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Rob Delaney Talks About Gratitude, Perspective, Spaceships And A Career With Teeth

At age 42, Ahmet Muhsin Tuzer has a modest post as Imam in a small mosque in the village of Pinarbasi, near Turkey's Mediterranean coast, where he serves about 15 Sunni Muslim families. It's not the kind of place where you'd expect to find an Imam attracting attention across Turkey and beyond.

But Tuzer is quietly – well, not so quietly, actually – pushing back against Turkey's religious establishment. He's attracting a following among younger Turks for his inclusive religious message, and especially for his work outside the mosque, fronting a rock 'n' roll band.

On a recent visit to Istanbul, Tuzer told NPR that his new adventure began this summer, when he met veteran Turkish rock guitarist Dogan Sakin and they formed the band FiRock. He says it's a genre-jumping band.

"Rock, Sufi mysticism, psychedelic rock; it's a bit like Pink Floyd," he says. "We record sacred songs and originals. We want to embrace everyone, so we don't limit our music."

The Reaction: Surprise, Praise And An Investigation

Some of the villagers of Pinarbasi were nonplussed when they were invited to one of FiRock's first concerts, when the band's sound favored energy over polish.

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The Affordable Care Act's early travails are yielding some lessons for future presidents and lawmakers. Here are three:

1) Presidents can't be too careful about making high-profile promises.
President Obama dented his credibility significantly by repeatedly promising that the Affordable Care Act would allow Americans with insurance they liked to keep those policies.

That turns out not to be true in many cases for those in the individual insurance market, leading to the conclusion that the president didn't understand the legislation's effects, that he intentionally misled, or that he way oversimplified his message for broad consumption.

None of those put him in a particularly good light. And the hit to his credibility as he closes in on the end of his fifth year in office could very likely wind up harming other parts of his agenda, like immigration, as opponents repeatedly ask: "How can we trust him?"

Health care experts have said they were surprised when they first heard the president's vow, since they knew Obamacare would invariably result in many private insurance plans being dropped — and thus people not being able to keep those plans. An obvious question is how the president's senior aides allowed him to keep making the promise?

2) Someone needs to tell the president bad news.
It's a truism that aides are loathe to bring presidents bad news. But even worse than telling a president bad news is allowing him to be surprised by it. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified this week, however, that the president was caught off-guard by the health care exchange website's meltdown.

That was despite the failure of HealthCare.gov when it was tested before its Oct. 1 launch, and couldn't handle a minuscule fraction of the traffic it was expecting. There were plenty of warnings that the site was troubled. According to the administration, they just never flowed to Sebelius' level or to the president's.

Future presidents might want to have a trusted, top-level White House aide whose sole job is to sniff out the bad news in the administration.

3) Democrats can forget about Republicans helping them fix Obamacare.
Democrats have argued that the GOP should take a page from how Democrats acted after Republicans passed the Medicare drug benefit program in 2003.

In recent congressional hearings about the ACA, Democrats have reminded Republicans that even though Democrats voted against the drug-benefit program because of the hole in its coverage, its ballooning of the deficit and its failure to rein in pharmaceutical company profits, they helped fix it. Democrats by and large didn't threaten to undo the Medicare program once it became law.

But the dynamics were totally different. When Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's political strategist, persuaded Republicans to create a new entitlement program, he argued that it would help Republicans capture ground from Democrats on the health issue. It also put Democrats in a trick bag since, as a party, they tend to support entitlements, not oppose them.

By contrast, the central premise of the health care law — the federal government mandating the purchase of a product and penalizing people who don't buy it — is anathema to many conservatives. It's why the repeal and defund argument appeals to so many Republicans.

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, has been killed in a U.S. drone strike, Taliban and U.S. sources have said, according to various news reports.

"We confirm with great sorrow that our esteemed leader was martyred in a drone attack," a senior Taliban commander was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The Associated Press reports that "a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed the strike overnight, saying the U.S. received positive confirmation Friday morning that he had been killed." The news agency said the CIA and the White House declined to comment.

An NPR producer in Islamabad, citing Pakistani intelligence sources, reports that Mehsud was in North Waziristan to attend a meeting at a mosque in the Darpa Dandakhel area of Miranshah when he was killed.

It's worth pointing out that in the past, initial reports of senior al-Qaida and Taliban leaders being killed in drone strikes have frequently proved wrong.

The death of Mehsud "would be a major blow to the group that comes just a day after the [Pakistani] government said it started peace talks with the militants," the AP says.

Mehsud is "believed to be behind a failed car bombing in New York's Times Square in 2010 as well as brazen attacks inside Pakistan, was widely reported to have been killed in 2010, but later resurfaced. The tribal areas where the drone attacks occur are dangerous, making it difficult for journalists to independently confirm information," according to the AP.

The BBC says four missiles were fired from the drone at a vehicle used by Mehsud.

The British broadcaster says:

"Four other people were killed in the strike, including two of Mehsud's bodyguards, intelligence sources say.

Several previous claims of his death, made by US and Pakistani intelligence sources, have proven untrue."

Indonesia, Kompas

There's more fallout over disclosures that the U.S. spied on many of its allies — this time in Indonesia.

The Foreign Ministry on Friday summoned Greg Moriarty, the Australian ambassador to Indonesia, over allegations that Australian diplomatic posts, including the one in Jakarta, were used as part of the U.S. surveillance network.

