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At age 86, Peter Matthiessen has written what he says "may be his last word" — a novel due out Tuesday about a visit to a Nazi extermination camp. It's called In Paradise, and it caps a career spanning six decades and 33 books.

Matthiessen is the only writer to ever win a National Book Award in both fiction — for his last book, Shadow Country, and adult nonfiction for his 1978 travel journal, The Snow Leopard.

Matthiessen is filled with the vitality of past adventures as he leads a tour of his country-style home on the East End of Long Island. I visited him in March, on the day before he was to begin a round of experimental chemotherapy for cancer.

On the living room wall are a dozen large black-and-white photographs of New Guinea tribal warriors. The pictures were taken in 1961 — half by the author, the others by his traveling companion, Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared on that expedition, and may have been the victim of cannibals. Matthiessen wrote a book about that journey called Under the Mountain Wall — one of his many nonfiction chronicles of man and his relation to the natural world.

His new novel, In Paradise, is based on a different kind of journey — a trek into the Heart of Darkness. In 1996, Matthiessen, who is a Zen Buddhist, traveled to Poland on a meditation retreat. It took place at the former Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. What he saw floored him — he recalls the barbed wire, the watch towers, and the crematoriums.

"The gas chambers were all blown up at the end of the war, so they are simply these grim-looking pale ruins out in the distance," he says. "It's a very grim scene. And so it's the enormity of it that just stuns you the first time."

Afghans are lining up to vote for a new president Saturday despite warnings of violence from the Taliban.

It will be be the first democratic transfer of power for for the nation. President Hamid Karzai has served for two terms and is not allowed to run for a third under the constitution.

The Taliban launched a number of attacks that killed dozens during the weeks before the election, but no major violence has been reported since polls opened.

Parallels

Afghanistan's Election Season Through The Photographer's Lens

We've invited comedian Amy Schumer to play a game called "Play ball!" It's the first week of baseball season so we'll ask three questions about The House of David baseball team — one of the weirdest and most religious teams in the history of the game.

As winter loosens its grip, employers are taking on more help.

Hotels, bars and restaurants added 33,000 workers, while retailers tacked on 21,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists say those increases suggest employers are growing more confident that Americans will be spending more this year.

"Consumers still have the wherewithal to make discretionary purchases and were just waiting for the snow to be plowed and the temperatures to rise to resume spending," IHS Global Insight chief U.S. economist Doug Handler wrote in his analysis.

The Labor Department report showed that all together, employers added 192,000 jobs in March.

That hiring boost encouraged people to resume their job hunts, pushing up the labor force participation rate to 63.2 percent, from 63 percent the previous month. With more people filling out job applications, there was no improvement in the unemployment rate. It held steady at 6.7 percent.

Still, that was a big improvement over last year's 7.6 percent.

This year's pace of hiring is "consistent with a moderately growing economy at present and a faster-growing economy later this year," Handler said.

The sense that the economy is thawing out after "a long, harsh winter" was echoed by Matthew Shay, who heads the National Retail Federation, a trade group for store owners. "Merchants are eager to move forward with their spring hiring and operational plans," he said in a statement.

The positive momentum also showed up in the construction sector, where employers added 19,000 jobs. Over the past year, construction employment has risen by 151,000.

That hiring helped March mark a milestone: private-sector employment returned to the pre-recession level of 2007.

“ [W]e need to at least get some people out of their trucks to make room for the rest of us.

"The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy" officially opens Saturday at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

As the nation's 43rd president says: "Who woulda thought it?"

Talking with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager during a pre-recorded interview on NBC-TV's Today show, the self-deprecating Bush says:

"I was a little reluctant to put them out [publicly], because I'm not a great artist. I don't want people to think I'm a great artist. On the other hand, I did want to refresh the Bush Center. I want people to come and visit us. We view ourselves as a place where people can learn."

Bush, who as we've said before took up painting after he left the White House in January 2009, has put more than two dozen portraits he's done of other world leaders on display. The subjects include Russian President Vladimir Putin, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Also on display: "artifacts, photographs, and personal reflections to help illustrate the stories of relationships formed on the world stage," according to the center.

Bush says his favorite from among the paintings is that of his father, the nation's 41st president. "I painted a gentle soul," he tells Jenna Bush Hager.

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The recent oil and natural gas boom in the U.S. is paying major dividends for Washington's geopolitical clout. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. is awash in domestic energy, which is having a ripple effect globally.

If you want to gauge one effect of this new found energy wealth, you don't have to look any further than the current crisis between Russia and Ukraine, says Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He says the U.S. would be reacting very differently to what's happening now if it was still a big natural gas importer. There's concern Moscow could cut natural gas supplies to the Ukraine which, in turn, would disrupt the flow to much of Europe.

Even five years ago, Levi says, Washington would have been alarmed that European nations could turn to U.S. suppliers, driving up the cost.

"We would be asking ourselves with every policy option we face, 'Will this disrupt markets and come back to hurt the U.S. economy?' We're not asking ourselves that question, because we're not dependent on imports," he says. "That's a surprise — and a good one."

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In what world does an annual salary of $174,000 meet the definition of underpaid?

That would be in the nation's capital, where soon-to-be-retired Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., asserted that Americans should know their members of Congress — as the board of directors for the "largest economic entity in the world" — are underpaid.

The longtime congressman made his comments Thursday after the House voted for the sixth straight year to deny members an automatic cost-of-living raise they're entitled to under law.

Not surprisingly, reaction to Moran's assertion was swift and derisive.

"Tone deaf," wrote Daniel Doherty at the conservative Town Hall website.

"The guy is retiring and has apparently gone Bulworth after getting his pension info," said the liberal Huffington Post, referring to 1998 movie featuring a politician who goes rogue and speaks without a filter. (With one big difference: Bulworth, played by Warren Beatty, addresses racial and economic divisions, not congressional pay.)

Fair Leadership Compensation

Though Moran's comments may be politically tone deaf given Congress's dismal approval ratings and the fact that the median household income in the U.S. is $51,000, compensation experts like Pete Smith say the guy has a point.

"Politically, he's in a sensitive area," says Smith, who advises corporate and non-profit clients on designing compensation and benefit packages for executives, "given that there is the perception that members of Congress don't work that hard, and don't do their jobs very well."

"But if you want good people in government, you shouldn't limit yourself to just people who can afford it because they'll have to find their wealth elsewhere," he said.

The Ethics Reform Act of 1989 allowed for an annual congressional pay adjustment, but it also gave members the authority to prohibit or revise the adjustment. Since 1992, Congress approved its annual adjustment 13 times, and rejected it 11 times.

Data compiled in a February Congressional Research Service report on Capitol Hill salaries showed that, in real dollars, members of Congress have continued to lose ground over the past two decades.

A Moran staffer who asked to speak on background Friday said that his boss is "not looking at a raise, but more at housing assistance, similar to what other federal employees get."

