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From nacho cheese to watermelons to macaroni, drug smugglers sometimes turn to food to get their illicit cargo across the U.S. border.

The case of a former FBI agent who disappeared from an Iranian resort island nearly five years ago has come back into the headlines. His family has decided to tell the media, for the first time, about some developments in the case that occurred last year — including a video of the former agent, Robert Levinson, who is shown asking the government to work for his release. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston talks to Lynn Neary about the questions surrounding the case and the family's efforts to bring Levinson home.

When people get sick from eating raw cookie dough, raw eggs are usually to blame. But a 2009 outbreak of E. coli that sickened people who ate ready-to-bake Nestle Toll House cookie dough may have been caused by a surprising culprit: the flour.

Congress isn't doing much — with the major exception of cybersecurity. Citing rare bipartisan agreement and a common sense of purpose, members of both parties are advancing bills designed to protect American businesses and government agencies from hackers and intellectual property pirates. The proposed laws allow the government to block Americans' access to certain overseas websites, as well as make it legal for Internet service providers to share with the government information about emails and other traffic traveling their networks, in the interest of detecting and stopping cyberattacks. Sponsors of the bills say they're necessary to protect the U.S. from hacker disaster. But skeptics say the fears are overblown, and the legislation could take the U.S. closer to having its own version of the Great Firewall of China.

As information becomes more and more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create "hackerspaces," where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools as well as expertise.

It's tempting to dismiss Siberia's cold temperatures as a Russian cliché. NPR Correspondent David Greene learns that Siberia is serious when it comes to cold.

The Artist of Disappearance contains three novellas set in modern India. Anita Desai's somber stories read like three symphonic movements in a minor key. Desai talks with NPR's Scott Simon about her writing, and about working with her daughter, novelist Kiran Desai.

That's the question scholar Christopher Phillips is asking in theoretical discussions at schools and cafes across the country. You can add your own amendment to the discussion.

The United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa, was scheduled to wrap up Friday, but the negotiations have gone into overtime. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Richard Harris about what is still under discussion.

The nation's oldest black church reopens to the public this week after a $9-million restoration fueled in part by federal stimulus funds, and completed in painstaking detail despite the recession. Shannon Mullen tours Boston's African Meeting House with the woman who led the project.