Search results for

Troops loyal to President Bashar Assad are reportedly descending on the city, which has already been the target of attacks from the air.

Greek track star Voula Papachristou has been expelled from her country's Olympic team, after she made a comment about Africans who live in Greece. The comment was widely noticed on her Twitter feed, and resulted in her removal from the London 2012 roster.

The President of Ghana unexpectedly died Tuesday, and Ghana's former Vice-President John Dramani Mahama has been sworn in as the country's new leader. The peaceful transition is in contrast to past coups and political problems. Host Michel Martin recently spoke to Dramani Mahama about the Ghana's turmoil, which he details in his new autobiography My First Coup D'Etat.

Researchers at MIT have developed a pretty nifty computer model to figure out the most influential U.S. airports in the early stages of an epidemic's spread. John F. Kennedy International is No. 1, followed by Los Angeles International. You might be surprised to learn that Honolulu's airport ranks third.

Bishop Leonard Blair talks about his Vatican-ordered assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents 80 percent of Catholic sisters in America. He says the LCWR is promoting a "new kind of theology that is not in accordance with the faith of the church."

The Boy Scouts of America recently reaffirmed its longtime policy of excluding openly gay members. While some praised the group, a growing number of adult Eagle Scouts are returning their badges in protest of the policy, including Kelsey Timmerman, who worries about the moral integrity of the BSA.

As drought and high temperatures continue to devastate much of the country's corn and soybean crops, the USDA reports that food prices will continue to rise at least into 2013. NPR senior business editor Marilyn Geewax and The Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown discuss the rising cost of food.

The crops taking the worst hit from the current drought are the ones we feed to animals, like corn. Higher corn prices mean it can cost more to feed pigs and cattle than they will fetch at market, meaning higher meat prices for all.

Brown expressed his frustration with what's become an intractable problem by dropping a four-letter expletive.

The thought of bagpipes usually conjures up images of Scottish men in skirts — not auto-rickshaws and South Asian spices. But no country manufactures more bagpipes than Pakistan, and no place in Pakistan makes more of them than Sialkot, a bagpipe-crazy city near India-administered Kashmir.