Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR & Classical Music

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

Just when it seemed that the fractious between the U.S. and its ally Pakistan couldn't get worse, they have. Calls on Capitol Hill to scale back aid to Pakistan are getting louder. And in the last couple of days, Pakistani officials have derided comments by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta who, on a recent trip to Kabul, said the U.S. was, quote, "reaching the limits of its patience with Pakistan."

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Senator John Kerry is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he is a key U.S. liaison to Pakistan. We asked him how relations stand between the two countries.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now, let's turn to how the country sees its own neighbors, Afghanistan and India in particular. This past week, we asked people in the streets of Islamabad whether those two relationships, or the one with the United States is more important.

NISAR SHAH: (Through Translator) I think at this time the most important thing for Pakistan is to make peace with India and other countries in the region. Borders should be opened, economy should be strengthened, and we should get rid of arms race.

On-Air Challenge: Given a sentence, change one letter in one word to make a new word which completely reverses the meaning of the sentence. For example, given "The singer is not coming on stage." Changing the "T" in not to a "W" in the word "not" makes the sentence, "The singer is now coming on stage."

Natasha Trethewey is the newly announced, 19th U.S. poet laureate. The position is described by the Library of Congress as "the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans."

Trethewey tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin that it's a lot of responsibility.

"Just trying to be the biggest promoter of poetry; someone who's really got to do the work of bringing poetry to the widest audience possible," she says.

Southeast of Macon, Ga., near Oglethorpe, rows of peanuts planted six weeks ago have sprouted. Tiny yellow flowers dot the rich-green plants. Donald Chase, his father and grandfather have owned this farm since the 1950s.

Like many southern farmers, Chase objects to the version of the farm bill kicking around in the Senate this week. The bill aims to do away with direct payments to farmers by expanding crop insurance programs.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin.

Disappointing. Dismal. Bleak. These are just a few of the words used to describe the latest employment report. It showed that the U.S. economy added just 69,000 jobs in May. That's less than half of what economists had expected. And this was the third consecutive month of weak results, which raises new concerns about the sputtering economic recovery.