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Poached ivory is destroying wild populations of elephants and rhinos across Africa and Asia. The strong demand for ivory takes an estimated 25,000 elephant lives each year.

Now, the government of the Philippines is sending a message to poachers and smugglers, by destroying five tons of ivory confiscated in the country. On Friday, environmentalists, government officials, and the public gathered in Quezon City to witness the pulverization.

"We want to send a strong message that we're against the illegal trade of ivory, these are all contraband." says Theresa Mundita Lim, Director if the Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau of the Philippines. Her country's ivory stockpile is spread out on the ground; thousands of disembodied tusks turning a shady parking lot into an elephant graveyard.

First a steam roller crunched over the tusks, but the surprisingly durable ivory withstood the pressure until a backhoe took over, stabbing with the toothy side edge of the bucket.

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(Updated at 4:50 p.m. ET)

National Security advisor Tom Donilon tells CBS News that Washington has asked Hong Kong to turn over NSA leaker Edward Snowden under the terms of a 1998 extradition treaty between the two governments.

"Hong Kong has been a historically good partner of the United States in law enforcement matters and we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case," Donilon said.

A senior law enforcement source tells NPR's Carrie Johnson:

"Extradition can, of course, be a lengthy legal process. But we are confident, based on the strong history of law enforcement cooperation between Hong Kong and the U.S., that at the end of that process, Hong Kong will extradite Mr. Snowden."

Here's our original post:

Now that Edward Snowden is an accused spy in the U.S., how will federal prosecutors get him extradited from the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, where he's reportedly in hiding?

A day after the Department of Justice filed a criminal complaint against the former NSA contractor who leaked classified information on U.S. surveillance programs to the media, charging him with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, The Guardian newspaper says Hong Kong legislators are asking mainland China to block his extradition.

Snowden, 29, surfaced in Hong Kong last week admitting that he was the source of leaks that led to a series of Guardian exposes on the National Security Agency's data-collection programs. Since then, he has become something of a cause clbre in the Asian hub.

The U.S. and semiautonomous Hong Kong have an extradition treaty that dates to 1998.

U.S. government sources tell NPR's Carrie Johnson that there's "every indication" that Snowden is still in Hong Kong, but that authorities "want to make sure every I is dotted and T is crossed" before making any move to bring him the United States.

Carrie notes that although Snowden has been charged in a criminal complaint, extradition proceedings can't begin until he's formally indicted by a U.S. grand jury. "Depending on how Hong Kong and China play this, it could take a while," she says.

The Guardian quotes Hong Kong barrister Hectar Pub as saying the extradition could take three to five years because the U.S.-Hong Kong extradition treaty doesn't specifically cover espionage; instead, authorities there would have to come up with an equivalent charge to go forward.

And until Hong Kong authorities actually charge Snowden, he's free to leave the city.

The newspaper says:

"Snowden could claim political asylum in Hong Kong, arguing he would face torture back home. Article six of the treaty states extradition should be refused for 'an offence of a political character.'

" 'The unfairness of his trial at home and his likely treatment in custody' were important factors to consider when assessing Snowden's chances of claiming political immunity from extradition, said [Simon] Young [a law professor at the University of Hong Kong].

"Should a Hong Kong court eventually call for Snowden's extradition, Hong Kong's leader and China could still veto the decision on national security or defence grounds."

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has pledged a nationwide overhaul of public transportation, improved funding for schools and a crackdown on corruption in response to sometimes violent anti-government protests that have roiled the country for the past week.

In a 10-minute address broadcast on Friday, Rousseff broke her silence on the protests, saying she would spend more money on public transportation and divert some of the country's oil revenues to pay for education, The Associated Press reported. She also addressed widespread anger over government corruption.

"I want institutions that are more transparent, more resistant to wrongdoing," Rousseff said. "It's citizenship and not economic power that must be heard first."

But she also denounced attacks by protesters on government buildings and acknowledged concern about security ahead of a visit by Pope Francis in late July. She threatened to put the army on the streets if the violence continued.

"I assure you, we will maintain order," Rousseff said.

In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, Brazil's Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said the rising expectations of the country's emerging middle class were in part the cause of the protests.

"I think there is a widespread view that they reflect aspirations by citizens who have benefited from rising living standards for [further] improvements in their lives," Patriota said.

Although the demonstrations began as a protest against a hike in the public bus fare, The New York Times reports:

"In So Paulo, the nation's largest city, protesters [Friday] blocked roads leading to the airport and thousands rallied at a downtown plaza to protest a measure backed by conservative legislators, known as the gay cure, that would allow psychologists to treat homosexuality as a form of mental illness.

"The protests continued even though one of the main groups that had been behind the original demonstrations here said that it would not call for any more marches in So Paulo. The group indicated that it had won the concessions on bus fares it had demanded and that it was concerned that some members of allied groups, like left-wing political parties or social movements, had been singled out and beaten up at the demonstrations.

" 'We won the fight, so we are going to take time to think about what to do next,' said Rafael Siqueira, a member of the group Passe Livre, which had pushed for the rollback of a bus fare increase.' "

Southwest Airlines says some of its Saturday flights will still be affected by a network computer outage that snarled check-ins, forcing the cancellation of more than a dozen flights and temporarily grounding some 250 others – mostly on the West Coast.

Although the carrier's computer system was back up and running after Friday's problems, Southwest says there was still a backlog that could cause flight delays.

The outage cropped up late Friday, affected check-in operations, the printing of boarding passes and access to departure information, The Associated Press says.

"Our system was brought back fully online around midnight Los Angeles time," spokeswoman Michele Agnew told the AP.

Southwest was forced to cancel 14 flights systemwide, she said, but none in the Los Angeles area.

On Friday, Southwest Airlines communications manager Brad Hawkins said of 3,400 flights nationwide, about 250 flights, mostly out West, were experiencing delays because of the computer problems.

He stressed that "None of it is safety-related."

In a statement on Saturday, the airline said it was "working hard to accommodate those impacted and encourage our Customers to check their flight status prior to arriving to the airport."

Kendamas seem to be the buzz these days at elementary schools all around Sacramento. My kindergartener knew all about them when I brought it up. He said his friends have them. Now he does, too.

But kendamas aren't that easy to find. They're usually at comic book stores, Japanese grocery stores, or online. And they aren't cheap. The one I bought cost about $17.

Vendors are reporting an uptick in the Midwest now, especially in Minnesota and Illinois. Seems like it might be possible for kendamas to go viral, even with no batteries, no screen, no buttons ... just a wooden ball attached to a wooden stick with a string.

NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin weigh in on President Obama leaving controversies like the IRS and the NSA behind as he attended the G-8 summit in Europe. Back in Washington, the House OKs a far-reaching 20-week abortion ban bill. And former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) raises eyebrows saying immigrants are "more fertile" than U.S.-born citizens.

In preparation for a complete exit from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the U.S. Military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of military equipment, the Washington Post reported.

Military planners for the U.S. Army have decided not to ship back more than $7 billion of equipment — about 20 percent of the what the Army brought into Afghanistan — because the shipping costs are too high and the need for the used equipment too low. Instead, the Army is destroying the equipment in-country: shredding it, crushing it and selling it on the Afghan scrap market.

The equipment destruction is likely to raise questions in both the U.S. and Afghanistan about military planning and whether the U.S. Army should be finding ways for their vehicles and machinery to get reused. Shipping the equipment back to the U.S. or to other allied nations seems too costly, and donating it to the Afghans is complicated due to thorny rules surrounding giving equipment to other countries, the Post reported. As such, army officials have opted to destroy it.

Much of the equipment being destroyed comes in the form of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, hulking vehicles built to counter the threat of road-side bombs. MRAPs cost approximately $1 million each, and the Army has labeled that about 2,000 of the 11,000 MRAPs in Afghanistan "excess." The remaining 9,000 will be shipped out of the country for use elsewhere.

Those excess MRAPs are in the process of being dismantled at scrap yards at the four U.S. Military bases in Afghanistan. The machines are resilient and were built to withstand explosions, so breaking down each MRAP requires about 12 hours of work with special blowtorches.

Part of the reason for destroying the equipment in-country rather than transporting it elsewhere — as the Army did when withdrawing from Iraq — has to do with the fact that the geography of Afghanistan presents unique challenges for retrograde, or removing military equipment from foreign warzones.

"Afghanistan is land-locked, so everything moving in and out must go by air," said U.S. Army spokesperson Wayne Hall. "This provides challenges for us to get the equipment out."

The U.S. Army's twelve-year occupation of Afghanistan means that there is an unprecedented amount of equipment to transport out of the country.

Maj. Gen. Kurt J. Stein, head of the 1st Sustainment Command, who is overseeing the drawdown in Afghanistan, told the Washington Post that leaving Afghanistan requires the largest retrograde mission in history.

