News from NPR

There they go again — those 17 federally appointed experts at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are telling American doctors and patients to stop routinely doing lifesaving tests.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that that a Florida man's children, conceived after his death through in vitro fertilization, are not entitled to Social Security survivors benefits. More than 100 similar cases are pending before the Social Security Administration, but Monday's ruling is unlikely to resolve most of them.

A federal task force has concluded that men over 50 don't need a regular blood test for prostate cancer. Millions of men get the test every year. The task force says too many unnecessary treatments are being performed because of the test.

"This is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about."

That's what President Obama said during a press conference in Chicago minutes ago, when he was asked what he thought about Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker's critique of the campaign ad about Mitt Romney's time as CEO of Bain Capital.

If you missed it, Booker made news by going off message on Meet the Press.

President Obama said the U.S. was making "diligent progress" in their negotiations with Pakistan over the reopening of a crucial supply line into Afghanistan.

Obama said he didn't think that issue would be solved by the end of the NATO Summit in Chicago, but "we are making diligent progress on it."

Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari met on the sidelines of the summit. Obama said while their talk was brief he "emphasized... Pakistan has to be part of the solution" in Afghanistan.

The SpaceX unmanned rocket will try to lift off again, after its first attempt was scrubbed a half-second before launch on Saturday.

So much for compromise.

A total of 43 Catholic educational, charitable and other entities filed a dozen lawsuits in federal court around the nation Monday, charging that the Obama Administration's rule requiring coverage of birth control in most health insurance plans violates their religious freedom.

Today at All Things Considered, we continue a project we're calling NewsPoet. Each month, we bring in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end of the day, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's stories.

U.S. diplomats were relieved this weekend when China allowed a prominent dissident, Chen Guangcheng, to fly to New York with his family.

China, too, is presumably happy that Chen is no longer in the country doing his advocacy work. Chinese exiles tend to fade into obscurity when they leave the country, and Beijing might be counting on that to happen with Chen.

But social media may be changing this equation.

Why did the chicken cross the road? That's just about the only bit of chicken-related trivia not answered by the cover story in Smithsonian magazine's new food issue this month.

This is a classic chain of events that never seems to go out of style in an election year.

First one of the presidential campaigns put out videos that it says are informational but critics say are attack ads. This time, it's President Obama's team and the target is Republican rival Mitt Romney. The point of the spots, such as this one, is to make the case that when Romney ran Bain Capital, some of the companies the investment firm took over ended up shedding jobs rather than creating them.

We'll get back to real news in no time, but we just couldn't resist a couple of curious details that a Sunday Times' interview (pay-wall) with Queen Elizabeth's sylist for 11 years revealed.