NPR News

San Diego, known for its nice weather, attracts even the homeless. About 4,600 people live on city streets or in shelters, and the number has been growing.

Now, the city has joined more than 70 other cities — such as Phoenix, Tucson and Nashville — in a national campaign to get 100,000 chronically homeless people into permanent housing. It was started by the New York City group Common Ground. Those leading the effort think it could be the first step toward drastically reducing homelessness in the U.S.

The congressional effort to end federal funding for NPR received new impetus Tuesday after a video surfaced of an executive who was the public-radio network's top fundraising official when he made controversial remarks about Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

Protesters in Bahrain are in their fourth week of a campaign to topple the government there, while the royal family attempts to hold on after more than two centuries of rule.

Far from the demonstrations, people in some Bahraini villages say they feel left out of the island's prosperity and blame religious discrimination, official corruption and neglect.

Bahrain's capital, Manama, is lined with glass-and-steel skyscrapers that reflect the blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf. Less than 10 miles away is another Bahrain — the poor village of Karzakan.

The Information, written by James Gleick, covers nearly everything — jungle drums, language, morse code, telegraphy, telephony, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, genetics and more — as it relates to information, which he describes as the "fundamental core of things." Information theory can now be seen as the overarching concept for our times, describing how scientists in many disciplines see a common thread to their work.

R.E.M. is a band that fans form intense bonds with. I'm one of those fans.

In the '80s and '90s, R.E.M. was my platonic ideal of a rock group: mysterious yet straightforward, arty yet unpretentious, noisy, delicate, serious, goofy, and heroic — more for its creative empathy than the band members' egos. But by the aughts they'd lost their drummer, and their music suggested they'd lost their religion too (so to speak). Now, they've made an entire album about getting it back.