The Soup Movement in America is based on a simple recipe: Bring a bunch of people together to eat soup. Ask each person for a modest donation — say $5. Listen to a few proposals about how people might use that pool of money for a worthwhile project. Vote on the best proposal, and give all the money to the top vote-getter. Go home full and fulfilled.

Last year was a tough one for Venezuela's firebrand leftist president, Hugo Chavez, who has frequently taunted the United States during his 13 years in power.

In June, a cancerous tumor was discovered in Chavez's abdomen, forcing him to dramatically scale back public appearances as he sought treatment in Cuba. Some predicted that the end was near.

But this year, Chavez has returned to his outspoken ways — just in time for his re-election campaign.

The FBI has released the files it kept on Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. The 191-pages are part of a background search the FBI undertook in order to clear him for an appointment made to the President's Export Council by George W. Bush in 1991.

For the background check, the FBI conducted 30 interviews with friends, family, neighbors and former colleagues. What emerged was a portrait of a man admired for his brilliance but whose personal life and character are often questioned. It's not unlike the picture painted in Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography "Steve Jobs."

In 2010, it was a guy dressed up in a tiger suit that wouldn't have scared many toddlers. One year keepers successfully captured a "zebra."

A Democratic member of Mississippi's state House has introduced legislation that would "for all official purposes within the State of Mississippi," change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.

Throwing a frisbee or a football on a Los Angeles County beach in the summer could cost you $1,000.

As NPR member station KPCC reports, the L.A. Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a revision of a 37-page ordinance that outlines acceptable behavior on county beaches.

KPCC reports:

Across the country, 1 in 6 hospitals has high rates of one of the most serious kinds of preventable infections — those caused by catheters inserted into large veins, according to new data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

The National Regulatory Agency announced it had given Southern Co. the OK to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia, making it the first new nuclear power plant approved in a generation.

The AP, which reported earlier today that the NRC was poised to give its approval, reports that one of the $14 billion reactors could be ready as soon as 2016. The second reactor could begin operating in 2017. The AP adds:

SPIN Magazine is hoping to review 1,500 albums and mixtapes exclusively in 140-character tweets on the SPINReviews Twitter feed in 2012. The music magazine recently abandoned their 80-word reviews for the new Twitter format, which critics think is killing the art of the music review.