NPR News

You know that shortage of nurses people have been warning about for about the last decade or two? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Soul music lost one of its great voices last week. Singer Howard Tate died Friday after a battle with cancer at the age of 72. Tate had made his name with a string of classic records including "Get It While You Can," before sliding into obscurity and addiction. But Tate got sober, found religion and he enjoyed a successful encore career over the past decade.

Tate's first turn at the music business came in 1966, when the single "Ain't Nobody Home" hit the R&B charts.

We don't usually share local crime stories, but two of them stuck out today. And one of them provides some hope. We'll start with the sad one:

Fox 8 Cleveland reports that a burglar has "ruined" Christmas for a Painesville, Ohio family. The burglar allegedly broke into the home, took their TV, an Xbox, a laptop and worst of all perhaps, then took all the newly-bought presents underneath the Christmas tree:

The United States and dozens of other countries convened in Bonn, Germany, Monday to discuss Afghanistan's future. But Pakistan, a key player in any Afghan settlement, boycotted the conference.

Pakistani leaders were deeply angered by the killing of 24 of their soldiers in a NATO airstrike along the Afghan border last month.

Many in Pakistan say relations between the United States and Pakistan have never been worse, though there may be signs of a coming thaw.

Envoys from dozens of countries and international organizations meet in Bonn, Germany, hoping to chart a path to peace for Afghanistan. But the conference has been marred by the absence of Pakistan, furious over NATO airstrikes that left two dozen of its soldiers dead last week.

Robert Siegel speaks with Julia Ioffe, Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker, about the riots in Moscow.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration, who among other duties is in charge of the nation's air traffic controllers, was charged with driving while intoxicated Saturday night in Fairfax, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C.

And Federal News Radio says Jerome "Randy" Babbitt has now been "placed on a leave of absence." The Associated Press reports that the leave was "at Babbitt's request."

Over the weekend, the company that runs the Japanese nuclear plant crippled by the earthquake and tsunami in March said they had detected another leak of radioactive water. This time, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) said, 45 tons of contaminated water had been found outside the cooling system and about 300 liters of it had leaked into the Pacific Ocean.