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Right. When the votes were counted caucus night - and I think it was three in the morning before we knew the result - there were eight votes separating Romney in first place, Santorum in second place. It was called essentially a tie, but Romney was declared the winner, and he's been going to New Hampshire and South Carolina since saying I'm the first guy in Republican history to win those two. And he kind of used it to create this aura of inevitability about himself. So now, we find out Santorum won because when they did a re-canvas, which is part of the normal process - it's not a recount. It's just that there's always a two-week period before they certify the vote. Everybody knew that there was a potential for some votes to (technical difficulty) for the tally to come in (technical difficulty) sure enough, Santorum 34 points. But the reason it's - 34 votes ahead - the reason is still in doubt is because, remember, these are paper ballots...

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm John Donvan, in Washington. Neal Conan is off. It is taking a huge risk to let the New York Times reveal in its pages the minute and most personal details of your love life. And the reason the Times even cares to write about the relationship you're in, it's not because you're running for office or because you're a movie star. It's because you are a teenager who has Asperger's syndrome. And by the way, the other person in your relationship is also a teenager with Asperger's syndrome. Teenagers Jack Robison, who is 19, and Kirsten Lindsmith, who is 18, took that risk. They told their story to writer Amy Harmon of the New York Times, and the risk was worth taking. The resulting piece is a beautiful, inspiring, funny, moving, sometimes sad look at love on the autism spectrum - because that's what Asperger's syndrome is, it is a way that the brain is wired that is sometimes described as a form of autism, but where the person who has it is generally intelligent or above average in intelligence and well-spoken.

Well, as you probably can hear in the background, there are a lot of people around me right now because I'm in a five-star hotel, which is normally fairly empty, but it's filled up with people from Caracas, the minority who have money who've come here because they have no electricity in their houses, because the restaurants have all closed. So they've moved in here with their families, with their kids, and the place is absolutely packed. That's the elite with money. Of course, it's really hit people without money extremely hard. Long lines at gas stations have started to appear because the electric pumps that pump the gas are out of power, and some people are without water. I went along to a very big hospital here in Caracas, the University Hospital, which has had terrible problems with power cuts before, leading patients to die, and spoke to some of the staff there. They're very worried about it. They say that patients are suffering. They did have a generator that worked in the emergency area, but it meant that all the corridors of the hospital are in darkness at night. And so then that's very worrying because they're worried about getting robbed themselves by people who get inside the hospital and rob staff in the hospital - anything that they might have - including medicine, if they have any.

Most of my really important discoveries were done by accident. The discovery of hydrothermal vents, black smokers, et cetera, all were found while looking for something else. And when I think about how many wonderful discoveries we've made and then realized how little real estate we made them in, the potential for discovery on our planet is amazing. What's hard is to convince sponsors. See, most sponsors want to know what you're going to discover and when. Well, those are sponsors I talked to very much because they don't understand. I can't tell you what I'm going to discover or when I'm going to discover it, but I can show you an incredible track record of making discoveries. And if you'll just bet on our horse, I'll bet you we're going to make discoveries. And so that's what we're off - the next year, to me, is going to be the year of ocean discovery because we finally, actually have ships that are dedicated to the process of exploring.

On Monday night, he was at the Getty House, which is the residence of the Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. And while you had Janet Napolitano, the governor of Arizona, or Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas, shaking hands, slapping backs, making fun, Bloomberg looked rather sedate and serious by comparison. And when he gave his speech, it was a speech that was heavy on policy, while people were sitting around sipping wine and seemed totally incongruous with the setting. He's going to have a challenge there, and it really is whether or not as a centrist problem solver, there is an audience at a time when the war in Iraq and these other major problems loom large and people feel as if - according to the polls - the federal government has been ineffectual.

She worked to save lives during the week, then drove back to Indiana to sing praises to God at the church in La Porte where her brother, LaShawn, is pastor. She'd also scoop up her nieces and nephews and take them into the city to see shows and try new restaurants. She played the piano. She made fabulous crab Rangoon. Dr. Tamara O'Neal was in a pre-med class at Purdue when she held a human brain in her hand. She felt what her family describes as awe to see such an intricate, powerful and fragile creation. That's when Tamara O'Neal decided she could put her sharp mind and skilled hands where they would help the most people.

Oh, yes it is. A tremendous amount of, I guess wonderful things that you can think about, when you think of gospel music. I was very pleased because it represents the traditional element of our industry, and right now we're basically into the kind of hip-hop, contemporary urban gospel, swinging kind of situations when it comes praise right now. But we can never progress further than where we came from. So I was delighted to see Sister Rosetta Tharpe, of course, and you know there's a difference between quartet and gospel singing, and we sometimes have to define those differences, but, to have the quartet and gospel together, and share with all the other elements that we have. It makes for a very interesting presentation, especially for those people who study music and use gospel as one of their entities they want to include in their curriculum, they can break it down into the various sections, the various periods, I should say.

Yeah. We didn't actually look at men in this study. And this is partly because this study is the third big piece of research that we've done on the phenomenon of violence against women online. And so it's based off the fact that we already knew and we know that the way that women are targeted online is very different, and it's very gendered. It's stuff like doxing and hacking and violent rape threats. And so, in this case, we are very specifically interested in the experience of women because we know, just as offline discrimination and violence against women is rife.

Later in the program, legend has it that hemlines rise and fall with the economy - down in bad years, up when times are good. Email us your personal economic index. The address is talk@npr.org. But first, can we trust this election? And we begin with Daniel Tokaji. He's an associate professor at Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University. He's served as counsel for groups from both parties that have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in several of the cases in this election season and joins us now from the studios at Ohio State University in Columbus. Nice to have you on the program today.

So my question has to do with fiscal discipline. And, you know, the president has used the term tax-and-spend-Democrats. I think that's (unintelligible) He, himself, is sort of a don't tax-and-spend-Republican. But the talk of a new program just makes me really nervous. And I want to ask the senator elect if he believes the Democrats can truly show this fiscal restraints and help us deal with the deficit? I mean, I don't care if we spend - tax and spend 35 percent of the GDP or if we tax and spend 17 percent of the GDP, but it makes no sense to tax 17 percent and spend 35 percent.

Well, worried parents across eastern Baghdad pulled their children out of school today after receiving warnings from the Mahdi Army that wider fighting could break out at any time. People were hoarding food in some neighborhoods. Local prices were skyrocketing we were told. And many government workers left early for the day. I witnessed in several areas Iraqi forces out and in the streets in greater numbers, and in several cases, old Iraqi T-72 tanks on main roadways in the capital, something you don't see everyday here. The Iraqi government also deployed additional troops to Naja, Hilla(ph) and a few other cities. So, clearly signs that they're taking the threat from Sadr very seriously.

Yeah. Well, the phrase the new normal, exists for a reason, although I want to be very careful. I mean, one of the neurologists said to me - she used a simile that I did not care for. She said, you know, it's like moving into a new house. You unpack your boxes and you make yourself at home, and you haven't really done that with George's illness yet. And I thought, wait a minute. That's not really a good simile. That's not a house I can live in, finally. So in chapter called "Similes," I talked about some similes that are useful and some are not. For example, a useful simile for me was that on a good day, a person with dementia will be a little clearer, maybe for an hour or 15 minutes. And it's like the sun coming out on a cloudy day and you hope that the weather will change, but, actually, the sun will go back behind a cloud. That I found more helpful.

The truth that that speaks to is that the UN is inevitably dependent upon coalitions of the willing, countries that are willing to step up to the plate as volunteers, and enforce UN mandates. There's nothing in the UN Charter--even though it's thought of as a collective security organization, it really isn't, because there's nothing in the charter that pledges--at least the charter as it operates--governments to contribute military assets for the enforcement of international law against victims. And in that sense, it really is true. There's--what there is, is alliance politics, well-done, well-crafted alliance politics. And if you can cajole your allies to contributing to a military expedition, then you can protect the victim; otherwise not.