He noted that Moran's proposal "wouldn't apply to him" because he'll retire at the end of the year and because his primary home is in suburban Virginia – an easy (depending on traffic) commute from the U.S. Capitol.

Smith, the Washington-based compensation consultant, says that while $174,000 sounds like a lot and "isn't a bad level of pay," for leadership-level positions "it seems low by today's standards – both in the for-profit and non-profit worlds."

"There are a lot of non-profit executives who are earning $80,000 for running a food kitchen, for example," he says. "But there are also a lot of non-profit executives earning $200,000, $250,000, $300,000."

Smith says that he believes there is a strong argument for devising a better system, unhooked from politics, to determine congressional pay.

Double Homes/Single Income

Moran's comment no doubt resonated with members of Congress of a certain class — those without the financial means to maintain their district homes and absorb the high rental and housing costs in Washington.

More than a few sleep in their offices; many also share rentals.

The cost of renting an apartment or home in Washington can be eye-popping for members arriving from just about anywhere but San Francisco or New York City.

Take a look at Akron, Ohio, for example, in the district represented by Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. The average monthly apartment rental in Akron is $779; in Washington that same apartment would rent for $2,042 a month, according to cost of living calculators.

And if you earn $174,000 in Akron? You'd have to up your salary to $251,794 in Washington, given the cost of living – and largely the cost of housing.

"Housing stipends are not unusual," says Smith. "And that would be not a bad way to politically create more income without making the salary look that high."

So while Moran's lament may inspire some sniggers, especially considering many of the other perks of office, his comments no doubt resonated with colleagues spending another weekday night on their office couch.

But who would never consider voting for a pay increase in the current environment.

Movie lovers probably already know Anthony Mackie from supporting but meaty roles in the Oscar-winning films 8 Mile, Million Dollar Baby and The Hurt Locker. But now he heads to the Marvel Universe in the new action film Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Mackie plays the Falcon, also known as Sam Wilson, a former military paratrooper skilled in air combat. He teams up with Captain America to face the legendary assassin known as the Winter Soldier.

The Falcon was also a standout character on his own. He was the first African-American superhero in mainstream comics, the first super hero of color to get his own action figure, and a co-headliner with Captain America (the comic series was once renamed Captain America and the Falcon in the 70s).

Anthony Mackie spoke with Tell Me More about his latest role, and how he carved an unorthodox path through the movie business.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data this morning on the March unemployment rate and the number of jobs added to payrolls last month, economists expect to hear:

— That there were about 200,000 more jobs than in February.

— That the jobless rate edged down to 6.6 percent from February's 6.7 percent.

NPR's John Ydstie previewed the report on Morning Edition. As he said, 200,000 more jobs "would be much better than the 130,000 average increase over the past three months, when most analysts agree the economy was held back by bad weather."

A month ago, when BLS said employers had added 175,000 jobs to their payrolls, the news was slightly better than economists had expected. That figure could be revised in today's report.

The data are due at 8:30 a.m. ET. We'll be updating with the news, highlights, reactions and analysis.

Saving for retirement is a challenge facing most Americans. Research shows the challenge is made harder by our basic human impulses. We know we should be saving. But we don't. We consistently make bad financial decisions.

One thing that leads us astray is what behavioral economists call "loss aversion." In other words, we hate losing. And that gets in the way of us winning — if winning is making smart financial decisions.

How A Smashed Car Is Like A Smashed Nest Egg

A few months ago I got rear-ended and my Jeep Cherokee was totaled. It's the first new car I ever bought. (That was 15 years ago, so it wasn't new anymore.) But I loved that car. And I hated losing it.

Insurance didn't give me much money to replace it. But still, I ran out with that $3,000 and impulsively bought the first cheap car that looked like my old one to replace it. The problem is, the underside of it was really rusty. I should have known the car would be more trouble than it was worth.

But it was like my primitive brain took over. I just wanted my car back. And I bought it anyway. Fast-forward 3 months, and three other things have broken on the car. It won't start. And I've discovered "frame rot." Ken Lucas, the owner of Elite Bodyworks in Boston, took a look at the car and said the rust is "extremely bad." He adds, "I wouldn't recommend you drive it."

Great.

I cover financial stuff as a reporter and I've always saved a lot for retirement. So why did I make this rash decision to buy such a clunker?

Well, it turns out a lot of Americans make all kinds of bad financial decisions for exactly the same reason.

We Hate Losing More Than We Love Winning

Professor Brigitte Madrian teaches behavioral economics at Harvard. "You experienced this loss of your car, and you wanted to make the loss go away," she says.

Madrian says this human instinct to avoid loss — she calls it "loss aversion" — is very powerful. In fact, once we have something, we hate losing it more than we enjoyed getting it in the first place. "It hurts twice as bad," she says. "The literature suggests that people are twice as sensitive to losses as they are to gains."

In other words, we hate losing twice as much as we love winning. And that gets us into trouble with financial decisions because it gives us the wrong impulses. These can lead us to make bad choices, involving a lot more money than a cheap, rusty car.

The Mistake Of Buying High And Selling Low

Generally, people understand that to make money investing in the stock market you want to buy low and sell high. But our instincts can lead us in the other direction. Take the stock market crash in 2008. A lot of people felt that loss so intensely, they did what they should never do. They sold all their stock after the market had already crashed and lost half its value.

Madrian says the sense of loss is very powerful in a situation like that. And they wanted to act, to stop the bleeding, to make the pain go away. So people lose sight of the more rational idea that if you are in the market for the long haul, if history is any guide, the market has always recovered.

So why sell after stocks crash? It's a human, emotional decision. Not a considered, analytical one.

Saving isn't losing. But it feels like it.

People know they should save. But most of us still just don't like writing a check to squirrel money away for the future. Madrian says that feels like a loss from our checking account. And our aversion to that is very strong and it often irrationally wins out. So, Madrian says, the best advice by far is to take advantage of things like an automatic payroll deduction.

In other words, getting your employer to put part of your pay into a retirement account before it ever shows up in your checking account. That sort of tricks us into feeling like we never had the money in the first place. And that saves us from ourselves. "The money you don't see is the money you don't miss," Madrian says.

Something We Should Fear: Fees

Usually, mutual funds and financial advisers don't ask you to write a check to pay them. They just take a percentage out of the money they're holding and investing for you. But that's often very expensive over time. People agree to it, though, because the cost — and the loss — isn't as visible. In this case, Madrian says, "the loss you don't see is the loss you don't feel."

She says if you find a good financial adviser, you'd be better off paying them by the hour to sit down once a year to give you advice — the same way you pay someone to do your taxes. Paying 1 or 2 percent of your entire life savings every year in fees could potentially cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits over the course of 30 years.

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We may think of baseball as America's national pastime, but in the 1870s and 1880s there was another sports craze sweeping the nation: competitive walking. "Watching people walk was America's favorite spectator sport" Matthew Algeo says in his new book Pedestrianism.

