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Earlier this month, the National Action Party of Mexico nominated the country's first ever female presidential candidate, economist Josefina Vazquez Mota. As Vazquez Mota accepted the nomination, she vowed to be the first woman to become the Mexican head of state.

The PAN, as the conservative party is known in Spanish, is Mexico's current ruling party. It has also put forth a woman, Isabel Miranda de Wallace, in Mexico City's mayoral race. Both elections take place on July 1.

Tracy Grant was just 39 when she got the diagnosis.

"They asked me to stay a little bit longer because they saw something a little weird," she remembers. "In my mind I was saying, ... 'Here we go, this doesn't look good.' "

It was breast cancer. As devastating as the news was, it wasn't a surprise. Her mother, Catherine Grant, was diagnosed at age 51.

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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For the thousands of U.S. military men and women still fighting in Afghanistan, the realities of war mean many will have their missions cut short by serious injury. Airlifting the wounded out of the war zone and to a hospital requires specially trained medical teams. Cheri Lawson of member station WNKU spent time with trainees of the Air Force's critical care air transport team in Cincinnati. That's where the training takes place.

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A tale of two couches: The first, pictured recently in the New York Daily News, is where NBA supernova Jeremy Lin reportedly spent nights — perhaps battling Linsomnia — before erupting into a game-changing beast and leading the New York Knicks to a euphoric win streak.

Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin talks to NPR education reporter Claudio Sanchez about the huge rise in public college tuition as states face a budget squeeze.

The mayor of Rhode Island's largest city is calling on the city's tax exempt hospitals and universities to chip in and help Providence stay out of the red. From member station Rhode Island Public Radio, Ian Donnis reports on how this has made for a sharp battle between Providence and its Ivy League university.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

If you've ever watched the television show Downton Abbey, you've probably deduced that dining was a very, very big deal in the lives of the landed gentry of Edwardian England.

Much of the drama surrounding the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants unfolds against a tableau of the table.

A light mist of cold rain started falling on us from the moment we reached the cemetery. If I hadn't felt it on my face, I probably wouldn't have even noticed it, as the hardscrabble stretching throughout the grave yard appeared just as parched as one might expect in a desert country.

The offensive started on the city of Homs, where neighborhoods that have seen some of the largest protests and armed resistance to the government are now under constant fire from tanks, rockets and mortars.

Homs is in central Syria, and it is thought that if the regime lost it to the opposition, that would cut the country in half. The offensive continued in the city of Zabadani, a mountain resort town just outside of Syria's capital of Damascus.

The rise of Rick Santorum in the race for the Republican presidential nomination hasn't exactly gone unnoticed by rival Mitt Romney or his friends. Turn on a TV in Michigan this weekend, and chances are you won't have to wait long to see an ad attacking the former Pennsylvania senator.

"America is drowning in national debt," a narrator intones in one ad, a product of Romney's campaign. "Yet Rick Santorum supported billions in earmarks."

Senegal's capital of Dakar remains jittery, with the youth and the riot police locked in running street battles.

The police are using teargas, rubber bullets and water cannon spray to chase away angry opposition demonstrators, including rappers from the Y'en a Marre movement. Their name means "We're Fed Up, Enough is Enough."

This past week, a planned overnight sleep-in protest was broken up by the security forces. Founding member and rapper, Djily Baghdad, blames Abdoulaye Wade for the ban, the crackdown and for overstaying his welcome as president of Senegal.

Not known as a hotbed of experimentation, the world of publishing has been slow to embrace the transition from print to e-books. This past week in New York, however, the Tools of Change digital publishing conference attracted entrepreneurs and innovators who are more excited by, rather than afraid of, the future.

It was the kind of crowd where some were more inclined to say "Steal my book!" than to argue over what that e-book should cost. These are people who see digital publishing not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

Do-it-yourselfers have made everything from bamboo bicycles to 3-D printers, but nothing as ambitious as what's happening on a farm in northwest Missouri where tractors and other industrial machines are being made from scratch.

Marcin Jakubowski earned a Ph.D. in physics, and his doctoral thesis deals with velocity turbulence and zonal flow detection, whatever that is. But when Jakubowski graduated in 2004, he wanted nothing to do with physics or academia.

It was at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., where Whitney Houston first learned to sing, and it was there that friends and family gathered on Saturday to say goodbye to the pop superstar.

The star-studded service lasted more than three hours. Among those in attendance were Dionne Warwick, Kevin Costner and Alicia Keys.

It was one of the more surreal photo ops this week: Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, live on Iranian TV, visiting a nuclear reactor. Ahmadinejad trumpeted his country's nuclear progress, but denied, once again, that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

In Washington, officials weren't buying it.

They rushed to repeat the official U.S. line — a line President Obama himself is fond of delivering.

"Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal," he said.

A troubled starlet dies in a helicopter crash off the Irish coast after sending a series of mysterious text messages. Three years later, a hungry young reporter desperate for work takes an assignment to write a quickie celebrity biography of her — but finds complexity and danger.

That seemingly accidental death is the catalyst for the events in Bloodland, a new thriller by Irish author Alan Glynn.

One of the most talked about personalities on the Republican presidential campaign trail — Callista Gingrich — rarely says a word.

That changed at the Conservative Political Action Committee earlier this month when she spent three minutes introducing her husband. Politico quipped it was the "longest most people have ever heard her speak."

In this presidential campaign, as in the past, the candidates' spouses play a very particular role.

Callista's Hair

In a victory for the White House, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an extension of the payroll tax cut on Friday after weeks of refusal. Host Mary Louise Kelly speaks with James Fallows of The Atlantic about the political reasoning behind the vote.

The market for children's books is huge: Consumers buy $3.1 billion children's books annually. Now, with e-books and apps taking off, there are new opportunities to turn traditional story books into interactive experiences. Guest host Mary Louise Kelly talks with Dan Poynter, consultant and publisher at Para Publishing, and Roxie Munro, an author and illustrator of more than 30 children's books, about where children's books are headed.