A physicist named Dmitri Denisov walks up wooden steps to the top of something that looks sort of like an abandoned railroad bed.

"Wow, look, it's beautiful," Denisov says, gazing out at a pond. "I didn't even know about these flowers."

The tall mound of dirt he's standing on stretches off into the distance, forming a huge circle nearly four miles around — and the inside of this ring is filled with acres of restored prairie.

When planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Father Mychal Judge ran into the North Tower alongside the firemen he served. Not long after, he became the first recorded victim of the terrorist attacks.

But 10 years later, his friends and colleagues remember Judge as vividly in death as they knew him in life: a gregarious, irreverent man wholly devoted to God, whom many considered a saint, in large part because of his own personal struggles.

Priest On A Fire Ladder

From the first, Mychal Judge loved to be where the action is.

A tinderbox landscape and unusually windy conditions have caused more than 60 wildfires to explode across Central and East Texas — creating a hellish Labor Day for thousands of Texans. Two people have been killed so far.

The worst fire is in Bastrop County, just southeast of Austin, where the blaze has been burning out of control for more than a day.

No one in Bastrop has ever seen anything like it. The tall, pine forests that were a favorite getaway for campers and city commuters have erupted into an inferno.

President Obama said Monday that congressional Republicans must put their country ahead of their party and vote to create new jobs as he used a boisterous Labor Day rally to aim a partisan barb at the GOP.

In a preview of the jobs speech he will deliver on Thursday to Congress, Obama said there are numerous roads and bridges that need rebuilding in the U.S., and over 1 million unemployed construction workers who are available to build them.

Pakistan's military announced Monday that the country's main intelligence agency has captured a senior al-Qaida leader responsible for planning and conducting international operations.

Younis al-Mauritani, also known as The Mauritanian, was among three suspected al-Qaida operatives captured in the city of Quetta, which is the capital of southwest Baluchistan and has long been a transit point for militants crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Part of an ongoing series.

Like some 14 million Americans, the people in our series The Road Back to Work started the year unemployed and searching for a job.

Back in January, we gave six people, all living in St. Louis, Mo., digital recorders and asked them to document their experience as they went through the process of looking for a job.

Working, Still Struggling

As the new school year begins, many districts face tighter budgets and difficult choices about what programs to cut, which teachers to keep, and what school supplies to provide. Steve Ellis, principal of Fike High School in Wilson, N.C. and, Walt Gardner and Sean Cavanagh of Education Week discuss the challenges and how they affect students and families.

Rebels in Libya continue to prepare for a final push on Bani Walid, one of the last strongholds of ousted leader Moammar Gadhafi. As rebel forces continue to topple key cities, questions arise about what happens next. NPR foreign correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid and Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, discuss the rapidly evolving situation in Libya and the country's next steps.