"In the decades after the Civil War there was mass urbanization in the United States [with] millions of people moving into the cities," Algeo tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "And there wasn't much for them to do in their free time, so pedestrianism — competitive walking matches — filled a void for people. It became quite popular quite quickly."

Huge crowds packed indoor arenas to watch the best walkers walk. Think of it like a six-day NASCAR race ... on feet.

"These guys were walking 600 miles in six days," Alego says. "They were on the track almost continuously. They'd have little cots set up inside the track where they would nap a total of maybe three hours a day. But generally, for 21 hours a day, they were in motion walking around the track."

One great mystery of sport is why they call the place that the general manager rules over the front office. Obviously, it's the box office that's out front. What they call the front office is really the "office office."

The front office has grown exponentially. Once it was pretty much just the general manager. Now it's added scouts and assistant GMs and statisticians. Another change: The general manager is usually called president. And once GMs started to be called presidents, the law of unintended consequences set in and that made an owner think that to one-up his president, he had to do more than just own.

Coaches get famous, but as a general rule, coaches don't make good general managers. Different talents. It's like the best assistant coaches usually don't make good head coaches. Different talents.

Recently, the New York Knicks named brilliant coach Phil Jackson to be general manager, er, president. What made Jackson so successful as coach was that he could relate to his players, actually coach them. He had a shtick that was hyped as sort of a trickle-down zen. However, these talents are pretty useless in the front office. Jackson will surely get a disciple to coach the team. Everybody will say Jackson has installed so-and-so as his coach, which sounds to the players like they just put in a new washing machine. It never works.

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

American consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the working conditions of the people who pick, pack and harvest their food. And retailers are responding. Wal-Mart is now paying Florida farm workers more for each pound of tomatoes picked. Whole Foods is using worker wages to rank the sustainability of the produce and flowers it sells.

But what happens when farmers who hire those workers don't even pay them minimum wage?

For the last 75 years, the Labor Department has had the power to step in. The "hot goods" clause in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 authorizes the agency to block the transportation, shipment, delivery or sale of goods produced by workers not being paid the minimum wage or required overtime.

However, language in the farm bill, which was signed into law by President Obama in February, may make it a bit tougher for Labor to act going forward.

The new law's provision (Section 10011, if you want to look it up) requires the Agriculture Secretary to "consult with the Secretary of Labor regarding the restraining of shipments ... or the confiscation of agricultural commodities, by the Department of Labor for actual or suspected labor law violations..."

From what we could gather, Labor has invoked the hot goods clause on farms only about half a dozen times in the past several years. But after a heated blueberry labor dispute two summers ago between farmers and the department, Congress took notice. Hence the new consultation requirement.

The National Employment Law Project, which supports the original hot goods clause, worries that the new law requiring inter-agency consultation could "gum up the process" and prevent migrant and seasonal workers from being paid before they return to their home countries at the end of the growing season.

"If [Labor] is required to do an additional step — and who knows what that actually means — it could slow down the process that could get workers paid as quickly as possible,"NELP general counsel Catherine Ruckelshaus tells The Salt.

Ruckelshaus recently wrote a strongly-worded opinion piece in Salon on the subject, but conservatives counter that the government overstepped its bounds.

While the rhetoric is running high, here's what we know: In August 2012, Labor blocked the shipment of blueberries from three farms after finding 1,300 workers were being underpaid. Not wanting to lose their perishables, the blueberry farmers agreed to pay $240,000 in back pay and penalties. And they agreed not to contest the department's findings or pursue an appeal.

But two of the farmers changed their minds. Along with the Oregon Farm Bureau, they tried to get some answers from the federal agency, asking for written reports summarizing the investigation and explaining the wage violations, but they say they got no response.

"[Labor] still, over 18 months later, has not explained what it did with blueberry farms in 2012," says Dave Dillon of the Oregon Farm Bureau.

So in August 2013, the farmers sued the government in federal district court, arguing, among other things, that Labor violated their due process rights. Instead of blocking the blueberry shipments, they argued, the fees the department imposed should have gone into escrow until the case was litigated.

Although it's still unclear exactly how the new law will change enforcement of wage and hour laws on farms, a USDA spokesperson says its team and Labor have begun discussions on how they will work together.

Meanwhile, the blueberry labor dispute in Oregon continues to grind on in federal court. In January, Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin sided with the farmers, saying they signed agreements under economic duress. Then last month, Labor filed an appeal.

In an emailed statement, a Labor spokesman seemed confident the government would prevail. He says of the hot goods clause: "Its use has been long-recognized and supported by court precedent."

Get recipes for Pine Nut And Meyer Lemon Aioli, Pistachio And Tarragon Aioli, Pecan And Red Pepper Sauce, Spicy Spinach And Cashew Sauce, Cilantro, Pistachio, Almond And Castelvetrano Sauce, Walnut, French Lentil And Herb "Gravy" and Savory Almond And Vanilla Sauce.

It's a simple plot, but a sturdy one. With impeccable pacing and momentum, Gilman draws his everyman, Arthur, into a spiral of eye-popping improbability that culminates in an elaborate, poignant picture of a Martian civilization that might have been. Gilman's descriptive powers are as economical as they are vivid, beautifully capturing the spirit of fin de sicle society and literature without grinding it into pastiche. A massive computer powered by both human minds and arcane energy is one of the book's most astounding, unsettling images, as is the grotesquely angelic appearance of the alien race Arthur and his uneasy company of adventurers encounter. And each item in Gilman's grab-bag of wonder comes with symbolic resonance; even the book's title can be read in multiple ways: Philosophical revolutions, astronomical revolutions, and the obvious political kind all overlap as the book's intricate assembly of elements click together like clockwork.

Not everything is so tidy. Gilman introduces seemingly-important plot threads early on — like the death of a duke — only to abandon them. Likewise, Arthur's aspirations as a writer are all but forgotten, with just a brief allusion to his detective character, Cephias Syme, thrown in at the very end. And Gilman frustratingly fails to explore some of the tantalizing themes he sets up; at one point the villainous yet sympathetically complex Lord Podmore seems ready to explore the distinction between the quest for knowledge and the quest for power, but then he drops it as quickly as he picks it up. Worst of all, though, is Arthur and Josephine's colorless relationship, which pales in comparison to the narrative's grand notions and conceptual spectacle.

Luckily, that spectacle makes up for it. For all its big ideas, The Revolutions is by far Gilman's most accessible and lighthearted book. Immersive, playful, and downright fun, it skims along at just the right height, only occasionally going too deep or not deep enough. As the story expands beyond Earth to the moons of Mars, Josephine becomes the central and most riveting character, a woman who endures an otherworldly experience that's as much of an ordeal as it is a cosmic awakening, a transformation that parallels humanity's own painful birth into the 20th century. The Revolutions is an alternate history of Victorian England, but it's also an alternate history of science fiction itself — and of the way we once gazed, and still do, into the future.

