NPR News

In the aftermath of the mass shooting in a Colorado theater, the hoopla surrounding a blockbuster movie opening was toned down, and theaters around the country began beefing up security.

Warner Bros., the studio behind The Dark Knight Rises, canceled Friday night's red-carpet premiere in Paris. It also called off a press conference with the director and the stars.

By just minutes, Jessica Ghawi escaped a mass shooting in Toronto, last month. She chronicled the experience on her blog.

She wrote that at 6:20 p.m., she bought a burger but instead of sitting down to eat it at the Eaton Centre food court, she went outside to get some fresh air.

"The gunshots rung out at 6:23," she wrote. "Had I not gone outside, I would've been in the midst of gunfire."

The Boston Globe reported new details Friday about Mitt Romney's lingering ties to his private equity firm, Bain Capital, after he left Boston to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

The Globe says Romney was "not merely an absentee owner" between 1999 and 2002, despite financial disclosure forms that say he "has not been involved in the operations" of Bain Capital "in any way," for more than a dozen years.

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CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here's your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you, Carl.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Thank you. Thank you everybody. I will tell you, I am just as excited as you are, because the guest on our show later on will be someone who's dear to my heart, Norton Juster. He's the author of "The Phantom Tollbooth." That was my very favorite book when I was a kid.

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PETER SAGAL, HOST:

We want to remind everybody they can join us here most weeks at the Chase Bank Auditorium in beautiful downtown Chicago, Illinois. For tickets and more information, you go to wbez.org, and you can find a link over at our website, which is waitwait.npr.org.

Right now, panel, of course, it is your turn to answer some questions about the weeks' news. Jessi, the company responsible for the Your Baby Can Read products announced it was going bust this week, after people finally realized what?

JESSI KLEIN: Their baby cannot read.

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CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell. We're playing his week with Jessi Klein, Brian Babylon and Paula Poundstone. And, here again is your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you, Carl.

(APPLAUSE)

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PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Now, on to our final game, Lightning Fill in the Blank. Each of our players will have 60 seconds in which to answer as many fill in the blank questions as he or she can. Each correct answer now worth two points. Carl, can you give us the scores?

CARL KASELL: Paula Poundstone has the lead, Peter. She has four points. Jessi Klein has three. Brian Babylon has two points.

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PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Now, panel, what is in Mitt Romney's tax returns? Paula Poundstone?

PAULA POUNDSTONE: The story of a little fella who dreamed of making lots of money, and did.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Jessi Klein?

JESSI KLEIN: Last year, his largest multimillion dollar investment was in a very rare Beanie Baby.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: And Brian Babylon?

BRIAN BABYLON: He actually bought the phantom tollbooth and tried to write it off as a tax write-off.

(LAUGHTER)

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PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Coming up, it's Lightning Fill in the Blank, but first it's the game where you have to listen for the rhyme. If you'd like to play on air, call or leave a message at 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. Or you can click the contact us link on our website waitwait.npr.org, there you can find out about attending our weekly live shows at the Chase Bank Auditorium in Chicago.

Transcript

CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell. We're playing this week with Paula Poundstone, Brian Babylon and Jessi Klein. And, here again is your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you, Carl.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: In just a minute, Carl is chosen to be Mitt Rhyme-Ney's running mate.

(LAUGHTER)

Cable news channels tend to treat intellectuals gingerly — as fragile curiosities or as targets for ridicule — when they appear at all.

Not MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry. This newly anointed cable host commutes 1,300 miles each week for her eponymous program of opinionated conversation, interviews and essays that runs live for two hours each Saturday and Sunday morning.

It's hard to listen to the 16-minutes of audio coming from the Aurora Police dispatch. It begins with the first reports of a shooting at a movie complex.

At about two minutes into the recording, you hear reports that "someone is spraying gas." Then as police begin arriving at the scene, they start asking dispatch to send more officers, to send more ambulances.

"I got people running out of the theater that are shot," one officer says.

As Mitt Romney has faced questions about his investments and tax returns, the likely Republican presidential nominee has responded with two words of explanation: blind trust.

Romney keeps most of his wealth in a blind trust designed to prevent him from knowing exactly where his money is and what it's doing. It's a long tradition for presidents and candidates, though anyone can set one up if he wants to.

