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Thank you, Farai. It is, you know, at the Discovery Channel I was put in charge of building networks there that was built around passionate fans, and as I created the Gospel Music Channel it was so obvious to me the passion, the size of the fan base across America with over 60 million people now buying gospel on a regular basis, and so many listeners across the country that the Gospel Music Channel has become the fastest growing network because of that the last two years. But it was, you know, understanding the fan base, the passion of the fan base that helped us, you know, really understand how to create a channel for them on cable. And it was so important, I think, that we recognize this art form of America that has infected our culture so much as well as, you know, it's deeply relevant to so many of your listeners, and many of people across America - deeply relevant to their lifestyle.

(Singing) Well, everybody's heard about the bird - bird, bird, bird, the bird's the word. Well, bird, bird, bird, bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, bird - the bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, bird, bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, bird - the bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, bird's the word. Well, bird, bird, bird - the bird's the word. Well, bird, bird, bird, bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, bird's the word. Well, don't you know about the bird? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word. Well, bird, bird, the bird's the word...

I think they're conflicted, honestly. The World Series, without question, has provided the necessary relief that this city has needed, as you mentioned, dealing with Hurricane Harvey. And there are still people here in the city that are displaced from their homes. And it could be a year or more before they're able to get back in them, you know, based on needed repairs. So that there's this diversion, and it's honestly such a thrilling diversion that a team is in the World Series, it's something that's really nice. The problem for the Houston sports fan is they believe - you know, perceived, real or not - that there's a kind of a dark cloud hanging over all sports franchises here in this town. This is not like New York or Los Angeles where they're, you know, most of the major league sports teams have won a number of titles. The Houston Rockets won two in the '90s and that's it for this city. So there's an awful big feeling I would say among the fans here of, when's that shoe going to drop? And when's the luck going to turn from good luck to bad luck unfortunately?

Yeah. So I'm an engineering student at the University of Florida, and we actually use the same exact 3-D printers that have been described here in our - in my undergraduate classes. One thing that we did was we kind of had to design something using computer-aided graphic design. We actually used SolidWorks in my class, and me and my group made a Rubik's cube. Unfortunately, it doesn't print in color. It's just kind of like an off-white color is what ours printed, at least. And so we painted on the different sides, and were able to use it. So I thought it was kind of interesting that it's being used in higher education, as well.

Well, I think the important thing to understand is that that is a very recent invention in our experience of time. One of the things I think it's really important for people to understand, that the experience of time that we have or that anyone has at any particular moment in history is an invention. It is neither God-given nor physics-given, and it is very much, you know, a social construct that is built both out of the science and the technology of that culture. And it has very specific needs for economics and for politics. And so there's nothing - I often in my class will ask people to tell me what time it is, and someone will take out their cell phone and say, you know, it's 1:17. And the question I ask them is: What is 1:17? That number wouldn't even have made sense 500 or 1,000 years ago.

Well, what he said to me was that South Central in 1971 was not protected by the Los Angeles Police Department. And so - but it was overrun with gangs even prior to the Crips being formed. So what happened was both he and Raymond Lee Washington decided to get together and form a gang that would protect them and their friends and their family members from the gangs that were ruling the streets of both the Eastside of L.A. and the Westside of L.A. in the black community. So in that sense then, they started off as a self-policing entity. But albeit, they - what he conceded is that it didn't take long before the Crips then became the very thing that - and behaving in the very same way as the gangs that the Crips formed - to protect themselves from.

Here's an email we have from Naomi in Davis, California. Surely one of the most remarkable speeches of the 20th century is Emperor Hirohito of Japan surrender announcement on August 15, 1945. He was a man, some Japanese still regarded as a deity-sounding, incredibly human and even small, his voice high-pitched, his Japanese oddly formal and scratchy off the airwaves. It brought an end, not just to a brutal war but to entire era, in which Japanese royalty were thought of this not entirely human. And this from Cynthia in Wadsworth, California. The speech by President Reagan after the Challenger disaster really stuck with me. It was a marvelous piece of oratory according to the John Magee poem "High Flight," the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. I think part of the appeal of President-elect Obama is his gift for oratory and she reminds us - you reminded us earlier that Bill Clinton could hit a homerun every once in a while, too. And certainly Ronald Reagan was one of the better orators of the 20th century. Do you agree?

I tell you, Leslie Van Houten could be out of jail with me with any dinner - professional dinner party in New York, or L.A. and she could pull it off. No one would ever, ever know that she had been in prison for 40 years. She's not a yuppie but she, I mean, you know, she's well-read. She's smart. She cares about people in prison. She's taught people to read. She's done the AIDS quilt - no one in that prison doesn't think she should get out. I mean the guards, all of the people, the psychiatrist - I mean, even when they had the one negative thing, they said she responded very well to an evil leader and now that she's in jail, she responds very well to the good causes. Well, you're damned if you do or if - you're damned if you don't, that way. All she can be is to try to make up for this terrible thing that happened. She wasn't violent. She talks about, and when I - in my chapter about how she was like a machine that was caught. And that she was so brainwashed that she believed all this. She thought it was the right thing. You know, they were really out of their mind. He did a good job on them.

Well, one of the founding precepts of Wired has always been information wants to be free. And that doesn't mean that nobody has rights to exploit their creations, but rather that digital technologies have made it very possible for all of us to take advantage of other people's creations and have made the actual creations far more powerful in that loop. So something like, you know - again I'll point you to Creative Comments, which is an organization which is trying to negotiate copyright for the 21st Century, where, you know, in the face of digital technologies, in the face of people being able to share things so easily, how can we reach a new middle ground that doesn't presuppose that everything needs to be locked down; which is actually an impossibility these days.