Well first of all, it's the futures market, because that is the market that is a forecasting market. And we've learned that such markets have predicting power. Beyond that, there's a lot of, you know, we've seen a lot of signs that a peak may be at hand. And Lawrence Yun mentioned some of those, without the same interpretation that I would give. I mean, he was generally not painting this as a dramatic scenario. But we've seen a sharp drop in how housing starts and in permits in the last few months. And these are leading indicators. Housing permits is one of the ten leading indicators in the index of leading indicators because it has, in the past, had consequences. When people stop buying or building houses, that's something to start worrying about. But I don't know for sure, I would say. It could just resume going up. But at this point, it looks like this could be a major turning point.

Email from Greg: I do not think Polanski should continue to be pursued. He's a criminal and a rapist. And I feel that that fact that he's unable to come back to Hollywood to hang out with the people associated with the film industry is quite a punishment for him. He knows if he steps off a plane in the United States, he would be immediately arrested. I'm sure his inability to make films in America is something that is devastating to him every day. This from James, in Tallahassee: So if I murder someone, but their family's okay with the loss and forgives me and I make good movies, I don't get punished?

That's a very classic sound for people in our field. That's something called a whistler, and it's been known for a very, very long time. And it comes about when a lightning strike occurs on the surface of the Earth. And that sends out a whole broad range of various radio waves, and they go up. And some of them can make it out through the Earth's ionosphere, which tends to reflect a lot of it. And as they move along out into space, it turns out the higher frequencies, the treble pitches, move faster than the slower, basier(ph) pitches. And so when they get to our satellite and measure them, what you hear first is that high pitch, and then it sweeps downward to lower and lower and lower frequency.

Well, in the music side, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz -which is an institution that I've been a part of about 10 years - we moved to New Orleans two years ago. And we've always had a big commitment to community service. And we take - what we do is we have graduate students that we choose from all around the world and we give them a two-year-commitment. And we take them and we have them go into the middle schools and high schools and work with young students to help prepare them and inspire them to be jazz musicians. I'm also working with the lieutenant governor's office, Mitch Landrieu, to revitalize the U.S Mint Building. We want to renovate it and make it a first-class performance space. And we're also going to put a jazz museum on the second floor of that building. I'm also working with another group called Music National Services, which is kind of like music - kind of like we Teach for America Program, where we bring - we will bring in educators. We're trying to bring educators to the city, older educators who were there and knew people into the music world. We have four that we've brought in so far. And we have been working with kids from kindergarten through third grade. And we have four teachers working with 800 students.

Well, there's not much he can say by way of, `We're going to win the war' and so forth if the public really doesn't think the war is worth the trouble. Now none of this is to say that this means there's a big tipping point and all the troops have to come home tomorrow, but it does mean that President Bush no longer has the luxury, if this reading is right, to have as many troops there as long as he thinks or his generals think it's necessary. It means, instead, that he will have to show the public some kind of plan for beginning to clearly reduce--not eliminate, but over time reduce troop presence; and indeed the Pentagon is talking about being under 100,000 by the end of next year. So there's signs that the White House is moving in that direction.

The first Chinese word many of our American crewmembers mastered was the call for silence, an jing(ph). The sound department even made T-shirts. My own Chinese film vocabulary has grown. I know how to say things like (Chinese spoken) - our call time is too early, (Chinese spoken) - hair and make-up will take an hour, (Chinese spoken) - and the next shot is the horse riding stunt doubles. I want to use these skills to keep working on foreign movie shooting in China. Next week, our film wraps and my stint as a personal assistant ends. I'm excited to get a break from living in a Hengdian hotel across the hall from my boss, but working on movies in China means I will always be coming back to Hengdian, which might not be so bad. They already know me here.

I think it's fair to say that on the facts, there were many accuracies in the president's speech. He was right on some of the facts. I think where the historians so heavily disagree is on the interpretation of the facts. Most historians would say, look, of the three wars in Asia, yes. We persevered in a very different kind of war against Japan. But that Japan was, after all, a functioning modern country, albeit one run by a dictatorship as it went into the war so that there were the makings of a stable society, if you would, and even a democracy there.

Yeah. The Rangers, as you said, are bigger units. Still, it's a small slice. These units are pretty small. SEAL Team Six, probably around 300 people, although we don't know. And the larger special operations community, they keep those numbers closely held. But compared to the thousands of Army soldiers and Marines, it's a small number. But the caller makes a good point that, you know, a lot of the equipment, a lot of the tactics, a lot of the know-how of the Special Forces has filtered down to the conventional forces. The conventional Army and Marines are battle hardened after 10 years of fighting.

That's right. The tragedy of this story that my book tells is what happened to comics, artists and writers during the crackdown. As you mentioned earlier, hundreds of artists and writers who felt that comics were the only place where they were welcome, and they could express what they had to say, were driven out of work. But the happy ending is that Gaines, confronted with, you know, an overly restrictive code that was enforced by the comics industry itself as a way to salvage itself. It was driven - had to discontinue all of his crime and horror and suspense and science fiction titles. But he kept one. He kept MAD. And the way that he got around the comics code authority was that he reformatted it as a magazine, so it wasn't a comic book anymore. He didn't have to submit it to the comics code organization. So he re-priced it at 25 cents, he reformatted it, and even more significantly, he designed it as a vehicle to kick in the pants the conservative authority that had hurt him so much.

I don't mind going through the screening just to make sure the plane is safe as long as your privacy is respected. I recently had to go see my daughter when she had her babies. And because I made my trip two weeks before it departed, I heard that you are often automatically red-flagged, and sure enough, I was pulled out of the line and I was told that I needed to be searched. And there were two women and one was in training and they were waiving a wand around my bra, because sometimes there is underwire in a woman's bra.

Well, it does, but if you don't mind, Neal, before we get there, I wanted to ask Ofeibea a quick question, and if I may parenthetically add how much I've admired her reporting from Africa. I have heard two different versions of what al-Shabaab has said, on the one hand that they have warned foreign aid agencies to stay out of there, that they don't want them in there, indeed that all this talk of famine is some kind of Western propaganda. And on the other hand, I've heard on the BBC from aid workers themselves in the area who say nonsense, we feel perfectly safe. What's the reality?

He wanted slavery struck out by the Declaration. Jefferson wrote a denunciation of slavery for the Declaration, which was amended and taken out, probably but not entirely because of the objections of Georgia and the Carolinas, also some New York forces who, if they weren't actually holding slaves, were doing a lot of transporting of them. And then the second time that Paine took a great stand on this was against Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase, which he had actually suggested to Jefferson. Jefferson may have come by the idea himself, but it was originally Paine's idea that we should take advantage of the difficulties of Bonaparte, buy what they had to offer, which was doubling the size of the United States, and not allow any more slavery in the new territories, start again. And again was overruled. Jefferson was such in a hurry to get the sugar crop in that he allowed slaves to be unloaded at New Orleans, and Paine was terribly disappointed that time, too.

No, that is actually what she's doing because I interviewed her last week. And this is, you know, the way Speaker Pelosi has always operated, no matter what the issue is. And when she talked to me about this, it wasn't in regard to impeachment. It was in regard to gun legislation. Public sentiment is there - 90% of the American people, for instance, want background checks. And she knows that she's got the leverage on - at least she's trying to squeeze Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on that issue. But in this case, asking - saying that Congress should pass laws goes all the way back to the famed OLC memo.

So there is a double standard at work. I think for Syria also, it's very hard to acknowledge they did nothing. It's a matter of shame for them that they did not respond. They took the hit. But beyond that, the ultimate bigot - for me, the focus, of course is, as an American, I - what's my country doing in this game? Why are we spinning stories anonymously, not talking publicly? And what I discovered in doing the reporting - I did played border reporter for months on this. Every single fact - I should say that many of the salient facts that were pushed by the various anonymous sources - a boat showed up, called the el-Hamid(ph) three days before it landed in a port in the Mediterranean in Syria with hot stuff in it. That boat, when you check it out, had been into - had been in North Korea in 10 years…

Essentially, the idea is that a lot of the traditional notions that we associate with a particular gender - male or female - are now being offered for the opposite gender. So for men, that often means that the clothes have a frillier feel to them. You know, there's more color, perhaps, there's florals, things that are normally associated with womenswear. And then on the women's side, it's not so much just sort of doing menswear for women, but it's an idea of sort of moving more toward something that is tailored, that has a bit more restraint to it, that looks a bit more sort of traditionally powerful. It differs from what we tend to think of as androgynous dressing because it's not meant to delete the notion of gender. It's meant to mix it up.

Bye-bye. All right. Here's an email that we got, this from Dan(ph) in Nashville. Texas might be doing better than others, but its governments are still hurting. After getting a master's in urban planning, I ended up moving to Nashville to find a job in my field. It has been a great choice so far. So, different people having different experiences moving to Texas. Though we have to report that on the list of the best and worst jobs in America - cities - jobs - anyway, the list - cities in Texas do very well and, well, some other places not so well. Again, take a look at the list. There's a link to it on our website at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.

I don't feel that this is even my right to do so. I became a Muslim to submit to Allah and his word, and that's a choice I made in my life. And it's not for me or any other Muslim to go around and point fingers at anybody else. We don't know what is in anybody else's heart. And a lot of us, we're all on this - in this journey called life, and everybody has their own way to Islam and through Islam. And so like I said, I think we need to practice more mercy among ourselves and not finger-point at everything. And just because a woman wears a niqaab, it does not translate that she goes and she takes Quranic verses literally, such as kill the pagans or anything like this.

Oh, I think so. I'm not sure it causes the change. It's probably reciprocal. But certainly it'll tell you what's deviant, what's normal, what's accepted, what's not accepted. You know, sometimes we've used gossip and rumor as a way of controlling crime. For example, in many cities and small communities, the johns who frequent prostitutes are arrested and then their photos and their identification are featured in local newspapers or on the Internet or on cable access television programs. And what they hope to do is to shame people so that the prostitution declines. It really bothers me when that happens, by the way. I know it's social control, but the problem is that some of these guys, who are often middle-class, middle-aged men with families, will commit suicide. Their wives and their children are stigmatized, embarrassed, humiliated. So sometimes gossip's social control function can go too far, I'm afraid.

You know, I - as you said, I was foolish, but it's good sometimes for us to learn in the process of being foolish, you know. And I was so happy that I came back to Liberia for his birthday to follow him to Tubmanburg. It was a terrible situation that day. I could not - you know, up to this day, I could not understand why I allowed myself to follow my dad. But I always say there is a reason for everything. You know, bad or good, there's a reason. So maybe that was my start for me to see a child soldier. Even though at that time, it was not in my mind to start working with the radio or to talk to victims or perpetrators. But that was a good reason, because when the civil war came, I had to reflect back to that day, when I saw child soldiers at Tubmanburg.

Just a couple of months ago, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Dan Glickman, was testifying before a congressional hearing. And he said that his industry had walked a long way down the road, looking and hoping for some improvement with China. And he warned then that Hollywood might be nearing the end in looking for another course. Well, that other course seems to be the U.S. going before the World Trade Organization. To challenge what the government views as weak enforcement of China's own anti-piracy laws and its tight limits on the distribution of foreign movies within China.

That was one of the themes of the debate - was that Iowans are a little different, that they might care about Iraq and immigration as the moderator Carolyn Washburn, editor of the Des Moines Register, told us at the beginning. But they care more about other things. So the debate was not to be about Iraq and immigration, which, of course, the candidates were expecting to talk about. It was going to be about other things. It was going to about debt. It was going to be about government spending. It was going to be about issues that Republicans in Iowa, according, at least, to the Des Moines Register, cared more about than some of these other national and international questions.

If you line up the entire text of "Moby Dick," which was published in 1851, into a giant rectangle, you may notice some peculiar patterns, like these words, which seem to predict the assassination of Martin Luther King, or these references to the 1997 death of Princess Di. So, was Herman Melville a secret prophet? The answer is no, and we know that thanks to a mathematical principle called Ramsey theory. It's the reason we can find geometric shapes in the night sky, it's why we can know without checking that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head, and it explains why patterns can be found in just about any text, even Vanilla Ice lyrics. So what is Ramsey theory? Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge. As a simple example, let's look at what's called the party problem, a classic illustration of Ramsey theory. Suppose there are at least six people at a party. Amazingly enough, we can say for sure that some group of three of them either all know each other, or have never met before, without knowing a single thing about them. We can demonstrate that by graphing out all the possibilities. Each point represents a person, and a line indicates that the pair know each other. Every pair only has two possibilities: they either know each other or they don't. There are a lot of possibilities, but every single one has the property that we're looking for. Six is the lowest number of guests where that's guaranteed to be the case, which we can express like this. Ramsey theory gives us a guarantee that such a minimum number exists for certain patterns, but no easy way to find it. In this case, as the total number of guests grows higher, the combinations get out of control. For instance, say you're trying to find out the minimum size of a party where there's a group of five people who all know each other or all don't. Despite five being a small number, the answer is virtually impossible to discover through an exhaustive search like this. That's because of the sheer volume of possibilities. A party with 48 guests has 2^(1128) possible configurations, more than the number of atoms in the Universe. Even with the help of computers, the best we know is that the answer to this question is somewhere between 43 and 49 guests. What this shows us is that specific patterns with seemingly astronomical odds can emerge from a relatively small set. And with a very large set, the possibilities are almost endless. Any four stars where no three lie in a straight line will form some quadrilateral shape. Expand that to the thousands of stars we can see in the sky, and it's no surprise that we can find all sorts of familiar shapes, and even creatures if we look for them. So what are the chances of a text concealing a prophecy? Well, when you factor in the number of letters, the variety of possible related words, and all their abbreviations and alternate spellings, they're pretty high. You can try it yourself. Just pick a favorite text, arrange the letters in a grid, and see what you can find. The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that, "while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible." The sheer size of the Universe guarantees that some of its random elements will fall into specific arrangements, and because we evolved to notice patterns and pick out signals among the noise, we are often tempted to find intentional meaning where there may not be any. So while we may be awed by hidden messages in everything from books, to pieces of toast, to the night sky, their real origin is usually our own minds.

I think he decided to protect an image of himself that involved a degree of appalling violence and then he dragged his children into this. So I'm actually not concerned with the sensitivities of his children above all in this issue. It seems to me that, yes, it's very unfortunate that children of violent criminals are victims, I suppose, of their birthright and their inheritance to the degree that it exposes them to a lot of terrible things. But, you know, that's not really the issue here. The issue seems to me to be - the person who sent an email, for instance, touched on the question of what would we think if others did it? And, you know, the Geneva Convention makes the point that you're not supposed to, you know, trod out and parade prisoners or parade - or expose to mockery or public humiliation prisoners. And every culture has rules against the desecration of the dead. The idea being that to sort of display a body in a certain way is an added offense. It's not an extension of the killing.

I mean, I think that when you assess a presidency, you have to look at the complete picture. And the fact that there has not been any kind of a follow-up attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, I think, accrues to the president's benefit, as it would accrue to any president. And so I mean, I think that's certainly a fair statement. Now obviously, there's a whole lot of other things that have gone on that have not gone so well on the economy as well as on foreign policy, but you do have to give credit where credit is due.

