All Things Considered Sunday

The second biggest soccer tournament in the world — the Euro 2012 — wraps up Sunday in Kiev, Ukraine. One of the marquee names for the Italian side is Mario Balotelli. Born to parents from Ghana, Balotelli is constantly harassed by racist fans and sometimes by players on the field. Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan speaks with Daniel Taylor of The Guardian about Balotelli's hot temper and how the taunts sometimes take their toll.

Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan talks with Heidi Cullen, chief climatologist at Climate Central, a non-profit science journalism organization in Princeton, New Jersey. They discuss wildfires and extreme heat in the Midwest this week and how these climate conditions are tracked by Earth-observing satellites.

One night a little more than two years ago, a 24-year-old man was rushed into the emergency room at Tulane University Medical Center in Louisiana. He was extremely agitated and hallucinating.

Dr. Corey Hebert figured the man was on drugs, probably PCP or a stimulant. But a few minutes later, the man became paranoid.

"He started doing some self-mutilating actions [and] was pulling out his eyebrows and eyelashes," Hebert tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan.

Billy Lynn is a 19-year-old college dropout living in the small Texas town where he grew up. After he's arrested for trashing the car of his sister's ex, he's given two choices: face jail time or enlist in the Army.

He chooses the Army. And Iraq.

Author Ben Fountain's debut novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, is the story of what happens to Lynn after he joins Bravo Company in the early years of the Iraq war.

Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan talks with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. They discuss the decision of the Supreme Court to uphold the Affordable Health Care act, Chief Justice John Roberts' role on the court and what the decision means in this election year.

Transcript

LAURA SULLIVAN, HOST:

A story now about women overlooked by history. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, dramatized in the 1976 movie "All the President's Men."

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (as Character) Woodward.

ROBERT REDFORD: (as Bob Woodward) Yeah?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (as Character) There's been a break-in at the Democratic headquarters. There's been an arrest.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Character) Local Democratic headquarters, yeah.

Metric has long been identified as an indie-rock band, but it recently embraced the "indie" part of that descriptor in a big way.

For their last album together, the band's members formed their own company — Metric Music International — to distribute the record, organize a tour and handle promotion without a label's support. The result was the biggest album of Metric's career: Fantasies sold half a million copies worldwide.

On the day after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of President Obama's health care law, Washington returned to business as usual.

In other words, supporters of the law were busy praising its virtues, and opponents calling for its demise.

Over at Georgetown University Law Center, several health law experts got together to dissect the court's ruling and what it might mean down the line.

It's a bit less likely now than a week ago that you'll hear people accuse the Supreme Court of being politicized.

That's because this week, the court ended its session with two controversial decisions — neither one of which was decided on the usual and predictable split between the five justices appointed by Republican presidents and the four appointed by Democrats.

But that doesn't make the court any less of a political animal.