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A Virginia jury has recommended life in prison for three Somali pirates convicted of murdering four Americans seized from a sailing yacht off the coast of Africa in 2011.

The prosecution had sought the death penalty for Ahmed Muse Salad, Abukar Osman Beyle and Shani Nurani Shiekh Abrar, who were convicted last month of piracy, murder and kidnapping.

The three were among 19 men who attacked the 58-foot S/V Quest with the intent of ransoming her crew: retired U.S. couple Jean and Scott Adam; and two friends, Bob Riggle and Phyllis Macay.

When negotiations broke down, however, the four were shot and killed.

The victims were the first Americans killed in a wave of piracy that has plagued the Somali Coast and the Indian Ocean in recent years.

The Internal Revenue Service, under attack by congressional Republicans, has been operating without a permanent commissioner. President Obama nominated John Koskinen on Thursday for what might be seen as a thankless job.

The president called his nominee "an expert at turning around institutions in need of reform." But Koskinen will have his work cut out for him, starting with his Senate confirmation hearing.

History With Struggling Agencies

Koskinen, 74, is a familiar figure in Washington policy circles. In his last government job, he was chairman of Freddie Mac, which buys home mortgages from lenders, and which was bankrupt when he took over in 2008. He helped lead Freddie Mac back into solvency.

Koskinen served as deputy mayor of Washington, D.C., and was chairman of the federal government's efforts to prepare for Y2K, the feared worldwide computer meltdown.

He earlier served as deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. In 2011, as threats of a government shutdown loomed, he spoke with NPR about the 1995 shutdown.

"They discovered that people cared about parks and museums; they cared about getting [Federal Housing Administration] loans," he said. "And there was a lot of that in '95 that people really didn't understand or think about ... shutting down the passport services and other things they depended upon."

Now, Koskinen is being called on to rescue another agency many Americans are struggling to understand: the IRS. It's been under attack by Republicans in Congress, who say that it unfairly targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status for special scrutiny. Recent reports indicate the agency also targeted some progressive groups for scrutiny.

Questioning Ahead

The senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Utah's Orrin Hatch, complained on the Senate floor Thursday night that Obama didn't consult him about Koskinen's nomination.

It's All Politics

Report: IRS Scrutiny Worse For Conservatives

Employers added 162,000 workers in July, and the U.S. unemployment rate slipped to 7.4 percent, the lowest level since December 2008, the Labor Department said Friday.

But while the number of jobs did increase, the hiring pace was slower than in the spring, marking a setback for unemployed Americans who had hoped for a better summer.

"The labor market begins the second half of 2013 with a fizzle," economist Heidi Shierholz, with the Economic Policy Institute, says in her analysis of the data. "At this rate, it would take six years to ... get back to health in the labor market."

Over the past year, the economy has added an average of 189,000 jobs per month. As jobs have grown, the jobless rate has dropped from 8.2 percent one year ago. In June, the rate was 7.6 percent.

To some extent, the falling unemployment rate also reflects a workforce that is shrinking as baby boomers retire and young people stay in college longer. Also, some people are staying home with children or elderly parents, and millions have stopped applying for jobs because they think it's hopeless. When fewer people seek work, then the unemployment rate looks smaller.

Another labor market measure that has been getting smaller is paychecks. The July report showed average hourly earnings slipped by 2 cents to $23.98. Over the past year, hourly earnings have risen only 1.9 percent. That's about the same rate of increase as consumer prices.

On 'Tell Me More'

NPR's Marilyn Geewax speaks with host Michel Martin about the latest jobs numbers.

Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday that unlike Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, he "did it the wrong way" by trying first to go through proper channels — a delay that he says cost thousands of lives.

"I really regarded [it] as anathema ... leaking as opposed to working within the system," Ellsberg says, speaking to NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "I wasted years trying to do it through channels, first within the executive branch and then with Congress."

"During that time, more than 10,000 Americans died and probably more than a million Vietnamese," Ellsberg says.

"That was a fruitless effort, as it would have been for Manning and Snowden," he says.

Ellsberg, an analyst with the RAND Corporation, leaked a study of U.S.-Vietnam relations from 1945-1967, known colloquially as the Pentagon Papers, handing over the document to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.

The release of the Pentagon Papers proved politically embarrassing for President Richard Nixon and the Watergate break-in, which eventually led to Nixon's resignation, was part of a broader White House effort to identify the source of such leaks.

Ellsberg was eventually charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy, but the charges were later dismissed, unlike the case of Private Bradley Manning, who was convicted on similar counts last week for releasing secret diplomatic cables and other material to Wikileaks.

The decision to go public with the Pentagon Papers — which detailed a pattern of deception regarding Vietnam and the Vietnam War that spanned several presidential administrations – was a difficult one, according to Ellsberg.

"I decided it was worth a life in prison to do that," he says.

Asked whether he thinks Manning and Snowden, the CIA contractor who leaked details of secret U.S. electronic surveillance activities to The Guardian newspaper, had been discerning in what they chose to release publicly: "Yes, that's obvious with Snowden," he says.

"The public has been very misled about Manning, I would say," Ellsberg says. "They talk about his being indiscriminate. That's simply false. Like me and like Snowden, he had access to communications intelligence higher than top secret. He gave none of that out."

Since The Guardian's exposes, based on information obtained from Snowden, first broke in June, "the whole focus has been on the risks of truth telling, the risks of openness, which are the risks of democracy, of separation of powers," Ellsberg says.

"I've really heard nothing at all about the risks of closed society, of silence, of lies," he says.