It's a miracle, though we're not quite sure of the details yet.

A Vatican official confirms that a committee of theologians has approved a second miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II's posthumous intercession — a sine qua non for sainthood.

Italian media say a Costa Rican woman was cured of a severe brain injury after her family prayed to the memory of the late pope. The Vatican is set to release details in the next week or so.

The Telegraph reports that it occurred on the very day of John Paul's beatification, on May 1, 2011.

Another miracle attributed to the former pope was approved by the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 2011. It involved the healing of a French nun, who reportedly recovered from Parkinson's disease in 2005 after praying to the late John Paul. The Catholic Church maintains that there is no medical explanation for the nun's recovery.

According to The Associated Press:

"The case now goes to a commission of cardinals and then Pope Francis. John Paul's canonization is possible in autumn to coincide with the 35th anniversary of his election, though the official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to reveal details about the case that it may be too soon."

Journalist Jonathan Alter sees the 2012 presidential contest as the most consequential election of recent times. In his new book, The Center Holds, Alter argues that President Obama's re-election prevented the country from veering sharply to the right.

Alter, who has covered eight previous presidential elections for publications such as Newsweek and The Atlantic, dissects the campaign and the events that led up to it in his book. He finds that the Obama campaign made effective use of young data geeks to microtarget voters and raise money online. And he says Republican Mitt Romney's campaign relied on Madison Avenue-style advertisers to craft a message that too often missed the mark.

By focusing on the numbers game, Alter says, the Obama campaign revolutionized more than just politics.

"There are lessons in all this that not just political campaigns but businesses are racing to learn from," Alter tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "In the past, it went the other way: Politics learned from business ... Madison Avenue values went into politics. This time, some of these techniques that are being used in politics will be increasingly used by businesses to increase sales."

The book also fills in some inside details of the frenetic campaign — from the efforts of conservative media figures to get New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie into the race to the backstory of the Florida bartender who secretly taped Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks at a fundraiser.

Alter is now a columnist for Bloomberg View and an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC.

The world's wealthiest nations are promising to fight what they call the scourge of tax evasion. This week's meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries concluded with a pledge to end the use of tax shelters by multinational corporations.

But there are still big questions about how they will make a dent in the problem.

In the aftermath of the global recession, countries all over the world have struggled with budget shortfalls. More and more of them have come to blame part of their revenue problems on one culprit — tax avoidance.

The G-8 statement this week represents a kind of doubling down on the determination of wealthy countries to take on the problem.

"If you want a low-tax economy, which I believe is fundamental to growth, you have to collect the taxes that are owed," British Prime Minister David Cameron said Tuesday. "That is only fair for companies and for people who play by the rules."

Big Questions Remain

But the G-8 statement was short on specifics about how to address the problem.

It says tax authorities in different countries should share information more readily. It also says multinational companies should be more transparent about the taxes they pay.

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Actor James Gandolfini, 51, has died, HBO and other sources confirm. The former star of the HBO series The Sopranos was reportedly on holiday in Italy when he died. The cause of death is not yet known with certainty, but HBO says the actor may have suffered a heart attack. Other reports have indicated Gandolfini had a stroke.

Update at 8:15 p.m. ET: Confirmation From HBO:

Initial reports of Gandolfini's death were confirmed to NPR by HBO, which has released a statement:

"We're all in shock and feeling immeasurable sadness at the loss of a beloved member of our family. He was special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect. He touched so many of us over the years with his humor, his warmth and his humility. Our hearts go out to his wife and children during this terrible time. He will be deeply missed by all of us."

In a statement, reports the Associated Press, Sopranos creator David Chase called Gandolfini a "genius."

"Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that," Chase said. "He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes."

Our original post continues:

Gandolfini won accolades and Emmy nominations for his portrayal of the gruff and complicated character of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mobster who was the heart of The Sopranos. The critically acclaimed show aired its last episode in 2007.

"His first break came in 1992 when he landed a role in a Broadway version of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' that starred Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange," the New York Daily News reports. "Smallish parts in major films followed — Gandolfini played a submarine crew member in Crimson Tide in 1995 and a gangland bodyguard in Get Shorty the same year.

Accepting a Golden Globe award for his work in The Sopranos' first season in 1999, Gandolfini graciously thanked the show's writers, its cast, and its creator, David Chase, "for giving someone like me the opportunity to play a part like this."

He also joked, "I have to mention my Teamster driver now, Joey Fay."

More recently, the burly actor was in the action film Zero Dark Thirty. He was also working on an upcoming CBS show, Taxi 22. Another project, Criminal Justice, is in the works for HBO.

Gandolfini is survived by his wife, Deborah Lin, and their daughter, as well as a son from his earlier marriage to Marcy Wudarski.

If you've experienced sticker shock shopping for ground beef or steak recently, be prepared for an entire summer of high beef prices.

Multi-year droughts in states that produce most of the country's beef cattle have driven up costs to historic highs. Last year, ranchers culled deep into their herds — some even liquidated all their cattle — which pushed the U.S. cattle herd to its lowest point since the 1950s.

And dry conditions this summer could cause the herd to dwindle even further. That means beef prices may continue on a steady climb, just in time for grilling season.

At Edwards Meats in Wheat Ridge, Colo., near Denver, workers divvy up the bright red ground beef into trays, sliding one into a glass display case. A laminated price tag is the final touch. Recently, the number on that slip of paper has been getting higher.

"In the last three weeks, it has really jumped," says owner Darin Edwards. "Most of our prices have gone up at least a dollar a pound or more."

Price increases are commonplace when people start firing up their backyard grills, but Edwards says this year is different. Prices for certain cuts of beef have jumped to all-time highs.

"Sometimes you throw a couple big, thick T-Bone steaks up on the scale and it's 30, 40 bucks, and [customers are] like, 'Yeah, I can't afford those,' " Edwards says.

And it's not just T-Bones. The same story goes for New York strips, tenderloins and rib-eyes.

Even with the higher prices. Edwards is absorbing some of the cost. That's not something he can keep up for long.

"If it doesn't come back down in the next couple of weeks, we'll have to adjust our prices accordingly," he says. "We just kind of bite the bullet for a little bit."

So why are prices going up? Simply put, there just isn't enough feed. Because of the drought that has been battering much of Midwest cattle country for more than a year, there's a smaller supply of hay and dense grasses. Ranchers are having a tough time finding feed, and when they do, it's more expensive.

During the winter, Gerald Schreiber, whose ranch is in Last Chance, Colo., paid more than double what he usually does for hay. He usually maintains a herd of 250 cattle, but last year he prematurely sold more than 30 of his animals, unable to justify the high feed prices. With hindsight, he says he should've culled even deeper. A combination of drought, wildfire and wind transformed Schreiber's pastures into a blanket of invasive, noxious weeds. The fields haven't recovered.

"This is pretty unpredictable country," Schreiber says. "We deal with drought a lot. You got to get the rose-colored glasses off."

Recent research shows that more than half of the country's beef cattle are in states where the pasture can't support large herds.

"A rancher has to make a decision," says Elaine Johnson, a market analyst with CattleHedging.com. "Do I buy expensive hay and try to hang on for another year? Or do I just liquidate my cows? Tighter and tighter supplies means higher and higher prices."

Those higher prices mean more people could choose to forgo burgers and steaks this summer. Sales of beef have been down so far this year, while less expensive options, like pork, are up. Johnson says consumers can expect to pay more for beef as long as dry conditions persist across the high plains.

"When you have a drought like this and have liquidated numbers significantly, it typically means that supplies are going to be reduced for two, three, four years, and it's one of the reasons why we've seen such a big increase in beef prices," Johnson says.

Most economists agree and expect prices to stay high the rest of the year. Until ranchers can build up their herds, the family barbecue will put a bigger dent in the pocketbook.

Luke Runyon reports from Colorado for KUNC and Harvest Public Media, a public radio reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food production issues. A version of this post appeared earlier on the Harvest Public Media website.

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects of the housing crisis and a recession — both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans — didn't seem to dampen a sense of optimism and overall life satisfaction among respondents. But the survey did reveal a dramatic — if not exactly surprising — split between two evenly-divided groups of respondents: 49 percent who saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good" and 50 percent who described their finances as "poor" or "not good."

This finding mirrors attitudes of African-American respondents to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Then, the stats were similar: 49 percent polled saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 51 percent considered them "poor" or "not so good."

Robert Blendon, a professor of Public Health at Harvard and one of the 2013 study's co-directors, told NPR's Kathy Lohr that many African-Americans who don't consider themselves well-situated financially still have a sense of optimism. A combined 81 percent of respondents said they would one day attain the American Dream — owning their own home, gaining financial security — or already had. Only 16 percent said they felt the dream was out of reach.

