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In Choire Sicha's Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City, a voice from our future looks back at events taking place in a "massive" East Coast metropolis, its citizens perpetually gripped with "a quiet panic" while living in a gritty landscape of iron and excess. Throw in a mysterious virus, a rich, blind governor, a sketchy mayor campaigning for a third term, and this novel gets even more curious.

Guiding us through this is John, a young man so poor he can't even afford socks or regular haircuts. His days are spent working in a dreary office, making less money now that he has a "real" job than he did freelancing. Sicha spins a compelling allegory of New York City and its residents. Here's a tangled fable of greed, consumption and isolation in a place where characters grapple with profound feelings of isolation despite too many friends, too many romantic flings, and too many choices.

John spends his nights partying with his tightknit group. There's the sensible Chad, a tutor to the children of the city's wealthy; and Chad's boyfriend, Diego, who he met on a dating website aptly called DList; the likable Kevin and his "incredibly symmetrical face," with whom John sometimes has sex; and the beautiful Tyler Flowers, whose skin is "so pale that you [can] see into his head a little."

As the novel progresses, the city sinks deeper and deeper into a recession, the shadowy virus gradually claims more victims, our imperious mayor spends more money on a re-election campaign based on fear and intimidation, and John and his friends find themselves increasingly lost in a labyrinth of smoky bars, hook-up sites, and sex clubs.

But even as they glibly rant about cigarettes and social media, wealth and power, Sicha portrays this group of gay men not as vapid and shallow products of their time, but as compelling, keen and intensely complex individuals yearning to be heard and remembered in the face of so much annihilation. In the relentless bombardment of text messages and non sequiturs, one-night stands, and obsessions about money and jeans, we encounter incisive musings on love and worth at a time when it seemed as though the entire world would unravel.

Choire Sicha's writing charms and delights, but beneath the biting wit and cynicism, I found a book that dares to explore the darker underbelly of human avarice and capital, a book that's equal parts blindingly terrifying and smartly humorous, and one of the most clever reads I've encountered in a long time. This novel forces us to consider the cyclical nature of profits and losses, forces us to remember that friends and fads come and go, and that some things survive while others die off.

For it's only when we closely examine our own very recent history that we can better learn to understand, and embrace, the very possible future we'll inevitably inherit.

Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego Leon.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel met with their Russian counterparts for talks in Washington on Friday aiming to repair strained relations with Moscow.

President Obama snubbed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday when he called off plans to go to Moscow next month for a one-on-one summit. He was reacting to Russia's offer of temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

But on Friday, the diplomats seemed eager to show that the dispute is not some new sort of cold war.

Kerry tried to lighten the mood at the State Department meeting with "the two Sergeis," as calls them.

"Sergei Lavrov and I are old hockey players and we both know that diplomacy, like hockey, can sometimes result in the occasional collision," Kerry said.

But there was no small talk when Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, and Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, addressed reporters at the embassy later in the day. There, Lavrov recounted a conversation he had with Kerry earlier this year.

The Two-Way

Obama Cancels One-On-One Meeting With Putin

Republican dreams of a U.S. Senate takeover have been shattered in recent elections by a collection of "unelectable" nominees — the term of art used by political pros to refer to not-ready-for-prime-time candidates whose extreme views doomed their chances with mainstream voters.

There was Delaware's Christine "I'm Not A Witch" O'Donnell, and Nevada's Sharron "Some Latinos Look More Asian To Me" Angle in 2010.

Last year's contests starred Indiana's Richard "Rape Pregnancies Are A Gift From God" Mourdock, and Missouri's Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin.

The very winnable general election races they bungled after capturing party primaries have left the GOP still in need of a half dozen more seats to wrest Senate control from Democrats.

Working in Republicans' favor during the 2014 election cycle? The math.

There are 20 Democratic and 15 Republican seats in play, and, at this point, the seats in danger of flipping are almost all Democratic.

A growing consensus is that the four most winnable-for-Republicans races include, for the moment, South Dakota, Montana, and West Virginia, where Democratic senators are retiring; and Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor is the party's most vulnerable.

No Republican-held seat appears to be flippable yet, with the exception of New Jersey, which will likely revert to Democratic control in an October 2013 special election. A Republican appointee has briefly held the New Jersey seat left vacant by the death in June of Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

Four And Counting

What remains unresolved is whether the kind of unelectable GOP nominees produced in the past two election cycles are going emerge again from contentious 2014 primaries

With candidate filing deadlines still months away, at the moment it's too early to come to any conclusions. At least one polarizing figure has returned for another Senate run: Joe Miller, the Tea Party-backed candidate who knocked off Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 Republican primary but lost to her write-in bid in the general election, has indicated he'll run in Alaska.

If 2014 turns out to have a dearth of outside-the-mainstream primary candidates, partly it will be a function of the lack of moderate Republicans left to target.

"The incumbents now are generally not likely to be knocked off in the party because of the care they have taken to be sure they won't," says Ron Rapoport, co-author of Three's A Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot and Republican Resurgence. "I think the Republican Party has moved to Tea Party positions, and the challenges are going to be less strong."

An exception to Rapoport's theory can be found in Kentucky. That's where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, increasingly unpopular back home, is facing a primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin.

McConnell no doubt thought he could sidestep such a challenge last fall when he hired as his campaign manager Jesse Benton, who ran Rep. Ron Paul's 2012 presidential operation.

Benton was also a strategist for Ron Paul's son, Rand, during his successful 2010 Tea Party primary challenge and ultimate Senate win in Kentucky.

Questions of Benton's loyalty were raised Thursday, however, after the libertarian-leaning Economic Policy Journal reported that Benton in January essentially said his heart wasn't in it for McConnell — he took the job only because it would ultimately benefit Rand Paul.

The journal reported that, in a recorded conversation, Benton said this: "Between you and me, I'm sorta holdin' my nose for two years, cause what we're doin' here is gonna be a big benefit to Rand in 2016, so that's the long vision."

Bevin's challenge to McConnell is why analysts like Nathan Gonzales of The Rothenberg Political Report suggest that Kentucky, along with Georgia, presents the "only two offensive opportunities for Democrats."

Gonzales says that Kentucky's Democratic Senate candidate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, "has a shot because of Mitch McConnell's unpopularity, although the fundamentals of the state and the president's unpopularity could bail out McConnell in the end."

"This is a far bigger race that Grimes has ever had before, when she's basically just outspent her opponents," he said. "That wouldn't happen this time."

Gonzales argues that McConnell's vulnerability is greater in the general election than it is against Bevin in the primary.

McConnell isn't the only conservative whose ideological credentials are under attack from within the party. Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina could face three challengers; Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi is expected to face Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a primary.

Then there's Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, considered one of the Senate's most conservative, who is closely watching his right flank — last month he hired a prominent tea party organize to manage his reelection campaign.

Even so, it was reported this week by the conservative National Review, Tea Party activists have been encouraging Rep. Louie Gohmert, a conservative lightning rod, to challenge Cornyn in a March 2014 primary.

Gohmert, famous for linking both same-sex marriage and gun control to bestiality, and other incendiary comments, so far has demurred.

"The overarching theme right now is whether history is going to repeat itself," says Gonzales. "There's a temptation to say that we've seen a cycle like this before, where Democrats are defending more seats, and where the Republican Party has imploded in the primary."

Lay of the Land

The analysts at Rothenberg, and at the Cook Political Report, another political handicapper, seem to agree that the most vulnerable incumbent senators are McConnell and Pryor. The Arkansas Democrat faces a formidable challenge from GOP Congressman Tom Cotton, an Army veteran and former management consultant who seems likely to avoid a divisive primary.

The retirements of Democratic Senators Tom Harkin of Iowa and Carl Levin of Michigan mean that open races for those seats could be competitive. Of special concern on the Democratic watch list are the seats currently held by Senators Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Kay Hagan of North Carolina.

In these close races, any issue could make the difference, including Obamacare, which national Republicans are making the centerpiece of their election efforts.

"The administration's pushing off of major implementation of parts of the health care bill until after the 2014 election is telling," Gonzales says. "I think that takes some of the specific impact out of the issue, but it's still going to be one of the main topics."

Republicans have the potential to overplay their hand on health care opposition, he says, but "Democrats are probably too optimistic about its popularity."

Heading into Friday's news conference, President Obama had a delicate balancing act before him: how to acknowledge widespread concerns about National Security Agency surveillance without in any way legitimizing the actions of leaker Edward Snowden.

The best course, the president decided, was to acknowledge that Snowden's revelations to some degree forced his administration to accelerate and expand a review of the federal government's surveillance activities.

But Obama wanted to make clear that he, not some random event, set in motion the administration's policy review — even before details of the NSA data gathering involving phone records and Internet communications became public.

The president sought to rip off the hero's mantle some have placed on Snowden after his leaks began appearing in the Guardian newspaper: "I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot. ... The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden's been charged with three felonies."

It also was a fact, however, and Obama spoke to it, that Snowden's disclosures did push the administration in ways it would have avoided if it could have.

"There's no doubt that Mr. Snowden's leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than would have been the case if I had simply appointed this review board to go through — and I'd sat down with Congress and we had worked this thing through."

The president reminded his audience of his May speech when he addressed the use of drones and targeted killings in U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

It was then, before Snowden became a household name, that the president told the nation he had ordered a broad examination of the government surveillance.

