Morning Edition

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning, I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Monopoly players, your game will never be the same. Hasbro, which has been making the for some 80 years, is retiring a game piece. The iron will no longer be passing Go or stopping at Park Place. The company ran a Save Your Token campaign, and only eight percent of respondents fought for the iron. The winner? That little Scottie dog, who may prefer the old iron to the token replacing it - a cat - though players using the cat may get nine chances to win.

Thousands of Tunisians are protesting in the streets after the assassination of opposition leader Chokri Belaid, a critic of the moderate Islamist group that dominates the country's government. Steve Inskeep talks with Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution's Doha Center.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

NPR's business news begins with an ending.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene.

Manti Te'o won't be tricked again - at least not on Twitter. Te'o's the Notre Dame football player who says he met his girlfriend online. The woman wasn't real, and Te'o says he was the victim of a hoax. He's now deleted his Twitter account. The page had included a quote from author Alexander Dumas: "Life is a storm. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes."

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

The movie "Lincoln" has many fans in Washington. It's reassuring, since the film's politicians shaving the truth and bending the law are doing it for a higher purpose. But Connecticut Joe Courtney is not happy. The film shows Connecticut lawmakers voting to uphold slavery. Courtney looked it up. He found his state's real-life lawmakers voted to abolish slavery in 1865. So he's asking director Steven Spielberg for a correction.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We're also tracking a story that federal authorities call one of the biggest credit card fraud rings in U.S. history. Eighteen people are alleged to have created an elaborate web of fake identities and sham companies to steal hundreds of millions of dollars.

NPR's Dan Bobkoff has more.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Leadership of the Boy Scouts of America may take an important vote today. The organization's executive board is wrapping up a meeting in Dallas, and they're talking about whether to drop their policy banning gay leaders and gay scouts. Activists delivered petitions with more than 1.4 million signatures to the national headquarters this week calling for the Boy Scouts to open up the organization.

NPR's Kathy Lohr reports that the issue has ignited a passionate debate about what the 100-year-old group should do.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Let's look at the economy in another way. The urban scholar Richard Florida has found a problem with the way our cities are evolving.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

He's famous for studying the creative class, his term for millions of entrepreneurs, writers, thinkers, engineers, the innovators who make an economy grow.

INSKEEP: Florida says cities become more prosperous when those innovators are concentrated there.

With no government ties, Bitcoin is used to buy everything from blogging services to Brooklyn-made cupcakes. Theoretically, millions of dollars are being kept in the digital currency, and it's increasingly being used by specialized online gambling websites. But is Bitcoin gambling legal?

Purely in the interests of journalism, I decided to get my hands on some of the currency. When I did so, Bitcoin, which has been around for a few years now, was fetching around $17 on most exchange sites. It has since risen to more than $20.