All Things Considered

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This Thursday, when the Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in the health care case, many fingers will be anxiously clicking on the website ScotusBlog. It'll be live blogging starting at 8:45 in the morning, even though opinions don't come down until 10.

ScotusBlog was started in 2003 by lawyer Tom Goldstein, who's argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And he joins me to talk about his website and how it works.

Tom, welcome back.

TOM GOLDSTEIN: Thanks for having me.

The uprising in Syria began in the spring of 2011 when rebellious teenagers scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a wall in the southern city of Daraa.

The protest against their arrest, and the regime's brutal response, sparked the wider revolt. Throughout the unrest, the country's younger generation has been at the forefront of efforts to end the repressive regime of President Bashar Assad.

At a cafe in the heart of Damascus recently, a young man flips open his cellphone to show pictures of people killed in the uprising.

"Actually, they are my friends," he says.

Kaiser Permanente rose out of Henry J. Kaiser's utopian, industrialist dream.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Now to a literary construction zone. Commentator Andrei Codrescu is starting a building project using books.

ANDREI CODRESCU, BYLINE: I put out the word that I'm making a house out of books, and thousands of books started arriving by truck, big publishers' remainders, 100 years of bad taste in hardback. My building made of books grew from a shack to a palace the size of Versailles made entirely out of bestsellers.

Summertime means motorcycles are on the roads — and many of the best roads snake through our National Parks. Officials say motorcycles are a major contributor to noise pollution in the Parks. Find more environmental stories at EarthFix.

The winner of Egypt's first competitive presidential election is the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi. The official announcement was made Sunday to the cheers and jubilation of a massive crowd in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Challenges remain, however, as the ruling military council has effectively stripped the incoming president of most of his powers. The popularly elected Parliament, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, was also dissolved.