But Obama's May message — the essence of which was "we've got this" — and the assurances since then clearly haven't tamped down enough of the fears or criticisms. Americans have become significantly less trusting of government assurances on civil liberties the more 9/11 recedes into the background.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found half of Americans approving government anti-terrorism programs that collect telephone and Internet data, with 44 percent disapproving.

But for the first time since Pew Research began tracking it in 2004, Americans expressed more concern about restrictions of civil liberties going too far than protection from terrorism.

And in a remarkable change since 2006, Pew found the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans — 38 percent — who agreed that the government's policies didn't go far enough to protect Americans. There was a 9-percentage point difference in 2006.

Part of what we seemed to be witnessing with Obama was the education of a president, and the difference between having the ultimate responsibility of protecting the nation and being a legislator in the policymaking process.

As Obama himself acknowledged again Friday, when he was a senator during the Bush administration, he thought somewhat differently.

"Now, keep in mind that as a senator, I expressed a healthy skepticism about these programs," he said. He gave the strong impression that knowing what he now knows from sitting in the Oval Office, his inclinations run in a different direction.

Still, he understood that though he may have thought the existing checks and balances were enough to assure Americans, he now realizes they're not. In explaining that he now gets it, the president arrived at what may have been one of the stranger metaphors he's used in some time, invoking the first lady and household chores.

"If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don't do the dishes that much, but back in the day and she's a little skeptical, well, I'd like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it."

A Mexican court has thrown out the conviction of infamous drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, 28 years after he was convicted and imprisoned for the 1985 kidnapping and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

Quintero had been serving a 40-year sentence for torturing and killing Camerena, but the court voided the sentence on a technicality – saying he should have been tried in a state court instead of the federal court where he was convicted.

After the announcement of his release, Mexican television showed a greying Camarena, now 61, leaving a medium security prison in the state of Jalisco, "where he reportedly had lived a life of semi-luxury," according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Times provides some background on the case:

"Special Agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena was working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, based in the city of Guadalajara, when Caro Quintero allegedly ordered him killed. Camarena went missing in February 1985, as he left the U.S. consulate. His body, showing evidence of torture, was eventually discovered near a ranch in western Mexico's Michoacan state, along with that of the Mexican pilot he flew with to hunt marijuana fields. ...

The Camarena killing strained relations between Mexico and Washington. U.S. officials were furious at Mexican authorities and suspicious that there had been high-level cooperation with Caro Quintero and, at the minimum, a cover-up of the crime by what was supposedly a friendly government."

Revelations this week that the U.S. intercepted communications between top al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri and other key terrorist figures in the Arabian Peninsula offered a pretty good plug for the work of the National Security Agency.

As leaks go, this was a big one. Was it a signal that government officials are going to be more open about intelligence gathering in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden affair?

It's a moment when many Americans, after all, have grown worried about the extent and scope of communication intercepts, due largely to the picture painted by Snowden, a former analyst. And polls report rising concern about the effect of anti-terrorism policies on civil liberties.

"It fits very well with those who want to defend the NSA," says Tom Sanderson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an international policy think tank.

Still, Sanderson doesn't believe that the leak was about answering Snowden's criticisms with proof of NSA effectiveness — or transparency.

Instead, he and other observers say it's part of a time-honored tradition of administrations leaking information in hopes of putting their own actions and decisions in the best possible light.

"It's not unusual for administrations to try to justify what they're doing when they're getting criticized," says Gary Schmitt, a former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I wouldn't guess it was connected to Snowden, per se."

More About Benghazi Than Snowden?

It's possible that the administration, or someone in the government, felt it was necessary to offer a compelling and public justification for closing embassies and other diplomatic outposts in more than 20 countries.

The "cloud" of Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed last September in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission, may have hovered over this particular leak, Sanderson suggests.

"They were a bit surprised by the criticism they got for closing all of the embassies," says Schmitt, who now directs a security studies center at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "They're certainly more conscious of embassy security issues than they were, absent Benghazi."

There's also a parallel with another moment in Libya. After the U.S. bombed the compound of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 1986, the Reagan administration similarly leaked information about intercepted communications that showed Libya was connected to a discotheque bombing in Berlin that killed an Army sergeant named Kenneth Ford.

"You can go back and back and back to find these [kinds of] leaks," Schmitt says.

Political Motivations

The latest leaks may have represented an attempt to find political cover, but the leaks themselves have earned the administration some criticism.

There have been complaints that the leaks have tipped off al-Qaida, and other terrorists, about its ability to listen in on their communications.

The administration also has been accused of hypocrisy, putting out such a big leak just after prosecuting Bradley Manning within an inch of his life for leaking huge amounts of classified documents.

And the Justice Department had been criticized this spring for snooping on Associated Press reporters in the wake of a story about another al-Qaida plot.

Leak As Rorschach Test

What all this really underscores is the sensitive and highly politicized nature of the fight against terrorism — and the Obama administration's response to it.

An administration that has touted its efforts to sideline al-Qaida is now having to cope with the reality of its refusal to fade away.

"We took these pretty extreme measures, closing all these embassies and sending cargo planes to Yemen to get people out," says Peter Juul, a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.

Juul says the person or persons who leaked the information about intercepts wanted to build public confidence, "to make sure people know what their intelligence agencies are doing and not having them run off on wild speculation about why we're closing embassies, scratching their heads or being actively paranoid."

But it's difficult to know for sure what the motivations were behind leaks that were not only anonymous, but also quite conceivably lacked the blessing of top officials of the White House.

Instead of being simply reassuring, this one set of leaks managed to speak to concerns held from various points of view — whether it's the fear that the administration isn't capable of protecting Americans abroad, or the belief that NSA spying is helping to do just that.

"Unfortunately, politics has entered into this, as it always does," says Sanderson, the CSIS analyst.

Every year, the U.S. Congress appropriates more than $1 billion in military aid to Egypt. But that money never gets to Egypt. It goes to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then to a trust fund at the Treasury and, finally, out to U.S. military contractors that make the tanks and fighter jets that ultimately get sent to Egypt.

The U.S. started sending M1A1 Abrams tanks to Egypt in the late '80s. In all, the U.S. sent more than 1,000 tanks to Egypt since then — valued at some $3.9 billion — which Egypt maintains along with several thousand Soviet-era tanks.

"There's no conceivable scenario in which they'd need all those tanks short of an alien invasion," Shana Marshall of the Institute of Middle East Studies at George Washington University, told me.

A thousand tanks would be helpful for large land battles, but not for the threats facing Egypt today, such as terrorism and border security in the Sinai Peninsula, according to Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In fact, he said, at least 200 of the tanks the U.S. has sent to Egypt have never been used.

"They are crated up and then they sit in deep storage, and that's where they remain," he told me.

The story with F-16 fighter jets is similar. Since 1980, we've sent Egypt 221 fighter jets, valued at $8 billion. "Our American military advisers in Cairo have for many years been advising against further acquisitions of F-16s," Springborg said. Egypt already has more F-16s than it needs, he said.

I asked the State Department why the U.S. is giving Egypt weapons against the advice of its own military personnel. (The State Department, along with Congress, gives final approval on the weapons we send to Egypt.) Regarding those unused tanks, an official told me via email, it's not usual for a country to "maintain a portion of its equipment in reserve in the event of security contingencies." The U.S. decides which weapons to send to countries like Egypt "in consultation with our partners' own determination of their strategic and force structure requirements," the email added.

I met with a high-ranking official in the Egyptian military who confirmed that the Egyptian military does request those tanks and fighter jets because it believes they're crucial for Egypt's security. And, he said, "the U.S. wouldn't have given us weapons they didn't want us to have."

The U.S. wants Egypt to have them in part because of people like Bruce Baron, president of Baron Industries, a small business in Oxford, Mich. "The aid that we give to Egypt is coming back to the U.S. and keeping 30 of my people working," Baron told me. Specifically, he said, 30 of his 57 employees are working on parts for the M1A1 Abrams tanks that we give to Egypt.

Every March for the past few years, Baron says, he and other small-business owners have gone to Capitol Hill at the invitation of General Dynamics, a big contractor. They visit their congressmen and "let them know of our support for these programs and also the impact that these programs have on employment," he says.

Former Republican congressman Jim Kolbe often received visits from military contractors like Baron. Before he retired in 2007, Kolbe was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that approves the military aid we give to Egypt. But when I talked to Kolbe recently, he said that "legitimate questions need to be asked of the Egyptian military."

"What is the objective of of the military these days? What do you see as the real threat?" he said.

In a perfect world, he said, the U.S. wouldn't be sending more F-16s and M1A1s to Egypt. "I think the Egyptian military needs to be doing more hard thinking about some of those things," Kolbe said. "Big toys are things that generals and military people like to have around."

But, Kolbe said, the State Department doesn't want to upset the status quo, the Defense Department doesn't want to upset a valuable ally in the region, and, of course, defense contractors want to keep their contracts.

Revelations this week that the U.S. intercepted communications between top al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri and other key terrorist figures in the Arabian Peninsula offered a pretty good plug for the work of the National Security Agency.

As leaks go, this was a big one. Was it a signal that government officials are going to be more open about intelligence gathering in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden affair?

It's a moment when many Americans, after all, have grown worried about the extent and scope of communications intercepts, due largely to the picture painted by Snowden, a former analyst. And polls report rising concern about the effect of anti-terrorism policies on civil liberties.

"It fits very well with those who want to defend the NSA," says Tom Sanderson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, an international policy think tank.

Still, Sanderson doesn't believe that the leak was about answering Snowden's criticisms with proof of NSA effectiveness — or transparency.

