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The U.S. sees Crimea as "occupied territory," as the government said in a recent statement. But in Russia, Google's Maps division now shows the peninsula as part of Russian territory. America and its allies have refused to accept the region's separatists' move to join Russia.

A look at the maps available on two Google Maps web addresses – one ending in .com and another in .ru – shows the disparity. In Russia, web visitors see a solid line dividing Crimea from neighboring Ukraine. In the U.S., a dotted line separates the two, implying a disputed status within the country.

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The Jackie Collins, by Wolfgang Puck

Yield: 1 Jackie Collins cocktail

Muddle the raspberries with the simple syrup. Add the vodka and lemonade into a cocktail shaker. Squeeze the lime over the vodka mixture. Add the ice cubes, and shake the cocktail shaker hard for 30 seconds. Pour in the club soda, shake once, and strain into a highball glass. Garnish with a raspberry and a fresh mint leaf.

6 raspberries plus an additional raspberry, for garnish
Splash of simple syrup (1 ounce or less)
2 ounces vodka
2 ounces lemonade, preferably Perricone's
1/2 lime
4 to 6 ice cubes
1 1/2 ounces club soda
Fresh mint leaf, for garnish

From THE LUCKY SANTANGELO COOKBOOK by Jackie Collins. Copyright 2014 by Chances, Inc. and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.

Read an excerpt of The Lucky Santangelo Cookbook

Forget about unbalanced diets and unattended soccer games. How can I help this silent, solitary little boy? Where is the line between letting him grow up to be himself and forcing him out of his safety zone so he can participate in worldly life?

Another way I failed my children, I thought, running for the shelter of Peanuts.

I bought my kids a selection of Charles M. Schulz's comics a few years ago, and all of a sudden an army of children (and animals) joined our family life. The boys laughed and read aloud, discussing the characters between themselves. We are on our way to owning the full Complete Peanuts set, and in our household you'll often hear, "Pass 1983-1984 to me," or, "Where is 1950-1952?"

Recently I began to read Peanuts with my children. Slow to the enterprise, I laugh at things that have already made them giggle many times. And I must admit: Charlie Brown makes me feel better about myself.

It's not your normal guilty pleasure read, I know. It's my escape from guilt, into pleasure. The thousands of strips are comforting in their vastness — the most solid books on my shelf that could shield me, momentarily, from the advancing troop of guilt. Forget apples and soccer games and worrisome silence. Maybe, just maybe, I've done all right.

The other day, my younger son said, "Shermy and Violet disappeared and became background characters later."

More On Yiyun Li

Book Reviews

'Gold Boy, Emerald Girl': A Study In Solitude

Sorry to ruin your appetite, but it's time to talk about cow farts.

Humans the world over are eating meat and drinking milk — some of us a little less, some of us a lot more, than years past. Farmers are bringing more and more cows into the world to meet demand, and with them escapes more methane into the atmosphere.

In 2011, methane from livestock accounted for 39 percent of all the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, according to a report that United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization released Friday. That's more than synthetic fertilizer or deforestation. Methane from livestock rose 11 percent between 2001 and 2011.

The bulk of the emissions — 55 percent — came from beef cattle. Dairy cows, buffalo, sheep and goats accounted for the rest.

Those emissions, combined with emissions from all the other sectors of food production, aren't likely to go down anytime soon. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry and fishing have doubled over the past 50 years, according to the report. Emissions could go up by 30 percent by 2050.

The Salt

Why Farmers Can Prevent Global Warming Just As Well As Vegetarians

This was the week that included Equal Pay Day, the point on the 2014 calendar to which the average woman worker must work in order to match the average man's 2013 pay.

To mark the occasion, President Obama held a White House event Tuesday to sign executive orders aimed at providing more transparency about what federal contractors pay their workers. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats held a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which failed in a vote that largely fell along partisan lines — the third time that's happened.

After a week of Democratic charges and Republican countercharges concerning who cares most about women, here's what we learned:

Republicans found what seemed to be an effective response to Democrats on the equal-pay issue: Senate Republicans had their women members take the lead in offering alternatives to Democratic proposals. One of those women, Sen. Deb Fisher, R-Neb., offered what she said would be a more effective legislative solution than the Democrats' Paycheck Fairness Act. While neither side's legislation went anywhere, the move allowed Republicans to provide at least some insulation against charges that the party doesn't care about women making less than men for doing the same work.

Democrats need to better anticipate Republican counterattacks. When the American Enterprise Institute issued an analysis of White House pay that found that women on the White House staff earned 88 percent of men's earnings, it appeared to catch the White House flat-footed. Ditto when Senate Republicans issued a similar analysis for Senate Democrats in very competitive races this year. White House press secretary Jay Carney responded that at least the White House was doing better on that measure than "the public at large" — since the President Obama has said women generally earn 77 percent of what men do. That answer immediately struck many ears as tone deaf — and a bit hypocrital.

And about that 77 percent — President Obama is not backing off that figure. Experts and fact checkers have pointed out, to no avail that the number is just one way of describing the gap, and not necessarily the most accurate. By other valid measures, such as the wage gap, it significantly narrower. But White House officials are making a political case to voters, not a statistical one to economists. So despite the criticisms, they continue to use the most dramatic data.

The paycheck equality issue might have boomeranged a bit on Democrats but at least they got the video — and Republican no votes — they sought for their mid-term campaign ads. As Democrats try to boost turnout, especially among single-women voters, they're intent on drawing a contrast this year on women's issues. In ads, expect to see Lilly Ledbetter — the Rosa Parks of pay equity, who was there when Obama signed two executive orders on Equal Pay Day.

