While the political furor over Congressman Todd Akin has shifted fortunes for Republicans in Missouri, what does it mean for the future balance of the U.S. Senate? Republicans need a net gain of at least four seats to control the Senate, and the focus on making that happen falls on a handful of very tight Senate races in other parts of the country.
Jennifer Duffy is senior editor at the Cook Political Report, and she joins us to check in with the state of the Senate races. Welcome, Jennifer.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Bird owners are clucking with alarm now that Bird Talk magazine has folded its wings. The September issue will be its last in print. For 30 years, the magazine has published everything from glossy cover photos of feathered pets to avian health tips to a story about a bird-mitzvah, once held for an African gray parrot.
But, like so many print publications, Bird Talk struggled to make money and so it is no more.
It's a typical day at a Head Start center near downtown New Haven, Conn., and restless 3- and 4-year-olds squirm and bounce on a colorful shaggy rug vying for their teacher's attention. Down the hallway several women make their way to a parenting class, stopping to marvel at a 4-month-old baby.
What you don't see, says the center's Keith Young, is men, fathers.
On a muggy summer afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a dozen people are hard at work on the patio behind a local church. They're stripping old bicycles of their brakes, cables and chains, and sanding and spray-painting them white.
But behind the lighthearted chatter, there's a more somber purpose to this gathering: They're building "ghost bikes."
Painted all white and adorned with colorful notes and flowers, ghost bikes are the cycling community's equivalent of roadside shrines dotting the highway; they mark the spot where a rider was killed in traffic.
