Tagged: Los Angeles

President Obama welcomed the Los Angeles Galaxy to the White House today in celebration of their Major League Soccer title.

The team, which has won three cups, is star studded. But there is no one bigger than David Beckham and president Obama took advantage of the opportunity to give the international soccer star a ribbing.

It's a "rare man who can be that tough on the field and also have his own line of underwear," the president said in reference to Beckham's underwear line for H&M. According to the AP, the president also made fun of the 37-year-old's age, saying half his teammates, "could be his kids. We're getting old, David."

The conference finals are underway in the National Hockey League playoffs. In the East, the New York Rangers will face the New Jersey Devils Monday. In the West, the Los Angeles Kings have won Game 1 — beating the Phoenix Coyotes 4-2.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. You didn't think we were going to get through this week without talking about sports.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: Both New York and L.A. host big game sevens tonight - hoops on the West Coast, pucks on the East Coast. NPR's Tom Goldman can open a can of bean dip, sit on the couch, watch the TV and say, hey, don't bother me, I'm working. He joins us from an undisclosed location.

Morning, Tom.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hi. I wake up eating bean dip.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GOLDMAN: Yeck.

School nurse Sherry Medrano has more than Band-Aids stored in her cabinets. She has an armory of birth control options: condoms, the pill, the patch, the ring and emergency contraception.

The teen pregnancy rate in the United States is the lowest it's been in nearly 40 years. However, in some communities, the number of young girls getting pregnant remains stubbornly high.

Planned Parenthood On Campus

Medrano is the chief nurse at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles' predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood. The campus is in what health officials call a pregnancy "hot spot," where teen pregnancy rates are two to three times higher than in other L.A. neighborhoods.

Twenty years ago Sunday, Los Angeles erupted into destructive riots after the verdict in the Rodney King trial. The violence lasted six days and left more than 50 dead and over $1 billion in damage. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates remembers; she lived in the one of the neighborhoods that went up in flames.

Several years ago, I interviewed Karl Fleming for the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots. He was a veteran journalist who'd covered the civil rights movement in the in the 1960s for Newsweek.

Fleming had left the Deep South when his editors decided he needed to be rotated out of there. Riding toward Watts, he told me he was shocked to discover that while he'd left the Deep South for L.A., he hadn't escaped it.