We haven't heard the last about the equal pay issue on Capitol Hill this year. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., author of the Democrats' bill, said the issue wasn't over and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., indicated he was open to pressing the issue again. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans indicated they also expected that the issue wasn't going away this election year. So expect more competing photo ops on the issue with Democratic and Republican women at the fore.

Many of Don Kluemper's management students at University of Illinois at Chicago have had this experience: After going on a job interview, they sometimes receive "friend" requests from their interviewers.

It puts the students in a bind, he says. They fear that not accepting the request might hurt their job chances, but they also feel compelled to scrub their profiles before accepting.

"They didn't know why they were being friended," Kluemper says. "If it was some personal request or if the person was going to be screening their profile."

In a job interview, there are some things that aren't immediately apparent to the interviewer: a candidate's religion, marital status or sexual orientation. Employers are not allowed to ask about those things, by law. Many employers check social media profiles of prospective hires online, but doing so is raising questions for both employers and job applicants.

"[The answer to] all of those questions that you shouldn't ask in a job interview [are] readily available on a social networking website like Facebook," Kluemper says. "So that creates the problem."

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 77 percent of employers now use social networking to recruit candidates, up from 34 percent six years ago. About a dozen states have banned employers from asking workers for their social media passwords and Congress is considering several measures that would make that a national policy.

But as far as using information that a job seeker makes publicly available, the rules aren't exactly clear. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has not issued specific rules governing social media.

Since so much of the searching is done unofficially, Kluemper feels that rules might not even help.

"Policies and regulation might just force hiring managers to do this in a less structured and more informal way, which wouldn't be positive," Kluemper says.

Patricia Sanchez Abril, a business law professor at the University of Miami, says that anti-discrimination laws apply regardless of where an employer sees the information. That doesn't make things much easier, though.

"This is a really gray area right now," she says. "How do you prove that the employer Googled you and learned that you want a big family, or that you keep the Sabbath? It's much harder to prove, especially since many of these judgments are even formed subconsciously. The employer may not even realize that he or she is discriminating."

Research shows that employers are discriminating based on what they find on social media. Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, recently set up fake identities of identically qualified candidates who identified their religion only on social media.

"Our results suggest, yes, there will be indeed opportunities for discrimination," Acquisti says.

For example, those who self-identified as Muslim online averaged 17 percent fewer callbacks nationally. Acquisti says that it's hard for policymakers to address these issues because technology always outpaces the law.

"What to do next is unclear," Acquisti says.

All Tech Considered

A Job At What Cost? When Employers Log In To Dig In

Congress has unanimously approved a bill that would deny entry to Iran's U.N. ambassador, who in 1979 was a member of a student group that seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

The legislation is a blanket prohibition to "deny admission to the United States to any representative to the United Nations who has engaged in espionage activities against the United States, poses a threat to United States national security interests or has engaged in a terrorist activity against the United States."

It passed in the House late Thursday after a voice vote in the Senate and now goes to President Obama, who must decide whether to sign it into law and upset diplomatic convention or veto it and face a likely political backlash.

At immediate issue is Iran's choice of Hamid Aboutalebi as its U.N. ambassador. Aboutabeli says he only served as a interpreter for the student group that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days during the takeover.

But the White House has opposed Aboutabeli and "made clear and have communicated to the Iranians that the selection they've put forward is not viable," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday.

Iran has called the rejection of Aboutabeli "not acceptable," insisting that he is among its most able diplomats and that international protocols would be thwarted if the U.S. denied him entry to take up his post at United Nations headquarters in New York.

As The Associated Press reports:

"In past, problematic cases - such as with a previous Iranian nominee in the early 1990s and more recently with Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir - the U.S. has either signaled opposition to the applicant and the request has been withdrawn, or the State Department has simply declined to process the application. Those options, as well as approving or denying the application, are available in the current case."

Congress has unanimously approved a bill that would deny entry to Iran's U.N. ambassador, who in 1979 was a member of a student group that seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

The legislation is a blanket prohibition to "deny admission to the United States to any representative to the United Nations who has engaged in espionage activities against the United States, poses a threat to United States national security interests or has engaged in a terrorist activity against the United States."

It passed in the House late Thursday after a voice vote in the Senate and now goes to President Obama, who must decide whether to sign it into law and upset diplomatic convention or veto it and face a likely political backlash.

At immediate issue is Iran's choice of Hamid Aboutalebi as its U.N. ambassador. Aboutabeli says he only served as a interpreter for the student group that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days during the takeover.

But the White House has opposed Aboutabeli and "made clear and have communicated to the Iranians that the selection they've put forward is not viable," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday.

Iran has called the rejection of Aboutabeli "not acceptable," insisting that he is among its most able diplomats and that international protocols would be thwarted if the U.S. denied him entry to take up his post at United Nations headquarters in New York.

As The Associated Press reports:

"In past, problematic cases - such as with a previous Iranian nominee in the early 1990s and more recently with Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir - the U.S. has either signaled opposition to the applicant and the request has been withdrawn, or the State Department has simply declined to process the application. Those options, as well as approving or denying the application, are available in the current case."

Pope Francis asked Friday for forgiveness from the victims of pedophile priests in some of his strongest words to date about the Catholic church's sex abuse crisis.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome that:

"The pope has come under fire from advocacy groups for a perceived lack of attention to the issue.

"Friday, in off-the-cuff remarks to members of the International Catholic Child Bureau, Francis said he felt compelled to take it upon himself to ask forgiveness for the evil that some priests had committed in sexually abusing children."