"That sense of optimism, with all the problems we found, is really a very important thing to recognize," Blendon told Lohr. "That's what carries people through life, is their sense that things can be a lot better for them in the future."

In many cases, Blendon said that this attitude stems from the fact that many of the participants said they thought they were doing better than their parents did, even amidst fears of job stability.

Fifty-six percent of blacks considered themselves better off than their parents when they were their age. Only 14 percent thought of themselves as worse-off, while 28 percent considered themselves about the same.

The split in perceptions tracks with a similar divide in attitudes throughout the rest of the poll. One of the starkest differences between the two groups was the degree of job security they reported. Fifty-eight percent of employed respondents with a negative view of their finances said they were very or somewhat concerned that they or someone in their household might lose their job. Only 32 percent of those employed respondents with positive feelings about their finances had that same worry.

Health followed a similar path: A whopping 80 percent of financially stable respondents considered themselves to have excellent or very good health. Contrast that with 64 percent of folks who felt their economic situations were not-so-good or poor.

For folks like Chinenye Oparah — who is in his 30s and has an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech — recent times have been trying. Oparah has worked in construction and in the Fayetteville, Ga., school district. Having been laid off from both jobs, he now works for himself; he got a contract to remove computer systems and projectors from schools that are closing. But it's not a full time job.

"I actually kind of like working hard," Oparah told Lohr. "But it's been a struggle to balance working hard and bringing home enough to sustain and then spending time with family, spending time with our daughter."

Still, he told Lohr he remains hopeful that things will turn around for his family.

"I'm optimistic about us," he said, "and hopeful, faithful, prayerful that something is going to work out in the very near future."

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

Canadian author Alice Munro says her writing days may be over. In an interview after winning the Trillium Book Award, Munro told the National Post that she was glad to get the award because she's "probably not going to write anymore. And, so, it's nice to go out with a bang." She continued, "Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be." This comes as a surprise from a writer who has often expressed horror at the idea of not working. Munro said in a 1994 Paris Review interview that it would represent "the beast that's lurking in the closet in old age — the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing." Asked what she would tell her disappointed readers, she responded, "Well, tell them to go read the old ones over again. There's lots of them."

In a letter posted on her blog, the Australian novelist Kathryn Heyman responds to a subscription renewal notice she received from The London Review of Books. She writes, "I had planned a simple, quiet lapse, but as you have raised the question, let me assure you that I have not forgotten to renew. Indeed, I would dearly love to renew my subscription, however, based on the tedious regularity with which you ignore female writers and female reviewers, I have to assume that my lady-money is quite simply not welcome in the man-cave of LRB."

The Apple ebook price-fixing trial is expected to wrap up Thursday with closing arguments from both sides. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who prior to the trial said she thought the government would be able to prove Apple "knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books," acknowledged Wednesday that "the issues have somewhat shifted during the course of the trial." It could take weeks or months for the final verdict to be announced.

For NPR Books, Lidia Jean Kott explores James Salter's creepy habit of comparing women to food: "In Salter, the women are experiences, storefronts, meals, but never people."

Kelsey Osgood describes the unique horror of Franz Kafka's stories: "It's easy to brush aside traditional fairy tales and their modern retellings because we have lost our belief in the overtly fabulous, but what Kafka describes becomes more frightening to us as we age. We are sure, as mature people with 401(k)s and digital subscriptions to the Times, that we will never be stalked by an amorous, sparkly vampire, but we are not sure that we won't be charged and prosecuted for a crime we aren't even sure we committed...In this way — not the bloody, but the banal — Kafka's work becomes more spooky than the original Brothers Grimm, in which Snow White's evil queen is forced to dance to death in scalding iron shoes."

Kim Thompson, one of the publishers of the alternative comic book publisher Fantagraphics, has died at age 56, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer. A major figure in the world of comics, he edited some of the world's most famous cartoonists. He was also famously crotchety — asked in a 2008 interview what he found exciting about his job, he responded, "There is always some new cartoonist, or some new work by an cartoonist, on the horizon to snap me out of my depressed torpor. And we've got such a great bunch of people working for us now here in the office ... that's energizing. That said, I wish I didn't have to answer this on a goddamn Monday morning."

In many parts of the developing world, drinking a glass of water can be deadly — especially for young children, who can die of diarrheal diseases contracted from dirty water.

So getting clean water to people in the developing world has been a top priority for aid groups for a long time. But it's been a surprisingly hard problem to solve.

For a while, aid workers largely treated clean water as an engineering problem: If there's no clean water in a village, dig a well. But when researchers actually tested the water in the homes of people who got water from clean wells, they often found contamination.

"It was a surprise," says Alex Mwaki of Care Kenya, who worked on one of the studies that found contamination. "My reaction, I would say, was, well, we still need to do more. We have not done much."

There are lots of ways water can get contaminated between the time it comes out of the well and the time someone actually drinks it. Maybe the container the family used to fetch the water wasn't clean. Or the container was clean, but the cup people used to scoop the water out wasn't. Or the water got stored in a big clay pot at the house, and kids stuck their hands in it.

All of those problems can be solved by adding just a tiny bit of chlorine, which keeps water free of germs for days. So aid workers started trying to get people to use chlorine. In Kenya today, you can buy little bottles of chlorine, made just for purifying water, for pennies.

Problem solved?

"If only it were that easy," says Evan Green-Lowe, who works in Kenya for a group called Innovations for Poverty Action. Surveys show that only a small percentage of people in Kenya buy the chlorine, even though it's cheap and widely available.

"Getting it to happen in every household every time proved to be an extraordinarily difficult task," he says.

So here's the latest iteration for helping families in rural areas get clean water: chlorine placed right next to the spring or well. It's basically an upside-down bottle of chlorine with a dispenser that releases a measured amount into the containers people use to carry water. A tiny bit is enough for 20 liters of water. It's free to use.

"It's very simple," says Green-Lowe. "A lot of its success is in its simplicity."

Success, though, is a relative term. It turns out that if you test the water in people's homes in villages where the dispensers have been installed, only 40 percent test positive for chlorine.

Some people don't like the taste; some people don't believe in it, "Sometimes you're in a rush, or you're thinking about something else and you just don't do it."

This would be frustrating, says Green-Lowe, if it weren't so familiar.

"I've had malaria five times now, he says. "I have a bed net hanging above my bed, and I don't use it."

People everywhere — in rural Kenya, in New York, wherever — just don't always do all the things we're supposed to do. The developed world has solved the water problem by essentially taking people out of the loop: We pipe clean water to everyone's houses. But it's going to be a long time before that happens in rural Kenya.

Actor James Gandolfini, 51, has reportedly died. Variety magazine reports that he suffered a "sudden stroke." The former star of the HBO series The Sopranos was reportedly in Italy when he died. HBO has confirmed the actor's death, CNN reports.

Gandolfini won accolades and Emmy nominations for his portrayal of the gruff and complicated character of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mobster who was the heart of The Sopranos. The critically acclaimed show aired its last episode in 2007.

More recently, the burly actor was in the action thriller Zero Dark Thirty. He was also working on an upcoming CBS show, Taxi 22. Another project, Criminal Justice, is in the works for HBO.

A 7-foot-tall statue of famed, lion-maned abolitionist Frederick Douglass that was dedicated Wednesday on Capitol Hill is perhaps best understood as a bronze symbol of the partisan divide in Washington and of racial politics.

The ex-slave, who later became a friend of President Abraham Lincoln, was a federal official and an important journalist of his day. It took years for a statue of him to land a spot because it became a proxy in the fight over voting rights and statehood for Washington, D.C.

District of Columbia officials years ago asked to have statues representing the district placed on display in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall just like the statues provided by the 50 states. They wanted two statues, one of Douglass and another of Pierre L'Enfant, the Frenchman who planned the layout of the district.

Republicans rebuffed the request, however, arguing that D.C. was not a state and therefore didn't rate the privilege of having representation in Statuary Hall.

The back and forth went on for years with national Democrats supporting the district, which has a nonvoting delegate in the House, for the usual reasons. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic and until recently was majority black. A politician's support for district voting rights and statehood has long been viewed by African-Americans as general solidarity with them.

For Republicans, there was little upside to the strongly Democratic district getting statehood or votes in Congress. Allowing the statues could be a step down a slippery slope since the district would receive yet one more attribute of a state.

A compromise was reached in September. Douglass, but not L'Enfant, would get a Capitol Hill spot, though in the Capitol Visitor Center, not Statuary Hall.

It probably helped the cause of Douglass' statue that he belonged to the GOP, like most abolitionists before and during the Civil War, and African-Americans after the war.

