Mary Louise Kelly used to cover the national security beat for NPR, but lately she's turned her attention to teaching and writing fiction. Her new novel, Anonymous Sources, follows rookie journalist Alexandra James as she investigates a shady banana shipment and a clandestine nuclear plot. The tale is fiction, but it draws on Kelly's own experiences reporting on the spy beat, including things she couldn't say when she was a journalist.

The furor over recently exposed government surveillance programs has posed an abundance of political challenges for both President Obama and Congress. Relatively unmentioned in all of this, however, is the role of the courts — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and how its role has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The U.S. spends more than $7 billion a year preparing classroom teachers, but teachers are not coming out of the nation's colleges of education ready, according to a study released Tuesday by U.S.News & World Report and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The study says most schools of education are in disarray.

There was optimism in the '90s that the end of the Cold War also meant the end of the threat of nuclear war and the fear of threats to America like the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, North Korea's nuclear ambitions of late bring back to mind just how dangerous a nuclear war could be, and makes the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis relevant even today. We'll be joined by a physicist and nuclear policy expert who will talk about our nuclear dangers today, how they compare with those from past decades and how we can protect ourselves, when Charlotte Talks.

Mecklenburg County Commissioners are scheduled to pass a new budget Tuesday. A group of parents has spent the past year pushing for one line in that budget to increase – funding for school nurses.

President Obama will be advised to veto a multi-year farm bill slated to be discussed in the House this week, the White House says. The administration issued a statement on the legislation Monday afternoon, criticizing it for cutting food programs for the poor.

At more than 575 pages, the bipartisan bill was introduced by Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Agriculture.