NPR News

Thirty years ago this month, President Ronald Reagan took a bullet. His would-be assassin was John Hinckley Jr., who shot Reagan outside a Hilton in Washington, D.C., where the president had just spoken to an AFL-CIO lunch.

These events have been revisited often over the decades. But a new book by journalist Del Quentin Wilber seeks to redefine what we know about that day. The book is called Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. "Rawhide" was President Reagan's Secret Service code name.

While protests in the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi towns have been small compared with elsewhere in the Arab world, they have shaken the government of Nouri al-Maliki.

The Iraqi prime minister at first reacted like strongmen who have ruled Iraq in the past — with violence. But now he has softened his approach.

'Thirsty To Get Their Liberties'

By 2006, most of the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, had been gone for decades. The population was shrinking year after year. So the city launched a bold plan to redeem itself.

The plan: Quit trying to redeem itself.

Before 2006 and the bold plan, there were other ideas. Or, rather, multiple variations on the same idea.

Youngstown was going to replace the steel industry with a car factory. Or with a NASCAR racetrack, or a riverboat casino. Maybe a blimp factory out by the airport.

Christians and others in Egypt are marching Friday to a burned-out church in a village called Soul.

The torching of that church recently was part of a series of incidents that started with a romance and turned deadly. The story says a lot about Egypt in this uncertain time.

The Rev. Apollo Isaac says a Christian boy in the village outside Cairo was caught with a Muslim girl.

"The village culture forbids that kind of relationship to happen," he said.

Jane Eyre has been adapted dozens of times for movies and TV, and now the Gothic romance — one of the most English of stories — gets another retelling, this time from the young American director Cary Fukunaga.

In the Charlotte Bronte classic, the heroine is an orphan child who's never known kindness or affection until she arrives at Thornfield Hall, the estate of one Mr. Rochester, to work as a governess. There, Jane earns her employer's love, even as she begins to wonder about what seems to be a dark secret locked away in the attic.