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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene. Some photos on Twitter ended Anthony Weiner's congressional career. The latest online image, not quite as damaging. Weiner launched his campaign yesterday to be mayor of New York City, and a gorgeous city skyline showed up on his homepage: the skyline of Pittsburgh, my home town. I'm honored if the Web designer is impressed with our city's skyline.

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Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne.

Fracking may have met its match in Germany, where beer makers have lined against it. Fracking, of course, is a way of bringing up natural gas by pumping water and chemicals into the ground. Germany's powerful beer industry is concerned fracking would pollute groundwater. Half of Germany's 1,300 brewers have their own wells and say the pure water is the essence of their famous beers. And if there's one thing Germans take seriously, its beer. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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More now, on the new federal health care law. States are preparing for that law to take effect. In California, officials have now unveiled plans and prices from millions of residents who will be using a new health insurance exchange two purchase their coverage next year. This is a key test of the federal health law's ability to draw competitive bids from insurance companies.

Sarah Varney reports.

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

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

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

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And I'm David Greene.

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And our last word in business today, quite a tongue lashing for McDonald's. The company held its annual shareholders meeting in yesterday, and when the floor opened for questions, a nine-year-old girl approached the microphone.

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Hannah Robertson spoke loud and clear, saying quote, "there are things in life that aren't fair, like when your pet dies." And she continued, "I don't think it's fair when big companies try to trick kids into eating food."

Denise Mauzerall arrived in Beijing this year at a time that was both horrifying and illuminating. The capital was facing some of its worst pollution in recent memory, and Mauzerall, a Princeton environmental engineering professor, was passing through on her way to a university forum on the future of cities.

"I took the fast train from Beijing to Shanghai, and looking out the window for large sections of that trip, you couldn't see more than 20 feet," Mauzerall recalled.

To Mauzerall, the lesson was surprising and inescapable.

Like a proud father, Nay Aung opens up his MacBook Air to show me the Myanmar travel website he has built. But we wait 30 seconds for the site to load, and nothing happens.

"Today is a particularly bad day for Internet," he says. This is life in Myanmar today: Even an Internet entrepreneur can't always get online.

This is an installment of NPR's ongoing Cook Your Cupboard, a food series about improvising with what you have on hand. Have a food that has you stumped? Submit a photo and we'll ask chefs about our favorites.

Harrison Gowdy of Dayton, Ohio, has developed a reputation among friends and family of liking everything and wasting nothing.

"Sometimes I'll even find things like Swiss chard dropped off on my doorstep," she says. And sometimes she receives foods that stump her.

In 1991, Kentucky residents Sally Edwards and Lue Hutchinson had sons serving in the Gulf War. Sally's son, Jack, was a Marine captain. Lue's son, Tom Butts, was a staff sergeant in the Army. The two men never knew each other, but today, their mothers are best friends.

Both soldiers were killed in February of 1991. Jack was 34. "They were the cover for a medical mission. The helicopter lost its top rotor blade, and they didn't make it back," Sally says.

As the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring approaches, commentator Miles Hoffman reminds us that — as earthshaking as that infamous debut was — the composer soon branched out into a variety of musical styles that would surprise his fans and critics.

Everybody itches. Sometimes itch serves as a useful warning signal — there's a bug on your back! But sometimes itch arises for no apparent reason, and can be a torment.

Think of the itchy skin disorder eczema, or the constant itching caused by some cancers. "A very high percentage of people who're on dialysis for chronic kidney disease develop severe itch that's very difficult to manage," says Dr. Ethan Lerner, an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School.

Scientists now say they've got a much better clue as to how itch happens.

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Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne. Five years ago, at the age of 75, a Japanese mountaineer raced a 76-year-old Nepalese climber to the top of Mount Everest. Japan's Yuichiro Miura lost. This morning, in an epic rematch, the now 80-year-old Miura won, becoming the oldest person ever to reach the summit. But that record may not last. Next week, his Nepalese rival, at 81, plans to make the ascent again. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Good morning, I'm David Greene with a story of mistaken identity - at the bar. New Jersey officials have wrapped up an operation called Operation Swill that target bars who are trying to pull a fast one. They'll charge for good booze but actually pour the cheap stuff in your glass. They've caught 29 bars red-faced; 13 of those TGI Fridays. The operation involved confidential informants, gizmos to test out liquor, and more than 100 agents. I would say this was some top shelf police work.

A day after school officials approved shutting down 50 schools, the Chicago Teachers Union and community activists say they'll hold a voter registration and education campaign. The union is agitated that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, school board members and some lawmakers failed to listen to parents, teachers and others who called for the schools to remain open.

