NPR News

Hundreds of police were deployed in southern Beijing Wednesday to quell a large protest after a migrant worker fell to her death at a clothing mall. Police say it was suicide, but there are reports the woman was gang-raped by security guards. Her family is asking for a proper investigation.

For our series on the Changing Lives of Women, we're asking NPR women about their careers — and inviting you to join the conversation. This question goes to All Things Considered host Audie Cornish.

Question: What does it mean to have it all?

President Obama travels to Texas on Thursday for the second time in as many weeks. He will talk about job training and economic opportunity, but he may have a political opportunity on his mind as well.

Obama lost Texas by more than 1 million votes last year. But Democrats believe their fortunes in the Lone Star State may soon change, thanks to demographics and a new organizational push.

As states gear up for the Affordable Care Act, they're trying to figure out if there will be enough providers of health care to meet demand from the newly insured.

California is one of 15 states expected to consider legislation this year that would give advanced practice nurses more authority to care for patients without a doctor's supervision.

Tina Clark is a nurse practitioner at Glide Health Services, a clinic in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, a low-income section of the city.

Anne-Marie Slaughter had been the director of policy planning for the State Department for two years — commuting from Princeton, N.J., where her family lived, to Washington, D.C., where the job was — when she realized something had to give.

"It was a fabulous job, but at the end of two years I simply had to recognize that I needed to be at home," Slaughter tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne. Moreover, she adds, "I wanted to be at home, and there was no way to do that and to do the kind of job that Secretary Clinton needed me to do."

Federal workers say they don't have much to celebrate these days.

Furloughs began in April, exacerbating already low morale for many government agencies as budgets have tightened. Downsizing has meant more work for those who remain, and talk of further cuts has many worried about job security. This year is also the third that federal workers haven't received a pay increase, contributing to discontent.

Authorities in Bangladesh say the death toll in last month's collapse of an eight-story garment factory complex has surpassed 800 as dozens more bodies were pulled from the rubble on Wednesday.

The latest corpses to be recovered were so badly decomposed that they were being sent to a lab for DNA identification, police said, according to The Associated Press.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has stepped into a political black hole.

He announced this week that he was withdrawing from a conference in Israel to protest that country's treatment of Palestinians, throwing his weight behind an academic boycott of the Jewish state. The Guardian reports:

Black voters showed up at the polls at higher rates than whites in last year's presidential election, driving the rate of minority participation to historic levels, a new government report shows.

President Obama turns his attention back to his economic agenda Thursday when he travels to Austin, Texas, where he will visit a technology high school and a company that makes the machines that make silicon chips.

The White House says the trip is part of Obama's Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tour. It also appears to be an effort by the president to get back to the issues Americans care most about.

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling could have his more than 24-year prison sentence reduced by as many as 10 years under a deal announced Wednesday by the Justice Department.

The agreement with Skilling's lawyers, which still needs the approval of a federal judge, would reduce the former Enron chief's sentence to between 14 and 17 1/2 years.