Morning Edition

The pro basketball season still hasn't started, but Kevin Durant got a workout. The Oklahoma City star drove across the state to a flag football game. On Twitter the other night, he wrote, "This lockout is really boring. Anybody playing flag football?" An Oklahoma State student invited Durant to join a game his team had planned.

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STEVE INSKEEP, host: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with tales of British alcohol. The one stop shop in Essex refused to sell whiskey to Diane Taylor. She didn't have proper I.D., and the shop said rules are rules, even though she is 92. Ms. Taylor at least caused less trouble than the ghost supposedly inhabiting a pub in Birmingham, England. At Halloween, the ghost has smashed bottles of wine it didn't like. It's not clear why the staff thinks it's a ghost and not a customer. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

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Much of Mindy Kaling's humor is rooted in something that might seem unfeasible: using logic to explore American culture. But it works — and works well — because Kaling uses a type of circular logic that's all her own. Just consider this recent Tweet: "Can everyone buy my book please? I wanna quit the business and homeschool my kids real weird."

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with bad bets and a big bankruptcy.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Italy needs the backing of Europe's bailout fund. But Italy's a huge economy — much, much bigger than Greece, Portugal, and Ireland combined. And the Europeans don't want to put enough money into their bailout fund to back Italy.

So they're getting creative.

The rest of Europe is likely offer investors insurance that will pay back the first 20 percent of any losses on new Italian bonds.

A $1.4 trillion rescue fund is a central part of the deal reached by European leaders to stave off financial catastrophe on the continent. But there are many big question marks about the fund.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.

David Huyette ended up holding the home-run ball that won Game Six of the World Series for the St. Louis Cardinals. It could have been worth thousands, but Huyette returned the historic ball, saying it was "the honorable thing to do." He was rewarded with another baseball, an autographed bat and tickets to Game Seven.

At 10 p.m. on Monday, NBC anchor Brian Williams will do something that hasn't been done in nearly 20 years: launch a new network TV newsmagazine.

Hosted live from NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters — thus the name, Rock Center — it's an ambitious attempt to showcase both Williams' serious news skills and his signature dry wit. And if it's going to succeed, he and NBC may have to reinvent the newsmagazine for a new age.