NPR News

It's another case of a beautiful idea colliding with some ugly facts.

The beautiful idea is the notion that clearing the blocked artery of a stroke patient with a device snaked right up to the blockage would salvage threatened brain cells and prevent a lot of disability.

The leader of a breakaway Amish sect convicted in a series of beard-cutting attacks across Ohio was sentenced to 15 years in prison, today.

Reuters reports:

Yeast can be pretty demanding little buggers, despite being unicellular microscopic organisms. Brewers know they must appease them to get the beer they want.

"It's yeast-strain dependent, it's environment, it's temperature, oxygen levels," says Matt Brophy, brewmaster of Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Md. "There's a lot of variables that you need to have a high level of control over."

The snow is going to pile up in parts of the Northeast and New England this weekend.

Which means millions of people are going to be:

-- Cooped up with their loved ones for a day or two.

-- And/or having fun in the snow.

Here's what we'd like:

Tell us how things go in your home or what amazing things you see or do during what's expected to be quite a storm.

Can you really be afraid of a storm with the same name as a cartoon fish with a bum fin?

Variations of that joke are all over social media, even as the storm called Nemo is dumping rain and snow throughout the Northeastern U.S. Albert Brooks, the voice of one clownfish in the movie Finding Nemo, quipped on Twitter: "They have named this new Nor'easter Nemo. I am not looking for it."

The Obama administration faces tricky political and legal questions on the subject of gay marriage. By the end of this month, the federal government is expected to file not just one but two briefs in a pair of same-sex marriage cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it is the Proposition 8 case from California that poses the thornier questions for the administration — questions so difficult that the president himself is expected to make the final decision on what arguments the Justice Department will make in the Supreme Court.

Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney, who has been the driving force behind the creation of a state-based exchange, got his answer from the feds: Sure can't.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rejected the plan Thursday, making Mississippi the only state to have its exchange blueprint nixed by the federal government.

The unlikely tale of "Loki Boy" came to a quick, uneventful resolution on Thursday.

Without incident, Boca Raton Police have evicted Andre "Loki Boy" Barbosa from the $2.5 million mansion he had been squatting in citing Florida law.