A key federal panel Wednesday recommended the Food and Drug Administration approve the first new weight-loss drug in more than a decade.

At the conclusion of a day-long hearing, the FDA's Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee voted 20-2 to endorse a request from Vivus to approve the drug Qnexa. The same panel gave a thumbs-down to Qnexa in 2010.

Qnexa is a combination of two generic drugs that are already on the market:

Don’t mean to overreact and risk boosting everybody’s blood pressure higher than opening offers on Facebook’s IPO, but this might be a halfway decent time to seek out a nice, safe, steel bunker to hunker down in or behind, because it’s awards season and heavy metal statuettes are being tossed around like dimes at a county fair. Like the flurry of résumés from the outer office of Michele Bachmann’s inner circle. As plentiful as the doubts currently circling Mitt Romney’s Super PAC.

On the next Voicebox, hear Stanford Music Professor Stephen Hinton discuss the vocal music of Kurt Weill and the singers who have helped to seal the German composer’s reputation over decades. 

Weill's Voices on Voicebox, Friday, February 24, from 10-11pm at 91.7FM or www.kalw.org.

The top lawyer at the Pentagon offered a strong defense of the Obama administration's targeted killing program Wednesday, arguing the use of lethal force against the enemy is a "long-standing and long-legal practice."

In a speech at Yale University's Law School, Jeh Johnson said there's no real difference between high tech strikes against members of al-Qaida today and the U.S. military decision to target an airplane carrying the commander of the Japanese Navy in 1943.

Now just about everybody should be getting vaccinated against whooping cough.

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are recommending all adults 65 and older be immunized against whooping cough, or pertussis.

The panel is expanding an earlier recommendation that seniors be vaccinated if they have contact with very young infants. Adults and teens have been on the recommended list for years already.

It's that time of year again — the time when the sports world starts to zone in on basketball's March Madness, hockey's playoff push, baseball's spring training ... and monster trucks. That's right, it's prime time for four-wheeled contraptions that specialize in crushing each other.

While it may be hard to get past the deafening radio ads, a funny thing can happen on the way to a Monster Jam show. It turns out that young fans' giddiness over the awesome destruction they're about to witness can be pretty contagious.

Not all that long ago, many Americans thought of Chinese food as fried rice, chow mein and orange chicken. And one reliable place to find it was at the mall, at places like Panda Express.

But food court mainstay Panda Express is now in the midst of a major transformation. That means moving from mall basements to stand-alone restaurants and keeping pace with an increasingly sophisticated American palate.

Wednesday marks the traditional Tibetan New Year, but many Tibetans won't be celebrating. They'll be mourning the almost two-dozen people who set themselves on fire in the past year as a protest against Chinese rule. Eyewitnesses say the town of Aba, site of many of the self-immolations, resembles a Chinese military camp, with soldiers and riot police every few feet. NPR's Louisa Lim traveled elsewhere on the Tibetan plateau to cover the story and sent this dispatch.

A team of United Nations nuclear experts has returned from Iran empty handed. In a statement today, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran refused the team access to a military site at Parchin.

The statement read in part: