All Things Considered

This April, roots-rock singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt released her first album in seven years, Slipstream. It's classic Raitt, mixing bluesy slide-guitar riffs with her soulful voice and a pop-friendly sensibility.

The delivery system, however, is brand-new. After years of working with the majors, Raitt decided to start her own label, Redwing Records. Raitt runs Redwing with the help of a tiny staff; Slipstream is the first release in its catalog.

Republican Mitt Romney was in New Hampshire today, kicking off a five day bus tour that will take him through six battleground states. Romney spoke in Stratham, the same town where he kicked off his second presidential bid nearly a year ago.

NHPR's Josh Rogers was with the Romney campaign. He tells All Things Considered host Brady Carlson about the event.

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.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And we're going to hear now from a human rights activist and blogger in Egypt. Dalia Ziada was part of the protest movement that led to the downfall of President Mubarak. Dalia, welcome back to the program.

DALIA ZIADA: Thank you so much.

BLOCK: And we just heard calls from Egyptians to boycott the election this weekend, people who say it's a sham, that it's all rigged by the military. Do you agree with that?

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.

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.

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.

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.