Robert Siegel speaks with James Varney, a sports reporter for the Times-Picayune, about recent sanctions against the New Orleans Saints and what it means for the fans, players, and the NFL.
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
In Sanford, Florida, the police chief at the center of a controversial killing says he is temporarily stepping down. Chief Bill Lee says he has become a distraction in the case.
Late last month, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, was shot to death. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, claimed self-defense in the shooting. He has not been arrested or charged. The police chief's announcement today follows weeks of public outcry over the officers' handling of the shooting.
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.
Freddie Mac, which has a public mission to help make home ownership affordable, also has placed multibillion-dollar bets against American homeowners being able to refinance to cheaper mortgages. NPR, in partnership with ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom, first revealed Freddie's bets on NPR during Monday's Morning Edition.
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.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg poses at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Feb. 5, 2007. The company is expected to file papers for an initial public offering this week.
Many investors are expecting Facebook to file papers for an initial public offering sometime later this week. The company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room less than a decade ago, is expected to be valued at nearly $100 billion by Wall Street.
And if these early reports are true this is shaping up to be the biggest Internet IPO ever.
"It will be larger than the Google IPO — larger than the Amazon IPO — the largest internet IPO in history," says Kathleen Smith. She tracks initial public offerings at Renaissance capital. "It's rumored that they will seek to raise $10 billion."
Chinese Oreos and news poetry get love from our listeners: Melissa Block and Audie Cornish read emails about Friday's program, in which we heard stories about how the Chinese embraced the Oreo cookie — and debuted a new monthly feature, the news poet.
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.
Everyone knows what an Oreo cookie is supposed to be like. It's round, black and white, and intensely sweet. Has been for 100 years. But sometimes, in order to succeed in the world, even the most iconic product has to adapt.
In China, that meant totally reconsidering what gives an Oreo its Oreoness.
At first, though, Kraft Foods thought that the Chinese would love the Oreo. Who doesn't? They launched the product there in 1996 as a clone of the American version.
Lorna Davis, who is in charge of the global biscuit division at Kraft, says the Oreo did okay. But it wasn't a hit. It was almost pulled out of China.
President Obama flew out to Maryland's Eastern Shore on Friday to fire up his rank and file in Congress.
House Democrats have spent the past few days in their annual retreat, regrouping and strategizing for the year to come. Lawmakers say their hopes for success — in the economy and in politics — depend on sticking together and sending the same message to Americans.
The head of the House Democratic Caucus, John Larson of Connecticut, whipped up the crowd before Obama's speech. Democrats, he said, came out of the president's State of the Union address this week with a fresh message "that reignited and energized this caucus, but more importantly the American people. Inspired, we came here to work!"
An Atlanta woman has told a local TV station that she had a 13-year-long sexual relationship with GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. For several weeks now, Cain's campaign has been dogged by several accusations of sexual harassment. Melissa Block talks with NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea.
When Rachel Martin was given a slot guest-hosting weekends at All Things Considered, she took the opportunity to get a little holiday shopping out of the way. Needing musical stocking-stuffers for a few pesky relatives — her fiance's mom, for example, or her dad, who likes "Tchaikovsky and Johnny Cash" — she consulted NPR Music's Stephen Thompson, and asked him for some tips.
Guy Raz speaks with Samer Shehata, professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, for an update on why Egypt is experiencing more protests and on elections planned for next week.
Last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited SeaWorld following the death of a killer whale trainer. If a Florida court rules in favor of OSHA, employees of SeaWorld and other parks like it will no longer be able to come into direct contact with whales unless there is a barrier between them. Guy Raz speaks to Tim Zimmermann, a correspondent for Outside Magazine, about the ongoing legal dispute.
Photo by Courtesy of the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation
Robert Johnson (left) with Johnny Shines, also a blues guitarist who toured with Johnson in the mid-1930s.
Photo by Fox Photos / Getty Images
Spanish musician and composer Pablo Casals, playing the cello in 1936.
Nov. 23, 1936, was a good day for recorded music. Two men, an ocean apart, each stepped up to a microphone and began to play. One was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain; the other was a guitar player in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. But on that day, Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson each made recordings that would change music history.
Honeyboy Edwards, who died this year, not long after being interviewed for this story, says he first met Robert Johnson in those juke joints: "He wasn't famous then," Edwards says. "He was just a quiet man who played guitar."
Melissa Block talks with John Seabrook, staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest article, "Crunch," delves into the world of the SweeTango — a new hybrid apple that is part Honeycrisp, part Zestar. It's sweet and tangy. There's a hint of cinnamon, a hint of pineapple and a whole lot of crunch.
Twentieth-century Russian music is often thought of as dark and brooding, a reflection of life under the thumb of a brutal state. When it was funny, it usually had a kind of gallows humor.
Yet many of the same composers whose concert works often reflected a dark reality also wrote cartoon music for kids. Thursday night, the Brooklyn Philharmonic is playing some of these cartoon scores in Brighton Beach — the heart of the Russian-American community in New York City. For some of its creators, cartoon music offered a certain kind of escape.
"I could be wrong, you know:" John Hodgman notes that while his book That Is All is intensely concerned with "the coming global superpocalypse," it also contains much information about travel and sports and wine, and is "not depressing."
If there's anything guaranteed to lift the heart of an NPR nerd, it's the sound of All Things Considered'sRobert Siegel losing his composure. This is a news anchor, after all, who can deliver the song title "Party 'Til You Puke" with all the gravity of a president announcing the death of a hero. (No, really. This happened.)
This round of Three-Minute Fiction attracted 3,400 original stories. NPR's Bob Mondello reads an excerpt from Sleep Lessons by Chad Woody from Springfield, Mo., and Susan Stamberg shares parts of The Edge by Andrew Morris from Andes, N.Y. To see these stories and others go to npr.org/threeminutefiction.
From cubicle farms to auto factories, accommodating larger and heavier employees has become a fact of life. One in three U.S. adults is obese, and researchers say the impact on business can be boiled down to a number: $1,000 to $6,000 in added cost per year for each obese employee, the figure rising along with a worker's body mass index.
Studies estimate the total cost of obesity to U.S. employers — including lost productivity — at $73 billion a year. But that figure doesn't include some of the smaller ways the workplace is adapting.
