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Construction is booming once again in the Gulf Coast, Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. But there are about 20 percent fewer skilled workers in construction than there were in 2008.

The Obama administration began granting deportation relief with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012. But half of the eligible unauthorized immigrants still haven't applied.

Mirren stars as a French restaurant owner in The Hundred-Foot Journey, a film about food, family and the clash of cultures. She says during her first 20 years in film, sets were "very locker roomy."

Most newspapers today are delivered by adults in cars, not kids on bikes. But in Carroll, young people who want to make some money on a paper route are growing up in the right place.

To learn about the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, Melissa Block talks with Deborah Birx, the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator. Birx talks about combating complacency in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

As the percentage of Americans who belong to a church, mosque or synagogue declines, congregations are selling their buildings. Some of those former houses of worship are finding new life.

Dr. Jesse Steinfeld stepped into the role of U.S. surgeon general in 1969. By 1973, he'd been forced out of office. But before he was, he became leading crusader in the anti-smoking movement. Dr. Steinfeld has died at 87; to remember his life and achievements, Audie Cornish turns to Stanton Glantz, professor of tobacco control at the University of California, San Francisco.

The Internet can reside in almost anything inside your home, which heightens opportunities for hacking your personal privacy. Cybersecurity firms face the tall task of keeping you protected.

{LOST AND FOUND SOUND: "VOICES OF THE DUSTBOWL"} -- Today we hear the latest installment the "Lost and Found Sound," series: "Voices of the Dustbowl." In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people from Oklahoma and Arkansas traveled to California, in search of better living. Depression-related poverty and a massive drought and subsequent dust storms had made life impossible for them back home. There were no jobs, and the fields were fallow. California held the promise of work and wages, harvesting fruit and vegetables year-round. Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1940, Charles Todd was hired by the Library of Congress to visit the federal camps where many of these migrants lived, to create an audio oral history of their stories, and to document the success of the camp program to the Roosevelt administration back in Washington. Todd carried a 50-pound Presto recorder from camp to camp that summer, interviewing the migrant workers. He made hundreds of hours of recordings on acetate and cardboard discs. Todd was there at the same time that writer John Steinbeck was interviewing many of the same people in these camps, for research on a new novel called "The Grapes of Wrath." Producer Barrett Golding went though this massive collection of Todd's recordings. Together, they bring us this story, narrated by Charles Todd.

In this latest installment of our series, Lost and Found Sound, producer Brent Runyon recalls leaning how his father taught him how to make a loon call, with tape of the teaching session. In Brent's family, his father could do the call, his grandfather knew how to, Brent's brother can do it, but Brent can't and he doesn't know why. He is the only man in his family who can't make the call. Sometimes he sits alone in his apartment and practices, but hasn't nailed the call of the loon yet. (5:30)Find out more at: http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/001229.stories.html.

John Burnett looks at the worst natural disaster in U.S. history: a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900, killing 6,000 people in the city alone.

Farmers at Smarter by Nature are tending to their community and their crops to cultivate their business. By maintaining a social media presence, the couple has been able to increase their profit during a global economic and health crisis.

NPR's Deborah George tells us the story of pioneering radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was among the first to take her preaching to the radio, bringing innovative ideas to the airwaves. In the first half of this century she was a celebrity of the first order, listened to by movie stars and common folk. She was a striking stage presence who used humor and song to make her message heard. In the first of these two segments, we hear from the movie actor Anthony Quinn who played saxophone at her rallies as a boy in East Los Angeles. He tells us he learned a lot of his stage presence from her -- using pauses and staring at the audience to get attention. We learn how scandal rocked her life. McPherson vanished at Venice Beach and turned up a month later in a Mexican border town with a strange story that few believed. There were rumors she had been seen in a love nest with a married man in California. This shadow over her Godliness was compounded during the stock market crash of 1929 by money woes and family arguments over money. She died in 1944 at age 54, long after her heyday ended.

Eighty-five-year-old Don Hunter plays us a few of his acoustic "trophies" from a lifetime of recording the sounds of his Pacific Northwest. The Eugene, Oregon man has been making stereo recordings of his region since the late 1950s -- and has been interested in sound since he was a boy. We hear a "planer," fog horns and a Douglas Fir being cut down.

Starting in 1935, Don Hunter made a sonic scrapbook of the Pacific northwest. The 85-year-old Hunter still works out of his basement studio in Eugene, Oregon, where he keeps his discs and tapes as trophies. He shares some of those prize recordings with us.

Eric Holder faced scrutiny from the Republican-dominated House Judiciary Committee on Thursday regarding the "Fast and Furious" initiative meant to keep guns from reaching Mexican cartels. Holder denied misleading Congress when hundreds of weapons were found at border town crime scenes.

The U.S. Air Force is accused of dumping the remains of at least 274 troops in a Virginia landfill. The practice, reportedly stopped in 2008, is now being investigated by the military and a special counsel.

The former House speaker, who cheated on his first two wives and was fined by Congress for ethical violations, is outperforming family man Mitt Romney among evangelical Republicans in key states. Says one influential Iowa conservative: "The centerpiece of our faith is forgiveness."

President Obama held a brief but wide-ranging news conference Thursday. He began with a brief statement criticizing Senate Republicans for blocking his nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also responded to questions talked about Iran, Plan B, a proposed extension of unemployment insurance benefits and Osama bin Laden.

Scientists have found what they say is the world's oldest bed: a 77,000-year-old grass and leaf mattress in a cave in South Africa. And the people who made it were crafty: Atop layers of sedge grass were leaves from a plant known to repel insects — key for living in buggy, dank caves.

For the first time, a government study has tied contamination in drinking water to an advanced drilling technique commonly known as "fracking." EPA scientists found high levels of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing in the ground water of a small Wyoming town.

In Nicky & Vera, Peter Sís chronicles the work of Nicholas Winton, who helped hundreds of kids escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939.

The different statements issued by Moscow and Washington after Tuesday's call between Presidents Biden and Vladimir Putin showed where the two can cooperate and where they will likely clash.

Researchers throughout the years have studied the use of curse words and according to some, dropping a well-placed expletive can be a sign of honesty or an indication of a high pain tolerance.

Los Angeles voters elected a progressive reformer to be county district attorney. George Gascón has moved quickly to upend how the nation's largest local prosecutor's office administers justice.