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By the time a bright-eyed secretary named Peggy Olson walked through the fictional doors of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper in 1960, one very real female pioneer was already hard at work down the street.

Like her Mad Men counterpart, the 84-year-old broadcasting legend Barbara Walters, who retired from television this week, got her start as a secretary for a Manhattan advertising agency. And though Walters' rise from the secretarial pool began much earlier and took much longer than Peggy's, it was no less dramatic.

It was 1951. Fresh out of Sarah Lawrence College, the 21-year-old daughter of a millionaire nightclub owner did what many bright, privileged female graduates of her generation did: Enroll in speedwriting school. But, as Walters confesses in her memoir, Audition, her shorthand skills "didn't get me my first job. My legs did."

Her first boss was the head of a small advertising firm who, after following her up the stairs at an employment agency, sized her up and hired her on the spot; "standard operating procedure in the 50s," according to Walters.

For a year, like Peggy Olson (Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss), Walters typed letters and took dictation as a young, single secretary in New York City. From the start, she, too, had to fend off the unwanted advances of a "pink-faced" boss, which, in her case, resulted in her leaving the firm after he became too "amorous."

The Department of Transportation is ordering General Motors to pay a record $35 million civil penalty for its handling of a recall of more than 2 million vehicles for ignition switch problems. The government says GM violated federal safety laws.

The fine is part of a "consent decree" that's being announced Friday. The agreement also calls for GM to change how it handles review of safety issues.

The substantial fine stems from an investigation into the Chevrolet Cobalt and other GM cars that were found to have problems with their ignition switches.

Business

Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect

Google's lawyers are trying to make sense of a ruling they did not expect.

This week, a Europe's highest court decided that people have a right to request the deletion of search results about them. So Google has to remove links to certain pages. Legal experts in Europe are torn about what it exactly means.

What Prompted The Ruling

There's a man in Spain who doesn't like his search results. I ask a fellow Spaniard, Cristina de la Serna in Madrid, to show us why.

She goes to Google.es, Spain's version of the search engine, and types in the name Mario Costeja Gonzalez. The second result she gets for Gonzalez is a link to a 1998 Spanish newspaper clip. It shows his home was repossessed because of debt.

Google Must Delete Personal Data When Asked, European Court Says

If the polls are correct, the Pennsylvania governor's race is poised to see the usual political script flipped.

The Republican incumbent, Gov. Tom Corbett, is using a populist attack against the challenger who's leading the Democratic primary field — accusing Tom Wolf of being an opportunistic businessman who profited at the expense of taxpayers and workers.

At this point, the May 20 Democratic primary seems Wolf's to lose: a recent Franklin and Marshall College poll released May 14 put Wolf's support at 33 percent.

That's compared to 14 percent for Rep. Allyson Schwartz, his next closest Democratic rival. Polling in the single digits were the two other Democrats, Rob McCord, the state treasurer, and Katie McGinty, an environmental advisor during the Clinton administration.

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Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki says he's accepted the resignation of the department's undersecretary for health, a day after the two officials testified before Congress about a growing controversy delays in treatment.

"Today, I accepted the resignation of Dr. Robert Petzel, undersecretary for health in the Department of Veterans Affairs," Shinseki said in a statement cited by Reuters.

"As we know from the veteran community, most veterans are satisfied with the quality of their VA health care, but we must do more to improve timely access to that care," Shinseki said.

As under secretary for health at the VA, Petzel oversaw the health needs of veterans under the department's care. Before coming to the under secretary's post, he served as network director of the VA Midwest Health Care Network, based in Minneapolis, Minn., according to his official bio.

As we reported on Thursday, Shinseki told a Senate panel then that he was "mad as hell" about reports that delays in treatment of veterans at some hospitals may have led to as many as 40 deaths.

Shinseki had told the panel that he would not fire any of the department's senior leadership until an inspector general's report was finished in August.

But, as The Washington Post writes, Sen. Mark Begich, Alaska Democrat, had pressed Shinseki "to get rid of those who had been found untrustworthy through fraudulent statements or documents."

"Sometimes you've got to have some heads roll to get the system to shape up," Begich said.

The Department of Transportation is ordering General Motors to pay a record $35 million civil penalty for its handling of a recall of more than 2 million vehicles for ignition switch problems. The government says GM violated federal safety laws.

The fine is part of a "consent decree" that's being announced Friday; the agreement also calls for GM to change how it handles review of safety issues.

The substantial fine stems from an investigation into the Chevrolet Cobalt and other GM cars that were found to have problems with their ignition switches. The flaw had the potential to cause airbags to fail to deploy during a crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the fine is "the single highest civil penalty amount ever paid as a result of a NHTSA investigation of violations stemming from a recall."

"Safety is our top priority, and today's announcement puts all manufacturers on notice that they will be held accountable if they fail to quickly report and address safety-related defects," Transportation Secretary Foxx said in a news release announcing the fine.

