All Things Considered

Big K.R.I.T. will turn 26 in August and seems halfway to stardom. His Def Jam debut, Live from the Underground, will feature a B.B. King cameo and is scheduled for a June 5 release. It should hit the charts high.

Although he's never had an official album, he's been releasing free mixtapes regularly since 2005. His 2010 K.R.I.T. Wuz Here won him a contract with Def Jam. 2011's Return of 4Eva made many top 10 lists. And a few months ago, 4Eva N a Day went up gratis after sampling issues held up its commercial release.

From now until November, President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney will emphasize their differences. But the two men's lives actually coincide in a striking number of ways. In this installment of NPR's "Parallel Lives" series, a look at one of those similarities: They both signed health care overhaul laws based on an individual mandate.

Health care has become one of the starkest contrasts between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. And that's surprising, given that once upon a time they both came up with similar plans to fix the system.

Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, says the two men once occupied the same political space on health care.

This is the tale of a single tweet and its far-reaching consequences in China.

In April 2011, retired forestry official Fang Hong posted a scatological tweet, mocking a powerful Chinese politician, Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary.

Fang had been critical of Bo in the past. But last year, he was fired up by what he considered the injustice of a court case taken against lawyer Li Zhuang, who'd been defending an alleged gangster during Bo's clampdown against the mafia. In the heat of his outrage, Fang posted his tweet, which also mocked the powerful police chief, Wang Lijun.

Five years in prison. Then five years of probation and wearing an electronic monitoring device. The shame of being a registered sex offender. Not being able to get a job. His dream of playing in the NFL destroyed, possibly forever.

Brian Banks, now 26, has gone through all that.

Then Thursday, the California man's rape conviction was dismissed. His accuser, who last year sent Banks a message on Facebook suggesting that they "let bygones be bygones," had been videotaped saying she lied about being raped. Wanetta Gibson's previous statements to police about the alleged 2002 incident had been the only evidence against Banks — there was no physical evidence that Banks had raped her. With the change in her story, prosecutors and a judge agreed, there was no case.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. In New York City, a decades old missing child case may have been solved. In 1979, a 6-year-old boy named Etan Patz disappeared as he was walking to school. Thirty-three years later, almost to the day, police say they have a suspect under arrest and his confession. That suspect is Pedro Hernandez, now 51 years old.

RAY KELLY: In the years following Etan's disappearance, Hernandez had told a family member and others that he had, quote, "done a bad thing," and killed a child in New York.

English teacher Eleanor Terry started a Facebook page last fall for the High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn. She uses it for the school's college office to remind seniors about things like application deadlines. The seniors use it to stay in touch with each other.

"There was a student who got into the University of Chicago," she says, "and the way we found out about it was that they scanned their acceptance letter and then tagged us in it."

Most of the school's 320 seniors have friended the Facebook page, but Terry disables the mechanism that allows her to see their individual profiles.

Officials at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard say last night’s fire on a nuclear-powered submarine caused extensive damage, and that seven people, including five firefighters, suffered minor injuries.

Deborah Mcdermott has been reporting on the fire for Seacoast Online. She talks with All Things Considered host Brady Carlson about the aftermath of the fire.

The Democratic Party will hold its national convention in Charlotte this September. The choice of venue was a signal that North Carolina would be a key part of President Obama's re-election strategy.

But the state's Democrats have suffered a few blows lately.

There's the high profile trial of former Democratic Sen. John Edwards. Even more troubling to North Carolina Democrats are the passage of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and a sex-scandal in the state party organization.

To physician Larry Shore of My Health Medical Group in San Francisco, it's no surprise that patients give doctors low marks for time and attention.

"There's some data to suggest that the average patient gets to speak for between 12 and 15 seconds before the physician interrupts them," Shore says. "And that makes you feel like the person is not listening."

A doctor's impatience, though, is often driven more by economics than ego. Reimbursement rates for a primary care visit are notoriously low, and Shore laments the need to hustle patients in and out.

In 2004, singer-songwriter Regina Spektor was a staple of the so-called anti-folk scene when she sat down for one of her first public-radio interviews with the now-defunct WNYC program The Next Big Thing. In the interview, she joked that she stayed up until 3:30 a.m. writing a song, trying not to wake the neighbors, but never wrote anything down.

She still doesn't.

"I try to be better now, at least about recording little things, because sometimes I still have things just disappear," Spektor says in an interview with All Things Considered host Audie Cornish. "You always think, 'Oh, I'll never forget that. That's so obvious.' And then, of course, you forget it."

Shares of Facebook on Wednesday made up a little of the ground they've lost since the company's troubled stock offering last week. But the company and its lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, still face a lot of legal problems.

Some of the investors who bought shares of the company filed a lawsuit alleging that the two companies concealed information about Facebook's expected performance.