At the official dedication ceremony Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner noted that at the 1888 Republican National Convention, Douglass was the first African-American to have his name placed in nomination for the presidency. Benjamin Harrison, the eventual nominee and president, had little to worry about: Douglass got just one vote.

Allowing the Douglass statue also probably wouldn't hurt and might help the image of a Republican Party whose establishment knows it needs to attract more minority voters or at least not turn them off.

Meanwhile, Democrats like Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used the dedication event to call for the district to get a vote in Congress (Biden, Reid and Pelosi) and even statehood (Reid and Pelosi).

Douglass, who advocated for district voting rights himself, would have appreciated that. After all, he once said: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will."

The U.S. State Department releases its report on human trafficking every year, naming the countries it feels aren't doing enough to combat modern-day slavery.

The department released a new report Wednesday, and NPR's Michele Kelemen is reporting on the story for All Things Considered. One thing that jumped out at us is that the State Department wants the report to hit home this year.

Luis CdeBaca, the official in charge of the office that monitors and combats trafficking, put it this way:

"This year's report looks at things like the fishing industry – and actually raises a question that I think all of us should be asking: Which is how much of my life is impacting modern day slavery? Do I know where the shrimp is being caught or processed that is on my plate? Do I know where the cotton is coming from that's on my clothes? ... And instead of it being somebody else's problem how can I make it my problem? How can I actually do something about it?"

Faced with the threat of mutiny for what seems like the umpteenth time during his speakership, John Boehner moved to mollify fellow Republicans on Tuesday, saying immigration legislation would need the support of a majority of the House GOP before it could be brought to a floor vote.

After emerging from a meeting with House Republicans, following days of warnings by conservatives that the Ohio Republican had better not try to pass an immigration bill with mostly Democratic votes, Boehner sought to calm the roiling Republican waters.

"I also suggested to our members today that any immigration reform bill that is going to go into law ought to have a majority of both parties' support if we're really serious about making that happen," he told reporters waiting outside the meeting room. "And so I don't see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn't have majority support of Republicans."

The practice of bringing to a floor vote only legislation supported by a majority of the party is known as the Hastert rule. Denny Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was speaker from 1999 to 2007, mostly stuck to the practice of bringing to a vote only those bills with a "majority of the majority" supporting them. It was a good way to keep his political base in the House contented.

Boehner's words to the House GOP were meant to reassure Republicans opposed to provisions in the legislation the Senate is now considering — provisions that would create a citizenship pathway for people in the U.S. illegally.

In a clear shot across the bow of Boehner's speakership, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California said in an interview Monday that if the speaker let legislation reach the floor that a majority of House Republicans found objectionable, Boehner should be evicted from the speaker's office. Rohrabacher said:

"I would consider that a betrayal of the Republican members of the House and a betrayal of Republicans throughout the country. If Speaker Boehner moves forward and permits this to come to a vote even though a majority of Republicans in the House oppose whatever is coming to a vote, he should be removed as speaker."

That statement would be virtually impossible to spin, even in Washington, into anything less than a bald-faced threat.

In the past, Boehner has passed legislation most fellow House Republicans found odious, like the bill that averted the fiscal cliff. It passed in January with just 85 of 241 Republicans voting for it, causing the speaker to rely on nearly unified Democratic support for passage.

Comments he made in a recent ABC News interview caused the latest bout of concern among Republicans. The speaker described revising the nation's immigration laws as his "top priority." That led some in the GOP to surmise that he would do anything to get a bill passed, even one most of them didn't like.

There were at least two other things worth noting about Boehner's Tuesday comments. One, he prepared the ground for the argument that Democrats would be to blame if immigration legislation should fail in the House.

Some Senate and House Republicans have maintained that before they will vote for any legislation, they will need to be persuaded that it contains border controls that will need to demonstrate their effectiveness before before individuals now in the country illegally get the chance at citizenship. Democrats have generally balked at going as far on border-enforcement features. They've accused Republicans of trying to kill the legislation by creating insurmountable hurdles for it.

Boehner said:

"... I just think the White House and Senate Democrats ought to get very serious. We know that border security is absolutely essential, that — if we're going to give people confidence that we can do the rest of what's being suggested. And I frankly think that the Senate bill is weak on border security. I think the internal enforcement mechanisms are weak and the triggers are almost laughable.

"And so if they're serious about getting an immigration bill finished, I think the president and Senate Democrats ought to reach out to their Democrat — Republican colleagues to build broad bipartisan support for the bill."

Advocates of tougher voter registration standards have racked up wins in recent years — voter ID laws have taken hold across the nation, for example.

But those who believe that government should make voting as easy as possible just gained a significant victory with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision slapping down an Arizona law that required potential voters to prove their citizenship.

In its 7-2 decision, the court ruled that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called motor voter law, trumped an Arizona law passed in 2004. The state law demanded that voters produce documentation of their citizenship at the time they registered to vote.

The federal law requires those registering in federal elections only to attest to their citizenship. The process is simple enough that people can register by postcard.

The high court's decision on the Arizona law put an extra bounce in the step of officials at civil and voting-rights organizations.

"We are very, very pleased with the outcome today after several long years of litigation up through the district court and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court," said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was among officials from several voting-rights groups who spoke with reporters in a teleconference. "This is not just a victory [for the individuals on whose behalf MALDEF filed suit] but it's a victory for voter registration organizations."

After the Arizona law took effect in 2006, voter registration fell 44 percent in Maricopa County, the state's most populous county, which includes the city of Phoenix. The higher standard not only kept many people of Latino ancestry from registering — Perales told NPR's Nina Totenberg in an interview that 80 percent of those whose voter registrations were rejected were non-Hispanic whites.

But the decision may not have been an unalloyed victory for voting-rights groups. Rick Hasen, an election law expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the Supreme Court's ruling left states with the ability to wipe the smile off the faces of voting-rights advocates. In an analysis of the court's decision, Hasen wrote:

"To begin with, Justice Scalia provided a road map for Arizona ultimately to win this very case when it goes back to the lower courts. The court wrote that Arizona should go back to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to ask it to reconsider its request to include the citizenship requirement on the federal form."

Of course, the little-known Election Assistance Commission actually exists more in theory than reality now, as all four of its posts are vacant — a casualty of Washington's partisan animus.

That led another California law professor, Tom Caso at Chapman University, who once served on The Federalist Society's board, to say in a statement:

"The Supreme Court today opened the door to noncitizen voting ... by striking down Arizona's voter registration proof of citizenship requirement. The Court conceded that the Constitution granted Arizona the authority to restrict voting to citizens, but ruled that Arizona's demand for documentation conflicted with a federal voter registration law. In order to ensure that only citizens are allowed to vote, according to the Court, Arizona must submit an application to a federal Commission that has no members for permission to change the federal voter registration application. The Court conceded that it may not have the power to require the Commission, which has no members, to take action on Arizona's application."

While important, the Arizona case isn't the superstar voting-rights case of the current term. That would be Shelby County v. Holder, which challenges Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section requires certain state and local governments with a history of discrimination against minority voters, particularly African-Americans, to receive Justice Department approval before they change their election laws. That so-called pre-clearance provision could be struck down. The conservatives on the court appeared to be leaning in that direction during the oral arguments.

But Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she hoped the Arizona decision augured well for the court upholding Section 5.

"They do both fundamentally serve the same purpose," she said of the motor voter and Section 5 laws in the conference call with reporters. "And you would hope if the court was being consistent that they would uphold this law because they serve the same purpose of guaranteeing to Americans, to all citizens, the right to vote unfettered by onerous practices — be they based on discrimination or be they based on unnecessary and unreasonable burdens on the right to vote."

If the US Airways-American Airlines merger announced earlier this year is approved, the combined airline would control two-thirds of the takeoff and landing slots at Reagan National Airport, outside Washington, D.C.

The government could force the airline to give up some of those slots as a condition of the merger. But lawmakers warn that could have consequences for some small- and medium-sized cities. And, not coincidentally, it could affect flight plans for lawmakers themselves.

Reagan National Airport is just a short taxi ride away from Capitol Hill. It's a standing joke that lawmakers are smelling the jet fumes as they rush out the door at the end of the week, heading for their flights home.

So it's easy to be skeptical about the letter signed by more than 100 lawmakers urging the Justice Department, which is reviewing the merger, to preserve the nonstop flights from Reagan National to small- and medium-sized airports across the country.

But Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud of Maine — who has heard this before — says it's really not about the lawmakers.

"It has nothing to do with lawmakers' convenience and everything to do with representing small communities that rely on these direct flights for economic benefits," Michaud says. "This is a bipartisan response to what we have heard from our constituents back home in the district."

Michaud represents Maine's 2nd District and lives about 65 miles from Bangor, which has three daily nonstops to the nation's capital.

