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.
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Activists in Iran say the government there is cracking down in an effort to undo infiltration by Israeli intelligence.
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The Kremlin is using the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum to showcase remaining allies and address questions of recession.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks with Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, about how U.S. strikes on Iran could impact nuclear proliferation globally.
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After six weeks of testimony, prosecutors and defense attorneys delivered their closing arguments in the federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean Combs last week. While the jury deliberates his judicial fate, one verdict we don't have to wait for is the one coming from the court of public opinion. NPR Music's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento and Rodney Carmichael explain why discussion of the trial within an ecosystem of podcast and YouTube hosts have made it loud and clear that we're in a post-MeToo era.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to R.T. Thorne about "40 Acres," his post-apocalyptic directorial debut.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks Cato Institute immigration expert David Bier how much the Trump administration's mass deportation program could cost.
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The huge tax and spending bill currently before the Senate is likely to pass into law. It may prove controversial enough to be a drag on Republican candidates.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to C.J. Chenier and Joel Savoy about the new album celebrating Clifton Chenier, "A Tribute to the King of Zydeco."
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In 2021, an Afghan man who helped the U.S. military narrowly escaped Afghanistan with his family, but was forced to leave several children behind. He struggled to reunite his family in the U.S.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe asks SEAD Consulting's Erin Williams, whose company tests seafood, how often U.S. restaurants use farmed and imported shrimp rather than local and wild-caught shrimp.