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Nathan Hoskins knew from an early age that he was gay. But when he was growing up in rural Kentucky, his mother took extreme steps to convince him otherwise.

"When I was in sixth grade, I had met a good friend and he wasn't interested in girls," Hoskins, who's now 33, tells his friend Sally Evans. "One day, he said, 'I have a Valentine's Day card for you.'"

"I asked him for it, and he said it was so special that he mailed it," he says. "And he didn't know he'd done a very terrible thing because at my house only one person got the mail — and that was my mother."

Was Mitt Romney a job-creating turnaround artist? Or was he, as some on the campaign trail have said, a "vulture capitalist"? That question has become a top issue in the Republican presidential primaries.

In the 1980s, Romney ran a private equity firm called Bain Capital. It's an industry where it's hard to avoid getting your hands dirty.

After a train journey of nearly 6,000 miles from Moscow, the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok can feel like a different country. The people and the language are still Russian, but the strong Asian influence is undeniable. And many residents say the bond to the rest of Russia has been growing weaker, while the ties to Asia have been growing stronger since the Soviet breakup two decades ago. NPR's David Greene has this report as he wraps up his journey on the Trans-Siberian railway.

The last of three stories

Amid recent reports that Kodak could be headed into bankruptcy, financial advisers in Rochester, N.Y., where the company is based, are seeing more and more Kodak retirees who are anxious about their personal financial futures.

Once upon a time, Kodak provided secure, good-paying jobs to tens of thousands of local residents. For about the past 25 years, the company has been shedding local employees — from a high of more than 60,000 in 1982 to about 6,000 today.

More than 20 years after his hit single, "Wicked Game," appeared in David Lynch's film Wild at Heart, Chris Isaak continues to produce the sort of timelessly yearning music that made him a star. Over the course of his 30-year career, Isaak has composed and crooned his way into the national spotlight with 15 albums and countless TV appearances.

Yet another foreign government has accused Americans of meddling in its internal affairs. It says U.S. donors are bankrolling local political activists, and it may be time for a crackdown on the political influence of outsiders.

The oil industry and environmentalists are fighting over the Keystone XL pipeline, and in this election year, President Obama is caught in the middle.

The industry says the pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, would create jobs. Environmentalists worry it will lead to more pollution. Obama has until next month to make a decision, and that has both sides lobbying heavily.

Russia's Vladimir Putin took to the Internet to present the platform he would persue should he be elected president on March 4.

It was a bold platform, considering that it would walk back policies he helped institute. As The Telegraph puts it, it was Putin remaking himself into a "liberal reformer."

The U.S. military says it's investigating a video that appears to show Marines desecrating the corpses of Taliban fighters killed in Afghanistan. Regardless of those findings, the outrage in the Islamic world is likely to be severe, as with other disturbing images that have surfaced during U.S. wars in Muslim countries over the past decade.

The already shaky case for the anti-aging powers of resveratrol, a substance in red wine, is looking a little shakier.

After a three-year investigation, the University of Connecticut Health Center has told 11 scientific journals that studies they published by resveratrol researcher Dipak K. Das may not be trustworthy.

A new study in the journal Health Affairs estimates that a penny-per-ounce tax on soft drinks and other sugary beverages could prevent about 240,000 cases of diabetes, 8,000 strokes, and 26,000 premature deaths per year.

Yes, death by soda.

So the analysis got me thinking: Our behavior is hard to predict, right? I know mine is.

Scientists are facing a riddle. For two years, researchers at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama have been studying the diets of Tiger Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and they found that the sharks not only eat sea creatures, but also make a habit of eating land birds. Yep that's right woodpeckers, catbirds, kingbirds and swallows have all been found in their bellies.

Today, World Cafe kicks off the new series Latin Roots, with Latin music expert Aaron Luis Levinson. Levinson visits host David Dye in WXPN's studios to share his take on all things salsa: the music, the beat and the culture. Levinson, a member of the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, is a Grammy-winning producer, musician, composer and owner of Range Recording Studios in Ardmore, Penn.

So you know how on Monday the federal government reported that the $2.6 trillion the nation spent on health care in 2010 translated into just over $8,400 per person?

Well, a different study just released by a separate federal agency shows that second number doesn't actually mean very much.

When someone dies, the eulogies roll in, the higher the stature of the departed, the more stately the praise.

And that's certainly somewhat true for Bill Janklow, South Dakota's former congressman and governor who died Thursday from his brain cancer.

An Alabama judge signed an order that declares Natalee Holloway, the teenager who went missing in Aruba while on a high school graduation trip, legally dead. Holloway was last seen in 2005.

The AP reports:

In Port-au-Prince, a radio blares from speakers in front of a guy selling pirated CDs on Delmas, a main street in the Haitian capital. Women sitting along the side of the road hawk everything from vegetables to cigarettes to pharmaceuticals. Overloaded tap-taps, the pickup trucks that serve as the main form of public transportation here, chug up the hill.

The scene is one that's remarkable for being unremarkable: Though it occurred this week, it could just as easily have been Port-au-Prince two years ago, before a massive earthquake destroyed much of the capital.

Earlier this month, a group Chinese workers at Foxxconn spent two days on the roof of one of the companies factories in central China. As The Telegraph reported, the workers were threatening to commit suicide to protest their working conditions.

Earlier this week, we were surprised to learn that food manufacturers increasingly X-ray foods to screen for foreign objects that can break a tooth. That sounds like a good idea.

But the notion of X-rayed food also sparked a lively debate in The Salt's comments section on whether this poses a health threat. After all, we do know that some X-rays can damage DNA in the human body. So what does radiation mean for food?