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North Dakota and western Canada are producing crude oil faster than it can be shipped to refineries.

Rail car manufacturers can't make new tank cars fast enough, and new pipeline proposals face long delays over environmental concerns. So energy companies are looking for new ways to get the heavy crude to market.

One proposed solution is to ship the oil by barge over the Great Lakes — but it's a controversial one.

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Pipeline On Wheels: Trains Are Winning Big Off U.S. Oil

The chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat is often spoken of as the country's next prime minister. But his critics accuse Narendra Modi of being responsible for a wave of anti-Muslim violence in his state in 2002. The accusation has stuck despite Modi being cleared of wrongdoing in the violence and despite his record as an efficient administrator.

In a long blog post Friday, Modi addressed the criticism.

"I was shaken to the core," he wrote on his website. "'Grief', 'Sadness', 'Misery', 'Pain', 'Anguish', 'Agony' – mere words could not capture the absolute emptiness one felt on witnessing such inhumanity."

But the comments fall short of what many victims of the riots wanted: an apology.

"This is just an attempt to try and burnish his image for the 2014 elections but this is not going to fly," said Manish Tewari, a member of India's ruling Congress Party and the country's information and broadcasting minister. "No expression of remorse changes the reality that thousands [were] ... massacred. There has to be closure, justice."

Zahir Janmohamed was visiting Gujarat when the riots occurred, but managed to return to California. He has since returned to the state, but as he told NPR's Rachel Martin the legacy of the riots still looms.

"I think the first thing that was surprising is how divided the city is," he says. There's a street known as 'The Border' that divides the all-Muslim area where he now lives — "known pejoratively as mini-Pakistan — and then across the border is the Hindu area."

Modi, as NPR's Julie McCarthy has noted, is a controversial figure in Indian politics. The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder spoke to NPR's Here & Now about the emotions Modi evokes among his citizens:

"He's one of India's most controversial politicians, because while he has an incredible reputation as being a very efficient administrator, a leader who is not known to be corrupt, he also has a legacy, which is that in 2002, under his watch as Gujarat chief minister, the state witnessed one of the worst religious riots in Indian history.

"Something like 2,000 people - most of them Muslims, from the minority - were killed. And he's often been accused of not just doing very little, but actually actively fomenting those riots. And that's the reason why, even today, he is seen very much as a divisive politician, someone who, while he has the backing of many people, equally is loathed by many others."

Okinawa's governor has approved a plan to relocate the U.S. Marine base on the Japanese island.

Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima's decision Friday is a reversal of his pledge to move the base out of the Japanese island.

The project would involve land reclamation for a new base that would consolidate the U.S. presence on the island.

"We decided to approve the application for the landfill as we judged it contains all possible steps that could be taken at present to protect the environment," Nakaima said at a news conference in Naha, the prefectural capital.

About half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are on Okinawa, and residents there have complained about base-related crime, noise and accidents.

Nakaima said that it would take an estimated 9 1/2 years to build the base, and he would continue to work to move the troops off Okinawa entirely.

"My thinking remains it would be fastest to relocate outside [Okinawa] prefecture to a place where there is already an airport," he said.

The Kyodo news agency reports:

"The decision marks a major breakthrough in the stalled relocation of the base after years of political maneuvering due to stiff local opposition to a 1996 bilateral agreement with the United States to return the land to Japan."

Eventually Branstad said "yes," but only if Iowa could take the money on its own terms. The state legislature, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, came up with an alternative: Federal expansion dollars would pay for managed care policies that poor people would select on the HealthCare.gov site.

Unlike in other states, these new Medicaid recipients will pay a premium — $20 a month.

Iowa's plan also provides incentives for people on Medicaid to monitor their health. Branstad calls it having "skin in the game."

Iowa is one of a handful of states that negotiated or are negotiating with the federal government to customize their Medicaid expansion and still get federal funding. Branstad notes that "other states, like Tennessee and Pennsylvania, are looking at our plan."

The federal Department of Health and Human Services' decision to grant Iowa a waiver to try this idea is not surprising, according to Joan Alker, executive director at the Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families, a policy research center. She says that the Obama administration "is willing to bend over backwards to get to 'yes,' " to show Republican governors how much flexibility they have in experimenting with Medicaid expansion in their states.

But "there are some lines they can't and will not cross," Alker says. While Iowa beneficiaries have to pay something for premiums and non-emergency care, recipients "can't be disenrolled if they're unable to pay those premiums," she says. "That's important, because we already have plenty of evidence to suggest that charging premiums to people below [the] poverty [line] will mean that they can't afford them and they're likely to lose their coverage."

Shots - Health News

Medicaid Enrollment Is Brisk Despite HealthCare.gov Troubles

President Obama on Thursday signed the bipartisan budget bill agreed earlier this month, setting the stage for an easing of mandatory spending cuts over the next two years.

