All Things Considered

A few short weeks ago, the Greek politician Alexis Tsipras was a young rebel leading Syriza, a fractious leftist coalition best known for anti-austerity protests. Now, his party could come in first in Sunday's election.

The party's possible win alarmed the German edition of the Financial Times as it posted an online appeal in Greek calling on voters to resist his demagoguery.

But Tsipras, a civil engineer who has been involved in leftist politics since his teens, says his program to roll back austerity will save the euro from its ballooning debt crisis.

Many states have done nothing to implement the health overhaul law, saying they'll wait to see how the Supreme Court rules.

Not California.

The country's most populous state got out in front first on implementing the law, and it hasn't slowed down in recent weeks as the rest of the country waits to hear from the high court.

In an interview with All Things Considered's Audie Cornish, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the administration's decision to defer the deportation of some young illegal immigrants is a part of a "strong enforcement" of immigration laws.

She said that this administration has stymied illegal border crossings and stepped up deportations of criminals.

"Strong enforcement also embodies looking at different categories differently when the facts justify that we do so," Napolitano said.

June 18 will mark 200 years since the start of the War of 1812. One of the most epic battles of that war took place in the Chesapeake Bay, only a few miles away from the young American capitol. A small, scrappy U.S. flotilla took on the British, who at the time had the world's largest and powerful Navy. The flotilla's flagship, the U.S.S. Scorpion, met a watery grave — but on the occasion of the bicentennial of the war, it is slated for excavation. Marine archaeologist and historian Donald Shomette joins Melissa Block to talk about the Scorpion and the fates of those who manned it.

Second of a two-part story. Read Part 1

In some countries of Africa, there's a land rush under way as investors claim farmland, establish mega-farms and try to cash in on high prices for food and biofuels. These deals are controversial. Critics accuse investors of dispossessing subsistence farmers.

Katerina Margaritou and Elias Tilligadas live in Athens. They're getting married next Wednesday — three days after the Greek election that has the global economy on edge.

Katerina is a chemist, and she works for a company whose main customer is the Greek government. The Greek government, of course, is broke. So Katerina hasn't been paid since last year.

"I'm very happy because I'm getting married," Katerina told me this week. "But I'm very sad because at the moment I cannot buy a dress. My boss promised me that he's going to give money to buy a dress. So I'm waiting."

All eyes these days are trained on the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule sometime this month on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

But some people are waiting more anxiously for the court to rule than others. Among them are those with a major financial stake in whether the law goes forward or not and if so, in what form.

If you've had a manicure in California, odds are the person at the other end of the emery board was of Vietnamese heritage.

Vietnamese immigrants now dominate California's nail-care industry — and make up a significant percentage of all manicurists nationwide.

The story began with a hurried immigration after the fall of Saigon almost four decades ago.

Sparked by the interest of a group of refugees and the help of a Hollywood star, the demand for affordable manicures quickly became the foundation of the American dream for many Vietnamese newcomers.

As car companies struggle to meet growing demand, the third shift is making a comeback. But many factories running on three shifts are doing it differently from in the past. And that new "three crew" shift pattern could make what's normally a hard job even harder.

At Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, employees work 10-hour shifts four days a week. The so-called A crew gets days, while the B crew gets afternoons. But the C crew shift rotates its start time every week. On Fridays and Saturdays, workers start at 6:00 a.m. On Mondays and Tuesdays, they start at 4:30 p.m.

Alaska Natives are twice as likely to get colon cancer and die from it as the white population in the United States. When Mayo Clinic doctor David Ahlquist took a trip to Bethel, Alaska, in the mid-1990s, that startling statistic caught his attention.

"Here they had one of the world's highest rates of colon cancer and one of the world's poorest outcomes in terms of survival from cancer, because of late diagnosis," Ahlquist says.

First of a two-part series. Read part 2.

In these days of financial uncertainty, the hot new investment tip is farmland.

Today at All Things Considered, we continue a project we're calling NewsPoet. Each month, we bring in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end of the day, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's stories.

Jamie Lynn Stevenson can still remember the smell of walnut meringue cookies wafting from her great-grandmother's kitchen. The "little piles of heaven," also known in her family as bussels, or "kisses" in German, were dense but chewy, with hints of caramelized nut flavor inside.

"I was just salivating waiting for them," Stevenson recalls. "And the great thing about these cookies is that they didn't take very long to bake!"

While Mitt Romney has a virtual lock on the Republican presidential nomination, fans of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas aren't quite giving up.

While they know he won't be president, they're still working to promote Paul's ideas. And they've started with state conventions, like the one in Iowa this weekend, where political observers are anticipating some fireworks.

7 a.m. June 15. IMPORTANT UPDATE: 'Forest Boy' Is A Hoax, Police Say.

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Take a look at the face.

If you've got any clue as to who this young man is, police in Berlin want to know.