Instead, he and other observers say it's part of a time-honored tradition of administrations leaking information in hopes of putting their own actions and decisions in the best possible light.

"It's not unusual for administrations to try to justify what they're doing when they're getting criticized," says Gary Schmitt, a former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I wouldn't guess it was connected to Snowden, per se."

More about Benghazi than Snowden?

It's possible that the administration, or someone in the government, felt it was necessary to offer a compelling and public justification for closing embassies and other diplomatic outposts in more than 20 countries.

The "cloud" of Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed last September in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission, may have hovered over this particular leak, Sanderson suggests.

"They were a bit surprised by the criticism they got for closing all of the embassies," says Schmitt, who now directs a security studies center at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "They're certainly more conscious of embassy security issues than they were, absent Benghazi."

There's also a parallel with another moment in Libya. After the U.S. bombed the compound of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 1986, the Reagan administration similarly leaked information about intercepted communications that showed Libya was connected to a discotheque bombing in Berlin that killed an Army sergeant named Kenneth Ford.

"You can go back and back and back to find these [kinds of] leaks," Schmitt says.

Political Motivations

The latest leaks may have represented an attempt to find political cover, but the leaks themselves have earned criticism for the administration.

There have been complaints that the leaks have tipped off al-Qaida, and other terrorists, about its ability to listen in on their communications.

The administration has also been accused of hypocrisy, putting out such a big leak just after prosecuting Bradley Manning within an inch of his life for leaking huge amounts of classified documents.

The Justice Department had been criticized this spring for snooping on Associated Press reporters in the wake of a story about another al-Qaida plot.

Leak As Rorschach Test

What all this really underscores is the sensitive and highly politicized nature of the fight against terrorism — and the Obama administration's response to it.

An administration that has touted its efforts to sideline al-Qaida is now having to cope with the reality of its refusal to fade away.

"We took these pretty extreme measures, closing all these embassies and sending cargo planes to Yemen to get people out," says Peter Juul, a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.

Juul says the person or persons who leaked the information about intercepts wanted to build public confidence, "to make sure people know what their intelligence agencies are doing and not having them run off on wild speculation about why we're closing embassies, scratching their heads or being actively paranoid."

But it's difficult to know for sure what the motivations were behind leaks that were not only anonymous but quite conceivably lacked the blessing of top officials of the White House.

Instead of being simply reassuring, this one set of leaks managed to speak to concerns held from various points of view — whether it's the fear that the administration isn't capable of protecting Americans abroad, or the belief that NSA spying is helping to do just that.

"Unfortunately, politics has entered into this, as it always does," says Sanderson, the CSIS analyst.

When winemakers crush the juice from grapes, what's left is a goopy pile of seeds, stems and skins called pomace. Until several years ago, these remains were more than likely destined for the dump.

"The pomace pile was one of the largest problems that the wine industry had with sustainability," says Paul Novak, general manager for WholeVine Products, a sister company to winemaker Kendall-Jackson in Northern California.

But now, scientists and entrepreneurs are finding new and often surprising uses for this former waste product. Some winemakers, for instance, are using pomace as compost or as the basis of grapeseed oil. Researchers are also exploring pomace's properties as a food preservative – studies have shown that compounds called polyphenols found in grapes and in pomace kill bacteria that can cause food to spoil. One Oregon State University professor, Yanyun Zhao, has even toyed with turning pomace into a biodegradable material to make flower pots.

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Four decades ago, Ho Van Thanh fled the fighting in his native Vietnam, disappearing into the jungle with his infant son, Ho Van Lang. This week, father and son emerged for the first time – an enfeebled Thanh carried in a stretcher and Lang wearing only a loin cloth made of tree bark.

According to the Vietnamese newspaper Dan Tri, Ho Van Thanh, now 82, was last seen in 1973, running into the jungle after his wife and two other children were killed by a bomb or landmine near his home.

When Thanh and Lang, 42, were finally coaxed out of the jungle in Vietnam's central Quang Ngai province on Thursday, they had been living 20 feet up in a tree house, stocked with arrows and other makeshift hunting implements.

The Telegraph quotes a local Vietnamese newspaper as saying the elder Ho had fallen out of the habit of speech and that his son only knows a few words of the local dialect of the Cor ethnic minority. They used a homemade axe to chop down trees and survived partly on corn they cultivated as well as fruits and cassava roots from the jungle:

"But there were poignant mementos of their previous life.

The father kept his soldier's trousers neatly folded in a corner [of the tree house]. Beside them was the little red coat his son was thought to have been wearing when they fled."

Brazilian police are preparing to occupy one of the deadliest shantytown complexes in Rio de Janeiro, hoping to drive out drug gangs ahead of next year's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

It's the latest "pacification" effort in a Rio slum, and the city's new chief of police says he'll need some 1,500 cops to secure this one, called Mare.

Police in the past would typically stage raids, but then withdraw from the dangerous shantytowns, known here as favelas. But under the pacification program, they now set up shop inside the favelas.

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The Department of State cautioned Americans not to travel to Pakistan.

Officials also ordered nonessential government personnel to leave the U.S. Consulate in Lahore.

The statement issued yesterday says the drawdown was due to "specific threats" concerning the consulate.

The consulate was scheduled to be closed for the Eid holiday from Thursday through Sunday and no reopening had been scheduled, a U.S. official told The Associated Press.

Earlier this week, 19 U.S. diplomatic outposts in 16 countries in the Middle East and Africa were closed to through Saturday.

Also, nonessential personnel were evacuated from the U.S. Embassy in Yemen after U.S. official said al-Qaida communications about plans for a terror attack had been intercepted.

Sen. Mitch McConnell undoubtedly had no illusions that he would be the ideal candidate of Tea Party conservatives.

Still, the Republican leader in the Senate couldn't have expected what sounds like disdain from his own campaign manager.

"Between you and me, I'm sorta holding my nose for two years because what we're doing here is going to be a big benefit to Rand (Paul) in '16. So that's my long vision," Jesse Benton, the campaign manager, said during a phone call, secretly recorded early this year by a conservative activist, and recently published by Economic Policy Journal.

Benton, a libertarian, has been a top campaign aide to both Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas, and his son, the junior senator from Kentucky, who is talked of as a possible presidential candidate. Benton is also married to a granddaughter of the elder Paul.

Basil is growing thick and leafy in many backyard gardens throughout the U.S. right now, which means many people are thinking about pesto. It's one of the more basic sauces you can make — in addition to basil, all you need is Parmesan or Romano cheese, a little garlic, some extra virgin olive oil and Italian pine nuts.

But if you've looked for them at the grocery store recently, you know those little Italian nuts sport a big price tag. Hungry bugs and warmer temperatures have severely diminished harvests. Now it's not uncommon to see them selling for $60 to $120 a pound.

Julia della Croce, author of Italian Home Cooking, says it's a global problem.

"Even in Italy, where they're also very expensive, they keep them under lock and key in the shops," she says. "So even the Italians can't afford them."

More From Julia della Croce

The Salt

Unraveling The Mystery Of A Grandmother's Lost Ravioli Recipe

Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the man at the center of the military takeover in Egypt, is the latest in a series of American-trained foreign officers to oust a civilian government.

Just seven years ago, he was a student at the Army War College in rural Pennsylvania. At a recent military graduation ceremony in Alexandria, Egypt, el-Sissi talked about his ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on July 3.

The army was forced to take that step, the general said, in the wake of mass protests against the elected government.

"Don't think I betrayed the former president," el-Sissi told the audience. "I told him the Egyptian army belongs to all Egyptians."

Half a world away, retired U.S. Army Col. Steve Gerras watched in amazement. Gerras served as the general's faculty adviser at the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., and helped him write a paper back in 2006.

The name of the paper? "Democracy in the Middle East."

"Pretty relevant," Gerras comments now, laughing.

Trained In The USA

The Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black has won over critics and viewers alike this summer. The original series follows a diverse cast of characters in a women's prison in upstate New York. One of the breakout stars is Laverne Cox. Her character, Sophia, is a transgender woman who stands up for herself among prison officials and other inmates.

Cox spoke with Tell Me More host Michel Martin about the show and her experience as a transgender woman and actress.

Don LaFontaine had a voice anyone would recognize. As a voice-over artist, he recorded thousands of movie trailers and TV commercials, and became famous for his delivery of the phrase "In a world," which kicked off countless trailers. He died in 2008, but the new comedy In a World – written and directed by actress Lake Bell, tells the story of voice-over artists competing to become the next LaFontaine.

Bell co-stars opposite Fred Melamed, who doesn't just play a voice-over artist — he is one, with any number of ads, trailers, and TV-network commercials. He's an actor, too, perhaps best known for his performance as Sy Ableman in the Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man.

Bell, for her part, starred with Meryl Streep in It's Complicated, and co-stars on the Adult Swim comedy series Children's Hospital. At this year's Sundance film festival, she won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award for In a World, which casts her as a veteran voice coach who wants to break into the male-dominated world of voiceovers. One of the men she's competing with is her father, played by Melamed, who's already near the top of the field.

Bell and Melamed joined Fresh Air's Terry Gross to talk about the attractions of voice-over work, researching an accent and the perils of "sexy-baby vocal virus."

It's hard to import a European murder mystery without importing baggage along with it — expectations of a gray chill, of relentless and austere severity.