Tony Caruso, director of Bangor International Airport, says those flights are pretty full.

"There's quite a bit of travelers. It's a good mix of both business and leisure travel," he says. "The load factor — which is basically the number of seats sold on those aircraft — they average over 80 percent. Certainly we think these flights are critical to the overall health and growth of, certainly, the Bangor region and Maine economy."

The Justice Department has forced airlines to divest themselves of slots as a condition of approving past mergers. At a Senate hearing on the proposed US Airways-American deal, Douglas Parker, the chairman and CEO of US Airways, warned that smaller cities will lose out if the combined airline has to give up slots at Reagan National.

"The slots that will be utilized by the new American are used to provide service to smaller communities that, if other airlines were given those slots, they would not go to similar-sized communities — they'd be flown to larger markets," he said. "I think that'd be bad for consumers."

Parker said the new airline would likely give up its least profitable routes from Reagan National if it had to give up slots — say, to places like Bangor — and keep the slots for flights to more populous cities. And the airlines that won the new slots would not necessarily have to fly to the smaller cities either.

Diana Moss, director of the American Antitrust Institute, says this points to a problem with airline mergers.

"All of these legacy mergers are driving traffic to large hubs at the expense of service to smaller communities," she says. "I think this particular problem at National — which is just one of multiple hubs that are affected by this — I think this is where the rubber meets the road. Can you have a merger of this size with this competitive impact and still be able to fix it?"

Congress has a long history of involving itself in the workings of its favorite airport — from long-haul flights to Phoenix instituted at the urging of Arizona Sen. John McCain to noise and late-night restrictions urged by members of the local Maryland and Virginia delegations.

Whether lawmakers can influence the process this time will soon become clear. The Justice Department is thought likely to rule on the proposed airline merger sometime this summer.

NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.

If you go onto a site like Artnet or Saatchi Online, you can shop for art by price, style or even size. It's not that different from buying a mutual fund on the Web. This suits Cappy Price just fine. She's a former Wall Street portfolio manager who now consults with clients about art as an alternative asset. She loves art for its beauty, but she also says it's an investable asset — one that wasn't really accessible to ordinary people until recently.

"The Internet is driving the ability of the masses to do their own research, do their own due diligence just as they do with a stock — really enabling individuals to determine and place their own value on individual pieces of art," Price says.

Why invest in art? One reason, Price says, is that fine art has a proven track record as a good choice during hard times. "It outperforms in times of economic turmoil and trouble. It has outperformed during all of the wars of the 20th century. It's outperformed during the last 27 recessions."

Like any other asset, the market for art goes through ups and downs. Over the past 60 years, the total return on art has been very similar to the return on the S&P 500-stock index, says Mike Moses, a retired New York University business school professor who co-created the Mei Moses World All Art Index. The index tracks repeat auction sales of fine art.

"If you use the last 30 years, the S&P substantially outperforms art," Moses says. "If you look at the most recent eight [to] 10 years, art has outperformed the S&P."

For paintings in my price range — we're talking a few hundred dollars — there's no Mei Moses index, no record of auction sales to use as a guide. So I have no idea whether it's a smart move financially for me to buy art. But I do know this: Art is different than other investments. It's there in your house, part of your life.

"You are telling people something about yourself when you hang it," Moses says. "And therefore, I think that emotional investment gives you a certain tie to that work that you don't find in other objects that you buy."

More In This Series

Dollar For Dollar: Adventures In Investing

How To Invest In Real Estate Without Being A Landlord

Get recipes for Strawberry-Apricot Pie, Broiled Apricots With Honey Mascarpone, Apricot-Anise Jam and Cheryl's Apricot Fragipane Galette.

Whether it's a free upgrade on a hotel room or skipping ahead in the check-in line, many businesses give preferential treatment to some customers, hoping to make them more loyal. The practice often works — but a new study suggests that when we get perks we didn't earn, negative feelings can result. And they can make a surprise deal a little less sweet.

That's the gist of a study to be published later this year in the Journal of Consumer Research, with the forthright title "Consumer Reaction to Unearned Preferential Treatment."

"The current research demonstrates that, although receiving unearned preferential treatment does generate positive reactions, it is not always an entirely pleasurable experience," write the study's authors, Lan Jiang, Joandrea Hoegg, and Darren W. Dahl.

The displeasing aspects of a treat tend to peak, they write, when the perks are given in public, in front of other customers who are no different than the recipient of the business's generosity.

"We propose that receiving something that others have just as much right to receive can activate concerns about negative evaluations, reducing the satisfaction with the preferential treatment," write the researchers, who teach marketing at business schools at the University of Oregon and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The study's authors found that "satisfaction with receiving preferential treatment can be restored if the observer who does not receive such treatment reacts positively to the recipient's good fortune or if the observer is of a higher status than the recipient."

That's right. The test subjects enjoyed "the positive experience of 'beating' a superior'" so much, the authors say, that it brought "increased overall satisfaction."

It also helps if nobody's looking. To test that theory, the researchers conducted experiments to test "feelings of social discomfort" and try to determine where they come from. They found that even in the most seemingly fair context — a random drawing — the winner felt best about it if they were alone.

All of the tests placed participants in situations in which one person received a surprise bonus. In one case, a booth that was dispensing free product samples suddenly gave one subject more than the others. That was welcomed — especially if no one else was around.

"It's like they wanted to get out of there," co-author JoAndrea Hoegg tells The Globe and Mail. "It's the fear of negative evaluation. If you're getting something you don't deserve, you're thrilled – as long as no one is watching you."

All of this isn't meant to imply that businesses should stop giving people free perks, the researchers say. The trick is to be sure all customers know the deal — and why they're not getting it. Other options include using scratch-off game tabs and loyalty emails, which can be kept private, to connect with customers.

Such steps, they say, "would minimize the potential for negative emotions."

Let's play a game. Quickly name three philosophers of any historical era and write them down. If you are really ambitious, name five.

Take your time and think about it. It's OK. I'll wait.

Now look at your names. Were any of the men or women you wrote down born east of Afghanistan? Where any of the names of Indian, Chinese or Japanese origin? If you are like most Westerners (myself included), your list only included Westerners. Odds are your list had guys like Plato, Aristotle and Kant on it (note the rarity of women on the lists too, something Tania got into yesterday). Such geographic provincialism in the tools of our thinking raises some profound issues.

Is it really possible that the civilizations of the "other" hemisphere have nothing useful to say about value, the categories of experience or the nature of mind? If not, what does it mean that the only non-Western philosopher most people can name is the Confucius?

An excellent piece by Justin Smith in The Stone, laid out the roots of maintaining such a divide between "philosophy" and "non-Western philosophy":

Non-Western philosophy is typically represented in philosophy curricula in a merely token way. Western philosophy is always the unmarked category, the standard in relation to which non-Western philosophy provides a useful contrast.

On Monday we told you about allegations that America's potato growers had banded together in a price-fixing Potato Cartel.

The allegations we described come from a civil lawsuit filed by the Associated Wholesale Grocers against the United Potato Growers of America, a group whose members produce the vast majority of the country's spuds. The lawsuit alleges, in part:

"As a result of these efforts, by the summer of 2008, according to the Idaho Potato Commission, a ten pound bag of potatoes cost consumers $15 — up $6 over 2007."

In the past decade, Mexico's tech industry has flourished, growing three times faster than the global average. Most of that growth has been fueled by demand from the United States. But as Mexico's startups strive to make it in foreign markets, they say they need more engineers and ways to finance their growth.

Softtek, Mexico's biggest technology services company, spans four continents and provides software support to a client base that includes Fortune 500 companies. The business sector is growing rapidly in Mexico, thanks in large part to the country's proximity to the United States.

"I think it's safe to say that without the U.S., the Mexico market would not be doing very well," says Morgan Yeates, an analyst with the IT consulting firm Gartner.

A Focus On The U.S. Market

Yeates says three-quarters of Mexico's tech services are focused on the U.S. and large, global companies — such as Wal-Mart or Coca-Cola — that need help managing massive computer databases. For years, India and China have been the main providers, but that's changing.

"More and more partnerships are happening between the U.S. and Mexico," Yeates says.

U.S. companies tend to mesh better with Mexican providers. Time zones are more compatible, and Mexico is better able to serve a growing Hispanic market within the United States.

But it's not all about IT support and services. It's also about creating original software. Publish 88 is one of many tech startups popping up across Mexico. The company licenses software to print publishers seeking a multimedia presence.

“ We are driving with our hand brake on.

High-tech spying with satellites. Intimidation. Price fixing.

Sound like the makings of a Hollywood thriller? These are actually among the allegations being thrown about in a federal court case against America's alleged "Potato Cartel." It's enough to make Mr. Potato Head blush.

