All Things Considered on WRVO-1: NPR News

There's just a sliver of light in the eastern sky as the patrol leaves the American compound through a thick metal door.

They scamper across Highway 2, a narrow asphalt road that leads to Kabul, just an hour's drive away — if not for the war. They cross an old graveyard and head toward the silhouette of a tree line, all seen through the eerie green glow of night-vision goggles.

Mississippi lawmakers have embarked on a controversial campaign to discourage older men from having sex with teenagers.

Starting in July, doctors and midwives in the state will be required by law to collect samples of umbilical cord blood from babies born to some girls under the age of 16. Officials will analyze the samples and try to identify the fathers through matches in the state's DNA database.

Fire season is off to an early start in the West. Across California, a hot and dry spring has fire crews on alert. Northeast of Los Angeles, thousands of firefighters are making progress toward controlling the so-called Powerhouse Fire, which has burned more than 30,000 acres and destroyed several homes.

And with no rain in sight, firefighters are out readying homes for a particularly bad year.

Oxana and Pavel Rucsineanu fell in love under the drug-induced haze of powerful tuberculosis medications. It was the summer of 2008. They were both in their late 20s, and they should have been in the prime of their lives.

Jazz musicians Cecile McLorin Salvant and Aaron Diehl, both in their 20s, have already racked up major industry pr

The summertime novelty tune "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" has been pouring out of radios for 50 years now. In late July of 1963, Billboard magazine reported that fans were "actually breaking down doors" of record stores to buy the song about the pains of summer camp.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

I'm Audie Cornish, and we begin this hour with the unrest in Turkey. There have been several days of intense anti-government protests in Istanbul and in the capital, Ankara. A doctor's union is now reporting the first death. A young activist was hit by a car under circumstances that remain unclear.

Syracuse Common Councilor Pat Hogan has officially announced that he'll join the primary for mayor of Syracuse.

Hogan says this election will paint a clear difference between him and Mayor Stephanie Miner, who's running for re-election.

"It's a choice between collaboration or combativeness, constituents or cronyism, community or concentration of power and transparency or closed door deals," he said.

The effectiveness of school suspensions is up for debate. California is the most recent battleground, but a pattern of uneven application and negative outcomes is apparent across the country.

Arthur Geisert is the author of more than two dozen children's picture books. Three of his titles have won The New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book Award. He's most famous for his intricate illustrations of the Midwest — sprawling prairie, family farms and his signature mischievous pigs.

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Litter by Kalad Hovatter of Orange, Calif., and The Shirt by Jennifer Anderson of Shorewood, Wis. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

When freelance journalist Anna Badkhen returned to Afghanistan in 2011, she set her eyes on a region so remote it doesn't exist on Google Maps.

In her new book, The World Is A Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, Badkhen chronicles her time in Oqa - a rural, rainless village of 240 people and "40 doorless huts."

For many of its residents, survival hinges on the fingers of women and children. They engage in the local tradition of carpet weaving, earning about 40 cents a day for carpets that eventually sell for $5,000 to $20,000 abroad.

Eleanor Friedberger was born in 1976, a little too late to have experienced much of that decade's music firsthand. But the singer-songwriter says she quickly made up for lost time.

Friday's tornadoes came less than two weeks after an F-5 tornado destroyed a large section of Moore, just south of Oklahoma City. Both episodes raise two sides of one question: When caught in a tornado's path, should you run or hide?

For Morning Edition the day after the powerful tornado on May 20, NPR's Wade Goodwyn spoke with Molly Edwards, who was covered in pink insulation and standing on the rubble of her home with her family.

It's a good time to be a cyclist in America.

New York kicked off a new bike-sharing program this week, with Chicago and San Francisco both close behind. Those cities are expected to launch similar systems this summer.

The sharing programs are all check-in, check-out systems, with automated stations spread throughout a city, designed for point-to-point trips. "We try to encourage people to use it ... almost like a taxi," says Gabe Klein, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation.

When her beloved Aunt Mary passed away, 15-year-old Sheri Booker sought solace in an unusual summer job — at the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home in the heart of Baltimore.