It's not that you won't see any of that in Broadchurch, the eight-part British drama that comes to BBC America beginning Wednesday night. It begins with a body found on a beach at the bottom of a wall of craggy cliffs. There are broken hearts, and there's a kind local cop (Olivia Colman), and there's a shipped-in city cop with a heavy heart and a sharp tongue who doesn't get along with anyone (David Tennant). You'd be forgiven for thinking it was going to be, in short, a drag.

And if it were a simple crime procedural, its close-up handling of such a devastating story might seem exploitative, like just another dead body in another quirky television town. But while there is a mystery here, and while they will solve it in these eight episodes, the solution to the murder mystery is not what the show is really about.

The show is about the town of Broadchurch, where the body is found, and about the way grief is so unwieldy and burdensome that it interrupts and interferes with every other emotion. Trust is upended, old wounds are opened (and others are healed), and relationships are threatened by the deeply human but totally wrongheaded tendency toward trying to negotiate the terms under which others manage pain.

At the center of the show are great performances from Colman and Tennant as Ellie Miller and Alec Hardy, the local cop and her new, grumpy superior who are working together to solve the case. Ellie's family knows the family of the deceased, and she represents what's unavoidably intimate and personal about handling tragedies. Alec is newly promoted and imported, and he's just coming off a case that went poorly, so his investment is just as great in its way, but very different.

Over the course of the story, suspicion will shift over and over before it settles. People will seem one way, then another. The local journalists following the story will seem craven, and then honest, and then desperate. Ellie and Alec are both right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and they will do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing.

Broadchurch treats tragedy in a community as almost an autoimmune disorder, where beyond the initial loss, the real fight is getting the thing not to turn its passions and defenses against itself. It does feel timely. It's common to talk about series as "timely" when their storylines closely mirror real events or the issues they raise are in direct parallel. But a story about pain not being translated into mistrust and mistreatment is always timely, really.

It's rare that television is this good at presenting flawed humanity as both the greatest and most dangerous element of any social structure. It's a lot more than a murder mystery.

Broadchurch begins Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET. The first episode is also streaming free, with no commercials, at the BBC America site.

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

Five major publishers are objecting to restrictions the Justice Department wants to place on Apple for colluding with them to fix ebook prices. The proposal, which has not yet been approved by the judge in the case, would force Apple to end existing contacts with the publishers, in addition to several other measures that Apple called "draconian and punitive." In a court filing Wednesday, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan – all of which settled with the Justice Department rather than go to trial – said the restrictions would unfairly punish them by effectively eliminating the "agency model" for five years. Under the agency model, publishers, rather than retailers, set book prices. (CNET explains why some publishers prefer these deals.) "The provisions do not impose any limitation on Apple's pricing behavior at all; rather, under the guise of punishing Apple, they effectively punish the settling defendants by prohibiting agreements with Apple using an agency model," the publishers wrote. A hearing on the Justice Department's proposed measures is scheduled for Friday.

A Brooklyn "missed connection" on Craigslist has gone viral: It begins as a normal encounter on the subway ("I was wearing a blue-striped t-shirt and a pair of maroon pants. You were wearing a vintage red skirt and a smart white blouse") and then descends unexpectedly into a surrealist short story ("For months we sat on the train saying nothing to each other. We survived on bags of skittles sold to us by kids raising money for their basketball teams"). An email inquiry from NPR seeking comment (or, you know, a date) wasn't answered.

In a blog post titled "Are you still a Brain Surgeon?" the queen of steam and one of the bestselling novelists of all time, Danielle Steel, explains why she's tired of men asking her whether she's "still writing." She says: "What this does is that it immediately puts my writing into the category as a hobby. As in, are you still taking piano lessons, doing macrame, have a parrot? ... It is a way of suggesting that what I do is really not very important."

Brainpickings features some of Lewis Carroll's unforgettable etiquette advice in a post about The Alice in Wonderland Cookbook: "As a general rule, do not kick the shins of the opposite gentleman under the table, if personally unacquainted with him; your pleasantry is liable to be misunderstood — a circumstance at all times unpleasant."

NoViolet Bulawayo, whose novel We Need New Names was called "one of the most powerful works of fiction to come out of Zimbabwe in recent years," spoke to The Los Angeles Review of Books: "I grew up in a very different time in Zimbabwe; as part of the first generation of kids born after independence, I experienced stability, success, and normalcy and of course the Zimbabwe that I remember is terribly gone."

Why buy 1 pound of hamburger meat from a local farmer when you can buy 5 pounds — plus another 20 pounds of stew meat, steaks and roast — for as little as half the price of what it all goes for at the market?

That's part of the logic behind meat shares — plans for buying meat in bulk that are cropping up around the country. Farmers are keen on these schemes, similar to meat CSAs, because it gives them the chance to sell whole, half and quarter animals (broken down into individual cuts). Selling this way allows them to move a lot of meat quickly, at a desirable price.

But if you're suddenly the proud owner of 20 pounds of frozen beef, pork or chicken, your freezer may be feeling the hurt.

Matt LeRoux, an agriculture marketing specialist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Ithaca, N.Y., says this is a common complaint in Ithaca, where meat shares have taken off. So he had an idea: Why not start a community freezer space to make bulk meat sales easier for both parties?

"I'm trying to reinvent an old system that was really popular in the 1940s, when not everyone owned a freezer, and then started to disappear in the '60s," says LeRoux.

In early August, LeRoux launched a pilot project called Meat Locker with an $80,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farmers Market Promotion Program. It's an amount that LeRoux says will fund two shared spaces — one in Ithaca and one in the nearby town of Corning — for around 100 members each, for a fee of $3 to $5 a month.

According to Arthur Neal of USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, the meat locker will also serve as food distribution hub, where people can rendezvous with farmers. "As consumers seek to purchase more local foods, including local meats and proteins, projects like this will aid those efforts," he says.

At first, LeRoux says, he considered raising money to help area residents buy home freezers. But then he realized a 10x14 freezer would be more energy efficient than 100 small home freezers running at once. "[Big freezers] are the public transportation of freezing meat," he says.

For consumers like Avi Miner, a local foods educator and farmers market manager in Ithaca, having access to a unit in the shared freezer space may inspire him to buy more local meat. Miner knows many of the farmers in his area, and values high-quality, pasture-raised meat grown close to home. But he admits that he springs for "good meat" less than half the time.

"There are a lot of people, like me, who love the idea of buying meat locally, but it's a big financial step — bigger than joining a vegetable CSA," Miner tells The Salt. Paying upfront, on the other hand, "would bring the price of local meat down to the point where it becomes affordable."

Once the locker is open, Miner plans to buy a quarter of an animal for himself or go in on half an animal with friends, if they can get a better price that way.

The Salt

Farm To Fido: Dog Food Goes Local

A city in South Korea flipped the switch on a road this week that will provide an electric charge to commuter buses on an inner-city route, officials say. The wireless power will be used to run two buses on round-trip routes of 24 kilometers (nearly 15 miles).

The charging road would allow electric vehicles to have much smaller batteries, according to researchers, and to be recharged whether they're parked or on the move.

The OLEV (Online Electric Vehicle) buses in the pilot program in the southern city of Gumi use batteries that are about one-third the size of a standard electric car battery. The city reportedly plans to add 10 more of the buses in the next two years.

According to a news release, the new power system includes a "smart function" that determines when an OLEV vehicle is on the road. That keeps the network from wasting power — and from bathing passengers in non-OLEV cars with an electromagnetic field.

To install the system, cables and power strips are added to 5 percent to 15 percent of the overall road's length, according to its inventors at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The OLEV system gained notoriety in 2010; in the following year, the Massachusetts Port Authority reportedly reached a deal to license the technology for use at Boston's Logan International Airport.

A plan to bring several of the buses to McAllen, Texas, was put on hold last fall due to financing issues, as The Monitor reported. A Boston-based company called OLEV Technologies says it is working to put the systems to wider use.

The charge transfers as long as a vehicle's undercarriage stays within 17 centimeters (about six and a half inches) from the road surface. The Korean institute explains more about how it all works:

"OLEV receives power wirelessly through the application of the "Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance (SMFIR)" technology. ... Power comes from the electrical cables buried under the surface of the road, creating magnetic fields. There is a receiving device installed on the underbody of the OLEV that converts these fields into electricity."

Ruben prances across the street one recent morning on his way to work on a corner of Tijuana's famous tourist strip, Avenida Revolucin.

Ruben's hair is freshly dyed. His nametag is shiny.

But both he and his boss, Victor Reyes, have long faces.

Ruben, well, he's a donkey, (a "zonkey" in local parlance).

As for Reyes, his business — taking photos of tourists atop Ruben — has stumbled on hard times.

'Old Mexico'

Back in the 1960s, Reyes says, the American tourists coming into this westernmost Mexican city, just south of San Diego across the California border, lined up for the chance to have a picture taken atop one of the donkeys painted to look like zebras.

Tijuana had been a tourist destination for a century, says Jose Beltrn, a professor of history at the Autonomous University of Baja California. Beltran says the American tourists would drink, gamble, visit prostitutes, and look for "old Mexico." The donkeys filled that bill.

Photographers trotted them out as a representation of old times, throwing serapes over the shoulders of Americans dressed in long dresses and heavy suits. They'd stand next to the donkey or climb on top.

The only problem was the white donkeys didn't show up well in black and white photos. Just a little ear and nose.

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Every summer, a village in eastern France celebrates a Gallic chieftain who lost a major battle to Julius Caesar in 52 B.C. Despite that defeat, the mythic Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, is a French national hero today.

