Melissa Block

Chemical Weapons Use In Syria Crosses U.S. 'Red Line'

Melissa Block — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:37:00 +0000

Transcript

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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block.

The Obama administration has now joined France and Britain in concluding that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its own people. That crosses a red line that President Obama has repeatedly warned would change the U.S. calculation in Syria. Tonight, the administration announced that it will step up its military support for the Syrian rebels.

On Gun Ownership And Policy, 'A Country Of Chasms'

Melissa Block — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000

The ideological gulf between gun owners and non-gun owners is a wide one — made all the more obvious by the ongoing debate over what, if any, gun control measures should be adopted in the U.S.

Sometimes, the debate feels like people are coming from different worlds, even for people within the same family. And while Americans are often willing to discuss their own views, it's rarer to hear conversations between people who own and love guns and those who do not.

Paul Gwaltney is one of the former.

Among Thousands Of Gun Deaths, Only One Charles Foster Jr.

Melissa Block — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:02:00 +0000

The Morris Missionary Baptist Church is nestled down a red dirt road, in Morris, Ga., set among pine trees near the Alabama state line. Next to the small white church lies its most recent grave site: that of Charles Foster Jr.

While the mass killings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., garnered a frenzy of news coverage, statistically, they are not the norm. Each year, thousands of gun homicides in the U.S. — 11,000 in 2010 alone — attract little or no media attention.

In those killings, the victim is most often a minority male between 15 and 25 years old and shot in an urban area.

A Dash Of Latin Flavor On The Thanksgiving Table

Melissa Block — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 22:15:00 +0000

When Chef Jose Garces, the Philadelphia-based restaurateur and author of The Latin Road Home, thinks back to the Thanksgiving table of his youth, he remembers the turkey, and his father's chicken giblet gravy.

But his parents, who emigrated to Chicago from Ecuador in the 1960s, whipped up Ecuadorean staples as well.

Those might be meat-filled empanadas, or sweet corn humitas — Ecuadorean