The disclosures came Thursday in the Sydney Morning Herald, which reported that the diplomatic posts involved included Beijing, Bangkok, Thailand; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

China also demanded an explanation of the reports.

Australia is part of the "five eyes" alliances, which includes the U.S., Britain, Canada and New Zealand. The five countries have shared sensitive information since World War II.

Last week, there was outrage in Germany following reports that the U.S. National Security Agency had spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Germany, Deutsche Welle

We'll stay in Germany, which on Friday became the first European country to allow parents to leave the gender field blank on birth certificates. The move effectively creates an intersex option.

The law, which came following a report last year by the German Ethics Council, is intended to ease pressure on parents whose children are born with the characteristics of both sexes.

A spokesman for the German Interior Ministry said the law "is not adequate to fully resolve the complex problems of intersex people."

South Africa, IOL News

The man accused of raping and murdering a 17-year-old girl in a case that shocked the country was sentenced Friday to life terms in prison without parole.

Johannes Kana was found guilty earlier this week of raping and disemboweling Anene Booysen on Feb. 2. She died later at a Cape Town hospital.

Kana was seen with her outside a pub in Bredasdorp, about 130 miles from Cape Town, earlier that day. He admitted during the trial to leaving the pub with Booysen, and hitting and raping her. But he denied killing her.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual violence against women.

Mexico, El Universal

Finally, a story that will sounds familiar to many Americans: Mexican snack food makers are warning that a tax on junk food passed by the Mexican Congress on Thursday will ultimately hurt consumers.

The Mexican Senate voted Thursday to raise the tax on junk foods from 5 percent to 8 percent.

Bruno Lemon Celorio of the snack manufacturers association told El Universal the move, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2014, would result in a price rise of between 8 percent and 10 percent.

Nearly a third of all Mexicans are obese, putting the country atop the list of overweight nations.

"President Obama's top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama's re-election outlook appeared uncertain," The New York Times reports.

The Times gets that news from an advance copy of Double Down: Game Change 2012, a book due next week from political journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The newspaper says it obtained a copy "from people in the publishing industry."

Rumblings about a possible Clinton-for-Biden veep switch were heard in late 2011. As It's All Politics wrote that year, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post had been saying "it's on the table."

Obviously, it never happened. According to the Times, Halperin and Heilemann report Obama's aides "concluded that despite Mrs. Clinton's popularity, the move would not offer a significant enough political boost to Mr. Obama to justify such a radical move." Clinton was Obama's secretary of state through the president's first term. The former first lady and Biden are now among those who may make bids for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

William Daley, who was White House chief of staff in 2011, tells the Times that it was simply "due diligence" to study a possible switch.

The Wall Street Journal, which says it also has seen a copy of the book, adds that Daley said in an interview that "he didn't know if Mr. Obama weighed in on the matter and [that he] never discussed it with the president."

Bob Goldin, executive Vice President of Technomic, a leading food service industry research and consulting firm, says it was a smart decision. "Tea consumption globally is actually far larger than coffee," he notes, "so I think they see this as another opportunity to capture the away-from-home-beverage market, and do for tea what they have done for coffee."

I ask Charlie Cain, a vice president at Starbucks, if this move will destroy the independent tea store. Absolutely the contrary, he contends.

"In 1991 there were 1,600 coffee shops," he says. "By 2005, there were 14,000 independent coffee shops ... we think the same thing is possible for tea."

But it's a little more complicated. Austin Hodge owns Seven Cups of Tea in Tucson, Ariz., which specializes in Chinese teas. Last year, it was named by Travel + Leisure magazine one of the best places to have tea.

The Salt

Starbucks Pours Money, And Health Hype, Into Pricey Juice

The fate of Nazi war criminal Heinrich Mueller, who led Adolf Hitler's Gestapo, has long been a mystery. Now a historian says has traced Mueller to a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. If confirmed, the discovery would end 68 years of uncertainty about the man who ran the secret police.

After becoming the head of the Gestapo in 1939, he played a key role in executing the Nazis' "Final Solution," a plan to exterminate Jews. He "was last spotted in Adolf Hitler's bunker in Berlin the day after the Nazi leader committed suicide in 1945," Reuters reports.

The news agency also notes that Mueller had been known to say he would never be captured alive by Germany's enemies. He is now believed to be in a mass grave in a historic Jewish cemetery in central Berlin.

"Mueller, who was an SS Gruppenfuehrer — roughly equivalent to a major general — was sought for decades after the war by investigators around the world, including Israel's Mossad, the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center," the AP says.

Historian Johannes Tuchel, the director of the German Resistance Memorial Center, tells Reuters and Germany's Bild newspaper that he's found proof Mueller died in Berlin in 1945. After being buried first in a temporary grave at the Luftwaffe headquarters, Mueller was interred in a mass burial at a historic Jewish cemetery in Berlin, Tuchel says.

Tuchel "reexamined evidence from a grave-digger after the war, in then communist East Germany," Reuters reports, "who remembered burying a man in a general's uniform in Berlin-Mitte Jewish Cemetery in 1945."

The historian says he then cross-referenced military decorations and documents found on the body to data from German intelligence and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the Berlin archives.

