Hundreds Try To Influence The Supercommittee

The deficit reduction committee, the so-called supercommittee, has less than a month to agree on massive spending cuts and deficit reduction. And so the race is on — not only for lawmakers but for interest groups, trade associations and corporations. An NPR analysis finds there are hundreds of them that want to influence the outcome. [...]

Groups That Plan To Lobby The Supercommittee

In all, 619 different groups and corporations said they intend to lobby around the work of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, better known around Capitol Hill as the supercommittee. All of them mentioned the supercommittee or the legislation that created it in their mandatory third-quarter lobbying disclosure forms. Here is an alphabetical list [...]

Republicans Struggle To Sway Latino Voters In Nevada

Barack Obama won Nevada when he won the presidency in 2008. So did George W. Bush before Obama and Bill Clinton before Bush. Nevada is a swing state — and when Democrats win it, it’s with the strong support of Latinos who account for 17 percent of the state’s voters. But recent polls have shown [...]

Mitt Romney Criticized For Slow Motion, Climate-Change ‘Flip Flop’

Mitt Romney drew barbs Friday for his continued shift to the ideological right on the climate change issue. Actually, the criticism for Romney that blew in from both the political right and left came as critics accused him of a full flip flop on global warming. Romney’s political foes jumped on comments he made in [...]

Kids’ Book Club: A ‘Graveyard’ Tour With Neil Gaiman

Welcome to the first installment of NPR’s Back-Seat Book Club! We’ve invited all of our younger listeners to join us for conversations with authors of kids’ books. We kicked off the club with The Graveyard Book, a thrilling Halloween treat from Neil Gaiman that won the Newbery Medal in 2009. Gaiman loves Halloween and all [...]

A Halloween Love Story

This is a weekend of things that go boo in the dark, so here’s a little bit of boo (which turns into a love story between a skeleton and a beautiful maiden). They meet—or have they already met? – in a famous bookstore in Paris. This comes from filmmaker Spike Jonze and designer Olympia Le-Tan. [...]

Corporations Offer Help In Trimming The Waist

Part of an ongoing series on obesity in America As companies feel the financial burden of the obesity epidemic, some are trying to help their bottom line by helping employees with their waistline. One of the largest such efforts is at the Dow Chemical Company, which has operations in Michigan, Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia [...]

Could Gingrich Be Next GOP Challenger To Surge?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich remains a long shot for the Republican presidential nomination. He’s been polling a distant fourth in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as in pivotal, winner-take-all Florida — all contests that will play out in January. His campaign faced hurdles, many self-imposed, from the start. Most of his [...]

Medical Schools Say Magazine’s Ratings Get An Incomplete

Deans from some of the nation’s top medical schools met Thursday — not to talk about training doctors or weathering economic challenges — but to size up the people who grade them. The sit-down between editors at U.S. News & World Report and the top brass at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and several other schools showed [...]

When Forgettable Salads Cause A Deadly Outbreak

Consider the last time you ordered a salad at a restaurant. What, precisely, was in it? Chances are you’ll remember the biggest, brightest ingredients, like the lettuce, the tomato, maybe the grilled chicken. But will you remember the little bits — the nuts, berries or toppings? In an age when salads increasingly aspire to be [...]