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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

And I'm Robert Siegel. President Obama is shuffling his national security team. As he announced this afternoon, his longtime advisor Tom Donilon will be stepping down next month and Donilon will be replaced as national security advisor by Susan Rice. She is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, whose comments on last year's attack in Benghazi, Libya have made her a favorite target for Republicans.

First lady Michelle Obama's confrontation with a heckler at a Democratic Party fundraiser Tuesday night has sparked a dramatic range of reaction.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish.

The largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history is nearing an end. Jefferson County, Alabama has been saddled with more than $4.2 billion of debt. Today in Birmingham, a federal bankruptcy judge began reviewing a tentative agreement in the case.

From member station WBHM, Andrew Yeager reports.

Army Sgt. Robert Bales pleaded guilty Wednesday to killing 16 Afghan civilians in a nighttime massacre. Audie Cornish talks with NPR's Martin Kaste, who listened to Sgt. Bales recount the killings at a military court hearing in Washington state. Bales has struck a deal with prosecutors that will spare him the death penalty.

A woman was killed when a four-story building collapsed in Philadelphia on Wednesday. A dozen others were rescued from the rubble.

Amazon already delivers everything from toothpaste to televisions to your doorstep. Now, it wants to bring your berries and beer, too.

A federal appeals court has dealt the Obama administration yet another blow in its quest to keep at least some age restrictions on the sale of emergency contraceptive pills.

Small knives, golf clubs, and other items that had been poised to be allowed in air passengers' carry-on luggage will instead remain prohibited, the Transportation Security Administration confirmed Wednesday. The reversal follows a review process in which the agency heard from passenger advocates, law enforcement, and others.

"After extensive engagement with the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, law enforcement officials, passenger advocates, and other important stakeholders, TSA will continue to enforce the current prohibited items list," the agency said in a statement.

People who are overweight or obese often feel like they're getting dissed by doctors.

So you'd think that a fat doctor would understand. Well, yes and no.

Patients are more apt to trust overweight doctors when it comes to diet advice, a study finds.

But they're also more likely to feel that the overweight doctor is judging them about their weight.

This contradictory bit of data is the latest to reveal the complex attitudes that doctors and patients have about weight and how best to deal with it.

The news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that at least 49 people in seven states have gotten hepatitis A from eating organic frozen berries has given our smoothie-making some pause.

Frozen berries are full of health-promoting compounds; plus, they're convenient and delicious. So we wondered: Is there a way to keep all those positives, and hold the virus? We checked with food safety experts to find out.

Fallout from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's controversial and short-lived decision to halt funding for Planned Parenthood projects appears to still be piling up.

The group is pulling the plug on three-day events featuring fundraising walks in Washington, D.C., and six other cities in 2014. The Washington Post reported on the change Tuesday.

There's an old expression, Boston College Law School professor Michael Cassidy said Wednesday on Morning Edition:

"When you want to get the devil, you have to go to hell to get your witnesses."

A U.S. trade agency says Apple infringed on its Asian rival Samsung's patent in its manufacture of some older models of the iPhone and iPad.

Bloomberg reports on the order from the U.S. International Trade Commission: "It's the first patent ruling against Apple in the U.S. that affects product sales, covering models of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G made for AT&T Inc."

U.S. Olympic speedskater Simon Cho will boycott a hearing next week that could result in his receiving a lifetime ban from the sport, NPR has learned.

Cho is the short-track bronze medalist (Vancouver, 2010) who in October confessed to sabotaging the skate of a Canadian athlete during an international meet in Poland in 2011.

Only time will tell how well New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie finessed a decision that seemed to pit his personal interests against those of the broader public.

But by calling an Oct. 16 special election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg, it appears the governor took the most politically advantageous option available to him.

The nation's top military leaders came to Capitol Hill on Tuesday primed to defend their ability to handle, in their chain of command, the sexual assault scandal that has engulfed the armed services.

But the dramatic faceoff with the Senate Armed Services Committee — in particular two of its female members — appeared to only deepen the chasm between the four-star brass and those who want significant change in a system that has failed victims for decades.

The lawyer for Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor charged with leaking top-secret information to Fox News, has accused the intelligence community of impeding his defense by slapping the "classified" label on hundreds of irrelevant and harmless documents.

The numbers go like this: Very few single black women — just a quarter of those surveyed — said they were looking for long-term relationships, or LTRs. But on the flip side, nearly 43 percent of single black men said they're looking for a long-term partner.

President Obama fired a warning shot Tuesday in the battle over Senate confirmations: He nominated three new judges to the powerful federal appeals court in Washington, and he challenged Senate Republicans not to stand in their way.

Obama complained about procedural roadblocks that have tied up many of his previous nominees — sometimes for years.

Young women covered by a parent's health insurance don't necessarily get maternity coverage. The National Women's Law Center thinks it may have found a way to get them benefits.

The group has filed sex discrimination complaints against five large publicly funded employers, using a little-noticed provision of the Affordable Care Act that bars discrimination in health benefits on the basis of gender.

Ohio State University president Gordon Gee will retire on July 1, ending his leadership of the school that was recently embarrassed by his verbal miscues. Gee, 69, recently sparked anger with comments he made about Catholics and rival universities.

Gee made those comments, reportedly intended as jokes, at a session of Ohio State's Athletic Council.

Former California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is a free man today, after spending more than seven years in prison on bribery and other charges. A distinguished Vietnam War veteran and former Navy pilot, Cunningham's 15-year career in Congress ended abruptly when he admitting to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors and evading taxes.

James Everett Dutschke, the Mississippi man arrested in April on suspicions that he sent letters containing the poison ricin to President Obama and other officials, has been indicted on five federal charges, from sending threats in the mail to knowingly making and possessing "a biological agent... for use as a weapon."

Maximum punishments for the counts leveled against Dutschke, 41, range from five years to life in prison.

Anyone searching for the place where the friction between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans is throwing off the most angry sparks need look no further than the clashes between the administration and Rep. Darrell Issa.

Mississippi lawmakers have embarked on a controversial campaign to discourage older men from having sex with teenagers.

Starting in July, doctors and midwives in the state will be required by law to collect samples of umbilical cord blood from babies born to some girls under the age of 16. Officials will analyze the samples and try to identify the fathers through matches in the state's DNA database.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, and see if the DNA matches any samples from unsolved crimes in a national database.

The 5-to-4 decision split the court's conservative and liberal blocs, with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia authoring a fiery dissent. Twenty-eight states and the federal government have enacted laws that provide for automatic DNA testing of arrestees.

Starkly different views of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning were presented Monday, the first day of his court-martial on charges that he aided the enemy when he gave a large batch of classified data to WikiLeaks that was then posted online.