Certainly. And I have to say that when I was working at ABC during the war, my job was actually to monitor Arab media. And I was in the London bureau and I was in a room with all the Arab channels on. And I remember walking into the newsroom and it just was a completely different war going on. But it was - on the British channels or the American's channels, it was much more, as Ted said, I think it was more heroic. It was more of a big show rather than what was shown on Arabic TV - it was already some people's misery, some death and destruction, some happiness and some anger depending on the situation. So it was really two completely different wars that reached these two organizations.

There's some good technical reasons besides just, you know, people worried about their own personal water supply. It takes a huge amount of money to build these pipelines. The volumes that are needed are - most people have a hard idea of - hard time conceiving of the type of size of these pipes that people are talking about and the amount of energy. I just did a quick estimate of, in terms of the flood versus people who are in parched. We would have to - just for using in people's homes, we would have to move over seven trillion gallons of water from one area to another, and it would cost over $10 billion in energy cost alone to move that water - not even talking about the size of the pipelines and such. Up to 15 percent of the energy in California is spent moving water.

Yes, a traitor to the cause, I believe, was the phrase that was used. So there are those on the right who were going to say that, you know, how dare they do this? On the other hand, remember, they have to run for office. The health care lobby, if you will, is a place where Republicans do tend to get a fair bit of money, so it's not insignificant. They're being pressed from both sides. One would expect that they would tend to go with a lot of these major hospitals in their states who are, you know, who will be filling their campaign coffers at some point.

You have to have relationships with all kinds of stakeholders, and your long-term viability depends on those relationships with the community, with your workers, with your suppliers, with your vendors and so on. Private equity comes in, and the Sacramento case that we just heard seemed to go under pretty quickly. Typically they hold a company for six years, on average that's what they hold a company for, and they need to be profitable in that timeframe. The example that she gave - so it's not a generalizable(ph) example, but when private equity comes into a firm that has assets, such as retail, for example, or nursing homes or the case that we heard, typically they divide that company into two companies: a property company and an operating company.

Yeah. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to just quickly -I'm in my 60's now. Thirty years ago, my son's father took off with no concern for me or my son. And I was on welfare and because I couldn't find a job that paid enough to cover daycare, you know, since there was nobody to stay with my son. So I was on my welfare for awhile. I was on food stamps. I also stood in lines for government surplus food. It was not enough, and so I would do things like take - buy a cup of coffee in a restaurant and then I'd go in the bathroom with an oversized handbag and I'd steal soap and toilet paper and paper towels because that was the only way we could obtain those products. I might go into a drugstore and also steal toothpaste and soap and shampoo - the same thing. The food stamps you couldn't use for those products. And so that was the best I could do. I mean, there was nothing else I could do. And I - my father was a minister. I don't come from a family of, you know, thieves. We're well-educated people. As soon as my son got, you know, got into school then I immediately went back, finished a degree in journalism and I'm well employed. So it's not like this was something that I wanted to do for a living. It's just simply there was no - the safety net isn't as broad as you may think.

Well, I think that's true and - but to the woman's point about the glamorization of the violence, in some cases, you would think about films by John Woo, "Hard Boiled" gangster films and "The Killer." I mean, there is a real glorification of violence because the whole thing is really about, you know, the sensuousness of the ballet of the slaughter and things like that. I wouldn't say that a lot of American gangster pictures are really like that. And quite frankly, one of the most interesting aspects of that is that - to quote Bugsy Siegel, you know, "we only kill each other. It's not like they're out slaughtering civilians."

Right. What happened was that there was a treaty in 1997. It was signed in Kyoto in Japan. It did not include the developing world. It soon became clear that that's just not going to work because the future emissions over the next few decades are mostly coming from the developing countries. It took 10 years of wrangling to get the developing world to say, look; this is everybody's problem, not just the developed world. Yeah, we made the problem, but everyone needs to be on board. And finally in 2015, Xi Jinping, president of China, President Obama, got together and said, look; we're going to do this. Are you on board or not? And that did the trick. And everybody signed up, and everybody's agreed to lower their emissions.

From the Rudyard Kipling story, "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," many of us learned early on that even the most venomous cobra is no match for a valiant mongoose, a carnivorous kin to a weasel. When Kipling's story was turned into a 1975 animated feature, Rikki, the mongoose, came out looking suspiciously like a squirrel. And from what we learned today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the California ground squirrel is also praiseworthy for its ability, not so much to fight as to scare off venomous snakes. Aaron Rundus, who is now doing post-doctoral research at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, studied the squirrel's remarkable defenses when he was a graduate student at the University of California-Davis. And Dr. Rundus joins us now from Lincoln. Welcome to the program.

Well, the truth is that people in N'vei Dekalim are packing. I'm sitting in a room right now of a family who's lived here for 20 years in this house, and the room is full of boxes, a cupboard here that's been taken apart, and a similar scene is repeated in a lot of the houses here at N'vei Dekalim. There are still people here at N'vei Dekalim and even more so at the hard-line ideological settlements in Gaza, settlements like Kfar Darom and Netzarim where people are still in denial about the withdrawal. Even as it is under way, they still believe that it's not going to happen and they still refuse to take any steps and acknowledge that it's going to happen. But here in N'vei Dekalim, which is a religious settlement, populated by ideological people, people are not in denial. People here are pragmatic and they understand that this is going to happen and people here are packing up.