A civil lawsuit that last week shifted into U.S. district court in Idaho — America's potato country — alleges that the United Potato Growers of America has become a veritable OPEC of spuds. The group's members, who produce about 75 percent of the potatoes grown in this country, are accused of illegally conspiring to inflate 'tater prices.

The allegations, which the potato growers deny, are being lobbed by the Associated Wholesale Grocers, which represents more than 1,900 retailers, according to its website. The grocers group is based in Kansas, where the suit was originally filed this spring.

In their lawsuit, the grocers accuse Big Potato of enforcing its pricing schemes through a variety of strong-arm, high-tech means, including using GPS systems and satellite imagery of farmland to make sure farmers aren't planting more spuds than they're supposed to. They were "using Spudnik, if you will, from the sky," AP reporter John Miller, who recently wrote about the case, joked with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. Growers who violated the production limits, the suit alleges, were fined $100 per acre.

At issue is whether the potato growers were engaging in predatory conduct or merely running a smart cooperative that helped its members avoid the cycle of boom and bust in the potato biz. According to its website, United Potato Growers of America formed in 2005, following the creation a year earlier of an Idaho cooperative with a mission to "manage their potato supply, matching it to demand to help their growers receive a reasonable price for their product."

Mission accomplished, it would seem: In 2004, AP's Miller says, a 10-pound bag of potatoes sold for about $8 or $9; by 2006, he says, that price had shot up to $15 or so. (Update: Some of you have noted that these prices sound too high. Here's what the lawsuit alleges: "In 2005-06, UPGI helped erase 6.8 million cwt. [hundredweight] of potatoes from the U.S. and Canadian markets. This helped drive up the market price over 48 percent.")

Now, under a 1922 law known as the Capper-Volstead Act, agricultural producers are allowed to band together to more efficiently market their products. And the potato folks clearly think they're on the right side of the law.

In a statement, UPGA told NPR: "United Potato Grower's goal has been to help growers provide quality potatoes at reasonable prices to American consumers. We have always acted openly and within the bounds of the law. We are confident in our legal position and look forward to a favorable outcome in court."

But in recent years, the Justice Department has been scrutinizing just how far such antitrust exemptions should apply to large modern agricultural operations.

And the current lawsuit is quite similar to another lawsuit filed against the potato co-op back in 2010. The judge in that case, Miller says, rejected a motion to throw the case out of court. Instead, the judge says it remains an open question just how far growers can stretch Capper-Volstead's antitrust protections.

You can hear Robert Siegel's interview with John Miller by clicking on the audio link at the top of this page.

"There's a scene set at CIA headquarters at Langley. So I was out at a CIA Christmas party — they do a big holiday party every year. They, needless to say, will not let you whip out your phone and take pictures when you're out there, but afterward in the parking lot, [I] raced back out, got out my reporter's notebook and started sketching. And this is late at night. I'm out in the parking lot and I suddenly feel this blinding light in my face and I look up and it's CIA security, who reach down and say, 'Can we ask what you're doing, ma'am?' and looked down, and I'm drawing this very detailed drawing of all the entrances and exits to the headquarters. So that took a phone call or two to sort out."

On how her real CIA contacts inspired a particularly cynical CIA character

"A few of my old sources at [the] CIA who I asked to read early copies of this, one of them told me that there was a little betting game going at Langley over which real-life CIA spook that character might be based on. He ventured a couple of guesses and I said I would be a fool to confirm or deny any of those. So it's a bit of a composite.

"By definition, a life in the CIA — in the clandestine service in particular — is a very strange one. You're being asked to go out in the world; you're being asked, by definition, to break laws in the country you serve in; you're being asked to lie, sometimes even to the closest members of your family. I think it's hard to maintain a great sense of optimism after decades and decades of doing that."

On the widespread belief that an attack on the U.S. is coming

"In my years covering national security, every time you actually sit down and have a longer conversation with people who are involved in counterterrorism and national security and you ask them, 'What keeps you awake at night?' ... the answer I got over and over and over through the years was the idea that some radical group could get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction.

"...: In my experience, the higher [the] level of security clearance of the people you're talking to, the more worried they are about this. One of the characters who I have in the book, who works at [the] CIA, at one point tells my heroine, 'Look, Pakistan is a country with more terrorists per square mile than another country on earth, and it's a country that is increasing its nuclear weapons stockpile faster than any nation on earth.' And he kind of laughs and says, 'What could possibly go wrong?' "

On whether she worried about the depiction of Muslims in her novel

"I did, but I would also say that many of the non-Muslims in this book come across pretty bad. There's very few — in fact I can't think of any — sincerely and 100 percent positive, nice [people] in this book. Everyone has their complexities."

On why she made her main character a rookie

"I thought it would be kind of fun to follow her as she learns how to do this. I mean, this is a path I had trod. Nobody's born knowing how to report on national security, and I certainly had covered the diplomatic beat and done some foreign news reporting, but that is actually a very different thing from covering the intelligence beat. When you switch over to covering the CIA, they don't do press releases, you can't wander around Langley, they don't tell you when they're traveling — even if you happen to find out, you're certainly not invited to travel on the plane as a reporter. There's no directory that you can access and find out what anybody's phone number is, or title. So it was really learning to do a very, very different type of reporting, and I had fun watching Alex James evolve along that path as she figures out: How do you make any progress in this world? You're chasing a huge story. You have a feeling something is out there, but it is really feeling around in the dark."

Read an excerpt of Anonymous Sources

Last Thursday, the NFL announced a policy change in which only clear plastic bags would be allowed into stadiums — one per person. Nothing they can't see through. The league says that the change is meant to ensure safety while speeding up security checks and preventing gate backups, which sounds good enough at the outset.

In the handful of days since, this has largely been framed as an issue affecting women, who won't be allowed to bring purses into the stadium anymore. Others have noted in online discussions that it might make it easier for stadiums to spot contraband food and booze, thus protecting one of the major revenue streams inside the facility.

And, of course, quite predictably, the NFL announced it would be selling official team-branded clear tote bags of exactly the kind and size that will pass under the policy. Handy! (Do they come in pink?)

No camera bags, no seat cushions, fanny packs ... you get the idea.

It's interesting that the league has chosen this moment to crack down considerably on fans. As we've discussed in this space before, it's harder and harder for normal humans to even afford to attend NFL games. (If you care about this and still haven't watched the documentary America's Parking Lot, it's available on demand and I do highly recommend it.) It doesn't necessarily seem like creating echoes of airport security is likely to make people particularly enthusiastic, even fans who understand that everyone wants games to be safe.

We have a curious drive to make ourselves completely secure in large crowds, despite the fact that it's awfully difficult to do. Within a secure perimeter (like a stadium), searches and checks of various kinds might make people feel safer, but something like an NFL game already presents tremendous opportunities for mischief if anyone was so inclined. And there are some situations like diaper bags that would indeed seem to present challenges.

But on the question of purses specifically, it seems rather quaint to suggest that women have substantially different needs to privately transport flotsam and jetsam into a football game (or in any other public space they'll be in for a limited time) than men do. Women have raised the issue of feminine-specific products they might wish to carry with them, but the fact that small, hand-sized clutch bags are OK seems like it might take care of that part, given that football games last a few hours, not a week. And even if not, it might be socially advantageous to get past the idea that there is something untoward about a woman between 15 and 50 being seen with a product used perhaps 20 percent of the time by most women between 15 and 50. (Pardon me, you can come back now if you fainted right there.)

What many of us carry in our bags on a day-to-day basis — a wallet, a brush, a tiny hairspray, some crumpled receipts, somebody's business card, half a roll of Life Savers, some gum, an umbrella, an extra pair of shoes, a shopping list, a paperback book (this is just my bag, understand) — we could certainly either leave at home or carry in a plastic bag. I'm not sure the need for women to retain a large and mysterious purse is about need as much as it is about not wanting anybody to see that there's half a wrapped-up granola bar in one of the pockets and some earbuds we can't figure out how to untangle in another one.

However you feel about security checks and safety and the ability of clear plastic bags to make you safer, we're probably all equally entitled to drag stuff we don't need all over the place because we don't want to throw it out before we leave home. USA! USA!

(h/t Metafilter)

About The E-book

Italy has secured its place in the global diet with the likes of espresso, cappuccino, pasta and pizza.

The latest addition to the culinary lexicon is ... gelato, the Italian version of ice cream.

And despite tough economic times, gelato-making is a booming business.

At Anzola dell'Emilia, a short drive from the Italian city of Bologna, people from all over the world are lining up for courses in gelato-making.

This is the headquarters of Carpigiani, the world's biggest gelato machine maker. Next door are the Carpigiani Gelato University and Museum of Gelato Culture and Technology.