Read an excerpt of The Revolutions

The city was wonderfully ramshackle. It had been thrown together really fast, by miners and the restaurateurs and the prostitutes, and a few decades on, after the Gold Rush, it was trying to clean itself up, so that there were all these new laws against, for instance, the carrying of parcels on a long stick, just because that was how the Chinese happened to carry them.

But really, it was a city of liberty, and it was known not just for its freedoms but for its diversity and its very urban mindset. And also, the city was in the middle of a very untypical heat wave, so it was burningly hot all that summer in San Francisco, and they had a smallpox epidemic. You couldn't make this stuff up.

On Blanche and her career

I wanted to tell quite a subtle story of somebody for whom the sex trade seems to be working just fine; Blanche feels that she's got loads of power when she's dancing, and these helpless men are just throwing money at her heels. But I wanted to find moments in which she realizes that the trade is actually costing her too much, and in particular she's had a baby and has farmed it out, and I wanted to look at the subject of mother love, and see, could it possibly grow up on this stony soil.

Book Reviews

'Frog Music' Sounds A Barbaric (But Invigorating) Yawp

The U.S. Supreme Court has once again erased from the books a major provision of the nation's campaign finance law. By a 5-to-4 vote, the justices removed the cap on the total amount of money that donors can contribute to candidates and parties in each election. Prior to Wednesday's ruling, the aggregate limit was $123,000. Now there is no limit.

The ruling is the latest in a series of decisions that have all but demolished the campaign reforms adopted by Congress beginning 40 years ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Those reforms were aimed at restoring public confidence by preventing rich contributors from essentially buying votes with their contributions. In 2010, however, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend an unlimited amount on their own to influence elections. And on Wednesday, in a case brought by the Republican National Committee, the court struck down the limit on the total amount that individual donors can give directly to candidates and parties.

"People should have the right to give their money and exercise free speech to as many candidates and as many political committees and PACs as they want," said an elated RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

Political Speech Protected

The court's decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, reversed a contrary ruling from 40 years ago. He said that the aggregate limit of $123,000 is unconstitutional because it can have the effect of limiting the number of candidates an individual can support with maximum contributions. The government, he said, "may not any more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse." If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades, he said, it surely protects political speech.

“ People should have the right to give their money and exercise free speech to as many candidates and as many political committees and PACs as they want.

NASA is suspending "the majority of its ongoing engagements" with its Russian counterpart over the crisis in Ukraine.

The Verge, which first broke the news based on a leaked memo, reports that "the suspension includes travel to Russia, teleconferences, and visits by Russian government officials to NASA facilities. NASA is even suspending the exchange of emails with Russian officials."

NASA confirmed the story in a statement late Wednesday.

"Given Russia's ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, NASA is suspending the majority of its ongoing engagements with the Russian Federation," the agency said. "NASA and Roscosmos will, however, continue to work together to maintain safe and continuous operation of the International Space Station."

As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reported in March, despite political tensions, the two countries need each other when it comes to ISS missions.

After the retirement of the shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. doesn't have a way to launch astronauts to the International Space Station, so Americans hitch a ride on Russian Soyuz capsules. Russia, on the other hand, depends on the $70 million fare the U.S. pays for every astronaut it sends up.

Russian and American relations came to a head, after Russia annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula with historic ties to Russia. The U.S. has imposed sanctions, but relations between the two space agencies remained normal.

In the memo obtained by The Verge, the agency links its suspension of ties to the conflict directly.

"Given Russia's ongoing violation of Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, until further notice, the U.S. Government has determined that all NASA contacts with Russian Government representatives are suspended, unless the activity has been specifically excepted," the agency said in the memo. "This suspension includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian Government representatives to NASA facilities, bilateral meetings, email, and teleconferences or videoconferences."

It's unclear how much non-ISS contact NASA has with Russia. Back in January, RIA Novosti reported the two countries were working on a joint effort to protect "our planet against thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth space bodies." The U.S. and Russia are also collaborating on mission to Venus dubbed Venera-D.

There are currently two American astronauts aboard the ISS: Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Congress last month that he did not expect NASA's relationship with Russians to change because of the situation in Ukraine.

“ ...we need to at least get some people out of their trucks to make room for the rest of us.

Day Two of General Motors CEO Mary Barra's time testifying before Congress about safety problems with her company's cars has been highlighted by a top senator saying the company "repeatedly lied" about its problems and has fostered a "culture of cover-up."

From The Detroit News:

"The head of a Senate panel blasted General Motors Co. ... for failing to take action to fix defects earlier in the recall of nearly 2.6 million cars linked to 13 deaths. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who heads the Senate Commerce subcommittee ... said an engineer 'repeatedly lied' during depositions last year when he didn't admit to approving the changing of the faulty ignition switch part in April 2006 but didn't change the part number. GM had a 'culture of cover-up' that allowed an engineer to 'repeatedly lie under oath,' McCaskill said."

The Columbian Mammoth is facing extinction as South Carolina's proposed state fossil unless the elephant-sized Ice Age mammal can survive the efforts of creationist lawmakers.

South Carolina is one of only 10 states that doesn't currently have an official state fossil, something an 8-year-old South Carolinian girl suggested the legislature remedy by adopting the Columbian Mammoth. The prehistoric pachyderm is a cousin of the better-known Woolly Mammoth (already Alaska's state fossil). The girl's rationale was that fossilized teeth of the tusked creature were discovered in a South Carolina swamp as far back as 1725.

But as the proposal was being debated last week, Republican state Sen. Kevin Bryant tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to include a quotation from the book of Genesis about God's creation of the animal kingdom.

"I attempted to recognize the creator," Bryant writes on his website. "However, the amendment was ruled out of order."

In tossing the amendment, Bryant's fellow senators cited his introduction of "new and independent matter," to the bill.

Undaunted, Bryant has rewritten his amendment, proposed language that refers to the mammoth — which paleontologists believe was the product of millions of years of evolution before disappearing about 12,500 years ago — "as created on the sixth day with the beasts of the field."

"I think it's an appropriate time to acknowledge the creator," Bryant tells The Greenville News.

According to the newspaper:

"Bryant said he thinks his latest amendment will pass muster as a logical extension of the bill because, "Since we're dealing with the fossil of the woolly mammoth then this amendment would deal with the beginning of the woolly mammoth."

"The original version of the bill referred to the woolly mammoth, but it was later changed to honor the Columbian mammoth.

"'The courts have upheld using Old Testament scripture because it doesn't point to a single religion,' he said. 'If I used text from the New Testament, if somebody challenged it in court you might lose on those grounds.'"

Get recipes for Greens And Tahini Borek, Warm Butternut Squash And Chickpea Salad With Tahini and Sweet Braided Tahini Bread.

President Obama travels to Michigan Wednesday to tout his proposal to boost the minimum wage.

Raising the wage to $10.10 an hour is one of the top agenda items for Obama and his fellow Democrats during this mid-term election year. The White House says the move would put more money in the pockets of some 28 million workers.

