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The denim store in Kobe, Japan, sells jeans for $350. The store is able to sell a pair of jeans for that price because it's tapped into a Japanese subculture that is obsessed by 1950s Americana.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist challenger Francois Hollande will face off next month in a presidential runoff. Anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen came in a surprisingly strong third place.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Now Marco Rubio happens to be one of those regularly mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice for Mitt Romney. And that's where we pick up our discussion with Cokie Roberts, who joins us most Mondays. Cokie, good morning.

COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.

INSKEEP: So is the vice presidential choice an opportunity for Romney to appeal to Hispanics?

Unlike the United States, Germany never had a housing bubble. Its mortgage market is too tightly regulated. But some German banks did lose a lot of money in the financial crisis, and they're still paying a big price for it.

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LYNN NEARY, HOST:

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When John Paton Davies died, he left some unfinished business. His daughter, Tiki Davies, knew he had signed a contract to write a memoir but never finished it. One of her sisters had a carbon copy of the manuscript, which Tiki Davies started typing into a computer.

TIKI DAVIES: What was interesting to me about retyping it is that it's very much in his voice. He was very funny and an elegant speaker as well as a writer. And so I felt as though I had him back for the couple of months I did this.

The home of the Red Sox may be a Boston landmark but it also holds a place in baseball history. The big green wall in left field is known as the Green Monster. Some fans are paying more than $1,000 to sit on top of the Green Monster when the Red Sox play Friday night.

Drummer and singer Levon Helm was a founding member of The Band. Helm and his group played as a backup band for Bob Dylan in the 1960s. Later the band became famous enough to simply be called The Band.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Any documentary about a singer-songwriter can provide great music, but with "Marley" you also get a remarkable personal story. We have a review from our critic Kenneth Turan.

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KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: Bob Marley, who was only 36 when he died in 1981, could be a dusty musical footnote by now. Instead, the enormous popularity of this transcendent reggae superstar shows no sign of going away, and "Marley," a moving and authoritative new documentary, explains why.

Earlier this week, two women took a new approach to raising awareness about Syria's crackdown. The wives of the British and German ambassadors to the United Nations appealed directly to Syria's first lady with a video on YouTube. The narrator calls on Asma Assad to "stop being a bystander" — and to stop her husband and his supporters from continuing the conflict.

More refugees are fleeing the fighting in Syria. Lynn Neary talks to European Union Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Kristalina Georgieva about what officials are doing to help the internally displaced, and those who have fled to neighboring countries.

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The Florida judge in the case of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin in February, set bail this morning of $150,000. Zimmerman took the stand during the hearing and told Martin's parents that he was sorry for the loss of their son. Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder, but he claims self-defense. Cable TV news channels carried the bail hearing live.

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One day after President Obama delivered a speech on the U.S. economy in Lorain County, Ohio, Mitt Romney went there Thursday to respond to the president. Romney is chasing the president to accuse the incumbent of failing to live up to his campaign promises.

Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper division is accused of phone hacking and bribing police officers. That scandal has already cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Now News Corp. is fending off media reports that a specialized unit engaged in industrial espionage on behalf of the company's global satellite and cable TV operations.

Nokia gave its new Lumia smartphone a splashy launch this month. The phone runs on a new Microsoft operating system and is a key part of the Finnish company's efforts to regain market share. But on Thursday, Nokia admitted that its new phone isn't connecting with consumers.

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Some other news. The Federal Reserve and other banking regulators have granted banks a two-year grace period to come into compliance with the Volcker Rule. That's one of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed a couple of years ago. It restricts American banks from making trades that put the bank and depositor funds at risk.

But as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, regulators are struggling to iron out the details.

Two billionaires took the stand this week — both named Larry. Google's Larry Page and Oracle's Larry Ellison have very different styles and personalities. And that came across in court.

Vegetarians and others were highly distressed after finding out that Starbucks uses a red coloring in some of its drinks that's made from crushed bugs. An online protest campaign delivered thousands of angry emails to Starbucks headquarters.