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When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Maurice Sendak's death was announced Tuesday just a few minutes before I was due at the residential foster home and school where I volunteer, teaching writing to abused teenagers. Sendak, the author and illustrator of "In the Night Kitchen," "Where the Wild Things Are"and other children's classics, once told NPR's Terry Gross that as a kid he thought that "adults seemed mostly dreadful. " I suspect the kids who find themselves in our foster care system would agree. I got to the school library before the class arrived, so the librarian and I had a moment to grieve about Sendak.

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

Reaching out to a 30,000-strong Christian crowd at Liberty University on Saturday, Mitt Romney delivered the school's commencement address, half congratulating the students, and half delivering campaign remarks. In the speech, Romney reiterated his opposition to gay marriage in the wake of President Obama's announcement of personal support for the issue, and made tacit references to his own Mormon faith. For Romney's full remarks, read below: For the graduates, this moment marks a clear ending and a clear beginning.

Lamar Odom's voice on the phone frequently was barely above a whisper. The pain clearly registered in words that flowed in stops and starts as he delivered a soliloquy about death and the effect it has had on his psyche. The Lakers forward spoke deliberately and expressed how emotional it has been for him to deal with two recent deaths. Odom attended a funeral in New York on July 13 for his 24-year-old cousin, who Odom said was murdered. The next day, Odom was a passenger in an SUV in Queens when it collided with a motorcycle.

Homeowners more deeply underwater on mortgages handled by five major U.S. banking firms are prime candidates for getting help from a $25-billion nationwide settlement over alleged foreclosure abuses. That's because the settlement gives the nation's largest mortgage servicers more incentives to help those who owe 40% to 75% more than the value of their homes, according to details of the settlement filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington. In a complex series of formulas designed to maximize the effect of the deal reached last month, banks will get more than six times the credit for reducing loans for severely underwater borrowers than they would for helping those who owe 5% to 15% more than the value of their homes.

Where's Harper Lee? Where's Margaret Mitchell? Where's Ayn Rand? Where's John Irving? Where's William Burroughs? No Raymond Chandler? OK, they included Faulkner, Nabokov, Steinbeck and Hemingway. But where's "Absalom, Absalom!"? Where's "Laughter in the Dark"? "Of Mice and Men" and "East of Eden"? "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls"?

In "PINEAPPLE EXPRESS," he plays a visibly unwashed hippie pot dealer on the run from mobsters: a THC-addled naif with a crinkly smile, a curtain of lank, dark hair and a heart of gold. But don't get the wrong impression about James Franco just because of his spot-on performance in the most anticipated stoner action-comedy of the year. He's no dope, even though he smokes plenty on-screen. To wit: Dude can almost carbon-date his experiences making certain movies by recalling what literature he was reading at the time.

Cigar-smoking Jack Lippert, 85 and the first editor of a skinny school news magazine that started in 1937, claims children haven't changed all that much over the last 50 years. They still like to know the latest about world and national happenings and inventions, according to Lippert, who turned out the first issue of Junior Scholastic. And he claims they still break up over the same kinds of jokes that tickled ribs of kids in grades 6 through 9 when he took charge.

In 1973, at age 58, John Henry Martin suffered a severe heart attack, the result of a viral infection he developed after cutting himself while clearing his property in Cold Springs Harbor, N.Y. He was dead on arrival at the hospital but physicians revived him. Then, as he recalls it, after 30 days in intensive care, he was sent home to die.

Want to learn more about meat? There are several recent good books. "Whole Beast Butchery" by Ryan Farr with Brigit Binns (Chronicle, $40). Do you really like cutting meat? I mean, really like it? This book, from the owner of San Francisco's 4505 Meats, is packed with very detailed, somewhat graphic photos of that being done. Granted, most of us will never be in a position to break down a whole short loin of beef, but there is a certain reassurance in knowing how it's done.

MINNEAPOLIS — As a reward for last week's no-hitter against the Minnesota Twins, Jered Weaver took part in one of his favorite shows Tuesday night, presenting the top-10 list on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman. " "I watch Dave before I go to bed when I'm home, so it's pretty cool to be on the show," said Weaver, who filmed the segment at Target Field on Tuesday afternoon. "As soon as you hear Dave in your earpiece, it's a little nerve-racking, but it was fun. I had a lot of time to rehearse.

The reality TV show "Bait Car" is supposed to catch car thieves in the act. Undercover cops park a rigged car on the side of the road, conspicuously leaving the keys inside, while a television crew waits nearby for an unsuspecting passerby to take the bait and steal the car. But in one recent sting filmed in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the lead detective on the case ended up getting busted instead....

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

WASHINGTON - On the first Friday of every month, at precisely 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics flicks a switch and the latest clue about the U.S. economy - the jobs report - gets transmitted all over the world. And then the frenzy begins. Politicians in Washington race for the mikes to proclaim that the economy is back, or maybe falling into an abyss. Investors from Brussels to Bangkok win and lose billions. And in American factories, offices and living rooms, you can almost hear a collective groan of dismay or sigh of relief.

Solar choices Re "Standing their sacred ground," April 24 The choice is not between disturbing Native American grave sites or building clean-energy projects; it's between continuing these huge, inefficient, enormously expensive and environmentally destructive boondoggles in the desert or using solar the way it should be used: with panels on every rooftop supplying that building's energy needs. The attempt to fit solar into the portfolio of big energy companies is a doomed strategy that may be good for Southern California Edison's bottom line but is bad for the desert environment and the species that live there.

The novel "The House of Dajani" by Israeli writer Alon Hilu, coming out in English this month, is set in the late 19th century in the coastal town of Jaffa and follows the encounter between Jews and Arabs in Ottoman Palestine. "The House of Dajani"

The future of books Re "Reading, no batteries required," Opinion, April 22 Patt Morrison's otherwise intelligent contributions to this newspaper trip up on the romantic notion that some technologies have spiritual value and others do not. Would Johannes Gutenberg's colleagues have pined away for the calligraphic works done by generations of monks? Electronic devices make reading, for some people at least, easier, in addition to offering it in a sleek package that can also claim to be accessible, tactile and beautiful.

Mind-reading robots? It's not as scary as it sounds. Researchers in Switzerland are developing a robot that can respond to human thoughts, and may one day help immobile people better interact with the external world. On Tuesday, scientists from Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne marked a milestone in this research, when they demonstrated that a partially paralyzed man could control the movements of a 1-foot-tall robot from more than 62 miles away, the Associated Press reported.