NPR News

Blue states and red states are moving further apart.

That's one of the clear lessons from the annual "State of the States" report, which the Pew Center on the States is rolling out in a string of assessments this week.

A decade after news of the sex abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic Church broke, reports of abuse continue to emerge. The number of priests in the U.S. is in rapid decline, raising questions about who still chooses the job and how the work has changed after high-profile abuse scandals.

Nearly two years after the crisis in Syria began, the humanitarian situation in the country remains dire. Shinjiro Murata, head of the Doctors Without Borders mission in northern Syria and NPR foreign correspondent Deborah Amos, discuss the efforts to address growing medical needs.

NPR's Neal Conan reads from listener comments on previous show topics, including reaction to the movie Django Unchained, Florida's python problem and rereading high school classics.

Choosing hospice care is never an easy decision. It's an admission that the end is near, that there will be no cure.

But even after a family has opted for this end-of-life care, some still face an unexpected hurdle: Twelve percent of hospices nationwide refuse to accept patients who don't have a caregiver at home to look after them, according to a recent survey of nearly 600 hospice providers published in Health Affairs.

Update at 1:25 p.m. ET: By a vote of 285-144, the House just passed a Republican plan that postpones for three months the federal government's next bump up against the so-called debt ceiling.

As we said earlier, the measure would head off another big battle over raising the government's borrowing authority — such as the one in 2011 that almost led to a government shutdown.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says union membership continues to decline in the United States.

In 2012, American Union membership rate dropped to 11.3 percent from 11.8 percent in 2011. As The Washington Post reports, that's the lowest level since the 1930s.