NPR Blogs

An explosive report from the New York Times today spelled out just how wealthy the relatives of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao are. Try $2.7 billion dollars in assets. This startling news so angered Chinese officials that the Times' website was quickly shut down in China.

It's Halloween — or it will be soon — and that means BOO! We talk about the scariest of holidays (if you don't count Valentine's Day). Not scary at all: with Trey on vacation, we're joined by the charming Tanya Ballard Brown, who kicks off with a delightful tale of a clothes-wearing friend of hers. We get the update on what Stephen's kids are doing this year (the World's Saddest Banana is retiring!) and I once again make the case for my favorite dog photograph of all time.

This terribly sad story from Manhattan is getting national attention this morning:

Marina Krim, a young mother who lives with her family in one of New York City's wealthier neighborhoods on the upper west side of Manhattan, "returned home on Thursday with a third child to find her 2-year-old Leo and 6-year-old Lucia dead in the bathtub." The children's nanny "lay injured nearby with apparently self-inflicted stab wounds." (The Associated Press)

A court in Milan has convicted former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on a charge of tax evasion and he's been given a 4-year prison sentence, The Associated Press and Reuters report.

But whether he will ever actually go to jail on the charge isn't yet known.

New sectarian violence is erupting in western Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, between Buddhist Rakhinese and Rohingya Muslims. It's turned very deadly: reports say more than 100 people from both groups are dead and 1,000 homes have been burned down.

An explosion outside a mosque in northwest Afghanistan today killed more than 30 people and wounded dozens more.

From Kabul, NPR's Sean Carberry reports that witnesses have said a man approached on foot and then detonated a suicide bomb. It happened in Maymana, the capital of Faryab Province. Worshipers were gathering to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

Thirty years ago, the primatologist Frans de Waal published Chimpanzee Politics, a wonderful bombshell of a book that revealed the depth of chimpanzees' social complexity. Based on long-term observations at Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, many of de Waal's descriptions match comfortably with what chimpanzees in the wild have since been observed to do.

"Fighting raged near a military base in Syria's north as a ceasefire in the bloody civil war was supposed to go into effect Friday at dawn," activists tell The Associated Press, which says the news illustrates "the difficulty of enforcing even a limited truce coinciding with a Muslim holiday."

The U.S. economy grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says.

That follows growth (at annual rates) of 1.3 percent in the second quarter and 2 percent in the first.

Good morning, here are our early stories:

If Sandy Becomes 'Frankenstorm', It Could Be Worst In A Century.

Giants Take 2-Game World Series Lead With 'Small Ball,' 'Slap & Score'.

And here are more headlines:

After the home run heroics of "Kung Fu Panda" in Game 1, last night's World Series faceoff between the San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers was a much different game, NPR's Tom Goldman said earlier on Morning Edition.

"We're not trying to hype it," National Weather Service meterologist Paul Kocin tells Bloomberg News. "What we're seeing in some of our models is a storm at an intensity that we have not seen in this part of the country in the past century."

Researchers largely agree that about half of Americans are probably not getting enough vitamin D from the places we've traditionally gotten it: food and sunlight. And that's a problem because vitamin D keeps calcium from leaking out of our bones; too little vitamin D can also be a factor in kidney disease and skeletal problems.