"The cemetery was desecrated by the Nazis and became the site of 16 mass graves for more than 2,700 people who died in Allied air raids and the fall of Berlin. It is now a Jewish memorial," according to Reuters.

The news that a notorious Nazi war criminal might be in a Jewish cemetery dating from the 17th century has produced new frustrations in the Jewish community — particularly because its religious law forbids exhumation, and Mueller's body could be difficult to identify beyond a doubt.

"The fact that one of the most brutal Nazi sadists is buried in a Jewish cemetery of all places is a distasteful monstrosity," Dieter Graumann, chairman of the Central Council of Jews, tells Bild, in a translation by Der Spiegel. "The memories of the victims are being grossly violated here."

In 1945 and the years that followed, efforts to find the former Gestapo leader were made more difficult by the fact "Heinrich Mueller" is a very common German name, according to the biography assembled by the Jewish Virtual Library.

"Ultimately the Allies would find many Heinrich Muellers in occupied Germany and Austria, but not the right one," the site says.

For years, many people suspected Mueller had somehow eluded capture, perhaps by allying himself with the Soviet Union. Der Spiegel reports:

"After [Adolph] Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust, was captured in Argentina in 1960 and taken to Israel to stand trial, he told his interrogators that he believed Mller was still alive. Documents from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) apparently show that Western intelligence agencies, too, long believed that Mller survived the war. In the summer of 1949, it was thought he was hiding in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary, and SPIEGEL reported in the 1960s on speculation that he was alive."

Welcome, all you ghosts and goblins! Welcome, all you cats and princesses! Welcome, Iron Man Under That Down Jacket! Welcome, Werewolf Whose Mom Is On The Phone!

I am pleased to see you at my door. I welcome always the young people in whose vicinity I reside, provided they are not so old that they pause before picking up their candy to put down a lit cigarette, which really happened to my parents once. (I will be using that anecdote in my upcoming book, Signs That You Have Outgrown Trick-Or-Treating.)

I know you expect every opened door to reveal a bag of Snickers bars or a plastic pumpkin filled with wee bags of M&Ms that you can later spread out on your bed, sort, argue over, try in vain to keep your parents from stealing after you fall asleep, and eventually allow to grow stale in the bottom of a Target bag.

But this is not that house. This is not that Halloween. Because I care. I care too much for Snickers bars. I care too much for Sweet Tarts. I care too much for Nerds. (I do actually care too much for nerds; my therapist would tell you that. Hiyo! But anyway, back to Halloween.) I care so much that I want to give of myself. I want to give of my possessions. I want to give, give, give.

I know you are accustomed to people who don't provide candy giving you something dull and unamusing, like pennies. Pennies! Of what use are pennies to an imaginative elf such as you? They are of no use at all. You need adventure. You need excitement.

You need Canadian change.

As it happens, I was recently in Toronto, a fine city in which Canadian money is surprisingly common. I returned home with previous souvenirs that say things like "ONE DOLLAR" and "TEN CENTS" on them. Into each of your bags will go a special treat that will remind you of our neighbor to the north. Your imagination will open to William Shatner and the CBC; to hockey and poutine.

You may also fear that I will make the worst possible feint in the direction of health by giving you the dreaded tiny box of raisins. Lamentable tiny box of raisins! It is always dried out and miserable; you always wind up scraping dried stems from under your fingernails.

I will not give you the tiny box of raisins. Oh, no. I will give you a handful of loose raisins from my personal supply! These are the same raisins I enjoy myself! They are very good raisins! I have about half a box!

If you are not fond of raisins, perhaps you are a scientist. Perhaps you like adventure! Perhaps you enjoy, as they say, "tinkering" with "gizmos"! As it happens, I have a large supply of batteries with the much envied "AA" rating. Don't worry! I've emptied them of any dangerous charge they might have contained, making them perfectly safe for classic kids' games like What's Wrong With The Remote? and What The Radio Says In My Imagination.

Maybe you're one of the "tweens" who's discovered the super-hot fad of safety-pin collecting! If so, you have come to the right house. Not only do I have a small box of safety pins that I am entirely willing to give you, but it often feels as if every box in my home has a safety pin or two rattling around in the bottom. Collector's items, every one. And in mint condition! Barely used!

Neighborhood children, I feel that we are off to an excellent start. I look forward to hearing your peals of laughter and your shouts of joy. I promise to ooh and aah over your costumes. I wish you a festive and profitable Halloween.

You're welcome.

In this final round, led by puzzle guru Art Chung, contestants are given the names of two actors who have played the same role in different movies, and they must name the character. For example, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro both played Vito Corleone from The Godfather trilogy. Who was a more convincing mob boss? We'll let you figure that out on your own.

Since the financial crisis hit five years ago, there aren't as many Americans starting new businesses. In uncertain economic times, it's harder for entrepreneurs and investors to take the risk.

And if you look back over the past 25 years, it turns out the overall trend is toward fewer new businesses getting started, too — and that's not good at all when the country needs more jobs.

The Next Google

New businesses are really important for the economy. For one thing, they often come up with new technologies and better ways of doing things. And when they do that, a small percentage start growing very fast and hiring hundreds or thousands of people.

"Out of this vast number of startups, about 10 percent take off, and they create an enormous number of jobs," says John Haltiwanger, a professor at the University of Maryland. He's an economist who studies these young, high-growth companies.

