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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep, with Renee Montagne. Good morning.

Let's try again, shall we, to explain what it means when we hear that the U.S. economy shrank in the fourth quarter of 2012. As we've discussed elsewhere in the program, the decline was slight - just one-tenth of a percentage point - but it is the first contraction of the economy since the Great Recession officially ended in 2009. NPR's Jim Zarroli is with us once again in New York. Jim, good morning.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Good morning.

Can Mark Sanford make a comeback? Right now, it appears quite possible.

The Republican ended his career as South Carolina's governor in disgrace after revealing in 2009 that he'd been surreptitiously spending time in Argentina visiting his mistress. But Sanford now hopes to return to his first job in politics, representing coastal South Carolina in the House.

"As soon as Sanford jumped in, he was the presumptive front-runner, simply because of his money and name recognition," says Scott Huffmon, a pollster based at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

We all know what fueled the sexual revolution: birth control and rock 'n' roll.

But what if that's not the whole story? What if America's libido was liberated not by the pill and heady doses of Jim Morrison, but by the lowly prescription drug penicillin.

Before penicillin was found to be effective against syphilis during World War II, sex brought with it the risk of syphilis, a disease that can cause blindness, dementia and paralysis.

After bad news about late 2012 — that the U.S. economy shrank a bit in the fourth quarter — there's modestly good news about early 2013:

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports, its first quarterly contraction since the second quarter of 2009.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

The Caravan of Peace is an annual march at the Vatican. As Pope Benedict looked on, two doves, symbolizing peace, were released into St. Peter's Square. It was beautiful until a seagull assaulted one of the doves. Time magazine got one of the finest headlines ever seen outside The Onion: Pope's Dove of Peace Attacked by Seagull of Irony. But the symbolism grew deeper when the surprisingly tough Dove of Peace fought off the much larger seagull.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne with gnomes in the news. This time, about 2,300 tiny paintings of gnomes have appeared on utility poles all over Oakland, California. Since the little guys showed up last year, full-sized residents got into the spirit - blogging and tweeting new sightings. Pacific Gas and Electric was going to evict the bearded figures, but when the anonymous artist appealed, PG&E backed off. Yesterday it declared the poles gnome-man's-land. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

A witness in the latest court-martial of a Lackland Air Force Base training instructor told a jury Tuesday that she was afraid to tell the instructor to stop touching her because he was her superior.

The command-directed investigation last fall found that command failures and gaps in institutional safeguards allowed a culture of abuse and secrecy to grow at Lackland.

Staff Sgt. Donald Davis is the seventh MTI to go to trial in the growing sex scandal at the nation’s Air Force boot camp training facility.

If you've earned a paycheck in recent years, you'll probably want want to know about this:

The Equifax credit reporting agency, NBC News reports, has collected 190 million employment and salary records on about one-third of U.S. adults and has sold some of the information "to debt collectors, financial service companies and other entities."