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Republicans rule rural areas, while any Democrat can count on running up big margins in most of the large cities in the country. That has left the suburbs as the main partisan battleground.

For several election cycles now, the presidency has been won or lost based on the vote among suburbanites in a few key states. That's likely to be true again this November.

And some political observers believe that President Obama took the calculated risk that his newfound support for gay marriage rights will boost his campaign in these all-important counties.

The latest cover of Time was obviously meant to spark conversation — and that it has.

The photo on the cover shows a 26-year-old mother breastfeeding her almost 4-year-old son. The reaction has been explosive and visceral and a lot of the more thoughtful commentary revolves around a philosophy by Dr. William Sears called attachment parenting, which encourages co-sleeping and carrying your baby everywhere and breast-feeding sometimes into toddlerhood.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

Coming up, this is the month when we acknowledge the contributions of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders to the history and ongoing life of this country. We decided to observe it by speaking with people who have changed the game in their respective fields. Today, we are talking with Hikaru Nakamura. At the ripe old age of 24, he has already won the U.S. Championships twice and he's working on his third, as we speak. We'll have that conversation in just a few minutes.

$15 million.

That's how much President Obama campaign will receive from a fund-raising event last night at George Clooney's home. The New York Times reports the A-list, Hollywood crowd paid $40,000 a person, helping to set "a record for a presidential election fund-raiser."

The Times adds:

What just happened?

JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in America, announced that it lost $2 billion on a massive trade placed out of its London office.

What was the trade?

In what could mark a watershed in the fight against HIV/AIDS, a panel of experts recommended that the Food and Drug Administration give a green light to a pill that can cut the risk of infections.

The daily pill, Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences, combines two medicines that inhibit the reproduction of HIV. It's already approved as a treatment for HIV, but its use could soon expand to include protection of uninfected people.

"It was a bad strategy. It was badly executed."

The words of JPMorgan Chase's CEO, Jamie Dimon, as he admitted late yesterday that the investment bank — or, more precisely, a single "rogue trader" working for the bank, had lost some $2 billion in the last six weeks in risky hedge-fund trades.

The news has sent chills through the markets. Shares of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, lost 7 percent in after-hours trading and British bank Barclays lost 2.9 percent, while more than 2 percent was shaved from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mortgage broker Freddie Mac named Donald Layton as its new chief executive officer. Layton worked for JPMorgan Chase for nearly 30 years before retiring in 2004.