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Close to 16 million American households — nearly 14 percent of households — receive food stamps. Who are they and how would a cut affect them? Robert Siegel puts those questions to Stacy Dean from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The House today is voting on a plan pushed its Tea Party wing to slash $40 billion from food stamps. That's twice as much as the original House farm bill contemplated, and eight times as much as the Senate bill.

Melissa Block visits a historic section of Rio de Janeiro that pays homage to Afro-Brazilian history and the many slaves that came ashore there. She talks with Brazilian filmmaker Joel Zito Araujo about what it means to be black or mixed race in Brazil, and how skin color still dictates many aspects of life.

A young writer from the outskirts of Rio reads an excerpt from a story in which she lets her chemically straightened hair go natural. The story, "Mc K-Bela," was published in a literary magazine that features the work of writers from favelas and what Thayná calls "the people's neighborhoods."

This fall the conservative group Generation Opportunity will fan out across college campuses to urge young Americans to be wary of Obamacare. The effort kicked off this week with some controversial and purposely creepy Web ads.

The video game "Grand Theft Auto V" made more than $800 million the first day it was released. Audie Cornish talks to Peter Rubin, a senior editor at Wired, about the video game that's on track to out-earn the summer's biggest movie blockbusters in only a few days.

Audie Cornish talks to Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, about recent gestures by Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, that hint at a more moderate opening to the West. This is in contrast to Rouhani's predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was downright combative in his relations with the U.S. Rouhani has said that Iran has no military nuclear ambitions. Maloney wrote about the thaw in a recent essay

Iran's nuclear program and the civil war in Syria are both matters that figure prominently in U.S.-Israeli dealings. Robert Siegel talks about those issues with Israel's outgoing ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.

In his first remarks to reporters since taking office this month, FBI Director Jim Comey addressed security concerns following the Navy Yard shootings that left 13 people dead. He also talked about sequestration and leaks on government surveillance programs.

Evan Mandery's A Wild Justice is an account of the legal battles that led to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down capital punishment, then reversing course four years later. He says that today, prisoners who are sentenced to death have a 10 percent chance of actually being executed.