Booker's new memoir, Nine Years Under, describes the job that became a nine-year career and lifelong fascination with the business of burials.

"After Aunt Mary died, I felt like I needed closure," Booker explains. "I wanted answers. I wanted to make sure that she was in good hands, so I found a way into the funeral home, and it was only supposed to be a summer, but it ended up being nine years!"

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REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN: I will not seek a fifth congressional term to represent the wonderful people of the 6th District of Minnesota.

WADE GOODWYN, HOST:

That's Republican Representative Michele Bachmann announcing her decision in a video released early on Wednesday morning. James Fallows of The Atlantic joins us, as he does most Saturdays. Hello, Jim.

JAMES FALLOWS: Hello, Wade.

GOODWYN: Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party darling - are you surprised?

The city of Istanbul for the fifth time is bidding to host the 2020 summer Olympics. It pitched itself as "an emerged nation" to the Olympic Committee. But at the same time, NPR's Peter Kenyon tells guest host Wade Goodwyn, images of police firing tear gas canisters and water cannons at anti-development protesters seemed to send a different kind of message this week.

Darius Rucker, famous for his rock music with Hootie and the Blowfish, has a third country music album out, called True Believers. He speaks with guest host Wade Goodwyn about his inspiration for the tracks on the album and the wide range of country music styles it covers.

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WADE GOODWYN, HOST:

Coming up, the strange history of tornado preparedness. Why exactly did they tell us to hide in the southwest corner of the basement? This is NPR News.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

And I'm Robert Siegel. It has been another day of terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. Supercells have moved across the state focusing their fury on the Oklahoma City metro area. It was just two weeks ago that another tornado devastated the city of Moore, killing 24 people.

Once again, the long-standing controversy over the name of the Washington Redskins is in the news. In May, 10 members of Congress sent a letter to the team's owner and several others urging a name change.

When a tornado roars into a populated area, the change is often drastic and deadly, and it happens within minutes. As the people of Oklahoma struggle to look beyond this month's devastating storms, residents of Xenia, Ohio, are reflecting on the tornado of 1974.

Xenia, in southwest Ohio near Dayton, became well-known to the nation that year. "Everywhere I go, and I've been all over the U.S., if I say I'm from Xenia people say, 'tornado,' " says Catherine Wilson, who runs the historical society in Xenia. She still gets a lot of questions about the twister.

Marc Fucarile reached a huge milestone this week: He was one of the last two Boston Marathon bombing survivors to be released from the hospital.

Fucarile spent 45 days in Massachusetts General Hospital, and he hopes someday to get back to work with a roofing company.

But first he will have to go through rehab. He lost his right leg, and his left leg was badly hurt. He also suffered head injuries.

Sixteen million men and women served in uniform during World War II. Today, 1.2 million are still alive, but hundreds of those vets are dying every day. In honor of Memorial Day, NPR's All Things Considered is remembering some of the veterans who died this year.

There were no "typical" tours of duty in World War II, but U.S. Army nurse Mildred Dalton Manning's was particularly extraordinary. Manning, along with six dozen other nurses, was held captive by the Japanese for almost three years. The group became known as the "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor."

Americans often think of World War II as the "good war," but historian Mary Louise Roberts says her new book might make our understanding of that conflict "more truthful and more complex." The book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, tells the story of relations between American men and French women in Normandy and elsewhere.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Now, our Friday politics session with columnists E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of the New York Times. Good to see you both.

DAVID BROOKS: Good to see you.

E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, and you've never had your holiday plans spoiled by unforeseen events: bad weather, misplaced reservations. But if you haven't been so lucky, then you may have...

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Vacation horror stories. Nothing tragic, just a cascade of annoyances, a series of unfortunate happenings that ruined a holiday dream but with the passage of time made a swell story.

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s Auburn home is one step closer to becoming a national park and it could mean a makeover for the property.

The bill to designate Tubman’s home a national park will get a hearing by the House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources June 6. Syracuse-area Rep. Dan Maffei sponsored the bill to recognize the leader of the anti-slavery network known as the Underground Railroad.