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NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with campaign reporter Scott Detrow about former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro ending his campaign for president.

For years, a State Department employee allegedly received tens of thousands of dollars in gifts from Chinese intelligence operatives and failed to report the repeated contacts to U.S. officials.

We look back at the most popular posts on The Salt in 2013. From tips on handling raw chicken to Japanese latte art, the stories spanned the spectrum of the food world.

Press secretary Jay Carney responds to a new book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, saying disagreement is a welcome part of a "robust" policymaking process.

Do billionaires have too much influence in both major parties? Three top Republican presidential prospects — Sens. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — say no.

Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to fly into space, according to Blue Origin. The company, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its first human spaceflight in July.

California's top election official has announced that organizers of a campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have submitted enough valid signatures to place the question before voters later this year.

In Turkey, the government is touting its donations of medical supplies abroad even though coronavirus is taking a steep toll in Turkey and the economy is on the brink.

NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."

Research shows that sleep deprivation makes people emotionally volatile and temperamental — a fact that hasn't escaped the notice of some reality TV producers, who deny contestants sleep in an effort to kick up televised drama.