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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

How hard will peace negotiations in Afghanistan be? For the past day — and before the first official meeting — the United States has been scrambling to get all parties to the table.

The talks were scheduled to beging today, but now they are on hold.

As we told you, Afghan President Hamid Karzai abruptly pulled out of the negotiations complaining that the newly-opened Taliban office in Qatar overstepped its role.

At around 10 a.m. ET, the Supreme Court will begin handing down some of the final opinions of their 2012 term. The court usually sets out for its summer recess at the end of June, which means we're quickly running out of time for the justices to issue their opinion on four major cases argued earlier in the term.

As we've told you before, we're waiting for:

A new campaign will distribute 30,000 pamphlets called "do you speak touriste?" It includes among other things, greetings in eight languages and cultural clues.

A one-year-old boy fell out of a window in New York. He was dangling from an awning then he dropped. Waiting below with open arms was Cristina Torre. Her dad, a former catcher, told the New York Post his daughter always had quick hands.

The 51-year-old actor died on Wednesday in Rome. Reports attribute his death to a heart attack. Gandolfini had been a character actor for years before he was given a chance to read for Tony Soprano in a new series about a New Jersey mob boss HBO was producing in the late 90s.

The man elected to be Iran's new president has been consistently described as moderate. In the days since the election, many have come to question what that means — especially when it comes to the country's nuclear program and its relations with the U.S. Steve Inskeep talks to one of the president-elect's long-time deputies, Hossein Mousavian.

Robert Mueller told a Senate panel on Wednesday that the FBI used drones rarely and for surveillance proposes. The DEA and the ATF had both revealed they possessed drones.

George Zimmer was the founder and executive chairman of the clothing retailer. For three decades, Zimmer starred in the company's commercials. His catch saying: "You're going to like the way you look. I guarantee it."

In many parts of the developing world, drinking a glass of water can be deadly — especially for young children, who can die of diarrheal diseases contracted from dirty water.

So getting clean water to people in the developing world has been a top priority for aid groups for a long time. But it's been a surprisingly hard problem to solve.