A guide explains that gelato has its roots in ancient Mesopotamia, where mountain snow was mixed with fruit and beer for refreshment. She then points to a medieval document, the first written recipe for shrb, the Arabic word from which sherbet derives.

Creamy gelato can be dated to 16th century Florence, where it was invented by an alchemist in the court of the powerful Medici family. Catherine de Medici introduced the delicacy in France after she married into the French royal family.

The museum wall is covered with quotes on the joys of gelato — the French philosopher Voltaire said, it's so sublime, it's a wonder it's not illegal.

Enlarge image i

This week, the Internet radio broadcaster Pandora made what seems like a backward move — technologically speaking. Pandora purchased a local radio station in Rapid City, S.D. The company says it's aiming to get the more favorable royalty rates given to terrestrial broadcasters, but the move has songwriters and composers up in arms.

Blake Morgan is an independent musician whose "Better Angels" was among a number of his songs that got some 28,000 plays on Pandora. "The song earned $1.62 in royalties over a 90-day period on Pandora," he says, "which is a very typical rate."

If his song were played over iHeart Radio — a streaming service owned by Clear Channel — he would get paid even less. That's because Clear Channel, which owns hundreds of terrestrial radio stations — pays the same amount in royalties for online streaming that it does for broadcasting the same songs. Pandora attorney Christopher Harrison says that's not fair.

"Pandora shouldn't be discriminated against simply because we don't own a radio station," he says. So, this week Pandora purchased KXMZ, a small adult contemporary station on the main street in Rapid City — population 70,000 — in an effort to get the rate enjoyed by iHeart Radio.

Royalty rates are negotiated mostly with rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI, which represent hundreds of thousands of songwriters and music publishers. Back when rates were established, playing a song on the radio was considered a free advertisement for a record. Since rights holders were getting money from record sales, they got less from radio royalties. Paul Williams, the president of ASCAP, says broadcasters pay the same in royalties for radio and streaming because those streams account for a tiny portion of their audience.

"The fact is," he says, "they're very, very different models. Internet radio and terrestrial radio use music and generate revenue in different ways."

He says Pandora's purchase of KXMZ isn't going to reduce its rates. "This is what I would refer to as a stunt — a way to do an end run to reduce the price of what they pay just one more little notch."

It should be said that ASCAP and Pandora are already in court battling over what the Internet radio service claims are unfair business practices.

Pandora, which is the No. 1 Internet radio service, saw more than $125 million last quarter in revenues — 55 percent more than the year before. But the company still isn't profitable, in part because it pays over 60 percent of its revenues to acquire music. Harrison says if Pandora gets into the radio business it should pay the same rate as Clear Channel does for its iHeart Radio.

"From our perspective, what we're trying to do is make sure that we operate at parity with our biggest competitors," he says. "If iHeart Radio's personalized Internet radio service pays a particular rate, we think we're entitled to operate under that same rate."

But the future is clearly in Internet radio services like Pandora. According to a survey by the NPD Group, people under 35 spent a quarter of their listening time on the Internet in 2012 — up 17 percent from the year before. Time spent listening to radio went down 2 percent.

At the same time, people are buying less music. Musician Blake Morgan says the only way for him to make a living going forward is for streaming services to pay a fair rate.

"I have a new record coming out — most people have new records coming out," he says. "These are things that we've worked on for months, if not years, and we're not looking to be paid unfairly. We're simply looking for a fair working wage for the music that we make."

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren sent out emails to musicians trying to get them behind Pandora's attempts to even the rates between terrestrial and Internet radio. Morgan wrote back to Westegren furious: "He cashes in a million dollars of stock every month on the first of the month and he's done so over the same 14-month period that recording artists like me earned $15.75."

That's not likely to change anytime soon. The issue of Internet radio royalty rates will almost certainly wind up in court.

Landing a job at a summer camp or at an amusement park is a rite of passage for many young Americans. Those jobs also appeal to foreigners participating in a cultural exchange using J-1 visas. But with U.S. youth unemployment at 25 percent, Congress is now taking a close look at the J-1 visa exchange program.

This visa category was created decades ago to promote cultural exchange. Overseas applicants go through an American company that sponsors, screens and places them in jobs. Most work as camp counselors, au pairs or at amusement parks. Participants must return home afterward.

Joe Davies, one of more than 170,000 such workers who are in the U.S. at any given time on a J-1 visa, came from the United Kingdom to learn about a new culture.

"I wanted to travel when I left education," he says. "I wasn't too sure on what I wanted to do, and at the time I didn't have much money to go out and just work my way around the world. So I looked into the Camp America program."

Now, he works as a lifeguard at a performing arts camp called French Woods in upstate New York. Beth Schaefer, part owner of French Woods, says the camp hires about half of its 400 employees from other countries. Foreign workers don't take jobs away from Americans, Schaefer says. In fact, they are helping to make the camp a success, she says, and that helps preserve jobs for everyone.

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Italy has secured its place in the global diet with the likes of espresso, cappuccino, pasta and pizza.

The latest addition to the culinary lexicon is ... gelato, the Italian version of ice cream.

And despite tough economic times, gelato-making is a booming business.

At Anzola dell'Emilia, a short drive from the Italian city of Bologna, people from all over the world are lining up for courses in gelato-making.

This is the headquarters of Carpigiani, the world's biggest gelato machine maker. Next door are the Carpigiani Gelato University and Museum of Gelato Culture and Technology.

A guide explains that gelato has its roots in ancient Mesopotamia, where mountain snow was mixed with fruit and beer for refreshment. She then points to a medieval document, the first written recipe for shrb, the Arabic word from which sherbet derives.

Creamy gelato can be dated to 16th century Florence, where it was invented by an alchemist in the court of the powerful Medici family. Catherine de Medici introduced the delicacy in France after she married into the French royal family.

The museum wall is covered with quotes on the joys of gelato — the French philosopher Voltaire said, it's so sublime, it's a wonder it's not illegal.

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Last Thursday, the NFL announced a policy change in which only clear plastic bags would be allowed into stadiums — one per person. Nothing they can't see through. The league says that the change is meant to ensure safety while speeding up security checks and preventing gate backups, which sounds good enough at the outset.

In the handful of days since, this has largely been framed as an issue affecting women, who won't be allowed to bring purses into the stadium anymore. Others have noted in online discussions that it might make it easier for stadiums to spot contraband food and booze, thus protecting one of the major revenue streams inside the facility.

And, of course, quite predictably, the NFL announced it would be selling official team-branded clear tote bags of exactly the kind and size that will pass under the policy. Handy! (Do they come in pink?)

No camera bags, no seat cushions, fanny packs ... you get the idea.

It's interesting that the league has chosen this moment to crack down considerably on fans. As we've discussed in this space before, it's harder and harder for normal humans to even afford to attend NFL games. (If you care about this and still haven't watched the documentary America's Parking Lot, it's available on demand and I do highly recommend it.) It doesn't necessarily seem like creating echoes of airport security is likely to make people particularly enthusiastic, even fans who understand that everyone wants games to be safe.

We have a curious drive to make ourselves completely secure in large crowds, despite the fact that it's awfully difficult to do. Within a secure perimeter (like a stadium), searches and checks of various kinds might make people feel safer, but something like an NFL game already presents tremendous opportunities for mischief if anyone was so inclined. And there are some situations like diaper bags that would indeed seem to present challenges.

But on the question of purses specifically, it seems rather quaint to suggest that women have substantially different needs to privately transport flotsam and jetsam into a football game (or in any other public space they'll be in for a limited time) than men do. Women have raised the issue of feminine-specific products they might wish to carry with them, but the fact that small, hand-sized clutch bags are OK seems like it might take care of that part, given that football games last a few hours, not a week. And even if not, it might be socially advantageous to get past the idea that there is something untoward about a woman between 15 and 50 being seen with a product used perhaps 20 percent of the time by most women between 15 and 50. (Pardon me, you can come back now if you fainted right there.)

What many of us carry in our bags on a day-to-day basis — a wallet, a brush, a tiny hairspray, some crumpled receipts, somebody's business card, half a roll of Life Savers, some gum, an umbrella, an extra pair of shoes, a shopping list, a paperback book (this is just my bag, understand) — we could certainly either leave at home or carry in a plastic bag. I'm not sure the need for women to retain a large and mysterious purse is about need as much as it is about not wanting anybody to see that there's half a wrapped-up granola bar in one of the pockets and some earbuds we can't figure out how to untangle in another one.

However you feel about security checks and safety and the ability of clear plastic bags to make you safer, we're probably all equally entitled to drag stuff we don't need all over the place because we don't want to throw it out before we leave home. USA! USA!

(h/t Metafilter)

If economists were cheerleaders, their favorite shout-out might be: "What do we want? Growth! When do we want it? Now!"