You know something, you really struck a nerve with me. I'm the father of five children, and at this point in my life as I broach the age of 50, I certainly don't think it's about us anymore. It's about the kids. It's about infusing them with life. And I think one of the reasons that I wrote Mama Made the Difference, was to say to mothers, you can make a difference. Yes the church has a role to play, the school has a role to play, but often the deck has been set before we ever get the child. It's very, very important that the family be resuscitated and that family values be shared, and that we begin to encourage mothers and fathers to do all that they can to really get these children going again.

We took that question recently directly to the source, you know, the gun runners, the guys who would be providing these weapons and these ammunitions. And their answer is a pretty resounding no, that up to this point, the talk has been just that, talk. There's been a lot of, you know, sort of bluster coming from the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, and also Qatar about - and even, you know, some talk among, you know, U.S. officials over at least whether or not this was an option. And I think that the answer, so far, has been no. The trickle of weapons has been just that, just a trickle coming in probably more so - more weapons coming in from Lebanon than anywhere else, but still it's not very many. I mean, what you saw in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs that Peter was talking about that fell to the Syrian Army and what you saw in Idlib and probably what you're seeing in Daraa now, is that the rebels simply, I mean, one of the reasons that they pulled back, one of the reasons they lost these areas is they simply ran out of ammunition. They ran out of guns. They didn't have enough left to fight with. So that's been a real issue for the rebels, and they've continued their call, you know, to be armed, but so far no one has answered that call.

At least they're not selling the cow. No, but if a lot of these - the moon rocks, the Mars rocks, pieces that have hit actual items - it's all about the story. It's all about being able to have an item that has an interesting story behind it. It was just a piece of rock. Well, it would not be anything - there wouldn't be anything more than a rock you find on the street. But that rock word, meteorite, already has a story that it's traveled all these thousands and millions of miles through space to find its way on Earth. And then damn the probability, but that it actually hit something that people can relate to. It hit a cow. It hit a car. It hit a mailbox.

During the meeting, anyone can call out a song suggestion or read a Bible verse. Instead of a sermon, everyone just talks about what's been weighing on them that week. This group says the only guidance they need to run a church can be found in the New Testament. And there were no church buildings in the time of the New Testament, according to L. Michael White, a professor of Christian origins at University of Texas. L. MICHAEL WHITE: We do have references in, say, the letters of Paul to meeting in someone's home - or, basically, the church in your house.

I want to ask you about a word that the campaign used in announcing this speech. They said that Secretary Clinton would lay out the exceptional role that the United States has played and will continue to play. And I guess I wonder about the idea of exceptionalism in the context of what we've seen in the Arab Spring. I mean, Secretary Clinton was supportive of removing a leader in Libya, hoping for a better life for people in that country. And, you know, that's a country in chaos at the moment. And I wonder if there are any lessons learned from experiences like that that might lead her as president to make a different decision.

Yeah. I think we were expecting already a lot of the other candidates to really start criticizing Joe Biden, in particular, on this debate stage. He has a wide lead in the polls, and, you know, he has this more moderate approach to governing than a lot of the rest of the field. So far, the criticism we're starting to hear has been implicit, talking generally about his policies but not saying Joe Biden in particular. I think this moment really broke the dam, and a lot of candidates are saying Joe Biden is wrong. And we're going to expect to hear a lot more of that next week and going forward.

And I said two percent and I think that he was trying to say that, you know, it's obviously a game of luck because, you know, on a two percent chance someone can win a hand. And I very quickly said to him, the fact that I know that it's two percent and that I know that Bond shouldn't have gotten himself in that position, if he were actually a good player, and that I don't get myself in position, those positions because I know what the mathematically advantageous positions are for me, that's what makes it a game of skill.

Yes, that's a key recommendation that we're making. And in other words, what we are calling for is to - for the forensic disciplines to have relative autonomy. That means administrative and fiscal autonomy, vis a vis the law enforcement agencies. The reason for that is, on the one hand, the forensic sciences are, you know, are a scientific enterprise and should be driven by science. And on the other hand, we also want to make sure that whatever potential for bias there is in the results of an analysis and in the context of an analysis, the bias - coming from the fact that the law enforcement agency would be in a sense the overseer and the supervisor and the employer of the scientist - that kind of bias is removed. I think there have been studies that show that various types of biases, conscious or unconscious, could creep into this. And that's another major consideration, on the basis of which we are recommending that forensic science and forensics laboratories have relative autonomy.

And I have to say to let the audience know that a lot of great insight in your first book in terms of really getting people to think that, you know, I don't - maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am, maybe my string of successes had been simply right place, right time. And I that's not to say that there may not be some skill involved, but it really put me, specifically, in a different mindset to know that, you know, sometimes you can be just in a very fortuitous situation. So I look forward to reading your new book, and I'll take your comments off air. But I just want to let you know it was a pleasure reading your first book, and I appreciate your insights very much.

There are quite a number of things. Brexit isn't the only factor. I mean, Brexit clearly is important because the prime minister is 2 1/2 years into her negotiation. And there's a feeling that she's getting nowhere. Most of these MPs, both on the Labour and the Conservative side, really want to have a second referendum to try and revisit the decision that was made in 2016. They've always wanted that. And as we reach a kind of denouement, they, basically, decided to press the button and leave their parties altogether. So that's one factor. But there's also another, which is that the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn looks institutionally anti-Semitic. And there are other factors as well. He's very much an old-style socialist. And so the Labour MPs in that party don't want to stay.

And we're trying to find out what is happening and what indeed happened earlier today at Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech, of course, one of the premier engineering schools in the eastern part of the country, and we were talking earlier with one of the students there. The weather in the northeastern part of the country has been especially nasty today. The tail-end of the nor'easter has been buffeting as far south as Virginia, with high winds, even snow in the mountains of Virginia where Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, is located. It's not the tidewater country but the piedmont up in the hills of Virginia and an area that is subject to freakish weather even at this time of the year. Obviously the situation that - the question that people want answered is who did this and why? Again, we do not know the answer to those questions. What we do know is, again, there were two shootings incidents: the first, early this morning at a dormitory on the campus of Virginia Tech; the second, about two hours later at an engineering hall, as we heard described, about half a mile on the other side of campus. Whether these were connected, whether it was the same person, we don't know. What we do know is two FBI sources have told NPR that at least 30 people are reported dead, that 20 more people are injured, and obviously we'll continue to monitor their status as it becomes available.

I think that one of the things that you have to look at is page 2 of the report. And the caveat that is put over there that, in fact, a lot of this does not apply when you're looking at under-participating and underrepresented populations. And as I've said before, one person's caveat is another person's headline. And if you look at the growing percentage that these students represent of the entirety of the talent pool that's available to move on into higher education and into the workforce, then you look at this particular aspect as being a one that is not a part of this descriptor of the schools working well. Schools work least well for these students. And I think that every bit of data that we can find, including that which they acknowledge in the report, indicates that this group is not included in those for whom the system is working well.

Well, I think that's an interesting point, and certainly I can't disagree with his personal experiences. But I do feel that fitness education classes need to be available across the board to all students and fitness education is more than simply being able to play dodge ball or climb the rope wall or whatever it is they're able to do. And certainly we know that, depending on the region where the school is located and what the student body population is, we know the availability of resources for physical education classes is very variant. But I think that it needs to be for all students, and there is more to P.E. And that means there's more than just the ability to run around the gym without getting out of breath, and I think that separating children who have a weight problem - if you can say it that way - who are overweight, from the more physically fit children is damaging. I think that could be what Ms. Story's daughter, Brittany, experienced, something that has a damaging effect on their self-esteem in a different way than perhaps being the one more out of breath when in physical education class.

Yes. Absolutely. In fact the Nobel Prize was just given for a protein - a very special protein from the jellyfish which naturally fluoresces, and so it's a very powerful tool in that you can put in bacteria, and they will turn green when they have this protein so they can tell you an answer. So, for example there was an iGEM project from the University of Edinburgh team where they made cells that could sense the level of arsenide in water. And so they would light up in response to how much arsenide was there, and this actually turns out to be a very useful machine because arsenide in well water is a serious problem in the third world. So, that's a really nice example of a team doing something that has a direct application in the world.

