Friday night, the House of Representatives prevented a shutdown with a stopgap bill, just hours before the last stopgap funding bill would have expired. There's also been a deal to keep a payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance from expiring two weeks from now. NPR's David Welna joins host Scott Simon to explain the congressional landscape in the final weeks of the year.
NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles.
The grill "is the one and only male-dominated appliance in America," says a researcher who recently crunched the numbers. He found that men are more than twice as likely as women to be the primary grillers at home. One reason? Grilling can feel like a form of recreation.
The congressional hearings about the IRS's handling of Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status raise the question of why and how tax-exempt groups engage in politics in the first place.
The Federal Trade Commission is in the early stages of opening an antitrust probe into how Google runs its online display advertising business, according to a report by Bloomberg News, citing sources who want to remain anonymous because the FTC has not announced the probe.