Martin Kaste

Social media companies don't like people creating accounts under fake names. That's long been the case at Facebook, but over the summer, Google's new social network, Google Plus, surprised users by making a point of shutting down accounts with names that didn't look real.

Some online activists refer to Google's action as the "Nym wars" — short for "pseudonym wars." They see it as part of a worrying trend to force people to use their real names online.

Trying To Weed Out 'Trolls'

Author Joe McGinniss has been out this week promoting his new book about Sarah Palin — a book widely condemned for gossipy allegations by anonymous sources. The book is getting attention in part because Palin might be running for president.

This summer, Palin certainly looked like a presidential candidate as she rode through Iowa and New Hampshire in a red-white-and-blue bus, but as time ticks away the pressure is building on Palin to make her candidacy official.

Parts of the U.S. are seeing a drop-off in vaccination rates among young children. The falling rates don't necessarily track with poverty or other poor public health trends; in fact, a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report flagged the poorest rates of kindergarten vaccination in relatively prosperous states, like Washington and Oregon.

Late last month, while Washington, D.C., was focused on the debt ceiling, the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation that could have long-term consequences on Internet privacy.

The bill requires all Internet service providers to save their customers' IP addresses — or online identity numbers — for a year. The bill's stated purpose is to help police find child pornographers, but critics say that's just an excuse for another step toward Big Brother.

Seattle is the home of the U.S. Coast Guard's entire fleet of polar-class icebreakers.

Both of them.

Capt. George Pellissier commands both the Polar Sea and the Polar Star. He has spent much of his career on these ships, which were built in Seattle in the 1970s.

Get ready to hear the word supercommittee a lot this fall. It's the bipartisan committee created by the recent debt ceiling deal, which has until Thanksgiving to figure out how to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit.

One of the panel's co-chairman is Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington. With Congress in recess, Murray is back home, doing the obligatory factory tours. She was at Machinists, Inc. on Seattle's industrial south side on Wednesday.

Downtown Seattle is one earthquake away from a transportation catastrophe. The city's last big quake in 2001 seriously weakened an elevated highway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and engineers say another good shake could bring the double-decker structure down. Although the city has been living with the threat for 10 years, residents and politicians still can't agree what to do about it.

Seattle would seem the ideal setting for noir crime novels, what with the rain, the port, and the gloomy Scandinavians. But it's not as noir as it used to be. J.B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Book Shop, says downtown Seattle was once a lot seedier. "It was more about sailors on leave and tattoo joints," he says. "And the Donut Shop!"

The Donut Shop? Tres noir, says Dickey. "People who were here during the '70s remember the Donut Shop as being a very notorious place."

If Democrats and Republicans are unable to meet the Tuesday deadline for raising the debt ceiling, and the Treasury starts running short of money, the government will have to start making choices about which bills to pay. On the West Coast, as elsewhere in the country, taxpayers and state officials are considering what would happen if Social Security and medical benefits really stop.

The Pacific Northwest is suffering from too much of a good thing — electricity. It was a snowy winter and a wet spring, and there's lots of water behind the dams on the Columbia River, creating an oversupply of hydropower. As a result, the region's new wind farms are being ordered to throttle back — and they're not happy.

Google is trying once again to challenge Facebook's domination of the social networking business. Its main social networking site "Orkut" is very popular in Brazil, but in the rest of the world, Google trails Facebook.

But the company has a new attempt to catch up.

The new social network is called Google Plus, and you're not allowed to join it. At least, not yet.

"It's small but growing," says Bradley Horowitz, who oversees Google's communications products and social applications.

Conservation groups howled when Congress removed the Rocky Mountain gray wolf from the federal endangered species list. The "delisting" in most of the Northwest was attached to the budget deal in April between the White House and Congress.

The head of one environmental organization likened it to Congress throwing the wolf off Noah's Ark. But now that states like Idaho have full authority over the wolf's fate, they're eager to use it.

Rebels in Libya say they need more outside help to finish their 3-month-old rebellion against the government of Moammar Gadhafi. The nightly bombings by NATO are holding Gadhafi's forces at bay, but the rebels say they need heavier weaponry to push deeper into Gadhafi-controlled territory.

At a rebel boot camp on the edge of Benghazi that used to be a Libyan army base, the buildings still bear the scorch marks that resulted from the recent change of management.

As the revolt against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi drags into its fourth month, people in the rebel-controlled city of Benghazi are doing what they can to keep themselves motivated — and to keep the outside world, interested.

Sunday night, that meant a light show.

As dusk fell, people gathered in a plaza outside our hotel, holding up lights. They formed the outlines of a crescent and star — symbols of the rebel flag — while others spelled out the names of other Libyan cities; including that of Zintan, a town in the western mountains.

If the U.S. flag in this photo looks a little improvised, it's because it is. In Benghazi, Libya, anti-Gadhafi rebels are eager to fly the flags of countries friendly to their cause: Qatar, Italy, France and the United States. The trouble is, the American flag is not exactly an off-the-shelf consumer item in Libyan stores. So these are homemade. This one has only eleven stripes, but it still makes its point.

These flags are outside the Tibesty Hotel, which is the main crossroads for rebel officials, international envoys and aid groups (not to mention journalists).

The longer the conflict in Libya drags on, the more important oil becomes. The U.S. and Europe are squeezing Moammar Gadhafi by preventing him from selling oil, and at the same time, they've given the rebels the green light to export oil from their territory. But, as NPR's Martin Kaste reports from Libya, the rebels aren't getting the boost from oil they'd hoped for.

In Egypt, the army is guarding two Christian churches that were burned over the weekend in an outburst of violence between Coptic Christians and Muslims. The clashes in Cairo left at least a dozen dead and hundreds injured.

The Copts make up about 10 percent of the country's population, and many say they feel more vulnerable to attacks by Muslims since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February.

'A Sense Of Shock'

Relations between Egypt's Muslims and Christians have degenerated to a new low. Riots left 12 people dead and a church burned.

NPR has been profiling some of the Republicans who are considering a presidential run in 2012, to find out what first sparked their interest in politics. Read more of those profiles.

Whether Sarah Palin will enter the 2012 presidential race is the political junkie's favorite guessing game — and Palin hasn't said much to end the speculation.

The rebels in Libya are short of many things these days — weapons, money, even Cabinet ministers.

In the largely improvised scramble to set up an alternative to leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime, the rebels are leaning heavily on a small number of people. One of them is Ali Tarhouni, a University of Washington economics professor who abruptly left his family and students to join an uncertain Libyan revolution.

Tarhouni is not an easy man to sit down with these days; it would be an exaggeration to call him a one-man Cabinet, but sometimes it seems that way.

There are at least a dozen Republicans considering a run for the White House in 2012. Over the next two weeks, NPR will be profiling some of them to find out what first sparked their interest in politics.

You may not be ready yet, but in Iowa, they're already thinking about 2012.

In the tiny town of Fayette, the local Republican Party is holding a fundraising lunch. It's a small event — but not too small for Tim Pawlenty.

Two computer researchers say the new iPhone quietly keeps track of everywhere you take it — even if you turn off the GPS function. The iPhone 4 is constantly recording its location relative to nearby cell phone towers and WiFi signals. In other words, it's all the information needed for a detailed map of everywhere the phone's owner has been.