For military families with loved ones serving in Iraq, this holiday season comes with varying degrees of relief and anxiety, as the nine-year war in Iraq winds down and deployments come to an end. Members of the Kentucky National Guard, deployed nearly six months ago, are beginning to come home from Iraq.
Brenna Angel, from member station WUKY, has the story of one soldier who has mixed emotions about his desire to serve and the toll it takes on his family.
Capt. Sean Malinowski of the Los Angeles Police Department does his crime-fighting in front of a computer screen.
He's in the LAPD's Real Time Analysis and Critical Response Division, located in a new crime data and analysis center in downtown Los Angeles. Malinowski is tracking two crimes that just occurred in south Los Angeles. Patrol cars are already on the scene. He says this facility is state of the art in real-time policing. He wants the force to be the best in predicting where criminals will strike.
President Obama's campaign is gearing up in the early states ahead of the 2012 election. In Iowa, Obama supporters are hoping to recapture at least some of the enthusiasm that catapulted a young senator from Illinois to victory in the state's leadoff caucuses four years ago.
When I heard Paula Deen was coming to town, the image that leaped to mind was a fried cheesecake, deep-fried. She actually makes this!
At a time when it's trendy to take things out of food (think: gluten-free, sodium-free, fat-free), Paula Deen unapologetically puts it all back in. She loves all that stuff we're told to eat less of: butter, mayonnaise, sour cream. Did I say butter?
Every Monday, Mario Barela heads to a domestic violence shelter on the west side of Phoenix to teach children of abused women how to drum. Their instruments are old paint buckets. They circle up in the cafeteria of the shelter as Barela leads.
(For the safety of families residing there, NPR can't name or share the location of the unmarked shelter or disclose the names of any of the children there.)
After nearly two years of bickering, NBA players and owners are back on the same side.
"We want to play basketball," Commissioner David Stern said.
Come Christmas Day, they should be.
The sides reached a tentative agreement early Saturday to end the 149-day lockout and hope to begin the delayed season with a marquee triple-header Dec. 25. Most of a season that seemed in jeopardy of being lost entirely will be salvaged if both sides approve the handshake deal.
Shoppers flooded stores across the country today as the holiday shopping season officially got under way and people rushed to grab Black Friday deals on electronics, toys and other merchandise.
More than 9,000 people waited outside Macy's Herald Square in New York City on Thursday night ahead of the midnight opening, according to The Associated Press. A Best Buy in St. Petersburg, Fla., had a line nearly 2,000 shoppers deep.
