Before there was YouTube or Mythbusters or The Amazing Race, there was Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley.
Ripley's pioneering mix of the strange, the shocking and the barely believable grabbed Americans' attention and grew his newspaper cartoon into a media empire.
LL Cool J has been making music for more than 25 years. Through it all, he says, he's tried his best to remain authentic.
"The last thing that I want to do is be a hack," says the rapper and actor, born James Todd Smith. "Someone who is adapting to whatever the current trend is, and manipulating the public into being on board with me even though, from an artistic standpoint, I'm not doing anything."
Pakistanis voted in parliamentary elections Saturday after a violent campaign season that left dozens dead. NPR's Julie McCarthy is in Lahore and tells Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Arun Rath the latest.
Guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, that's the verdict today against Efrain Rios Montt, a former dictator of Guatemala. The general ruled the Central American nation in the early 1980s, one of the bloodiest periods of its 36-year-long civil war. Rios Montt, now 86 years old, was found responsible for atrocities committed against the Maya Ixil indigenous group. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Presiding Judge Yasmin Barrios read the verdict to a packed audience in the expansive Supreme Court auditorium.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star in Baz Lurhmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby — but the new film's music is so bold it may as well be a character, too.