"If you add up the job creation in the United States from just the fast-growing businesses, they account for over 50 percent of all job creation in the United States," Haltiwanger says.

The State Of The American Small Business

When It Comes To Jobs, Not All Small Businesses Make It Big

Texas has one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the nation. In 2012 a federal court struck down Texas' ID law, ruling it would potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of minority voters.

But that federal decision was invalidated when the Supreme Court last year ruled part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. So now Texas is test driving its Voter ID law.

Texas Judges are accustomed to a certain level of respect, even deference as they go about their daily business in the Lone Star State. So imagine Judge Sandra Watts' surprise when she went to cast her vote last week and was told there was a problem.

"What I have used for voter registration and identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote," Watts says.

Why? Because Watts' name on her driver's license lists her maiden name as her middle name. But on the state voting rolls, her real middle name is there, and that's difference enough to cause a problem.

"This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting," she says. "And so why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I've been voting regular ballot for the last 49 years?"

Sandra Watts stomped out of her polling place and called the local Corpus Christi TV station KIII. Her voting problems became the lead story that night.

The original Justice Department concern with Texas' Voter ID law involved its discriminatory effect on the state's poor and minority voters. In 2012 a federal court ruled it unconstitutional on that basis, but that ruling was itself invalidated last year when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, and with that Texas' Voter ID law was back from the dead. So it's come as a surprise how, in practice, the law has also been a problem for Texas women.

Soon after Judge Watts went public, the Democratic candidate for governor, state Sen. Wendy Davis, also was forced to sign an affidavit before she could vote. Married women, divorced women anything that involves changing or adjusting your name could be problem.

"What the law says is in two parts," says Toni Pippins-Poole, the elections administrator for the city of Dallas. "You must have a photo ID and that photo ID has to be one of the listed categories."

For example, it is fine to use a concealed handgun carry permit to vote, but a student can't use his or her university photo ID as they could before. Texas Democrats complain that's because those who carry concealed tend to vote Republican while university students tend to vote Democratic.

"The second part of the photo ID bill is that the name on the ID that you are presenting has to be identical; exactly match what we have on the official list of registered voters," Pippins-Poole says. She knows the real test is next year's congressional elections, and she's concerned about elderly voters.

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Justice Files Voter Discrimination Suit Against Texas

The Federal Reserve's message, at least for now, is to take a wait and see approach to the economy before tapering off on its bond-buying program.

In a statement issued after Wednesday's meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee said that while it's seen signs of "growing underlying strength in the broader economy" it awaits "more evidence that progress can be sustained."

As a result, the FOMC says it has "decided to continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month."

The Committee said it would keep the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent for now and anticipates keeping it there "at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent" and inflation holds steady.

NPR's Neal Carruth points out a subtle but important difference from last month's statement, when the Fed said the housing sector was strengthening. On Wednesday, it changed it's tune slightly, saying, "the recovery in the housing sector slowed somewhat in recent months."

Stocks fell in volatile trading after the announcement.

The Associated Press reports:

"The Fed again noted that budget policies in Washington have restrained growth, but it made no mention of the 16-day government shutdown. However, the Fed no longer expressed concerns about higher mortgage rates, a concern it flagged in September.

The Fed's policy decision was approved on a 9-1 vote with Esther George, the president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, dissenting as she has done at each of the central bank's seven meetings this year."

Good morning, fellow political junkies.

It's the last week of October. That means the administration has just a month to meet its self-imposed deadline to have the Affordable Care Act website running as efficiently as it and millions of Americans had originally envisioned.

But the first item in our Monday political mix of some of the more interesting tidbits that caught my eye this morning indicates why setting such a deadline might be easier than meeting it.

The part of the Affordable Care Act's star-crossed, back-office technology that was thought to be working well experienced problems Sunday reports Reuters' David Morgan and Sharon Begley.

President Obama apparently didn't know until this summer that the NSA was electronically eavesdropping on leaders of U.S. allies but ordered a halt to that spying once he learned of it, The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous report.

Budget negotiations between the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-led House start this week with low expectations for the sides to reach any significant deficit-reduction agreement since they're so far apart on entitlement cuts and tax increases. The National Journal's Billy House compares the competing budget proposals.

Who knew? The Pentagon has a 92-year old futurist nicknamed "Yoda" who runs a Defense Department outfit whose value to the nation is hard for outsiders to determine because it's output is so classified. In a delicious Washington irony, it's difficult for budget cutters to assess the Office of Net Assessment. Yoda and his operations also have political support from big-name policymakers past and present, the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock reports.

More than half the economists surveyed by USA Today said the federal government's partial shutdown hurt economic growth to the point where they are significantly adjusting downward their economic growth forecasts for the next two quarters, report Paul Davidson and Barbara Hansen.

A year after Superstorm Sandy destroyed and damaged tens of thousands of coastal homes and businesses in New Jersey and New York, rebuilding is uneven, reports NPR's Joel Rose on Morning Edition. Meanwhile, the high costs of insurance and reconstruction have led to wealthier buyers snatching up properties that once belonged to middle class families, reports The Wall Street Journal's Josh Dawsey.

In polling is accurate, Democrat Bill de Blasio, an unabashed liberal, appears poised to win the New York City mayoral election by the widest margin for a non-incumbent since 1973 the New York Times' David W. Chen and Megan Thee-Brenan report.

