Morning Edition

Opening statements will be made Tuesday in the trial of a former Air Force instructor accused of rape and sexual assault of the young trainees in his care.

Staff Sgt. Luis Walker faces 28 charges and could be sentenced to life in prison. A total of 12 Air Force instructors are under investigation for allegedly abusing recruits at Lackland Air Force Base, the main Air Force training center.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he can do better than President Obama at finding jobs for unemployed Americans. One way he would do that is by bringing back personal re-employment accounts.

When people lose their jobs, one of the first places they turn to is their state unemployment office, where they can sign up for unemployment benefits; they often can enroll in some kind of retraining class as well.

In 2004, the Bush administration conducted an experiment to begin privatizing a small part of the federal retraining program.

Sir Elton John is constantly remembering his life as a drug addict, whether he wants to or not.

"I still dream, twice a week at least, that I've taken cocaine and I have it up my nose," John tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "And it's very vivid and it's very upsetting, but at least it's a wake-up call."

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renée Montagne. Former President George H. W. Bush says when he turns 90 he'll celebrate by skydiving. Thrill seeking at 90 is becoming a trend. Thelma Gratch spent her 90th, presumably with arms raised, hurtling down a 230-foot high roller coaster at 80 miles an hour. She's had a season pass to an amusement park outside Cincinnati since 1979 so chances are she's spent other birthdays screaming her head off. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

The late Paul Conrad's 1991 work "Chain Reaction" is a mass of black chain link shaped into a mushroom cloud. It's in Santa Monica, Calif., where people either love or hate it. Now the end of the world has been delayed long enough for the statue to decay.

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Montana is making it easier to hunt wolves. The wolf population has been growing even though wolf hunting is already legal. So wildlife officials are doing away with the statewide kill limit. They are nearly doubling the length of the season and the state will also allow trapping, which many conservationists call inhumane. Here's Dan Boyce with Montana Public Radio.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with Microsoft's moves in the news business.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And let's stay in the land of milk and honey, because our last word in business takes us to a barnyard venture that is solving to very old problems at once. The first is keeping unwanted plants out of a productive vegetable garden. The second, more existential problem is finding a suitable romantic partner. And the last word is weed dating.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

On a Monday, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne.

President Obama will be in the swing state of Ohio again today. He'll be holding his first big town hall meeting of the campaign in Cincinnati. And the president will likely continue his campaign attack against Mitt Romney's record of what Democrats characterize as sending jobs overseas while he was the head of Bain Capital. Over the weekend, the president said he would not apologize for those attacks.