All Things Considered

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

NPR's Kelly McEvers has been following events in Syria from neighboring Lebanon, and she joins me now from Beirut. Kelly, as we just heard, the UN Security Council has failed to agree on a resolution condemning Bashar Assad. Any reaction from Syria?

The U.N. Security Council failed again Saturday to take decisive action to stop the escalating violence in Syria as Russia and China vetoed a resolution backing an Arab League plan that calls for President Bashar Assad to step down. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports the veto drew intense criticism from the U.S.

Boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard remembers the trainer who stood in his corner through some of his greatest fights ever. Along with Leonard, Angelo Dundee trained a long list of boxing champions including George Foreman and the great boxing legend Muhammad Ali. The renowned trainer and cornerman died this week at age 90 at his home in Tampa, Fla.

Nevada holds its Republican caucuses today it is the first Western state to weigh in on the nominating contest. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports that Mitt Romney is widely favored to win and has the latest from Nevada.

NPR's Corey Flintoff reports from Moscow where tens of thousands of demonstrators braved bitter cold to rally for and against Vladimir Putin today. With just one month before a presidential election, the opposition is making a big push for a fair vote, and the government is responding with counter-demonstrations.

Just three days after announcing it would no longer fund cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, the pink-ribboned breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure abruptly reversed course today. But the Komen foundation's actions still leave many questions unanswered — not to mention a public relations challenge.

KUNM’s Gwyneth Doland stopped by Friday to give us an update on what’s happening at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe.  She’s been covering the 30-day session for NMpolitics.net and KNME TV.  Doland spoke to KUNM’s Elaine Baumgartel.

Ron Silver, the owner of Bubby's restaurant in Brooklyn, recently put a word on his menu you don't often see anymore: lard. The white, creamy, processed fat from a pig. And he didn't use the word just once.

For a one-night-only "Lard Exoneration Dinner", Silver served up lard fried potatoes. And root vegetables, baked in lard. Fried chicken, fried in lard. Roasted fennel glazed with lard sugar and sea salt. Pies, with lard inside and out. All from lard he made himself in the kitchen.

Sharon Van Etten was once an aspiring songwriter in Tennessee, but she had no idea how the music industry worked. So she moved to New York City and took an unpaid internship working for a record label.

"I started doing mail orders and then learned my way around the music blogs," Van Etten says in an interview with Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "I didn't know what a music blog was at the time."

Host Audie Cornish talks with Stefan Fatsis about the Super Bowl — the game and the player safety ad the NFL will premiere — to remind fans about the history of the game amid all the concussion scandals.

The New York Giants' Brandon Jacobs is a 6'4", 270 pound running back. And with that kind of size, you think he'd be able to run right through would-be tacklers, especially when he only needs to pick up a few yards. But he often can't — Jacobs's stats are below average in those situations. A couple NFL greats and a physics professor have the answer.

The Obama administration got some got good news early in an election year with the latest jobs numbers and the lowest unemployment rate in three years.

The Labor Department released its monthly report Friday, which shows unemployment down to 8.3 percent. Is the dip strong enough to push the rate down further in the coming months?

Republican candidates are campaigning across the state ahead of Saturday's caucuses. The state looks much different than it did four years ago — today it leads the country in home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and unemployment.

Preschool works. There is a wealth of evidence that early education is key when it comes to narrowing the achievement gap between Latino children and their peers. But across the country and this region, access to quality affordable preschool is lacking. As Jude Joffe-Block reports in this final installment of the Fronteras series on the Latino Achievement gap, a state-funded pre-K program in Nevada that is achieving results. 

Recent fatal attacks on police officers in the Mexican border city of Juarez have city officials on high alert. But despite this latest spike in violence, there's actually been talk around Juarez lately that the worst of times are over. The murder rate last year went down about 30 percent after three years of steady increases.  More people are going out to restaurants, concerts and public events. But are things really getting better? Fronteras Changing America Desk reporter Monica Ortiz Uribe visited one neighborhood in the city's outskirts to find out.  

Leaders of the breast-cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure tried in vain Thursday to contain the controversy stemming from its decision to end its grants to Planned Parenthood.

In an ongoing effort to seal the border with Mexico, the U.S. Border Patrol will build a new substation in the southwestern corner of New Mexico.  It’s one of the weaker points along the border because it’s so difficult to reach. But as Monica Ortiz Uribe reports for the Fronteras Changing America Desk, some residents don't agree with the plan.

In Las Vegas Nevada the heart of the Latino community is Rancho High School.  The school has become a campaign touchstone for politicians courting Hispanic voters. In fact, during the last presidential election, candidate Barack Obama visited Rancho not once, but twice. Yet nearly half of the Latino students who enroll at the school, never finish. 

Several U.S. lawmakers and prominent economists on Monday said Congress and the White House should end a financial conflict of interest at the taxpayer-owned mortgage company Freddie Mac.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Freddie Mac is a gatekeeper in the mortgage market. In many cases, the taxpayer-owned mortgage company controls who qualifies to refinance a mortgage and who doesn't. Well, NPR has learned that Freddie Mac has been making financial wagers, betting against American homeowners being able to refinance. And now some lawmakers want to put a stop to it. NPR's Chris Arnold has been reporting this story in partnership with ProPublica.org. He has this report.

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

And sticking with presidential politics for a moment, speaking a second language has recently become something of a liability for those aspiring to live in the White House. It turns out very few American presidents have had a strong command of a second language, most of them in the early days of the Republic, and that language, it was French.

John McWhorter wrote about this recently in The New Republic, and he's with me now. John, bonjour.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

JOHN MCWHORTER: Bonjour, Guy. How are you doing?

A radical Islamist group in northern Nigeria has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombing attacks last week that left more than 200 people dead. Boko Haram's campaign of violence has left minority Christians on edge in the city of Kano.

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

Just a little more than a day left before voters in Florida have their say in the GOP primary. The latest polls by the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times show Mitt Romney with an 11-point lead over Newt Gingrich, with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul trailing far behind. Newt Gingrich, who's had trouble getting support from establishment Republicans, picked up a nod from a decidedly non-establishment figure - one of his former rivals, Herman Cain.