One test of that strategy will be in Arkansas, where proponents are trying to put a minimum wage increase on the ballot in November. Arkansas has some of the lowest wages in the country and it's also home to one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats.

President Obama travels to Michigan Wednesday to tout his proposal to boost the minimum wage.

Raising the wage to $10.10 an hour is one of the top agenda items for Obama and his fellow Democrats during this mid-term election year. The White House says the move would put more money in the pockets of some 28 million workers.

One test of that strategy will be in Arkansas, where proponents are trying to put a minimum wage increase on the ballot in November. Arkansas has some of the lowest wages in the country and it's also home to one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats.

The birth mother of Amber Marie Rose, the teen whose 2005 death was the first linked to an ignition switch problem that's triggered a massive recall of General Motors vehicles, says that through a Facebook group for families of victims, she's identified at least 29 fatalities due to the defect. GM only acknowledges 13 deaths.

"I found 29 so far myself," Laura Christian tells All Things Considered. She said she's determined the additional fatalities using crash data, police reports or eyewitnesses [who reported] the airbags did not deploy."

GM has announced the recall of 2.6 million vehicles to search for the faulty ignition switches.

Christian was reunited with Amber, her biological daughter, a year before the girl's fatal accident at age 16.

Amber's accident was attributed to a faulty ignition switch in her Chevrolet Cobalt, which apparently shut off the engine while the car was in motion – cutting power to the air bags, which didn't inflate when the car hit a tree in Dentsville, Md.

But alcohol and excessive speed were also cited as factors in the crash, although Christian insists she's "very confident" that her daughter would have survived if airbags had deployed as designed.

"I spoke to the EMTs shortly after [the accident] and they told me that had the airbags deployed that she would have been injured, but she would have been alive today," she tells ATC host Robert Siegel.

Christian believes that Congress should increase the maximum of $35 million penalty for delaying the reporting of potentially life-threatening problems.

"That may sound like a lot to us as individuals, but to a corporation like GM, who made over $3 billion last year, that's nothing. It's hardly a deterrent," she says.

She also wants passage of a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal to require earlier reporting of defects to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or NHTSA.

"It shouldn't come to a fatality, especially when it's coming from a car that has a defective part," Christian says. "GM knew about this defect, they knew about it in 2001, they OK'd it going forward. They should have been required to pass on that information to the NHTSA from day one."

In testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, GM CEO Mary Barra expressed "sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall ... especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured."

"I cannot tell you why it took years for a safety defect to be announced," Barra said in her opening testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I can tell you that we will find out."

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott is running for re-election, he's got a few things going for him. The state's economy has rebounded from the recession and he's on track to raise at least $100 million for his reelection bid.

But Scott's campaign has recently run into trouble with an important group of voters — Hispanics.

Latinos make up just 14 percent of Florida's electorate. But, as a bloc of voters, they have the power to swing elections statewide.

Although Scott has not formally announced his re-election bid, he is working to court the Hispanic vote. This week, he met in Miami with Venezuelan-Americans concerned about political violence in their native land.

Afterwards however, Scott was once again forced to answer questions about the resignation of one of his top campaign fundraisers, billionaire Cuban-American businessman Mike Fernandez.

In an email leaked to the media, Fernandez said he quit because of concerns with how the campaign was being run and the staff's insensitivity to Hispanics. Fernandez cited an incident in which one of his partners heard senior campaign staff members mimicking a Mexican accent on the way to a Chipotle restaurant. Scott's campaign denies the incident ever happened and the governor says he believes them.

"We have a very diverse team. They care about everybody in our state. I'm going after every vote in our state. They would not tolerate anybody doing the wrong thing," he said.

For Scott, winning support from Hispanics is especially crucial. In his first election four years ago, he won just over half of the Hispanic vote. But since then, his approval rating has plummeted with all voters.

Scott's former campaign finance co-chair Fernandez is a Cuban-American success story—immigrating to the U.S. when he was 12 and later starting a series of successful healthcare companies. A week and a half after his resignation roiled the political waters in Miami, Fernandez said he thinks the story has been overblown.

He supports Scott, but says he is still concerned about the Chipotle incident.

"In my opinion, I have no reason to believe that it did not happen. And I'm not sure that it has been addressed properly," Fernandez said.

Well before this, Florida's Republican Party was losing ground among Hispanics: President Obama won 60 percent of Florida's Hispanics two years ago. Obama even carried Cuban-Americans — a community that once was strongly Republican.

Following Fernandez's resignation, another prominent Cuban-American Republican broke with Scott. Gonzalo Sanabria resigned — Scott says he was fired — from his position on a local transportation board.

Sanabria says he's upset about how Fernandez was treated and the campaign's insensitivity to supporters, including Hispanics.

"It's not that we're all going to run over to the Democratic Party. But we're not enthusiastic about supporting the governor," he said.

The flap over the slights — perceived or real — comes just as the Scott campaign seemed to be making progress. Some polls show him closing the gap with possible Democratic opponents. And recently, he appointed a Miami legislator, Carlos Lopez-Cantera as his lieutenant governor—a move that helps him connect with Latinos in South Florida.

Political scientist Dario Moreno of Florida International University says for Scott to be re-elected governor, he needs every Hispanic vote he can get, especially in South Florida.

"It's very hard for a Democrat to win the state of Florida if they don't win Dade County by 80,000 votes. And the Scott campaign is dangerously close to that number," Moreno said.

That is one reason why, between now and November, Governor Scott is likely to be spending a lot of time wooing Hispanic voters in South Florida.

Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans both can find plenty to love in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's new plan.

For conservatives, there's the promise of a balanced budget by 2024; a repeal of Obamacare; cuts and structural changes to Medicaid totaling $732 billion in savings; a subsidized alternative to Medicare for those currently 55 and younger; a reduction in the top personal income tax rate to 25 percent; and an increase in defense spending by $791 billion over 10 years.

For liberals, all of the above underscores their contention that Republicans care more about the wealthy (whose taxes would be cut most dramatically) than the middle class and the poor.

Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee and a possible 2016 presidential candidate, plans to get the proposal out of his committee Wednesday. What happens next is unclear, as it's not certain if Republicans can muster enough votes to pass it on the floor.

While congressional budget resolutions never actually appropriate actual money, Ryan's budget plan starts out even less relevant than usual. That's because of the two-year budget deal – which includes top-line spending caps for both this and the next fiscal year – that Ryan and Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray hammered out in December. Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, says there's no need for a 2015 budget resolution and will not be pursuing one.

Which means that Ryan's budget proposal is not likely to get far in Congress but is almost certain to play a major role in this coming autumn's elections – pretty much the same role his budgets have played from the time Republicans took control of the House three years ago.

In a hearing before the House Oversight and Investigations panel, GM CEO Mary Barra and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Acting Administrator David Friedman testify Tuesday on concerns surrounding GM's recall of a faulty ignition switch that's been linked to more than a dozen deaths.