The Senate approved the spending measure last week, following its approval in the Republican-dominated House.

The president also signed the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2014.

As The Associated Press reports:

"Obama signed the bill Thursday while vacationing in Hawaii. The deal reduces across-the-board cuts already scheduled to take effect, restoring about $63 billion over two years. It includes a projected $85 billion in other savings."

"It's not the grand bargain that Obama and congressional Republicans once had wanted, but it ends the cycle of fiscal brinkmanship for now, by preventing another government shutdown for nearly two years."

"The bill signing marks one of Obama's last official acts in a year beset by the partial government shutdown, a near-default by the Treasury, a calamitous health care rollout and near-perpetual congressional gridlock."

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The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, was hit by indirect rocket fire Wednesday morning, officials say. NPR's Sean Carberry reports for our Newscast unit that no one was injured.

"They hit in an open area; they didn't strike any of the embassy buildings. There was no damage to embassy facilities, and there were no causalities," he said.

Embassy officials say they are investigating. Taliban insurgents claimed they fired rockets at the embassy, but they often make claims that turn out to be exaggerated or untrue.

At least six people were killed in attacks elsewhere in Afghanistan on Wednesday, The Associated Press reports. An Afghan official told the news agency a bomb on a bicycle was detonated in front of a restaurant in Logar province. Two of those killed were police officers and four were civilians, AP reports.

If you want to look into the future of commuting, you need only go to the graduate transportation program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.

The program's creator, Geoff Wardle, says he started it because he sees a coming tipping point "where all aspects of transportation, whether it's of people or goods, is going to go through some fundamental changes, and we've seen the early signs of that even with the convolutions the automobile industry has been through recently."

In program's design studio, you can see almost every pie-in-the-sky idea about transportation — some as out there as flying cars to hovercraft. Most are more (ahem) down to earth.

Student Russell Singer is working on a project to crowdsource car design — so instead of going to a big car company you could build your own car that fits the needs of you and your exact location.

"But we want to do is get it almost to this level of simplicity, like a Lego car, where you can just kind of plug things together, and you can experiment with the function and the form factor of the vehicle without needing to be an engineer or highly trained transportation designer," Singer says.

The idea is that open source designing could potentially make it easier to come up with breakthroughs of things like fuel efficiency.

Meanwhile, student David Poblano says one of the most important things he's hoping to see in the future the connection between social networking and travel.

"The transportations systems and networks that we look at, they have a certain amount of demand and they kind of track how many people get on to the trains at certain times, but they don't necessarily know all the information about how you get from your home to the bus to the subway station to a taxi," Poblano says.

So right now, Poblano says we're all connected but our transit systems aren't. Think about it: If Facebook knows that you like golf, it'll show you ads for Big Bertha drivers. But if your transportation system knew what percentage of people were going to work on any given day and what direction they were going in, it could change the number signals to divert traffic through less congested streets and add more train cars or buses.

One thing to keep in mind, Wardle says, is that our current transportation is totally unsustainable. For example, 75 percent of commuters drive alone to work. Studies show we're likely to see another peak in the number of vehicles on the road.

"So as well as making life much better for people who commute, making it a much more seamless part of their everyday lives, we have to figure out how to do that in a way that this planet can support, " Wardle says.

That's something that car designers and transportation designers might not have thought of in the past. And student David Day Lee says the biggest problem in transportation isn't really design or infrastructure. It's the way we think.

Think about how much the phone has changed for instance. "This has become the device through which people do business, the device through which people can capture precious moments," Lee says. "And so, in the same way, mobility could be reimagined as a platform around which we can bring about changes."

For these changes to happen, all the students assume that to some degree or another our cars will be driving themselves. And every step toward driverless cars opens up a new realm of possibility for what your commute could be like. It changes everything.

Student Calvin Ku says that he sometimes holds out little hope that commutes can improve. But, he says, solving transportation problems is akin to fighting a disease. "We can't stand in the corner and just crawl into a ball and hope it goes away," Ku says. "And you can see the range of ways of tackling transportation problems in [the graduate design studio], with these people here. If we can collectively work together, I think we can solve these problems."

That's the message from these students of transportation: your commute will definitely get better. It has to.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday after serving a decade in prison, says he will dedicate the rest of his life working for the release of other political prisoners.

"I would like to devote this time to pay off my debt to people who are worst off," Khodorkovsky said through an interpreter provided by Russia Today, a state-funded, English language news outlet.

During the press conference in Berlin, Khodorkovsky said because it has been only 36 hours since he was released, he had not decided on specifics, but he said he would not return to the business world and does not plan to seek political power.

"I'm not going to fight for power. This is not for me," Khodorkovsky said.

As Scott reported, Khodorkovsky's imprisonment was widely seen as the Kremlin's attempt to silence his opposition. Scott goes on:

"Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003, when masked commandos stormed into his jet as it was parked on a runway in Siberia. Two years later, he was convicted of tax evasion and in 2010 found guilty of embezzlement.