Without question. In fact, easy is not the right word at all. The human genome sequencing now, we're really moving towards - as spoken, you know, that the cost has come down, the technology has improved so much so that now we have these massive amounts of data that we can compare one person to another. But really the interpretation at this point is very limited. We don't know - we can see variations from one large group of people to another and say there's a difference in risk for breast cancer, for example, but we don't have the full answer. We still can't account for why, you know, Sally gets breast cancer, and Jane does not.

Alone, the female orca, also known as a killer whale, circles her small, shallow tank stopping only to surface and open her mouth as trainers drop in dead fish. She thinks of a time when she shared her tank with her children. But they are long gone – all five having died in captivity by the age of seven. And she remembers her mother, from whom she was taken at the age of three, in waters off Iceland, to be put on display at an amusement park. When a trainer provides a hoop or a ball, she might listlessly move it around for a few times before giving up. Her worn, flattened teeth are a result of years of gnawing on concrete sections of her tank out of frustration. This has been her life in a marine park on the east coast of North America for the past 38 of her 41 years. Across the continent, in the summer of 2011, I joined a group of scientists, conservationists, former whale trainers, journalists and a filmmaker on San Juan Island in Washington state. We spent our days watching whales, giving presentations during the evening and socialising at the Center for Whale Research, which has been studying the local orca population for almost 50 years. I gave a talk on whale brains and intelligence. The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite was interviewing some of us for a movie she was making that was, unbeknown to us at the time, going to be a watershed for the cetacean captivity industry – Blackfish (2013), about the orca Tilikum, who had killed his trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld Orlando the previous year. And the author David Kirby was interviewing members of the group for the book he was writing about the same incident, Death at SeaWorld (2012), which is scheduled to be a 10-part television series in 2022. On day three of our trip to San Juan Island, we joined an expedition of whale watchers hoping to see the local orcas known as the Southern Resident killer whales – a community of three pods, J, K and L, each led by a matriarch. We turned off our motor and waited, drifting in the ocean, never expecting the honour about to be bestowed on us. Suddenly, out of the blue, we saw a tall dorsal fin, and then another and another, until we realised that we were surrounded by orcas! It was a superpod! About once a year, the three pods come together (in a superpod) to frolic and play in a celebration of life, and we happened to be on the water that very day to witness it. And, as if our luck couldn’t get any better, the elderly matriarch from the J pod, known as Granny, approached our idling boat as if to offer a greeting and acknowledgement of our presence. Then the majestic female – who might have been 100 years old – rejoined the rest of the orca party. But even during this joyous reunion of whales, our thoughts drifted to another female whale ­– the last-remaining missing member of this tight-knit community – who was captured in 1970 by the marine park industry in the infamous Penn Cove, Washington, and who languishes thousands of miles away in a concrete tank only four times as long as she is. Although it has been 50 years since she and her family swam together, if you play the calls of her pod to her, she cries out in her concrete tank trying to make a connection across the void. She too had an orca companion, but he perished in 1980 when he bashed his head into the side of the tank repeatedly until he died of a brain aneurysm. She performs for a small audience while sharing her tiny tank with two white-sided dolphins, her only companions for decades. The free-ranging orcas I’ve come to know are palpably intelligent and have lives to lead And around the same time as our meeting on San Juan, halfway across the globe on another continent, yet another female orca was being transferred from a shallow holding tank to an entertainment park where she is currently forced to perform with five other orcas, including her daughter, who was born in 2018. To this day, she strives to raise her child in a tank where there is no room to get away from an aggressive male who is confined there with her and who killed his trainer in 2009. (She has, in the past, hauled herself out of the water and onto the tank-side concrete just to get away from him.) Under natural circumstances, she would have enjoyed years of living with her family in the ocean and learning how to be the best mother she could be with the support of her own mother and older sisters. Instead, in captivity, she struggles to understand and learn what is needed to keep her child alive in the crowded tank. These are the true experiences of three adult orcas who currently live at three different marine parks in North America and Europe. Their stories aren’t unusual and echo the tragedy of captive male and female orca lives in amusement parks across the globe. Those days, and subsequent trips to San Juan Island, revealed something very important about who orcas are. I had studied their brains and evolution, but had only seen them live in tanks at places like SeaWorld. It wasn’t until I was able to witness them in their own environment, doing what they wanted to do, that I came to understand who they are. The free-ranging orcas I’ve come to know in the San Juan Islands are palpably intelligent, have lives to lead, and live those lives for the sake of each other. Humans are an afterthought. I’ve had the same kind of perspective-shifting experience seeing bottlenose dolphins in the wild for the first time. There’s something so unburdening and freeing about seeing dolphins and whales on their own terms and, once experienced in this way, it’s felt – in one’s bones – that their lives in tanks are highly distorted versions of reality. Orcas (Orcinus orca) are members of the suborder Odontoceti (‘toothed whales’) who, along with members of the second suborder Mysticeti, comprise the modern order Cetacea. Most people are surprised to find out that they are large dolphins, members of the Delphinidae family to which bottlenose dolphins and 36 other species belong. They have exquisitely adapted to life in the ocean over 50 million years to become one of the most intelligent and socially complex mammals – indeed, top predators – on the planet. In the natural environment, orcas spend a lot of their time socialising and travelling from 35 to 75 miles a day in close-knit family groups called pods. Pods are embedded in a larger community held together by strong cultural traditions. The