News & Politics
Weekend America on News & Politics
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Moving Into Miami's Foreclosed Homes
New numbers on foreclosure rates came out this week, and Florida has risen to the number two spot. One in every 173 homes there is now in foreclosure, and that rate is not looking to get better in the near future. That adds up to a lot of empty houses in Miami, a place where there are a lot of homeless families as well. One local activist has decided to match the two together.
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Dear Dad: A Christmas Card
We're getting into the thick of the holidays. Maybe you've already spent some time shopping for gifts. Maybe you've started receiving a few holiday letters or cards. Sometimes these letters are incredibly personal - and not always in the best way. Sometimes they even reveal family secrets long buried. Raluca Oncioiu, whose family is originally from Romania, received one such Christmas card.
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The Death of News?
In light of the Tribune bankruptcy and the massive loan the New York Times just leveraged on its own building, the future of daily journalism looks to be on life support. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Weekend America's Ben Adair debunks the top three myths of the media meltdown and tells us why reports of newspapers' demise have been severely exaggerated.
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Chicago Politics
Early Tuesday, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was led away in handcuffs by federal authorities, and he's now charged with a conspiracy to sell off the US Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Obama. We check in with Chicago Public Radio political reporter Ben Calhoun for a sense of how the scandal is affecting Chicago so soon after the glow of Obama's victory.
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Reflecting on Mumbai
London had the 7/7 bombings. Madrid had the 3/11 train bombings. America had September 11th. And while India has suffered bombings before, last week's terrorist attacks were something else altogether. Brooklyn-based Indian-American poet Vijay Seshadri lived through 9/11, and this weekend, he talks about what the events in Mumbai mean for him and the poem that helps him get as close as he can to understanding it all.
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Obama's Team of Rivals, Getting Paid for Good Grades, and Bratz
Our panel of non-experts weigh in on this week's news events in a parlor game to gauge what kind of week America had. Joining us on this week's panel are: author and New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee; television host Sofia Dickens; and Luke Burbank, who hosts the radio show "Too Beautiful To Live" in Seattle.
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Your Take on the New American Car
The CEOs of Ford, Chrysler and GM are driving back to Detroit this weekend after asking Congress a second time for billions of dollars to avoid bankruptcy. We still don't know if Congress will say yes. In the meantime, you sent us your best ideas about how to make American cars inspiring and awesome again. Here are some of our favorites.
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Voter Intent
For most of the country, the 2008 election is over. But not in Minnesota. After nearly three million votes were cast in Minnesota's US Senate race, incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman leads his Democratic challenger Al Franken by only 215 votes. The state has finished hand counting all the ballots, but there's still no winner.
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Letters: Survivors of Suicide, Axl Rose, and a Post-Election Mixtape
Quite a few listeners have had strong emotional reactions, both happy and sad, to certain parts of the show recently. In fact, there may have been some crying and laughing. We hear your responses to our segments on survivors of suicide, Axl Rose's editor and our post-election mixtape.
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Inside Blackness: Two Coopers, Two Continents
Helene Cooper, author of "The House at Sugar Beach," was raised in Liberia and is now the diplomatic correspondent to The New York Times. As part of our series Inside Blackness, she sat down with Weekend America's Desiree Cooper to discuss the psychological difference between being raised as a black person in Africa versus the United States.
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America's Infrastructure: Urban Drains
This week in Missouri, a constitutional amendment goes into effect to help cities access more money for drainage projects. In an effort to get to the bottom of what the amendment aimed to do, reporter Adam Allington did a little urban spelunking into the miles of storm water drains running underneath the city of Columbia, Mo. He met up with a guide to help him find his way.
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The Real Recession
If you didn't get the news this week, we're officially in a recession. Yes, we dropped the R-word. But does it actually mean something different now that we know the recession is real? To help process what all this means we spoke with Dan Ariely. He's a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and a regular Marketplace commentator.
