NPR News

This segment was originally broadcast on Oct. 8, 2011.

Before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Adam Riess had already won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and just about every prize there is to win in his field. So there's really only one place left for him to be victorious: the Not My Job game.

Kevin Clash, the Sesame Street puppeteer who made Elmo a sensation, has resigned.

Robert Siegel talks to Aaron David Miller, Vice President at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who has worked on Middle East policy at the State Department under past Republican and Democratic administrations. Miller points out that while the world is focused on the issue of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the leadership in the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank, is seeing diminished clout. Milller says the militant approach of Hamas is drawing support from many Palestinians.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Russia has a problem with drunken passengers on airplanes. On its national airline, for example, more than 1,000 incidents of disorderly conduct in the past three years, most of them involving drinking. Now, aviation officials are considering drastic measures, as NPR's Corey Flintoff reports from Moscow.

With the conflict in Gaza on its seventh day on Tuesday, Egypt dispatched its foreign minister to Gaza City at the head of an Arab delegation. Egyptian officials say a ceasefire deal could be reached soon, but meanwhile the Israeli air strikes and Hamas rocket attacks continued. Anthony Kuhn talks to Audie Cornish.

Two weeks after votes were cast, Tea Party firebrand Allen West conceded he lost his Florida Congressional race to Democrat Patrick Murphy. He was one of just a few Tea Party activists to be defeated.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. We begin this hour with growing talk of a cease fire in the fight between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, but at this point, it is still just talk. Officials in Israel and in Egypt, where negotiations are underway, say there is no agreement yet. In the meantime, the fighting has intensified, with more casualties on both sides.

Since an escalation in fighting between Gaza and Israel last week, there have been more than 100 casualties on Gaza's side of the border. On Israel's there have been three. That low death count in Israel, despite many rockets fired into its territory, is thanks largely to the Israeli "Iron Dome" air defense system. For more on how that system works, Robert Siegel speaks with Barbara Opall-Rome, Israel bureau chief for Defense News.

Berlin is known as the "wild boar capital" in Germany, with thousands of the animals roaming its residential neighborhoods. In the past, the city and animal rights activists battled over hiring hunters to kill the streetwise swine, who cause a lot of damage. But with attacks like the one in late October in which four people were injured by a male boar, curbing the wild pig population in the German capital is a growing priority.

Some Mississippi parents are learning a new routine when they drop their kids off at day care centers that are taking part in a new pilot program aimed at combating fraud and saving the state money.

Under the program, the state scans parents' fingerprints to capture biometric information, and that information is turned into a number. Then, at a day care center, parents dropping off or picking up their kids put their fingers on a pad, and a small keyboard records the exact time a child is checked in or out.

The drummer Pete La Roca, a top freelance drummer during New York's post-bop heyday in the 1950s and '60s, died early this morning in New York. The cause was lung cancer, according to Randa Kirshbaum, a former girlfriend. He was 74 years old.

Julie Klausner's podcast, How Was Your Week?, has been featured on all manner of lists of the best shows of its kind — in Rolling Stone, in GQ, and in The New York Times. Comedy podcasting is a field growing so fast that, as NPR's Audie Cornish mentions in talking to Klausner on today's All Things Considered, comedian Colin Quinn recently commented that the only thing comedians talk about anymore is doing each other's podcasts.

Presidential pardons usually take the world by surprise. There's no advance notice — the White House just sends out an announcement with the names of those receiving clemency. Thanksgiving is one lighthearted exception.

On Wednesday, President Obama will once again take part in the traditional turkey pardoning at the White House. But while the business of pardoning humans is more serious, it's also increasingly rare.

Imagine going to college and finding an oil rig on campus. That's becoming increasingly likely as oil and gas companies use a controversial technique commonly referred to as fracking to extract resources from land underneath campuses across the country.

Environmental science professor Jeffery Stone will never forget the day the earth shook on Indiana State University's campus in Terre Haute.

"They did it like in eight-second pulses, and you could feel the whole sidewalk wobble like an earthquake almost," Stone says.

Hi! I'm back again. I'm a former banker, now a writer at Dealbreaker and an answerer of real and imagined questions about the financial world here. You can send questions to planetmoney@npr.org with "ask a banker" in the subject line, or ask on Twitter (@planetmoney).

The Grand Place in downtown Brussels can be a feast for the senses: the wafting scent of hot waffles, shop windows chock-full of chocolate, exquisite Baroque architecture.

But that's not all you'll find on the quaint cobblestone streets as the city that serves as both the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the European Union. There's also puke, dog poop, trash, spit, drug addicts, drunks and brawls.

Talk about a tease! Our friend Joe Palca reported some pretty big news today on Morning Edition.

The scientists working on the Mars Curiosity rover mission have found something "earthshaking," some data that is going "be one for the history books."

But John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the rover mission, stopped there. He'll say nothing more until the rover conducts more tests to prove this wasn't a fluke.

Many of you will be out of town this week and likely to miss this week's ScuttleButton puzzle. So for that reason I'm going a bit easy on you with today's offering.

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Congolese rebels today captured the city of Goma, as government troops melted away and U.N. peacekeepers stood by. And if that sounds a bit like deja vu, you may be remembering a similar battle on the same ground four years ago, or parts of other wars that have ravaged the eastern part of Congo for nearly two decades now, wars blamed for the deaths of five million over those years, along with a long list of associated crimes including systematic rape, looting and child soldiers.

The Guardian, which followed the vote live, says whether to allow female bishops was the Church of England's biggest decision in 20 years.

A majority of the House of Bishops voted yes. A majority of the House of Clergy voted yes. But about 36 percent of The House of Laity, members elected by lay members of the church, voted no.

The measure needed a two-thirds majority in all three houses to pass.

The Guardian writes: