Towns and cities across the U.S. have been dealing this spring with fast-moving natural disasters, from tornadoes to flash floods.

In northern New York and Vermont, the disaster has developed slowly. Weeks of torrential rains have glutted Lake Champlain, flooding hundreds of miles of coastline.

Now in the mountain village of Keene Valley, N.Y., all that water has triggered a massive landslide that is slowly destroying a neighborhood.

'Largest Landslide In State's History'

At a big cancer meeting in Chicago right now there's a lot of talk about progress in cancer treatment, including experimental new drugs for skin cancer and lung cancer.

It's apparently easier to win a Nobel Prize in economics than it is to navigate the perilous partisan waters of Washington politics.

That's one lesson to draw from the case of Peter Diamond, the Nobel laureate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who President Obama nominated to be a Federal Reserve Board governor but who won't be coming to Washington, after all.

Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee soured on Diamond after several had initially seemed supportive.

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.