This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
In Libya, vote counting continues after a largely peaceful vote over the weekend to elect the country's national assembly. This is the first election in decades. Few Libyans are old enough to remember the parliamentary elections under the king, who ruled before Moammar Gadhafi.
Thousands of coal miners continued to suffer and die from black lung during the 40 years that tough new limits on exposure to coal dust were supposed to provide protection.
The latest fundraising numbers are in for the two presidential campaigns, and the amounts are eye-popping. President Obama and the Democratic Party raised $71 million, which is an enormous haul. But it was dwarfed by Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $106 million in the month of June.
On Florida's northeast coast, trams filled with families and school groups run constantly in St. Augustine, hitting nearly all of the old city's historic sites.
But down a side street lies an important piece of St. Augustine's history most visitors don't see, because it's only open one day a month.
"This is Tolomato Cemetery. It was formerly the parish cemetery for what is now the cathedral parish," says Elizabeth Gessner, who heads the cemetery's preservation association.
Palestinians collect their belongings after Israeli bulldozers raze their house in an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem on Feb. 9.
Credit Ahmad Gharabli / AFP/Getty Images
Palestinian Motasem Farrah (center) and a friend tear down Farrah's home in an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem, March 12. Israel often tells Palestinians who build without permits that they must tear down the house themselves or they will be charged by Israel for the cost of knocking it down.
Credit Ahmad Gharabli / AFP/Getty Images
Israeli soldiers keep watch as a bulldozer demolishes a house belonging to a Palestinian resident in east Jerusalem on Feb. 13. Israel said the home was built without a permit.
Israel has dramatically increased its demolitions of unauthorized Palestinian homes in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, according to a recent United Nations report.
Last year, 1,100 Palestinians — more than half of them children — were displaced, an 80 percent increase from the previous year. And demolitions this year continue at a high rate.
For Sami Idriss, the Israeli bulldozers came while the 26-year-old Palestinian was at work.
Jennifer Larr (center) is seen here in Rwanda at the Gashora Girls Academy, where she was a teacher in 2011. Larr is part of a new generation of young adults focusing on travel, studying abroad and global experiences.
Jennifer Larr has the itch to go abroad. She's 26 years old and has already spent a year studying in France and two years in Rwanda with the Peace Corps, and she is headed to Uganda this summer for an internship. She's also a graduate student, studying international relations at UCLA.
Larr is part of a growing number of 20- and early 30-somethings whose American dream has moved beyond suburban homes and traditional nuclear families, and it's one that now goes even beyond U.S. borders.
A sign on undeveloped land welcomes visitors to "New Toshka City." Toshka was to be a new settlement along the Upper Nile Valley, complete with enough jobs and infrastructure to support the relocation of 20 million Egyptians from polluted and over-crowded cities.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
An empty water canal at Sheikh Zayed, near Toshka. Fifteen years after the project's inception, there are just 21,000 hectares of farmland, no schools or hospitals have been built, and the food produced is mainly for export to benefit private landholders.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Fishing boat captain Adel Mohamed Hussein (right), at Sheikh Zayed Canal, is one of the few Egyptians who has benefited from the Toshka project.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Engineer Mamduh Diab, chief of agricultural affairs for the South Valley Company, stands among grapevines on the company's land.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Wheat grows on South Valley Company's land.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Laborers pull weeds from watermelon fields on South Valley Company land in Toshka.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Water pumped from Lake Nasser cascades down an irrigation canal to crops on South Valley Company land.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Yasmine, 16, prunes green grapes at Saudi-owned KADCO.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
An industrial-sized sprinkler waters alfalfa plants at Saudi-owned Kingdom Agricultural Development Company (KADCO).
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Khaled Mohamed tills the soil after a wheat harvest at KADCO.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Critics say Egypt lacks the means to transport large quantities of wheat and other produce from Toshka to the rest of the country.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
A sign on undeveloped land welcomes visitors to "New Toshka City." Toshka was to be a new settlement along the Upper Nile Valley, complete with enough jobs and infrastructure to support the relocation of 20 million Egyptians from polluted and overcrowded cities.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Mohamed Abdul Fattah is secretary-general for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party in Aswan, Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is adamantly opposed to Toshka and other projects that it links to the excesses of former President Hosni Mubarak.
Credit Holly Pickett / Redux
Ibrahim Dahrouk, a crop manager at Saudi-owned Kingdom Agricultural Development Company in Toshka, says the farm provides hundreds of jobs to local residents, including women. The wages of $6 to $9 a day are considered good for the region.
In the middle of southern Egypt's windy desert, wheat fields stretch as far as the eye can see on a 24,000-acre farm. It's part of a grandiose project called Toshka that was dreamed up 15 years ago by the government of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's authoritarian leader who ruled the country for three decades before being ousted last year.
Fireworks light the night sky above the National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, during the closing ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The stadium is largely empty these days.
Credit Louisa Lim / NPR
The Bird's Nest, with its cavernous arches, has fewer and fewer visitors these days. Few events can fill a stadium built to seat 91,000.
Credit Louisa Lim / NPR
One money-making scheme has been to lease out Segways to tourists: $20 for a 15-minute ride around the Olympic track at the Bird's Nest.
Credit Liu Jin / AFP/Getty Images
A woman goes snow-tubing in January 2010 inside the Bird's Nest, which was transformed temporarily into a winter theme park.
Credit David Gray / Reuters /Landov
The National Aquatics Center, also known as the "Water Cube," was the Olympics venue for swimming events.
Credit Louisa Lim / NPR
The Water Cube has found an Olympic afterlife, with some of the building converted to a water park.
As the opening date for the London Olympics nears, Beijing's acclaimed Olympic venues are saddled with high maintenance costs and are struggling to get by. And the most famous, the Bird's Nest stadium, has been repudiated by its own creator, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Even the state-run government mouthpiece, the China Daily, worries that Beijing's iconic structures risk becoming "white elephants."
In Senate races, Democrats are fighting to preserve their thin majority. Their party campaign committee wants the Federal Election Commission to crack down on some of the Republicans' wealthiest allies — outside money groups that are using anonymous contributions to finance a multimillion-dollar onslaught of attack ads.
Comments under today's piece on a very well-travelled Volvo, reveal an abundance of affection for the make. "I'll be here all week" recalls with fondness all the "quirky features" of his white 1968 P1800S, including "rear view mirror ... mounted on the center of the dashboard, vertical temp gauges between the speedo and tach, the funky aircraft style levers for the vents and fan."
Simon Fabich (center) is CEO and co-founder of the Berlin-based online shopping startup Monoqi. Artsy and relatively inexpensive, Berlin is an up-and-coming city for European tech startups.
Credit Courtesy of Sankt Oberholz
Sankt Oberholtz cafe is a magnet for Berlin's startup community. Day and night, people hold meetings and work on laptops.
California's Silicon Valley remains by far the dominant arena for high-tech startups and venture capitalists looking to back innovative projects.
But Europe is starting to make its mark on the startup scene. London, Paris and Berlin are starting to hold their own as more and more European startups look to compete on the global stage and attract investors.
