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Saddam Hussein is back in court, but Iraqis are increasingly disinterested in the proceedings. Most are focused on escalating sectarian violence and growing fears that the country is on the brink of civil war.

To see if kids would actually eat a new kind of white wheat bread, four Seattle kids, aged 8 to 11, volunteer to touch and sniff and taste to get a sense of whether they prefer it to regular white bread.

Scott Simon speaks with Dori Bell, of Houston, Tex., about the 1978 movie, "Grease," which she just watched for the first time.

Joey Zanaboni uses the full range of the English language to call games in Virginia for the Fredericksburg Nationals. His trademark homerun call: "Lock it, cock it, rock it, restock it."

Measha Brueggergosman is a young soprano on the rise. Her major label debut, Surprise, features offbeat cabaret songs by Satie and Schoenberg. She describes the CD as "classical music letting its hair down."

The young singer, part of a wave of British female pop stars finding success in the U.S., has been compared to Dusty Springfield and sparked rumors that her father is fellow Wales native Tom Jones. She talks about the tiny town where she grew up, and recording her first demos on a karaoke machine.

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, son of Indian immigrants, says he didn't think about his ethnic identity growing up. But on his new album Kinsmen, he and other like-minded South Asian American jazz musicians, fuse American jazz with a global sound that embraces the music of India.

The film Blood Diamond is about the violent underbelly of the international diamond trade. Writer Tom Zoellner's book The Heartless Stone chronicles how diamonds are mined in some of the world's poorest countries.

The Seattle band Ivan and Alyosha counts neither an Ivan nor an Alyosha among its ranks. It takes its name from characters in the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. Turns out the questions of faith in that book can be found in this group's music, too — however inverted.

O'Neal's Whirling Mantis is named for a defensive move in karate. The martial-arts reference suggests one way to look at how O'Neal's music operates: The players react to each other's moves, deflecting one another in stylized interaction.