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The rumor mills in China are in overdrive this week, with speculation about the health and whereabouts of the heir to China's top leader. Just weeks before Vice President Xi Jinping is expected to be elevated to head of the party, he seems to have disappeared. He's been mysteriously out of sight since last week when he missed an important meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and also the Prime Ministers of Denmark and Singapore.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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And I'm Renee Montagne.

Here's some troubling news. Ice covering the Arctic Ocean has melted more dramatically this year than ever before. This year's loss of ice has exceeded the previous record by an area the size of Texas. NPR's Richard Harris reports.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News, I'm Renee Montagne.

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And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

President Obama - and many other people at this point - have joked that he should name former President Bill Clinton Secretary of Explaining Stuff. Clinton has embraced that role, delivering a memorable address at the Democratic National Convention, and now campaigning for the president in Florida, he will rally the troops in Orlando later today.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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And I'm Renee Montagne. We're getting more details, this morning, on the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the consulate in Libya. They died at the hands of protestors in Benghazi, protesting an American-made video that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad. The responses are coming in, this morning, to those deaths, from the White House, from President Obama, from Mitt Romney, and also Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.

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It was four years ago this week that the big Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Its collapse sent shockwaves around the world and brought on the worst of the financial crisis. But the story didn't end there. Lehman Brothers is still in business - sort of.

Planet Money's Adam Davidson went to its offices in New York, and is here to tell us about it.

Good morning.

ADAM DAVIDSON, BYLINE: Good morning.

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After a scandal, somebody finally gets rich for doing the right thing. It's NPR's business news.

A former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, has just been awarded $104 million by the IRS. That is believed to be the largest amount ever paid to an individual whistle-blower. Birkenfeld told the IRS how a Swiss bank was helping thousands of Americans evade taxes, and was then thrown in jail.

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NPR's Wendy Kaufman has more.

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Here in the United States, a court has been considering the fate of an iconic fruit. And that's our last word in business today.

Forty-five years ago, the artist Andy Warhol created an album cover for the rock band The Velvet Underground, an album cover featuring a stylized banana. The Warhol banana has remained a popular image, moving from an album cover to iPhone covers.

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Foreign policy has not played much of a role in the presidential campaign, but we have a reminder this morning of how important it is to any president. And today we continue our series on foreign policy and this fall's election. We're going to focus on Russia. As NPR's Corey Flintoff reports, no matter who wins, Russians are worried.

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep, with Renee Montagne. Let's get the latest, now, from North Africa, in the wake of attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in both Libya and Egypt. In Cairo, as we saw yesterday, protesters went over a wall and took down an American flag. The far more serious attack was against a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where we now know four Americans were killed, including the United States ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.

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Three weeks remain in Major League Baseball's regular season. Can't promise that September will end as dramatically as last year, but things are looking pretty interesting. An expanded post-season will make this year's playoffs a little different, and NPR's Mike Pesca is with us for some analysis. Mike, good morning.

MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello.

INSKEEP: OK, five teams from each league make it to the post-season this year. How does that change things?