There are two apartment buildings in my Manhattan neighborhood that share a block. They sit very close. One is about nine inches from the other. In the small vertical space between them, a horde of finches have built themselves nest upon nest upon nest rising for nine human floors. It's a finch skyscraper. In March and April you can see finches busily flying in and out of this vertical crack, bearing twigs, grasses and nest-building material.

Seventy-seven people have gotten sick and one has died in a salmonella outbreak that's appears to be caused by tainted ground turkey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

And the bacterial strain investigators are closing in on — Salmonella Heidelberg — is potentially quite bad because it's resistant to a lot of common antibiotics. That complicates treatment for people who get sick from it.

So why hasn't the government issued any turkey recalls?

Christina Larson is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Hosni Mubarak, the man who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for nearly three decades, was wheeled into a Cairo courtroom on a hospital bed and placed in a metal cage as his trial opened Wednesday on charges of corruption and conspiracy in the killing of protesters who sought his ouster.

The ailing 83-year-old lay ashen-faced as he pleaded not guilty from inside the defendants' cage. His two sons, also on trial, stood beside him in white prison uniforms.

ABC News has a report out this morning that claims to name the source of the new information in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking. ABC says unnamed and unspecified sources have confirmed that a woman named Marla Cooper provided the FBI with a guitar strap for fingerprint testing.

NPR is trying to independently confirm ABC's claim. The FBI has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Good morning!

The story dominating the morning is that six months after his ouster, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is standing trial on charges of corruption and complicity in the deaths of protesters. The ailing 83-year-old was in a hospital bed inside a metal cage. The AP reports:

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

Mathew Continetti is an opinion editor for The Weekly Standard.

The talks were going nowhere. It was July 13, the fifth straight day of negotiations between President Obama and congressional leaders over an agreement to increase the debt ceiling. The hour was late when House majority leader Eric Cantor repeated the Republican preference for a short-term increase. But the president wasn't having it. "Eric, don't call my bluff," Obama said. "I'm going to the American people on this."

Yet another politician has given up his seat because explicit pictures of themselves ended up on the World Wide Web and in this case on the site of a political adversary.

Louis N. Magazzu, 53-year-old Democrat, had been a New Jersey freeholder, or county commissioner, for nearly 14 years. He resigned, yesterday, amid a controversy that's becoming very familiar: Magazzu texted naked pictures of himself to a woman he'd never met in person and then those pictures went public.