The International Olympic Committee is listening to pitches and accepting bids Monday and Tuesday for exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States.

American broadcast rights are the single biggest revenue generator for the IOC and the bidding underway in Lausanne, Switzerland, has ABC/ESPN and Fox challenging NBC for its lock on the 10 most recent summer and winter games.

The IOC is hoping for a deal totaling more than $4 billion for four Olympics, beginning with the Sochi, Russia, Winter Games in 2014. That would be the biggest TV rights deal ever.

Later this month, President Barack Obama is expected to announce just how many troops will be pulled out of Afghanistan starting in July. Whether the U.S. should still be engaged in Afghanistan has been hotly contested for years, but the budget crunch and the killing of Osama bin Laden has only intensified the debate.

As many Americans watch their job benefits shrink amid tight budgets, Connecticut is about to defy the trend: It's set to become the first state to mandate paid sick days for some low-wage workers.

Across the country, 40 million people have no paid sick time, and advocates now see momentum for a national movement.

Network evening news may not have worked out, but Katie Couric is wasting no time making other plans.

Her replacement on the CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley, starts tonight, but today, she announced that she's starting a syndicated daytime talk show to be produced by ABC, beginning in the fall of 2012.

"I'm sure New York does failure better than anyone else because it does success better than anywhere else," Tim Harford says.

Harford, an economist and author, isn't just being kind. He argues in his new book, "Adapt," that success always starts with failure.

And so we've set out across Manhattan to look for some of those big ideas that didn't work out.

Out first stop is the main library. In the lobby is a classic example of how even things we consider successful were flops at the time: a 15th-century Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg himself.

There's one guilty plea so far in the immigration "hit list" case in Utah that energized anti-immigration activists and appalled privacy and civil rights groups.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that fiction at least nominally aimed at readers under 18 — young adult or "YA" fiction, that is — is entirely too dark.

Two years running, Treme has featured a sensory-overload pageant of a Mardi Gras episode. Let's get right to this one. New Orleans native son Josh Jackson is here again to help break down the music.

Patrick Jarenwattananon: A lot of the first few scenes are scored to the sounds of marching bands. First, what's all this business with the Muses parade and their glitter shoes?

"I didn't at any time yell. ... I didn't go on a rant. I wasn't irate."

So says Jason West, the Utah man who's at the center of a tale about 2,500 pennies and how he used them to pay a disputed $25 medical bill — and now faces a potential fine of 14,000 pennies ($140, that is).

History books tend to suggest that the world was black-and-white before 1950. Photos by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans paint a stark picture of the Depression. Famed war photographer Robert Capa almost single-handedly forged the monochrome mental imagery of the D-Day landings at Normandy.

But, although it was expensive and somewhat rare, color photography did exist at the time.