It's not every day that the hereditary boss of one great family-controlled but publicly traded newspaper comes to the defense of the hereditary boss of another great family-controlled but publicly traded newspaper. In the editorial pages of, you guessed it, yet a third family-controlled but publicly traded newspaper. But that is what happened this morning in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Donald Graham, the president and CEO of The Washington Post, wrote in defense of The New York Times Company. Some shareholders want to end The Times' practice of having two classes of common stock - one class for the insiders who pick most of the directors, and another class for outside investors. As Graham writes, Washington Post stock has a similar structure. And as The Journal notes at the end of its piece, Dow Jones and Company, which owns that paper, also has a dual-class share structure, which is controlled by the Bancroft family.

But then I added - God has turned his face toward the Romanians. I wouldn't say something like this now, because now I realize God is apolitical. He doesn't care much about revolutions and societies. But at that time, it seemed to me that we were experiencing a miracle because I had never thought I could participate in such a scene and announce that Ceausescu had run away. That moment set off mass protests in other Romanian cities. At that moment, I didn't think we were going to have capitalism. I didn't know where we were going. It simply seemed to me that the communist era had come to an end. I wasn't thinking of any ideology and I wasn't making any future plans. We had witnessed a miracle.

We often talk about the sport of politics on this program. This hour we're talking about the politics of sports in particular the Olympic Games which have had a long history of reflecting international political events on the athletic field, sometimes even at the medal podium. In just a few minutes, we'll hear from Tommie Smith who raised his fist in Black Power salute on the medal stand in 1968. But right now, we're talking with Anita DeFrantz, a member of the International Olympic Committee, and also still with us, Joey Cheek, an American speed skater who donated his winnings from the Winter Olympics a couple of years ago to children in Darfur and is now the founder of Team Darfur. Of course, we want to hear from you as well. Is the Olympic stage the right place for a political statement or protest? 800-989-8255. E-mail talk@npr.org. You can also check out our blog, npr.org/blogofthenation.

Well, they're talking about tax cuts, which will make the deficit worse to some degree. They're not talking nearly as much about spending cuts, which is what's going to be necessary. There are those who believe the tax cuts ultimately help the deficit in a dynamic scoring sort of way. The Bush administration certainly believes that, and there were a number of years recently where the deficit did come down for the Bush administration, from 413 billion down to about 162 billion. They would argue that the tax cuts that they enacted in 2001 and 2003 had something to do with that by spurring the economy.

Is there a constitutional right to lie? Ohio and about a third of all the states have laws that make certain kinds of campaign lies illegal. The Buckeye State version imposes potential fines on organizations convicted of violating the law. During the 2010 midterm elections, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List wanted to put up a billboard ad targeting then-Congressman Steven Driehaus or his vote on the Affordable Care Act. The ad said, quote, "Shame on Steve Driehaus. Driehaus voted for taxpayer-funded abortions." In fact, Driehaus and other anti-abortion Democrats supported the Obama health care bill only after the president agreed to issue an executive order that specified tax dollars could not be used for abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman.

Yeah, hi. Very interesting. I have been commenting mostly at the New York Times on many of the stories that I read, especially in the opinion section. And for example, I just read Paul Krugman's very good article, I believe, in the last day. And I find that it adds layers of depth to the overall opinion piece or article that I don't get in the article itself in many cases. And I've been reading these comments for a number of years. I would like to say one thing, though. I kind of disagree with the person on the show to say that we have to, quote, foster or moderate. I think this is a reality of today's online, and I don't see how it's any different than going to a town meeting where you might have a few hecklers and people in the audience. But still, the conversation goes on and information can be exchanged. So I'll take my answer off the air.

Well, I mean, the traditional notion of investigating a crime is that you - you know, a crime occurs, you look at the evidence, and you then begin an investigation based upon the evidence to find suspects and then collect enough to potentially bring charges and then prosecute the individual. Or, you know, preemptively, if there is a ring of organized crime or crimes that have been committed previously, you know, you perhaps get search warrants and you, you know, investigate. And, it just - the evidence is easier to find and to use in court to prosecute based on actual intent or actual commission of a crime. In these cases, these are people who, you know, the term that sometimes the investigators are using is that they're aspirational, that…

Yes. I think that's exactly right, and I thank Rita for her kind words. And one of the reasons that I always kind of want to pull the conversation back to the social is because I think it's very instinctive for veterans and soldiers themselves to want to deal with it themselves. I think that it's sort of a natural reaction to society. And, in fact, Dr. Shay even pointed out to me recently that the military is preferring now the term inner conflict over moral injury, and you can see the implications right there where, OK, this is a personal - this is personal work. You may get help, you may get a - you may get, you know, clinical support, but this is still personal work.

Pediatrician Gary Carpenter has taught at Thomas Jefferson University for almost 40 years. It's the same medical school where Samuel Gross taught a century ago. Carpenter and I are standing outside the school building where the painting hangs because university officials wouldn't let us record inside. Feelings about "The Gross Clinic" have been running high since last month when Jefferson announced it would sell the painting. Anne d'Harnoncourt is director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ms. ANNE d'HARNONCOURT (Philadelphia Museum of Art): It'd be a great painting in any museum. In Philadelphia, it's a great painting plus and extraordinary icon of Philadelphia's creative, intellectual and professional life.

There is no doubt that violence did take place on July 2nd, and some of those arrested may have been involved. Protesters blocked public roads and threw rocks at police while police fired teargas and rubber bullets at protesters. But was it terrorism? The law doesn't clearly define what a terrorist is. And the part of the law that is being used to try the 14 activists criminalizes actions aimed at, quote, "destroying or damaging the belongings of government officials or their physical person," something Human Rights Watch says does not fall within any reasonable definition of terrorism. El Salvador's vice minister for public security, Astor Escalante, denies that the law is being misapplied. I began by asking him what he thinks a terrorist is.

Yes. I think I'm, you know, as a teacher, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. But I kind of felt, you know, the only thing that's more - that I care more deeply about than a great teacher is my own family. You know, I have three kids. And the most important thing in the world to me is being a great dad. And anytime someone can give me something that makes me a better dad, I'm going to take it because it's - you know, even if I was the best dad in the world, I would take that advice because the work is so important.

And so someone claiming asylum is basically professing to be a refugee. That is to say, they say they have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, political opinion, national origin or social group. And it's never been easy because the burden of proof is on the applicant. And frankly, sometimes the people who say they're going to kill you don't send you a notarized letter saying that. And you may not have documentary evidence of the well-founded fear of persecution. And the Trump administration has made it more and more difficult to request asylum to the point that they announced an interim final regulation - so it is in effect at the moment - that basically says if you pass through Mexico, you have to be able to show that you requested asylum and were denied in Mexico, or you will be ineligible for asylum in the United States.

Now his mom is saying, you know what? This makes it look as if he was involved when they were saying all along in Louisiana that he wasn't involved in the attack on the white teen in Louisiana. It looks as if that - it makes it looked as if he's guilty all along, and I think she's right. It's like we said in the piece that we were just now discussing - duh, yeah, absolutely. It looks as if he is guilty here, and this is the reason why I've said all along when we look at the Jena situation that this is a dog. This case is a dog.

I was looking at some things and saying, you know what? I like that, and I could do that tomorrow. And there's nothing wrong with reading something or - and seeing something that you feel like you can do tomorrow. But I was like, eh - well, let's just hold off, McConaughey. And let's sit back and see if something comes and intrigues me, that I do not feel like I could do tomorrow; that I feel like I could do it, but I've got to go to work and figure out how I can do it. And as the world works in that wonderfully cyclical way, I started to attract exactly what I was looking for. All of a sudden, I got a call - you know, I met with Richard Linklater about "Bernie." Then I get a call from William Friedkin; we have a meeting. And Steven Soderbergh calls for the first time; Lee Daniels; Jeff Nichols, with "Mud." Very independent and singular-minded directors and very singular-willed characters that were, you know, no pandering to society or anyone's rules, really, but their own.

Fifteen years ago today an amateur photographer would capture what would become the most shocking traffic stop in American History. Grainy images showed several white Los Angeles police officers surrounding, kicking, and beating what looked to an already subdued African American male. More than a year later, on April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, California acquitted four officers charged with beating a now famous defendant named Rodney King. Just hours after the verdict, chaos would erupt in South Central Los Angeles and some of the worst rioting in U.S. would begin. Unidentified Woman #1: It's like a live in hell. It's a war zone. I've never seen anything like this before in my life, never.

Well, you know, the most plausible case that Trump's defenders can make for the idea that he's not a Russian agent is no agent would behave this way and be out there in the way Trump is. And, you know, this could create new problems for Kavanaugh because the Democrats are making a big deal out of the fact that Kavanaugh has an extremely expansive view of presidential power and whether even a president can be investigated or should be investigated while he's in office. And by sort of demonstrating over and over again that he is so close to Putin that he doesn't want to say a bad word about him, he's feeding the Mueller - what we might expect out of the Mueller investigation. And that's going to strengthen the democratic case that somebody in this position shouldn't be allowed to name to the court someone who so believes the president should be protected.

There is a lot of discussion that needs to be done around immigration. There are those that are in my own congregation that does not understand why I've taken such a personal lead in this kind of an issue. For some African Americans there is this ideology that we're fighting for the bottom of the barrel. I don't know if you ever heard that term before or not. And that's not true. I sometimes have to remind some of the African American congregants that are there under my watch that it wasn't that long ago that it was the civil rights fights, the plight of the African American in the United States that we were actually being what I consider to be picked out, picked on, isolated and our rights were being denied. For us to now sit back and not be proactive, not be concerned about any other group, would make us hypocrites and would make us false to the God that I believe in.

Right. Well, there are lots of theories about the origins of language. I supposed there are - it's a multi-stage theory. We don't think there's any one magical thing that happened that could have given rise to language in humans. But glossolalia - I'm not sure whether - so this is where people just sort of spontaneously start vocalizing and using speech sounds that, perhaps, don't make any sense, or some people think they are another language that's often associated with religion. I - yeah. Well, certainly, it shows just how much we like to generate sounds and even if that don't make any sense. And so perhaps it's affecting an underlying drive enough. Yeah, but I'm not sure I would want to link it, in particular, to the origin of language.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Even decades later, some of us cannot help but cringe when the new school year begins, as we remember teases and taunts, and sometimes our own paralysis, as we stood helpless before the power of a bully. Sometimes they ganged up, sometimes they dished out real violence, but always with large helpings of humiliation. What would you say or write to that bully today? Tell us your story, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You could also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. We take this idea from a new book, where Carrie Jones and Megan Kelly Hall compiled a collection of stories from writers called "Dear Bully." Later in the program, we'll remember the engineer who created the container, and as a by-product, globalized trade. But first, "Dear Bully," and we begin with Carolyn Mackler, who joins us from our bureau in New York. She's the author of several teen novels, including "The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things." And it's nice to have you with us today.

Well, I think you have to do it by concentrating real attention at people. The Africa bureau of the State Department is the smallest in the department. It covers 48 countries. It doesn't have the strength and depth to handle three major conflicts. Second, you have to cross the bridge between the bureaucratics of Africa and the bureaucratics of the Middle East because Middle Eastern countries are heavily involved in two of those crises, Sudan and Somalia. So we need a new peace structure to deal with it, and we need to work very much with these African countries and the surrounding countries to deal with those. So you need a high level, intensive, well-staffed, well-directed peace process, and we haven't put that together in any of these three crises so far.

When I was a kid, my grandmother and my great-aunt were my best friends. That meant that their friends were my friends, which is fine as far as that goes. In 1976, though, when your friends are all over the age of 65, that meant you learned how to play Bridge and Canasta. And in my case, it also meant that I met my grandmother's good friend Ms. Virginia Huber. Ms. Virginia worked part time at an antique store on Frankfurt Avenue in Louisville. I would pass by Earl's Antiques on my way to the Crescent Hill Branch Library, about a block away from my house. The store was right at the streetlight where I would cross and I would stand there fidgeting, my arm full of books waiting for the light to turn.

That's right. Duke and John became very, very close friends. They traveled together, they vacationed together. Duke, I think, he was even the godfather of their daughter, Megan. And they were very, very tight all the time doing events out at the air base, they would fly together and everything. So it was just a natural thing when John started talking to him about politics. Duke came to me and said, do you know anything about the career of John Rhodes? What he's going to do? And I said no, I don't know that. He said there's a rumor that John is not going to seek nomination again, and he may step aside. John was then the Speaker of the House from Arizona. He had a distinguished career, a Republican. So he said, you know John very well. Would you call him and find out? And I said sure, I'll find out. So I called John and he was very discreet about it. He said, Bill, I can't tell anybody about this because I'm not announcing it to anyone. And I said this is between us, John. Not for the reporters. So he told me, he said yes, I'm going to announce in a short time that I will not seek reelection. And I didn't tell him the reason why and so, he was fine with that. So I told Duke. And Duke said well, stay where you are, and McCain is going to call you in a few minutes. And within a half hour, John McCain called me. There was a lot of noise in the background and I said John, where you? He said I'm on a freeway. I'm out to way to do a buy a home on Mesa, I think he said within Tempe.

Well, you know, we're somewhat limited in that we are a small school. We're 335 students in a middle school, grades five, six and seven - or six, seven and eight. And so we don't have single-sex classrooms, though on occasion we have some that are heavily weighted, mostly boys or mostly girls. So I have that point of comparison. And I will say that that does present challenges for us. Frequently we've found that the boys tend to be perhaps less on-task in a situation where there are more predominately boys in the class, you know, less so when we see the majority of girls. But certainly if I'm going to be talking with a teacher about how to improve instruction in a classroom, one of those things that they often cite as a problem is the number of boys that were in a class.

Let's talk about Syrians in particular because, in 2011, the Obama administration put in place this enhanced vetting for Syrians - 21 steps, three different security agencies. They're vetted by counterterrorism specialists. And that vetting continues until a refugee lands at an American airport. So advocates who work with refugees, they challenge the rhetoric that we don't know who they are. The bigger problem is most Americans don't know anything about the refugee program. It's done very quietly. It's been in place since the Second World War. It usually has bipartisan support. It's backed by faith-based groups, including those evangelicals. Let's hear from Chris George. He heads an official resettlement program in Connecticut. And he says that is the problem, in part, because this refugee resettlement program gets no public attention, and that is by design.

A story from my last short story collection, "Dillinger in Hollywood," I wrote first as a short story, but it was 75 pages long and that's--you know, no magazine can print a story that long. And I eventually turned that into one of my last movies, "Casa de los Babys." So there is some, you know, some switching from one to the other, and sometimes you start down the road and it gets too big. Right now I'm working on what may become a novel based on a screenplay that I wrote that when--years ago when I wrote the first draft of it, it just seemed so big that it should be a 50-part miniseries, but that's an impractical thing to think that you can get made. And I'm coming back to it. We've never, you know, been able to raise the money to make it and saying, `Well, what about a novel?'

