KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio

On Monday, we pointed to how the bipartisan Gang of Eight senators mostly avoided the term "illegal immigrant" in the language of their immigration reform plan.

It looks like President Obama did the same in his address on the issue the next day.

Reports from Timbuktu, Mali, on Wednesday indicate that most of the ancient manuscripts at a famed library may have been saved by residents before Islamist radicals had the chance to burn them.

"I can say that the vast majority of the collections appear from our reports not to have been destroyed, damaged or harmed in any way," Shamil Jeppie, an expert on the documents who teaches at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Reuters.

Quite a few families with expensive job-based health insurance may be ineligible for federal subsidies to help them buy cheaper coverage through new online insurance markets, under final rules released Wednesday by the Internal Revenue Service.

The two rules, published by the Treasury Department here and here, uphold earlier proposals outlining what is considered affordable, employer-sponsored coverage.

If you were looking for good news, here's a bit of it from South Africa: Patrice Motsepe, the country's first black billionaire, announced today that he will donate half his fortune in order to help the poor.

Reuters reports:

Israel's air force bombed a military facility in western Syria, the Syrian media said Wednesday, a development that could further complicate the already volatile conditions in the region.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's memoir is riding high, topping the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of sales.

My Beloved World, Sotomayor's account of her path from the tenements of the Bronx to the U.S. Supreme Court, is on track to outdistance even the best-selling books of other justices.

After a slew of multidisc sets devoted to key points in the career of Miles Davis, you'd think Columbia Records would have unearthed every speck of consequential music by now. But not quite.

This week, Columbia brings out Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 — a three-CD, one-DVD set devoted to the jazz maverick's "lost" quintet, his touring band from 1969.