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For months, Spain's borrowing costs have been hovering near levels that sent Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bailouts. Spain will have to cough up nearly $40 billion to pay interest on its debts this year alone. That's many times what's been cut from things like health and education, which has Spaniards so upset. But the only alternative to raising money on markets is simply to stop spending it. Last week, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy signaled he may simply give up, and try to rely on tax revenue alone.

A mass tax revolt is under way in Ireland, and hundreds of thousands of people have resolved to break the law and refuse to pay a newly-introduced levy on households. The tax is $125 a year, but protesters say it could lead to larger property taxes in the future.

The sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a full grade.

The end of Round 8 of our Three-Minute Fiction contest has finally arrived. We've read through more than 6,000 stories, and now our judge for this round, novelist Luis Alberto Urrea, has picked his favorite.

From your late 40s through early 60s, you're supposed to squirrel away cash to cope with health care costs in your old age. But for millions of Americans, middle age also is the time when children are seeking help with higher-education bills, and elderly parents may be needing assistance with daily care.

Darkly funny, suspenseful and cunningly plotted, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will be published June 5. In this exclusive selection from the book's opening, we meet Nick and Amy, the seemingly perfect couple whose alternating chapters soon reveal them to be unreliable narrators — and spouses.

As the nation's roughly 78 million baby boomers move into old age, the need for long-term care will soar. But when it comes to long-term-care insurance, relatively few sign up. The policies can be expensive and some big insurance companies have stopped offering them.

For the second year in a row, Spanish teams Barcelona and Real Madrid paid the highest average salaries of any team in a major sport. But in India, cricketers fare better on average than NFL players.

Next week, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol finally arrives in paperback, along with Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton's memoir, journalist Fareed Zakaria's update on the post-American world, journalist Annie Jacobsen's look inside a top secret U.S. military base, and journalist Mitchell Zuckoff's true tale of the survivors in a WWII plane crash.

Indonesia has the largest share of the world's mangroves — coastal forests that have adapted to saltwater environments. They play important environmental and ecological roles. The challenge is convincing locals that they benefit more from protecting the trees rather than cutting them down.