Saying the government would continue to "aggressively monitor GM's efforts" to resove the issue, he also called for Congress to raise the limits on how large a fine the government can use to punish businesses. He cited a new law that would make the limit $300 million.

The $35 million fine is a civil penalty; earlier this year, Toyota agreed to pay a $1.2 billion criminal fine over its behavior during a safety probe. That case was handled by the Justice Department.

The GM recall includes the 2005-2010 Chevrolet Cobalt, 2007-2010 Pontiac G5, 2003-2007 Saturn Ion, 2006-2011 Chevrolet HHR, 2006-2010 Pontiac Solstice and 2007-2010 Saturn Sky vehicles.

Update at 11:05 a.m. ET: GM Comments On The Fine

"We have learned a great deal from this recall. We will now focus on the goal of becoming an industry leader in safety," said GM CEO Mary Barra, who faced a grilling on Capitol Hill last month.

The company's vice president of Global Vehicle Safety, Jeff Boyer, said that GM "has created a new group, the Global Product Integrity unit, to innovate our safety oversight," among other measures.

Where does Don Draper's formidable presence come from in Mad Men? From his impeccable style, sure, and from his brooding good looks, of course, but also from his stillness. A few drug-induced exceptions aside, Don is as restrained in movement as he is in his speech. The combination gives him an irresistible, if unsettling, allure; in meetings, it's his solid stare that holds your attention as much as his words.

Jon Hamm's stillness playing Don in Mad Men became particularly noticeable after I watched him in Million Dollar Arm, which, among other things, lacks a noteworthy performance to ground an otherwise loosely-constructed film. Hamm doesn't play Don in Million Dollar Arm, of course, but he does play another salesman: the sports agent JB, who, after leaving a large agency to start his own business, is struggling to sign a big name athlete and pay his bills.

In fact, Million Dollar Arm begins with a pitch from JB to a superstar NFL linebacker he hopes to represent. JB doesn't quite offer the same satisfactions as Don, though. He's something closer to Jerry Maguire in need of an editor, concluding his promise to secure countless riches with the supplication: "Will you let me help you do that?"

JB leads a hurried existence, rushing around LA in his Porsche convertible. Eventually he takes that energy to India, where, with the prospect of a billion new baseball fans on his mind, he hopes to save his career by converting Indian cricket bowlers into professional pitchers. To that end, he holds a contest called Million Dollar Arm, offering two finalists an opportunity to try out for the major leagues in the U.S. And when the winners, Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal), return with JB to LA, one of the first English words they learn is the essence of JB's way of life: Hustle.

Looking at Hamm's previous roles, you can chart his range by whether his characters default to a smile or a stone-faced stare. If deadpan, he's Don—assertive, composed, unflappable. With a smile—which, unlike most things about Hamm, is generally strained and awkward—he flips: now he's goofy and approachable, characteristics he used to great effect on 30 Rock.

Either way, he has presence. In Million Dollar Arm, he disappears. And he's not the only one: Between director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), writer Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), and co-stars Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin, and Lake Bell (who is good enough to make you realize how wasteful her love-interest-as-motherly-sidekick role is), there's a lot of potential talent subsumed here by plain studio-fare.

Whoever you want to blame, Million Dollar Arm is a film that, like JB, is in a needless rush. This isn't the hurry of a tense thriller. Instead, with time to kill, the film resembles a long car ride, with McCarthy and Gillespie producing the closest approximations to excitement possible so no one realizes they're bored. The scenes in India stuff a series of montages in between jokes about animals roaming the streets and a brief, preposterous stop at the Taj Mahal. (A Disney movie isn't where one ought to search for nuanced multiculturalism, of course, and here, at least, both sides are reduced to stereotypes: America is baseball, luxury, and cultural insensitivity; India is spicy food, crowded streets, and poverty.) In other moments, when a montage is too clearly out of the question, the film resorts to sudden leaps in time: Anything, that is, but a stop for breath.

In the end, Hamm is most affected—there's a strain to his performance that suggests something about JB, perhaps, but also strips the character of any charisma. As a result, Million Dollar Man may be the first hint that Hamm is unable to rise above mediocre material and demand our attention regardless (an essential feature of any leading Hollywood actor or actress). But before passing judgment, I'd like to see a film that lets him sit still and prove otherwise.

This is a monster sold on a sigh. For all of the bombast, the buildings falling, and the brawling beasties, the moment when this Godzilla is most impressive, the moment he suddenly transcends his digital underpinnings and feels like a real presence, is one of his subtlest and quietest. During a lull in a battle among the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, the danger around him briefly subsides; his head droops momentarily, his body heaves ever so slightly downward, and he exhales quietly. The fearsome jaws, knifelike talons, and spiky plates on his back might scream world-destroying lizard god, but that sigh just murmurs, "I'm gonna need a minute here."