The 50th anniversary of President Johnson's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is being celebrated this week at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

NPR's Don Gonyea spoke Wednesday to Luci Baines Johnson, the 66-year-old younger daughter of the 36th president, about some of the human dimensions of the presidency.

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If you have young children, you may know by heart the songs from the Disney animated musical Frozen, including its massively ubiquitous "Let It Go." The songwriting team behind the Oscar-winning hit includes Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (a married couple with two children), who each sing on the soundtrack.

Robert Lopez co-wrote the satirical Broadway musicals Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, which is now touring. He is now an EGOT, the acronym for the select few who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Together, the two also wrote the songs for the 2011 Disney animated musical Winnie the Pooh. They tell Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the inspiration for the songs from Frozen, including "Let It Go" and a "very strong strike across the bow at all princess-myth things" song that didn't make the film.

A group of beautiful, accomplished women are on the hunt for love —and great clothes— in a vibrant metropolis.

No, Carrie Bradshaw is not returning for another run of Sex and the City. It's the story of the new web series, An African City. The show follows the adventures of five young women who've returned to their home country of Ghana after years spent abroad.

The stories of An African City may present a side of Africa that viewers have never seen before. ButExecutive Producer Millie Monyo embraces the connection to Carrie and company.

A group of beautiful, accomplished women are on the hunt for love —and great clothes— in a vibrant metropolis.

No, Carrie Bradshaw is not returning for another run of Sex and the City. It's the story of the new web series, An African City. The show follows the adventures of five young women who've returned to their home country of Ghana after years spent abroad.

The stories of An African City may present a side of Africa that viewers have never seen before. ButExecutive Producer Millie Monyo embraces the connection to Carrie and company.

One week after McDonald's announced it was temporarily closing its three restaurants in Crimea, Burger King Russia has said it plans to open shops on the disputed peninsula.

Dmitry Medoviy, CEO of the Russian branch of the fast-food empire, tells ITAR-TASS that Burger King is "planning to introduce our services in Crimea, though, I can neither tell you when exactly it will happen, nor how many restaurants there will be."

According to The Moscow Times:

"Burger King operates about 200 restaurants in Russia. The brand has worked under franchise since 2010, when the first outlet opened in a Moscow shopping mall. In 2012, Russia's second-largest bank, state-owned VTB, paid $50 million for a 47 percent stake in Burger King Russia, the company that now operates the franchise. In 2013, VTB sold 12 percent of the company to a financial investor, reducing its stake to 36.6 percent, Forbes.ru reported."

Every language has words and phrases that elude easy translation. In Portuguese, "saudade" (pronounced by Brazilians as "sow-DAH-djee") is one of those. Some musicians equate it with the blues; it's generally associated with melancholy and longing. In its most recent bio, the Washington, D.C., electronic duo Thievery Corporation defines it as "a longing for something or someone that is lost."

Though countless songs have "saudade" in the title, the condition of saudade isn't usually conveyed through words. It's evoked. Its wistfulness radiates through every element of the music — from the sound Joao Gilberto makes humming that iconic introduction to "The Girl From Ipanema" to the yearning melody itself to the precise chop of the rhythm guitar behind the voice. You can't just order up saudade. There's no setting for it on a drum machine; no software emulation available. It comes seeping through the music, between the notes, as delicate and evanescent as a May breeze.

Alt.Latino

Saudade: An Untranslatable, Undeniably Potent Word

Embattled GOP Rep. Vance McAllister has made at least one smart move: He concluded that finding out who may have leaked a security video that captures him in a torrid embrace and lip lock with a woman (not his wife) won't actually erase said video.

One day after the freshman congressman — who ran last year as Christian conservative — indicated he planned to ask GOP House Speaker John Boehner to request an FBI investigation into the leak, he reversed course.

A statement issued Wednesday afternoon by McAllister's office asserted that he "will not pursue an FBI investigation at this time regarding the distribution of a video filmed in leased federal office space," which happened to be the congressman's district office back home.

"Congressman McAllister is focused on earning back the trust of those he has disappointed," the statement said, "and he reiterates his request for privacy for his family during this difficult period."

The development is the latest in the sad and, at times, startling fallout from this week's public dissemination of a video that shows the married, father of five McAllister in a clinch with then-staffer Melissa Hixon Peacock. (Also married, she has since left the congressman's employ.)

It's the rare situation in which the act or indiscretion has been captured on video and publicly shared. (There was, of course, former Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner and his porno selfies, but those were self-posted –- he was a victim of his own leak, so to speak.)

The release of the grainy, black and white video snippet — and an even more widely distributed screen shot of McAllister, 40, and Peacock, 33, in mid-make out — set in motion the following:

A statement of apology from the congressman, which said, in part: "There's no doubt I've fallen short and I'm asking for forgiveness. I'm asking for forgiveness from God, my wife, my kids, my staff, and my constituents who elected me to serve...From day one, I've always tried to be an honest man."

Charges that a McAllister office worker leaked the video. The Monroe, La., News-Star reported that a local minister pointed to the congressman's office manager as the potential leaker, alleging she wanted McAllister ousted.

A heart-rending, if ill-advised, appearance on CNN by Peacock's husband, Heath, 34, a longtime friend and generous financial supporter of McAllister's. Heath Peacock pronounced McAllister's Christian bona fides as faked for campaign purposes. "He's about the most nonreligious person I know," he said. "He wrecked my life." Peacock said he and his wife of six years are "headed for divorce" and that he's "just freaking devastated by the whole deal, man. I loved my wife so much."