Before they voted yes on the sweeping school closure plan, school board members faced a torrent of criticism Wednesday. Protesters tried to conduct a sit-in at the front of the boardroom, but security officers escorted them out.

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London is no stranger to terrorist attacks. But yesterday's events had a peculiar horror. A British soldier was hacked to death on a London street. in broad daylight. His two attackers did not try to escape. They stuck around and made speeches to bypassers, trying to justify the brutal killing. Here's one attacker, addressing a passerby filming on a cellphone.

(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE VIDEO)

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NPR's business news starts with some of the shine off the stock market.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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The IRS has admitted to targeting conservative groups seeking tax exempt status. And yesterday at a House hearing the IRS director of exempt organizations said, quote: "I have not done anything wrong." She then declined to testify. Lois Lerner's brief appearance at the committee was just the beginning of a stormy, five-hour session filled with angry outbursts and allegations of political motives.

NPR's Peter Overby reports.

PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: Lois Lerner did read a statement that she had done her job properly.

NPR continues its conversations about The Race Card Project, where NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris asks people to send in six-word stories about race and culture. The submissions are personal, provocative and often quite candid.

Prison is a tough place, but Congress made an exception nearly 30 years ago, giving terminally ill inmates and prisoners with extraordinary family circumstances an early way out. It's called compassionate release.

But a recent investigation found that many federal inmates actually die while their requests drift through the system.

One of them was Clarence Allen Rice.

When it comes to weaning, humans are weird.

Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, breast-feed their offspring for several years. Some baby orangutans nurse until they are 7 years old.

But modern humans wean much earlier. In preindustrial societies, babies stop nursing after about two years. Which raises the question: How did we get that way? When did we make the evolutionary shift from apelike parenting to the short breast-feeding period of humans?

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This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

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And I'm David Greene. We now know the tornado that struck the city of Moore, Okla., on Monday was an EF5, with winds over 200 miles an hour. That designation is the strongest possible rating for a tornado. Federal, state and local teams are on the ground this morning, cleaning up debris and tending to survivors. But there is little - if any - chance of finding any more survivors; that, according to the fire chief in Moore.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. A drummer in Baltimore pulled off the interstate yesterday, out of gas. So he pulled his drum kit out of the trunk and sat up on the shoulder and played along with traffic. When a state trooper pulled up, drummer boy explained he was just biding his time until help arrived, practicing his chops. He got away without a ticket and with the gift of gas from the highway department. Rock on. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Good morning, I'm David Greene.

Well, our wings have been clipped by some listeners. Yesterday, we told you about how some scientists in Canada saw their research crops destroyed by geese. We used the term Canadian geese. Listeners like Frank Kohn said we got that wrong.

FRANK KOHN: They're not Canadian geese. They're Canada geese because they don't hold passports, as far as I know, and it's not a nationality. It's a species name.

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Finding a parking space, probably not at the top of the list of things you like to do. Well, experts in parking think they might be able to change that. One key, they say, is for developers to think about the parking experience when they're designing malls or apartment complexes, instead of just treating it as an afterthought.

This came up in Florida this week, at the International Parking Institute's annual conference. Reporter Kenny Malone, from member station WLRN, was there.

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Here's some news for travelers. If you can't afford - or don't want to pay the price for - a hotel room, maybe you've used the cheap lodging site Airbnb. If so, you have to take New York City off your list. The popular website has suffered a major setback in court. A judge in New York ruled that an Airbnb user in Manhattan violated local laws when he rented a room to an out-of-towner.

From member station WNYC, Ilya Marritz reports.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

And I'm Linda Wertheimer.

This week, Boy Scouts of America officials will meet in Texas to consider changing the group's longstanding ban on gay members. The first round of voting starts tomorrow. A new membership policy would allow gay youth, but continue to ban adult leaders who are gay.

NPR's Kathy Lohr reports.

Apple was criticized in a Senate committee hearing Tuesday for using complex accounting to minimize the corporate taxes it pays. One key piece of the company's tax strategy: It funnels lots of its profits through subsidiaries in Ireland.

Offering low corporate tax rates has been a fundamental part of Ireland's economic strategy for decades — a way to get foreign companies to set up operations in the country.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry heads back to Israel and the West Bank on Thursday for more talks on restarting peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. When he was there last month, he walked away with at least one agreement — to improve the West Bank economy. Here's how he put it as he left Israel:

It's exactly the sort of futuristic thinking you'd expect from Google and NASA: Late last week, the organizations announced a partnership to build a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center.