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A man in Japan wanted to make it into the Guinness book of world records. He considered trying to drink the most hot sauce, but settled on a spikier record. His hairdo — a mohawk — stands 3 feet, 8.6 inches high.

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This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

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And I'm Steve Inskeep, on a tense day across the Arab world. We're gathering information from Yemen, where hundreds of protestors today breached the wall of the U.S. embassy. Witnesses say they burned an American flag, though it appears none reached the main embassy building. One reporter describes a man in the streets shouting against Jews and Christians, and the reporter adds: This is not the Yemen I know.

Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep speak with NPR's Dina Temple-Raston and Leila Fadel for the latest on the deadly U.S. Embassy attack in Libya.

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NPR's business news starts with a boost for the euro.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: Opponents of the European currency have been dealt a big setback in the Netherlands. The center-right Liberal Party, which favors remaining in the eurozone, won the most seats in yesterday's parliamentary elections.

NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

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Apple unveiled a new version of the iPhone yesterday. The iPhone 5 is thinner and faster than its predecessors. And it joins a tiny handful of new smartphones that run on the super fast LTE network.

To learn more about the wireless networks that are a crucial part of the smartphone experience, we reached Rich Jaroslovsky. He's a technology columnist for Bloomberg News and speaks to us often.

Good morning.

RICH JAROSLOVSKY: Good morning.

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And today's last word in business takes us to the faux Roman Empire that stands for everything that is the opposite of austerity. We are, of course, talking about Caesars Palace in Vegas, baby.

The old adage that politics ends at the water's edge is out. Even before the State Department had confirmed the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney issued a statement condemning the Obama administration.

A handful of executive MBA programs around the country — from Harvard to Michigan's Ross School of Business — are teaching students Buddhist meditation techniques. It's not necessarily about teaching spirituality, but focus. There's no way to quantify whether learning how to be centered during a stressful business meeting is balancing the bottom lines at companies. But students say slowing down does help them be more effective.

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So we've heard the film clips. A bigger question is who is really producing that film. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.

CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: The movie was shot in Los Angeles County sometime last August, under the name "Desert Warriors." It's full of choppy dialogue, bad acting and scenes of a buffoonish Muhammad.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE INNOCENCE OF MUSLIMS")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: And this shall be the first Muslim animal. His name is Yafour. No, Yafour does not like the women.

Most of the election-year attention Ohio gets is focused on the heavily Democratic areas in the northeast around Cleveland, or in GOP strongholds in rural areas and in the south around Cincinnati.

But it's also worth keeping a close eye on the state's less-traveled southeastern border with Pennsylvania and West Virginia — the Ohio River Valley. It's a place where there is a lot of doubt about how much either candidate can help.

Newly released census figures show a long-standing and glaring contrast: A third of families headed by single mothers are in poverty, and they are four times more likely than married-couple families to be poor. The disparity is on the rise, and as the number of single mothers grows, analysts are debating if more marriages could mean less poverty.

Here's a typical Saturday night for a music fan in Manhattan: You go grab some dinner, and then go to a show. You hang out there for an hour or two, enjoy the music and then leave, right? But what would happen if, instead, the musicians onstage took turns soloing for an hour or more apiece, and you wound up staying until dawn?

Samir Chatterjee is a tabla player, and every spring, he invites musicians from India and elsewhere to come to New York for marathon concerts that start in the early evening and last all night long.

We think of the power of the Federal Reserve as the power of money. After all, the Fed is the one institution that can create U.S. dollars out of thin air.

But recently, Ben Bernanke has argued that the Fed has another, critical power: the power of words. And when you're the chairman of the Fed, a few words can go a long way.

Federal Reserve policymakers are meeting in Washington, trying to decide whether — and exactly how — to boost the sluggish economy. Many analysts are expecting the Fed to take action, but they're also beginning to question whether another stimulus program will have any effect.

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United States ambassadors do not always have a close connection to the countries where they serve. Sometimes, the ambassadors are friends of an American president. Sometimes, they're career diplomats who have posted to many countries over the years.

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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And I'm Renee Montagne. All through the morning we've been getting more details about the attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

In the city that was at the heart of the Libyan revolution, protesters killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Here's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne. We come to you this morning with grim news. The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans have been killed when protesters stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The protests were sparked yesterday by an American-made video circulating on the Web that ridicules Islam and the prophet Muhammad.

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Here in the United States, a court has been considering the fate of an iconic fruit. And that's our last word in business today.

Forty-five years ago, the artist Andy Warhol created an album cover for the rock band The Velvet Underground, an album cover featuring a stylized banana. The Warhol banana has remained a popular image, moving from an album cover to iPhone covers.

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep, with Renee Montagne. Let's get the latest, now, from North Africa, in the wake of attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in both Libya and Egypt. In Cairo, as we saw yesterday, protesters went over a wall and took down an American flag. The far more serious attack was against a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where we now know four Americans were killed, including the United States ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News, I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

President Obama - and many other people at this point - have joked that he should name former President Bill Clinton Secretary of Explaining Stuff. Clinton has embraced that role, delivering a memorable address at the Democratic National Convention, and now campaigning for the president in Florida, he will rally the troops in Orlando later today.

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On the face of it, the teacher's strike in Chicago is about money, job security and how teachers are evaluated. But it's also about the political pressure on teachers' unions to make concessions that not long ago would've been unheard of. Teachers' collective bargaining rights these days have taken a backseat to bare-bones budgets and to claims that unions are an obstacle to efforts aimed at improving the quality of schools. As NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports, all these elements have come together in Chicago.

Military commanders, government officials and members of Congress have long wrangled over which weapon systems are needed. Now, there's an argument over what computer software should be provided to soldiers in Afghanistan. It's a defense dispute for the digital age.

In recent years, the ability to analyze data has become almost as important to U.S. war-fighters as the guns they use.

Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, tells us what she's been reading in a feature that Morning Edition likes to call "Word of Mouth."

This month, Brown shares reading recommendations related to the changing role of women, including a book about when the women of Newsweek sued their bosses, an article about a wife becoming the primary breadwinner and another about how a woman's Facebook photo reflects her sense of identity.

'Women In Revolt'