A 10-mile section of California's Interstate 405 closed Friday night for construction. Host Scott Simon talks with KCRW traffic reporter Kajon Cermak about the shutdown and the impact on the surrounding community.

The week in Washington began and ended with presidential news conferences. In between, there were daily meetings between President Obama and leaders of Congress over what to do about the federal deficit as the deadline nears for raising the federal debt limit.

But despite some dire warnings about defaulting on some of that debt, the government seems no closer to an agreement that could solve either its short- or long-term budget woes.

A tall ship from Chile, the Esmeralda, is touring the West Coast of the United States this month. It's intended as a peaceful naval ambassador, but it's stirring dark feelings about Chile's history. The ship pulled into port in San Diego this week.

The Esmeralda is the second-longest and second-tallest in the world, with a pristine white hull, brass portholes and four masts topped with Chilean flags. Onboard, a sailor sells Chilean wine.

"[It] kind of reminds me of the Titanic," tourist Alex Rios says. "That old feeling to it, you know."

Each summer thousands of salmon can be seen shooting upstream at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon and into Washington state. Sea lions congregate there. They think of the salmon migration as a buffet.

Sea lions are protected species, but salmon are endangered. Wildlife regulators don't want sea lions to gorge themselves on endangered salmon. For a time, the National Marine Fisheries Service was authorized to shoot any sea lion with a salmon dangling from its mouth. A bill has recently been introduced in Congress to allow the killing to start again.

When Command Sgt. Maj. Jeff Mellinger announced he was retiring from active duty, the U.S. Army thought it had lost its last Vietnam-era draftee.

It turns out that there were more — they were just hard to find, because the soldiers' service records began before the Army started using its current computer system.

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch says new emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request prove that "contrary to its repeated denials" the Obama administration "attempted to exclude the Fox News Channel (FNC) from a round of interviews with Treasury's 'Executive Pay Czar' Kenneth Feinberg."

More than 18 million allegations of copyright infringement have landed on the doorstep of Hadopi, the French agency charged with administering the country's "three strikes" law.

The news, as reported by Ars Technica, is that a mere 470,000 "first strike" e-mails have been sent to Internet users accused of breaking copyright law through file sharing.

Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton has resigned. He is the latest casualty of the phone hacking and police bribe scandal that has engulfed parent company News Corp. For more, Michele Norris talks to NPR's David Folkenflik.

The latest domino in the News Corp. phone hacking scandal has fallen on this side of the pond: Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones and Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, told the paper that he is resigning. The AP has confirmed the news with Dow Jones.

Hinton was the head of News International, which oversaw the News Of World, when the phone hacking allegations arose.

"We are a rock band, believe it or not," John Stanier says.

The drummer of the New York trio Battles maintains that even though its music is densely layered, digitally processed and often lacking traditional song structure, the tools behind it are nothing special.