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The U.S. is one of the world's largest economies, but it lags when it comes to happiness: the World Happiness Report ranks America number 19.

A man climbed to the top of Philadelphia's City Hall, about 500 feet up. City officials only found out after he posted a video on YouTube.

The top quarter of American students made progress. The bottom 10 percent did not.

On a summer night in Phoenix, city dwellers can watch a line of head lamps inch up Piestewa Peak. The mountain rises sharply more than 1,200 feet above the neighborhoods of Central Phoenix. It's the most popular outdoor trek in the city. But in July and August the sun turns deadly there and hikers wait until it's safely below the horizon to begin their ascent. At the top, the view unfolds like magic every time — a desert city of four million people that glows red, white and orange.

Millennials' top source for political news is Facebook, according to a recent study. Now, other social networks are trying to get on board.

For the past eight years, jazz critic Francis Davis polls his fellow critics on the best jazz records of the year. He shares this year's top jazz picks.

A Swiss banker has pleaded not guilty to charges he helped thousands of Americans evade paying their taxes. Raoul Weil was one of the top managers at UBS, a Swiss bank that helped nearly 20,000 Americans hide their assets in secret accounts.

Steven Levy, senior writer for Wired, has written an article called "How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet." He tells Audie Cornish about what he learned from security personnel at many of the top tech companies. They claim that they were surprised to learn of the National Security Agency's data gathering.

An email thread released Wednesday is raising more questions about whether lanes were closed on the George Washington Bridge as political payback. The emails indicate that top officials in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration are involved in the closures — motivated more by politics than a traffic study, as originally claimed.

NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports on the most widely used school-based drug education program in the nation, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, known as DARE. DARE is a "just say no" curriculum taught in middle schools by police officers. Critics of the program say the DARE approach is too limited to be effective, especially with children who are likely to use drugs. Research released Monday by the US Department of Education confirms the program does not change kids' attitudes and behavior in the long term. But DARE is popular with schools and with Clinton's top drug advisors, who say it should continue to receive federal suppport.

Five must-hear songs, including a Belgian artist with more than 180 million YouTube views, a wry outsider's take on "sweet France" and an earworm from American Top 40 rooted in the Balkans.

In his new book, The Inheritance, David Sanger writes about the multiple foreign policy challenges President-elect Obama will face when he takes office. Also, he reports on the top threats Obama will likely contend with during his presidency.