But Vercingetorix wasn't always remembered with such fanfare: For 2,000 years, he lay nearly forgotten.

On a recent day, actors posing as Gauls and Roman legionnaires engage in a mock battle at Alesia MuseoParc, a newly opened museum in Burgundy, where the real battle of Alesia, also known as the Battle for Gaul, is believed to have taken place.

In the verdant countryside not far from the museum, a giant statue of the sandal-footed Vercingetorix rises from a hilltop, with his sword by his side, long hair and mustache flowing. Olivia Surge says even though Vercingetorix lost to Caesar, it was a noble defeat.

"We might have lost, but we held on," the museum visitor says. "And Vercingetorix was the first leader in France to speak of liberty. And that's our motto today: liberty, equality, fraternity."

A Proxy For Napoleon III

Surge has brought her children to watch the jousting. Every French schoolchild learns about "our ancestors the Gauls." Although vanquished and Romanized, the Gauls are seen as the moral victors in the collective memory of France, and are now a national symbol. There are the iconic Gauloise cigarettes, and millions of readers around the world know the beloved comic book characters Asterix and Obelix, whose Gallic village is the last to resist Roman invaders thanks to a druid's magic potion that grants super strength.

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Most every time the U.S. government gets wind of a potential terror attack, it faces a tough choice. It can quietly pursue the suspected plotters or it can go public in the belief that public awareness can discourage or thwart the attack.

In the current episode, the Obama administration has gone public in a big way, announcing the threat, temporarily shutting more than 20 U.S. embassies and diplomatic posts from Rwanda to Bangladesh, and evacuating many embassy workers in Yemen, the country described as the main source of the threat.

"One thing I've tried to do as president is not overreact, but make sure that as much as possible the American people understand that there are genuine risks out there," President Obama told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show on Tuesday evening.

Reasons To Go Public

By announcing the threat, the U.S. could potentially buy time and perhaps force al-Qaida to delay or cancel a planned attack because it will now suspect that an operation is much more likely to be foiled.

"You usually want to keep things quiet to protect your intelligence sources, and your chances of disrupting an attack are better if the attackers don't know you're looking for it," says Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. "But if your information is vague, you might be better going public and letting everyone know that you know something."

Based on what the government has said so far, the U.S. seems to believe something is in the works, but has not been able to uncover the details, according to Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert who eaches at Princeton Univeristy.

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It's hard to import a European murder mystery without importing baggage along with it — expectations of a gray chill, of relentless and austere severity.

It's not that you won't see any of that in Broadchurch, the eight-part British drama that comes to BBC America beginning Wednesday night. It begins with a body found on a beach at the bottom of a wall of craggy cliffs. There are broken hearts, and there's a kind local cop (Olivia Colman), and there's a shipped-in city cop with a heavy heart and a sharp tongue who doesn't get along with anyone (David Tennant). You'd be forgiven for thinking it was going to be, in short, a drag.

And if it were a simple crime procedural, its close-up handling of such a devastating story might seem exploitative, like just another dead body in another quirky television town. But while there is a mystery here, and while they will solve it in these eight episodes, the solution to the murder mystery is not what the show is really about.

The show is about the town of Broadchurch, where the body is found, and about the way grief is so unwieldy and burdensome that it interrupts and interferes with every other emotion. Trust is upended, old wounds are opened (and others are healed), and relationships are threatened by the deeply human but totally wrongheaded tendency toward trying to negotiate the terms under which others manage pain.

At the center of the show are great performances from Colman and Tennant as Ellie Miller and Alec Hardy, the local cop and her new, grumpy superior who are working together to solve the case. Ellie's family knows the family of the deceased, and she represents what's unavoidably intimate and personal about handling tragedies. Alec is newly promoted and imported, and he's just coming off a case that went poorly, so his investment is just as great in its way, but very different.

Over the course of the story, suspicion will shift over and over before it settles. People will seem one way, then another. The local journalists following the story will seem craven, and then honest, and then desperate. Ellie and Alec are both right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and they will do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing.

Broadchurch treats tragedy in a community as almost an autoimmune disorder, where beyond the initial loss, the real fight is getting the thing not to turn its passions and defenses against itself. It does feel timely. It's common to talk about series as "timely" when their storylines closely mirror real events or the issues they raise are in direct parallel. But a story about pain not being translated into mistrust and mistreatment is always timely, really.

It's rare that television is this good at presenting flawed humanity as both the greatest and most dangerous element of any social structure. It's a lot more than a murder mystery.

Broadchurch begins Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET. The first episode is also streaming free, with no commercials, at the BBC America site.

President Obama has canceled a one-on-one September summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House says.

It's the most dramatic effect so far on U.S.-Russian relations in the wake of Russia's decision to grant "NSA leaker" Edward Snowden temporary asylum while he tries to get safe haven in some third country.

Word of the decision not to meet with Putin was first reported by The Associated Press earlier Wednesday morning. The White House then confirmed the news in statements sent to NPR and other news outlets.

Obama is still set to attend the G20 summit of world leaders in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sept. 5 and 6 — which Putin will host. The meeting that's being canceled was to have been between Obama and Putin in Moscow while the president is in Russia.

As NPR's Michele Kelemen and others have reported, and as the president said Tuesday on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the U.S. is disappointed in Russia's decision to give Snowden temporary asylum. Snowden, a former contractor for companies that do business with the National Security Agency, earlier this summer shared secrets about NSA surveillance programs with The Guardian and The Washington Post.

Update at 9:35 a.m. ET. White House Says Decision Came After "Careful Review."

This statement was just emailed to reporters from the White House press office:

"Following a careful review begun in July, we have reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a U.S.-Russia Summit in early September. We value the achievements made with Russia in the president's first term, including the New START Treaty, and cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea.

"However, given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda.

"Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship.

"Our cooperation on these issues remains a priority for the United States, so on Friday, Aug. 9, Secretaries Hagel and Kerry will meet with their Russian counterparts in a 2+2 format in Washington to discuss how we can best make progress moving forward on the full range of issues in our bilateral relationship.

"The president still looks forward to traveling to St. Petersburg on September 5-6 to attend the G-20 Summit."

"The fact that folks weren't able to legally marry and have those traditional ways of being able to set up retirement, those folks are particularly impacted," says Lisa Marie Alatorre, a human rights organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.

As is the case today, gays who moved to large cities years ago might have cut off, or been cut off from, relations with their families. Most didn't start families of their own.

"Probably the bigger factor that protects you from losing your housing seems to be having adult children," says Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies health issues among the homeless.

In addition to their diminished family lives, many older gays have lost their closest friends, due to the scourge of AIDS.

"When I was 30 years old, I threw a birthday party for myself," says Oviatt, who moved to San Francisco in 1972. "There were probably 30 people there. There's about four of them still alive."

Issue Gaining Attention

People like Oviatt who have lost work or housing face an additional hurdle: San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country.

"We have a very strong, thriving economy," says Supervisor Campos. "With that comes a very significant increase in rents."

The desire to charge higher rents has led to a spike in evictions. The epicenters recently have been traditionally gay neighborhoods such as the Castro and Bernal Heights.

In April, Jonathan Klein, who like Oviatt had been a longtime business owner in the Castro, committed suicide when faced with eviction. His death, along with the the most recent census, has helped bring attention to the problem of displaced gays.

"If there is a silver lining here, it is the hope that it will increase awareness and heighten the commitment not only of city government but the entire community to deal with this issue," Campos says.

Next week, San Francisco's Planning Commission will hold a hearing to decide whether to approve the opening of a shelter specifically dedicated to housing people who are LGBT.

Many — particularly those who are older or transgendered — have been wary of going to existing shelters for fear of discrimination or abuse.

"About 50 percent of our shelter staff will identify as LGBT," says Marlon Mendieta, program director for Dolores Street Community Services, which will run the shelter. "It's not creating a room or a space where I'm going to segregate the LGBT community. The whole program is prepared."

But the new space will only have 24 beds. Getting it open has been a struggle that has gone on for more than two years.

How The City Responds

San Francisco's problem takes place against the backdrop of a city with an unusual number of top public officials who are gay or transgendered.

"There's an eye on it," says Alatorre, the advocate for the homeless. "By and large, people recognize it's an issue and express sympathy, but we don't see the resources going to the programs that actually serve the need."

San Francisco has enjoyed some success in combating homelessness. The recent census found that the overall count is about where it was two years ago, but there are significantly fewer people who are chronically homeless — that is, who have been living on the streets for more than a year.

"San Francisco has made a tremendous amount of progress on chronic homelessness, which isn't always evident when you walk down the street," says Kushel, referring to the visibility of the homeless.

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee has run a number of programs designed to combat homelessness, says Bevan Dufty, his lead advisor on the issue, including winning approval from voters last November of a housing trust fund that will create more affordable units.

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Yemen is still the focus of concern as the U.S., its allies and countries across the Middle East and North Africa remain on alert for possible terrorist attacks.

But according to the BBC, Yemeni government spokesman Rajeh Badi says an al-Qaida plot there has been disrupted. The news network reports that Badi "said the plot involved blowing up oil pipelines and taking control of certain cities — including two ports in the south, one of which accounts for the bulk of Yemen's oil exports and is where a number of foreign workers are employed."

The BBC is also reporting it has been told by "sources" that "the U.S. is preparing special operations forces for possible strike operations against al-Qaida in Yemen." That report has not been confirmed by U.S. officials or matched by other news outlets.

