In the middle of the Mojave Desert, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, there is a place that looks just like Afghanistan.

There are villages with houses, shops, a mosque and a marketplace. But it is all a facade. The area is actually a U.S. Army installation, the Fort Irwin National Training Center. If you want to see how a decade of fighting has profoundly changed the way the U.S. prepares its soldiers for war, this is where you come.

As the U.S.

General Motors delayed a safety recall of more than 330,000 Saturn cars that have been found to have defective power steering systems, newly released federal documents show. The records also show federal regulators didn't demand a recall of the cars, despite thousands of complaints about them.

The cars' problem is described as "a sudden loss of electric power steering (EPS) assist that could occur at any time while driving" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Search teams have recovered the body of the 13th victim of a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest. Crews are digging through a mass of ice and snow in an unstable ice field on the world's tallest mountain in hopes of finding Sherpa guides who are still missing.

"Three guides remain missing, according to the head of the Nepalese government's mountaineering department," NPR's Julie McCarthy reports from New Delhi.

Health officials in Columbus, Ohio, are calling the city's mumps outbreak the biggest since the development of the mumps vaccine in the 1940s.

Columbus generally gets an average of one case of mumps a year, but since February, there have been 244 cases reported in an outbreak that began on the Ohio State University campus.

Prominent TV anchor Hamid Mir is in a Karachi hospital after gunmen opened fire on his car Saturday afternoon. Mir's car was ambushed by attackers, at least some of whom were riding motorcycles, according to local media reports.

Details about the attack are still emerging. Citing police, Mir's broadcast network, Geo TV, says he arrived at a hospital in critical condition after being shot three times in the leg and torso.

In a surprising discovery, scientists have found evidence of a tundra landscape in Greenland that's millions of years old. The revelation goes against widely held ideas about how some glaciers work, and it suggests that at least parts of Greenland's ice sheet had survived periods of global warming intact.

"Glaciers are commonly thought to work like a belt sander," a news release from the University of Vermont says.

Jonathan Henderson of New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network is flying Louisiana's coast looking for oil. As usual, he's found some.

"I just noticed something out of the corner of my eye that looks like a sheen that had some form to it," he says. "We're going to go take a closer look and see if there's a rainbow sheen."

It's a target-rich environment for Henderson, because more than 54,000 wells were planted in and off this coast — part of the 300,000 wells in the state. They're connected by thousands of miles of pipelines, all vulnerable to leaks.

And leak they do.

How did it happen? How'd the zebra get its stripes?

In Rudyard Kipling's version, a gray, horsey-looking beast went into "a great forest 'sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-batchy shadows," stayed there awhile, and after a "long time"... got stripy.

OK. Not bad.

Here's another notion, this one from Ricardo Solis, an artist working in Guadalajara, Mexico.

This post was updated at 6 p.m.

The number of confirmed dead from a South Korean ferry that sank on Wednesday has risen to 36. Since the ship sank, difficult conditions have complicated recovery efforts; heavy cranes have arrived that can shift the ferry, but officials say they'll wait to use them until they're sure none of the hundreds still missing managed to survive.

"They've been dealing with next to zero visibility, very strong currents," NPR's Anthony Kuhn tells Wade Goodwyn on Weekend Edition Saturday.