"Khodorkovsky, regarded by human rights groups such as Amnesty International as a political prisoner, has been in jail for the past decade. However, the former tycoon only had about eight months left on his original sentence."

This summer, I hit one of life's great milestones: I became a person who posts baby pictures on the Internet. A lot of them.

Our son was born in August, and I have already taken 15,000 pictures of him, hundreds that I want to share with our family and close friends, and a few dozen that I might want to show colleagues and acquaintances. But how?

In theory, we're in a golden age of photo sharing. There are literally dozens of ways to share photos with friends now. But with the new capabilities of the Internet come new and distinctly contemporary problems.

For one, most parents don't want photographs of their children widely available. You want your people to see them but not anyone else. The privacy issues that lurk in our daily lives cry out to be addressed when it comes to children

And second, not everyone uses the same social network. Grandma's on Facebook, your nephew is on Instagram and your colleagues are on Twitter and LinkedIn.

So, what do my wife and I do?

More Tools For Shutterbug Parents

Snapchat: This mobile app has garnered a lot of publicity as a platform for sexting. That's because photos people send to each other using this app disappear (from all phones and the company's servers) within 10 seconds of viewing them. So how do we use it as parents? Well, for the gross stuff. You might want to send your partner a photo of a particularly impressively filled diaper, but you don't need or want that image in your phone's memory. That's the kind of thing Snapchat was made for.

Blurb: Online services are great for storing vast quantities of photographs of your child. But what if you want something curated, more like a keepsake or a photo album of old? Well, Blurb is a print-on-demand publisher with really simple tools that allow you to create beautiful, professional-looking photo books.

The Wirecutter: If, after taking a few snapshots with your phone, you find yourself in need of a camera upgrade, this is the site to find gear recommendations. It's not like other gadget sites, which are overwhelming. Wirecutter provides one recommendation for every product category. So, you're looking for the best point-and-shoot camera? It will say, "Buy this one."

The Grammy nominations are in, and the talk now is of what actors will be chosen for the Academy Awards, but not once have I heard anyone suggest that any of the singers or actors may not be nominated because of some character deficiency.

Likewise, when it comes to awards in theater or television or dance or literature, I don't ever recall any candidate losing out because of a personal flaw.

Only sports applies that peripheral off-the-field standard. Most recently, of course, this has come up with respect to Jameis Winston, the star quarterback of the top-ranked Florida State team.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

In the two-year, $2 trillion budget deal that cleared the Senate last week, one item, worth just one-sixth of 1 percent of that total, was the reason many senators said they voted against it.

That item would produce some $6 billion in savings by shaving a percentage point off annual cost-of-living adjustments, and it would apply only to military pensions. Not all military pensions — just the retirement paid to veterans younger than 62.

Even though the budget compromise spares the Pentagon another round of painful across-the-board spending cuts next month, many of the staunchest military supporters in the Senate opposed it. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said it's not fair that working-age veterans have their retirement benefits reduced under the deal.

More On The Budget Deal

Economy

The Washington Two-Step: Dancing Back To Normal

At one point, she appeals to Bruce, "But you can change things around later, no? Bruce? With the editing? You can sand down the rough edges." I'll admit, there were points that I found myself wishing that he had.

Frankly, though, these are minor quibbles. The novellas live instead in their contradictions, bringing opposing terms together again and again. Wagner mines this friction for comedy and pain — often both at once. In India, the streets swarm with "Swami Mafiosi." Queenie interrupts a dramatic moment to comment on how well she pulled it off — or, would have pulled it off, had she not interrupted herself. In one devastating scene, Charley discovers divinity at the heart of trauma. And even as he and Queenie tell of their quests for self-abnegation, they become painfully self-aware in the telling.

Religion pervades this book — Roman Catholicism, mysticism, Buddhism, warts and blessings and all. But, for all the dogma, one concept stuck with me: "'Bardo' is Tibetan," Charley explains early on, "it means the limbo or 'in-between.'" It's here — in bardo, of all places — that this book offers the reader its pleasure and challenge. Between religions, between contradictions, and even between their various tellings, these stories grasp at something difficult to put into words.

In the end, our trusty transcriber Bruce finds the tiny thread that binds the two novellas. Wagner, on the other hand, remains content to relish the humor and sadness of that space between.

Read an excerpt of The Empty Chair

As the year winds down, we here at NPR are looking at a few key numbers that explain the big trends of 2013.

Today's number: 1.6 million.

That's 1.6 million acres — about the area of the state of Delaware.

That's how much land was removed this year from the federal Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, which pays farmers to keep land covered with native grasses or sometimes trees. Most of that land now will produce crops like corn or wheat.

It's a sign of the shifting economic tides that are transforming America's farming landscape.