Godzilla is nearing retirement age, with nearly three dozen movies under his scaly belt, so as the franchise enters its seventh decade, it's fair to ask any director attempting to resurrect the series whether there's a good reason (apart from box-office grosses) to poke this particular sleeping giant. British director Gareth Edwards' answer to that seems to be that it's time for a return to the creature's sober, serious roots after decades of rubber suits and silly monster-on-monster action.

To that end, Edwards demonstrates a clear understanding of what made 1954's Godzilla such an enduring story. As was the case there, he's attempted to create an allegory about the dangers of militarized science, and one that foregrounds the human drama while the monstrous chaos unleashed by man's dabbling in nuclear power and weaponry goes down in the background. He centers the story on one family, the Brodys, whose fates are intertwined with a Japanese nuclear disaster and its subsequent fallout.

Bryan Cranston plays Joe, an engineer at the Janjira nuclear power plant, which early in the film is destroyed in a series of earthquakes mirroring the real-life Fukushima disaster. His wife dies in the accident, and he becomes a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, trying desperately to prove that the official explanation for the disaster is a smoke screen. Fifteen years later, he's an embarrassment to his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military ordnance expert now with a family of his own in San Francisco. Ford has to head to Japan to retrieve Dad after a run-in with local authorities, and his visit just happens to coincide with the earth starting its familiar rumbling again. Turns out Joe's theories aren't so crazy after all, particularly to Dr. Ichikawa (Ken Watanabe), a secret government scientist studying a mysterious phenomenon at the Janjira site.

The characters don't quite escape the thinly drawn traditions of the standard summer blockbuster, but they are full enough to provide adequate personal stakes, especially with Ford's desperate attempts to reunite with his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son amid the carnage. Similarly, the allegorical underpinnings never quite match the grace with which the 1954 Godzilla interrogates scientific ethics in a militarized age, but they're present enough to provoke at least a little thought.

What Edwards is really after here is balance, not just of character and meaningful story, but also of spectacle. This is still a big summer tentpole, after all, and Edwards is committed to making a popcorn flick that thrills without sacrificing brain cells.

Edwards' only previous feature was the 2010 indie Monsters, which impressed its small audience with how effective a monster movie could be even if it barely had the budget to really show the monsters. Godzilla has the budget, but it maintains commitment to the notion that the unseen is more impressive than the seen: Godzilla doesn't appear until over halfway into the film (after one nicely executed bait-and-switch), and really doesn't take center stage until the very end.

When we do see him and the movie's other creatures — because this does still share some DNA with the later monster-vs.-monster iterations of Godzilla — it's most often from specific human points of view. They're partially obscured by goggles, by blurred binoculars, by smoke, by foregrounded buildings. Everything Edwards does visually creates a sense of scale as compared with humans, and when he does open Godzilla up to wide shots, it makes him all the more impressive.

Edwards' willingness to not always go over the top, to not try to be bigger than Godzilla, is what drives restrained moments like that labored sigh, or the stunningly executed paratrooper sequence teased in the poster, with troops falling from the sky trailing red smoke while the eerie Ligeti Requiem made famous by Kubrick's 2001 winds up the tension in preparation for another release.

This is exactly what big summer movies ought to aspire to: never short on dazzle, but unafraid to let us catch our breath once it's been taken away.

The U.S. housing market is strengthening after a tough winter, according to economists at a Realtors convention in Washington.

But even as the short-term outlook brightens, they remain worried about a long-term problem with "missing" young buyers.

"There really are serious issues in the first-time-buyer market," Eric Belsky, managing director of Harvard's Joint Center of Housing Studies, told the National Association of Realtors on Thursday.

He estimates that nearly 3 million more young adults are living with their parents compared with 2007 — before the Great Recession had settled in.

Many would like to strike out on their own now, "but their incomes just aren't high enough to make it work," Belsky said. "You have a very stressed group in their 20s."

Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, said the trade group is expecting "steady improvement" for the housing market through 2015, but agreed that for many would-be buyers — particularly younger ones — getting a mortgage "is still tough."

One decade ago, the homeownership rate for young adults under age 35 was 43.6 percent. Today, the rate is just over 36 percent, according to U.S. Census data.

There are very few professions where poverty is romanticized, but if you're a Franciscan friar or an artist, being poor is seen as somehow ennobling. Josh Shaw, who ran a recent Pacific Opera Project production of La Boheme in Los Angeles, says the opera's famous story of starving artists hits a little close to home.

"There's been times recently when I have nothing my bank account," Shaw says. Almost everyone in his company works multiple jobs — waiting tables, teaching music, writing for little publications. Their lives don't seem too different from the artsy bohemians in Puccini's opera.

La Boheme saw a spectacular reboot with the musical Rent in 1994. But how is its story of suffering romantically for art's sake faring in an age of rising income inequality?