cultures of orcas across the globe are varied, complex and unique to each group; from ways of hunting to specialised diets and dialects, all these elements of culture are passed on from one orca generation to the next through learning. Orcas have one of the most elaborated brains on the planet, with its weight close to 2.5 times greater than expected for their adult body size and with more surface area devoted to neocortical functions (higher-order cognition) than human brains. And the area of mammalian brains that’s most involved with processing emotions, called the limbic system, is also highly developed in orcas, and has strong connections to other parts of the brain through a paralimbic lobe. This complex brain supports a sophisticated intelligence, which comes into play to learn and remember important information over an extended juvenile period and enables them to become thriving members of a free-ranging orca society. Orca brains and bodies have evolved to flourish in a complex, free-ranging sociocultural milieu. When they’re prevented from having this experience, as they are in display tanks where they’re forced to live in highly artificial circumstances, the result is chronic stress. By definition, stress is the effect of living in disequilibrium – outside of one’s adaptive comfort zone, if you will. Marine park proponents claim that life is less stressful for captive orcas than for free-ranging ones, but they aren’t recognising that orca thriving means being exposed to the complexity, variability and even the risks and challenges associated with a life in the ocean. For an orca, an ‘easy’ life, where there are no challenges and nothing to do but perform tricks, is a stressful one. All mammals, including orcas and other cetaceans, mount a stress response through the same brain structures and mechanisms known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which releases a cascade of hormones to the rest of the body. When a threat is detected, corticotropin-releasing hormone is released from the hypothalamus (a structure located on the ventral side of the brain), causing the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone from the pituitary gland and, in turn, the release of glucocorticoids from the adrenal glands (parts of the endocrine system that sit atop the kidneys). The main glucocorticoid involved in this response is cortisol, known as the ‘stress hormone’. Cortisol release has several effects on the body that prepare an organism for fight or flight, and one of the most relevant is temporary suppression of the immune system. But this response evolved to allow organisms to cope with acute, short-term stresses that resolve quickly, and return the body to stability, or homeostasis –­ not the chronic, long-term stress of life in a concrete tank. The HPA response is evolutionarily conserved. That is, it’s shared across all mammals for the simple reason that it works very well for emergencies. Therefore, it has remained virtually unchanged throughout the course of mammalian evolution. (Don’t fix what ain’t broken!) But when this response is triggered frequently or in a prolonged manner, in which the body never resets to homeostasis, cortisol has a harmful effect. These well-documented effects include shrinkage of brain tissue, cognitive deficits and immune-system dysregulation leading to increased susceptibility to opportunistic infections. For captive orcas, living outside of one’s adaptive zone, in a concrete tank, is a constant stress that never eases. The environment is so lacking in texture or novelties that orcas experience a kind of sensory deprivation What are the chronic stressors experienced by orcas living in marine parks? Several colleagues and I identified five in our recent study: lack of adequate space; insufficient social support; unnatural acoustic environment; boredom; and loss of autonomy. Studies have shown that the stress of confinement to a small space in naturally wide-ranging mammals, such as orcas, can be severe and result in both mental and physiological harms. Orca tanks are usually only 100-140 feet long and 25-35 feet deep, a minuscule fraction of the horizontal distance and depth needed to meet their physical needs, inter alia, a range of natural movements, postures and behaviours of an animal who grows to an adult length of 16-26 feet and weight of 3-8 tonnes. As highly social mammals, orcas depend upon strong and long-lasting social relationships for their proper development and mental resilience throughout life. The lifelong mother-calf bond is particularly critical. Wild-caught orcas in captive facilities suffer the trauma of maternal separation early in life as most are captured when they’re very young. Not uncommonly, mothers and calves, and other family members in the tanks, are separated due to business decisions that result in frequent transfers in and out of various facilities. They carry these insults throughout their captive life and often aren’t prepared for parenting in the tanks when they become pregnant (many through artificial insemination). The result is, not infrequently, social isolation, failure to nurse and a perpetuation of poor parenting skills down the captive generations. Moreover, the confinement prevents the natural coping mechanism of dispersal during conflict and increases social tension, sometimes resulting in a level of physical aggression not found among whales in a natural setting. The issue of acoustic stress for orcas in marine parks is paradoxical. On the one hand, there are sources of human noise from crowds, amusement park rides, motors, generators, etc that overwhelm the sensitive auditory systems of orcas. On the other hand, the environment is so sparse and so lacking in texture or novelties that they experience a kind of sensory deprivation, with little need for their exquisite echolocation system to explore their predictable and austere surroundings. The fourth and fifth chronic stressors ­– boredom and lack of control – are particularly harmful to an animal who is highly intelligent, socially complex and autonomous. Boredom is a deeply unpleasant state resulting from lack of stimulation, challenges, variety and novelty. Chronic boredom is expressed as impaired attention, listlessness (known as ‘logging’ on the surface of the water for long periods of time) and ‘stereotypies’, repetitive self-stimulatory behaviours that are often self-injurious as well. More than 60 per cent of captive orcas in the United States and Spain exhibit dental damage from long-term grating of their teeth on hard surfaces. Extensive tooth damage leaves them highly susceptible to systemic infections. In addition to monotony, their lack of the ability to control these circumstances adds independently to the chronic stress of captive orcas. Orcas in tanks can’t control who they’re in the tanks with, when they’re required to perform or where in the tanks they can be (eg, the holding pool or performing tank). Nor can they control when trainers and other humans interact with them for husbandry and veterinary