Originally published on Mon April 23, 2012 7:03 am
The denim store in Kobe, Japan, sells jeans for $350. The store is able to sell a pair of jeans for that price because it's tapped into a Japanese subculture that is obsessed by 1950s Americana.
It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Renee Montagne is back with us. Renee, welcome back.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Glad to be back, Steve. Thanks.
Let's begin with one of the most colorful European leaders, who is on the verge of losing his job. Nicolas Sarkozy has walked the world stage with his supermodel wife on his arm.
When John Paton Davies died, he left some unfinished business. His daughter, Tiki Davies, knew he had signed a contract to write a memoir but never finished it. One of her sisters had a carbon copy of the manuscript, which Tiki Davies started typing into a computer.
TIKI DAVIES: What was interesting to me about retyping it is that it's very much in his voice. He was very funny and an elegant speaker as well as a writer. And so I felt as though I had him back for the couple of months I did this.
The home of the Red Sox may be a Boston landmark but it also holds a place in baseball history. The big green wall in left field is known as the Green Monster. Some fans are paying more than $1,000 to sit on top of the Green Monster when the Red Sox play Friday night.
Drummer and singer Levon Helm was a founding member of The Band. Helm and his group played as a backup band for Bob Dylan in the 1960s. Later the band became famous enough to simply be called The Band.
Any documentary about a singer-songwriter can provide great music, but with "Marley" you also get a remarkable personal story. We have a review from our critic Kenneth Turan.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: Bob Marley, who was only 36 when he died in 1981, could be a dusty musical footnote by now. Instead, the enormous popularity of this transcendent reggae superstar shows no sign of going away, and "Marley," a moving and authoritative new documentary, explains why.
Earlier this week, two women took a new approach to raising awareness about Syria's crackdown. The wives of the British and German ambassadors to the United Nations appealed directly to Syria's first lady with a video on YouTube. The narrator calls on Asma Assad to "stop being a bystander" — and to stop her husband and his supporters from continuing the conflict.
More refugees are fleeing the fighting in Syria. Lynn Neary talks to European Union Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Kristalina Georgieva about what officials are doing to help the internally displaced, and those who have fled to neighboring countries.
