Food and Dining
1:00 pm
Thu September 20, 2012

Linda Gassenheimer’s South Florida “Restaurant Roundabout” 09/20/12

09/20/12 - Thursday's Topical Currents is an edition of our popular “Restaurant Roundabout” with Linda Gassenheimer and dining critics from Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade.  Learn about new hot spots and chefs old favorites and best values. Critics Jen Karetnik, Rochelle Koff and Jan Norris will take calls.  Plus Fred Tasker gives his wine suggestions.  That’s Topical Currents with hosts Joseph Cooper and Bonnie Berman 09/20/12 at 1pm on 91.3 WLRN-HD1 rebroadcast at 7pm on WLRN-HD2.

David Greene is NPR's Morning Programming Host/Correspondent. In this role he is the primary substitute host for Morning Edition as well as Weekend Edition Saturday and Sunday. When he is not hosting he brings his deep reporting talents to these programs.

For two years prior to taking on his current role in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics, east to Siberia. During that time he brought listeners stories as wide ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian Babushkas. He spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli. He was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene's voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his four years covering the White House. To report on former President George W. Bush's second term, Greene spent hours in NPR's spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it's about the size of your average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay – and, of course, Crawford, Texas.

During the days following Hurricane Katrina, Greene was aboard Air Force One when President Bush flew low over the Gulf Coast and caught his first glimpse of the storm's destruction. On the ground in New Orleans, Greene brought listeners a moving interview with the late Ethel Williams, a then-74-year-old flood victim who got an unexpected visit from the president.

Greene was an integral part of NPR's coverage of the historic 2008 election, covering Hillary Clinton's campaign from start to finish, and also focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters' decisions. The White House Correspondents Association took special note of Greene's report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama, addressing the nation's racial divide. Greene was given the association's 2008 Merriman Smith award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America – with a recorder, camera and lots of caffeine – to learn how the recession was touching Americans during President Obama's first 100 days in office. The series was called "100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times."

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration's first term, and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper: Why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in government, Greene worked as the senior editor on the Harvard Crimson. In 2004, he was named co-volunteer of the year for Coaching for College, a Washington, D.C., program offering tutoring to inner-city youth.

Real Estate
9:13 pm
Wed September 19, 2012

Palm Beach County’s Middle Class Still Waiting For Promised “Workforce Housing”

Credit Flickr/Dean Terry

A controversial agreement between Palm Beach County and developers is finally producing reduced-price homes for low- to middle-income families.

It’s just not happening fast enough.

In 2006, at the height of South Florida’s building boom, the county decided to set aside affordable housing for its workforce.  So it struck what sounded like a sweet deal for developers: they could build more houses than usual within certain areas, provided they knock down some prices. 

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Romney in Miami
9:09 pm
Wed September 19, 2012

In Miami, Romney Connects With His Segment Of Latinos

Credit Rick Stone / WLRN
Hundreds braved punishing heat and humidity at El Palacio de los Jugos for a glimpse of Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romey made a stop at El Palacio de los Jugos, or the Palace of Juice, to reach out to Republican Latinos.

El Palacio is a popular Latino spot located on Coral Way in Miami.

Romney was met with an excited crowd at the event. However, experts will probably tell you that this isn't exactly a sign that Romney has a lock on the Hispanic vote.

In fact, polling shows that he doesn’t. With Latinos as a whole, Romney is doing best with South Florida's Cuban Republicans.

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Dirty Politics
9:06 pm
Wed September 19, 2012

Campaign For State House Seat In Miami Becomes Ugly Personal Fight

Credit MyFloridaHouse.gov

One of the ugliest primary races in the state is going on here in South Florida.

Gus Barreiro and Alex De la Portilla, both former Republican state lawmakers, are battling it out for a Florida House seat in Miami.

Their race has become a messy fight with a series of slurs against each man’s moral character.

They also have quite a bit in common.

Both men come from political families, as well as a past as state lawmakers in the Florida Legislature. 

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Early Voting
8:32 pm
Wed September 19, 2012

Florida Starts Early Voting With Dual Election Laws

Credit digitalshaman/flickr
Early voters line up in Aventura, Nov. 2008

Monroe County, and four other Florida counties,  have begun early voting for the August 14th primary. All five are protected by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This means that any new voting law there must be cleared by the federal government.

Last year, state lawmakers passed a law reducing the number of early voting days.

“Until this year, the state has refrained from implementing those changes statewide until it had pre-clearance to do so in the five covered counties,” explains Michael Masinter, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University.

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Whether covering the manhunt and eventual capture of Eric Robert Rudolph in the mountains of North Carolina, the remnants of the Oklahoma City federal building with its twisted metal frame and shattered glass, flood-ravaged Midwestern communities, or the terrorist bombings across the country, including the blast that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, correspondent Kathy Lohr has been at the heart of stories all across the nation.

Lohr was NPR's first reporter based in the Midwest. She opened NPR's St. Louis office in 1990 and the Atlanta bureau in 1996. Lohr covers the abortion issue on an ongoing basis for NPR, including political and legal aspects. She has often been sent into disasters as they are happening, to provide listeners with the intimate details about how these incidents affect people and their lives.

Lohr filed her first report for NPR while working for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and began her journalism career in commercial television and radio as a reporter/anchor. Lohr also became involved in video production for national corporations and taught courses in television reporting and radio production at universities in Kansas and Missouri. She has filed reports for the NPR documentary program Horizons, the BBC, the CBC, Marketplace, and she was published in the Saturday Evening Post.

Lohr won the prestigious Missouri Medal of Honor for Excellence in Journalism in 2002. She received a fellowship from Vanderbilt University for work on the issue of domestic violence. Lohr has filed reports from 27 states and the District of Columbia. She has received other national awards for her coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Midwestern floods of 1993, and for her reporting on ice storms in the Mississippi Delta. She has also received numerous awards for radio pieces on the local level prior to joining NPR's national team. Lohr was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She now lives in her adopted hometown of Atlanta, covering stories across the southeastern part of the country.

Topical Currents
1:00 pm
Wed September 19, 2012

Alex Berzow: The Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left

09/19/12 - Wednesday's Topical Currents looks at the trend of many so-called “progressives” to disregard scientific opinion. One usually thinks of the conservative right disputing evolution, global warming and stem cell treatments . . . but those on the left have railed against vaccines, “green energy” forms and genetically modified foods. We’ll speak with the co-author of SCIENCE LEFT BEHIND: Feel Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, Alex Berzow.

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