NPR's Morning Edition

China vice President Xi Jinping first encountered America through the eyes of Iowans. In 1985, he was just a mid-level Communist Party official on an exchange trip to the Hawkeye State. At a formal dinner Wednesday night, he fondly remembered his initial visit to America.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Israel says Iran is behind a string of bombing attempts in three cities abroad. And it says Israelis are the targets. Details are still emerging from attacks this week in India, Georgia and Thailand. Steve Inskeep talks David Ignatious, a columnist for "The Washington Post," about the series of attacks that Israel is blaming on Iran.

The Greece debt crisis has forced the country to look to the eurozone for a bailout. But Greece is looking less and less like part of Europe. In the capital Athens, they are still cleaning up from the weekend riots. Even in its tourist precincts, the area is shabby and covered with graffiti.

Congress appears to have avoided another showdown over the payroll tax reduction that has been pumping billions of dollars back into the economy. There may even be a deal ahead on jobless benefits and payments to Medicare doctors.

The last time Congress extended the payroll tax holiday was in December, when it passed a two-month extension tied to two other measures. One extended unemployment benefits, and the second fixed a formula by which Medicare doctors are paid. The Medicare fix would stop big cuts in reimbursements for doctors.

Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne have business news.

New York Fashion Week may be coming to a close on Thursday, but a cycle of fashion shows in cities around the world is just about to begin. Fashion editors and store buyers will descend upon London, Milan and Paris to inspect clothes that may appear in stores next fall. Sally Singer — editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine — is one of those tastemaking jet-setters, and she joins NPR's Renee Montagne to talk about 2012's trends.

On this day 50 years ago, first lady Jackie Kennedy offered a Valentine to America: A televised tour of the newly-restored White House. She had been shocked at how little of the past was in the White House. So she threw her heart into bringing that history back. A record number of Americans tuned in to watch the tour.

The museum's collection includes a wedding dress from a marriage gone wrong. It also includes a shattered garden gnome that a wife had hurled at her husband's car. And then there's an axe a woman used on her ex's furniture.

China's Vice President Xi Jinping visits the White House Tuesday. While in Washington, Xi will discuss a broad range of bilateral, regional and global issues. He'll also travel to Iowa and California. Xi is widely expected to become China's next president.

The natural gas boom in Pennsylvania has new workers flooding into the state. That's causing a housing crunch in some communities, as locals get priced out of the rental market. One rural county in the northern part of the state has opened its first homeless shelter.

About 40 percent of TV households have digital video recorders. Once you have one, you may think differently about the shows you watch. TV critic Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times has found some hidden meanings in the TV series his DVR tapes week after week.

"Relatively few people should start companies," Reid Hoffman says bluntly. And he should know. As a co-founder of popular social networking website LinkedIn and an influential Silicon Valley angel investor, he has engineered several startup success stories — and now he has distilled his business wisdom into a book, The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.

As comedian John Fugelsang recalls, all in life was dandy until one fateful day, at age 6, he noticed an odd motif in some photos: "In every family picture ... my mother was wearing a habit."

Last August, he tweeted his parents' unusual love story — with photos — on the first anniversary of his father's death. In a series of blurbs 140 characters or less, he tells it better than I ever could: