NPR Blogs

Just hours after accepting the presidential nomination of the Republican party, Mitt Romney is headed to Louisiana for a more sober occasion: He will tour the damage left by Hurricane Isaac.

Update at 11:42 a.m. ET. President Obama also announced that he would visit the affected areas on Monday.

NPR's Ari Shapiro reports Romney hopes to console the victims of the floods. Ari filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"This New Orleans trip was a last-minute addition to the schedule.

If teachers and administrators can't reach a deal for a new contract by Sept. 10, Chicago Teachers Union members will walk out of classrooms.

As the AP reports, the union's president said they made that decision because they were "tired of being bullied, belittled and betrayed."

The AP adds:

Seventeen states offer tax incentives to people who donate a kidney, a portion of their liver or bone marrow for transplantation. But a study finds these sweeteners aren't working.

Researchers looked at what happened in the years before and after these tax incentives were passed and found no increase in organ donation rates.

The Department of Defense fired a warning shot against the former Navy SEAL who is about to release a book with his version of the secret raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon addressed the letter to "Mr. Owen," the pen name of Matt Bissonnette. In the letter, Jeh Charles Johnson, from the Pentagon's office of the general counsel, says that Bissonnette signed a non-disclosure agreement that stated he would "never divulge classified information."

Good morning, here are our morning headlines:

Five Takeways From Thursday At The Republican Convention.

As Cleanup Begins, Two More Isaac-Related Deaths Reported In Louisiana.

And here are more early headlines:

As thousands of residents of the Gulf Coast begin to emerge from the flood waters left behind by Hurricane Isaac, authorities in Louisiana reported two bodies were found Thursday in the ravished Plaquemines Parish.

The Times-Picayune reports Parish President Billy Nungesser said a man and a woman were found in what appeared to be their home.

The paper adds:

This November, voters in California will decide whether the state should require labels on foods with genetically engineered ingredients. If the initiative, known as Proposition 37, passes, manufacturers would have to say somewhere on the front or the back of the food's packaging if the product contains or may contain genetically engineered ingredients.

The trial of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the WikiLeaks website, has been scheduled to begin in early February. That news came on the last of three days of pretrial hearings held in Fort Meade, Md., this week.

You may remember the story from South Africa earlier this month in which police opened fire on a group of striking miners, killing more than 30 people. There's an update to that story: South African authorities charged about 270 miners Thursday with the murder of their colleagues under a law that was commonly used during the apartheid era.

The Justice Department has closed an investigation into the deaths of two detainees in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan without bringing any criminal charges.

Attorney General Eric Holder said prosecutors had declined to proceed "because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt."

This paragraph from NASA worried us:

"In one study, astronomers used WISE to identify about 2.5 million actively feeding supermassive black holes across the full sky, stretching back to distances more than 10 billion light-years away. About two-thirds of these objects never had been detected before because dust blocks their visible light. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light."

A 100-year-old driver accidentally backed up his car onto a sidewalk full of children in south Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The Los Angeles Times reports nine children and two adults ranging in age from 14 months to 48 years old were injured seriously but were in stable condition.