A fire onboard a school bus left at least 15 children dead in Pakistan Saturday morning.

The New York Times reports the private school bus caught fire near the town of Gujrat, when the driver tried to switch from using gasoline to natural gas.

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. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

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.

When Raymond Sokolov began writing about food, it was considered a specialty portfolio. Today, celebrity chefs abound in the U.S. and Britain, with cookbooks, TV shows and groupies. Host Scott Simon speaks with Sokolov about his new book, Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food.

There's a lot of innovation in grilling — everything from fancy briquettes to gadgets that help grill veggies to perfection.

But according to survey data from the NPD Group, one thing that's not changing is who's firing up the grill.

I email. I search. I shop. I Facebook. I stream. I Skype. Every year I seem to do these things a little bit more. Stroke by stroke, as I slip deeper into the Internet's embrace, I find myself wondering:

"What would happen if the Internet went away?"

Can it? It was famously built to be indestructible, with no center, no hub, no "off" or "on" switch. It is, after all, a creature of the U.S. Defense Department, designed, supposedly, to survive a global war.

Nearly 18 million tourists descend on our nation's capitol every year, and most of them are keen to spend time at the many free museums in Washington, D.C. But only about 100,000 people take the trip across the river to a museum of a different sort: the Pentagon. The Pentagon's exhaustive historical displays offer fresh insight into the range of the Defense Department's activities.

Host Scott Simon catches up on the week's sports with NPR's Tom Goldman.

Hundreds of volunteers have come to Moore, Okla., to help the community following Monday's tornado. Some are helping clear debris, others bringing out water and supplies to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed, and whose lives are in disarray. One group of volunteers is cooking more than 10,000 meals a day.

Gnomes marched their way into one of England's most prestigious gardening events this year. The 100th annual Chelsea Flower Show, which ends Saturday, opened its gates to the flower-friendly creatures for the first time.