It looks like they're going to have to change some promotional materials down in Louisiana, where the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway has long claimed to be the world's longest bridge over open water.

At nearly 24 miles, the causeway is plenty long.

The day after a panel of experts advised the Food and Drug Administration to go ahead with plans to revoke approval of Avastin to treat breast cancer, European authorities moved in the opposite direction.

The European Commission gave the OK to an expansion of Avastin's approval to include using the drug in combination with Xeloda, a chemotherapy drug, to treat metastatic breast cancer, Genentech parent company Roche said Thursday.

Using a common euphemism for penis, Time magazine editor-at-large Mark Halperin said during MSNBC's Morning Joe program today that President Obama was a "@#$% yesterday," during his White House news conference.

Apparently, Halperin — a frequent guest on TV — didn't know his comment would be broadcast live. He may have thought it would be covered up by a "delay" switch that allows engineers to block inappropriate comments from being broadcast.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market — it knows nothing about target markets. Young readers have always reached above their reading level to get to meatier stories, and lately we've seen adult readers reaching into the world of teen fiction in search of the same thing — no-holds-barred storytelling. But the attraction isn't just related to the fact that young adult novels tend to have faster-paced narratives.

There were 428,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, a decrease of just 1,000 from the previous week, the Employment and Training Administration just reported.

Though down from the peak of more than 650,000 a week during the official recession that stretched from late 2007 to mid-2009, weekly claims remain above the 350,000-or-less level that's generally associated with a healthy economy.

There was a scary moment in Brax, France, earlier today when a man grabbed President Nicolas Sarkozy by the shoulder and almost pulled the French leader down.

Guards quickly tackled the man and got him away from Sarkozy, who did not appear to be injured. The incident happened as the president was walking down a line of people, shaking hands.

David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.

The Axis of Evil may never be the same. A changing of the guard is looming for the James Bond villains of the world, and the bedtime stories with which we scare our children are going to have to go searching for new bogeymen.

Good morning.

There's word from Afghanistan, as we just reported, that a NATO airstrike has killed a senior militant believed to be linked to Tuesday's deadly attack on Kabul's Inter-Continental Hotel.

Other stories making headlines include:

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999.

Rejecting Republican demands for massive cuts in federal programs while maintaining tax breaks for the wealthy as not "sustainable," President Obama used a press conference Wednesday to argue that serious negotiations about balancing the budget and addressing deficits and debt must include plans to end tax breaks for "millionaires and billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners."

Mitch Pearlstein is the founder and president of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis. His book From Family Collapse to America's Decline (Rowman & Littlefield) is due out in August.