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The United Nations has 193 member states. And United Noshes aims to recreate meals from every last one of them, alphabetically, as a series of dinner parties.

The project was started by Jesse Friedman and his wife, Laura Hadden, three years ago, as a way to explore the culinary bounty of New York City. As they cooked food from Algeria to Djibouti to Guyana, United Noshes hosted dinners that ranged from just a few friends gathered around a living room table, to dozens of guests assembled in a banquet hall. And the ingredients have ranged as well — from cashew juice to French charcuterie to fermented corn flour.

These ingredients can be hard to find — especially those that haven't yet won fans in America.

The Salt

Gastrodiplomacy: Cooking Up A Tasty Lesson On War And Peace

"One time I walked into an African market, and the person behind the counter asked me, 'So where did you do Peace Corps?' " Friedman laughs. "Because that's the only time a non-African would come into their store." Funny, enough, Friedman notes, Peace Corps cookbooks can be a surprisingly good recipe source, especially for some of the world's smaller countries.

In addition to exploring global culinary diversity, Friedman has also been happy to cook for people — which doesn't always happen in New York City. The dinners started with friends and family. Then, as articles cropped up and their blog readership and mailing list grew, the meals came to include interested strangers (some from other countries themselves).

From there, Friedman says, it was a natural step to turn the project into a fundraiser.

"We felt we had to acknowledge the fact that many people couldn't even enjoy the sorts of foods we were celebrating from their own country," says Friedman.

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Jesse Friedman (center, foreground) and guests dine outdoors during Cuba night, Aug. 26, 2012. Courtesy of Laura Hadden hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Laura Hadden

Jesse Friedman (center, foreground) and guests dine outdoors during Cuba night, Aug. 26, 2012.

Courtesy of Laura Hadden

Diners contribute a small donation, and over the years the project has raised over $20,000 — first for the U.N.'s world food program, and now for Mercy Corps, an international aid organization based in Friedman's new home of Portland, Ore.

In addition to learning about the culinary holdovers of colonialism, and several dozen very distinct ways to cook rice, the project has been a way for Friedman and Hadden to discover places with surprising foodways — like the African islands of Comoros.

"There's a lot of central African countries that start with the letter c," laughs Hadden, who had grown a bit fatigued of meal after meal of fufu and collard greens. "And so we were like OK, another one of these meals. And then [we] discovered this really great cuisine."

The Salt

Gastrodiplomacy Gives Foreign Chefs A Fresh Take And Taste Of America

Comoros, with its Portuguese, French and Arabic influences, has a rich culinary tradition quite different from its African neighbors. That includes the dish United Noshes featured, a lobster in vanilla crme fraiche sauce, which became an all-time favorite.

Of course, there have been meals that were less successful: the attempted yak butter and chiles of Bhutan, or the sheeps head of Iceland, or the red palm oil fry disaster of Cameroon.

But United Noshes' impact isn't just the money that's being raised. Friedman and Hadden say it's the connections that happen when you share a meal with the world — both at the table, and beyond.

"I had a cab driver in D.C. from Burkina Faso," Remembers Hadden. "And I said, 'Oh, I've had food from Burkina Faso.' And he was like, 'No, you haven't.' And I was like, 'Yes, I have.' And I told him the name of the little doughnuts. And he said, 'Oh, my god! I used to sell them in the market with my mom when I was a kid!' "

Friedman and Hadden should reach the halfway point of their project in a few weeks — with a meal from Libya. They expect to conclude the entire project in about four more years.

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Republican lawmakers of the House and Senate emerged from a rare joint retreat in Hershey, Pa., a town known best for its chocolate, with little to show for it.

Unlike last year's House retreat where lawmakers unveiled their principles for an overhaul of the nation's immigration overhauls, there was little grand takeaway.

"The most positive thing is we've got a group of new Republican members in the Senate, a group of new Republican members in the House, and we've all had an opportunity to get to know each other a little better," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters at a press conference Thursday, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

That much seemed to be true — in conversations with nearly a dozen Republican lawmakers, each pointed to the opportunity to talk with members of the opposite chamber and hear their views.

But for all the talking, Republicans remain divided on how to best move forward to fund the Department of Homeland Security, a bill that has become inextricably linked with immigration.

The bill that passed the House earlier this week would roll back some of President Obama's actions on immigration and drew the opposition of even some moderate House Republicans like Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif.

