NPR News

As someone who has spent a lot of time around MRI scanners, there are a few things I know don't mix with their powerful magnets.

Leave your bank and credit cards at the door, unless you're keen on bulk erasing the magnetic strips. And anything metal — especially any kind of metal that's attracted to magnets — should be kept far away from the electromagnetic fields the scanners use to make those cool images of your insides.

There's "an almost carnival-like atmosphere" in Cairo's Tahrir Square today, our colleague JJ Sutherland says in an audio report he filed for NPR's newscast.

It's Day 16 of the anti-government protests, and just one week since deadly clashes broke out in the square when "pro-Mubarak" Egyptians attacked the "anti-Mubarak" protesters.

There's word from the Associated Press in Los Angeles that prosecutors have formally charged actress Lindsay Lohan with felony grand theft in the alleged taking of a $2,500 necklace from a Venice, Calif., jewelry store last month.

That much was expected.

Way back in 1994, companies — on average — provided employees with 90 square feet of working space. In 2010, reported the International Facility Management Association, that number dropped to 75 square feet. And this is a populist change: The same was true for senior-level office workers, whose space shrunk from 115 square feet in '94 to 96 square feet in 2010.

Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are blamed to greater or lesser degrees — depending on the political ideology of the finger-pointer — for their roles in the 2008 financial meltdown.

But even before the bursting of the mortgage bubble, critics complained the mortgage companies were risky. As government-sponsored entities, or GSEs, the argument went, they operated with an implied guarantee that federal taxpayers would rescue investors if the companies got in trouble.