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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

One of the great American surfers and great shapers of surfboards has died: Donald Takayama. He entered the scene young, a hard-scrabble kid in Waikiki making his own boards out of scrap materials and skipping school to surf.

CORI SCHUMACHER: He would go from his mom's house, and he'd paddle down the Alawai, that dirty little canal in the Waikiki. You paddle all the way down it, pop out and then go surfing all along Waikiki.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

An explosive report from the New York Times today spelled out just how wealthy the relatives of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao are. Try $2.7 billion dollars in assets. This startling news so angered Chinese officials that the Times' website was quickly shut down in China.

More than a year after popular protests rocked the Arab world, U.S. intelligence officials are struggling to understand the myriad of Islamist groups that have filled the vacuum.

Those groups run the gamut from moderate believers who are willing to give the political process a try to violent extremists. The difficulty is figuring out which is which.

In a highly unusual step, the Food and Drug Administration has released a report of inspections it conduct this month of the Massachusetts pharmacy at the center of a national outbreak of fungal infections.

The suspension of Jae Su Chun, the former head coach of the U.S. Short Track Speedskating Team, hasn't stopped some skating clubs from wanting to hire the embattled coach, even as an investigation expands into the most serious allegation against him.

The U.S. economy remains in a gray area, so it's no wonder that the presidential race is essentially tied.

Gross domestic product grew at a 2 percent annual rate between June and September, according to figures out Friday. The White House says this means the economy has been growing for 13 straight quarters.

If you've ever found yourself anxiously wondering where a hurricane might make landfall, then you're probably familiar with "spaghetti charts" — the intertwined web of possible storm tracks put out by many forecasters.

Those lines represent hundreds of millions of observations from satellites, aircraft, balloons and buoys, all crunched from complex forecasting equations on some of the world's most powerful computers.