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The man likely to be China's next leader has vanished, at least from the public eye. He hasn't made an appearance for 10 days and his conspicuous absence has unleashed a wave of rumor and speculation.

Our Beijing correspondent, Louisa Lim, reports on the mysterious case of the missing politician.

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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

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I'm Melissa Block. And we begin this hour with day two of the Chicago teachers' strike. Some 350,000 students are affected by the walkout in the nation's third-largest school district. We'll have a report on how the strike is playing out in the presidential race.

CORNISH: But, first, NPR's Sonari Glinton reports on how parents, churches and local charities are scrambling to figure out what to do with so many kids with nowhere to go.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave his first public interview after his tech company's rocky IPO and the disappointing stock performance that followed. Facebook's share price is now worth about $19 — half as much as it was priced back in May when its stock first went on the market.

Zuckerberg took questions from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt, a San Francisco conference for startups. We watched and listened in to the talk in case you missed it:

Building a mission and business go hand-in-hand

When Scott Van Duzer welcomed President Obama to his pizza shop Sunday with a massive bearhug, it was the beginning of the end of his anonymity.

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A different take on city as melting pot now, in this City Life Snapshot from Austin, Texas.

BALDOMERO FRANK ALVAREZ CUELLAR: I'm Baldomero Frank Alvarez Cuellar, and that's a mouthful. And I am one-half of the owners of Rancho Alegre Radio.

BLOCK: Back in the '70s and '80s, Conjunto music was everywhere in Austin, and Alvarez is trying to bring it back.

The strike going on in Chicago is serious: 350,000 students are locked out and we brought you the news in a post from this morning.

We'll get back to real news in a little. First, here's a bit of levity:

There is a picture from the picket lines on Monday that had Daniel Strauss, who tweeted it, saying, "Civility has disappeared in Chicago Teachers Union protests."

Arctic sea ice has melted dramatically this summer, smashing the previous record. The Arctic has warmed dramatically compared with the rest of the planet, and scientists say that's what's driving this loss of ice.

To be sure, ice on the Arctic Ocean always melts in the summer. Historically, about half of it is gone by mid-September. But this year, three-fourths of the ice has melted away, setting a dramatic new benchmark.

Living next to a noisy highway can be annoying. The racket can also disrupt your sleep.

Too many bad nights' sleep can raise the risk of heart attack, high blood pressure and other ailments.

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Here are some descriptions of a foul smell that has stunk its way across a huge stretch of Southern California.

PAT STEVENS: Rotting fish, sewage, you know.

JOYCE THATCHER: It smells exactly like somebody's septic system overflowed.

SEAN NEALON: Like an old banana under the seat for, like, a week, and it just turns all black and gooey and, like, something's rotting.