Denham said that while President Obama had put "hurdles" in Congress' way, the bill that the House voted "sets us back on immigration reform" and "sends a mixed message to the American public."

"I think that by adding the deferred action amendment in here, it goes back to a situation where we've got kids that through no fault of their own ... that now are going to be at the top of the list for ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to deport if this were to become law," he said. "I think that sends the wrong message to the American public about what our overall goals for reform are."

But other Republicans, including Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, said Republicans need to take a strong stand.

"We can't always gravitate to the lowest common denominator," he said, noting that President Obama had "totally overstepped on his executive amnesty."

McConnell told reporters that his chamber would try to pass the House's DHS funding bill — with the immigration related policy riders.

"If we're unable to do that, we'll see what happens," he said.

The math is not on McConnell's side. The bill is likely dead in the Senate, where Democrats have enough votes to filibuster the measure.

“ "The House is going to work its will. The Senate is going to work its will ... We'll find some way to resolve our differences."

- House Speaker John Boehner

"The magic number in the Senate is 60," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. acknowledged.

"We want to give our members an opportunity to express their opposition to the president's action," he added. "But we also realize that at the end of the day in the Senate, it's going to take 60 votes."

When asked about the chasm between the two chambers, Boehner said "The House is going to work its will. The Senate is going to work its will ... We'll find some way to resolve our differences."

There's little time for that to happen.

Republican leadership in the Senate vowed to make a bill to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline their first priority and that could take several weeks of precious floor time, meaning lawmakers would have little time to pass an alternative to meet DHS's funding deadline at the end of February. Missing the deadline would weaken the party on national security — one of the traditional three prongs of the Republican party platform — as the party heads toward the 2016 presidential election. It would also be an early blow to the new Republican-controlled Congress.

Still, Republicans remained confident that the Homeland Security funding bill would pass on time, one way or another.

"We will pass a DHS bill. It will be passed on time. We will not shut down this part of the government," Denham said. "There are important issues within the DHS bill that we cannot play politics on."

In the new movie, Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays Alice Howland, a 50-year-old linguistics professor at Columbia with a razor sharp intellect. She's at the prime of her career but gradually she starts to forget things. She loses her way, she gets fuzzy — and she is soon diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. The movie charts her rapid decline and her struggle to hold on to her sense of self.

"She is someone who has always defined herself by her intellect and now that that's something she can't depend on, she's finding that she doesn't really know who she is," Moore tells NPR's Melissa Block.

Interview Highlights

On speaking with people who had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's

I spoke to so many people. I didn't have any familiarity with Alzheimer's. I think I'm one of the few people who hasn't had a family member affected by it. When I spoke to the filmmakers, I said I didn't want to represent anything on screen that I hadn't witnessed myself or had been described to me. So my research process was pretty lengthy. I actually had about four months. And the women I spoke to were so incredibly generous with their time and their thoughts and their experiences and it was a pretty profound experience.

On what she learned from her research

One of the things that I sort of misunderstood about Alzheimer's is that somehow it ... just affected memory, just simple memory. What I didn't really understand [is] that it's also kind of a neuro-spatial disease — that you're going to have a different interpretation of how things are happening to you.

“ "One woman I spoke to ... she was a high school Spanish teacher and she said she didn't know what was happening to her but one of her students noticed that she was writing backwards on the blackboard."

- Julianne Moore

One woman I spoke to ... she was a high school Spanish teacher and she said she didn't know what was happening to her but one of her students noticed that she was writing backward on the blackboard. Another woman told me that she was making very simple mistakes at work. ... She was an O.R. nurse in a neurosurgery ward, and she couldn't learn a very simple computer program and didn't know what was wrong. So it was interesting to me that for some of these women, so many things happened at work — that was where they noticed the deficits first. And then once there had been some kind of ramification in their professional life, they realized that things had been happening in their personal life as well.

On a scene in the film in which Alice gives a speech about Alzheimer's

I am taking a yellow highlighter as I read so I can follow along so I'll know what I've read and what I have to read. And this is something that we saw in speeches that people give at these Alzheimer's conventions.

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Moore recently won a Golden Globe award for her performance in the film. "It's a progressive disease," Moore says. "So it's about how do you stay present? How do you stay with the people that you love?" Denis Lenoir/Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

itoggle caption Denis Lenoir/Sony Pictures Classics

Moore recently won a Golden Globe award for her performance in the film. "It's a progressive disease," Moore says. "So it's about how do you stay present? How do you stay with the people that you love?"

