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President Hugo Chavez is too ill to attend his inauguration this week, the Venezuelan government announced Tuesday.

In a letter to the National Assembly, Vice President Nicolas Maduro said the president's medical team said Chavez's recovery should be extended beyond Thursday – the day he is scheduled to be sworn in. The Associated Press reports: "Maduro said Chavez was invoking a provision in the constitution allowing him to be sworn in before the Supreme Court at a 'later date.'"

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Call it a stampede or a riot or the chaos born of desperation. Syrian refugees in a camp in northern Jordan attacked aid workers today, using sticks and stones, after a major winter storm blew down tents and flooded streets. Police say seven aid workers were injured in the attack.

A fuel leak Tuesday on a Tokyo-bound Japan Airlines flight forced the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft to cancel takeoff and return to the gate at Boston's Logan International Airport. It was the second incident involving a Dreamliner in two days.

Here's how Logan airport described the incident on its Facebook page:

It's called Beit Qamishlo, or the House of Qamishlo. It's named after a city in northeastern Syria, though the house isn't even in Syria — it's just across the border in southern Turkey.

The house is humble, made of concrete blocks, with tile floors. Arabic slogans are taped on the walls: "Beit Qamishlo is a house for everyone," "It's a window to Syria's future," "Under one roof we plant life together and freedom."

After the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., President Obama asked Vice President Biden to lead a group tasked with drafting policies to reduce gun violence. One of the issues sure to come up in the Biden group's discussions is the role of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

(7 a.m. ET, Jan. 9: We've updated the headline and reworded the top of this post to better reflect the judge's ruling. Our earlier headline was "Judge Reduces Possible Sentence For Alleged Leaker Bradley Manning.")

At a pretrial hearing Tuesday at Fort Meade in Maryland, a military judge ruled that the Army private accused of leaking a mass of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks was subjected to illegal pretrial punishment while being held in a military prison.

Gonorrhea is one tough germ to beat.

Over the past 70 years, the bug has outwitted four classes of antibiotics, leaving just one set of drugs available to kill it.

Now there's more evidence that the arsenal against gonorrhea is shrinking again.

Canadian doctors have documented the first failure in North America of cefixime, the front-line antibiotic for gonorrhea.

The British have some stunning cathedrals, and York Minster, in the north of England, is one of the most magnificent of all.

Construction on it began 800 years ago, and a mere 2 1/2 centuries later, work was complete.

The result was one of Europe's largest Gothic cathedrals and one that's had a rough ride through history: It's been pillaged and looted, and damaged by devastating fires and lightning strikes.

Today, there's another threat: acid rain. As a result, the cathedral's stones are decaying.

Amkoullel, a 33-year-old Malian rapper, sings about self-image, immigration and respect. He's among a new generation of young rappers in Mali, mixing traditional instruments with new themes. He has played all over the world, performing with Malian legends Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate.

There are more than 5 million people with Alzheimer's in the U.S., and most are cared for at home. Now, one company has begun offering training to family caregivers to help them deal with the special challenges of caring for an Alzheimer's patient.

The company, Home Instead Senior Care, is the nation's largest provider of nonmedical home care for seniors. The workshops are free and available to anyone, whether they're clients of the company or not.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, there's been renewed talk of assault weapons bans and other gun control measures. But such legislation won't even be called for a vote in Illinois' state legislature this week, even though shootings and homicides have spiked in Chicago, topping 500 in the last year. So Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his police department are renewing community policing in an effort to improve community relations and reduce violent crime.

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CORNISH: With recent mass killings in Colorado and Connecticut on their minds, residents of another place scarred by violence marked a somber anniversary today.

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The federal government does lots of things that free market economists don't like, but it does at least one thing that they really despise: subsidies for farmers. These subsidies were up for renewal last year and the battle over them ended on New Year's Eve in a stalemate. As NPR's Dan Charles reports, Congress extended them but for just nine months.

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The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable had a pillow stitched with the words: Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it. That was the zingy caption of a New Yorker cartoon from 1968. The cartoon showed a rough construction site with only a single column erected. A construction worker in a hardhat is holding a newspaper reading Huxtable's scathing critique to the architect. Ada Louise Huxtable, who pioneered architecture criticism, died yesterday in Manhattan. She was 91.

Many a college student lives off of microwavable meals – but some do it not by choice but because they're worried school food might make them sick.

They may have celiac disease, a digestive ailment caused by gluten, or life-threatening allergies to foods like peanuts — both are on the rise. But even as more people become aware of the issues, schools and institutions may lag behind.

"We are sending a rep to hear what they have to say," National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam says of the organization's decision to accept an invitation from the task force Vice President Biden is leading — the group that's studying gun laws and related issues in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Con

Binge drinking is something many people want to shrug off.

But officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it's a public health problem that deserves more attention.

You might be tempted to think binge drinking is mainly an issue for men, but that's not the case. So the CDC is putting the spotlight on women's binge drinking, which it says is both dangerous and overlooked.

On Day 2 of the preliminary hearing for James Holmes, who is charged with the murders of 12 people and wounding of dozens at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., last summer:

In the European Union, unemployment rates in the region that uses the euro currency are at their highest ever, as a returned recession, falling income levels and persistent debt concerns trouble the region's economy, as its latest statistics show.

After nearly five years of economic crises, the European Union is also seeing more divergence between its member nations, particularly in the north, where economies have resilience, as opposed to the south, where unemployment rates are an average of more than 7 points higher.

The United Nations released statistics estimating that more than 60,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011. In his first public appearance in six months, President Bashar Assad addressed a crowd of supporters in Damascus Sunday to outline new structural reforms within the government.

Time was that a Swiss bank account was synonymous with confidentiality and keeping assets from prying eyes. No more.

Last week, Switzerland's oldest bank, Wegelin & Co., pleaded guilty in a New York court to helping Americans hide $1.2 billion from the Internal Revenue Service over a decade-long period. Wegelin's plea, and a $57.8 million fine, forced the bank to shut its doors. It follows a $780 million settlement with UBS in 2009 that forced the Swiss banking giant to identify the names of its U.S. account holders.

Elvis Presley was better known for his music than his gourmet tastes. But he did have a famous affinity for the fried goodness of the American South — and he had the waistline to prove it.

In honor of what would have been the King of Rock 'n' Roll's 78th birthday, let's take a look at some of his legendary eating habits.

Southern Louisiana in the early 1960s was a hotbed of musical creativity among youngsters who'd been raised listening to French-language country music and Fats Domino. They combined those — and other — influences to make what's now called "swamp pop." Joe Barry was a pioneer in this area who should have been much bigger.

There's really not much we need to add regarding Monday night's "discussion" about guns and gun control on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight. Everyone's perfectly capable of forming their own opinions.

The widow of slain Civil Rights organizer Medgar Evers will deliver the invocation at President Obama's inauguration. Myrlie Evers-Williams will become the first woman, and someone other than clergy, to say the prayer that precedes the ceremonial oath of office, as The Washington Post reports.

The inaugural ceremony will take place on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.