NPR Blogs

Southwestern Colorado's 4,700-acre Chimney Rock Archaeological Area will on Friday be designated a national monument, according to Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

The designation, which President Obama will approve and that has bipartisan support, will help preserve the site.

The headlines on the press releases that started showing up yesterday, here at The Salt certainly got our attention. Just one sample: "BREAKING NEWS: New Study Links Genetically Engineered Food to Tumors."

Cecilia Giménez, the Spanish woman who really messed up when she tried to restore a 19th-century fresco of Jesus, now wants a piece of the action from the 2,000 or so euros ($2,600) her church has collected from tourists coming to see the ruined artwork.

There were 382,000 first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, down by just 3,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

Meanwhile, "the 4-week moving average was 377,750, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week's revised average of 375,750." That figure offers a slightly better look at the trend.

Iran's Mehr news agency says a Muslim cleric in the northern province of Semnan claims he was recently knocked to the ground and kicked by a woman who apparently had had enough of his criticism about how she was dressed.

Bloomberg News writes that:

Good morning, here are our early stories:

Pakistani Students Burst Barricades In Latest Protest Linked To Anti-Islam Video.

And here are more morning headlines:

Syrian Group Files Complaint Against French Paper's Muhammad Cartoons. (BBC)

More than 500 people presumed to be university students today broke through police barricades and got into Islamabad's diplomatic enclave as they protested against the anti-Islam video that has sparked sometimes deadly demonstrations in many Muslim nations, NPR's Jackie Northam reports from the Pakistani capital.

An experimental drug that helps people who have Fragile X syndrome is raising hopes of a treatment for autism.

The drug, called arbaclofen, made people with Fragile X less likely to avoid social interactions, according to a study in Science Translational Medicine. Researchers suspect it might do the same for people with autism.

(We retopped this post at 8 a.m. ET.)

Though fresh data from the Census Bureau show that the number of Americans living in poverty edged higher in 2011, its latest American Community Survey also signals that after a Great Recession and a painfully slow recovery the U.S. economy may finally be bottoming out.

The Associated Press leads its report on the news this way:

Plans that would allow John Hinckley to leave a mental institution and go live with his mother are on hold. His doctors say the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan is well enough to deserve more freedom.

But a key part of the treatment plan is now up in the air.

Therapists in Virginia, near the home of John Hinckley's elderly mother, say they want to withdraw from a plan to treat him several days a week.

Hinckley's longtime defense lawyers say they want to quit too, because they're not getting paid any more.

Two years ago the United Nations' Global Fund launched an experiment that aimed to reduce the cost of malaria drugs in parts of Africa where they're needed most.

The idea was to subsidize the cost of drugs, sometimes making them available even cheaper than wholesale.

Did it work? The results for the first phase of the pilot were unveiled yesterday in Washington, and they looked pretty good — at least for the short time the project has been up and running.

You thought this happened only to Homer Simpson.

But, no, it happened in real life to oilfield workers in Texas: During the course of their work, they lost a radioactive rod. That's the story our friends at State Impact Texas are telling this afternoon.

We'll let you click over to get the full story about how even the National Guard has been enlisted, but here are the basics:

The big names on the Internet are forming a new lobbying group they hope will influence lawmakers when it comes to privacy and piracy.

The Washington Post reports that Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and 10 other Web companies formed the Internet Association to counter any efforts to issue new rules for their industry.

The Post adds:

A lot of medicine's direst emergencies come down to one problem: lack of oxygen.

Cardiologist John Kheir started thinking about that when a little girl in his care, drowning from lung hemorrhages, died before she could be hooked up to a heart-lung machine that would have kept her blood oxygenated while the damage was repaired.

Scientists have known for a long time that rice — often babies' first food and the staple of much of the world's diet — is good at absorbing inorganic arsenic from soil during the growing process.

Two separate analyses, one by Consumer Reports and one by the Food and Drug Administration, have raised concerns that we might be getting too much of this known human carcinogen in our diets.