Anyone who's ever been to the Montreal International Jazz Festival knows there's nothing else quite like it in North America. Every year for a week and a half, the festival takes over a massive plaza, several adjacent city blocks and everything that can be called a concert venue in the area. There's live music all day and deep into the night, and at the heart of the matter is plenty of exceptional, well-programmed jazz.

Mexico's secretary of the Council on National Security said authorities had captured one of the most wanted men in organized crime. The Mexican daily, El Universal reports that Alejandro Poiré said José de Jesús Méndez Vargas, or "The Monkey Méndez," the alleged leader of La Familia Michoacana cartel had been captured in Aguacalientes without any confrontation.

"With this arrest, we've destroyed what was left of the leadership of the organization," El Universal quotes Poiré as saying.

Unemployment is still dangerously high. But things are looking up for both households and companies.

On today's Planet Money, economist Mark Zandi says households have been steadily reducing their debt over the past few years.

The number of credit cards outstanding, bank cards, retail store cards, peaked at almost 600 million back in August of 2008. As of the end of May, we are down to less than 500 million.

Today, British police said they arrested a 19-year-old man in connection with distributed denial of service attacks on, among other sites, the U.S. Senate and the CIA. Police said Ryan Clearly was linked to the hacker activist group LulzSec.

The Guardian reports:

Investigators believe the arrest is significant and linked to the attacks based mainly at websites belonging to US institutions and organisations.

How much has the nation's political landscape changed after 10 years, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and whatever we define Libya as?

So much so that a Democratic president who ran as an anti-war candidate, at least on Iraq, has come to look like a hawk when compared to Republican presidential candidates.

On the eve of his Wednesday evening speech to the nation in which he will announce how he plans to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan, it's Obama who finds himself fending off calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces there.

From our colleagues at ProPublica:

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that JPMorgan Chase has agreed to a $154 million settlement for allegedly misleading investors in mortgage-securities deal involving the hedge fund Magnetar.

The Food and Drug Administration's revamp of its dated anti-smoking campaign was long overdue. And, although the new graphic images make us a bit squeamish, that's kind of the point.

But how did they get to be so gruesome?

Back in 2004, the Joint Commission, a group that certifies health care providers, issued rules to try and prevent wrong-site surgery — terrible blunders involving the wrong limb or the wrong surgery.

The rules were supposed to became mandatory in hospitals and accredited outpatient centers. At the time, the president of the group that issued the rules called them so obvious that even if they weren't "quite Dick and Jane" simple, they were "pretty close."

It's been three years since For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut album that landed Justin Vernon's band Bon Iver on virtually every best-of list for 2008.

Now, Bon Iver has released the follow-up to For Emma, titled Bon Iver. The song titles draw from the names of places — real, imagined or a combination of both, like "Minnesota, WI."

Yeah, we know. When we made a list of our favorite records of the year so far, we left off Helplessness Blues and The King Is Dead. Among the other casualties: Let England Shake, So Beautiful or So What, Tomboy, Nine Types of Light and The King of Limbs.