Denis Lenoir/Sony Pictures Classics

There's a joke in that speech, too, where she drops her papers, and she says: "I think I'm going to try to forget what just happened." And that was the other thing — it was remarkable that I found with the women that I spoke to. Everyone had such a great sense of humor. One woman told me — this made me laugh so hard — that after she was diagnosed, all of her children gave her puzzles for Christmas.

On how people live — and continue living — with the disease

It's not like you have a disease and you disappear, you go away, and that's it. There's so many people who are living with this disease, you know, it's a progressive disease. So it's about how do you stay present? How do you stay with the people that you love? How do you keep the life going that you value?

On meeting with older people who had been living with Alzheimer's for a long time

Even when I went to a long term care facility, I met several people who were patients. I felt that I got a very strong sense of who they were. Then I spoke to the caregivers there and family members. There was one woman who told me to get away from the draft, I was going to get sick. And then her daughter came in. ... I said, "Is that your mother?" And she goes, "Oh yeah." ... I said, "Your mother told me I was going to get sick if I stayed in the draft." And she goes, "Yup, that's her, she's always telling people what to do. That's my mother." ...

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Movie Reviews

A Lead Performance Keeps 'Still Alice' Grounded

I found that people did retain a tremendous sense of self. So I think the questions that it raises [include] ... Who are our essential selves? Who are we, and why do we place value on one stage of life or one stage of cognitive ability and not another?

On how this movie affected her thinking about aging

It's not just about aging, it's about mortality. And aging is about mortality, too. ... I think in our culture, and lots of cultures, we have this kind of "You are as old as you think you are! Forever young! You can do whatever! 50 is the new 30!" This idea that somehow you're forever young and this refusal to look at our life cycle.

“ "I think you're never, never more in love with life than you are in the presence of death or your own mortality."

- Julianne Moore

The thing that happens to Alice in this movie is that she's kind of in the prime of her life, and a great place in her life, and she's faced with the idea of her own mortality. She does know that it's going to be shorter than her expectation was, or it just forces her to acknowledge an end, which is very difficult for any of us to do.

I think the interesting thing about looking at the end of your life or knowing it's an end of your life is that you start to value what you have even more. You know, you value the present. I think you're never, never more in love with life than you are in the presence of death or your own mortality. ... You think about how much you love to live, how much you love the people you love. ... What do you value? Who do you value? What do you want to do? In a sense, it makes everything kind of crisper, and sharper and more vital.

Overnight across in France, Belgium and Germany police arrested more than two dozen people suspected of having ties to terrorism.

In Paris, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports police moved in at dawn and arrested about a dozen people, who police said were tied to Sad and Chrif Kouachi, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a Kosher market in eastern Paris.

"These people are said to have been in their entourage," Eleanor told our Newscast unit. "They may have helped them to obtain cars, guns or may have been drivers."

The BBC reports that in the Brussels area, police broke up a terror plot when they arrested 13 suspects.

The arrests followed a standoff last night that left two men dead.

The BBC reports:

"Guns, munitions and explosives, as well as police uniforms and a large amount of money, were seized during the raids, prosecution spokesman Thierry Werts told reporters.

"Eric Van Der Sypt, another spokesman, added: "The investigation... has shown that these people had the intention to kill several policemen in the street and at police commissariats [police stations].

"'The operation was meant to dismantle a terrorist cell... but also the logistics network behind it,' he said. No link had been established with last week's attacks in Paris, Mr Van Der Sypt said, adding that Belgium would seek the extradition of the two suspects in France."

The investigation that led to these arrests, said Der Sypt, had started before the Paris attacks.

Here's Fox News with what's going on in Germany:

"Also Friday, Berlin police said that they had taken two men into custody on suspicion that they were recruiting fighters and procuring equipment and funding for the Islamic State group, better known as ISIS, in Syria.

"The two were picked up in a series of raids involving the search of 11 residences by 250 police officers. Authorities said the raids were part of a months-long investigation into a small group of extremists based in Berlin. However, they also said there was no evidence the group was planning attacks inside Germany.

"The group's leader, identified only as 41-year-old Ismet D. in accordance with privacy laws, is accused organizing the group of largely Turkish and Russian nationals to fight against 'infidels' in Syria. Emin F., 43, is accused of being in charge of finances."

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