The House Financial Services Committee voted on Wednesday to suspend nearly $13 million in bonuses paid to executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The measure would also prohibit future bonuses. The Senate is expected to take up similar legislation.

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Today, Chrysler is expected to announce plans to add more than 1,000 jobs at an assembly plant in Ohio. Local officials there have reportedly signed off on tax incentives for the plant expansion in Toledo. It's where Chrysler makes the Jeep Liberty and Wrangler.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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And here's a follow-up to the dramatic scandal at Olympus, which we've been following on this program. It's one of Japan's most respected corporations - or it was. Now executives Olympus are facing criminal charges and prison sentences. The company may be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and may also go bankrupt. All this after revelations of dubious acquisitions and allegations of massive accounting fraud. From Tokyo, Lucy Craft has more.

Australia is the latest stop on President Obama's tour of the Pacific Rim countries that the president thinks should be the new focus of U.S. foreign policy. It is already the focus of a competition for influence with China.

At an Iowa town hall meeting Tuesday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry laid out a plan to, as he put it, uproot and overhaul the federal government. Among other things, Perry would end life-time tenure for federal judges including those on the Supreme Court, and make members of Congress take a 50 percent pay cut.

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Let's remember a bit of very recent history. Back in August, Congress came close to defaulting on U.S. government debts. Republicans wanted big cuts in spending. They finally got some, but a deal with President Obama pushed more deficit reductions off to the future, to a bipartisan committee which has been meeting this fall, and now has one week left until its deadline to reach a deal.

The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is attacking Nintendo's new video game Super Mario 3-D Land. In the game, Super Mario sometimes wears the skin of a tanooki, which is a raccoon dog. Since tanooki are, in real life, killed for their fur, the group says the game "sends the message that it's OK to wear fur."

A foreign mining company, protected by hundreds of soldiers, extracts precious resources from a remote tropical forest. The mining enrages indigenous tribes, who resist.

It may sound like a movie script, but it is in fact the story of the world's largest gold mine, located high in the mountains of Indonesia's Papua province and owned by Freeport-McMoRan, an American mining conglomerate.

The Village of Hempstead, N.Y., sounds like a posh resort in the Hamptons. But if you ride the train an hour east from Penn Station, what you'll find is a working-class town of about 54,000 people, more than 80 percent of them African-American and Hispanic.

Nearly a third of local residents are underwater on their mortgages, six times the state average. Mayor Wayne Hall says he heard story after story from local residents who tried to get banks to refinance their loans, but couldn't. Finally, Hall got fed up.