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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just completed a week-long tour of Central Asia, which is playing an increasingly important role as the U.S. begins its drawdown in nearby Afghanistan. NPR's Jackie Northam has been traveling with Clinton and reports from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the last stop on the tour.

After 36 years, the annual Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention will go silent. Radio dramas don't have the audiences they once had, losing out to other distractions. Listeners can still tap into the rich catalogue of The Lone Ranger, Sherlock Holmes and many others via the Internet, though, so the work lives on. Scott Gurian spent time with the group on their last day.

"Madam, I'm Adam!" is child's play. Master palindromist Barry Duncan creates works of art that are paragraphs long and read the same forward and backward. The secret, he says, is finding the middle, "the letter on which the palindrome is going to pivot and turn."

Did you really think the apples you lifted out of a wooden crate at a grocery store came from a local farm? Think again. As Martin Lindstrom explains in his new book, Brandwashed, companies use many tricks to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy.

For most of the past few decades, congressional appropriators decided how the federal budget would be spent. but since the supercommittee was formed in August to find federal deficit cuts, the House and Senate appropriations committees have seen their responsibilities wane.

President Obama may have lost popularity among the community, but Hispanic voters looking for alternatives find problems with the Republican presidential slate as well — primarily with the rhetoric on immigration. GOP activists want to focus instead on the nation's struggling economy.

The annual "open enrollment" period for joining or changing prescription drug or private health plans is already under way. But the new dates are only one of several changes Medicare enrollees need to be aware of this year.

Alabama farmers are facing a labor crisis because of the state's new immigration law. So far, piecemeal efforts to match the unemployed or work release inmates to farm jobs are not panning out, and farmers are asking state lawmakers to do something before the spring planting season.

With his jobs package stalled in Congress, the president is going to announce some executive actions on mortgages and student loans that his advisers say could give the economy a lift. Republicans say "we can't wait" to defeat the president.

"An arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade ... has destroyed 95% of our revenue," the group says.