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You'll never suffer from writer's block as long as you've got a copy of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Prolific pulp novelist William Wallace Cook turned his fiction production methods into a wacky manual for aspiring writers. Originally published in 1928, it has just been reissued.

On the lighter side this week, there's a comic Western about two gun-slinging brothers and a memoir by TV's 89-year-old naughty girl, Betty White. Plus a father's wry look at the college admissions game, and a sports writer's tale of the cutthroat world of youth basketball.

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander writes about his own faith — and what it means to be Jewish — in stories that explore religious tension, Israeli-American relations and the Holocaust.

A consortium of consumer and environmental groups says there's too much lead in lipstick. The Food and Drug Administration says there's nothing to worry about.

This month, the bees from 1.6 million hives — many of them trucked in commercially from as far away as North Dakota — will pollinate California's almond orchards. Then beekeepers will pack up their colonies and drive them back to the northern Plains, where bees can graze for the summer. But scientists says that floral feast in the Great Plains is shrinking because of high corn prices.

Melissa Block speaks with Eric Heginbotham — senior political scientist at RAND — about China's military capability today, how it's developed over time and what the Chinese make of ramped-up attention from the US.

The U.S. military is at a turning point. It has just pulled out of Iraq, it is starting to wind down its effort in Afghanistan, it's shifting its focus to Asia, and the Pentagon budget for next year will shrink after a decade of huge increases. The defense secretary and the head of the Joint Chiefs spoke about the changes to Congress.

Ji Xinping, the heir apparent in Chinese government, is visiting old friends in Muscatine, Iowa, this week. The last time he stopped by was in 1985 as part of an agricultural trade mission. Mayor DeWayne Hopkins is looking forward to making him the only person to receive two keys to the city.

Two hundred small California charities have been bilked by another nonprofit, International Humanities Center, to whom they outsourced accounting and the processing of donations. Many groups are now unable to make payroll or continue their work.

Congress only has two weeks before inaction would result in a tax hike for 160 million Americans. The payroll tax cut extension passed in late December is set to expire at the end of the month.