Under pressure from increasingly effective economic sanctions and a growing banking scandal, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went before parliament to defend his government. His Economics Minister was nearly impeached. NPR foreign correspondent Mike Shuster explains Iran's internal power struggles.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Herman Cain's past raises questions about his future. We can't wait auditions as the next yes we can. And Rick Perry takes himself off-base. It's Wednesday and time for a...

GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: Bring it.

CONAN: Edition of the Political Junkie.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: There you go again.

VICE PRESIDENT WALTER MONDALE: When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?

When moms see cartoonist Pat Byrnes on the playground with his daughters, he says they often check the sex offender registries on their cell phones. Byrnes is a stay-at-home dad and creator of a "manly blog of stay-at-home parenting" where he writes not as Mr. Mom, but as Captain Dad.

Women who raise a glass just a few times a week appear to have a higher risk of getting breast cancer than those who are teetotalers.

A study that looked at the drinking habits and development of breast cancer in more than 100,000 nurses found those who drank more had a small but detectable increase in breast cancer compared with those who drank less.

Bill Nighy shot to international stardom after playing an aging rocker in the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually. The part led to roles in the movies Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, Notes on a Scandal, Valkyrie, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Before his film career took off, Nighy acted on the British stage and in television. He returns to the latter in the BBC drama Page Eight, which will be broadcast stateside on PBS on Nov. 6.

Citing stronger economic growth, the Federal Reserve announced it is not making any changes to its monetary policy.

As the AP reported earlier, economists were expecting this wait-and-see approach because they figured the Fed would want time to assess whether its policy from August and September was spurring growth.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion contemplated how the rituals of everyday life were fundamentally altered after her husband died suddenly in 2003. The book was published in 2005, just months after Didion's only child, her daughter Quintana Roo, died at age 39.

Didion pieces together her memories of her daughter's life and death in her new book Blue Nights. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that she was unable to start mourning her daughter's death until she started writing again.

The schedule for the first four Republican presidential caucuses and primaries appeared officially set Wednesday with New Hampshire announcing that it would hold its first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 10.

That would come exactly seven days after the Iowa caucuses, which were moved to Jan. 3, the first Tuesday of the new year, and which will kick off the process by which Republicans will choose their party's nominee to contest President Obama for the White House.

Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was among the head architects of the way America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. She was also at the center of divisive debates within the George W. Bush administration. In her new memoir No Higher Honor, she defends and explains Bush's decision to engage in war in Iraq, and shares how her work took a toll on her personal life. She speaks with host Michel Martin.

As states across the U.S. are redrawing their district lines to account for changing populations, some groups, like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, are pushing for majority-Latino districts. MALDEF says such districts will boost Latinos' political power, but others say it'll bring limited influence. Host Michel Martin speaks with MALDEF President Thomas Saenz and Center for Equal Opportunity Chair Linda Chavez.