Weekend Edition Sunday features interviews with newsmakers, artists, scientists, politicians, musicians, writers, theologians and historians. The program has covered news events from Nelson Mandela's 1990 release from a South African prison to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Weekend Edition Sunday debuted on January 18, 1987, with host Susan Stamberg. Two years later, Liane Hansen took over the host chair, a position she held for 22 years. In that time, Hansen interviewed movers and shakers in politics, science, business and the arts. Her reporting travels took her from the slums of Cairo to the iron mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula; from the oyster beds on the bayou in Houma, La., to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park; and from the kitchens of Colonial Williamsburg, Va., to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
In January 2017, Lulu Garcia-Navarro became host of Weekend Edition Sunday. She is infamous in the IT department at NPR for losing laptops to bullets and hurricanes. She comes to Weekend Edition Sunday from Rio de Janeiro where she was posted as NPR's international correspondent in South America. She has also been NPR's correspondent based in Mexico and spent many years in the Middle East based in Israel and Iraq. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring began and spent months painting a deep and vivid portrait of a country at war. Her work earned her a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, and an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement. She has received other awards for her work in Mexico and most recently, the Amazon in Brazil.
Every week listeners tune in to hear a unique blend of news, features and the regularly scheduled puzzle segment with Puzzlemaster Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks Marina Diamandis, who performs as MARINA, about her new album "Princess of Power."
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Oklahoma City is getting ready for Game Seven of the NBA finals. The city has never won the title. Fans hope this will be the year.
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The Pentagon provided a briefing on the U.S. airstrikes on Iran Sunday morning, after President Trump took direct action for the first time in the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the role Russia and China could play in de-escalating the Iran-Israel conflict.
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The Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., includes a section of graves of LGBTQ Americans. We take a pride month tour.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, about the regional impact of American strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks Middle East analyst, author, negotiator and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Aaron David Miller for his views on the U.S strike on Iran.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks Arash Azizi, who studies both Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian opposition, what Iran's next moves may be now that the U.S. has struck its nuclear sites.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Sarah-Masha Fainberg, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University, about Israel's next moves after the U.S. bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities.
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A heat wave is moving across the U.S., resulting in both high temperatures and dangerously high humidity. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with meteorologist Ben Noll of the Washington Post.