They won't actually shout those words, but they may be thinking them as global leaders meet this week for a G-8 summit. Economists are hoping that at the gathering in Northern Ireland, leaders of eight major economies will discuss expanding global trade and investment to spur job creation.

"The world needs growth," says Scott Miller, a trade-policy expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group.

Too many countries have legions of unemployed people, but too few tools to boost job creation, he said. That's because their leaders are trying to cut government deficits, limiting their ability to fund "stimulus" programs. At the same time, central bankers can't lower interest rates further because they already have done lots of slashing.

So if you can't spend government money or cut interest rates, where can you find a hot poker to jab the economy and get it moving?

"Trade is where the growth is now," Miller said Friday at a gathering of economists and trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Miller and the other participants were pouring over new data put together by institute.

The study's conclusion was: "Increased trade means more jobs in the export sector, and export jobs are generally better paid than jobs in other sectors of the economy."

Economists say examples abound. Here's just one: Honda Accords built in Marysville, Ohio, are shipped to South Korea. The Buckeye plant now has 4,400 workers and is undergoing a $23 million expansion.

Europe

Obama Begins European Trip With G-8 Summit In Ireland

If economists were cheerleaders, their favorite shout-out might be: "What do we want? Growth! When do we want it? Now!"

They won't actually shout those words, but they may be thinking them as global leaders meet this week for a G-8 summit. Economists are hoping that at the gathering in Northern Ireland, leaders of eight major economies will discuss expanding global trade and investment to spur job creation.

"The world needs growth," says Scott Miller, a trade-policy expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group.

Too many countries have legions of unemployed people, but too few tools to boost job creation, he said. That's because their leaders are trying to cut government deficits, limiting their ability to fund "stimulus" programs. At the same time, central bankers can't lower interest rates further because they already have done lots of slashing.

So if you can't spend government money or cut interest rates, where can you find a hot poker to jab the economy and get it moving?

"Trade is where the growth is now," Miller said Friday at a gathering of economists and trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Miller and the other participants were pouring over new data put together by institute.

The study's conclusion was: "Increased trade means more jobs in the export sector, and export jobs are generally better paid than jobs in other sectors of the economy."

Economists say examples abound. Here's just one: Honda Accords built in Marysville, Ohio, are shipped to South Korea. The Buckeye plant now has 4,400 workers and is undergoing a $23 million expansion.

Europe

Obama Begins European Trip With G-8 Summit In Ireland

Miguelo Rada doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd have extra cash. He just spent 32 years in prison, he lives in a halfway house in West Harlem, and his current income comes only from public assistance.

He uses food stamps for food, wears hand-me-down clothes and buys almost nothing. He is also an unofficial bank.

"If somebody asks me, 'Can I borrow $20?' If I have it I'll say, 'Here!' " he says.

This kind of borrowing is one way people do what economists call "consumption smoothing" – basically making spending more regular, even when income is not.

Some people use credit cards or banks to smooth consumption. Others use each other, says Jonathan Morduch, an NYU professor, who studies how ordinary people make ends meet.

"Sometimes we do see people who say, 'I'm getting my money on the 17th, you're getting your money on the 2nd,' and they actually split their checks," he says.

Rada says the people he's lending to often have bad credit, so they can't borrow from banks. His version of a credit check is asking people "What's the problem? Is there a way out?" His ledger, he keeps in his head. And he says he doesn't charge interest.

Rada also accepts deposits for people like his brother, who have a hard time managing their own money. "I say, 'You want me to hold something for you?' So he gave me a hundred, and I held his hundred."

A while later, when his brother came back for the money, "I asked him, 'What's going on? What do you need this for?' " Rada says. "He told me, 'I gotta take care of this bill,' and I went with him."

There are downsides to informal lending. Borrowers don't build up a credit history that allows them to get credit cards and formal loans. And borrowing from friends and family can be a downer.

"When you put family in, then they have the right to critique," says Tamara Bullock, a funeral director in Harlem.

Bullock is part of a bank-like savings club called a sou-sou. In the last one Bullock was in, 13 people promised to pitch in $100 each every two weeks. And every two weeks, one member of the group got $1,300.

Bullock says she loves sou-sous because they force her to save. "There's no 'ifs' and 'buts' because other people are depending on you," she says.

Bullock has been working her way out of deep debt. When she got her most recent $1,300 from the sou-sou, she used it to pay off a debt to a collection agency.

But it isn't always about getting out of debt; a while back, Bullock and her colleague Patricia Hamilton used some of their sou-sou money to go sky diving. Hamilton wants to celebrate her 62nd birthday by taking Bullock sky diving again with her next sou-sou payout. Bullock is trying to get out of it.

For more on Jonathan Morduch's work on how people make ends meet, see the U.S. Financial Diaries Project.

Mortgage rates have seen a relatively sharp rise this month. The average 30-year fixed-rate loan hit 4 percent earlier in June — a big jump from the record lows of recent years. Some investors are now concerned that the housing recovery could be stifled if rates continue to rise quickly.

White House economic adviser Alan Krueger took some ribbing from his boss this week. President Obama noted that Krueger will soon be leaving Washington to go back to his old job, teaching economics at Princeton.

"And now that Alan has some free time, he can return to another burning passion of his: 'Rockanomics,' the economics of rock and roll," the president said. "This is something that Alan actually cares about."

In fact, Krueger gave a speech this week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where he said the music business offers valuable lessons about the broader U.S. economy.

For More

Read Alan Krueger's full speech

As it turns out, prime urban parking can be almost as valuable as a single-family home. A Boston woman bought two parking spaces for $560,000 at auction Thursday, winning a tough bidding war that increased by the tens of thousands at each turn.

The buyer, Lisa Blumenthal, said the spots will be used for guests and workers, at the hefty price of $280,000 each — nearly 90 percent of the worth of the median sales price of a single-family home in Massachusetts.

The price tag for the spots on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue comes close to, but doesn't break, the record for a single parking spot. Five blocks away on Commonwealth, a single spot sold for $300,000 in 2009.

The spots aren't the only ones to fetch a high price in the city's ritzy but parking-challenged Back Bay area. The Boston Globe reports:

"Two tandem spots a block from the Public Garden on Commonwealth Avenue sold for $200,000 last summer, and a spot on Marlborough Street went for $250,000 in December, according to the real estate firm Cabot & Co."

Landing a job at a summer camp or at an amusement park is a rite of passage for many young Americans. Those jobs also appeal to foreigners participating in a cultural exchange using J-1 visas. But with U.S. youth unemployment at 25 percent, Congress is now taking a close look at the J-1 visa exchange program.

This visa category was created decades ago to promote cultural exchange. Overseas applicants go through an American company that sponsors, screens and places them in jobs. Most work as camp counselors, au pairs or at amusement parks. Participants must return home afterwards.

Joe Davies, one of more than 170,000 such workers who are in the U.S. at any given time, came from the United Kingdom to learn about a new culture.

"I wanted to travel when I left education," he said. "I wasn't too sure on what I wanted to do and at the time I didn't have much money to go out and just work my way around the world. So I looked into the Camp America program."

Now, he works as a lifeguard at a performing arts camp called French Woods in upstate New York. Beth Schaefer, part-owner of French Woods, said the camp hires about half of its 400 employees from other countries. Foreign workers don't take jobs away from Americans, Schaefer said. In fact, they are helping make the camp a success, she said, and that helps preserve jobs for everyone.

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At 41, with long black hair, Stuart Neville looks more like the rock guitarist he used to be than the author he is now. He lives in a small town with his family — not in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the city that plays a central role in his thrillers, but just outside it.

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Landing a job at a summer camp or at an amusement park is a rite of passage for many young Americans. Those jobs also appeal to foreigners participating in a cultural exchange using J-1 visas. But with U.S. youth unemployment at 25 percent, Congress is now taking a close look at the J-1 visa exchange program.

This visa category was created decades ago to promote cultural exchange. Overseas applicants go through an American company that sponsors, screens and places them in jobs. Most work as camp counselors, au pairs or at amusement parks. Participants must return home afterwards.

Joe Davies, one of more than 170,000 such workers who are in the U.S. at any given time, came from the United Kingdom to learn about a new culture.

"I wanted to travel when I left education," he said. "I wasn't too sure on what I wanted to do and at the time I didn't have much money to go out and just work my way around the world. So I looked into the Camp America program."

Now, he works as a lifeguard at a performing arts camp called French Woods in upstate New York. Beth Schaefer, part-owner of French Woods, said the camp hires about half of its 400 employees from other countries. Foreign workers don't take jobs away from Americans, Schaefer said. In fact, they are helping make the camp a success, she said, and that helps preserve jobs for everyone.

Enlarge image i