In the HBO series Girls, young faux bohemians subsidize their Brooklyn rents with handouts from their parents — and have to explain to their parents their choice of an artist lifestyle: "Tell them you'll get tuberculosis in a garret if you have to," one character advises. "Tell them it's what Flaubert did. Tell them that Picasso did it. Rappers who were poor and sold their tapes in the street did it."

Playwright and performer Mike Albo loves Girls, even though it bears little resemblance to the vision of fabulous poverty he aspired to in the 1990s. "I moved to the city thinking: But I'm like Patti Smith. I'll just sleep on a mattress and you know, eat one potato," he says.

But Albo, who recently staged a well-reviewed off Broadway show called The Junket says his romance with artistic poverty is dead. He says that paying his bills every month in a city as expensive as New York requires a lot of "plate spinning."

And that is why a new generation of artists would never dream of a glamorously poor existence almost anywhere, much less in the capital of the art world.

"It's sort of impossible, it's really sad," says Bianca Diaz. Diaz lives in Pilsen, a Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago that's also been an artists' enclave for years. It was actually founded more than a century ago by Bohemians — the original ones, from Czechoslovakia. Diaz graduated last year from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she says her classmates showed little interest in living in garrets and eating ramen noodles.

"I really don't feel like people are glamorizing poverty as much," she says. "They're more interested in glamorous technology that can support their work."

In short, a YouTube channel might be today's equivalent of a raw loft space on Avenue B. Musician Stephen Brackett sees a deeper problem than the rising costs of life in cities, and that's how artists are viewed broadly: That artists aren't "laborers," and that they're not "working."

Brackett believes all kinds of Puritan projections are put on jobs like his that are fundamentally about creating visions, not pulling paychecks.

"Because we are living this kind of dreamed upon lifestyle, I think there's kind of like a passion tax," he says.

Brackett is an MC with a group called The Flobots. They try to redress what they see as the general devaluation of the arts by bringing music education to public schools in Denver.

Arts education is itself impoverished even though study after study points to its importance in a post-industrial global economy. One year after Lyndon B. Johnson started the War on Poverty, he approved the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports artists and arts education. Its current budget is about $146 million says visual artist William Powhida.

Just compare that he says to today's private art market. On Tuesday night, in one single auction, wealthy collectors bought almost a billion dollars in contemporary art at Christie's in New York.

"If you had a 2 percent tax just on the auctions in New York you could probably double the NEA budget in two nights," he says.

Critics might call that wealth redistribution. Powhida finds it strange and not a little cruel that art is one of the most excessive markers of income inequality — even as artists tend to be among the least well paid workers in the art industry.

The world has already seen 28 Godzilla movies — 29, if you count Roland Emmerich's 1998 Hollywood remake (which most of us don't). So why is another one opening this week?

Well, the fiduciary logic is no doubt compelling if you're a studio executive — even that widely derided '90s version made $379 million — but for the rest of us, director Gareth Edwards needs to make a case. He starts in the opening credits, by letting you know that everything you think you know about this story is suspect. The background is black-and-white footage of atom bomb tests from the 1940s and '50s — the time Godzilla originally surfaced — the foreground, movie credits. But as soon as each credit comes up, it's redacted: Words blacked out, censored as if to say the audience lacks security clearance. Something has been kept from us.

Flash forward to 1999, when earnest scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins come across a mysterious radioactive exoskeleton in the Phillipines, at about the moment that trouble surfaces at a Japanese nuclear facility. A seismic disturbance — think of it as a bug in the system — destroys the reactor, and gives the authorities an excuse to keep everyone away from it for the next 15 years, including a hysterically shock-haired Bryan Cranston who lost his wife (Juliette Binoche) in the reactor meltdown and who's now convinced that the powers-that-be are hiding something.

I won't describe what they're hiding, except to say that it's not Godzilla. But it is big, and feeds on radiation, so if you come at it with nuclear weapons, it thinks you're just serving snacks. Oh, and it emits electro-magnetic pulses that knock out all things technological. Nifty critter, about to escape. Fortunately for humanity, the navy's on hand to give it an acronym.

Graaaaaaaaaargh!

Movies

Movie Monsters, Monster Movies And Why 'Godzilla' Endures

Singer songwriter Ledisi has had eight Grammy nominations, and says she is grateful for that. "I would like to win, but it will happen when its time."

For more than 10 years, Ledisi has garnered an international fan base while striving to grow her musical abilities.

On her latest album, The Truth, the New Orleans native opens her heart and talks about how she had to face the truth about a failing relationship. But the album is far from being a collection of downtrodden songs. For "The Truth" Ledisi breaks away from her trademark ballads and tries her hand at more upbeat tracks with tongue-in-cheek names such as, "That Good Good."

Ledisi recently spoke with Tell Me More guest host Celeste Headlee about why she wanted to expose her love life and what she learned in the process.

More From This Episode

Ask Me Another

Random Questions With: Andrew W.K.

An attack on anti-government protesters in Thailand's capital, Bangkok, has left at least two people dead and more than 20 wounded, Thai authorities say.