procedures. All of these stressors have, in many other captive mammals, led to a well-known psychological syndrome called learned helplessness. The lack of motivation, anorexia and illness that characterise this syndrome are observed in captive orcas. The impacts of chronic stress on orcas fit well within the larger picture of how chronic stress affects mammals of all kinds, including humans. These include behavioural dysregulation in the form of stereotypies (as exemplified by the tooth wear described above), self-harm, hyper-aggression, poor parenting, and immune system dysfunction, which increases vulnerability to opportunistic infections such as bacterial and viral pneumonias, encephalitis and meningitis, gastric disease and candidiasis, to name a few. The results are lower survivorship rates for orcas in tanks versus healthy free-ranging populations. Very few captive orcas live past the age of 30, whereas in the wild they can live for 60 to 100 years or more ­– the Southern Resident Granny was estimated (but not confirmed) to be 105 years old when she died. Whether she was indeed 105 or closer to 90 years old, she far exceeded the lifespan of the oldest captive orca. When one considers that, in marine parks, orcas are fed daily, have no predators, are under the care of veterinarians, and are in a controlled, sanitised aquatic environment, there’s little left to fall back on as a reason for their short, unhealthy lives in the tanks – except the effects of chronic stress. Currently, there are reportedly more than 3,000 dolphins, whales and porpoises held in marine parks around the world. In North America alone, there are 22 captive orcas. And while SeaWorld has agreed to stop breeding orcas, they still hold 20 on display in concrete tanks. The number of additional captive orcas globally is at least 40, but records aren’t readily available in many other countries. Some countries still capture orcas from the wild, and the number who perish in the process of being captured and transported to marine parks is unknown. Russia and Japan reportedly hold three and seven orcas, respectively. But it’s China that has become the flashpoint for orca captivity as best estimates suggest that they hold more than 18 wild-caught orcas in their growing marine-park industry. As of January 2019, approximately 954 cetaceans, from at least 12 species, were being displayed in Chinese facilities, with most of these originally captured from the wild and imported from Japan and Russia. In the biggest whale rescue in history, the Whale Sanctuary Project and Russian animal-protection groups worked with the Russian government to return to the ocean 10 orcas (and 87 beluga whales) who had been captured illegally in Russian waters for sale to China. At the end of 2019, the last group of whales were released and what was known, throughout the world, as the Russian ‘whale jail’ was closed. China currently has close to 80 marine entertainment parks and shows no sign of slowing, as the Chinese public is now demanding the same forms of entertainment available for decades in the West. Despite the growing problem in Asia and a few other places, there has been progress in other parts of the world. Canada leads the global movement to end orca and cetacean captivity with the passing of Bill S-203 in 2019 banning the display and breeding of cetaceans in tanks for entertainment. In Canada, there are only two marine parks with cetaceans and one of them, the Vancouver Aquarium, is considering transferring its last cetacean, Helen, a white-sided dolphin, to a facility in the US where she can have companions. The other, MarineLand in Ontario, holds more than 50 beluga whales, one orca and five bottlenose dolphins, among other marine mammals – all ‘grandfathered in’ before the passing of S-203. Recently, France’s environment minister announced a gradual ban on keeping dolphins and whales in captivity in marine parks. Over the next few years, four orcas and several bottlenose dolphins will be relocated. Other countries, such as India and Belgium, have followed similar trajectories. Therefore, in a global version of whack-a-mole, the situation for orcas and other cetaceans continues to be in flux. Despite the increasing public sentiment opposed to keeping orcas on display and the progress made in phasing out this practice, there are still many facilities throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia that continue to capture, breed and confine orcas and other cetaceans to concrete tanks for entertainment. There is a paradigm-shifting solution that has been in place for many other captive wild animals – sanctuary It would seem that the ready answer to the problems that orcas endure in marine parks is to set them ‘free’. But the situation is much more complex than that. Orcas, like humans, depend upon a long juvenile period in a natural environment in the company of their family and social group in order to learn how to survive. Those born in captivity never learn these critical life lessons and, thus, ironically, would likely perish if released into the open ocean. So, while we can’t simply end cetacean captivity overnight, we can do so in stages by shifting the paradigm, ie, the perception of orcas and other cetaceans in the minds of the public from one that promotes objectification and exploitation to one that encourages an authentic understanding and respect for them on their own terms, as wild animals who are highly intelligent, autonomous, socially complex mammals who thrive in the ocean. And there is a paradigm-shifting solution that has been in place for many other captive wild animals – sanctuary. A wildlife sanctuary is a place where the wellbeing of the residents is the top priority and where they’re afforded an opportunity to flourish in a natural environment that encourages species-specific natural behaviour. Sanctuaries exist for elephants, big cats, bears, great apes and many other wild animals. There is now a growing global movement to shift the paradigm for captive orcas and other cetaceans. And that is why, in 2016, I founded the Whale Sanctuary Project, a US-based nonprofit organisation whose mission is to create a permanent seaside sanctuary for captive orcas and beluga whales. Today, in 2021, we’re on our way towards creating a 100-acre netted sanctuary area in Port Hilford, a beautiful bay on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia in Canada. The space we will offer is more than 300 times the size of the largest display tank in the world, and the residents will enjoy not only space but a natural environment that resonates with the needs of their large brains and complex minds. And they will be able to exercise their autonomy for the first time in their lives – all while receiving the care and sustenance that they require. There aren’t yet enough sanctuaries to house all of the 3,000 cetaceans currently forced to live in small concrete tanks around the world, but the more that come into existence, the more they will become the alternative to concrete tanks. Back to nature!