On Morning Edition, Times of London correspondent Iona Craig (who is in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa), told NPR's Renee Montagne that "the feeling I've always gotten from the Americans is that they would never want to put those troops on the ground" in Yemen in part because "there's already an anti-American sentiment" there. Many Yemenis object to the drone strikes that have killed some civilians along with suspected al-Qaida terrorists.

We reported Tuesday on the State Department's warning to any Americans in Yemen that they should leave immediately. As we said, "the ominous advisory follows the 'temporary shutdowns of 19 American diplomatic posts across the Middle East and Africa.' " It also came after a more general, worldwide "travel alert" that the State Department issued last Friday.

Local record and book shops have been disappearing as the market for music and literature moves online. In the past few years, there's been a growth in sites that sell fine art on the Internet. On Tuesday, Amazon joined that market. But in this case, many brick and mortar galleries aren't seeing the Internet as a threat.

Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco currently has 11 very large eerie photos of a fair-skinned women in a white-lace dress donning its walls. In one photo the woman sits in a chair and feeds milk to a TV. In another, the top half of her head is replaced by a bird cage. The artist's name is Jamie Baldridge. Gallery manager Danny Sanchez says the work was inspired by his childhood and "afternoons reading fairy tales for their dark nature. So you kind of get a little bit of that in his imagery."

It's especially exciting to Sanchez that art collectors are able to look at and buy these creative photos online.

"It'll be another outlet for us to showcase our artists," he said. "And get that wider range of people who are looking for art that would normally not come into our building."

And Sanchez was eager to partner with Amazon. He believes, "they redefined online shopping." Now he thinks, "they have the ability to do that for this new kind of marketplace for art."

The audience for visual art is there says Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace who is overseeing the launch. Faricy said they were actually getting customer requests to put art on Amazon. "We know our customers love fine art and want ways to discover more of it and so this really gives them a way to discover artists far beyond their geography."

The new Amazon fine art site includes galleries in New York, Miami, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Canada. Faricy said Amazon's got more than 150 galleries and dealers signed up with work from more than 4,500 artists. He said they've tried hard to make the site easy to use and appropriate for looking at fine art. "All of the images we're using for the artwork are high definition," he said. "They're all able to be looked at in more detail."

But Amazon isn't the first business to bring fine art online. Back in the late 1990s, Eyestorm set up shop from London. More recently Artsy and ArtSpace have made deals with major museums and galleries to sell works by art stars like Saul Lewitt and Cindy Sherman.

But, David Ross the former director of both the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York thinks Amazon's entrance into the market is a much bigger deal because some hundred million people already shop at the site.

Dollar For Dollar: Adventures In Investing

The Art Of Investing: The Rewards Aren't Always Financial

A series of threats and abusive messages aimed at prominent women in the U.K. have placed Twitter in an awkward spot. As the company gears up to go public and expand its brand around the world it is increasingly running into cultural and legal hurdles that challenge Twitter's free speech ethos.

Earlier this year, Caroline Criado-Perez led a successful campaign to keep non-royal British women on the country's currency. Then last week, because of that work, the 29-year-old feminist and blogger became the target of a barrage of hateful messages on Twitter.

"I think I just feel under siege because it has been going on for five days now and it has been so relentless," Criado-Perez said during a BBC interview last week. "The threats have been so explicit and so graphic that obviously ... they have sort of stuck with me in my head. They really have put me in fear I realized."

Rape threats, death threats and insults of every kind poured in. Criado-Perez complained to Twitter and nothing happened. When Stella Creasy, a British Member of Parliament, published an op-ed saying Twitter's slow response to this torrent of electronic hate was itself an abuse, Creasy herself became a target.

"It is not Twitter, it is not the platform itself that is making people ... persistently do this," Creasy says. "I am still receiving rape and death threats today. It is people who are idiots and people who may well be exculpating in their violence and aggression toward women."

But Creasey says that doesn't let Twitter off the hook. She's demanded that Twitter do more to help law enforcement when there are specific threats of violence. She asked that Twitter make reporting abuse easier and to respond to complaints faster and do more to help end harassment on the platform when it becomes so intense that it's aimed at silencing dissenting voices.

While other western democracies censor hate speech, the U.S. does not. Awful, hateful and execrable things are constitutionally protected, at least until they cross that line and become specific threats or are so irresponsible they put someone's life in danger.

In many ways, Twitter is trying to export these free speech values around the world. But from Great Britain to Bahrain, it's running into problems.

Navigating these conflicts falls to Del Harvey, the senior director of trust and safety at Twitter. Harvey has been at Twitter since 2008 and joined the company as its 25th hire.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn't ban bullying. It doesn't try to stop people from saying hateful, mean and even terrible things, but Harvey says its policies have evolved in the last five years and are not universally understood.

Twitter's help page makes it clear targeted abuse and real threats of violence are verboten, but the page is kind of buried. So on Saturday, Twitter amended its rules, adding language on targeted abuse and harassment more prominently.

"We've had a policy against abusive behavior and violent threats for some time, but we needed to make sure that was clear and easy for folks to understand," Harvey says.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

The Fat-Shaming Professor: A Twitter-Fueled Firestorm

Get recipes for Peach-Blackberry Cobbler, Plum-Cherry Crumble, Apple-Raspberry Pandowdy and Blueberry Buckle.

What does Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bring to The Washington Post, which he just agreed to buy for $250 million?

Here's how the Post's executive editor, Martin Baron, answered that question Tuesday on Here & Now:

"He's an extraordinary business man, a great entrepreneur and innovator — someone who has disrupted other businesses. We're a business that has been disrupted. I think it'll be nice to have somebody who knows how to disrupt other people and other businesses."

Baron also said Bezos is "a risk taker, he's a long term thinker, and that's a big plus for us."

As for the reaction to the sale in his newsroom, Baron said:

"There's a certain wistfulness for the Graham [family] era, and certainly a lot of admiration for the family stewardship of the paper over the last 80 years. But also, there's a lot of anticipation and I think excitement about the possibilities that this opens up. You know, if we're going to get a new owner, I think a lot of people think there couldn't be a better one."

Also on the show, news industry analyst Ken Doctor from the Newsonomics website said that Bezos and a few others with lots of money to spend have apparently decided that when it comes to newspapers " 'we think [the prices are] close to the bottom. We're going to buy close to the bottom and we'll reap a financial benefit, but it might take 3 to 5 years.' "

It's being called a destroyer, or perhaps a helicopter carrier. But by any name, Japan's new warship, unveiled Tuesday, is the largest it has built since World War II. The ship was shown to the public on the anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and at a time of escalating tensions with China.

"Though the ship—dubbed 'Izumo'— has been in the works since 2009, its unveiling comes as Japan and China are locked in a dispute over several small islands located between southern Japan and Taiwan," The Asahi Shimbun reports. "For months, ships from both countries have been conducting patrols around the isles, called the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyutai in China."

With a flat flight deck — but reportedly lacking catapults or other means of launching fixed-wing aircraft — the Izumo could be used against submarines, or to deliver large loads of supplies and people to disaster areas, officials say.

The ship measures 248 meters (814 feet) in length; in comparison, the largest U.S. aircraft carriers are between 1,000 and 1,100 feet long.

"We express our concern at Japan's constant expansion of its military equipment. This trend is worthy of high vigilance by Japan's Asian neighbours and the international community," China's defense ministry tells Agence France-Presse. "Japan should learn from history, adhere to its policy of self-defense and abide by its promise of taking the road of peaceful development."

Japan's military is collectively known as the Self-Defense Forces, a name that reflects its pacifist constitution. But in recent years, the country's leaders have shown a shift in how they view that document, which dates from the end of World War II.

Over the weekend, a Japanese official who heads an advisory panel said it will urge a reinterpretation of Japan's constitution later this year, a move that would allow the country to engage in "collective self-defense," such as attacking a nation that attacks an ally, The Japan Times reports.

Also from The Japan Times comes news of a joint poll of citizens in China and Japan which found that, "Over 90 percent of Japanese and Chinese have an unfavorable impression of each other." The number is the highest in eight years, according to the newspaper.

With sizzling temperatures in much of the country, tourists are turning to mountain ski resorts to find relief. Resorts from Colorado to California and Oregon are on track to set a record this year for summer business.

Brandon Wilke is spending a long weekend at a resort just down the road from Aspen, Colo. He came for a wedding, but Wilke and his brother-in-law decided to bring their mountain bikes and try out some bike trails at the Snowmass ski resort. At first, Wilke says he didn't know mountain biking was an option.

"I went to the Snowmass website and just looked at what kind of activities, events that they held up here and saw the mountain biking and the gondolas," he says, "and decided it's for me, I gotta bring my bike."

In the summer, the Aspen Skiing Co. allows mountain biking on terrain normally used for skiing.

From a gondola car, Aspen Skiing's Jeff Hanle points to dirt trails that crisscross the mountain. Bridges, jumps and big wooden-banked turns are tucked between pine trees. All the trails were in place last summer, Hanle says, and some from the year before.

"We're still winter-driven, that's where most of our income comes from," Hanle says, "but we've got these facilities up here and we can use them to sort of expand and stretch out our business season."

The ski resort operator isn't the only the one benefiting from expanded summer offerings. Hotels, restaurants and shops in Snowmass and Aspen are enjoying a banner summer. Bill Tomcich, who tracks visitations through his resort-booking company, noticed the trend too.

"You just take a look at the number of visitors in town," he says, "and it's almost unprecedented numbers compared to what we are used to in years gone by."

