Weekend Edition

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Just two years ago today, the effort to change regimes in many parts of the Islamic world was just beginning. And President Obama was at the U.S. State Department talking about a new chapter in American diplomacy.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region and to support the transitions to democracy. That effort begins in Egypt and Tunisia where the stakes are high.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

We begin this hour in the Middle East, first Iran. This week, the religiously based Guardian Council is expected to announce the final roster of candidates in that country's presidential election. Even though Iranians will go to the polls in less than a month, some of the candidates for the presidency are still waiting for approval to run for office.

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You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. And it's time for sports.

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MARTIN: NPR's Mike Pesca is on the line from New York. Good morning, Mike.

MIKE PESCA: Hey.

MARTIN: There's a little wrestling news to talk about this morning. There was this big landmark wrestling match last week between Iran and the U.S. that took place in Grand Central Station, right?

PESCA: Grand Central, yeah. I was there. The Russians were involved, too, quite exciting.

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There were countless sacrifices made during the Civil Rights movement, in Birmingham, Ala. And for African-American students graduating high school during a particularly turbulent year, one of those sacrifices was their prom. But this past Friday, hundreds of members of the Class of 1963 got to have their night, 50 years later. From Birmingham, Gigi Douban has the story.

GIGI DOUBAN, BYLINE: They arrived at the Boutwell Auditorium in downtown Birmingham, in stretch limos. Some came from Atlanta and Detroit.

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One hundred and forty years ago this month, a German immigrant named Levi Strauss patented the first pair of jeans ever made. During the California gold rush, Strauss traveled across the country to set up a West Coast branch of his family's dry goods business. That business changed forever when Strauss got a letter from a tailor named Jacob Davis.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

Earlier this month, three women held captive for nearly a decade came home. Amanda Barry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from a Cleveland basement where they had been held captive since early 2002. The case has generated worldwide attention, some of it fell on the Cleveland Police Department. Officers there had searched in vain over the years for the missing women. Following a case like this for years demands an emotional investment from investigators.

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That concern is reflected in the Arab media. Ramez Maluf, head of the Department of Journalism at Balamand University in Lebanon, has been tracking that reaction. He joined us from our bureau in Beirut. And I asked him how invested people in the region are in the conflict in Syria.

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I'm sure if I asked him, Will Shortz would probably acknowledge that the same people who really love words and word play also have a special affinity for punctuation. I would put myself in this camp. I have a lot of respect for a well-placed semicolon. But it's really the ellipsis that captures my punctuation imagination. To be honest, I've never much cared for the apostrophe. Maybe it's just too utilitarian.

On-air challenge: Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word starts with H-A and the second word starts with T.

Last week's challenge: From listener Al Gori of Cozy Lake, N.J. Name a famous American man — first and last names. Change the first letter of his first name from T to H. The result will sound like a term for an attractive person. Who is it?

Answer: Ted Turner; head turner

Winner: Vernon Cole, Brownsboro, Ala.

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COLONEL JEANNIE LEAVITT: I was fascinated with flying. I loved everything about flying from the time I was a child. The more I learned about the more I just loved aviation and flying, and that's what made me want to be a pilot.

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Three years ago, Navy corpsman Angelo Anderson was shot in his arm and leg in Afghanistan and he thought he was going to die. Sunday, he's competing at the fourth-annual Warrior Games in Colorado, along with more than 200 wounded service members. Eric Whitney of Colorado Public radio has this profile of Anderson, who credits the paralympic-style competition with restoring him physically and mentally.

NPR's Frank Langfitt and Gregory Warner have teamed up for a series about how myth and money are driving extraordinary slaughter of rhinos. They talk with host Rachel Martin about the issue, which has repercussions from the African continent all the way to Asia.

Our perspectives on personal space — the distance we keep between the person in front of us at an ATM, the way we subdivide the area of an elevator — are often heavily influenced by the norms of the places we inhabit.

Jerry Seinfeld once focused an episode of his sitcom on the concept of personal space, giving us a new term: the "close talker."

President Obama traveled to Central America this weekend, to Mexico and then to Costa Rica, where he met with other leaders from the region. Host Rachel Martin speaks with Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who attended the meeting.

Planet Money's Zoe Chace reports that the immigration overhaul bill proposes doubling the number of skilled-worker visas available to companies that want to hire foreign workers. But the application process is a challenge in itself. (This piece initially aired May 2, 2013, on Morning Edition.)

Brooklyn-based keyboardist and vocalist Xenia Rubinos likes to play with syncopation. Her debut album, Magic Trix, is based around rhythms that sometimes are identifiable as Caribbean, and at other times veer into the experimental.

"It's something I have a lot of fun with — just taking one rhythmic figure and turning it around as many ways as I can," Rubinos says. "That's a huge part of my compositional process, just messing around with something very simple and seeing how far I can take it."

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Six months after Hurricane Sandy, nearly 1,000 New Yorkers are still living in temporary housing, hotel rooms paid for by the city.

DAPHNE MURPHY: My name is Daphne Murphy and I'm from Rockaway Park, Queens.

MARTIN: Daphne and her long-term boyfriend were living in a Rockaway Park bungalow when the storm hit.

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Here in the U.S., the largest Korean population is in California. It's actually the largest concentration outside of northeast Asia. People in that community have been especially alarmed by North Korea's recent threats. But as Doualy Xaykaothao reports from Los Angeles, many Koreans living there think the North's provocations are mostly bluster.

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We wanted to hear what younger people are thinking about when it comes to retirement and the viability of Social Security. Here's reaction from 20- and 30-somethings in Nashville, Tennessee.

ROD KELLY: I don't expect it to be there and I'm not planning on it to be there. I'm doing what I can right now to put into, like, IRA, you know, or Roth funds to make sure that I don't have to depend on it.

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The 78th Annual National Football League players' selection meeting, what you probably think of as the NFL draft, well, it wrapped up yesterday. And NPR's Mike Pesca, who is our top pick, was monitoring as it played out over the last three days.

Hey, Mike.

MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Ah, thank you.

MARTIN: You're welcome.

PESCA: Its swell to be a top pick

MARTIN: It was close.

PESCA: I'm putting on the WESUN hat right now.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

There's been a lot of talk about a red line this past week and whether the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has crossed it. After U.S. intelligence reports came out saying with varying degrees of confidence that Syrian forces have used chemical weapons on rebels and civilians, President Obama said he is still weighing America's response.