Morning Edition

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

Let's catch up now on protests that have swept through nation after nation in response to an anti-Islamic film. And today, we go to Tunisia. It was the first nation to stage a successful uprising in the Arab Spring. It's a popular destination for tourists, and violence there last week took some by surprise.

Eleanor Beardsley reports.

Mitt Romney's effort to refocus his GOP presidential campaign on substance hit a rough patch Monday night. A secretly filmed video, released by Mother Jones magazine, shows Romney saying nearly half of Americans think they are "victims." Romney says his remarks were not elegantly stated.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

The trial of the former police chief who ignited one of the worst political scandals in China in decades wrapped up Tuesday. Wang Lijun is accused of trying to defect to the United States, and covering up a murder involving the wife of a powerful Communist Party official.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

At the heart of NATO's strategy to turn over security to Afghanistan is the joint patrol: Afghan and international troops training and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder. Now faced with a rash of insider attacks - Afghans in uniform turning their guns on international troops - NATO is suspending most of those joint operations.

Space shuttle Endeavour begins a kind of farewell tour this week. The shuttle will set off on a cross-country trip to its retirement home, flying from Florida to Los Angeles on the back of a modified jumbo jet.

Along the way, the spaceship will stop off in Houston, home of NASA's Mission Control and, weather permitting, fly over NASA centers and various landmarks in cities that include San Francisco and Sacramento.

There is a new crisis in Mexico. It's not the ongoing drug war or a plunge in the peso: It's eggs.

The recent violence sparked by the film Innocence of Muslims recalls a very different controversy from more than 20 years ago:

When it comes to healing the wounds of its troubled racial past, the United States is still in its "adolescent phase," says novelist Attica Locke. The 2008 presidential election changed everything she had been taught about race, she says — and, as an African-American writer, she felt compelled to write about that new reality. The result is The Cutting Season, a thrilling, century-spanning story of two murders.