And, finally, the publication of a strange exchange of texts between McAllister and a person who reached out to him anonymously. "I messed up," McAllister told the stranger.

McAllister told the News-Star that he has experienced "an outpouring of support, not for my actions, but for me to continue to represent the people."

But the congressman, who before Monday, was best-known for bringing a Duck Dynasty cast member to the State of the Union address, doesn't have a lot of time to make amends. He won the seat last year in a special election to finish out the term of retiring GOP Rep. Rodney Alexander.

That means this year is another election year for McAllister, and primary challengers are no doubt already jockeying for position.

It's the fall of 1970. Neil Young takes the stage at a small club in Washington, D.C. His career is heading in a new direction: His folk-rock group, Buffalo Springfield, has dissolved; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is on the way out, and he's going solo.

His new album, Live at the Cellar Door, is one of three recent live albums, all from about the same time period. Thelonious Monk's Paris 1969 performance preceded Young's, while one disc of a four-CD anthology from the late R&B and soul singer Donny Hathaway, Never My Love, was recorded in 1971.

In a discussion with NPR's Melissa Block, music critic Tom Moon looks back at the time when all three albums were recorded. Moon says each record shows an influential musician at a turning point in his career.

To say that the town of Perewalsk in eastern Ukraine has fallen on hard times would be an enormous understatement. The small industrial town near the Russian border is a collection of concrete buildings with no windows, falling-down houses and empty, abandoned factories; there's a chemical smell in the air.

In the middle of this dystopian landscape, there's an even more unexpected sight: an 80-year-old woman in a bright purple coat and headscarf, happily digging with a shovel in the dirt.

She introduces herself as Lida Vasilivna.

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For doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, all the complexities of medicine get boiled down into a system of codes.

These codes are used to track and pay for every procedure you can think of. There's 813.02 for mending a broken forearm, and 800.09 for treating a concussion. There's even 960.0 for being hurt in an "unarmed fight or brawl."

But this coding system is now four decades old. The codes were scheduled to be upgraded in October, but last week Congress delayed the switch.

JaeLynn Williams, for one, is seriously bummed out. "It's kind of like looking forward to Christmas, and it doesn't come," she says

Williams and her company, 3M Health Information Systems, are helping about 5,000 hospitals upgrade from the old coding system, called ICD-9, to the new one, ICD-10.

It's a $100 million project for 3M Health. Williams is passionate about the upgrade since it will give doctors, hospitals, researchers and insurance companies better data — which will allow them to zero in on the best, most cost-effective treatments.

"With ICD-9 there's only so much information that's captured with each code," she says. ICD-9 offers about 4,000 codes for procedures. ICD-10 has about 72,000.

Without very specific codes, cardiologists, for example, can't differentiate between the dozens of different kinds of implants now commonly used to open clogged arteries, Williams says, "So we can't use the data to analyze which implant had a better outcome," she says. "We can't use the data to determine which implant results in the shortest recovery time. You won't be able to use the data to understand which implant had the best long-term success."

Shots - Health News

Paintball Injury? Your Hospital Has A Code For That

Try to buy a Tesla in some states, and you may find yourself having to shop online. Texas and Arizona are among those that have banned direct sales of the electric vehicles. New Jersey may be next. Tesla intends to fight a ruling in the state that says it has to close its stores there by April 15.

These individual disputes could turn into bigger battles, as Tesla works on making cheaper, more mainstream models.

The question isn't really about the cars themselves. It's about how they're sold: directly to consumers.

In Tesla's Manhattan store, there aren't signs advertising "0 percent down." No garlands of triangular flags. There's not even a car lot.

The neighborhood, Chelsea, is expensive and known for its art galleries and fancy stores. If you didn't notice that the glass front says, "Electric Cars for Sale," you could easily mistake it for just another gallery or shop.

At the back of the store, Paul Stamm is helping a couple choose options for a new car. He's not a dealer. He's a senior ownership adviser. Bradley Spieler and Natasha Woehrli are standing across from him at a tall, sleek wooden table, contemplating choices like fog lights and shock systems.

This is really the essence of the Tesla customer experience: more Apple store than your father's Oldsmobile dealer.

The Sale

Diarmuid O'Connell, Tesla's vice president of business development, says the company has to sell cars in a different way.

"The typical experience with customers is to spend 2 to 3 hours with them over the course of several visits in order to help them understand the technology in general, the background of the company, and the merits of the vehicle specifically," he says.

Parallels

Norway Takes The Lead In Electric Cars (With Generous Subsidies)

A 9-month-old Pakistani boy has been charged along with the rest of his family with attempted murder, according to reports.

Musa Khan was photographed last week crying as his grandfather held him for fingerprinting. He was with his family during a protest in a Lahore slum that turned violent in February. Police say the boy, who was 7 months old at the time, threw stones at them.

The New York Times reports:

"Slum residents threw stones at gas company workers who had tried to disconnect households that failed to pay their bills, leading the police to charge an entire family with attempted murder, including Musa.

"The absurdity of the case became apparent last Thursday when the screaming child was produced in court, and had to be comforted with a milk bottle as a court official recorded his thumbprint.

" 'He does not even know how to pick up his milk bottle properly — how can he stone the police?' his grandfather Muhammad Yasin said to news service reporters outside the courthouse."

Toyota Motor Corp. is recalling more than 6 million vehicles spanning nearly 30 models in the U.S., Japan and Europe for a variety of problems ranging from air bags not deploying to driver's seats not locking properly.

The top-selling Camry sedan, RAV4 SUV, Corolla, Yaris and Matrix are among the vehicles being recalled, according to a company statement.

It comes on the heels of a similar recall by General Motors involving some 2.6 million vehicles for problems including defective ignitions switches that might affect air bag deployment. And last month, Toyota reached a $1.2 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department for hiding defects in its vehicles and it paid $66 million earlier as a penalty for delaying the reporting of unintended acceleration problems.

For the latest Toyota recall, certain model years for these vehicles sold in the U.S. are included:

2009-2010 Corolla

2009-2010 Matrix

2008-2010 Highlander

2009-2010 Tacoma

2006-2008 RAV4

2016-2010 Yaris

2008-2010 Scion xD

For all but the Scion models, Toyota says:

"The driver's airbag module in the involved vehicles is attached to a spiral cable assembly with electrical connections that could become damaged when the steering wheel is turned. If this occurs, the air bag warning lamp will illuminate. In addition, the driver's air bag could become deactivated, causing it to not deploy in the event of a crash.

"Toyota is not aware of any injuries or fatalities caused by this condition."

Sandy's flirtation with ponytailed, sweaty Tim at Disneyland is irrelevant to the story, but perfectly observed: "As Tim hands Joan an ice cream sandwich with great ceremony, Sandy regrets ever suggesting that he spend the day with them. With a sudden ferocity, she hates what she's wearing. The blameless shorts and sleeveless white blouse with blue buttons feel constrictive, malicious. If she were alone with Joan, she would be irked by her spoilsport habits — the way she won't drink fun cocktails ... the way she gets up at the crack of dawn without an alarm clock and stretches and exercises ... but Tim had to come along and prove how much more desirable Joan is than Sandy, even though Sandy is the one who knows how to have a good time." Then Sandy lures him onto the Matterhorn for a fumbled encounter, while Joan rides the teacups and Sandy's daughter stares from the seat in front of them.

The narrative leaps around, mostly between New York City during Joan's dancing days and California, where she lives with her family, with other abrupt stops in Chicago and Paris. In Paris she meets Arslan for the first time, waiting in his dressing room and peeling his tights off "violently, as though she were skinning an animal." "Tu m'etonnes," she tells him. You astonish me.

But Joan ends up with kind and gentle Jacob instead of Arslan, and feels her love for him grow "slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves." That is how Shipstead creates this book, slowly and artfully like a pastry chef. It's a lemon tart of a book, lovely and neat.

How do you astonish anyways? With the blunt force of ravishing prose? With a devastating plot twist? With as-yet-undreamt experimental heights? Reading Astonish Me, I didn't need to be astonished. I was happy.

"I'm now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft, in the not too distant future," the head of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 told reporters on Wednesday after an Australian ship detected two more pings that may be signals from the plane's black boxes.

Those hopeful words from retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston are in stark contrast to the more cautionary tone he struck in previous days. Last week, for instance, he warned that the jet and the 239 people who were on board might never be found.

Houston is not declaring victory, however. Though he struck a more optimistic tone on Wednesday, he added that with the black boxes' batteries likely to run out of power at any time, there may be "no second chances" for the searchers.

"It looks like the signals we picked up recently have been much weaker than the original signals we picked up," he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. "We're either a long away from it or in my view more likely the batteries are starting to fade." Experts say the batteries last 30 to 45 days. The jet has now been missing for about 33 days.

Flight 370 was about one hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early morning hours of March 8 (local time) when it was last heard from. The jet was headed north over the Gulf of Thailand as it approached Vietnamese air space.

Investigators believe the plane turned west, flew back over the Malay peninsula, then out over the Indian Ocean before turning south toward Australia. They're basing those conclusions largely on data collected by a satellite system that received some information from the aircraft. The critical question — why did it turn? — remains unanswered.

The center of the search area where planes and ships are looking for any sign of the jet is now about 1,400 miles northwest of Perth, Australia. They're scouring a grid that's more than 29,000 square miles in size — a little less than the state of South Carolina.

Within that zone, two U.S. Navy officers tell Reuters, the pings that have been picked up by searchers are in an area that covers about 500 square miles. That's roughly the size of the city of Phoenix.

Reuters notes that "the signals, which could be from the plane's black box recorders, bring to four the number of overall pings detected in recent days within the search area by a U.S. Navy Towed Pinger Locator." That locator is being towed by an Australian Navy vessel, the Ocean Shield.

Google has created a virtual trek through Cambodia's jungle temples that will transport cyber-travelers to a wonder of the ancient world.

In July 2013, Google began photographing the ancient Angkor World Heritage Site, sending in Street Cars, tripods and "Trekkers" — backpack-mounted devices with camera lenses pointed in different directions that continuously shoot pictures. Then they combined 90,000 panoramic images to create virtual Street View tours through the temples — without any need for bug spray, sun hats or gear to beat the tropical heat.

Angkor Wat joins the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and dozens of other monuments given the Street View treatment.

The Angkor experience is extremely immersive — arrows on the map beckon in multiple directions, through stone doorways and past trees whose roots are sunk into the stones. High-resolution images show moss growing on toppled pillars, intricately carved bas-reliefs, and the iconic and beatific smiles of Buddha statues.

The result, Cambodian tourism authorities reckon, is sure to entice virtual visitors to want to see the real thing: the light filtering through the Cambodian jungle canopy, the integration of the temple with the jungle foliage and the texture of the carved sandstone. Angkor is the crowning glory of the art and architecture of the ancient Khmer Empire, built beginning in the 12th century A.D. It is also the focus of Khmer pride, represented on the Cambodian national flag.

