NPR News

Everybody over a certain age — say, around 50 — has these moments: The car keys go missing. They can't retrieve a once-familiar name. They stride into a room with purpose and then forget why.

Phyllis Hersch knows about those lapses.

"I go to the store and do five errands and miss the most important one because I've gotten distracted by something else," says Hersh, who just turned 70. Recently she alarmed herself by leaving her car in the garage with the motor running at her home in Massachusetts.

The Japanese government says it may ask major businesses and institutions to reduce the amount of power they use by 25 percent this summer.

Parts of Japan have had rolling blackouts as a result of last month's earthquake and tsunami, which crippled a major nuclear reactor complex. But some Japanese businesses say the huge cuts being contemplated right now will be difficult to live with.

Most people in Japan have a story to tell about where they were on March 11.

Every week people across the globe spend 3 billion hours playing video games — but that isn't enough for Jane McGonigal. She told an audience at last year's TED conference in California that we need to play more.

"If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity," she said, "I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade."

If anyone is a poster child for people who should not be facing foreclosure, it's Debra Dahlmer.

Dahlmer, who is retired and legally blind, has never missed a mortgage payment on her home. She lives in Gloucester, Mass., in a modest house with her 80-year-old mother and several small, well-fed dogs.

The global economy has largely recovered from the crisis of 2008, but when finance ministers from around the world gather in Washington this week, they will still face sobering challenges. World trade talks are on the verge of collapse, and the uprisings in the Arab world show that unemployment and corruption can shake up governments that otherwise seem stable.