There are words quite common a century ago that trigger anger and embarrassment today, words like `Sambo' and `coon,' which are reviled these days as racial slurs. You can put the name of one performer in the same category, Stepin Fetchit. Lincoln Perry adopted that stage name during his years on the black minstrel circuit and became famous as the lazy, shiftless character in early Hollywood movies. Because he portrayed a stereotype, some denounced him as Hollywood's Uncle Tom, but because he played it so well, he also won praise for brilliant comic timing and for the sly spark of intelligence inside his shuffling, sleepy-eyed character. If you have questions about the life of Lincoln Perry or Stepin Fetchit, our number is (800) 989-8255; that's (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

No, it doesn't. Most of the oil money has not been used well in countries like Nigeria and Angola. In Angola, it funded a war for a long time. Diamonds and gold, well, yeah, it pays for a few people to hit the rocks with pickaxes, but it doesn't actually bring a great deal of wealth except in Botswana where it has been very well used. There are 52 countries in Africa and not all of them have got oil. There's only about 10 of them have oil, and many of those oil-rich countries are very corrupt because they're not actually taxing their own people, making them accountable. The money comes straight in at the top and often it doesn't trickle down to the people who really need it.

Correct. And I think that's hard because we look to our families for guidance and for values. But when families tell you to be quiet or to not speak up, you have to consider the costs. But ultimately, for me, there are members of the Lee family that will never agree with me. And it's a big, big clan. There are a big group of Lees. But I know deep down that in some small way, if this is making a difference, using Robert Lee - my name, Robert Lee IV - as someone who can say that this is wrong, then it's worth every ounce of strength I have. It's worth my life. It's worth my dignity. It's worth everything I've got to redeem this situation.

He argues that sugar cane ethanol is eight times more efficient to produce than corn ethanol. Biofuels are just a part of Brazil's energy bonanza. Just a few miles from Rio's shore deep in the sea bed, geologists from the state oil company Petrobras have discovered what they say could be billions of barrels of oil. All this energy is a point of pride for Brazilians who decided decades ago to cut a path of independence from the uncertainty of world oil supplies. The old joke goes, Brazil is a land of great potential and always will be. But in a world craving ever more energy, you cannot pull into a gas station or view the vast fields of sugar cane and not believe that Brazil has done something extraordinary; found a cost-effective alternative to gasoline.

I've encountered several voters who've said look we're not big supporters of Hamas but we're going that way because we just want a change. We want an alternative. Fatah has had a decade running the Palestinian authority. They founded the revolution to try to establish a Palestinian state but they're saying look it's time for a change. They've become out of touch, entrenched and we want to give Hamas a try. They've also, I've encountered several people here who bring their children to the polling stations. They want to show their kids that, look, this is an historic election. This is your right. We want to show you democracy in action. So there's been a real festive atmosphere around some of these polling sites with the, sort of, families coming to vote and going through the process.

Well, I wouldn't say it was due to outside pressure. Obviously, the finality of a decision for execution has caused the board and caused us to be more cautious and deliberate in our decision, and we will leave no rooms for question. You know, this is a man's life and the board understands that. And they are seriously considering this case, but it is based on the information that was presented to us at the hearing. If there are questions that are being raised and the board is having to look them, they are going to pay attention to that. They don't want to put a man to death that there are some questions about what may have happened. Again, the finality of it all, you know, you can't give a man back his life.

Things like that. And also, you know, my wife, she has some argument kind of supporting the stereotype. I mean, for her, it's like according - I mean, she is, you know, college educated, she worked in Mexico in professional level. And when she comes here and she say that, you know, some of the people that moved here illegally are not very much the, you know, educated part of the Mexico. And you know, they're being their culture, which is not very highly educated in the first place, and people see it and think that, okay, the rest of the Mexicans are like that.

Well, I think that it depends, again, on the different countries we are talking about. There are countries where governments do not allow us to have access to many of their internally displaced, or countries in which the conflict itself and the insecurity is such that access is not possible. And so it's more and more unpredictable - the security situation. Some of the actors of this conflict simply do not respect humanitarian people. They even consider them to be legitimate targets, and so the capacity to provide assistance and protection to the victims of displacement is severely hindered by the problems of access.

During World War I, one of the horrors of trench warfare was a poisonous yellow cloud called mustard gas. For those unlucky enough to be exposed, it made the air impossible to breathe, burned their eyes, and caused huge blisters on exposed skin. Scientists tried desperately to develop an antidote to this vicious weapon of war. In the process they discovered the gas was irrevocably damaging the bone marrow of affected soldiers— halting its ability to make blood cells. Despite these awful effects, it gave scientists an idea. Cancer cells share a characteristic with bone marrow: both replicate rapidly. So could one of the atrocities of war become a champion in the fight against cancer? Researchers in the 1930s investigated this idea by injecting compounds derived from mustard gas into the veins of cancer patients. It took time and trial and error to find treatments that did more good than harm, but by the end of World War II, they discovered what became known as the first chemotherapy drugs. Today, there are more than 100. Chemotherapy drugs are delivered through pills and injections and use "cytotoxic agents," which means compounds that are toxic to living cells. Essentially, these medicines cause some level of harm to all cells in the body— even healthy ones. But they reserve their most powerful effects for rapidly-dividing cells, which is precisely the hallmark of cancer. Take, for example, those first chemotherapy drugs, which are still used today and are called alkylating agents. They’re injected into the bloodstream, which delivers them to cells all over the body. Once inside, when the cell exposes its DNA in order to copy it, they damage the building blocks of DNA’s double helix structure, which can lead to cell death unless the damage is repaired. Because cancer cells multiply rapidly, they take in a high concentration of alkylating agents, and their DNA is frequently exposed and rarely repaired. So they die off more often than most other cells, which have time to fix damaged DNA and don’t accumulate the same concentrations of alkylating agents. Another form of chemotherapy involves compounds called microtubule stabilizers. Cells have small tubes that assemble to help with cell division and DNA replication, then break back down. When microtubule stabilizers get inside a cell, they keep those tiny tubes from disassembling. That prevents the cell from completing its replication, leading to its death. These are just two examples of the six classes of chemotherapy drugs we use to treat cancer today. But despite its huge benefits, chemotherapy has one big disadvantage: it affects other healthy cells in the body that naturally have to renew rapidly. Hair follicles, the cells of the mouth, the gastrointestinal lining, the reproductive system, and bone marrow are hit nearly as hard as cancer. Similar to cancer cells, the rapid production of these normal cells means that they’re reaching for resources more frequently— and are therefore more exposed to the effects of chemo drugs. That leads to several common side effects of chemotherapy, including hair loss, fatigue, infertility, nausea, and vomiting. Doctors commonly prescribe options to help manage these side-effects, such as strong anti-nausea medications. For hair loss, devices called cold caps can help lower the temperature around the head and constrict blood vessels, limiting the amount of chemotherapy drugs that reach hair follicles. And once a course of chemo treatment is over, the healthy tissues that’ve been badly affected by the drug will recover and begin to renew as usual. In 2018 alone, over 17 million people world-wide received a cancer diagnosis. But chemotherapy and other treatments have changed the outlook for so many. Just take the fact that up to 95% of individuals with testicular cancer survive it, thanks to advances in treatment. Even in people with acute myeloid leukemia— an aggressive blood cancer— chemotherapy puts an estimated 60% of patients under 60 into remission following their first phase of treatment. Researchers are still developing more precise interventions that only target the intended cancer cells. That’ll help improve survival rates while leaving healthy tissues with reduced harm, making one of the best tools we have in the fight against cancer even better.

As I'm listening to this, I'm thinking about violence, including murder and suicide, are also consequences of excessive use of alcohol and other drugs, as well as mental illness. And it is possible that there's no law to prevent it. For schools - and especially universities - it would be fairly easy for schools to require screening for anxiety, depression, misuse of alcohol, and I don't know about other drugs because there are like, yeah, illegality. But they could require that as one of the admission standards, and require that the person who shows positive on any of those admit him or herself for treatment as a condition of being admitted to the university. Schools could do that, too -high schools.

