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  • The plan has been for U.S. and NATO military personnel to be be in Afghanistan at least another two years to advise the Afghan military. Attacks and protests, though, are making it increasingly difficult to perform that mission.
  • The fire killed at least 356 people and now human rights groups are calling for Honduras to reform its prison system.
  • An IPO filing provides a window into wealth. In the case of Facebook, the wealth will likely be enormous and spread across hundreds if not thousands of early investors and employees. The number of millionaires and billionaires in Silicon Valley grew noticeably Wednesday.
  • By agreeing to hear a case on admissions at the University of Texas, the newly energized conservative majority on the high court signaled it may be willing to severely cut back on the use of racial preferences.
  • Nearly a third of people said they'd questioned or refused a doctor's recommendation of painkillers, according to findings from the latest NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll. Fear of addiction and worries about side effects were common concerns.
  • The government is expected to shut down at least 3,000 post offices — and one hobbyist who visits post offices around the country has taken notice. Evan Kalish, who blogs about post offices, has visited 2,745 of them, especially those in danger of closing. He says if he can't save them, he at least wants to memorialize them.
  • A niche industry of tour companies is taking people into wolves' habitat at Yellowstone National Park. Montana Public Radio's Dan Boyce went on an expedition with a man who recognizes the problems wolves bring to the landscape even as he makes his living off of them.
  • Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to fly into space, according to Blue Origin. The company, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its first human spaceflight in July.
  • The iconic 26.2-mile trek through all five of the city's boroughs returned in person on Sunday after it was cancelled last year due to the pandemic.
  • NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."
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