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Amnesty International is urging Iranian authorities not to go ahead with the execution of a convicted drug smuggler after the man survived a botched hanging last week.

The 37-year-old man, identified as Alireza M, was found alive in a morgue after he was hanged at a jail in the northeast Iranian city of Bojnord.

A news release from Amnesty International says:

"According to official state media, a doctor declared him dead after the 12-minute hanging, but when the prisoner's family went to collect his body the following day he was found to still be breathing.

"He is currently in hospital, but a judge reportedly said he would be executed again 'once medical staff confirm his health condition is good enough.' "

A handful of German and Polish residents at a nursing home in the Polish mountain town of Szklarska Poreba play a Scrabble-like game using blocks with large letters.

The seniors are tended to by Polish workers who offer a steady supply of smiles, hugs and encouragement.

Leonardo Tegls says such personal attention makes this nursing home, Sun House, special. The 87-year-old Dutch-born immigrant to Germany says he first learned about the Polish nursing home from a TV ad.

He says he had become too frail live on his own, but his German stepdaughter didn't have enough room to take him in. So Tegls moved 500 miles from Moenchengladbach across the border to Sun House, where he pays a third of what he would spend in Germany.

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Syria's chemical weapons could be consolidated and moved out of the country, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested in an interview with NPR.

Weapons inspectors are still in Syria assessing the country's stockpile and how to destroy it, in accordance with a United Nations Security Council resolution approved in September.

Asked by Morning Edition host Renee Montagne whether the agreement ensures that Syria's President Bashar Assad will remain in power, perhaps for many more months, Kerry replied:

"The fact is that these weapons can be removed whether Assad is there or not there because we know the locations, the locations have been declared, the locations are being secured. And my hope is that much of this material will be moved as rapidly [as] possibly into one location, and hopefully on a ship, and removed from the region."

Talk to economists about the government shutdown's impact on their forecasts and you'll hear this phrase again and again:

Flying blind.

For economists and investors, "at this moment, we are flying blind," said Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and now president of Greenspan Associates LLC, a consulting firm.

Greenspan is not alone in feeling a little lost without the compass of government reports.

"We have not been collecting the data, so we are flying blind," said Diane Swonk, past president of the National Association for Business Economics and an economist for Mesirow Financial, a financial services firm.

Even though federal offices were reopened on Thursday morning, government economists have not yet been able to release their long-delayed reports. For example, the Labor Department's September employment report should have been released on Oct. 4. But when the government shut down on Oct. 1, it sent home the workers who should have been there releasing the statistics.

That employment report is very closely watched by investors. Its regular release — precisely at 8:30 a.m. — has the power to move markets.

But you can't see it yet. The Bureau of Labor Statistics website says the much-anticipated report will be released Tuesday.

At the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which issues reports on international trade, personal income and spending, the website read, "Please Note: BEA is currently assessing the impact of the shutdown and will post a revised release schedule as soon as possible."

The government data points — and their release times — are crucial for making decisions about investments. At BLS alone, this month's missing reports include those that measure wages, job creation, unemployment rates, import and export prices and consumer inflation.

The Government Shutdown

Without Key Jobs Data, Markets And Economists Left Guessing