Business

Congress is set to make a brief appearance in Washington this week, then recess until after Election Day. That means a farm bill is likely to be left undone, just one of the many items on lawmakers' "to-do" lists that won't happen anytime soon.

In Chicago, parents were fuming over a weeklong strike by teachers. Around the rest of the country, in the face of growing evidence that many U.S. students are falling behind, administrators have tried to devise different ways to motivate teachers.

Careful planning can transform the shape and life of a city. But sometimes, a city's features develop spontaneously — like the immigrant enclaves that grow around certain jobs and trades in urban centers like New York.

Occupational cliches have been a fact of life in the Big Apple for generations. Historically, New Yorkers thought of Jewish tailors, Italian greengrocers or Irish policemen, says Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist with the City University of New York.

I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper, but clearly, some people are not Peppers.

Dr Pepper's new Facebook ad campaign featuring an ape moving from all-fours, to seeing a soda on a rock, to an upright man, enjoying a Pepper, is apparently red meat to some creationists who are loudly expressing outrage at the idea that humans evolved from soda-discovering apes.

Demand for Apple's iPhone 5 is expected to be so big that one economist predicted sales could boost the U.S. economy 1/2 percent. And Apple's going to court to shut down what it sees as copycats. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo talks about who's competing with Apple, and whether it's working.

Imagine every thousandth blood cell in your body has a tiny radio transmitter in it. Imagine that 10 times a second that transmitter sends each cell's location to a computer storing the data. Along with position, it also sends the concentration of a list of 10 chemicals encountered at receptors distributed at 10 sites over the surface of each cell. Now imagine following all those blood cells for an hour. That makes a billion blood cells being sampled 10 times a second for 3,600 seconds.

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NPR's business news starts with a delay in Arctic drilling.

A controversial oil drilling project in Arctic waters off Alaska is being pushed back to next year. Oil giant Shell blames a combinations of problems with an oil containment device, drifting sea ice and the need for permits. This is the second delay this year in oil companies search for oil in the Arctic. In July, BP shelved its plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea because of new stricter safety standards. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

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And today's last word in business is: red, white or diet - wine, that is.

Weight Watchers has announced a new line of reduced-alcohol wines soon to be available in the U.K., the wines billed in the trend of popular diet alcoholic drinks in the United States.

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GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has criticized President Obama for not taking a harder line against China. On Monday, the White House announced a new trade complaint over what the administration calls China's unfair subsidies for auto parts. The news came as Obama campaigned in Ohio, where auto parts are big business.