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Now that Ecuador has said it will give WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asylum as he seeks to avoid being extradited from Great Britain to Sweden by hiding out in Ecuador's London embassy, news outlets are looking at the complicated legal issues involved in cases such as his.

Here are some things we've found fascinating in the coverage:

This week, Bill Gates was at a summer fair in Washington State, but he was not eating deep-fried butter on-a-stick, or checking out livestock.

Gates was inspecting cutting-edge toilet technology on display at an event his foundation hosted in Seattle — the Reinvent the Toilet Fair.

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the newly chosen vice presidential running mate for Republican Mitt Romney, was in Ohio on Wednesday to speak at his alma mater.

Ryan graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 1992 with degrees in economics and political science. And his ascension to the GOP ticket thrills Rob Harrelson, a member of the school's College Republicans (as was Ryan, two decades earlier).

Journalist Karl Fleming chronicled many of the key moments in the civil rights era in the South. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he was beaten during the 1965 Watts Riots. Fleming died last weekend at age 84.

Japanese officials are experimenting with ways to help people displaced by last year's earthquake and tsunami. One idea is to create parallel towns where everyone from the dog-catcher to the schoolteacher can shift to one town while their old village is being rebuilt. It's a way of keeping communities intact. But after more than a year, many of the affected communities have already scattered.

An analysis by USA Today says this Congress may be the least productive since the end of World War II. Sixty-one bills became law so far this year, 90 bills last year. So it's not surprising that Congress' approval rating is 10 percent.

All this week, All Things Considered will listen to dispatches from the campaign trail. On Tuesday, we checked in on President Obama — today, a bit of Mitt Romney's stump speech.

The question many young immigrants have had since President Obama's Deferred Action policy was announced is whether their new status would allow them to pay in-state tuition at state universities. Audie Cornish speaks with Maria Sacchetti, immigration reporter for The Boston Globe, about how various states are handling tuition matters.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block. This presidential campaign season features not only battles between candidates, but fights over how the voting process should work. Today in Pennsylvania, a judge refused to block the state's new voter ID law from going into effect before the election. The law requires voters to show identification at the polls.

As we hear from NPR's Pam Fessler, opponents of the law say they will appeal.