State and National News

Here's a clip of President Obama's interview with ABC News:

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Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

The beauty industry has lost one of its titans. The hair stylist Vidal Sassoon died today at his home in Los Angeles after suffering an undisclosed illness. He was 84. NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Vidal Sassoon was emblematic of an era.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHE LOVES YOU")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: One, two...

THE BEATLES: (Singing) She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. She loves you...

Once upon a time, CIA operations were secret.

But as the latest bomb plot in Yemen shows, little stays hidden for long these days.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, even the most sensitive intelligence operations quickly become daily fodder as the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet and media-friendly politicians give the story momentum. And it's often senior government officials and the intelligence community who spread the juiciest details.

The ancient year marked seasonal changes with special festivals and rituals. Beltane, one of four quarter-day festivals, is recreated today in the modern Scottish capital with festivities to re-establish Edinburgh residents' links with the natural year. Join in our celebration with a Beltane-themed hour of music.

The planned downsizing of the U.S. Postal Service, which wants to shed thousands of jobs and reduce hours at post offices, struck Baltimore native Eric Easter at his core.

For him, it will mark the end of an era in which a post office job has meant stability and a path to a better life, as it did for him and his six siblings living in public housing in the 1960s.

In an interview with ABC News, President Barack Obama said, "It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." NPR's Ken Rudin discusses the president's comments.

1. Ryan Seacrest's double/triple/quadruple fakeouts. Our host used to screw with the contestants by teasing the results before throwing to a guest performance or commercial. Now he gives those results using sentences so convoluted, with so many double-backs and twist-arounds, that you need a white board to diagram them and unpack their actual meaning. Frustrating the singers, yes. Confusing them entirely, no.

Many headlines and stories (including some of ours) have been saying that a "double agent" infiltrated al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and foiled a plot to get another underwear bomb aboard a U.S.-bound passenger jet.

But we've been looking at definitions of spy terms and think that based on what we have been told so far, the person at the center of the story wasn't a double agent.

That character was at least an "agent."

In an interview with ABC News, President Obama declared his support for gay marriage. This marks a departure from the president's previous stance, which has repeatedly been described as "evolving."

Here's the money quote from ABC's OTUS blog: