Karen Kraushaar, a 55-year-old federal employee and registered Republican, has been identified as one of the two women who in the late 1990s settled claims of sexual harassment against 2012 GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, our colleague Liz Halloran reports on the It's All Politics blog and the NPR Newscast.

The National Weather Service is predicting a "historic" storm for the west coast of Alaska. Here's how meteorologists described it to the Alaska Dispatch:

"This is going to be one of the worst storms on record over the Bering Sea," said Bob Fischer, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Alaska. "Essentially the entire west coast of Alaska is going to see blizzard and winter conditions — heavy snow, poor visibility, high winds."

Would President Obama swap Joe Biden for Hillary Clinton on his 2012 ticket? NPR's Political Junkie Ken Rudin is dubious. "Where this comes from I do not know," he declared in his Monday column dismissing the speculation about any plans to replace Biden.

Not all hospital patients are alike. Some are harder to satisfy. Especially those who are admitted to hospitals in and around New York City, Chicago and parts of Florida.

Patients in those places gave some of the lowest evaluations of their hospital stays, Medicare data show. The surveys asked patients how well their doctors and nurses communicated, whether their pain was always handled welland whether their rooms were clean and quiet.

The number of Americans who use food stamps is now close to 46 million, or 15 percent of the population. The government program that provides food stamps is formally known as SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And the number of people who depend on it to buy groceries has grown substantially, even since the recession was officially declared over, back in June of 2009.

Update at 2:26 p.m. ET. In a meeting with Italy's president, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offered to resign after Parliament approved a budget filled with new austerity measures.

The Guardian reports that President Giorgio Napolitano broke the news in a statement that read in part:

Herman Cain definitely doesn't seem to have this crisis-management thing down yet.

He presumably went on Jimmy Kimmel Live Monday evening to fight the latest charge of sexual misbehavior, this one from Sharon Bialek that he made a vulgar and unwanted sexual come-on to her in 1997 when she was seeking his help for reemployment at the National Restaurant Association.

This probably isn't going to satisfy many of those who think of The X-Files as a documentary series, but the Obama administration has now put the White House on record as saying the government doesn't have any evidence of life "out there."

And the Obama team doesn't believe anything's being hidden from us.

Mary, a 46-year-old flight attendant, had a persistent runny nose that was sometimes so bad she had trouble doing her job.

She'd tried antihistamines, nasal sprays and "allergy drops" prescribed by a specialist. None of them helped.