National News from NPR

The deficit-cutting supercommittee re-emerges Wednesday morning with its first public meeting in more than a month. The group is charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions by late November. If it fails, automatic, across-the-board cuts follow.

Ari Shapiro speaks with San Francisco Chronicle reporter Matthai Kuruvila about Tuesday's dramatic clashes between police in Oakland, California, and protesters supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, host: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Ari Shapiro.

RENEE MONTAGNE, host: And I'm Renee Montagne.

The European Union is facing the worst crisis in its history and it has to the potential to affect us all. The meltdown in Greece could eventually imperil the entire global financial system. Today in Brussels, Europe's leaders will make another attempt at finalizing a eurozone survival plan. But time is short and the stakes could not be higher. The key players have big national issues to worry about.

Consumer Reports has come out with its ranking of car reliability. Toyota's Scion brand topped the list. Luxury carmaker Jaguar was at the bottom. Chrysler was rated most improved.

Ten years ago, on Oct. 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act.

Congress overwhelmingly passed the law only weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. It's designed to give the FBI more power to collect information in cases that involve national security.

But in the decade since then, civil liberties groups have raised concerns about whether the Patriot Act goes too far by scooping up too much data and violating people's rights to privacy.

Nicholas Merrill is one of the people sounding an alarm.

For those of you desperately missing basketball during the NBA lockout, an antidote to your hoop pangs is on the way: A musical comedy about basketball will open for previews on Broadway on Nov. 12. It's called Lysistrata Jones and is based on the original Lysistrata, which, of course, was written by Aristophanes back in 411 B.C.

Twice a year, Google releases aggregate data on requests it receives from governments across the world. It's part of a project they call "Transparency Report."

In its latest release, Google says the number of content removal requests it received from the United States increased by 70 percent from the previous six months. And the number of user data requests jumped by by 29 compared to the previous reporting period.

Flu shots are safe, cheap and pretty much universally recommended.

But how well do they really protect us from getting sick?

The most comprehensive review to date, just published online by The Lancet, suggests that flu vaccines aren't as effective as many of us have thought.