The incident marks renewed violence between supporters and opponents of ousted Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was removed from her post last week by the country's Constitutional Court along with nine of her cabinet ministers. Her Pheu Thai party, however, remains in power.

The Associated Press writes:

"Bangkok's emergency medical services center says 21 people were ... wounded in the assault early Thursday in the capital.

"The violence took place near the city's Democracy Monument, where protesters are camping out."

In eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists are claiming independence based on a victory in a hastily organized referendum. Now, they're resisting a nationwide presidential election that's scheduled for May 25.

With Russian troops still massed near the border, Ukrainian and international mediators are trying to find a solution for the crisis.

There are some very different visions of the future for the volatile region.

The Two-Way

Separatists Vote To Split From Ukraine; Russia 'Respects' Decision

Is there some form of existence after death, or is the notion a product of wishful thinking about our own mortality?

These questions have fascinated humans for millennia. Many approach the concept of an afterlife as a religious one, but in a recent Intelligence Squared U.S. debate, a physicist and three medical doctors put faith aside to debate life after death from a scientific perspective.

In an Oxford-style debate, they faced off two against two on the motion "Death Is Not Final," considering the concepts of an afterlife as well as near-death experiences. In these events, the team that sways the most people by the end of the debate is declared the winner.

Before the debate, the audience in New York's Kaufman Music Center voted 37 percent in favor of the motion and 31 percent against, with 32 percent undecided. After the debate, 42 percent agreed with the motion, while 46 percent were against, making the team arguing against the motion the winner of this particular debate.

Those debating were:

More From The Debate

The tea party scored a win in Nebraska on Tuesday as university president Ben Sasse captured the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in a bitter race that highlighted fissures within the GOP. Two women set the stage for history-making in West Virginia.
Sasse, who had the backing of outside conservative groups, Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz, grabbed 48 percent of the vote in a five-man primary. Sid Dinsdale, the president of Pinnacle Bank, surged to second and former State Treasurer Shane Osborn finished third.
"We were never doing this because we need another job," Sasse told supporters Tuesday night. "We were only going to do this if we were going to talk about big, bold, conservative ideas."
Outside groups pumped millions into the race for Sasse while allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tried to propel Osborn to the nomination.
With little to celebrate to date, conservative groups immediately trumpeted Sasse's victory.
"Ben Sasse won this race because he never stopped fighting for conservative principles," said Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. The group spent more than $1.2 million to help Sasse.
Cruz said Sasse's win "is a clear indication that the grassroots are rising up to make D.C. listen."
Voters in Nebraska and West Virginia decided their lineups for the November elections in the latest round of spring primaries. The fall midterms will determine control of Congress for the last two years of President Barack Obama's second term, with Republicans expected to hold the House and cautiously optimistic about winning control of the Senate.
The GOP needs to net six seats to grab the majority
In West Virginia, Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito and Democrat Natalie Tennant cruised to primary wins and will square off in a Senate showdown in November that will give the state its first female senator.
Capito is a seven-term congresswoman and daughter of former Gov. Arch Moore; Tennant is the state's secretary of state. Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller is retiring after 30 years.
West Virginia has become increasingly Republican, and Capito entered the general election contest as the heavy favorite. If elected, she would be the first Republican senator from West Virginia since 1959.

Conservative money has poured into Nebraska's Republican Senate primary race.

Big GOP names like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are on opposite sides.

And the attack ads have been brutal – including one that took a page directly from the Swift-boating of John Kerry's military record during his 2004 presidential run.

But that doesn't mean the contest to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Mike Johanns is another clear-cut primary battle between the GOP's Tea Party wing and the establishment.

After all, Ben Sasse, the so-called anti-establishment candidate, worked in the Bush White House and spent the better part of last decade in federal jobs in Washington. And the candidate favored by GOP leaders in Washington, Shane Osborn, has support from prominent local anti-tax and tea party organizations.

The distinctions are muddled enough that FreedomWorks, a national Tea Party-affiliated group, first backed Osborn before switching gears and throwing its support to Sasse.

"We are on track for some incredible spin on Wednesday morning – some anti-establishment groups are building this up to be a monumental fight," says Nathan Gonzales, who analyzes Senate races for the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. "I just don't think the Nebraska primary fits neatly into the establishment-vs. anti-establishment battle within the Republican Party."

Sasse, a former congressional staffer and Department of Health and Human Services official, has served as president since late 2010 of Nebraska's Midland College. Osborn, a retired, decorated Navy pilot, is a former one-term state treasurer. Another candidate, multi-millionaire Omaha banker Sid Dinsdale, has pumped $1 million of his own money into the race.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have notably stayed out of the race, leaving the playing field largely to groups like the limited-government Club for Growth and the conservative 60-Plus Association, both backing Sasse.