The resort is bouncing back to pre-recession levels, Tomcich says, partly because of activities like mountain biking. It's also cheaper. A summer hotel stay in Aspen is about 60 percent of the cost of a winter vacation.

Heavenly Resort in California is also expanding its summer activities. A 2011 law allowed resorts that operate on U.S. Forest Service land to offer activities other than skiing. For Heavenly, that meant offering things like summer tubing. Tourists tube down a long green, plastic mat, resort spokeswoman Sally Gunter says.

The Two-Way

Ski Resort Makes Snow With Treated Wastewater, After A Long Dispute

In Choire Sicha's Very Recent History; An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City, a voice from our future looks back at events taking place in a "massive" east coast metropolis, its citizens perpetually gripped with "a quiet panic" while living in a gritty landscape of iron and excess. Throw in a mysterious virus, a rich, blind governor, a sketchy mayor campaigning for a third term, and this novel gets even more curious.

Guiding us through this is John, a young man so poor he can't even afford socks or regular haircuts. His days are spent working in a dreary office, making less money now that he has a "real" job than he did freelancing. Sicha spins a compelling allegory of New York City and its residents. Here's a tangled fable of greed, consumption, and isolation in a place where characters grapple with profound feelings of isolation despite too many friends, too many romantic flings, and too many choices.

John spends his nights partying with his tight-knit group. There's the sensible Chad, a tutor to the children of the city's wealthy, and Chad's boyfriend, Diego, who he met on a dating website aptly called DList, the likeable Kevin and his "incredibly symmetrical face," with whom John sometimes has sex, and the beautiful Tyler Flowers whose skin is "so pale that you [can] see into his head a little."

As the novel progresses, the city sinks deeper and deeper into a recession, the shadowy virus gradually claims more victims, our imperious mayor spends more money on a re-election campaign based on fear and intimidation, and John and his friends find themselves increasingly lost in a labyrinth of smoky bars, hook-up sites, and sex clubs.

But, even as they glibly rant about cigarettes and social media, wealth and power, Sicha portrays this group of gay men not as vapid and shallow products of their time, but as compelling, keen, and intensely complex individuals yearning to be heard and remembered in the face of so much annihilation. In the relentless bombardment of text messages and non-sequiturs, one-night stands and obsessions about money and jeans, we encounter incisive musings on love and worth at a time when it seemed as though the entire world would unravel.

Choire Sicha's writing charms and delights, but beneath the biting wit and cynicism, I found a book that dares to explore the darker underbelly of human avarice and capital, a book that's equal parts blindingly terrifying and smartly humorous, and one of the most clever reads I've encountered in a long time. This novel forces us to consider the cyclical nature of profits and losses, forces us to remember that friends and fads come and go, and that some things survive while others die off.

For it's only when we closely examine our own very recent history can we better learn to understand, and embrace, the very possible future we'll inevitably inherit.

Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego Leon.

Apple has been notoriously disinterested in Washington politics. But two decisions coming from the Obama administration in the past few days indicate that Washington is increasingly interested in Apple.

Apple got some good news this weekend when U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman stepped in and overturned a ban on the import of the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. The ban was put in place by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which ruled that those Apple products violated standard industry patents held by Samsung.

The U.S. Trade Representative hasn't overturned an ITC decision since 1987. But a presidential administration can throw out a decision if it determines that it's in the best interests of the U.S. economy and American consumers.

At first glance, Froman's decision doesn't seem that significant. According to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner, the ban only applied to iPhone 4s and iPad 2s using a particular technology largely available on AT&T and T-Mobile. The iPhone 4 still sells because it's cheaper than getting the latest version, but sales of AT&T iPhone 4s are only a bit over 1 million units a year. Milanesi says the iPad 2 hardly sells at all.

The U.S. Trade Representative may have been looking at the way Samsung was using its patents as a negotiating tactic with Apple. Last year, Samsung lost a big patent case to Apple. Unless it wins on appeal, Samsung is going to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. However, Samsung has some patents that are necessary for a lot of mobile communication devices like the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. It was those patents that were at issue in the ITC ruling.

In his letter overturning the ITC, Froman said Samsung was engaged in a "patent hold-up." Basically, Samsung was trying to get a very high price on patents that are essential to Apple and others who make wireless devices. To Froman it may have seemed that Samsung was trying to get revenge from Apple over its earlier loss.

In a statement, Apple applauded Froman for "standing up for innovation." But if the company was having a fuzzy moment toward the Obama administration, it didn't last long.

On Friday, the Justice Department handed down some pretty harsh punishment to Apple for its role in price-fixing e-books. Last month, Apple was found guilty by a federal judge of conspiring with publishers to raise the price of e-books. Under the Justice Department's proposed remedy, Apple will now face extra scrutiny when entering into agreements with suppliers of music, movies, TV shows and other content that might raise prices for consumers: Every time Apple signs a new contract, it will have to demonstrate to a DOJ auditor that its action won't raise prices.

Google and Microsoft used to ignore lawmakers in D.C. But both ended up being scrutinized for their business practices by antitrust regulators. Now, these companies no longer sit around waiting on Washington to act.

Last year, Politico reported that Google and Microsoft spent $7 million lobbying Congress. Meanwhile, Apple spent about $500,000 — and that's less than the year before. Over the weekend, the long arm of the Obama administration reached out into the offices in Cupertino. And you have to wonder if Apple isn't thinking it better start reaching back.

On the Ashley River, a few miles south of Charleston, S.C., the water is murky and the marsh grass high. Louis Marcell and the rest of a three-man logging crew are cruising on a 24-foot pontoon boat. It's low tide, and logs are poking out everywhere.

Hewitt Emerson, owner of the Charleston-based reclaimed wood company Heartwood South, is in charge. He's going to an old saw mill site, but won't say exactly where. He's heading to Blackbeard's Creek, he says. As in pirate Blackbeard — the early 18th century scourge of the seas.

"He'd hide his boat up there and would go across the river to Middleton plantation to see his girlfriend," Emerson says.

Once a secret hiding place for a pirate, this is now a hidden trove of valuable wood.

Like much of the United States, South Carolina was once covered in old-growth forests. By the mid-20th century, virtually all of the virgin wood in the state was gone, either hauled away on trains or floated down rivers to be cut into lumber at saw mills.

But not all that timber made it to its destination. Some sank on its way down the river, where those old-growth logs have been preserved for about a century. Now, these precious leftovers can be worth up to several thousand dollars each.

But getting that treasure out is no easy task. First, anyone hoping to dredge the logs, known as sinker wood, must obtain a permit from the state. The logs weigh tons and are buried deep down in the muck. Once removed, the wood must be properly stored before milling to avoid cracking. And then, there are the alligators.

Enlarge image i

Apple has been notoriously disinterested in Washington politics. But two decisions coming from the Obama administration in the past few days indicate that Washington is increasingly interested in Apple.

Apple got some good news this weekend when U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman stepped in and overturned a ban on the import of the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. The ban was put in place by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which ruled that those Apple products violated standard industry patents held by Samsung.

The U.S. Trade Representative hasn't overturned an ITC decision since 1987. But a presidential administration can throw out a decision if it determines that it's in the best interests of the U.S. economy and American consumers.

At first glance, Froman's decision doesn't seem that significant. According to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner, the ban only applied to iPhone 4s and iPad 2s using a particular technology largely available on AT&T and T-Mobile. The iPhone 4 still sells because it's cheaper than getting the latest version, but sales of AT&T iPhone 4s are only a bit over 1 million units a year. Milanesi says the iPad 2 hardly sells at all.

The U.S. Trade Representative may have been looking at the way Samsung was using its patents as a negotiating tactic with Apple. Last year, Samsung lost a big patent case to Apple. Unless it wins on appeal, Samsung is going to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. However, Samsung has some patents that are necessary for a lot of mobile communication devices like the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. It was those patents that were at issue in the ITC ruling.

In his letter overturning the ITC, Froman said Samsung was engaged in a "patent hold-up." Basically, Samsung was trying to get a very high price on patents that are essential to Apple and others who make wireless devices. To Froman it may have seemed that Samsung was trying to get revenge from Apple over its earlier loss.

In a statement, Apple applauded Froman for "standing up for innovation." But if the company was having a fuzzy moment toward the Obama administration, it didn't last long.

On Friday, the Justice Department handed down some pretty harsh punishment to Apple for its role in price-fixing e-books. Last month, Apple was found guilty by a federal judge of conspiring with publishers to raise the price of e-books. Under the Justice Department's proposed remedy, Apple will now face extra scrutiny when entering into agreements with suppliers of music, movies, TV shows and other content that might raise prices for consumers: Every time Apple signs a new contract, it will have to demonstrate to a DOJ auditor that its action won't raise prices.

Google and Microsoft used to ignore lawmakers in D.C. But both ended up being scrutinized for their business practices by antitrust regulators. Now, these companies no longer sit around waiting on Washington to act.

Last year, Politico reported that Google and Microsoft spent $7 million lobbying Congress. Meanwhile, Apple spent about $500,000 — and that's less than the year before. Over the weekend, the long arm of the Obama administration reached out into the offices in Cupertino. And you have to wonder if Apple isn't thinking it better start reaching back.

A cyclist who commutes to work in Vancouver, Canada, was surprised and angered last week when she found a note from her office building on her bike that threatened its confiscation. Her offense? Parking in the "15-minute-only" bike rack.

"So I got a ticket from #CadillacFairview for parking my bike outside their building/my office," tweeted Molly Millar, who works in the Vancouver Sun & Province Building, also known as Granville Square.

