NPR's Weekend Edition on KUER 1

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The up and down Iran nuclear talks appear to be in a down cycle as negotiators prepare to meet tomorrow in Moscow. Difficult talks in Baghdad last month were followed by contentious comments on both sides. And all this as new oil sanctions against Iran are due to take effect July 1st. NPR's Peter Kenyon has more from Moscow.

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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. Now, to the war in Afghanistan. NPR's Tom Bowman is just back from a month-long reporting trip in Afghanistan. He was out with U.S. troops and Afghan security forces trying to get a sense of how those Afghan forces are doing, since the U.S. is going to be bringing home more than 20,000 troops at the end of the summer. So, the question is: Will security gains last after the Americans leave? Tom is here in the studio to talk about what he saw. Good morning.

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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

The eyes of Europe and global financial markets are on Greece today, where voters go to the polls in a re-run of the May elections that created a political stalemate. The vote could affect whether the debt-burdened country stays in the eurozone, or if it becomes the first member state to leave it.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli joins us on the line from Athens. Good morning, Sylvia. You have been out at polling stations today, what are Greek voters saying?

Oregon and California are locked in a dispute over something that happened 433 years ago, when Sir Francis Drake became the first British explorer to make contact with Native Americans.

It happened on what is now the American West Coast. The question is where? Oregon or California? The National Park Service is now poised to officially recognize one state's claim.

You know things are going badly when the person at the front of the room has to say, "This is not going well." The fireworks at Iowa's Republican State Convention began even before lunchtime Saturday. At one point during the day, the parliamentarian threatened to kick out the next person who tried to speak out of order.

If Saturday's convention is any indication, Mitt Romney may not be in for smooth sailing at this summer's national convention in Florida.

It's a question that kicks around endlessly without resolution: Can men and women really be just friends? On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR's Rachel Martin talks to Faith Salie and Mario Correa, hosts of WNYC's RelationShow, about this very topic.

On-Air Challenge: Every answer is a word, phrase or name starting with the letter "B," ending in "Y" and having "A" and "B" inside, in that order, although not necessarily consecutively. For example, if I said "assistant to a baseball team," the answer would be either "batboy" or "ballboy."

Over the course of 85-year-old Kelan Phil Cohran's long career as an avant-garde jazz trumpeter, he's toured the world, performing with everyone from Sun Ra to Sarah Vaughan.

When not on the road, Cohran has worked as a music educator, teaching music in schools and prisons, and to his own children.

When the 2012 Summer Olympics begin in July, a culinary starting gun will go off: Fourteen million meals will be prepared for spectators and athletes during the Olympic and Paralympic games in London.

The criticism is already pouring in.

Jacquelin Magnay, the Olympics editor at The Daily Telegraph wrote a recent article calling the food to be sold at Olympic venues "bland and over-priced." In response, an Olympic caterer sent her a custom bento box of gourmet delicacies.

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It's a little early in the program for a puzzle, but here's a trivia question for you: How much is an undecillion?

STEPHEN SHANKLAND: The number one followed by 36 zeroes. It's an awfully large number. It's also a trillion trillion trillion.

MARTIN: That's Stephen Shankland of the tech media website C-Net. He's been contemplating those kinds of numbers since the launch this past week of something called IPv6. It's the next generation Internet protocol. Shankland spoke to us via Skype.

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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

Just when it seemed that the fractious between the U.S. and its ally Pakistan couldn't get worse, they have. Calls on Capitol Hill to scale back aid to Pakistan are getting louder. And in the last couple of days, Pakistani officials have derided comments by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta who, on a recent trip to Kabul, said the U.S. was, quote, "reaching the limits of its patience with Pakistan."

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Senator John Kerry is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he is a key U.S. liaison to Pakistan. We asked him how relations stand between the two countries.

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Now, let's turn to how the country sees its own neighbors, Afghanistan and India in particular. This past week, we asked people in the streets of Islamabad whether those two relationships, or the one with the United States is more important.

NISAR SHAH: (Through Translator) I think at this time the most important thing for Pakistan is to make peace with India and other countries in the region. Borders should be opened, economy should be strengthened, and we should get rid of arms race.

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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

Europeans woke up this morning with a couple of big fundamental questions looming over them. Have they saved Spain? And if not, is the eurozone heading for collapse? After weeks of denial, the Spanish government finally admitted what pretty much everyone else already knew: The country's banks need a bailout. The Spanish haven't said how much they need. But eurozone finance ministers had a long conference call yesterday and agreed they'd lend Spain up to $125 billion.

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(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIFE IS A BALLGAME")

SISTER WINONA CARR: Life is a ball game being played each day...

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For visitors and athletes from around the world who will be staying in London this summer for the 2012 Olympic Games, they might be wondering what they're going to eat.

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On-Air Challenge: Given a sentence, change one letter in one word to make a new word which completely reverses the meaning of the sentence. For example, given "The singer is not coming on stage." Changing the "T" in not to a "W" in the word "not" makes the sentence, "The singer is now coming on stage."

Natasha Trethewey is the newly announced, 19th U.S. poet laureate. The position is described by the Library of Congress as "the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans."

Trethewey tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin that it's a lot of responsibility.

"Just trying to be the biggest promoter of poetry; someone who's really got to do the work of bringing poetry to the widest audience possible," she says.

Host Rachel Martin talks to NPR's Mike Pesca about betting on the Belmont Stakes and boxing.

Disappointing. Dismal. Bleak. These are just a few of the words used to describe the latest employment report. It showed that the U-S economy added just 69-thousand jobs in May, less than half of what economists expected. With the unemployment rate now at 8.2 percent, we asked people in Athens, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., how they're faring in this economy.