Osborn, meanwhile, has gotten money from McConnell's leadership PAC. (Sasse angered the Senate minority leader last year by calling for better Republican leadership in Washington, and for accepting an endorsement from the Tea Party-fueled Senate Conservatives Fund, one of the minority leader's harshest in-party critics.)

There's little ideological difference between the three competitive candidates, and no one can lay exclusive claim to tea party support. National organizations have gotten behind Sasse — as have noted conservatives such as Sarah Palin — but Nebraska Tea Party activists have pushed back. Last month more than 50 of them signed a statement asserting that Sasse is not their choice.

"Recently," they wrote, "a barrage of radio, TV and direct mail ads from national Washington D.C.-based PAC organizations have swept Nebraska like a plague of locusts."

"These groups claim to know what Nebraska Tea Party, conservative and libertarian movement folks want in their next U.S. senator," they said.

Both Sasse and Osborn have accused the other of not being enough of a Nebraskan. Osborn has sought to paint Sasse as a Washington insider; the Sasse camp counters that Osborn, while in the military, registered to vote in Florida while stationed there, and once suggested he may settle in South Dakota.

A super PAC supporting Osborn — and formed by a former McConnell campaign manager — has attempted to portray Sasse as a "liberal" supporter of President Obama's health care law by taking comments he made at a 2010 health care summit out of context.

But the harshest ad was released recently by the 60 Plus Association, in which three veterans questioned Osborn's fitness for office because of a memo his campaign circulated that lauded his actions in landing a disabled Navy spy plane in China in 2001.

It turns out that the unsigned memo, on Navy letterhead, was written as a favor to Osborn, the Omaha World Herald reported, by a friend working at the Pentagon.

Backlash to the ad, which echoed attacks on John Kerry's decorated service during the Vietnam War, prompted Sasse to issue a statement about what he termed the "counterfeit memo."

He said: "We have nothing but respect for those who serve our country in the military, decry all attacks on Shane's service, and have repeatedly thanked him for his service to our country."

There's little reliable polling in the race, though Sasse looks to be the candidate to beat. Dinsdale, however, appears to have an unexpected opening. Once considered an also-ran, he could tap into a vein of voters fed-up with the nastiness and has plenty of his own money to spend. Last week, in a telling move, the 60 Plus Association shifted its attacks from Osborn to Dinsdale.

Erick Erickson of the RedState blog has predicted that a Sasse win in Nebraska "could re-energize conservative efforts and give them hope."

But the political message that Nebraska sends Tuesday night will likely be a lot more diluted than many hope it will be.

The Tea Party Express bus tour made a recent swing through Mississippi, stopping on the lush grounds of the state capitol in Jackson.

It's a strategic stop to rally support for a state senator who is giving longtime Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran the re-election battle of his career. The Senate primary here is the latest episode in the national GOP power struggle between establishment forces and Tea Party upstarts.

"The conservative movement is starting its life again," challenger Chris McDaniel says to the small crowd gathered under sprawling oaks and magnolias. "And it's happening right here in Mississippi. Right? A revival."

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As expected, an energy efficiency bill failed in the Senate on Monday, which makes a separate Senate vote on the Keystone XL oil pipeline unlikely before the November election.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had made a Keystone vote contingent upon passage of the energy efficiency bill, and letting one doom the other may have temporarily gotten him out of a bind.

Reid faced a dilemma: Some Senate Democrats — especially vulnerable ones running in conservative states this year — want to support the pipeline. That is the 1,2-00 mile pipeline stretching from western Canada all the way to the Gulf Coast that has yet to be finished.

Most Democrats don't want a vote on Keystone. So Reid devised a way out. Avoid a Senate vote on the pipeline, and blame Republicans for it.

"Look at how Republican obstruction is bringing the Senate to its knees again and again and again," Reid said. "And now even on this bill — a bipartisan bill."

The bill Reid mentioned was one that would have helped increase energy efficiency in federal buildings and private homes.

For days, Reid had said only after that bill passed would he then allow a stand-alone vote on Keystone. He then blocked the other side from introducing amendments to change the bill, which made many Republicans, like Sen. John McCain of Arizona, vow they'd in turn block the energy efficiency bill.

"The dictator won't allow us to have any amendments," McCain said. "I mean, it is just unprecedented. I've been around here a long, long time."

And that's the procedural dance that let Senate Democrats avert a Keystone vote this time around.

"This is a tough issue for Democrats," says Frances Lee, American Politics professor at the University of Maryland, "Because it divides the Democratic Party, and it sets the Democratic Party and Congress against the president."

Lee points out the president would have likely vetoed any bill this year giving the green light to build Keystone, and most Democrats don't want that drama with the White House months before the midterm elections.

But where does that leave red state Democrats facing tough races this year — like Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana?

"They could have had a vote on Keystone," Landrieu says. "They can't take yes for an answer."

She's already blaming Republicans for messing up the Keystone vote. She can tell her constituents at least she tried, and hope that's good enough.

A week after apparently losing his nomination bid for Congress, Keith Crisco has died.

