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Maryland Officials Cite More Progress With Health Insurance Website

The executive director of Maryland's online marketplace for health insurance says more upgrades to the website have enabled more people to create accounts to use it.

Becca Pearce says thousands of additional user accounts were created this week, just days after the website opened to significant delays to an onslaught of visitors. Pearce says information technology vendors made additional upgrades to the system overnight.

She insists further improvements are planned for overnight maintenance periods between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. daily through October.

Pearce also says technicians have found other areas of the website that could be improved as well. She adds some of those improvements may require additional periods in which certain functions will be unavailable.

NPR

George R.R. Martin, Author And ... Movie-Theater Guy?

The author of the wildly successful Game of Thrones books has been spending his days working on reopening an old movie theater in Santa Fe — much to the displeasure of fans who think he should be writing the next book.
NPR

Sandwich Monday: The Limited Edition Candy Corn Oreo

For this week's Sandwich Monday, we try a new take on the classic sandwich cookie: the Limited Edition Candy Corn Oreo.
NPR

California Won't Wait For Congress On Immigration Reform

California Gov. Jerry Brown has singed a bill that limits cooperation with federal authorities that want immigration holds on undocumented people arrested for minor infractions. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has a more extensive proposal to ban virtually all cooperation with the feds. On immigration issues, California appears to be headed in the opposite direction of states like Arizona.
NPR

Funding For Software To Cloak Web Activity Provokes Concern

A service called Tor makes it possible to communicate and surf the web anonymously. It sounds like a plot by privacy-minded rebels, but in fact the service receives most of its funding from the government and was started by the Pentagon. Despite recent revelations of government email snooping, the U.S. government supports anonymous communication so foreign dissidents can work undetected, and so government agents can pursue bad guys without giving away their identities. But now the service faces new accusations that it might be serving NSA surveillance efforts.

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