The personalness of it is public knowledge. I mean, the most personal thing is her unhappy childhood. That is totally public knowledge. She not only writes about it in her novels, she has written about it in non-fiction forms, in essays. She spoke in public about it. This is not a secret. And look, we're both novelists. We're both artists. The impulse to tell the truth about life and the human condition is deeply engrained in artists. There is nothing in that e-mail that is not public knowledge in one way or another. But it puts it together in a way so that who Elizabeth is and why she's doing it - there would not be the chance of there being the reflex reaction that she's somehow prostituting herself or going after the money. It's not about money. It's about love. They really care for each other, these two people.

Bryan Norcross, a meteorologist and senior executive director of weather content at the Weather Channel. He joined us from their studios down there in Atlanta. We should mention we did get this note from Jane by email: Your return to some of the most memorable stories of 2012 has been fabulous. I found myself especially moved by Rich, the farmer who was on with us at the start of the hour, and his generosity in the face of adversity. He's a role model for the rest of us on how we can walk the talk. Yeah, he is. Thank you to all of you who called in and wrote and joined us on our webpage and joined us on Twitter over 2012. We'll hope to speak with many of you again over the next year. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

I would simply add to what Professor Pagels said. And I agree with most everything that she said. But I would simply want to add that this is, in a way, kind of the fundamental question that a number of people are raising. What does this say about Jesus and Judas and the historical figures and so on? And what I would say about the historicity of it is that all of the gospels that we have are interpretations. All of them are theological statements. All of them have been heavily edited so that it's not as if we find one that tells the real historical story and all the others depart from that.

That's part of it. But by the way, Ira, and maybe not everybody agrees with me, I don't think there's a tragedy when a scientist or an engineer goes into another industry, goes into government service. And we're going to need more people doing jobs in the future we don't necessarily think of as science and engineering because they're going to have to understand systems, they're going to have to understand technology to face these big challenges we have of water, energy, environment, health care, security. These all have a technical underlay that we need to both train all kids to take jobs, and also we're going to need real expertise in science and engineering in things other than just being in the research lab or teaching in the university.

I'm the same age as Etan. And here in the - it wasn't directly as a result of Etan's disappearance, but a year or two after that in Iowa we had a paperboy that was kidnapped, and he's not been recovered yet either. But my parents, it was just - it was - what changed for us is that it was just such a way of life change. It was no longer, you know, the innocence of a, you know, doing what you want. You really had to pay attention and especially as a kid to know that someone your age was abducted and has not been found. My - I lived out in the country, and a neighbor of mine and I, same age - we were about 10 or 11 years old - went to a 4H meet that we do every month. And our parents actually tested us and we - they sent a friend of theirs, but we didn't know who she was, to stop by and pick us up after this meeting. And she did the whole, you know, pulled up to the side of the building, opened the door. She knew our names and said, hop in. Your mom and - your moms have asked me to come pick you up, and it's just terrified me. And both of us grilled this woman for 10 or 15 minutes, and we're 10 or 11 years old, on, you know, where is - where are our parents? Why are they there? How do you know them? And reluctantly, you know, we got in the backseat of this car, but we were just, you know, arms clinched and - because this was just such a change of our life. And I think it's something, you know, as a parent now and having two young kids, I think of, you know, these are things that - this is not something that our parents would have thought off in the mid or early '70s.

The neighbor across the road, Mrs. Hubert(ph), would say to me, what are you going to sing in church on Sunday? And she was quite old and, sort of couldn't really leave her house and so I said well, this is what I'm going to sing. And she said well, come over and sing it for me. It was very simple. I would go over to Mrs. Hubert on her port and I'd sing “Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam” or whatever it was, my great number. And so I had a platform. I had a space in which to grow at the same time being protected in that growth.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I really liked it. I thought it was sort of comforting, because, to me, this book was about butting up against the limits of your own imagination. You have the square living in two dimensions, and a guy from three dimensions, the sphere, tries to bring - explain what it would be like to live in three dimensions. And it's almost impossible, and I feel like this is true all the time. It's really hard - for me, anyway - to imagine a world that's very different from our own. And so in that sense - I don't know - I liked it.

I guess the thing is, it happens obviously. There's - there are bloggers and there's blogs, there's so many blogs out there. So many of them have little regard for the truth. And as - but a lot of bloggers are doing their best not to spread rumors and lies, and the best you can do if you happen to post something that turns out to be not true or turns out to be debunked, then you say it, you correct it and you don't repeat it. And when there is in formation out there, you - I always do my best to track it to some sort of reputable news source. And a lot of times you can figure out if it's a rumor that way because there's no basis for it. You can't figure out where it originated, and then you just don't post it.

Well, I think I agree with Ron in that the Senator Kennedy speech was so well-received and so emotional that it did kind of kick off a level of emotion for the night. And I was certainly standing in a section where there were some women who were wiping tears from their eyes while Michelle Obama was speaking. But I think that a lot of people that I spoke to after seemed really cognizant of what the perceptions of Michelle Obama are, and what her speech attempted to do to combat those. So I heard people say things like, I was really glad she talked more about the family, I was really glad she made jokes, I was really glad that she tried to show people that they're like us. Or another big thing was people saying I was glad that, you know, she is patriotic, and that she is showing that. And I think this speaks to a sense of that maybe a lot of these party faithful are kind of acutely aware of what the criticisms of her have been, and they wanted her speech to combat that, and I guess we'll see if it did.