Vice President Biden, political animal that he is, appears to be reveling in his key role in the effort to recruit Democrats to run for Congress, reports Politico's Edward-Isaac Dovere. Not only does Biden help the party in its uphill battle to retake the House but he gets to reenergize connections in states that could be important to him if he decides to run for president.

Under online marketplace Etsy's new policies, vendors can now use an outside manufacturer to help make their goods.

That is not going down well with some longtime sellers, who are calling the new policies a turnaround from the site's original mission.

"Their moniker is, you know, a place to buy handmade. It doesn't say a place to buy factory-made," says Rae Padulo, a potter who began selling dishes and ornaments on Etsy in 2009.

"There's nothing wrong with factory-made; it's just, that's not what Etsy started out to be," she says. "It started out to be a place where you could get something special, something one-of-a-kind, something made by a human being."

Padulo says Etsy is abandoning makers of handcrafted goods, who, like her, have only one pair of hands.

Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says the company is still behind lone artisans — they make up most of its 1 million sellers. Still, it wants to support those whose businesses are growing, and under the old rules, that was difficult. Successful vendors were frustrated that they couldn't get enough help with their work.

"We heard from a wedding seller, for example, who said that when wedding season came around she was in a state of mild panic attack because she just reached her limit and was working, you know, 18 hours a day," Dickerson says.

Under the new policy, anyone who wants to work with an outside manufacturer has to apply and be vetted by Etsy, which makes sure the arrangement meets its ethical guidelines.

Alexandra Ferguson started her pillow business on Etsy several years ago working from home. She's since expanded her line to makeup cases made out of organic cotton with recycled felt lettering.

Ferguson's business has tripled in the last two years. She now works out of a small factory in Brooklyn with 11 employees.

Ferguson says she's proud to be creating manufacturing jobs in New York City. "That Etsy is now encouraging and embracing that growth, to say it doesn't matter how many employees you have — you can have 25, you can have 50, you can have 100 — just means we've now been given free rein to hire as much as we need to sustain our growth," she says.

But not all vendors want to grow their businesses like Ferguson did, especially those who were attracted to the site's small-business ethos.

Business

Etsy Crafts A Strategy For Staying Handmade And Profitable

Local Chinese government propagandists have outdone themselves in what seems to be the increasingly competitive category of bad Photoshop.

This week's entry hails from Ningguo County in central China's Anhui province. The workmanship is so bad, it seems almost, well, effortless.

The photo, which was posted to the county's civil affairs website, purports to portray government officials visiting a 100-year-old woman. But the officials appear to be about 20 feet tall compared to the diminutive lady, and one of the officials has no legs.

Reviews on China's Internet, which often serves as a Greek chorus of ridicule these days, were predictably mocking. (Officials have since taken down the photo, apologized and issued an explanation.)

Last year, a photo purportedly showing officials from a district in the city of Hangzhou inspecting a park drew similar attention. The Photoshop job was so bad, the men appeared to levitate above a road and lawn.

One Chinese netizen, as Internet users are called here, summed it up succinctly: "The engineer who merged the picture is not skilled at Photoshop at all."

The Chinese have surpassed their North Korean allies, who are old pros at the art of bad Photoshopping.

A subcontractor that built a portion of the HealthCare.gov website that's now working relatively well is being promoted to oversee a thorough revamping of the entire glitch-prone portal, and work will be done by the end of next month, the White House says.

QSSI apparently will replace Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the lead role. QSSI is tasked with identifying problems and prioritizing fixes, Jeffrey Zients, who is in charge of fixing the website, said in a briefing on Friday.

"By the end of November, the vast majority of consumers will be able to successfully and smoothly enroll through HealthCare.gov," Zients said.

HealthCare.gov — the online entry point for uninsured Americans to get coverage under the Affordable Care Act — has turned into an obstacle for people trying to purchase coverage.

Zients told reporters that currently about 90 percent of the website's users are able to set up an account but "as few as 3 in 10 are getting through the process."

He said that a team of "leading managers and programmers" drawn from government and the private sector assessed the problem with the portal and determined "it is fixable."

Reuters says QSSI "produced the federal data hub and a software tool for creating online consumer accounts, which was at the center of early logjam problems."

When you sit down at Chef Jos Andrs' tapas restaurant, Jaleo, in Washington, D.C., and ask to see the beverage options, as I did recently, you're in for a surprise. Instead of a traditional leather-bound menu, I was handed an iPad.

An app called SmartCellar guided me to search for wine by grape variety and climate zone. Selecting a bottle, I got details about the vintage and its producers, tasting notes written by the restaurant's wine team, pictures of the bottle or label, and food pairing suggestions.

Having all this information on hand was initially intimidating. What was I in the mood for? Did I want to splurge on a rare bottle from the illustrious, shuttered Spanish restaurant El Bulli? What was the back story on that Rioja? But as I immersed myself in the app, I got so into it that the waiter had to stop by three times before I was ready to order.

While paper menus, which have been around for centuries, still dominate the restaurant world, a growing number of restaurants are singing the praises of tablets to better serve their customers.

"There's a clear advantage to digital menus," says Lucas Paya, wine director for Jos Andrs' ThinkFoodGroup, which has been testing them at two of the company's 16 restaurants since 2012. "First, there's the amount of content you can display, which is impossible on paper. And there's the real-time capability. I can update the list at a moment's notice online from anywhere in the world."

