News from NPR

The nation's housing crisis has touched countless people. Increasingly, the well-off are among them.

Housing counselors around the country say they are seeing more people struggling to keep their million-dollar homes. It's a twist on a familiar story of hardship — but one that involves some very big numbers.

Moving Up, Falling Down

The governing board of the University of Virginia decided to reinstate the president it had ousted earlier this month.

The AP reports 15-member board voted unanimously to give Teresa Sullivan her job back, after it faced scathing criticism for its original decision, which students and faculty thought had been reached in a secretive manner.

"I want to partner with you in bringing about what's best for the university," Sullivan said after the vote.

The AP adds:

The swine flu pandemic that raced around the world in 2009 seems like ancient history now.

One reason it's easy to forget is that the H1N1 strain of flu virus turned out to be milder than was originally feared. Still, there's no doubt the flu killed a lot of people around the world. But how many?

The answer isn't so easy to come up with. Only a small fraction of cases were actually confirmed with lab tests, even in highly developed countries like the U.S.

An Egyptian court decided today that the military should not have continued power to arrest civilians.

Reuters reports:

"The Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents of military rule were furious when the army-backed interim government empowered soldiers to arrest civilians, effectively reinstating Hosni Mubarak's hated state of emergency, which lapsed on May 31.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

Over the past couple of weeks we've seen some important changes on immigration - the president announced a new plan to defer deportation for some young undocumented immigrants, and yesterday the Supreme Court decision on Arizona's controversial immigration law. Much of writer Luis Alberto Urrea's career has focused on life along the U.S.-Mexican border and on the lives of the people who cross it. Now those stories are beginning to change a bit.

When Colum McCann came to the U.S. from Ireland in the early 1980s, he set out on a cross-country bicycle trip to get to know his new country and its stories. He's spent the years since telling those tales through prose. With his project, Story Swap, he's helping diverse communities better understand each other by sharing their own stories.

The uprising in Syria began in the spring of 2011 when rebellious teenagers scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a wall in the southern city of Daraa.

The protest against their arrest, and the regime's brutal response, sparked the wider revolt. Throughout the unrest, the country's younger generation has been at the forefront of efforts to end the repressive regime of President Bashar Assad.

At a cafe in the heart of Damascus recently, a young man flips open his cellphone to show pictures of people killed in the uprising.

"Actually, they are my friends," he says.