But it turns out that not all blind trusts are equally blind. Some are cast into complete and utter darkness. Others are more nearsighted.

Few governors have been as vocal and as unequivocal in their opposition to the federal health care law as Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Perry, a Republican, has vowed not to expand Medicaid and not to create an insurance exchange. Consumer advocates in Texas say the Perry administration has also been dragging its feet when it comes to insurance rate review.

Two-Way readers were immediately struck by a sense that the victims of the Aurora, Colo., shooting could have been anyone, as well as shock that something as simple and fun as going to a movie could turn violent without warning:

The world record for high jump — the event in which a person hurdles himself over a horizontal bar — is just over 8 feet. That's like leaping over a stop sign, and clearing it by a foot. Jesus Dapena, of Indiana University, has studied the high jump for 30 years, filming athletes to understand exactly how they produce the force required to clear the bar.

Florida's Aquarius Reef Base is the only working undersea lab left today. But now that federal funds have dried up, it may be forced to surface. Oceanographer Sylvia Earle joins Science Friday from inside Aquarius, 60 feet underwater, to talk about sponges, corals and other life she's observed on the reef.

Antarctica has 90 percent of the world's ice--and it's melting. Ice sheet guru Bob Bindschadler talks about climate change in Antarctica, and rising sea levels across the globe. Plus, biologist Diana Wall talks about hidden life in the barren Dry Valleys, and microbe hunter John Priscu talks about "bugs in the ice."

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(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PERCEPTION)

ERIC MCCORMACK: (As Doctor Daniel Pierce) In this class, we're interested in what goes on in the brain. And if we were to put someone in an FMRI machine and watch what happens when they make up a lie, we'd see their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex light up like a Christmas tree...

(LAUGHTER)

MCCORMACK: (As Doctor Daniel Pierce) ...because we use our brains when we lie. We use our brains when we're being lied to. But can the brain ever lie to itself?

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Engineers say technologies like spray-on clothing and 3D-printed shoes could help future Olympians break records. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers' Philippa Oldham discusses how technology impacts sporting performance and why engineers should work closely with regulators.

How does blood doping boost performance in events like the Tour de France? Do anabolic steroids help the world's fastest man run faster? In his book, Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat , Chris Cooper discusses how these banned drugs work, or don't — and how they are detected.

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney who was in Bow, New Hampshire for a campaign event addressed the mass shooting in Colorado, during a speech this afternoon.

Romney said he was addressing the nation, not as "political candidate," but as "a father, a grandfather, a husband, an American." Now, he said, "is the time to look into our hearts and remember how much we love one another and how much we love and how much we care for our great country."

Sylvia Woods, known as the Queen of Soul Food, died yesterday at age 86. She opened the legendary Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem 50 years ago, around the corner from the Apollo Theater, and it soon became a gathering place for prominent African Americans, politicians, and foodies of all ages and races.

(Updated @ 1:11 pm ET)

As deeply as the mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., shocked the national conscience, they also quickly affected the U.S. political scene, with both major party presidential campaigns ripping up their scripts for Friday, and the mayor of the nation's largest city using the issue to put the candidates on the spot on gun control.

At the core of the Israel-Iran dispute is the latter's nuclear program. But it's been playing out in a strange way, in a shadow war that stretches across continents.

Almost immediately after a bomb killed several Israeli tourists and wounded more than 30 on a Bulgarian bus Wednesday, Israel blamed Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

Mitt Romney, under attack over taxes, Bain and outsourcing, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month. But he's still tied with President Obama in nearly every poll. Plus, we weigh in on potential veeps, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin await their convention invites, Harry Reid complains, and Anthony Weiner mulls a comeback. Really.

Join NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving in the latest installment of the It's All Politics podcast.

Authorities have identified 24-year-old James Holmes as the suspect in the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

According to witnesses, the gunman showed up at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire. Quoting a federal law enforcement official, the AP reports the gunman had an assault rifle, a shotgun and two pistols."

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Eight hours ago, a gunman burst into a packed movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, tossed in a can of tear gas, and then opened fire. Those in the audience had lined up hours in advance to get seats for the world premier of the Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises." Many were dressed festively, in costume, but the movie and the evening ended in horror.