Despite extensive experience in business and government, Crisco is fated to be best known as the person who finished behind former American Idol star Clay Aiken in a Democratic primary in North Carolina last Tuesday.

"The president of the company founded by 71-year-old Keith Crisco says Crisco died at home on Monday after an accident," The Associated Press reports.

The Asheboro Courier-Tribune, which first reported the death, says "early information" indicates that Crisco suffered injuries from a fall at his home and had died by the time emergency workers arrived at the scene.

In addition to founding Asheboro Elastics Corp., a textile company, Crisco had served as state commerce secretary and as a member of the Asheboro City Council.

None of that was enough for him to outpace Aiken, a political newcomer. Aiken was leading by 369 votes by last count.

Roll Call reports that Crisco was planning to call Aiken on Tuesday to concede.

"I had spoken with Keith earlier in the day," Brad Crone, a Democratic strategist and Crisco friend, told the Capitol Hill newspaper. "Keith was going to concede the election tomorrow morning and would be calling Mr. Aiken to congratulate him."

Declaring himself "stunned and deeply saddened," Aiken said he was suspending his campaign for the time being.

NPR's Charlie Mahtesian notes that either Democrat would have faced an uphill climb against Republican Rep. Renee Ellmers. She took 56 percent of the 2nd District's vote in 2012, while GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney performed slightly better.

"That's a district that's pretty comfortably Republican, so it won't be easy for a Democrat to win there," Charlie said last week on Here and Now.

A boat carrying migrants from North Africa sank off the coast of Libya on Monday, killing at least 14 people a day after dozens were drowned in a similar incident.

The sinkings are just the latest in a long series of such accidents amid an exodus of would-be illegal immigrants from North Africa trying to reach EU shores.

Monday's accident occurred about 100 miles south of the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, a common destination for migrants trying to enter the European Union illegally because of its relative nearness to the African coast.

In Monday's incident, at least 14 are reported dead and 200 have been rescued by the Italian navy. In a similar episode on Sunday, at least 36 bodies had been recovered along with 52 survivors and at least 54 are still missing.

As The Associated Press notes, the incident "is the latest in a string of tragedies in the Mediterranean sea involving migrants who embark on perilous journeys in overloaded or unseaworthy boats." In February, we reported on one such case in which more than 1,000 migrants were intercepted trying to reach Lampedusa in inflatable boats.

The AP says:

"At least 232 people perished in the fiery capsizing of a smuggler's trawler near Lampedusa last fall. Only 155 people survived that capsizing.

"In the past week alone, more than 4,000 migrants have reached Italy's shores, arriving in smugglers' boats. Many of the boats set out from Libya's loosely patrolled coast with migrants who are fleeing wars or hardship in Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere.

"Italy says it can no longer afford the costs of rescuing, feeding and sheltering the steady stream of arrivals and wants the rest of the European Union to do more. Northern neighbors like Germany retort that they already take in far more asylum seekers than Italy does."

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

Misha Defonseca, the author of a fabricated Holocaust memoir that describes her hunt for her missing parents, her adoption by wolves, and her killing of a Nazi soldier, has been ordered to pay back $22.5 million to her publisher. Defonseca – who was born Monique de Wael — was awarded the money after suing Mt. Ivy Press in a dispute over the book's profits, but she was later found to have lied about the events in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. She was not Jewish, as she claimed, and during the time she wrote that she lived with wolves, she was actually attending school in Belgium. In 2008, she said, "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving."

The regional government in Calabria, Italy, has approved a bill that would reduce prison sentences in exchange for reading books: For certain inmates, sentences would be cut three days per book. The bill will now go to the Italian Parliament. The bill was inspired by "Redemption Through Reading," a similar program that's been successful in Brazil's overcrowded prisons.

On Sunday, Vogue published an excerpt from Hillary Clinton's upcoming memoir, Hard Choices. Writing about her mother, she says, "Mom measured her own life by how much she was able to help us and serve others. I knew that if she was still with us, she would be urging us to do the same. Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to make the world a better place. That's our unfinished business." Related: Casey N. Cep's essay for Politico about why political memoirs aren't worth reading.

Some Notable Books Coming Out This Week:

"Make no mistake. I frown upon books about creativity." So begins Creativity: The Perfect Crime by Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who walked a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. This unconventional treatise is full of a stunning arrogance, but that is perhaps as it should be – tightrope walking between the Twin Towers is the ultimate act of arrogance, and the book makes a compelling case (not always on purpose) that a certain amount of arrogance may be a necessary part of creativity. In an interview with NPR's Arun Rath, Petit says, "I have not followed the right path. I have been expelled from five different school when I was a kid. And I learned basically all what I do by myself. So I have something to say that rarely is being said."

A referendum on independence from Ukraine shows strong support for secession, according to separatist leaders in the districts where Sunday's vote was held. Kiev and Western governments say the vote is illegitimate.

