President Obama headed West Wednesday. He's holding a series of town hall meetings – as well as a series of campaign fund raisers. NPR's Ari Shapiro is traveling with the president to Palo Alto, Calif., where the president held a town hall meeting at Facebook headquarters. And he speaks with Michele Norris.

Michele Norris speaks with NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman about Major League Baseball's takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Commissioner Bud Selig also said his office is investigating the club's finances.

For the next two weeks, the International Space Station will be one the brightest objects in the sky.

"It outshines all the stars, all the planets but Venus and actually gives Venus a run for its money," Kelly Beatty, Sky and Telescope's senior contributing editor, told Robert Siegel in today's edition of All Things Considered.

But if you want to get in on the action, you have to be prepared: the sightings last about a minute because the ISS is speeding at five miles per second. That lets it travel around the Earth in 90 minutes.

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed during heavy fighting in Libya. Michele Norris speaks to James Hider, Middle East correspondent for the Times of London. Hider was there when Hetherington was brought to the hospital.

Apple Inc. reported another exceptional quarter Wednesday, nearly doubling its net income and far exceeding analyst estimates on the strength of the seemingly unstoppable iPhone.

There's only one problem: The tech giant couldn't produce the new iPad fast enough.

"We sold every iPad 2 we could make," said Apple's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer.

Thousands of utility customers in rural communities across Weld, Larimer and Boulder counties will soon take advantage of smart meter technology. It’s thanks in part to a $43 million loan that the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted on Wednesday to Poudre Valley REA.

Although images of dead birds and blackened marshes in the Gulf of Mexico are gone, many scientists say it's too early to declare a recovery. They suspect there could be hidden damage to the Gulf's marine life and marshes. And some of these scientists say research on the effects of the spill has been delayed or kept secret.

The lifting of tariffs and quotas of pork products coming into Korea from the US would have a direct impact on Brett Ruttledge’s bottom line, in the form of about $10 more per head for the price of one of his hogs. But there’s just one problem for Rutledge, who farms in Yuma on the northeastern plains, a free trade agreement between the two countries is still pending.

This week, a federal jury in Virginia convicted mortgage executive Lee Farkas of fraud and conspiracy charges that could send him to prison for life.

Authorities say Farkas tried to defraud banks out of almost $3 billion, in one of the biggest cases to come out of the mortgage crisis. And that, critics say, is the problem.

Almost three years after the economy nearly collapsed, most top Wall Street banks and their executives have emerged with no criminal trouble. And that's making people angry.

Madoff And More

Gerard Smith, who played bass for the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio, has died today after a battle with lung cancer. He was 36 years old. The sad news arrived this afternoon via the band's website, which posted this brief note: