TONY COX, host:
From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Tony Cox, in for Farai Chideya.
Happy Friday. I hope you've got a good one to look forward to this weekend. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to today's show because we've got a great one for you including a chat with Bob Johnson, the man behind BET who's got a new movie venture going. And a summer snapshot with Betty Baye that's guaranteed to take you back.
But first, let's kick things off with the headlines. Today, we start in Zimbabwe where political tensions threaten to boil over. The last presidential election there was held in 2002 amid allegations of corruption and vote rigging. The next election is now set for March 2008. President Robert Mugabe has held the top post for 20 years and is currently trying to amend the constitution a second time to stay in power.
This week, the Zimbabwe government and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, held talks in South Africa. According to the MDC, the goal of the talks was to ensure fair elections. But the official government-run media accused the opposition of negotiating in, quote, "bad faith." To top it all off, yesterday, the Zimbabwean dollar suffered its worst crash on record. We'll bring you more as the news unfolds.
Our next headline hits a little closer to home, at Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas. You may not know the name but you almost certainly know the case, Brown v. Board of Education. The all-white school was at the center of the 1954 Supreme Court case that desegregated America's schools and it had been slated for demolition. That is, until the Kansas State Historical Society stepped in.
It says an agreement signed by the city's former mayor requires that the Art Deco building stay up until 2012 at least. City officials defended their desire to tear Sumner down saying the city could not afford the preservation price tag. The case that immortalized Sumner began in 1950 when Topeka Minister Oliver Brown, who was black, tried to send his daughter there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.