Enlarge image i

Under online marketplace Etsy's new policies, vendors can now use an outside manufacturer to help make their goods.

That is not going down well with some longtime sellers, who are calling the new policies a turnaround from the site's original mission.

"Their moniker is, you know, a place to buy handmade. It doesn't say a place to buy factory-made," says Rae Padulo, a potter who began selling dishes and ornaments on Etsy in 2009.

"There's nothing wrong with factory-made; it's just, that's not what Etsy started out to be," she says. "It started out to be a place where you could get something special, something one-of-a-kind, something made by a human being."

Padulo says Etsy is abandoning makers of handcrafted goods, who, like her, have only one pair of hands.

Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says the company is still behind lone artisans — they make up most of its 1 million sellers. Still, it wants to support those whose businesses are growing, and under the old rules, that was difficult. Successful vendors were frustrated that they couldn't get enough help with their work.

"We heard from a wedding seller, for example, who said that when wedding season came around she was in a state of mild panic attack because she just reached her limit and was working, you know, 18 hours a day," Dickerson says.

Under the new policy, anyone who wants to work with an outside manufacturer has to apply and be vetted by Etsy, which makes sure the arrangement meets its ethical guidelines.

Alexandra Ferguson started her pillow business on Etsy several years ago working from home. She's since expanded her line to makeup cases made out of organic cotton with recycled felt lettering.

Ferguson's business has tripled in the last two years. She now works out of a small factory in Brooklyn with 11 employees.

Ferguson says she's proud to be creating manufacturing jobs in New York City. "That Etsy is now encouraging and embracing that growth, to say it doesn't matter how many employees you have — you can have 25, you can have 50, you can have 100 — just means we've now been given free rein to hire as much as we need to sustain our growth," she says.

But not all vendors want to grow their businesses like Ferguson did, especially those who were attracted to the site's small-business ethos.

Business

Etsy Crafts A Strategy For Staying Handmade And Profitable

Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has begun his prison sentence, resolving a brief period of confusion over his status. It seems that Jackson tried to turn himself in to federal prison officials Monday — but he was four days early. The official deadline for his surrender for a 30-month prison term had been set for Friday.

"He is in our custody, as of about a minute ago," Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke tells The Chicago Tribune this morning.

Jackson reported to the federal Butner Correctional Center near Raleigh, N.C., Monday, according to reports and a spokeswoman; he did so again on Tuesday, and was accepted into custody.

"He had been ordered to report to a federal prison camp or correctional institution no earlier than November 1," CNN reports. "The Bureau of Prisons said it couldn't comment on why Jackson reported earlier than ordered."

A former warden at the prison tells the Tribune that an early arrival at the prison can't be held unless the sentencing judge's order is amended.

A former rising star from Illinois, Jackson is being punished for taking $750,000 in campaign funds for his personal use; his wife, Sandi was sentenced to a year-long prison term for not reporting $600,000 in income on her federal tax return.

Jackson now joins disgraced financier Bernie Madoff as an inmate at Butner, the Tribune says.

Because the Jacksons have a school-age son and daughter, they are being allowed to serve their sentences one after the other.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, who accompanied Jackson to prison, said he "was in good spirits entering the prison, 'all things considered,'" the AP says.

Under online marketplace Etsy's new policies, vendors can now use an outside manufacturer to help make their goods.

That is not going down well with some longtime sellers, who are calling the new policies a turnaround from the site's original mission.

"Their moniker is, you know, a place to buy handmade. It doesn't say a place to buy factory-made," says Rae Padulo, a potter who began selling dishes and ornaments on Etsy in 2009.

"There's nothing wrong with factory-made; it's just, that's not what Etsy started out to be," she says. "It started out to be a place where you could get something special, something one-of-a-kind, something made by a human being."

Padulo says Etsy is abandoning makers of handcrafted goods, who, like her, have only one pair of hands.

Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says the company is still behind lone artisans — they make up most of its 1 million sellers. Still, it wants to support those whose businesses are growing, and under the old rules, that was difficult. Successful vendors were frustrated that they couldn't get enough help with their work.

"We heard from a wedding seller, for example, who said that when wedding season came around she was in a state of mild panic attack because she just reached her limit and was working, you know, 18 hours a day," Dickerson says.

Under the new policy, anyone who wants to work with an outside manufacturer has to apply and be vetted by Etsy, which makes sure the arrangement meets its ethical guidelines.

Alexandra Ferguson started her pillow business on Etsy several years ago working from home. She's since expanded her line to makeup cases made out of organic cotton with recycled felt lettering.

Ferguson's business has tripled in the last two years. She now works out of a small factory in Brooklyn with 11 employees.

Ferguson says she's proud to be creating manufacturing jobs in New York City. "That Etsy is now encouraging and embracing that growth, to say it doesn't matter how many employees you have — you can have 25, you can have 50, you can have 100 — just means we've now been given free rein to hire as much as we need to sustain our growth," she says.

But not all vendors want to grow their businesses like Ferguson did, especially those who were attracted to the site's small-business ethos.