Millar is a fashion editor for Momentum magazine (motto: "smart living by bike"). The property is owned by the Cadillac Fairview Corp., a large real estate company whose website touts its "Green At Work" initiative and its efforts to increase sustainability.

The note on her bike warned that repeat offenses could result in her bike being taken by the company and possible fees, Millar says. She says there were no signs at the rack referring to a time limit.

The episode raised the ire of cycling advocates in Canada and the U.S. as word spread on Twitter. It also sparked debate about how deeply committed cities and businesses are to environmental efforts and to supporting the growth of cycling.

After receiving the notice, Millar emailed Cadillac Fairview to ask that they install bike racks for commuters. She shared part of their response with the site Cyclelicious:

"We do like to encourage cycling to work and our tenants to think about being 'green' ... but we also need to maintain the professional image of the building. We don't want to encourage all day parking of bikes throughout our plaza, which would deter from this [professional image]."

Employers added 162,000 workers in July, and the U.S. unemployment rate slipped to 7.4 percent, the lowest level since December 2008, the Labor Department said Friday.

But while the number of jobs did increase, the hiring pace was slower than in the spring, marking a setback for unemployed Americans who had hoped for a better summer.

"The labor market begins the second half of 2013 with a fizzle," economist Heidi Shierholz, with the Economic Policy Institute, says in her analysis of the data. "At this rate, it would take six years to ... get back to health in the labor market."

Over the past year, the economy has added an average of 189,000 jobs per month. As jobs have grown, the jobless rate has dropped from 8.2 percent one year ago. In June, the rate was 7.6 percent.

To some extent, the falling unemployment rate also reflects a workforce that is shrinking as baby boomers retire and young people stay in college longer. Also, some people are staying home with children or elderly parents, and millions have stopped applying for jobs because they think it's hopeless. When fewer people seek work, then the unemployment rate looks smaller.

Another labor market measure that has been getting smaller is paychecks. The July report showed average hourly earnings slipped by 2 cents to $23.98. Over the past year, hourly earnings have risen only 1.9 percent. That's about the same rate of increase as consumer prices.

On 'Tell Me More'

NPR's Marilyn Geewax speaks with host Michel Martin about the latest jobs numbers.

In the small town of Coalinga, Calif., on the corner of 6th and Elm streets, the Fresno County Superior Court's old courthouse is still. Inside, veteran police Lt. Darren Blevins gestures inside an empty courtroom.

"In the past, when we actually had court in here, over on this wall here was the seating for the inmates or the people that were held in custody," he says.

But now, in the wood-paneled courtroom, a large flat-screen television hangs where the podium used to be. Due to budget cuts, Fresno County closed the courthouse last year. Now, it uses video streaming, via the television, to hold traffic court.

“ I know others have disagreed with our choice, but financially we could not do anything else but close those courts. We have to live within our budget.

Ask Americans about the most pressing concerns for the nation, and overhauling the tax code probably isn't all that high on the list — that is, unless those Americans happen to be Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairmen of the congressional tax-writing committees.

The two lawmakers are on a mission to simplify the tax code.

When they're out on the road selling that tax overhaul, they don't wear ties and they skip much of the formality of Washington — like last names even. Just call them Max and Dave.

On a recent Monday morning, they found themselves in Debbie Schaeffer's appliance store in New Jersey, Mrs. G TV and Appliances. After looking over some high-end ovens, the chairmen sat down with Schaeffer at a faux kitchen island near the front of the store to talk taxes.

"Right now, it's just so extremely complicated," Schaeffer says.

Welcome to the tax overhaul road show — the public part of Max and Dave's bipartisan push for a fairer, flatter, simpler tax code. Their leading question to the business owners and taxpayers they visit is: Wouldn't it be better if the tax code were simpler?

The answer is always: Yes, but...

In Schaeffer's case, Baucus asks her about getting rid of a bunch of deductions. That would mean lower tax rates, he says, maybe even a top rate as low as 25 percent.

"You'd pay a lower rate," he says. "Is that an approach that makes sense?"

Schaeffer says it is. Then comes the "but."

Related NPR Stories

News

A Bipartisan Duo Takes Tax Pitch On The Road

You may have heard about last week's announcement that scientists implanted false memories in laboratory mice. The paper, published by Nobel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa and co-authors in the journal Science, explains how mice were caused to "remember" a scary an environment that was actually neutral.

Here's the procedure in a nutshell: Hippocampus neurons of mice firing to make memories in a non-scary environment were labeled, then activated with light when the animals were put into a second, different environment. In this second location, during the neurons' forced activation — when the act of remembering the first environment was underway — the mice received mild foot shocks.

The BBC reports:

Later when the mouse was put back into the first environment, it showed behavioural signs of fear, indicating it had formed a false fear memory for the first environment, where it was never shocked in reality.

One day after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., last December, Liza Long wrote a blog post urging the country to focus on treatment for the nation's mentally ill youth. In it, she shared the story of her own son, "Michael" (not his real name). "I live with a son who is mentally ill," she wrote for The Blue Review.

"I love my son. But he terrifies me. A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books ...

"No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options."

Those who hope, as I did, to trace Lin-Liu's noodle quest in one long, shining, unbroken strand will be disappointed. Lin-Liu travels through rice country (China and Iran) and bread country (everywhere else), and finds noodles relegated to secondary or zero status. Like all those who follow roads not knowing whether they lead to Oz or perdition, she must wrestle with whatever answer comes. It's an awkward predicament, and it ties Lin-Liu in knots: "Maybe noodles and filled pasta had taken a roundabout tour of the Middle East and North Africa on their journey to Italy. Or perhaps ... culinary exchanges had taken place between the Italian peninsula and Asia Minor. Or perhaps, it was a coincidence? After seven thousand miles, the connection was still a mystery."

The Salt

From Ramen To Rotini: Following The Noodles Of The Silk Road

A cyclist who commutes to work in Vancouver, Canada, was surprised and angered last week when she found a note from her office building on her bike that threatened its confiscation. Her offense? Parking in the "15-minute-only" bike rack.

"So I got a ticket from #CadillacFairview for parking my bike outside their building/my office," tweeted Molly Millar, who works in the Vancouver Sun & Province Building, also known as Granville Square.

Millar is a fashion editor for Momentum magazine (motto: "smart living by bike"). The property is owned by the Cadillac Fairview Corp., a large real estate company whose website touts its "Green At Work" initiative and its efforts to increase sustainability.

The note on her bike warned that repeat offenses could result in her bike being taken by the company and possible fees, Millar says.

The episode raised the ire of cycling advocates in Canada and the U.S. as word spread on Twitter. It also sparked debate about how deeply committed cities and businesses are to environmental efforts and to supporting the growth of cycling.

After receiving the notice, Millar emailed Cadillac Fairview to ask that they install bike racks for commuters. She shared part of their response with the site Cyclelicious:

"We do like to encourage cycling to work and our tenants to think about being 'green' ... but we also need to maintain the professional image of the building. We don't want to encourage all day parking of bikes throughout our plaza, which would deter from this [professional image]."

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

Following its successful antitrust lawsuit against Apple, the Justice Department is ready to mete out punishment. It has asked a court to force Apple to end existing deals with five publishers and submit to broad oversight intended to "reset competition to the conditions that existed before the conspiracy." An external monitor, to be paid for by Apple, would ensure the company was not engaging in anticompetitive behavior. The proposal also states Apple must "for two years allow other e-book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to provide links from their e-book apps to their e-bookstores, allowing consumers who purchase and read e-books on their iPads and iPhones easily to compare Apple's prices with those of its competitors." And Apple "will be prohibited from entering into agreements with suppliers of e-books, music, movies, television shows or other content that are likely to increase the prices at which Apple's competitor retailers may sell that content." Of course, Apple wasn't happy about the proposed punishments, calling them "a draconian and punitive intrusion into Apple's business, wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm."

Caroline Alexander tries to make sense of Homer's famous phrase "the wine-dark sea" in a broad-ranging essay for Lapham's Quarterly: "The phrase is alluring, stirring, and indistinctly evocative. It is also, strictly speaking, incomprehensible."

James Folta and Luke Burns imagine "Fragments from the Ancient Gospels of 'The Church of a Pretty Good God' " in the literary magazine McSweeney's: "The Lord said, 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.' And the people replied, 'No other Gods? Even that one God with a crocodile head?' And the Lord conceded that the God with the crocodile head was hard to compete with."

In The New York Times, Jodi Kantor considers Portnoy's Complaint and the rise of the Jewish sex scandal: "Nearly half a century after the publication of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' politics is finally catching up with fiction, as libidinous, self-sabotaging politicians are causing grimaces among fellow Jews and retiring outdated cultural assumptions — that Jewish men make solid husbands and that sex scandals belong to others."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Suit Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems is Thomas Sayers Ellis' stingingly intelligent, heart-thumpingly lovely collection of poems on the broad theme of race and identity — though Ellis strives to defy categorization. In the opening poem, he writes, "These genres these borders these false distinctions / are where we stay at / in freedom's way."

The Goddess Chronicle is Natsuo Kirino's feminist reinterpretation of Japan's creation myth. Although the translation occasionally seems stiff and unskilled, the dark power of the story still manages to shine through.

NPR contributor Alan Cheuse writes that Robert Pinsky's Singing School is a " career-crowning book" and "a magnificent anthology of, as Pinsky defines it for us, poems to inspire — each of them with his brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them."