Group Therapy: Director Nanni Moretti (left) plays an agnostic psychiatrist summoned to the Vatican to counsel the pope — but he's advised not to ask about sensitive topics.
Heavy Lies The Head That Wears The Mitre: Michel Piccoli plays Melville, a cardinal unexpectedly elected pope who falls into an existential crisis before he can make his first papal address.
When the College of Cardinals gathers in the Vatican to choose a new church leader — formally the Bishop of Rome — it announces its selection with the Latin phrase "Habemus papam" ("We have a pope").
But suppose that, when a cardinal steps out onto a balcony in St. Peter's Square to utter those fateful words, the gentle soul in white sitting behind him, out of sight of the crowd, develops stage fright.
Rick Santorum speaks in Mars, Pa., on Tuesday, after Mitt Romney swept primaries in Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., and Maryland. In his speech, Santorum declared that it's "halftime" in the race for delegates and the GOP nomination.
In presidential nominating contests, the delegate count really matters — right up until the moment where it doesn't.
Unfortunately for Rick Santorum, that moment seems ever more imminent in this spring's Republican presidential race.
Mitt Romney's overwhelming wins this week in three states (including Wisconsin, where Santorum not too long ago had been leading in the polls) seem to have reconfirmed the sense that he has cleared all the major hurdles, and the rest is mere formality.
The Australian artist Gotye has been big in his home country for several years, but this winter, one particular song started an avalanche. "Somebody That I Used to Know," from the album Making Mirrors, has been a massive hit everywhere it's landed: the U.K., Germany, South Africa, Israel and now here in the U.S. It even inspired a YouTube cover that's become a runaway hit all its own.
In one Alaskan fishing village, crime is a laughing matter. It's not the crimes that have residents chuckling so much as how they're written about. The Unalaska crime report is full of eagle aggression and intimate encounters gone awry in the Aleutian Islands.
When Sgt. Jennifer Shockley heads out on patrol each day, she's got the police blotter on her mind. Her goal is to paint a detailed picture of the town's often ridiculous crimes.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a nonprofit based in Bangalore, partners with the government to make close to 1.3 million nutritious meals a day for schoolchildren throughout India.
One of Akshaya Patra's kitchens, just outside Bangalore, churns out an average of 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of lentil soup every school day. A kitchen overseer checks in on the food preparation in the early morning.
Rice falls down a chute (top left) and is packed into sterilized stainless steel vessels for delivery to schools. Over time, Akshaya Patra has learned what children like in different regions and has customized the kitchen according to the local palate.
A workman closes the door of an Akshaya Patra truck filled with fresh school lunches. Some 34 trucks head out from this kitchen every school day, providing lunch for nearly 150,000 children in the Bangalore area.
Many malnourished students have benefitted from the Akshaya Patra school lunch program. Bangalore middle school student K. Suchitra (center), 13, often comes to school with an empty stomach, but she knows she'll eat at school and can have as many servings as she wants.
The school lunch program customizes the menu in different parts of the country to local preferences. At this middle school in Bangalore, lunch often consists of a South Indian meal of rice and vegetable-lentil soup.
Akshaya Patra's daily meals keep dropout rates low and provide many parents, who cannot afford to feed their kids adequately, a reason to send them to school, the foundation's executive director, Shridhar Venkat, says.
At a government-run public middle school in Bangalore, the blackboard's cracking, the textbooks are tattered and most of the students are barefoot.
But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast.
On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says.
"When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13.
The Motion Picture Association of America and The Weinstein Co. have finally come to an agreement: After editing some profanities, the MPAA walked back its R-rating and Bully, a documentary about school bullying, will be released on April 13 with a PG-13 rating.
Two homeless men lie on mattresses in central Budapest in 2010. Hundreds of people live on the streets in the Hungarian capital; many refuse to stay in night shelters for fear of having their goods stolen.
Zoltan Szarka is a 27-year-old unemployed construction worker. He grew up in and out of foster care, ending up in Budapest's Danko street homeless shelter after losing his job and apartment.
Hungary's new anti-vagrancy laws — the toughest in Europe — now mean that homeless people sleeping on the street can face police fines or even the possibility of jail time.
Advocacy and human-rights groups are alarmed by the new efforts to crack down on and effectively criminalize homelessness, where the ranks of the needy have increased during the country's dire financial crisis.
Debt, joblessness and poverty are on the rise. The country's bonds have been downgraded to "junk" status, and the nation's currency, the forint, has dropped sharply against the euro.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish. The U.S. economy added 120,000 jobs last month according to the Labor Department. A few years ago, that would have had economists cheering. Today, they're using words like disappointing. Here's the problem, 120,000 is half as many jobs as the economy added in February and far fewer than most observers were expecting.
Guerrilla grafter Tara Hui grafts a fruiting pear branch onto an ornamental fruit tree in the San Francisco Bay Area. She doesn't want the location known because the grafting is illegal.
Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don't bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.
But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.
Rachel Syme is a frequent contributor to NPR Books. She is the former culture editor of The Daily Beast, and has written and edited for Elle,Radar, Page Six Magazine, Jane, theNew York Observer, The Millions, and GQ.
