This is just a guess, but the single part of America's food system that inspires the most horrified fascination is probably the slaughterhouse. One reason may be that these factories that turn cattle, hogs and chickens into packaged meat are generally off-limits to the public and photographers.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera called it a "comedy of errors."

Indeed.

Imagine you're a professor in Canada, 28-years removed from Italy and one day you get a call: While forming its new government, Italy wants you to be its junior agriculture minister.

Despite boasting one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, San Jose, Calif., is running large and growing deficits. And next Tuesday, the city council is expected to declare a state of "fiscal emergency." The main reason is pensions and other benefits for retired city workers, such as health insurance.

San Jose's problems are severe, but hardly unique. In recent years, pension costs have become a central concern both in the U.S. and in Europe.

The songs we turn to during winter months are as distinct from the light, joyous anthems of summer as tank tops and shorts are from the mittens and scarves we pull out of the closet when a chill creeps into the air. This season, we'll ask musicians, writers and listeners to tell us about a song that evokes winter for them, along with a memory or story that goes with it.

Sometimes a picture does indeed tell the story.

In this case, a photo taken today when Hillary Rodham Clinton had a private dinner in Myanmar with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi speaks volumes about the purpose and meaning of the first visit to the country by an American secretary of state in more than five decades.

When the iconic American punk band Fugazi started playing back in 1987, it started taping, too.

"Our friend Joey Picuri, who was a local sound man — or a fellow who helped do sound for bands — he recorded the shows," Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye tells NPR's Guy Raz. "He just gave us tapes of our first show, and he gave us a tape of our second show."

The Detroit dream-pop duo Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. released its Horse Power EP in July 2010, and followed it with a set of remixes, including one of Junip's "In Every Direction." Easily capturing the sunny warmth of surf pop, the EP takes traditional pop structures and fills them with lush melodies that melt together with upbeat guitar maneuvers and dashes of electronic soundplay.

In a highly anticipated speech Thursday night, French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid the groundwork for tighter French-German cooperation.

He made an ambitious call for a re-write of European treaties, but his speech — billed as his last-ditch plan to save the euro — offered no concrete emergency measures to contain Europe's debt crisis.