The recall, which now includes more than 2 million vehicles, will be the focus of today's hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The event's title hints at lawmakers' frustration, and the grilling that likely awaits Barra: "The GM Ignition Switch Recall: Why Did It Take So Long?"

We'll update this post with news from the hearing. Barra, who rose to GM's top job in January, is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill for two days.

Barra has asked former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas to investigate her company's handling of the defect and the ensuing recall. In her written testimony, which GM posted online Monday, Barra tells the panel:

"When we have answers, we will be fully transparent with you, with our regulators, and with our customers.

"As soon as l learned about the problem, we acted without hesitation. We told the world we had a problem that needed to be fixed. We did so because whatever mistakes were made in the past, we will not shirk from our responsibilities now and in the future. Today's GM will do the right thing.

"That begins with my sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall...especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured. I am deeply sorry."

In a hearing before the House Oversight and Investigations panel, GM CEO Mary Barra and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Acting Administrator David Friedman testify Tuesday on concerns surrounding GM's recall of a faulty ignition switch that's been linked to more than a dozen deaths.

The recall, which now includes more than 2 million vehicles, will be the focus of today's hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The event's title hints at lawmakers' frustration, and the grilling that likely awaits Barra: "The GM Ignition Switch Recall: Why Did It Take So Long?"

We'll update this post with news from the hearing. Barra, who rose to GM's top job in January, is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill for two days.

Barra has asked former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas to investigate her company's handling of the defect and the ensuing recall. In her written testimony, which GM posted online Monday, Barra tells the panel:

"When we have answers, we will be fully transparent with you, with our regulators, and with our customers.

"As soon as l learned about the problem, we acted without hesitation. We told the world we had a problem that needed to be fixed. We did so because whatever mistakes were made in the past, we will not shirk from our responsibilities now and in the future. Today's GM will do the right thing.

"That begins with my sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall...especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured. I am deeply sorry."

Captain America is, and superheroes in general are, often tasked with protecting a certain condescendingly rendered idea of middle America, where children go to state fairs and ride Ferris wheels and teenagers neck in parked cars. But here, the America to be protected is, surprisingly enough, Washington, D.C. There are no baby carriages, there are no small-town diners, and there are no farmers sitting down to dinner. What's low to the ground isn't swaying crops but an old-fashioned city that chose years ago not to climb too high – a modesty that stands in stark contrast to the flashy Triskelion.

There's something both forward-looking and deeply conservative about this view of America and Americanism. On the on hand, just as the bogeymen of the past were based on fears of Russians and atomic power, the topical terror here is of governmental data mining. A couple of the more villainous declarations sound like things you'd find on an episode of $25,000 Pyramid in the category "Things A Fascist Who's Reading Your E-Mail Says." And it does have a dash of that '70s paranoia that inspired The Parallax View and The Conversation, though it lacks their quiet, grainy dread in favor of slick bombast.

But on the other hand, despite the echoes of post-Watergate American political cinema and its profound distrust of domestic politics, there's an almost quaint faith in that low-built, grassy Washington and in its fundamental decency and importance. Rather than relying on fields and carnivals to define what Cap is working to save, the film visually defines the imperiled idea as the government – or at least the Jefferson and Lincoln version. This movie may not have much affection for a snooping Washington, but it has great (ahistorical or not) reverence for George Washington's Washington, right down to making it a postcard against which dangerous machinations are carried out.

To go one step further, it turns out that thanks to a tax credit, while there was location shooting in D.C., a good part of what is presented as Washington is actually ... Cleveland. Rather than playing itself, the heartland, or at least the Rust Belt – because of a government program, no less – is playing inside-the-Beltway, in order to seem more like what this particular movie means when it says it's the job of Cap to protect "America."

But if the Washington inside the Triskelion and the Washington on the National Mall are 21st and 18th century notions respectively, the climactic battles are fought for the most part on heavy, industrial-looking helicarriers that could be World War II battleships. So in the end, you get three very different ideas about what Americanism means. Is it scenic, historic Washington? Is it the super-advanced technology and capabilities that both captivate and frighten us? Or is it the hulking metal monsters that represent the last great war on which we all, according to the way the winners wrote the history, basically agreed? The great war, that is, that's baked into Captain America and superhero mythology in the first place?

Whether or not all this coding is consciously done, it's demonstrably within the reach of the creators. Directing are Joe and Anthony Russo, perhaps best known at the moment for their work on NBC's sometimes frustrating but always interesting Community. They've done so much genre parody and skilled pastiche that every stroke that seems to be a reference probably is one, from those helicarrier battleships to the shot of Evans, clean-cut and helmetless on a motorcycle with his jacket flapping madly, riding in profile, that uncannily recalls another classic notion of what a military fighter as Captain America might look like: Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Unfortunately, as skilled as they are at stylistic manipulation, the Russos have little if any reputation when it comes to directing action. And indeed, when the fists start to fly and the guns start to rat-a-tat, the action in Winter Soldier is uneven. The Russos seem to belong to the school of staging action sequences, pushed by directors like Michael Bay and popularized in less conceptually interesting fare like G.I. Joe, that relies on editing so frenetic – shots are often under a second, sometimes significantly shorter – that the mind loses all sense of real objects moving in real space and substitutes a nonspecific perception of cacophony and chaos.

On its own, there's nothing wrong with chaos, of course; you could consider it a kind of impressionism if you felt generous enough on a given day. And there is a clever, funny fight scene that takes advantage of all that glass in an unexpected way. But the sequences that employ the chaotic editing technique suffer substantially in comparison to those that don't – like a car chase involving Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that gathers seriousness and a genuine sense of danger from its simplicity and our ability to follow what's happening.

Over and over, the action sequences try to locate some palpable gravity by suddenly going quiet and focusing on something that makes mechanical and spatial sense, like a car door skidding down a street. But the rest retreats regrettably into literal and visual noise. (It's pointless to pine for the action films of the late '80s and early '90s, like Die Hard and Speed, that relied on a certain amount of object permanence to build momentum. But oh, it's difficult not to.)

The America of which this particular iteration of Steve Rogers is Captain is a deeply conflicted one, saleable both to Americans and international audiences as one with villainy that dances on the line between corruption (from within) and infiltration (from without). It feels cynical but simplistic, made for people who love the idea of Wikileaks, whether or not they have the patience to actually read the documents it releases. The film is speaking an interesting language of reverence and revulsion about Washington, less wisecracking than Joss Whedon's approach to this world but less heavy than, for instance, Kenneth Branagh's.

The Triskelion, after all, is made of all that glass, which gives the power to observe, but perhaps at some cost in frailty.

As the job market improves and people are trying to get back to work, more older workers in their 40s and 50s are signing on for internships. It may pay off, but it can come with some difficult tradeoffs.