Business

Etsy Crafts A Strategy For Staying Handmade And Profitable

In an alley in Northeast Washington, D.C., hundreds of pounds of produce are piled haphazardly on pallets. Mexican Fruits, a discount grocer, can't sell the fruit and vegetables inside these boxes because it has gone soft or is lightly bruised. Some will be donated, but most boxes are destined for a large, green Dumpster nearby.

Before it gets tossed, Roger Gordon grabs one box of lightly speckled bananas. Gordon is the co-founder of Food Cowboy, a start-up that's trying to redirect discarded food from Dumpsters to hunger relief groups. He's here at Mexican Fruits because he's hoping they'll call him the next time they have this problem.

"We want to set ourselves up as air traffic control for food," says Gordon, who's based in the Washington, D.C., area.

According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 percent of food in the U.S. goes uneaten. And many see this wasted food as a business opportunity — from start-ups like Food Cowboy and Crop Mobster to the former president of Trader Joe's, who is opening up a market. But although food waste is an obvious problem, it's a complicated one to solve, whether you're targeting farmers, retailers or consumers.

In the retail food world, a lot of waste happens because distributors don't have time to find a home for the perishable food stores won't accept.

Gordon's brother, Richard, came to understand this first hand. In his work as a trucker, he often hauls "kick" loads of food that's been rejected by retailers often just for aesthetic reasons. If the load is small enough, he can take it home. But if it's large, his distributor might instruct him to drop it at the nearest Dumpster or landfill.

Convinced there should be a better way, the brothers started working together to scout out nearby food charities along Richard's trucking route. "The trucker is under time pressure ... But oftentimes the charity is just a few miles away from where the shipment has been rejected," he says. "It's just that the truckers don't know about it."

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Good Tuesday morning, fellow political junkies.

As you go through your day, keep this in mind: at least you're not Marilyn Tavenner. When critics of the Obama administration's botched launch of the Affordable Care Act call for heads to metaphorically roll, Tavenner, the top official of the Health and Human Services agency that oversaw the ill-fated website project, is high on that list.

She will be the first senior Obama administration official to testify before Congress since the botched Oct. 1 startup of the Obamacare website.

The only person likely to have a worse time of it this week on Capitol Hill is HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, due to testify Wednesday before Congress.

With the World Series in full swing, in the language of baseball Tavenner is the first administration official up at bat. But unlike actual baseball, lawmakers not only get to pitch her high and tight fastballs, they also get to call balls and strikes.

With that, here are some of the more interesting pieces and tidbits of political news, analysis and reflection that caught my eye this morning.

The government shutdown and wobbly launch of the Affordable Care Act website now look like the ground the 2014 mid-term campaigns will be fought on, writes Politico's Alex Isenstadt. Of course, all that could change by next summer.

A federal judge stopped parts of a Texas anti-abortion law that would have restricted access to abortions to many women by raising requirements for providers, reports Christy Hoppe in the Dallas Morning News. The ruling can expected to fire up both sides in the abortion debate in Texas, where it is already figuring prominently in the 2014 governor's race, and beyond.

With congressional budget negotiations as the backdrop, Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Obama advisor, channeled his inner Alexander Hamilton, telling Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep the national debt is an "asset" that can be used to invest in the nation's future growth.

Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich has become a contrarian in his own party when it comes to the importance of the social safety net for the poor, the New York Times' Trip Gabriel reports. Kasich recently defied his state's Republican legislature and took Obamacare-related funding to expand his state's Medicaid program.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe has expanded his lead over Republican Ken Cucinelli a double-digit lead on Republican Ken Cuccinelli, the Washington Post's Laura Vozella and Peyton M. Craighill report. McAuliffe's momentum increases the chance that Democrats could sweep all state-wide races. President Obama is scheduled to attend a McAuliffe rally Sunday to help boost turnout, especially of minorities and young voters, in a traditionally lower-turnout off-year election.

Graphics based on research by Bloomberg Businessweek's Eric Chemi help us visualize the states where House Republicans are likely to be most vulnerable because of the narrowness of their 2012 margins of victory.

The odds are still against the Democrats regaining control of the House, writes Andrew Gelman in the Monkey Cage blog on the Washington Post site.

The meaning of all the conspiracy theories and of the assassination of John F. Kennedy himself 50 years ago occupy the musings of Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. He concludes that assassination exposed just how near America's light and dark sides are to each other.

More on Johnny Cash

Music

Inside Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison

In Kalyanee Mam's new documentary A River Changes Course, a teacher stands before a room packed with grade schoolers, leading them in an arithmetic drill. They're in Cambodia, and though the drill is in the Khmer language, the body language is clear enough as the children hold up their hands one at a time, displaying all five fingers: five and five make 10, in most any dialect.

That's one of the film's few optimistic scenes, however — and it's one not typical of the experiences of the three young Cambodians the filmmaker follows. Like many of their compatriots, they live off the land, or the water. For them, a classroom education remains a distant dream.

Among the three is Sari Math, a young man whom we first meet fishing with his father. Forced to leave that job, he goes to work on a cassava plantation owned by the Chinese. Another is Khieu Mok; faced with mounting debt, she prepares to leave her village and her family behind for the big city of Pnom Penh, where she'll go to work at a garment factory.

And Sav Samourn, a farmer in the mountainous jungles of northeast Cambodia, fears the creep of loggers deeper into her forest.

"We used to be afraid of animals here in the jungle," Sav says in the film. "Now there are no more animals. We are afraid of people who are going to destroy the forest."

