NPR News

Fewer than 20 percent of Americans now say they're interested in buying stocks. That's according to a survey conducted by the site Bankrate.com. Guest host Celeste Headlee talks to Roben Farzad, contributor for Bloomberg BusinessWeek about what this could mean for the market's future.

After two weeks, legal challenges and plenty of barbs with his opponent, Rep. Allen West, the Republican Tea Party firebrand, conceded defeat this morning.

Kevin Clash, the voice and puppeteer who for 28 years has made Sesame Street's Elmo come alive for kids, has resigned because "the controversy surrounding [his] personal life has become a distraction," Sesame Workshop said this morning.

Former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman has died. His name will always be linked to a 1980s-era effort to tame the federal budget deficit and to a pre-Sept. 11 warning about the nation's security. And he will be remembered as a "moderate" Republican who could work across party lines.

Medical marijuana is now legal in 18 states and the District of Columbia, but health insurance doesn't cover it and patients often scramble to cover the cost.

"It's an expensive medication, no doubt about it," says Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access, a patient advocacy group. "Patients are struggling to afford it, regardless of whether it's available in their state."

When farmers from Japan settled in California more than 100 years ago, they brought Japanese persimmons, with their bright, shiny skins and sweet interiors.

Some Americans almost immediately caught onto the charm of these orange beauties, and with the help of a few prominent backers, passion for the Japanese varieties spread across the country, according to botanist Julia Morton.

British officials today filed more charges against former top editors at some of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers in the U.K., this time for allegedly paying nearly $160,000 to a ministry of defense official to get information.

That information allegedly included the "Green Book" that lists phone numbers and other contact details for members of Britain's royal family.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, those charged are:

Saying it was a victim of "serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations" by a British software company it acquired last year, tech titan Hewlett-Packard just announced it erased $8.8 billion from its books last quarter to properly account for the acquisition.

Calling it the "sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said today that the U.K. is officially recognizing the Syrian National Coalition, Reuters reports.

Rimsha Masih, the young Christian Pakistani girl whose arrest earlier this year drew international attention, has been cleared of the blasphemy charge against her.

According to NPR's Jackie Northam, who is in Islamabad, Pakistan's High Court today threw out the charge against Rimsha because there was no hard evidence that she ever burned pages of the Quran, as neighbors had charged.