NPR News

"The U.S. economy has continued to recover, but economic activity appears to have decelerated somewhat during the first half of this year," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tells Congress this morning in testimony prepared for his semiannual report on economic conditions and monetary policy.

"Police at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport say they still do not know how needles got into turkey sandwiches on Delta Air Lines flights from Amsterdam to the United States, but are investigating," The Associated Press reports.

As The Wall Street Journal writes:

The Brooklyn-based duo She Keeps Bees likes to go it alone. Singer-guitarist Jessica Larrabee and drummer Andy LaPlant have been recording their music at home and self-releasing it since 2006. Their sound is intimate and moody, with incredibly spare arrangements that mix swampy blues with gritty rock.

To record the band's latest single, "Counter Charm," the duo headed to Paris, where they set up a makeshift studio in a small restaurant, late on Halloween night. If they were hoping to bottle the airy creepiness of the time and space, they found it.

"I was just praying that I would get there and that if she [fell] that I would catch her," Steven St. Bernard tells CBS 2 TV in New York City.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Drought In U.S. Now Worst Since 1956; Food Prices To Spike, Economy To Suffer.

-- Pentagon Is Prepping Defenses Against Iran, 'Wall Street Journal' Reports.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renée Montagne. The mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska is celebrating his 15th year on the job. No worries about term limits for this mayor. Stubbs, so named because he's missing half a tail, is as popular as the day he was elected. Townspeople voted for him as a write-in candidate even though he's a cat out of disappointment with the human candidates and Stubbs has been mayor ever since - honorary mayor.

Separate mass shootings at opposite ends of North America have left dozens wounded and at least two people dead.

Late Monday evening in Toronto, two people were killed and at least 19 others wounded in a shooting that "Police Chief Bill Blair called the worst in the city's history," The Globe and Mail writes. It adds that:

On this edition of All Songs Considered, hear the first new song from The xx since the group's stunning debut in 2009. "Angels" is a sensitive love song, and fantastically sparse in instrumentation, aside from a booming bass.

One of this morning's scoops, from The Wall Street Journal:

"The Pentagon is building a missile-defense radar station at a secret site in Qatar and organizing its biggest-ever minesweeping exercises in the Persian Gulf, as preparations accelerate for a possible flare-up with Iran, according to U.S. officials."