NPR News

Madhulika Sikka, who has been Morning Edition's executive producer since joining NPR six years ago, will become the organization's executive editor in January.

In announcing the promotion this morning, NPR Senior Vice President for News Margaret Low Smith lauded Sikka's work at Morning Edition, saying she "brought real vision" to the show and that it has "evolved into a more interesting and relevant program" under her leadership.

For all their variety and variation, cities are, at their root, physical systems. That means, at some fundamental level, they are also expressions of the laws of physics. In physics size matters (or "scale" as we call it). Physicists learn different things about an object by looking at it from different scales. In our first exploration of physics and cities we stayed at the street level. At that scale we saw cities as machines: cars and elevators, pipes and plumbing. Then we went up to the roof. At that scale we saw cities as engines, vast systems for turning energy into work.

Saying that the global economic recovery "has suffered new setbacks, and uncertainty weighs heavily on the outlook," the International Monetary Fund today warned that the probability of "recession in advanced economies and a serious slowdown in emerging market and developing economies" next year have gone up.

The fund said its research indicates the risk of those things occurring in 2013 "has risen to about 17 percent, up from about 4 percent in April 2012."

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- French And American Scientists Share Physics Nobel.

-- Seemingly Unrepentant Sandusky 'Is Going To Die In Prison'.

"Top Zetas drug cartel leader Heriberto Lazcano has apparently been killed in a firefight with marines in the northern border state of Coahuila, the Mexican navy said late Monday."

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Planning a wedding can feel like running a marathon. A couple in Oregon took that metaphor a step further and married while running one. The bride wore white. Her veil attached to a baseball cap. The groom a tuxedo T-shirt. It was a race that sparked their romance. So Eric Johansson and Katie Holmes decided to run 20 miles of the Portland marathon before stopping at a park to exchange vows. Then the newlyweds ran the final 6.2 miles. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

A lot of would-be professional writers dream of someday getting a book contract that includes an advance, enough money, paid upfront, to let them quit their day job and write full time.

Of course, those advances do come with an expectation that an author will actually write the book. The Penguin Publishing Group recently filed suit against a dozen authors who failed to produce manuscripts after getting an advances.

NPR's Lynn Neary reports.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Finance ministers and central bankers from around the world are on their way to Tokyo for their annual get-together, sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The mood, at the moment, about the global economy, is worried. In fact, the IMF has just called the risk of a worldwide slowdown alarmingly high.

To find out more, we turn, as we often do, to David Wessel. He's economics editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Good morning.

DAVID WESSEL: Good morning, Renee.