Kalyanee Mam's film was honored earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Mam joined NPR's Robert Siegel on today's All Things Considered to talk about her film, about the tides of rivers and of history, and about the crush of modernization that's driving many Cambodians from their traditional livelihoods.

When you sit down at Chef Jos Andrs' tapas restaurant, Jaleo, in Washington, D.C., and ask to see the beverage options, as I did recently, you're in for a surprise. Instead of a traditional leather-bound menu, I was handed an iPad.

An app called SmartCellar guided me to search by grape variety and climate zone. Selecting a bottle, I got detailed information about the vintage and its producers, tasting notes written by the restaurant's wine team, pictures of the bottle or label and food pairing suggestions.

Having all this information on hand was initially intimidating. What was I in the mood for? Did I want to splurge on a rare bottle from the illustrious, shuttered Spanish restaurant El Bulli? What was the back story on that Rioja? But as I immersed myself in the app, I got so into it that the waiter had to stop by three times before I was ready to order.

While paper menus, which have been around for centuries, still dominate the restaurant world, a growing number of restaurants are singing the praises of tablets to better serve their customers.

"There's a clear advantage to digital menus," says Lucas Paya, wine director for Jos Andrs' ThinkFoodGroup, which has been testing them at two of the company's 16 restaurants since 2012. "First, there's the amount of content you can display, which is impossible on paper. And there's the real-time capability. I can update the list at a moment's notice online from anywhere in the world."

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There's a thing you can find, mostly in Brooklyn, called lard bread. It's bread, with cured pork baked right into it, and it's not the slightest bit embarrassed about its name. We had ours imported from Brooklyn's Mazzola Bakery.

Eva: Now I know when people call me "lard bread" they mean it as a compliment.

Miles: Hard outside with a ham surprise inside. This is the closest we'll ever come to a meat piata.

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That mansion in Limburg, Germany, where about $40 million was spent on renovations for the since-suspended cleric now known as the "bishop of bling" may soon be "turned into a refugee centre or a soup kitchen for the homeless," according to reports from The Independent and other European news outlets.

We posted last Wednesday about Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst and the decision by Pope Francis to remove Tebartz-van Elst from his post at least temporarily. As we wrote:

"Tebartz-van Elst earned his unflattering nickname after reports surfaced that close to $40 million has been spent on work at his home and offices — about eight times what had been expected. He also, as National Catholic Reporter writes, allegedly made false statements in court about that work."

Actor John Lithgow has won awards for performances ranging from the goofy alien patriarch in 3rd Rock from the Sun to a demonic serial killer on Dexter to dramatic and musical roles on Broadway. (And if that weren't enough, he's written best-selling children's books, too.)

Since he's so successful onstage, we're going to ask him three questions about failures. He'll take a quiz about terrible new products, from Daily Finance's Top 25 Biggest Product Flops Of All Time.

Disclosures about the National Security Agency's spying on U.S. allies, including France and Germany, have sparked outrage in Europe, and created tensions in trans-Atlantic relations. But just how widespread is such spying? Here are four things to know.

1. Who spies on whom?

Spying on adversaries is common – as is spying on your allies.

As Charles Kupchan, a professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, told NPR's Audie Cornish last week: "Everybody spies on everybody, including friends on friends."

Parallels

5 Things To Know About The NSA's Surveillance Activities

George Polk may have been born to make history. He was descended from the American president who led the conquest of Texas and much of the southwest. But for George, Texas was too small, says his brother, William Polk.

In the 1930s, "Texas was a little backwater at the time and very few people even knew where other countries were — what the names were, what the languages were that were spoken," William recalled. "And he had a tremendous sense of curiosity."

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According to Kawash's research, Americans were "candy-crazy" during the first few decades of the 20th century. Ads from the 1920s framed candy as a weight-loss agent, and recipes for healthier foods like lima beans were supplemented with marshmallows.

Kawash says that while our obsession with candy hasn't waned since then, we may be eating even worse. "Today, we're eating a lot of candy, but we're also eating a lot of all kinds of other things — packaged snack cakes and potato chips and sodas and energy bars ... sweetened yogurts, sweetened cereals," she says, calling fruit snacks "candy training pants."

All these other things, she says, "are bringing sort of these empty calories into our diet. So the place of candy has kind of stayed the same, but what's changed has been the way that candy-like foods have entered our diet from morning to night."

When candy first became widely available at corner stores and groceries around the country in the early 20th century, our relationship with sweets began to sour, she says. Lots of people — especially kids — couldn't get enough, but others claimed it contained toxic chemicals and the roots of moral and physical decay. Members of the temperance movement were convinced that candy could turn into alcohol inside the stomach.

"This could be good, because that meant you could eat candy instead of drinking, so candy could be a good substitute for liquor," says Kawash. "Or this could be bad, because it might mean that all those little kids sucking on their lollipops were really boozing it up."

Obviously, we don't think these things anymore, she says, "but in our ambivalence around candy ... we can hear the echoes of this historical anxiety and these worries."

Some candy-eaters, she notes, even couch their love-hate relationship in religious terms.

"I talk to other people, and women especially talk a lot about candy in ... a language of sin and guilt and temptation and the sort of penance of the salad. Like, if you fall into the sin of a Snickers bar at lunchtime, you can do penance with salad at dinner," Kawash says.