For Renee Killian, 50, it has meant working an unpaid stint alongside fellow interns who are less than half her age. Killian's dayside duties at the Red Cross in Washington, D.C., often involve making sure the response trucks are properly stocked with blankets, water bottles and cleaning kits. At night, she is a volunteer on call. And she's not earning a dime.

"And right now I go out and I'm not being paid for anything, but I do get paid in hugs, and so that's a big thing for me," she says.

It's a line of work this 47-year-old former police officer adores. After losing her job managing a marina, she opted to intern alongside George Washington University undergrads.

For the Internet community, the principles of free speech and equal rights are foundational. But in recent days, those issues are clashing at Mozilla, the nonprofit foundation and tech company behind the Firefox browser.

At issue is Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Mozilla, inventor of the much used Javascript programming language and the newly appointed CEO of the company. Eich made a $1,000 donation to the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. The donation had come to light in 2012, but fizzled.

When Eich was promoted last week, the issue resurfaced. Twitter erupted with voices of Mozilla employees, who doubted his suitability for CEO and called for him to step down. Other employees went public with their support of Eich. Brendan MacDougal, Mozilla's head of development, framed the clash this way:

"The free speech argument is that we have no right to force anyone to think anything. We have no right to prevent people from pursuing their lives based on their beliefs. That what matters is their actions. And as long as they act in the best interests of the mission, as long as they don't impose their beliefs on those around them, they are welcome.

"The equality argument is that this isn't a matter of speech. That believing that 1/n of us aren't entitled to the same rights as the rest of us isn't a 'belief'. That the right to speech is only truly universal if everyone is equal, first."

Army Capt. Drew Pham, 26, returned from a tour in Afghanistan in October 2011. Since Drew's been back, it's been hard for him to make sense of what he saw there and adjust to his life at home. It's been difficult for his wife, Molly Pearl, to respond to some of the things he would tell her, too.

Pham called once to tell her he had shot a man. He says she didn't know what to say, so she replied, "Well, we'll deal with it when you get home."

"I did a lot of bad things. We killed this 60- or 70-year-old schoolteacher. He was an old man and snipers shot him because he had a 2-liter water bottle in his hand and we thought it was a rocket," Pham says. "I had to go and clean up the mess. I had to talk to his son and try and convince him that, you know, it was a mistake, I'm sorry."

It was hard to fight in Afghanistan, he says, but "here in the States I don't even know how to talk to people."

"I don't think anything that anyone says anymore is important, or what they think or what they feel. Sometimes I want to take everyone that I know to Afghanistan and force them to see it. I want them to feel all of it," he says.

When Pham first joined the Army, Pearl assured him four years of duty would fly by like four years of college. She says that used to help him — "that ability to look past and see how time always moves on and moves you with it."

She's not sure they'll ever be able to put Afghanistan behind them.

"I don't think that this is ever really gonna be over for any of us," Pham says.

His wife is the only thing that keeps him going, he says: "I still don't know how to carry on a normal life with all these things, but at least I get to carry all of those things with you."

Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Jasmyn Belcher.

Would Tennessee whiskey by any other name taste as sweet?

A debate in Tennessee simmers over a legal definition of what makes Tennessee whiskey "Tennessee."

The state legislature passed a bill last year saying whiskey can be labeled "Tennessee" only if it's made in the state from a mash that's 51-percent corn, trickles through maple charcoal, and is aged in new, charred oak barrels.

There's some precedent in the spirits world. A sparkling wine is champagne only if it's from the Champagne region of France, Scotch whisky is from Scotland, and tequila from blue agave grown in Mexico.

The Brown-Forman Corporation, which makes Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey in Lynchburg, likes the law. They credit their founder, Mr. Daniel, with steeping his mash in maple charcoal to "mellow" the drink. Jack Daniel's sells about 90 percent of the Tennessee whiskey in the world, and Jeff Arnett, their master distiller, has said, "We shouldn't do anything that would make Tennessee whiskey an inferior product."

But Diageo PLC — a British company, wouldn't you know, that owns Smirnoff Vodka and Johnnie Walker scotch — bought the George Dickel distillery, which has been making what they consider equally Tennessee whiskey since 1870.

A Diageo spokesperson says, "We're in favor of flexibility that lets all distillers, large and small, make Tennessee whiskey the way their family recipes tell them."

There is a history of Tennessee families making whiskey, licensed or not, that goes back to moonshining days. And there are small-craft distillers today — artisanal moonshiners, if you please — who make whiskey "according to our own methods with our own ingredients of choice and our own techniques," as Phil Prichard of Prichard's Distillery says. They believe they're as Tennessee as Mr. Daniel.

So some representatives now have what sounds like lawmaker's remorse for the bill. Rep. Ryan Haynes, who chairs the state government committee, now says, "It's wrong for the government to codify recipes."

This week, they moved the matter to summer study. Sounds like a nice summer. Study Tennessee whiskey on a porch, at twilight, over Lookout Mountain, a small glass in hand — and watch the sheriff chase those artisanal moonshiners.

Lisa Garzone married John Joyce in 1994. They had four children together, and at one point, says Lisa, they were best friends. But their marriage ended badly.

"John became alcoholic, and things got volatile," she says, "so we had to have him leave."

John wound up living on the streets. "He stopped showing up for visits. I tried to follow where he was, and I knew that he was homeless — that just always worried me. I didn't want him to die on the streets."

Many years later, John met Megan Smith, who worked with the homeless. He was still on the streets then and hadn't been in contact with Lisa for about 12 years.

"But it was a different place and time in his life," Megan tells Lisa during their StoryCorps interview in Pawtucket, R.I. He was sober, and later found an apartment.

Then, says Megan, John found out that he had cancer. He died last year.

"I met you the day before John died," says Megan, who was with John for four years. "The reason I didn't reach out to you sooner was because John didn't want to do more harm."

"I can remember just looking at him and having great sadness," says Lisa. "And I kissed him on the forehead, told him that I loved him, and I whispered in his ear that I forgave him."

After the memorial service, Lisa and Megan decided to get together. The two had dinner one night, "then we sat in the car and talked for like another three hours or something," Megan recalls.

"It was pouring rain out," Lisa adds, "we got out of the car so I could have a cigarette, and then in the pouring rain we just hugged. And I just said, 'I hope that you'll be a part of our lives.' And you have been ever since."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

It's been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The impact on wildlife was devastating. Cleanup crews poured into the nearby port town, also called Valdez, where an animal rescue center was set up.

"The chaos is incredibly difficult to describe or even imagine," says LJ Evans, a local resident who volunteered to help. "Somebody came back with the first bird — the reporters were so frantic, somebody got in a fight trying to take a picture of this poor little oiled bird."

"We were working 14-, 16-, 18-hour days there for the first month and a half," Suzanne Bishop, another rescue worker, tells LJ on a visit to StoryCorps in Fairbanks, Alaska. "We ran countless times a day from one room to the other with dog kennels stacked up high all the way down the hallway of otters."

"I had nightmares for years, because they screamed," LJ says. "I'd never heard a sound like that."

