This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, President Obama honored late labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez earlier this week but a new book questions whether the full story of his life and legacy isn't perhaps more complicated. That's in a moment.
More states and cities are turning to casinos to generate revenue and plug budget holes.
The latest to try its luck is Maryland, where groups are waging an expensive campaign over a ballot question that will be put to voters next month. Proponents promise jackpots of jobs and funding for public schools, but analysts say the gamble doesn't always pay off at the levels promised for public coffers.
Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 9:53 am
This interview was originally broadcast on Oct. 11, 2011. The Viral Storm will be published in paperback on Oct. 16.
The New Yorker once called virologist Nathan Wolfe "the world's most prominent virus hunter." Wolfe, the director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, spends his days tracking emerging infectious diseases before they turn into deadly pandemics.
Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 10:14 am
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta delivered a policy speech that he said was a "clarion call" for Americans to take cyber security seriously. Attacks that can cripple a country, he said, are no longer theoretical.
That's Bananas: "Whether [Josephine Baker's] getting a pedicure or she's walking down the street or she's relaxing in a yard somewhere, I just love the variety of pictures of her," Gainer says. "The banana skirt is a part of who she was, it's the most famous thing, but it just annoys me when that's just the only thing. ... There was a lot more to her than that."
Credit Robert Scurlock / The Smithsonian Institution
Actress Fredi Washington circa 1940s. Washington played Peola in the 1934 Academy Award-nominated Imitation of Life.
Credit The Schomburg Center
Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert Delany (brother of the Delany Sisters) overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem in the 1920s.
Credit William Gottlieb / Library of Congress
Duke Ellington, amid "his 20 suits, 15 shirts, suede shoes and his ever present piano" in his dressing room at the Paramount Theater in New York in September 1946.
Credit Robert Scurlock / The Smithsonian Institution
Argentine dancer instructing a group of young women behind her in a dance at Howard University in February 1963.
Credit Scurlock Studios / The Smithsonian Institution
Camille Nickerson was noted for her research on the music and culture of Louisiana Creoles. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Oberlin College and also studied at Juilliard and Columbia University. Nickerson collected, arranged and published Creole folk songs and, during the 1930s to 1950s, lectured and performed as "The Louisiana Lady."
Credit William Lovelace / Getty Images
Lena Horne, the sultry American singer who appeared in several musicals in the '40s and was a regular of the Cotton Club, trying on a dress May 4, 1956.
Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 2:03 pm
I was scrolling through my Tumblr feed a year or so ago, when I saw a photo of Joyce Bryant. The caption said she was once dubbed the "black Marilyn Monroe" and was mentioned many times in Walter Winchell's gossip column.
Nerds, rejoice! It's Nobel season — the Oscars for lab rats, peacemakers and cognoscenti alike. Every fall, big thinkers around the world wait for a middle-of-the-night phone call from Sweden, dreaming of what they might do with the $1.2 million prize.
Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 10:14 am
In a dramatic reversal, Tokyo Electric Power Co. admitted for the first time that if it had fixed known safety issues, Japan's nuclear disaster following the March 2011 tsunami could have been avoided.
The Associated Press says the utility company made the admission in a statement released Friday. The AP reports the company said it delayed implementing the safety measures because of political, economic and legal pressures.
Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 5:18 am
Authorities have arrested three men suspected of having a role in the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old activist who demanded an education for girls.
"Police said the suspects, aged between 17 and 22, had claimed the person who organized the attack Tuesday — in which two other young girls were shot and injured — was a man called Attaullah."