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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning, I'm David Greene with congratulations to Laura Gramble. She graduated from Indiana University. To celebrate, mom ordered a cake - Indiana red and white with a photo of Laura's face. And one more request, a graduation cap made of icing. The baker evidently misheard and drew a cat, instead, on Laura's head; pink nose, white whiskers. The Gramble laughed it off and kept the cake from the bakery. Laura says they must have thought she was going to become a veterinarian.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

At a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, NATO officially handed over security of Afghanistan to the country's forces. It marked the first time the whole nation has been under Afghan control since the coalition invaded to oust the Taliban in 2001.

From Brussels, Teri Schultz filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Afghan forces are now leading security operations all over the country, as NATO-led forces gradually drop back into a supporting role in the remaining, most difficult, districts.

In a 45-minute interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, President Obama defended a government program that collects vast data about the electronic activity of Americans.

Obama rejected comparisons to the Bush-Cheney administration, saying his administration had implemented new safeguards to protect Americans' privacy.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

NPR's business news begins with Ben Bernanke's future.

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GREENE: OK, President Obama has given the clearest hint yet, that Ben Bernanke's time as chairman of the Federal Reserve may soon be up. In an interview that aired last night on PBS's "Charlie Rose" program, the president said this...

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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I think Ben Bernanke's done an outstanding job. Ben Bernanke's a little bit like Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI...

CHARLIE ROSE, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And today's last word in business is home detention.

The story comes to us from New Zealand, where authorities have been locking up some criminals in their homes rather than jail. House arrest is a lot cheaper, but it turns out that serving time at home is not as comfortable as you might think.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NASA introduced eight new astronauts yesterday. The space agency says they will lay the groundwork for missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

For the first time, half the new astronauts are women whose paths can be traced back to an event that happened 30 years ago today.

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Mary Louise Kelly used to cover the national security beat for NPR, but lately she's turned her attention to teaching and writing fiction. Her new novel, Anonymous Sources, follows rookie journalist Alexandra James as she investigates a shady banana shipment and a clandestine nuclear plot. The tale is fiction, but it draws on Kelly's own experiences reporting on the spy beat, including things she couldn't say when she was a journalist.

The furor over recently exposed government surveillance programs has posed an abundance of political challenges for both President Obama and Congress. Relatively unmentioned in all of this, however, is the role of the courts — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and how its role has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Many of the militia fighters who rose up and ousted former dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 have refused to lay down their arms and are still challenging the post-revolutionary government.

Yet the militias are facing a challenge of their own. They now come under verbal attack on one of Libya's newest radio stations, Radio Zone.

You've likely heard about the link between sugar consumption and Type 2 diabetes. But fresh research ties another dietary pattern to increased risk of the disease, too: eating too much red meat.

It's not your everyday real estate deal. A team of young entrepreneurs persuaded about 50 deep-pocketed investors to help them purchase a mountain. The deal just closed in April, and development on Utah's nearly 10,000-acre Powder Mountain is now underway.

"When we made those first phone calls, everybody's like, what? That being said, they know that we aren't kidding," says Jeff Rosenthal, co-founder of Summit, the group that led the purchase of the peak.

The U.S. spends more than $7 billion a year preparing classroom teachers, but teachers are not coming out of the nation's colleges of education ready, according to a study released Tuesday by U.S.News & World Report and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The study says most schools of education are in disarray.

President Obama will be advised to veto a multi-year farm bill slated to be discussed in the House this week, the White House says. The administration issued a statement on the legislation Monday afternoon, criticizing it for cutting food programs for the poor.

At more than 575 pages, the bipartisan bill was introduced by Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Agriculture.

Advocates of tougher voter registration standards have racked up wins in recent years — voter ID laws have taken hold across the nation, for example.

But those who believe that government should make voting as easy as possible just gained a significant victory with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision slapping down an Arizona law that required potential voters to prove their citizenship.

Editor's Note: Many of you noted that the price for a 10-pound bag of potatoes cited in the lawsuit seems ridiculously high. So we look into the matter further — you can read what we found in this follow-up post.

High-tech spying with satellites. Intimidation. Price fixing.

Paula Cooper, 43, left prison Monday morning, decades after she became America's youngest resident of death row at age 16. She had confessed to the 1985 murder of Bible studies teacher Ruth Pelke, 78, in Gary, Ind. Cooper's death sentence was commuted in 1989, after widespread appeals for mercy.

The human voice appears to trigger pleasure circuits in the brains of typical kids, but not children with autism, a Stanford University team reports. The finding could explain why many children with autism seem indifferent to spoken words.

Once upon a time, it was MySpace. (Huh. Turns out you can still link to it.) Then Facebook happened. And Twitter. And beyond those two dominant social-media platforms, there are a host of other, newer options for staying in touch and letting the digital universe get a look at your life. And for certain kinds of sharing, some of those other options make more sense to tech-savvy teens than the Big Two do.