NPR Blogs

The work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal oversight agency established by Dodd-Frank three years ago, has resulted in its first criminal referral — a case against a debt-settlement company it says defrauded thousands of people.

Ray Harryhausen, who brought sword-fighting skeletons to the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts and was known as the master of stop-motion animation for his work on that and other films such as Clash of the Titans and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, has died.

If you've followed the story of "Prisoner X," the mysterious Israeli-Australian national, who allegedly committed suicide in an Israeli prison after being secretly held, you have no doubt asked yourself: What did Ben Zygier, who worked for Israel's spy agency, do for the country to imprison him and then keep everything about his arrest — or even his existence — secret for years?

The four women who survived a fire that erupted in a moving limousine Saturday did so by squeezing through a narrow partition window between the passenger cabin and the driver's area. As we reported Monday, the tragedy claimed the lives of five other women on a bridge over San Francisco Bay.

A Pentagon survey estimating sexual assaults in the military finds that cases have spiked by a third since 2010.

USA Today obtained a summary of the report, which is due out later this week. The newspaper reports that in 2010, 19,300 service members were believed to be victims of sexual assault; that number went up to 26,000 in 2012.

The paper adds:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose weight has been both joked about and treated as a real health concern, told The New York Post on Monday that he "secretly underwent lap-band stomach surgery [in February] to aggressively slim down for the sake of his wife and kids."

"I've struggled with this issue for 20 years," he told the Post. "For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them."

Good morning, here are our early stories:

-- Cry For Help Led To Freedom For Missing Women In Cleveland.

-- Many Offers, But No OK's For Burial Of Boston Bombing Suspect.

And here are more early headlines:

The Massachusetts funeral director who is trying to find a cemetery that's willing to bury the body of Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev says he has gotten 120 offers from graveyards around the U.S. and Canada.

But when Peter Stefan "calls officials of the cities or towns involved, nobody wants the body," The Associated Press reports.