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?

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.

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.

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."

It's been a tumultuous week in the world of women's health. On Wednesday, it was revealed that the breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure had stopped giving grants to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. On Friday, the Komen foundation reversed itself, apologizing for any appearance that it was penalizing Planned Parenthood. Komen says grants will be only suspended to organizations when investigations are criminal and conclusive — not political. Planned Parenthood has been the target of one congressman's requests for financial information.

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 social network filed to go public earlier this week and is hoping to raise $5 billion in a huge IPO. The markets are buzzing, but what might it mean for an individual investor? Melissa Block gets the story on how high profile IPOs work from Dennis Berman, Marketplace editor at The Wall Street Journal.

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?