Through two decades of the Cambodian civil war, access to and preservation of the temples was impossible. Now the crush of tourists during peak season can detract from the experience.

The Phnom Penh Post newspaper has this video about the making of the virtual trek:

General Motors says it's "fully cooperated" with federal authorities in connection with the recall of 2.6 million cars for defective ignition switches and other problems.

But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disagrees and says it will fine the automaker $7,000 for each day it misses a deadline to answer 107 questions that passed on April 4.

"We will continue to provide responses and facts as soon as they become available and hope to go about this in a constructive manner," GM's statement said. "We will do so with a goal of being accurate as well as timely."

Michigan Radio's Tracy Samilton reports that NHTSA says GM failed to answer a full third of the questions.

The Associated Press reports:

"In a letter to GM's top lawyer sent Tuesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration imposed its maximum allowable fine for the delay of $7,000 per day. That adds up to $28,000 so far, and the fines will continue to accrue until GM responds.

"According to the letter, GM was granted extra time to answer "technical engineering questions" posed by the agency. But NHTSA contends many of the questions GM failed to answer are not engineering ones, and should have been answered by the deadline."

Depending on who you talk to, either no one could have predicted the massive mudslide in Oso, Wash., last month — or it was a disaster just waiting to happen. But if homeowners in the slide's path are typical of most people in this part of the country, they were not insured against this kind of event — and are unlikely to see an insurance payout.

That's because standard homeowner's insurance doesn't cover mudslides. And the insurance is not only expensive, it's also difficult to purchase.

"[Coverage] is less than 1 percent in both Oregon and Washington," says Karl Newman, president of the Seattle-based industry group Northwest Insurance Council. He recognizes that number is low for a part of the country prone to mudslides, but it's just not part of a typical homeowner policy.

"There's only one type of policy that you can get for that, and it's called a 'difference in conditions' policy," Newman explains. It's generally not available from your local insurance agent. Instead, you have to buy it from a specialty firm.

Newman likens mudslide insurance to someone buying Jimi Hendrix's old guitar and trying to insure it, or attempting to insure a parade. "You can get that type of insurance that's not something that everyone would experience. So a 'difference in conditions' policy falls in that same category," he says.

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Covered For Mudslides? How This Insurance Is Different

Help us make poetry!

April is National Poetry Month: 30 days set aside for the celebration of all things verse. Many of us here at Code Switch love poetry every month of the year, but we can't always make space for it in our coverage.

So this month, we're taking advantage of the national celebration and highlighting great poets and poems that address issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

To kick off our coverage, we're inviting you to help us create collaborative poetry on Twitter. We've invited poet Kima Jones to curate a crowd-sourced poem on the subject of race and identity. (Keep your eyes peeled for a profile of Jones tomorrow.)

This Wednesday, April 8 at 12 p.m. EST, join us on Twitter and tweet out the line you'd like to see added to the poem. Use the hashtag #CSPoetry so we can see your submission.

We'll share the final product, a co-creation of Code Switch readers and Kima Jones, and have a conversation about race, culture, poetry and creativity.

Join us! And as you're enjoying National Poetry Month, please share your favorite poetry recommendations in the comments.

A speech in Ukraine's parliament sparked violence Tuesday, after other lawmakers took exception to a communist leader's speech that criticized the current government and Ukrainian nationalists who helped to oust the country's president earlier this year.

"You are today doing everything to intimidate people. You arrest people, start fighting people who have a different point of view," communist party leader Petro Symonenko said in Kiev, according to Euronews.

And with that, two members of the far-fight Svoboda party grabbed the party official at the front of the chamber. Others rose to Symonenko's defense, in a tense situation that culminated in lawmakers wrestling and throwing punches at one another.

When Emily Amanatullah was a graduate student studying management, she couldn't help noticing a lot of the classic advice in the field was aimed more at men than women. Negotiation tactics in particular seemed tougher for women to master.

"You realize they're pretty at odds with how women comport themselves and how they're expected to comport themselves," she says.

She started to talk to other women and to examine her own behavior. All the women she spoke to said they hated advocating for themselves at work. But they had no trouble speaking up for colleagues.

So Amanatullah, now an assistant professor of management at the University of Texas, devised an experiment. In a simulation, she had men and women negotiate a starting salary for themselves. Then she had them negotiate on behalf of someone else.

When the women negotiated for themselves they asked for an average of $7,000 less than the men. But when they negotiated on behalf of a friend, they asked for just as much money as the men.

Amanatullah says when women advocate for themselves they have to navigate more than a higher salary: They're managing their reputation, too. Women worry that pushing for more money will damage their image. Research shows they're right to be concerned: Managers of both sexes are less likely to want to work with women who negotiate during a job interview.

One person I spoke with for this story lowballed herself so much in a negotiation that the recruiter came back and asked if she was sure she wanted to request so little. She hates negotiating to this day.

But Maggie Neale of Stanford Business School says there are ways around this discomfort. For one thing, she says, women can use their ability to fight for others for their own ends. She says when you're negotiating a raise, think of the other people your salary is supporting so the negotiation doesn't seem like it's all about you.

She also recommends that women stop thinking about negotiation as "adversarial, putting on the armor, getting ready to do battle." Instead, she says, think of it as solving a problem.

When Emily Amanatullah was a graduate student studying management, she couldn't help noticing a lot of the classic advice in the field was aimed more at men than women. Negotiation tactics in particular seemed tougher for women to master.