"I remember going home every night and sobbing, because it was not only terribly sad, it was very hard work," Suzanne adds.

"Then one joyous day, in this whole long stressful experience, we took all these birds that had been washed, and lined up all these kennels on the beach — 30 of them, 40 of them — each one with half a dozen birds," LJ recalls. "We opened all those crates, and they swarmed out into the water and made such an incredible noise. They either paddled or they flew, but they got the hell out of there.

"There was so much stress, so much tension for so many months," she adds. "At least for that moment, that little while, you could feel good about something that we had done."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

More than any other nation, America is awash in teams. There are the pro teams, the college team, the high school team, the fantasy teams.

Well, at a certain point, something has to give — and apparently, the team sport that's given way the most is men's college basketball.

Yes, college hoops has its fleeting moment in the vernal equinox. It's fun. You make out brackets — but it's not like other sports where you're familiar with the principals.

Take fantasy football. Fans make up their own teams, yes, but they know who the players are. It's their fantasy, but it's real, knowledgeable fantasy.

By contrast, March Madness is like phantom basketball. It's more like a lottery. Who are these teams? Where did they come from? It's upside-down.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on March Madness.

Monday is the deadline to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or at least to begin the process. We already know that nationwide more than six million people have enrolled.

But each state has its own insurance market and its own experience with the law. In New Hampshire, polls show the law is quite unpopular.

"The sense is among people is it hasn't helped them," says Andy Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. "And that if anything comes out of it, it's actually going to make their health care costs go up."

And yet, enrollments in the state have greatly exceeded expectations.

When Lisa Kerrigan, 25, heard people talking about the Affordable Care Act, it was never anything good.

"I had thought I was going to be hit with this huge bill every month. And I wasn't going to be able to afford it," says Kerrigan, as her two young daughters play in their bedroom nearby. "I've never been able to afford health insurance before, and I was really, really hesitant going into it."

Kerrigan lives in Rochester, N.H., and runs a daycare and pre-school called Where The Child Things Are.

"I love what I do, it just doesn't pay very much," she says.

And it doesn't come with health insurance. This made Kerrigan the ideal target for a sophisticated campaign in New Hampshire aimed at getting people to sign up for coverage.

Using Presidential Campaign Experience

Half a dozen people sit around a table in a downtown Concord office, mapping out the final push to get people to enroll in health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Karen Hicks sits at the head of the table. She's the project manager for Covering New Hampshire, which got federal funding to promote the law.

"We used all of the learnings from the last two or three presidential cycles and really applied it to this campaign," Hicks says.

Hicks was a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2008 and is a seasoned grassroots political strategist. She and her team used commercial databases to identify and target 50,000 households most likely to be uninsured. They did polling and focus groups to hone their message.

"I remember being struck by this in the first set of focus groups that we did," Hicks says. "We put the chart of financial eligibility in front of people and you literally saw people sort of go from having their hands crossed sitting back in their seat to leaning in and looking, and then when they could locate themselves on the chart, it just changed the whole tone of the conversation."

A Message Of Affordability

As a result, that chart showing affordability is on every brochure and piece of mail the campaign produced.

The daycare manager, Lisa Kerrigan, saw one of those brochures. She had heard the sign-up process on the website was terrible. New Hampshire is one of about three dozen states that chose not to create its own marketplace — so residents have to use the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov.

But Kerrigan tried it on a whim, just to see how bad it really was. About an hour later, Kerrigan had signed up for a plan that costs just $37 a month.

"And I have a $170 deductible, which is nothing," Kerrigan says. "I have $5 co-pays and $10 prescriptions. It's wonderful."

Kerrigan later agreed to have her story used in some of the marketing materials.

Success, With An Asterisk

There are certainly people with less positive stories to tell, those who don't qualify for tax credits or find their doctor or nearby hospital isn't in the network. Still, more than 21,000 people had chosen a plan as of the end of February, significantly exceeding the federal government's enrollment projections — but the state's success may come with an asterisk.

"One possible explanation is that health insurance costs are quite expensive here in New Hampshire, and the offerings on the exchange are less expensive," says Stephen Norton, executive director of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies.

That means it's possible people who already had insurance traded their existing coverage for government-subsidized plans. The answer to the question won't be clear for quite some time.

Charlie Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and a critic of the law, is unimpressed by the state's numbers.

"A small state is easier to target," Arlinghaus says. He says New Hampshire is both small and homogeneous.

"A state with fewer language barriers is easier to target, and a state with well-off consumers who are more likely to be aware of the law and the mandate is also more likely to sign people up," he says.

He points out New Hampshire had some of the state's most qualified political professionals with a multimillion-dollar budget encouraging people to do something that's required by law — even if it remains an unpopular law.

The deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops along their country's western border with Ukraine worries the new government in Kiev and its Western allies, including President Obama.

In a phone call Friday, he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull those forces back, a demand likely to be repeated by Secretary of State John Kerry when he meets with his Russian counterpart in Paris Sunday.

But people in the Russian border city of Belgorod, one of the places where troops have been gathering, say they can't understand why the U.S. is making such a fuss.

Armored vehicles belonging to Russian paratroopers were recently spotted on a train crossing an overpass outside Belgorod.

A man who asked not to be identified because he feared police retribution says the military vehicles — which were headed toward the nearby border with Ukraine — took residents by surprise.

The Two-Way

Obama And Putin Talk About Diplomatic Solution To Ukraine Crisis

Bilal Sarwari is a local correspondent for the BBC in Kabul, and over a week ago, he was called to report on yet another insurgent attack that had left civilians dead.

This particular attack, however, was different for him. Among those killed were Sarwari's friend and fellow journalist Sarwar Ahmad, his wife and two of his three children. A third child is recovering in a Kabul hospital. They were eating in the restaurant at the luxury Serena hotel when gunmen opened fire. Five other people were killed in the shooting.

It is one of several attacks launched by the Taliban in Kabul ahead of this week's presidential election. On Saturday, the heavily fortified election commission headquarters came under fire. But the attack on the Serena hotel resonated with the close-knit community of Afghan journalists in a different way.

“ My heart just bleeds, because an entire family have disappeared. A family of hope, a family of success, a family that was very committed. Sarwar began everything; his achievements were tremendous. And Afghanistan lost a very brave journalist who had been able to give the people of Afghanistan a voice.

Panh was not alone in the work, though. He worked with two screenwriters and has a group of longtime collaborators whose contributions are essential. He says he struggled to make The Missing Picture until he learned that his assistant could sculpt figurines of clay. Another collaborator, musician Marc Marder, has scored 18 of Panh's films.

"I think the music for Rithy's films has to be like these clay figurines in fact," says Marder. "It is the soul of the people. And it's not really a music, it's never an illustrative music. But this score, as for all of Rithy's films, I think I'm trying to [compose] music as soul of the people who are not there."

“ I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me I cannot. I continue to talk with those who died every night, every day.