All Things Considered

If you've checked your retirement account lately or read the business headlines you probably know the stock market is riding high. The major U.S. stock indexes are in record territory. So what's lifting the market? Despite all the turmoil in Washington, is it still the Trump rally?

Since the U.S. election, the S&P 500 is up 16 percent and the Dow is up 18 percent, even though President Trump has yet to deliver on most of his pro-growth policies, including tax cuts and a big infrastructure plan.

Russian, American and French ballet dancers are gathering Thursday night for a bit of cultural diplomacy at New York City's Lincoln Center. They're celebrating the 50th anniversary of George Balanchine's masterpiece Jewels, considered the first full-length, nonnarrative ballet.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer, the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix says. McCain, 80, underwent surgery for a blood clot on July 14.

The hospital says testing revealed that a tumor "known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot."

"The Senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team. Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation," the hospital statement said.

Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads.

It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country. So if you're not a STEM major (science, technology, engineering, math), why even study algebra?

More than 20 years ago, children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak and his friend Arthur Yorinks collaborated on a book. But they were both busy with other projects at the time, and they never bothered to get it published. Sendak died in 2012, but that decades-old collaboration, Presto and Zesto in Limboland, has been rediscovered.

Londoners may feel hot this summer, but historian Rosemary Ashton says it's nothing compared to what the city endured in 1858. That was the year of "The Great Stink" — when the Thames River, hot and filled with sewage, made life miserable for the residents of the city.

"It was continuously hot for two to three months with temperatures up into the 90s quite often," Ashton says. "The hottest recorded day up to that point in history was the 16th of June, 1858, when the temperature reached 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit, in the shade."

It's the famine that not enough people have heard about.

An estimated 20 million people in four countries — Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen — are at risk of famine and starvation. And the word isn't getting out, says Justin Forsyth, a deputy executive director of UNICEF.

State legislatures and city halls are battling over who gets to set the minimum wage, and increasingly, the states are winning.

After dozens of city and county governments voted to raise their local minimum wage ordinances in the last several years, states have been responding by passing laws requiring cities to abide by statewide minimums. So far, 27 states have passed such laws.

Updated 11 p.m. ET

Defending President Trump on television is giving longtime conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow new prominence these days, but it's also reviving questions about a pair of charities he is involved with.

Sekulow, 61, who appeared on all five Sunday morning news shows over the weekend to address questions about Trump's ties to Russia, is a fixture in the Christian conservative movement, serving as chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice.

Micromanagement is routinely the top complaint people have about their bosses, and in today's good job market where workers have more options, that's a bigger problem for employers.

People might have their own definition of when a manager crosses into being too controlling, but most people would probably agree that Marjon Bell's former boss would fit.

The initial report of Sen. John McCain's surgery sounded simple: the removal of a blood clot above his left eye. But it was actually brain surgery, and the clot was almost 2 inches long.

The surgery prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to delay a vote on the health care bill until the 80-year-old McCain is well enough to return to the Senate.

Ten years ago this summer, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas staged a coup, ousted members of the rival Fatah party and took over the Gaza Strip.

It felt it took what it deserved: Hamas had won the majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, but Hamas and Fatah couldn't work out how to share power.

It led to gun battles. A 29-year-old man saw his cousin, a Fatah border guard in training, get shot in a fight with Hamas gunmen in one of the many battles that led to the coup. The man is afraid to be identified — even a decade later.

Iran says it has sentenced an American graduate student to 10 years in prison for spying for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The Princeton University student was in Iran doing research when he was arrested.

Xiyue Wang, 37, is pursuing a Ph.D. in Eurasian history, studying local government in predominantly Muslim regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Stephen Kotkin, Wang's advisor at Princeton, says Wang came well-prepared for an extremely ambitious thesis topic.