President Jimmy Morales and Guatemala's first lady visited the province of Escuintla today asking for Guatemalans to stay calm and to pull together in this tragedy. It's estimated that this disaster has affected nearly 2 million Guatemalans. In addition to the scores of casualties, a list which is expected to grow, there are hundreds injured, including rescue workers and journalists hit by hot rocks. Many burn injuries are also reported, especially of people trying to run away from the lava flow. Many in the worst-hit areas are very low-income people, and so their losses are magnified. Dozens of shelters for the homeless and for those who've been evacuated have been set up, many in the most affected areas, the provinces of Escuintla, Sacatepequez and Chimaltenango. For NPR News, I'm Maria Martin in Antigua, Guatemala.

I don't think it undermines the conversation. I think anything that points again to this issue of, you know, licensed private security personnel, mercenaries, hired killers, whatever you want to call them, helps us realize that we have too many unanswered questions that we've jumped head long into privatizing the militarization not only of other countries but of our own cities with no, you know, conversation going on about it. I mean, it's not just the Blackwater that was, you know, doing things in New Orleans in an armed fashion. In fact, you have the governor - a Democratic governor down there saying, really proudly displaying that we have, you know, the Arkansas National Guards here, they've got their M-16s, they're ready to shoot to kill and they'll do it, if they have to, and I expect they will. And that's, you know, a U.S. government representative talking about a U.S. government service provider.

I mean, in the year 2000, the whole world looked at Austria said you crazy guys, what are you doing? And now this is a phenomenon where Austria is not alone. I mean, they're right-wing wing populists all over the place. And now Austria is maybe considered to be some kind of bellwether state, but certainly not the outlaw in a sense that you say, OK. We have to block that because this is just crazy what's gone on in this country. You see right-wing populism now even in Germany, which nobody would have believed just a couple of years ago.

Well, this week we saw, not all conservatives, but some pretty important individual voices criticizing Romney. First, it was Jack Welch, who's a kind of corporate hero. He's the former CEO of GE. Then Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted that Romney's advisors were not up to the job. And then in a really scathing editorial by the Wall Street Journal, which is Rupert Murdoch's paper - which is a very important voice for conservatives - saying that Romney was in danger of squandering a historic opportunity to defeat the president by mangling his message on the president's health care law, by not laying out a bold, clear conservative reform agenda. And these conservatives clearly think that the fundamentals aren't enough for Romney. He won't just be swept into office by a bad economy. He needs to do more.

And that's where people who - and for example, they cite the Navy, well, the Navy's casualties - the Navy personnel were dying (unintelligible). Why? Because they're with Marines. Very few Navy or Air Force personnel, they're not fighting, it's Marines and Army, particularly the combat arm guys. And I guess my biggest thing is why don't we listen. If, for example, it's 40 percent of Marine - if it's the majority of the guys who were doing the fighting and dying, how can you de-minimize and say, you don't have to listen to it. It's a no - we'll put this - we'll take it to another level. I mean, I just think it's an unfairness, the ones who were actually put boots on the ground - and those are the 0300s, the infantry and the recon guy - how can you say your opinion doesn't count?

Duty is almost a character in Ishiguro's most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day." The tale of Stevens, a self-effacing butler in an English great house just before World War II, won universal critical acclaim and was made into a popular movie. In this scene, Stevens, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, has just been informed by his colleague, Ms. Kenton, played by Emma Thompson, that his elderly father, who trained him in household service, has died in the servant's quarters upstairs. Tragic and inconvenient as Stevens' employer is hosting a historic gathering downstairs and expects Stevens to make sure all runs smoothly.

Well, it certainly wasn't the case after 9/11. There was a brief moment, and a horrifying moment but it was a brief moment, where Democrats and Republicans actually talked to each other, looked at each other and worked with each other in the aftermath of 9/11. And that didn't - it lasted somewhat, a short time, but it didn't last that long. And then we saw in campaign, subsequent campaigns, people would use tragedies to their political advantage. We saw that in Georgia in 2002, for example, the race between Saxby Chambliss and Max Cleland. The Republicans called Max Cleland, he was soft on Osama bin Laden, he was not really truly patriotic, even though of course Max Cleland had lost three limbs and was a decorated war soldier. But because he voted against some kind of a Homeland Security - part of the Homeland Security bill, he was deemed unpatriotic.

I would criticise him if he were to do that. But as his incoming press secretary Sean Spicer said, the briefing will continue. And based on Donald Trump's actions, I see no reason to believe that he would cut back from the amount of interviews he's done with the mainstream media. Now, the news conference is different. News conferences take on a pack mentality, and it really has become an aggressive game of gotcha (ph). And I blame a lot of that on live TV and on press bias, but I would not hold regular news conferences if I were Donald Trump or really any anybody. But they do need to have one-on-one regular interviews with hard-hitting reporters.

Yes, that's right. I mean, (unintelligible) after the horse has bolted and that two interviews have been done today, one with Faye Turney another with Arthur Bachelor, the junior member of the crew. And they will have received some money, Faye Turney much more than Arthur Bachelor. Obviously, there's a lot more interest in her. Some of the other members of the crew haven't given any interviews at all. Others have, but have done so for free. I mean, the Ministry of Defense saying that - as Des Browne has acknowledged tonight - that in a way, the Navy was in a very, very difficult situation. They felt the stories were going to come out anyway, that if the service personnel didn't give interviews, then their relatives might and you might have this way the top level(ph) is supporting here, where they, sort of, say, friends of Faye Turner and so-and-so, let it be known. And that might mean, you know, you might get cousins and uncles and brothers making money out of the story without letting the service personnel make money themselves. So they were faced with this problem: they jumped one way, and now they've jump back. : And surely, that would have been the case with any number of other hostage crises before, no?

