National News from NPR

Russians are feeling pretty gloomy after spending days trying to contact a spacecraft aimlessly orbiting Earth.

The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft was destined for one of Mars' moons. As we reported earlier this week, it was supposed to scoop up some rocks and return home with its specimens, but one of its boosters failed to ignite and now its stuck.

This interview was originally broadcast on October 13, 2011.

Improvements in medical care and equipment mean fewer troops are dying on the battlefield. But more troops are returning home severely wounded, with injuries that require lifelong care and cost millions of dollars in medical bills.

For the many Americans who have been following the story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as she recovers from being shot in the head last January, there's now a chance to briefly hear her voice.

She feels "pretty good," Giffords has told ABC News' Diane Sawyer, although things are still "difficult."

"Volatile" is one of the words that probably best describes the race for the Republican presidential nomination and a new CBS News poll captures that flux. The national poll indicates a three-way tie, showing Herman Cain at 18 percent and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich at 15 percent each.

That's essentially a tie since the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

When young children get ear infections, parents face an unpleasant choice: dose them with antibiotics and pain relievers, or tough it out.

But certain kinds of chewing gum may help reduce the number of ear infections children get in the first place.

That's chewing gum with xylitol, a natural form of sugar sometimes used in gum and candies because it has fewer calories for its sweetness than table sugar, or sucrose.

"My heart aches for the victims and the families and my mind searches for answers," Penn State University's interim president, Rodney Erickson, just said at the opening of a meeting of the school's board of trustees.

WPVI-TV is streaming the meeting here.

It's become the formula.

1. Have an embarrassing gaffe, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry did during Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, when he couldn't remember the third of three federal agencies he would eliminate.

Good morning. We've veered from the solemn to the silly already today. Our early headlines:

-- We Pause On Veterans Day To Reread 'In Flanders Fields'

-- Penn State Scandal: Alleged Victim's Mother Was 'Horrified'

Jim Romenesko, a blogger who pioneered online reporting about the news media, "has submitted his resignation" to the Poynter Institute "and I have accepted it," Poynter's online director Julie Moos writes.

Here are some of the latest developments in the scandal at Penn State, where former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexually abusing young boys for more than a decade (he says he's innocent) and head coach Joe Paterno has been fired after coming under withering criticism for not having done more to investigate the allegations: