.

"It is an on-the-ground effort," he says. "It is a social media effort. It is a paid media effort. It is an earned media effort. But [it's] all leading to the same thing, which is that man or woman sitting in their living room online, comparing different prices for different products and deciding what works best for them."

The administration is developing an Expedia-style website, hoping to make the experience as customer-friendly as possible.

But just getting people to that website is a huge task. Last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that 4 in 10 Americans don't even know the health care law is still on the books.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, who has worked on this issue for years — until recently as Obama's deputy chief of staff — says that's not a cause for concern.

"The truth is that people weren't paying attention until now," she says. "There's so much else going on that even if we had wanted to start a campaign two years ago, it wouldn't have been very effective because people weren't listening."

Financial Stumbles

But with the sign-up date approaching fast, the administration's efforts have already stumbled. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has repeatedly asked Congress for money to implement Obamacare.

Republicans have repeatedly said no, while they vote to repeal the law.

Without the money she wanted from Congress, Sebelius tried to fundraise for an independent group called Enroll America that is focused on implementing Obamacare. When Republicans heard that she was asking insurance companies and health care providers to donate millions of dollars, they cried foul.

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander told Fox News: "Congress has said we refuse to give you more money to implement Obamacare, and she's saying, 'Well then, if you won't do it, I'll go outside and I will raise private money, use a private organization, and do it anyway.' "

Now two Republican-controlled House committees are investigating the solicitations. Dan Mendelson of the health care consulting group Avalere says that makes donors skittish.

"Much as a health care company might really want to improve enrollment, they also need to make sure that they do not run afoul of politicians on either side of the aisle," Mendelson says.

If health care companies hold back, he says, it's going to be much harder to reach all of those people in all of those communities.

"The fact of the matter is that if you starve a media campaign for funding, you're not going to have the reach that you otherwise would, and that's the situation that we find ourselves in," he says.

There's another key part of this campaign: Sicker and older people without insurance may be eager to sign up Oct. 1. But to make the system work financially, young and healthy people who don't need much medical care have to get into the pool, too.

So you can expect administration officials around the country to give lots more commencement speeches this season, telling captive audiences of 20-somethings: Congratulations on your diploma. Now make sure to sign up for health coverage in the fall.

President Obama often tells audiences that he has waged his last campaign. But that's not exactly true.

The White House is gearing up for a massive campaign this summer that will cover all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. And the president's legacy may hinge on whether it succeeds or fails.

The Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," has been through more life-and-death cliffhangers than a season finale of Homeland. After squeaker votes in Congress and a 5-4 ruling upholding the law at the Supreme Court, now there's another big hurdle: getting uninsured people to buy health care when it becomes available Oct. 1.

When Obama delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College this month, his advice to the graduates — along with working hard and helping others — was to sign up for health insurance this fall.

"We've got to make sure everybody has good health in this country," he said. "It's not just good for you, it's good for this country. So you're going to have to spread the word to your fellow young people."

Reaching Out

David Simas, deputy senior adviser to the president, works in a quintessential West Wing office — a windowless basement room — where he oversees one of the top projects on the Obama agenda: implementing universal health coverage.

In the first year, the administration hopes to sign up 7 million people across the country. Simas says that will require TV ads, door knocking and lots of word of mouth.

"It is an on-the-ground effort," he says. "It is a social media effort. It is a paid media effort. It is an earned media effort. But [it's] all leading to the same thing, which is that man or woman sitting in their living room online, comparing different prices for different products and deciding what works best for them."

The administration is developing an Expedia-style website, hoping to make the experience as customer-friendly as possible.

But just getting people to that website is a huge task. Last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that 4 in 10 Americans don't even know the health care law is still on the books.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, who has worked on this issue for years — until recently as Obama's deputy chief of staff — says that's not a cause for concern.

"The truth is that people weren't paying attention until now," she says. "There's so much else going on that even if we had wanted to start a campaign two years ago, it wouldn't have been very effective because people weren't listening."

Financial Stumbles

But with the sign-up date approaching fast, the administration's efforts have already stumbled. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has repeatedly asked Congress for money to implement Obamacare.

Republicans have repeatedly said no, while they vote to repeal the law.

Without the money she wanted from Congress, Sebelius tried to fundraise for an independent group called Enroll America that is focused on implementing Obamacare. When Republicans heard that she was asking insurance companies and health care providers to donate millions of dollars, they cried foul.

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander told Fox News: "Congress has said we refuse to give you more money to implement Obamacare, and she's saying, 'Well then, if you won't do it, I'll go outside and I will raise private money, use a private organization, and do it anyway.' "

Now two Republican-controlled House committees are investigating the solicitations. Dan Mendelson of the health care consulting group Avalere says that makes donors skittish.

"Much as a health care company might really want to improve enrollment, they also need to make sure that they do not run afoul of politicians on either side of the aisle," Mendelson says.

If health care companies hold back, he says, it's going to be much harder to reach all of those people in all of those communities.

"The fact of the matter is that if you starve a media campaign for funding, you're not going to have the reach that you otherwise would, and that's the situation that we find ourselves in," he says.

There's another key part of this campaign: Sicker and older people without insurance may be eager to sign up Oct. 1. But to make the system work financially, young and healthy people who don't need much medical care have to get into the pool, too.

So you can expect administration officials around the country to give lots more commencement speeches this season, telling captive audiences of 20-somethings: Congratulations on your diploma. Now make sure to sign up for health coverage in the fall.