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Proposals for chemical plants to use "inherently safer" design practices have been blocked by industry executives and their allies in Congress, despite deadly accidents and the risk of a potential terrorist attack that could harm an entire community or city.

The Justice Department is investigating the IRS's flagging of grass-roots conservative groups that sought nonprofit status. But some lawmakers want the debate extended to look at the well-financed activities of existing 501(c)(4) groups that spent millions in the 2012 elections.

Attorney General Eric Holder met reporters on Tuesday for the first time since reports surfaced of his Justice Department secretly seizing telephone logs from the homes and offices of Associated Press journalists. Holder said he himself had not been involved in that subpoena, but that it had been part of an investigation into a national security breach he called a threat to American lives. Audie Cornish talks to Carrie Johnson about the news conference and about her own interview with the attorney general.

Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah is about a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S. It's a story of relocation, far-flung love and life as an outsider. But reviewer Rosecrans Baldwin says that despite the author's talent, much of the storytelling feels flat.

The fourth volume in Robert Caro's monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson is The Passage of Power; it explores the period between 1958 and 1964 during which Johnson went from powerful Senate majority leader to powerless vice president to — suddenly — president of the United States.

How much hospitals around the country bill for 100 top procedures became public this week. Though insurance or Medicare may not actually pay the sticker price, some hospitals in Alaska are considering how they'll respond to more knowledgeable consumers.

Robert Siegel speaks with former top diplomat Thomas Pickering, who led the State Department's investigation into the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Pickering's report was criticized by witnesses at this week's congressional oversight hearing about the administration's handling of the attacks.

On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a massive spreadsheet containing a comparison of what hospitals across the country bill for the 100 most popular medical procedures. The document revealed wild disparities in pricing from hospital to hospital. Robert Siegel speaks with Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, who studies health care economics, about how the American hospital system evolved this way.

In Mission To Mars, astronaut Buzz Aldrin lays out his plans for getting Americans on Mars by 2035.

Lucas Mann's Class A combines baseball and sociology in this chronicle of a farm team from a fading Iowa factory town. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says Mann "uses the full tool kit of literary nonfiction" in a book that "encompasses nostalgia, hope and failure."