Today's commercial-free coverage starts in the Southern Asian country of Nepal, where there's been another earthquake. 

 

Tuesday's tremor with magnitude 7.3, not as powerful as the 7.8 magnitude quake that struck on April 25th, but still deadly and very destructive. It killed at least 50 people in Nepal, 17 people in India and one person in Tibet. It caused more buildings to collapse, more landslides to tumble, and more people to run for their lives. 

 

This quake was centered west of Kathmandu and a little closer to the capital than the one two weeks ago. One man said it was like the whole earth was alive. It left more than 1,200 people injured and many others asking, when Nepal can return to normal? The impoverished country still needs help. 

 

At cnnstudentnews.com, we have a link to CNN's "Impact Your World" site. It can connect you to several of the charity and aid organizations that are helping earthquake victims in the region.

 

The Shell oil company is one step closer to drilling for oil in a very cold part of the world--the Chukchi Sea. It's located in the Arctic Circle, between Alaska and Russia. The U.S. government gave Shell the green light this week, saying that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had taken into account the environmental, social and ecological resources in the region.

 

Some environmental groups have opposed Shell's efforts for years. Greenpeace said it could lead to disaster in the Arctic. 

 

Shell still needs the approval of some other American organizations before it can start its oil search, and a British energy expert says if oil prices stay low, the company might not get much return on its investment.

 

Yesterday, the Barack Obama Foundation announced that Chicago, Illinois, would be home of the 44th president's library, specifically the South Side of Chicago. It's 500 million dollar project, roughly the cost of the library of his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

 

A presidential library is kind of a library and a kind of a museum and kind of an archive, but mainly, it's a living memorial to the chief executives of our country. 

 

The first one came around in the late 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt has been steaming along as president, he looked around his office and he said, "I got a lot of papers here. We've been dealing with the Great Depression. We need to do something with this record so people can see it later on."

 

Eventually, Congress got on board and said, what we need to do is have a rule here. Basically, the rule is that the president who is going out, raises the money to build his presidential library and museum, or whatever he wants to call it, and then the taxpayers take over and basically pay for it running .

 

It's not a library in the sense that you wouldn't go and check out a copy of "Black Beauty". The courts decided a long time ago, we gave him a nice house, we gave him a nice job, we gave him a nice office. That stuff belongs to us, and we get to see it. 

 

So, with a few restrictions, most of the official business of the White House that a president does: the people he meets, conversations he has, everything that's recorded there, winds up in these archives.

 

Presidential libraries do allow you to have a really up close personal look at these presidents in some ways, the way you can't really see it through the news. For example, I walked through Jimmy Carter's library once with Jimmy Carter and he stopped and talked about his Nobel Prize and how he felt when he got it. 

 

Another time, I walked with the elder President Bush through his library, down in College Station, Texas, and we stopped at a replica of his office from Camp David, and he stood there and shook his head and he said, "it's exactly the way it was."

 

Presidential libraries are tourist attractions and that every town that has one advertises it, but they're also serving a more serious purpose. Think about this: there are hundreds of millions of documents and papers buried in these libraries, and those are pored over on a weekly basis by historians and researches who every now and then come up with new information that shed new light on how a decision was made, or how the president thought.

 

If you get a chance to go to the White House and talk to the president, be careful what you say, because one day, it could wind up in a presidential library with everybody looking.