Conrad Balliet reads Marian Schwilk-Thomas' poem, "Starlings"

TransCanada announced today that it would reroute its planed Keystone XL Pipeline, which would carry crude oil from Canada to Texas. The company said the new route woud avoid the Sandhills area of Nebraska, which is home to an important aquifer.

The AP reports:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has sent a friendly letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the AFP, Reuters and Israeli news outlets are reporting.

Our friends over at Food & Think, a Smithsonian blog, had a nice little post not long ago about one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's best loved paintings of a Paris café. "Luncheon of the Boating Party" is a jolly scene of men and women flirting and chatting over lunch. But if you look closely, it's hard to tell just what they're eating.

Phillips Collection Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone tells Food & Think:

Transcript

GUY RAZ, host: From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.

MELISSA BLOCK: And I'm Melissa Block. Today, the Players' Union for the National Basketball Association decided to disband and take its fight with NBA owners to the courts. The move could jeopardize the entire 2011 to '12 NBA season. The union plans to argue that the NBA lockout of players is illegal and will sue the owners under antitrust laws.

The Supreme Court said Monday it will review President Obama's health care overhaul, setting up an election year legal showdown.

In an apparent effort to be as comprehensive as possible, the court certified four questions for review. First, and most important: Did Congress exceed its constitutional authority in requiring virtually all Americans to have basic health care coverage?

The MS-13 gang got its start among immigrants from El Salvador in the 1980s. Since then, the gang has built operations in 42 states, mostly out West and in the Northeastern United States, where members typically deal in drugs and weapons.

But in Fairfax County, Va., one of the wealthiest places in the country, authorities have brought five cases in the past year that focus on gang members who have pushed women, sometimes very young women, into prostitution.

Last night the first-ever Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award was given to Barbara Kingsolver as part of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The former Lifetime Achievement Award was renamed in honor of the late Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States diplomat who was instrumental in negotiating the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. Holbrooke passed away in December 2010 while serving as special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan under President Obama.

For the first time, the Department of Transportation has fined an airline for keeping passengers cooped up in a plane while it lounges on the tarmac for hours. Today, DOT announced it fined American Eagle, a regional affiliate of American Airlines, $900,000 for 15 planes that sat on a Chicago O'Hare International Airport runway for more than three hours.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Over the past 30 years, prolific American author Don DeLillo has written more than a dozen novels, including White Noise, Falling Man, Libra and Underworld. But his latest, The Angel Esmeralda, is a departure from his expansive novels. It is a collection of short stories — nine brief flashes, which, like DeLillo's longer works, center on characters who feel out of sync with the worlds around them.