Morning Edition

Twenty Feet from Stardom, filmmaker Morgan Neville's new documentary, is a reminder that most of pop music's catchiest hooks, riffs and refrains were sung by voices harmonizing in the background. Neville says he wanted to put backup singers — black, female and honed in church — front and center.

"I was really more interested in people who were voices for hire," he says, "who were able to walk into sessions never knowing what they had to do and could bring it."

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. In Stockholm, engineers on the Swedish commuter rail line have found a new way to skirt a dress code. The drivers were told no more shorts, even though the heat in the cab can top 95 degrees - just long pants or skirts. So many of the male engineers are now wearing skirts. Women are allowed to, so the company says it will not discriminate. Something tasteful in an A-line, or pleats, perhaps? It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Sheriff's deputies on patrol in the Florida Keys spotted a deer on the side of a road with an empty bag of Doritos stuck on its head. "It must have wanted the last chip in the bottom," a deputy told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

The story of Venezuela's Eloisa Barrios is especially revealing because so many of her relatives have been killed. Revealing because of who she believes pulled the trigger.

Some weeks ago, Barrios climbed into our van for a drive to a cemetery. The burial ground is outside a village in the Venezuelan countryside. We went there to visit the Barrios family dead.

She told us nine relatives had been killed in shootings over the past 15 years. All nine were young men.

Winners of 14^th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition were announced Sunday night in Fort Worth, Texas. The competition was held over 17 days.

Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine, won the top prize of $50,000, but he said the rankings don't mean that much.

"It's kind of fun for audience, for press. It's interesting to put first, second, 10^th and so on. But in life, not so important," Kholodenko says.

And, he says, so much of life involves competing no matter what you're doing.

City life can be harsh on people. For example, it pushes people to work longer and sleep less. A new study suggests that city life can have a somewhat similar effect on birds too. It shows urban blackbirds wake up earlier and go to bed later than their forest dwelling cousins.

In Sanford, Fla., Monday, jury selection begins in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer charged with shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Police at first declined to charge Zimmerman after the shooting because of Florida's Stand Your Ground law, which gives immunity to people who, fearing for their lives, use deadly force in self-defense.

The Guardian has identified its source for a series of reports it published in recent days on secret U.S. surveillance activity. The paper says the source is Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA who now works for a private-sector defense and technology consulting firm.

As privacy advocates and security experts debate the validity of the National Security Agency's massive data gathering operations, the agency is putting the finishing touches on its biggest data farm yet.

The gargantuan $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City features 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet.

The Utah Data Center is a data farm that will begin harvesting emails, phone records, text messages and other electronic data in September.

In California, a high-profile lawsuit is seeking to halt construction of a new $500 million rail yard next to the Port of Los Angeles. Activists, including a national environmental group that's spearheading the opposition, say the massive project would mean even more pollution for nearby neighborhoods that already have some of the worst air in the country.

On this day 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in an effort to abolish wage discrimination based on gender. Half a century later, the Obama administration is pushing Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to make wage differences more transparent.

Some dispute the frequently cited figure that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. But even those who argue the gap is narrower agree it's most prominent when a woman enters her childbearing years.

For many years, high medical bills have been a leading cause of financial distress and bankruptcy in America. That pressure may be easing ever so slightly, according to a survey released earlier this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But 1 in 5 Americans still face hardships due to medical costs — and African-Americans continue to be the hardest hit.

Syracuse city worker Gary Clifford saw a mother duck leading a dozen little ones down a busy street. He followed in his truck, stopping traffic along the way. Until they walked across a storm drain and four ducklings fell in. Syracuse.com reports a city crew was called in and took the feathered family to a creek.

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Linda Wertheimer.

He has performed around the world for millions of screaming fans. Now, Justin Bieber is taking his talents off the planet. Bieber put a quarter-million dollar deposit on a seat on Virgin Galactic's spaceship. The singer wants to shoot a music video in space.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield already did that last month, singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on board the International Space Station.

It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

This week The Guardian newspaper shared with its readers a document that few people ever get to see — an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court telling Verizon to share countless phone records with the National Security Agency. The White House would not confirm the existence of this surveillance effort, but it insisted Congress is fully briefed about such activities. Members of Congress confirmed that they knew.