Russia, which has been accused of orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, says it "respects the expression of will of the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions." But the Kremlin's statement also called for dialogue with Kiev, not violence.

Majorities of Ukrainians — in its east, its west, and among Russian speakers — want the country to remain unified, according to recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center. Overall, support for keeping the current borders ran at 77 percent.

A "round table" meeting between Ukraine's government and leaders of civil groups is slated for Wednesday, Reuters reports. Ukraine plans to hold presidential elections on May 25.

From Donetsk, NPR's Jessica Golloher reports for our Newscast unit:

"Pro-Moscow demonstrators here in Donetsk are declaring victory in a referendum to secede from Ukraine. It's unclear if the declaration of self-rule means the Luhansk and Donetsk regions will stay independent or possibly join Russia.

"Donetsk elections commissioner Roman Lyagin says 89 percent voted in favor of seceding from Ukraine. A representative from the Luhansk region says more than 94 percent of residents voted in favor of the referendum as well.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier urged pro-Russian demonstrators to delay the vote, saying it could create dialogue with Kiev. The Kremlin now says it hopes the practical implementation of the referendum results will take place in a civilized way and without violence."

You may have heard that dollar bills harbor trace amounts of drugs.

But those greenbacks in your wallet are hiding far more than cocaine and the flu. They're teeming with life.

Each dollar bill carries about 3,000 types of bacteria on its surface, scientists have found. Most are harmless. But cash also has DNA from drug-resistant microbes. And your wad of dough may even have a smudge of anthrax and diphtheria.

In other words, your wallet is a portable petri dish.

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Akira also acknowledges that her positive experience in pornography is not necessarily representative. Many women fall into the sex industry because they feel they have nowhere else to go, or are forced into it by abusive men. Drug addiction is very common, and many women who have left the industry say the culture is one of emotional, financial and physical exploitation of desperate young women.

As the title of her memoir suggests, Akira is happy to be a porn star. She doesn't feel her work is degrading or exploitative.

"I don't really see anything degrading about living out a sexual fantasy," she says. "I see it as empowering."

But Akira also says that when she chose a career in porn, she "knew it would ruin my life forever." Her profession could limit her options for the future; the social stigma that comes with being a porn star means she will likely never hold a regular job or be able to work with children.

One of the toughest questions Akira faces about her future is whether to start a family. She wants to have children, but she is concerned that explaining her work to her kids would be difficult. Her husband also works in pornography.

"It would be a lot to put on a child," she says.

As for whether she would allow her own daughters to pursue a career in the sex industry, Akira is unsure. "It's a really hard question, because if I knew in my heart that my daughter was getting into porn for the same reason I was getting into porn, I would say definitely go for it," she says, "but ... how would I know she's in it for the right reasons?"

For Akira, the "right reason" for her own career has been that she enjoys her job. It's fun. If that changes, she says, she'll leave pornography.

"You should never sell your body for just money," she says. "It's not worth it."

When you think of China, what pops to mind? Superhighways. Bullet trains. Gleaming skyscrapers. Economic growth. A booming middle class. Opportunity.

My friends and I graduated from college five years ago, embarking on lives that we hoped would be full of promise, excitement and opportunity. We all went to Minzu University of China (formerly known as the Central University for Nationalities), a prestigious school in Beijing.

But now many of my friends find their dreams unfulfilled, and hopes for a better life slipping away. Each, in their own way, feels trapped, and their struggles reflect some of the toughest issues in China today: fierce competition in mega-cities, the declining appeal of once-coveted civil servant jobs, and the struggle of being gay in what is still a socially conservative society.

State-Owned Firm Employee: Only Those With Connections Get Ahead

Andy Wong hails from a farming village in eastern China. He did well in school, earning a law degree. He says his goal is to "either get rich or become powerful."

The 27-year-old works for a state-owned investment company in Beijing. Jobs such as his at Chinese state-owned companies are highly sought after because of the security and benefits.

But Andy is struggling to rise through the ranks in a society where guanxi – the Mandarin word for "connections" – and money seem more important than ever. More than half of Andy's co-workers arrived at the company through family connections.

"They don't need a master's degree and they get promoted quickly," Andy complains. "It's unfair."

His colleagues from well-connected families hire nannies for their kids and bring them to the fanciest restaurants in town. As for his own family, he's seen his 2-year-old niece play with mud in a yard, her chubby face reddened and chapped from playing outside in the sun and wind. The Beijing-born niece still speaks with a country accent because she's looked after by grandparents, who are peasants.

"She is no different from kids in the countryside," Andy recalls, his voice shaking.

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If you walk your dog after dinner each night, does that help you sleep better? Maybe you've noticed that this seems to be the case, but access to hard data would help confirm it.

As technology advances and more people dig into the metrics of how they live, the market is exploding with wearable devices that enable deeper self-monitoring. There's even a fancy name for this: the quantifiable self, basically using technology to gather data on your life.

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