"You realize they're pretty at odds with how women comport themselves and how they're expected to comport themselves," she says.

She started to talk to other women and to examine her own behavior. All the women she spoke to said they hated advocating for themselves at work. But they had no trouble speaking up for colleagues.

So Amanatullah, now an assistant professor of management at the University of Texas, devised an experiment. In a simulation, she had men and women negotiate a starting salary for themselves. Then she had them negotiate on behalf of someone else.

When the women negotiated for themselves they asked for an average of $7,000 less than the men. But when they negotiated on behalf of a friend, they asked for just as much money as the men.

Amanatullah says when women advocate for themselves they have to navigate more than a higher salary: They're managing their reputation, too. Women worry that pushing for more money will damage their image. Research shows they're right to be concerned: Managers of both sexes are less likely to want to work with women who negotiate during a job interview.

One person I spoke with for this story lowballed herself so much in a negotiation that the recruiter came back and asked if she was sure she wanted to request so little. She hates negotiating to this day.

But Maggie Neale of Stanford Business School says there are ways around this discomfort. For one thing, she says, women can use their ability to fight for others for their own ends. She says when you're negotiating a raise, think of the other people your salary is supporting so the negotiation doesn't seem like it's all about you.

She also recommends that women stop thinking about negotiation as "adversarial, putting on the armor, getting ready to do battle." Instead, she says, think of it as solving a problem.

The Senate voted 59-38 Monday to resurrect federal jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, and a small band of Republican supporters swiftly appealed to a reluctant Speaker John Boehner to permit election-year action in the House as well.

Steps are needed "to restore unemployment benefits to struggling Americans," seven House Republicans wrote Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia. They released their letter as the Senate was bestowing its widely expected approval on the legislation.

Despite the appeal, the bill's prospects are cloudy at best, given widespread opposition among conservative lawmakers and outside groups and Boehner's unwillingness to allow it to the floor without changes that Republicans say would enhance job creation.

The Senate vote itself, seven months before congressional elections, capped a bruising three-month struggle. Fifty-one Democrats, two independents and six Republicans voted for approval.

The bill was the first major piece of legislation that Democrats sent to the floor of the Senate when Congress convened early in the year, the linchpin of a broader campaign-season agenda meant to showcase concern for men and women who are doing poorly in an era of economic disparity between rich and poor.

In the months since, the Democrats have alternately pummeled Republicans for holding up passage and made concessions in an effort to gain support from enough GOP lawmakers to overcome a filibuster. Chief among those concessions was an agreement to pay the $9.6 billion cost of the five-month bill by making offsetting spending cuts elsewhere in the budget.

The White House-backed measure would retroactively restore benefits that were cut off in late December, and maintain them through the end of May. Officials say as many as 2.3 million jobless workers have been denied assistance since the law expired late last year. If renewed, the aid would total about $256 weekly, and in most cases go to men and women who have been off the job for longer than six months.

Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Dean Heller, R-Nev., the bill's leading supporters, said they were willing to consider changes in hopes of securing passage in a highly reluctant House.

Heller also said he was seeking a meeting with Boehner to discuss the measure.

At the White House, President Barack Obama said in a statement: "I urge House Republicans to stop blocking a bipartisan compromise...Let's remove this needless drag on our economy and focus on expanding opportunity for all Americans."

In their letter to Boehner, seven House Republicans wrote that since the program expired, "many more people have lost benefits each week, bringing the number of long-term unemployed Americans without government assistance to greater than two million."

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, noted that the speaker had said months ago "we are willing to look at extending emergency unemployment insurance as long as it includes provisions to help create more private sector jobs — but last week, Senate Democratic leaders ruled out adding any jobs measures at all."

That was an apparent reference to a refusal by Senate Democrats to permit a vote on a Republican proposal that would have allowed construction of the proposed Keystone oil pipeline from Canada and made numerous changes in the nation's health care law. GOP lawmakers say all of the proposals would help create jobs.

In remarks on the Senate floor before the vote, Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., directly criticized Democratic leader Harry Reid for refusing to allow votes on GOP-drafted proposals to amend the measure. He called that a "black mark" in the Senate's history.

Some Democrats assailed Boehner rather than seek to meet with him. Said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.: "The House needs to extend unemployment benefits to millions of Americans right now, without attaching extraneous issues that are merely an attempt to score political points."

Whatever the bill's fate in the House, Senate Democrats have taken steps to follow their action with a test vote on a bill to strengthen "equal pay for equal work" laws. That measure includes a provision giving women the right to seek punitive damages in lawsuits in which they allege pay discrimination, a change that Republicans call a gift to trial lawyers who contribute extensively to Democratic campaigns.

Next up in the Democratic attempt to gain ground during the election year will be a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It is currently $7.25 an hour.

Underscoring the political backdrop, a little-noticed provision in the jobless-benefits legislation is specifically designed to benefit the long-term unemployed in North Carolina, where Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan faces a stiff challenge for a new term. It would make residents eligible for long-term benefits if the state negotiates an agreement with the Department of Labor. North Carolina residents are currently ineligible because state benefits were reduced below a federal standard.

In an additional indication of the challenge confronting the broader legislation, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies sent a letter to lawmakers citing "significant concerns about the implementation of the legislation" after a Senate compromise emerged last month. The organization represents state agencies that would be responsible for administering the law.

Citing the letter, Boehner pronounced the Senate bill "unworkable," and a blog posting by his aides quoted the Ohio Republican as saying there was "no evidence that the bill being rammed through the Senate by (Majority) Leader (Harry) Reid" would help create more private sector jobs.

