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Portland's NBA team is riding a hot streak. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Tom Goldman about the Trail Blazers, a new champion in chess, and how John F. Kennedy's assassination set a precedent for how sports commissioners handle cancelling games after tragedies.

Writer Nicholas Dawidoff spent a year living with the New York Jets and came away with a respect for players and coaches that not all fans will like. NPR's Mike Pesca says Dawidoff's new book, Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, demystifies the game as it entrances.

The island village of Patchogue, N.Y., appears to be an all-American suburb. But in 2008, it was the site of a brutal murder that left residents struggling to reconcile deep-rooted issues of racism and hatred with the town's idyllic appearance.

The Shenzhen-based company BYD started producing cellphone batteries and moved to electric cars. Now, it's rolling out a fleet of electric buses in the U.S., a first for a Chinese auto manufacturer.

After one of his top aides was detained by the government, opposition leader Henrique Capriles dared them to imprison him. Nicolás Maduro, who won the presidential election against Capriles, was recently given the power to rule by decree.

A former Massachusetts chemist is now behind bars because of sloppy drug testing that went on for years, compromising up to 190,000 criminal cases and costing the state millions of dollars. The scandal raises questions of accountability in forensic labs around the country.

In Afghanistan, a grand assembly of some 2,500 tribal elders, politicians and civil society elites are meeting to decide whether to approve a security agreement with the United States. Approval by the grand assembly, called a loya jirga, would be in addition to the OK of the Afghan government. But as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has noted, the agreement can't go forward without the backing of the Afghan people. The security agreement would allow as many as 9,000 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after the current NATO mission ends next year. Those troops would continue to train Afghan forces, but also conduct limited counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida fighters.

On the 80th birthday of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki — whose music helped make The Shining so terrifying — NPR's Arun Rath considers how the classical music of Penderecki's generation has been shaped by real-life horror.

Friends, X-Men, notables of the British Empire: Now Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart have teamed up again on Broadway this season, performing two classic plays in repertory — Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land.

Spain's dictator Francisco Franco set the country's clocks an hour ahead in World War II in order to be aligned with Hitler's Germany. Memo to Spain: the war is over, the Nazis lost and it's OK to turn back the clocks now.