NPR Blogs

I would like to give you this. It's not much. But in its way it may offer some solace on this date always synonymous with suffering.

It's an image. It is a picture of someplace else, someplace utterly different, someplace that knows nothing of the hatred, bigotry and violence humans unleash on each other for the most seemly absurd reasons.

[Monkey See will be at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) through the middle of this week. We'll be bringing you our takes on films both large and small, from people both well-known and not.]

We've already heard warnings about the so called "fiscal cliff" from the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office.

The health care overhaul law makes it easier for most people with private insurance to get the vaccines they need without going into their pockets for a copay. Medicare beneficiaries don't get the quite same sweet deal, though.

The web hosting company GoDaddy says it has finished an investigation into yesterday's outages and the company has concluded that it was not caused by an external hack.

As we told you yesterday, many of GoDaddy's members complained that their websites were inaccesible for a while on Monday. The company hosts some 5 million websites and has registered more than 53 million domain names.

In the rarefied air of China's leadership circle, anything that strays from strict protocol becomes grist for the rumor mill.

So it is with the mysterious and sudden disappearance of Xi Jinping, the presumptive heir to President Hu Jintao.

Xi, 59, has inexplicably missed a series of important meetings with foreign dignitaries in the past week, including one with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Beijing. The last time anyone saw him in public was Sept. 1.

Flu pandemics don't happen very often. So many people might feel the relative fizzle of a flu pandemic three years ago somehow immunizes the globe against another one for awhile.

But don't relax, say the authors of a report published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Good morning, here are our early stories:

Lower-Key Ceremonies For This Year's Sept. 11 Commemoration

Chicago Classrooms Empty For Second Day

And here are more early headlines:

Striking teachers in Chicago manned the picket lines for a second day today as parents again scrambled to occupy their stay-at-home kids.

Some 350,000 of the district's students are locked out of their classrooms because city officials and thousands of teachers represented by the Chicago Teachers Union have yet to reach a contract. The strike is the first by public school teachers in the Chicago in 25 years.

[Monkey See will be at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) through the middle of this week. We'll be bringing you our takes on films both large and small, from people both well-known and not.]

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master probably came to Toronto with as much Oscar buzz as anything showing here. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in his first film since the 2010 experimental quasi-documentary I'm Still Here, The Master is emphatically a piece of award bait, but deservedly so.

Today in Washington, D.C. we got our first taste of fall. It was crisp and in the low 60s. And just as we slide into the last days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published its summer 2012 recap.

It's exactly what you were expecting: It was really hot. In fact, 2012 was the third hottest on record.

NOAA reports:

It's human nature to hope for positive results after spending months or even years conducting a research study. In well-designed studies, however, scientists identify in advance the criteria for success, so their optimism won't color their conclusions when the study is completed.