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Portland's NBA team is riding a hot streak. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Tom Goldman about the Trail Blazers, a new champion in chess, and how John F. Kennedy's assassination set a precedent for how sports commissioners handle cancelling games after tragedies.

While the high-level meetings raise expectations for a deal, the State Department warned against jumping to conclusions. The last time, Kerry was in Geneva, negotiations crumbled at the last minute, when France objected to certain terms.

The anti-poverty group Oxfam is asking Pepsi's shareholders to approve a resolution that, if passed, would force the company to disclose its sugar suppliers and investigate whether those suppliers are implicated in "land grabs" that unfairly take land from the poor.

The relationship between the two countries has been strained every since Mohammed Morsi was deposed.

After one of his top aides was detained by the government, opposition leader Henrique Capriles dared them to imprison him. Nicolás Maduro, who won the presidential election against Capriles, was recently given the power to rule by decree.

A former Massachusetts chemist is now behind bars because of sloppy drug testing that went on for years, compromising up to 190,000 criminal cases and costing the state millions of dollars. The scandal raises questions of accountability in forensic labs around the country.

In Afghanistan, a grand assembly of some 2,500 tribal elders, politicians and civil society elites are meeting to decide whether to approve a security agreement with the United States. Approval by the grand assembly, called a loya jirga, would be in addition to the OK of the Afghan government. But as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has noted, the agreement can't go forward without the backing of the Afghan people. The security agreement would allow as many as 9,000 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after the current NATO mission ends next year. Those troops would continue to train Afghan forces, but also conduct limited counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida fighters.

On the 80th birthday of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki — whose music helped make The Shining so terrifying — NPR's Arun Rath considers how the classical music of Penderecki's generation has been shaped by real-life horror.

Spain's dictator Francisco Franco set the country's clocks an hour ahead in World War II in order to be aligned with Hitler's Germany. Memo to Spain: the war is over, the Nazis lost and it's OK to turn back the clocks now.

Hondurans vote for a new president on Sunday. Crime, gangs and drug cartel violence have made it among the most dangerous countries in the world. If that weren't enough to drive voters to the polls, Honduras's economy is nearly bankrupt, and more than half of the country lives in poverty.