Mark Memmott

It's called the Black Hole because "everything goes in and nothing comes out," as founder Ed Grothus told NPR's John Burnett in 2008.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Rushdie Decries 'Mindset Of The Fanatic' That Sparks Anti-American Protests.

-- White House Launching Trade Complaints Against China.

"The White House Monday will demand through a world trade panel that China stop subsidizing auto parts made for export," reports Cleveland's Plain Dealer.

Buckingham Palace is following up its promise to bring a civil suit against the French magazine that published photos of a topless Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) with a criminal complaint that's also been filed in a French court.

According to the BBC:

Anti-American demonstrations tied to the film Innocence of Muslims spread to Afghanistan's capital today, where a thousand or so men and boys shouted "death to America!," burned cars and threw stones at police.

File this under "you think you had a bad day?" and "that was a really dumb idea."

First, a plane headed from Philadelphia to Texas is turned around Thursday because someone called authorities to say a passenger was carrying a "liquid explosive."

It was, as Eyder wrote Thursday night, "one of the convention's most emotional moments."

So here, in case you missed it, is a video clip of former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords leading her fellow Democrats in the Pledge of Allegiance.

President Obama and Vice President Biden are naturally getting the big headlines. But it's former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm who is getting a lot of the buzz this morning for her high-energy address Thursday night at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Thanks to the video archive that C-SPAN helpfully makes available, we've created a clip of her 6 minute, 30-second appearance.

One of the most violent groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan — one which top U.S.

The young Pakistani girl who has been in custody for about two weeks after neighbors accused her of burning some Islamic religious materials has been granted bail by a judge in Islamabad.

But NPR's Jackie Northam reports that the bail set today — the equivalent of about $10,000 — is an "enormous sum here in Pakistan." So it's uncertain whether Rimsha Masih will be out of jail anytime soon.

Good morning.

Some of the early and overnight headlines on posts we've done here and at It's All Politics:

-- High Unemployment & Slow Job Growth: Likely News From Today's Report.

-- Obama: 'Times Have Changed ... So Have I'.

The number of jobs on private and public payrolls grew by just 96,000 in August from July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this morning.

Meanwhile, the nation's unemployment rate edged down to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent the month before. Often, the jobless rate dips even when employment growth is weak because the size of the labor force shrank as many Americans gave up looking for work.

It's a report that will surely add to the presidential campaign rhetoric.

"We heard some facts being spun" Thursday night when President Obama and Vice President Biden gave their acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Convention, report the watchdogs at FactCheck.org.

They and other independent fact checkers have compiled, just as they did at last week's Republican National Convention, a list of those things said by the two parties' standard bearers that don't quite add up or may give misleading impressions.

Some details are emerging from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward's new book about the 2011 battle between President Obama and congressional Republicans over the budget, taxes and deficit reduction.

Joe South, who wrote such '60s and '70s hits as Games People Play and (I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden, died Wednesday of an apparent heart attack at his home in Buford, Ga. He was 72.

Three bits of good news about jobs were just released.

"Private-sector employment increased by 201,000 from July to August on a seasonally adjusted basis," according to the latest ADP National Employment Report.

And ADP revised up its estimate of the job growth in July — to 173,000 from the 163,000 it previously reported.

"The European Central Bank refrained from cutting interest rates today as President Mario Draghi prepares to unveil a bond-purchase plan to save the euro," Bloomberg News writes. It adds that:

The news that Art Modell died earlier today in Baltimore at the age of 87 has produced very different ledes from newspapers in the two cities where the former NFL owner was a major presence.

The Baltimore Sun writes that:

Good morning.

When we heard that astronauts aboard the International Space Station took a spare toothbrush along on a spacewalk today and used it to help clean debris from around some bolts they needed to secure in order to install a power unit, it got us thinking.

Just how versatile are old toothbrushs? We know we've used them to:

-- Clean bike gears.

-- Get grime out of our hubcaps.

-- Get at the crust around a car battery's terminals.

-- Polish jewelry.

The Pacific coasts of Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua are no longer the focus of tsunami warnings, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center announced just after 1 p.m ET.

As we've been reporting, there was a strong — 7.6 magnitude — earthquake in Costa Rica this morning. At first, there were concerns about possible tsunamis from Mexico south to Chile. As the day continued, however, authorities gradually reduced their warnings.

Looking to stem the recent wave of "green on blue" attacks in which men wearing police or military uniforms have killed more than 30 U.S. or other international forces, Afghan officials said today that they have "arrested or discharged hundreds of their country's soldiers," NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Kabul.

An estimated 14.9 percent of U.S. households — 17.9 million in total — "had difficulty" at some point last year getting food because they just didn't have enough money or other resources, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported this morning.

In 2010, 14.5 percent of households were similarly "food insecure" at some point, USDA says.

Even worse:

"For the first time in history," hundreds of millions of people in China are now wealthy enough to buy jewelry, combs and trinkets made of ivory and that's led to a huge spike in the illegal slaughtering of elephants in Africa, The New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman said earlier today on Morning Edition.

Before we run through the news of the day, let's pause for something spectactular: a new video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows a "massive filament" eruption on the sun that occurred last Friday. As Britain's The Register says, it is "mind-bogglingly gorgeous."

Just as they did during the Republican National Convention, independent fact checkers spent the first day of the Democratic National Convention listening for claims that don't add up — and found them.

-- FactCheck.org says it heard "a number of dubious or misleading claims" from the Democrats who spoke on stage Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C. Among the problems it found:

A federal judge in Boston today "ordered state prison officials to provide a taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate serving life in prison" for murder, The Associated Press writes.