The drive to renew the lapsed program comes as joblessness nationally is slowly receding, yet long-term unemployment is at or above pre-recession levels in much of the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it accounts for an estimated one-third or more of all jobless individuals.

In a study last summer, the Urban Institute reported that "relative to currently employed workers, the long-term unemployed tend to be less educated and are more likely to be nonwhite, unmarried, disabled, impoverished and to have worked previously in the construction industry and construction occupations."

After a long winter of protests, Ukrainian activists overthrew their president in February. Now, Ukrainians are staring at the bill they have to pay.

The International Monetary Fund is demanding that Ukraine's new government implement austerity measures in exchange for loans. Russia is threatening to raise Ukraine's heating gas prices by 80 percent. Taken together, this could further squeeze ordinary Ukrainians, who are already getting by with almost nothing.

On a balmy Sunday afternoon, dozens of old men huddle around tables in a Kiev park, playing round after round of chess.

This is what they do every day. Dead of winter, middle of the work week, it doesn't matter. Chess is a simple pleasure that costs nothing. And these guys have no cash to spare.

One of the men, Yevgeni Yemilianov, says he was Kiev's chess master 30 years ago. Now he makes a living teaching the game to kids. He and his friends are picnicking with brown bread and cured pork fat, raw onions, radishes and, of course, shots of Ukrainian vodka, called horilka. Yemilianov believes that once people hit the bottom, there's no place left to fall.

"Let me tell you. These people who receive $100 a month in pensions? It's not just a little. It's very little. So you can't take anything more from them," he says.

i i

A few weeks ago, January Chang, a student at National Taiwan University, joined her fellow students in protesting a controversial trade agreement, which would bring Taiwan closer to China. The students occupied Taiwan's legislature, and some of them are still there, but they had a problem: With weak or nonexistent cell phone coverage, it was hard to communicate with students in other areas.

They turned to an iOS app called FireChat, which lets them text each other and send messages without using the cellular network or the Internet. As Chang explains, FireChat let them talk to each other using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (even if the Wi-Fi is not connected to the Internet) in a way creating a small Internet of local users.

FireChat launched two weeks ago, with a more recent Android version on Thursday, and the iOS version has now been downloaded more than a million times. The app is limited to sharing text and photos in a range of around 30 feet, but it relies on a concept called mesh networking, which has greater potential: Mesh networks can be used to set up temporary networks in disaster zones, and even to spread the Internet to remote areas beyond the reach of existing wireless networks and cables. That's the technology that Google and Facebook are counting on for their plans of spreading the Internet across the globe with balloons and drones.

The technology behind it is quite simple, the same as what we use for the Internet today, says Jeff Lunt, a programmer at Northwestern University who helped set up a mesh network in the Chicago area.

Once everyone in the network is connected by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, then they can talk to each other. If one person has access to the Internet, that connection can be shared via the mesh network.

"If you wanted to connect to the Internet and you didn't have Internet, but you had the mesh, and I had Internet, I could publish what's called a route to you," Lunt says. "You can think of it like a road map."

The route, or road map, tells your device about a path its data can take to get out to the Internet. With these routes, traffic on a network knows how to efficiently get from one place to another: from person to person, or between networks.

Lunt built the Chicago mesh net as an experiment. Many other cities, including Detroit, New York, and Athens have larger mesh networks.

Lunt says it's nothing new, but it's getting attention now because of the lack of trust in centralized access control and oversight mechanisms, such as when Internet service providers and companies either partner with, or are ordered to cooperate with the National Security Agency. He explains that governments can shut off access to Internet service providers, but authorities can't shut down mesh networks.

Internet Without Wi-Fi Or A Cell Signal

Open Garden, the company that made FireChat and an Android mesh networking app, has greater ambitions. FireChat, the simple text and photo sharing app, is just the first step: With more users on mesh networks that complement the existing Internet architecture, people could stay connected everywhere, says Christophe Daligault, the vice president for sales and marketing.

"Once you build a mesh network ... now you have a network that is resilient, self-healing, cannot be controlled by any central organization, cannot be shut down and is always working," Daligault says. "I think that solves many other drawbacks or challenges of the mobile broadband Internet today."

He says none of this would be possible without the rapid spread of smartphones, because that means no extra hardware is needed.

"Each [phone] becomes a router and in a sense you're growing the Internet — everyone who joins the mesh network creates an extension of the Internet," Daligault says. "In a year or two from now, I think people won't even remember that you had to be on Wi-Fi or get a cell signal to be able to communicate."

"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.

i i

"I thoroughly enjoy this topic in kind of a dark way," he says. "There's a kind of deviousness and brilliance that is on display in a lot of these things that is really fascinating to me."

It would have been very funny if I had been. That would have been a very peculiar reason — but it was a dream. And I thought it was a great dream, so I wrote it down.

On how she knows when to end a story

I think I have a sense right in the beginning of how big an idea it is and how much room it needs, and, almost more importantly, how long it would sustain anybody's interest. And that's sometimes been a problem with a story when it's sort of offered me two ways that it could go, and I have to choose one or the other.

On whether she ever lengthens or shortens her stories

Sometimes. The last story in the book, called "Ph.D," is really only one line long, and that started as, say, a paragraph. ... "All these years, I thought I had a Ph.D. But I do not have a Ph.D." A friend of mine had that dream — who does safely and securely have a Ph.D. But she would dream over and over that there was one crucial exam she had not taken.

On the longest story in the collection, called "The Letter to the Foundation"

More About Lydia Davis

Book Reviews

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