President Obama said Tuesday that it is "more vital than ever" for Israel and the Palestinians to restart peace talks, pushing for an outcome that looks more distant than ever as he plunges into an intense period of Middle East diplomacy.

Addressing reporters after a White House meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II, Obama said the U.S. would continue to push for "an equitable and just solution to a problem that has been nagging the region for many, many years."

ABC isn't doing its actual upfront presentations until 4:00 p.m. Eastern (boo!), so we're on a little different schedule than we were with NBC and Fox yesterday. We'll just dive into the long list of clips (where they're available) and the materials the network is releasing to go along with them, and you can see what you think. Please do remember: these are early looks. They're just clips. Upfronts week is just a peek at what's out there, and we won't know until finished pilots arrive how any of this stuff is going to play in the long run. With that said: Onward.

All along the swollen Mississippi River, hundreds of thousands of lives depend on a small army of engineers, deputies and even prison inmates keeping round-the-clock watch at the many flood walls and earthen levees holding the water back.

They are looking for any droplets that seep through the barriers and any cracks that threaten to turn small leaks into big problems. The work is hot and sometimes tedious, but without it, the flooding that has caused weeks of misery from Illinois to the Mississippi Delta could get much worse.

For some time now, the Transportation Security Administration has said its full-body X-ray scanners are safe. But a group of scientists with expertise in imaging and cancer say the evidence provided by the maker and the government is unconvincing. The scientists sent a letter to John Holdren, the White House's science adviser, that also questions why the machines haven't been made available for independent analysis.

ProPublica reports:

Baseball fans are mourning a legend Tuesday — Minnesota Twins Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew has died, ending his battle with esophageal cancer. Killebrew was a top power hitter in the 1960s. And he helped the fledgling Twins put down roots in a place that until 1961 had never had a major-league team.

Back in the summer of 1954, word had spread that a 17-year-old in a semipro league was hitting baseballs out of the park in tiny Payette, Idaho. Ossie Bluege, a scout for the old Washington Senators, came to check it out. But it was pouring rain.

Seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas sits a land parcel in the middle of the desert. Called Area 51, the parcel is just outside of the abandoned Nevada Test and Training Range, where more than 100 atmospheric bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s. Officially, the U.S. government has never acknowledged the existence of Area 51. Unofficially, it has become a place associated with conspiracy theories, alien landings and tiny spaceships.

Character — what Webster's defines as "the complex of mental and ethical traits often individualizing a person" — has long been almost universally agreed to be a stable fixture. People believe that it is formed at an early age through learning and experience, and that it becomes internalized and solidified into a deep-seated disposition that guides their actions over the course of their lives. In fact, the word character itself comes from an ancient Greek term referring to the marks impressed indelibly upon coins to tell them apart.

The latest student numbers at Eastern Kentucky come with an interesting twist. Since 2006, summer school enrollment at EKU has increased by more than 4 percent. At the same time, there are fewer faces on campus.  School officials cite the growing popularity of online classes.  President Doug Whitlock says Eastern is competing with  institutions like Phoenix University to provide quality online classes.

Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, the duo behind the quirky, hip-hop and pop group Cibo Matto, announced today that they're getting back together for a new album and tour. The first leg of the tour, which they're calling "Yeah Basically Cibo Matto," launches June 21 in Seattle, Wash., with later dates on the east coast in July. Hatori and Honda also say they're working on a batch of new songs for an as yet untitled album, due out early next year. It'll be the band's first release since the 1999 album Stereo * Type A.

Pakistan says its intelligence agency has arrested Muhammed Ali Qasim Yaqub, a senior al-Qaida official. The statement says he's from Yemen and has been working closely with al-Qaida militants along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His alias is reported to be Abu Sohaib al Makki and the BBC reports an individual with that name was once listed by a jihadist website as leader of a group of Arab Afghans in Afghanistan.