This is - it's a really difficult and, I think, for the people at NIH must be a painful story. And it's important to emphasize we know about this because they went public. They actually, last month, wrote a paper in a medical journal describing everything that happened and everything they did. So it's not that this was something covert. What happened was that a patient came into NIH's clinical center, which is a hospital that's part of NIH that is a very special kind of hospital. You pretty much can't go there unless you're invited. People are there because they're very sick, but also because they're participating in some kind of clinical trial of a treatment.

Lawyer Starr swerved, noting this time that the problem was that the case, which had originally been limited to Nogales, had spread to the rest of the state. Justice Ginsburg, yes, but that's because the state attorney general said the state constitution requires any English-learner funding to apply not just to students in Nogales, but also to students with similar problems elsewhere in the state, too. Starr conceded that state officials have been divided on this litigation. Justice Scalia, that's water over the dam now. That's not what this case is about. Justice Kennedy, well, is the court order valid in Nogales? Answer, no, because circumstances have changed and the court order in intrusive.

No, we're not making too much of it, but I think we should never give such episodes, we should never give such lawlessness any intellectual context(ph), any justification, because in the end the price is paid by Muslims themselves. That is really the people who pay the price. And I think what's kind of interesting about all these episodes, you always get the people who say, oh, the broader causes, the broader causes. There are no broader causes. It's a cheap, vulgar film made by a guy who happens to be, we think, from Egypt, who made it, and this would be easy to ignore.

The best way I can put this - some of your listeners will have known somebody at school who was slightly crazy, who always managed to get into trouble. And I think that was Eddie. That he would go to nightclubs and he would fall in with the wrong sort. But he was - I think he was extraordinarily brave. And I think he was a patriot - I think there's no question of that. That he was doing this to try and help the country, and to try and get out. And I think that the best description I came across, which is actually the final line of the book, was one of his wartime handlers who said, he was a rouge but a very brave man. And I think that's it. I think he was a patriot, a rouge, a hero. God doesn't make Englishmen like that anymore, I'm afraid.

And also the idea that the government itself, the bureaucrats, or the government, the doctors will be reporting back to the government these results. I mean, it almost sounds like a commission sales approach, which is not what doctors need to be in the position of doing. This idea you report back: Were you successful in getting A, B, C and D. And these are decisions that have medical implications, ethical implications, implications for people that have religious faith, for those that do, moral concerns. All of those are the totality of what takes place here. And this idea that you just simply give this to a government commission, who's then in consultation with the doctor, I think, is dangerous. Having said that…

finding the sources of water into the city and stopping them. During a flyover of the area yesterday, officials said they saw three breaches in the levees. The largest one is some 300 feet long. One plan under consideration by the Army Corps of Engineers is to drop cargo containers full of sand to plug the breach. As bad as things are here in New Orleans, in the parishes south and east of the city conditions are even worse. Thousands of homes were flooded in St. Bernard parish, and much of Plaquemines parish down on the Gulf has been literally washed away. Yesterday, state police sent trucks to rural Plaquemines parish to bring officials to New Orleans to coordinate rescue efforts. Parish president Benny Rousselle said the Gulf of Mexico had apparently moved 40 miles inland. Sheriff Jiff Hingle said recovering from Hurricane Katrina may take a year or longer.

So, in other words, what else was going on in American society that might help explain how the hospital came to be? So I think the first thing to really consider is this idea of American internationalism, so during, as you mentioned, the Spanish-American War, there's this moment when the U.S. was really for the first time beginning to proclaim its power as an international force. And during that very short conflict, what you have is deaths due to disease far outnumbering deaths due to battle. So in the aftermath of the war, you have Congress asking how could this happen? How could we have lost more than 2,000 troops due to things like malaria, typhoid, dysentery, yellow fever as opposed to what we're seeing as more worthy injuries and fatalities due to things like gunshots? Only about 360 troops died in battle during the Spanish-American War. So what these congressional committees conclude is that an Army has to prepare for the medical consequences of war even during times of peace.

Hi. I just wanted to speak to the point that while a lot of professional athletes can probably take drugs or performance-enhancing substances, you know, in a more or less safe manner, under a doctor's supervision, that puts a lot of downward pressure on the athletes really trying to, you know, break into the professional level of sport. And they are often forced to, you know, get drugs from, you know, questionable sources or without the proper supervision or to take them properly. I know that Joseph Papp can speak to this personally that there is actually, you know, probably a lot of deaths in cycling from, you know, misuse of EPO and there's been, you know, riders, 22-year-old riders, dying in their sleep of heart attacks because…

Yes, all of that. One of the things that I set out to do when writing this book was to look at the fabulous variety of this country. Jamaica is not only populated by descendants of African slaves but by white British, by Sephardi Jews, by Lebanese businessmen, by Chinese. So it's a whole kind of bewildering melting pot of different skin colors, different peoples, different religions, different creeds, backgrounds. In that way, Jamaica's a very modern society, I think. So I was looking at that side of Jamaica in particular and celebrating it as much as I could, and particularly the music, reggae. And that's something I think that might come in these in-between areas too.

No matter who wins in 2020, staffing an administration is a big challenge. It's been especially rocky for this White House. Yesterday Patrick Shanahan withdrew as President Trump's nominee to be defense secretary after details emerged about violence in his family's past. Last year, White House staff secretary Rob Porter resigned over past allegations of domestic abuse. Ronnie Jackson withdrew his nomination to be veterans affairs secretary over allegations that he abused his power as White House doctor. And there are others. Often these issues show up during the vetting process before the president makes a nomination. David Gergen joins us now to discuss why this White House seems to be having so much trouble with the process. He has been an adviser to four presidents of both parties. Welcome back to the program.

Neal, if I may just jump in for a second. You know, Secretary Duncan made a point the other day, in talking about, you know, the president's budget for education. He said that 600 local teachers' unions had pretty much looked at Race For The Top, and what the administration was doing with the No Child Left Behind, and had pretty much agreed or endorsed some of the ideas that the administration was pushing. What it didn't say, of course, is that the rank and file, really - and we're talking about a lot of other local units and many, many teachers -are very, very skeptical. I think that there was a lot of potential in this - in what the president has proposed, both in terms of time teach -students' test scores and performance to teacher evaluations or even time paid to the way kids - a teacher's students do on tests.

I think it's a mystery to me and I suspect it's a mystery to them. I think we can bet that he's not going to be as pro-Israeli as the Bush administration has been. George Bush has been the most pro-Israeli president I think we've ever had. The Obama administration will be less so and try to steer more of a middle course between Israel and the Arab states. You know, we know a good deal about the Obama people going into this new administration, and they are more tilted toward Israel, but basically middle-of-the-roaders, with the exception of Hillary Clinton who is quite pro-Israel. And as for Obama himself, he's made the requisite pro-Israeli statements during the campaign, but we don't know what this guy's going to do. And I suspect he's going to surprise us in areas like Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

You know, so, you know, it's why would they want to sort of emulate the behavior of the corner rather than a car full of hardworking folks. But then on our side, you know, why didn't any of us speak up. I mean my subway car was completely silent. No one took them seriously, but we were all silent. And I think that it's very easy to sort of point your finger and pick out the ghetto in others without sort of recognizing the ghetto in yourself. And one of the most common ways that we're all ghetto, I think, is our silence, because our silence is an endorsement of behavior that shouldn't be acceptable.

President Morsi agreed that we needed to move forward on the IMF and that he would do so. He suggested that he had a full understanding of the need to do that, as well as to try to reach out to the opposition and be more inclusive and deal with some of the problems in the streets that we have all spoken out about. Now, I can't tell you there's a guarantee that the things that he said he wants to do can, in fact, be affected. And if they are not, then Egypt is going to have a very difficult time in the days ahead. But we thought it was important for the United States, as a matter of good faith, to follow through on the promise President Obama made a year ago; that they would be helped in their transition if they chose to do the right things.