NPR News

High school students with heavy academic course loads often find the demands of homework colliding with the need for adequate sleep.

It looks like a bright new car wash, but it's a battery swapping station for electric cars in Israel. When a vehicle pulls up, it is slowly pulled through a conveyor. The spent battery is taken out and replaced with one that is fully charged. The entire process takes less than five minutes.

Fighting health care fraud in the U.S. can seem like an endless game of Whack-a-Mole. When government fraud squads crack down on one scheme, another pops up close by.

But the fraud squads that look for scams in the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs have some new weapons: tools and funding provided by the Affordable Care Act.

Medicare and Medicaid pay out some $750 billion each year to more than 1.5 million doctors, hospitals and medical suppliers. By many estimates, about $65 billion a year is lost to fraud.

From Congress to The Colbert Report, people are talking about the Midwestern drought and debating whether it makes sense to convert the country's shrinking corn supplies into ethanol to power our cars.

It's the latest installment of the long-running food vs. fuel battle.

The Department of Transportation said it has fined JetBlue $90,000, after it failed to inform passengers that they could leave a plane that sat at the gate for close to three hours.

DOT said that violated airline protection rules that went into effect in April 2010. The rule says that if passengers can get off the plane, they should be informed that they can do so and they should be given updates every 30 minutes.

A 21-year-old man whose hands were cuffed behind him in the back seat of a police car in Arkansas killed himself with a concealed handgun. That's according to an autopsy report released Monday into the death of Chavis Carter.

Carter died July 28 after being detained during a traffic stop. Police said he had an outstanding arrest warrant – later revealed to be drug-related. The driver and the passenger of the vehicle he was in were allowed to go.

Police searched Carter twice, but found no gun.

In a new study, The Pew Hispanic Center says that for the first time ever, Hispanics have become the largest minority group in the country's college campuses.

It's a report that marks many firsts for the ethnic group, which has been making great strides in education since 1972.

Among them: For the first time, there were more than 2 million latinos ages 18 to 24 enrolled. They reached a record 16.5 percent of all college enrollment. Hispanics make up a little more than a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in two-year colleges.

Today at All Things Considered, we continue a project we're calling NewsPoet. Each month, we bring in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end of the day, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's stories.