You know, the private unions have been shrinking. They were - I think one in more than three workers were members of a private union in the '50s. That's been shrinking. It's now like one of 12. So there's no reason to think that that's not going to continue to drop. What's an issue here is public sector unions, which has been steady at around 35 percent since 1979. That's really the healthiest leg of the stool for the unions in the United States. So this is specifically, you know, an attack on the (unintelligible) and an attack on the healthiest part of that body.

There had been widespread doubts expressed about bringing charges in both cases. The Edwards case was premised on a legal theory never used before. And critics of the Clemens case wondered aloud about the wisdom of spending considerable government resources on a case with such paltry evidence. The criminal probe of the use of steroids in baseball began in the Bush administration with the prosecution of baseball slugger Barry Bonds. Three years later, he was convicted of just one count of obstruction, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other three charges. Bonds was sentenced to just 30 days of house arrest.

The streets of Yemen's capital, Sana, are always crowded, mostly with men. They're whimsical in their fashion choices. The men from Yemen's countryside wear a kilt that reaches mid-calf; on top, perhaps, a long-sleeved, colorful Oxford shirt paired with flip-flops and cotton cloth wrapped around the head. Women almost all look the same, basic black with only the eyes showing. Some wear black gloves, but they don't linger much in the streets. Women here require written permission from a husband or father to get a passport and to travel abroad. But in 2004, the president abolished a law that required a wife to obey her husband. For writer and columnist Rashida al-Qaili it's not enough. It's time for women to take charge.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The video game industry has been with us for some decades now. Today we're talking about the that business: who benefits, how harmful video games might be or if they could be even be a useful educational tool. Our guests are Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, authors of "Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution." We got the appropriate and correct subtitle for your book this time around. If you'd like to join the conversation, our number is (800) 989-8255, and our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

Well, I mean, I realize it's a big call, it is going to be harder for black Obama to get elected from the electorate at large than it was from the Democratic faithful. But I think that if he runs an effective campaign, if he does what he did within the Democratic primaries, which is mobilize the black Americans, younger Americans, and bring over Independents, I think the worst thing that can happen is that he loses, but loses narrowly. And, you know, I believe that even if he loses this way, as long as he fights a good race, and I'm sure he will, he will come out an immensely strong figure in the Democratic Party. For this massive fundraising machine, he is going to help hundreds of down-ticket Democrats win. He, I mean, is still in his 40s. Win or lose, Obama is going to be a big figure in U.S. politics for years going forward.

I do, actually. I don't think we're going to get any global warming -serious legislation. We will not get cap and trade, which will rob the administration of $642 billion in revenue. But I suspect, like E.J., that we're going to get health care, in part because the groups are really sort of organized around it. The administration is making great progress for the interest groups, in part because of reconciliation. The big problem is the money. They've got sort of 4 or $500 billion to pay for this $1.2 billion proposal. Where does the other 700 billion come from? That is a huge problem with all the other deficit stuff we've got running around here.

Like it or not, the role of the media is a central issue in politics right now. Supporters say press freedoms are in jeopardy and must be protected. Critics contend that the media is biased and is undermining the very democracy it purports to defend. Well, we aren't about to settle that debate. But we are going to head to the United Kingdom, where the government actually does regulate the content of its broadcast media. The body that does that is called the Office of Communications - or Ofcom for short. Ben De Pear is the editor of the prestigious Channel 4 news program in the U.K. And he joins us now to explain. Thanks for being on.

There's no right way, wrong way. There are certainly healthier ways or unhealthier ways, but often the unhealthy ways happen because they're not receiving the kind of support they need. But everybody does grieve differently based on the kind of relationship they had, unresolved issues. You know, the last conversation I had with my dad wasn't a good one, and now I can never make it better. Was I somehow responsible? All kinds of issues that they wonder about. And what seems to be important is that they feel that they're not alone, someone understands what they're going through and that they have opportunities for expression.

He came as a frequent guest to Amon Goeth. He stayed over nights. But whenever they had parties, he'd participate with the crowd with other SS, and a lot of talk was taking place in the living room. I was not allowed to stay when they started to speak or discuss things. However, he was different. He was civilian. He was one of those that was striking. He always had a smile on his face, and he would come down to the kitchen to comfort me. I didn't understand at the time who the man was because I saw him with the rest of the Gestapo, SS. And he also embraced many times Amon Goeth, like his best friend. So I was quite confused. But at the same time, him coming down, comforting me, telling me I will survive, to have hope. He patted me on my head, and I was scared for a while, not knowing what he really was - 'til after the war and being in his camp, I found out that he was for real. He was the one that tried to help and tried to save us.

Well, I think, as I've said in various different contexts, these are very different circumstances. The Rwandan genocide occurred over a period of 100 days, people going house to house with machetes killing at extraordinary pace and speed. That is a very different scenario than what we witnessed in Syria, which is a horrific tragedy. But it's a five-year-long civil war in which a government, backed by foreign powers, has engaged against its own people. So one of the things I've learned is that there are no cookie-cutter solutions that you can apply from one circumstance to another. They're different. Our interests, as implicated, are different. The tools we have at our disposal are different.

First off, you start with caution. You're trying to get to know who the political appointees are going to be, what attitudes they will bring to the job. They're trying to find out what you've been doing, and quite frankly, how flexible are you going to be? My take on this whole thing is that career civil servants really do believe in the political process. If you're a career civil servant, you're obliged to respect the decisions of the nation. Here's a new boss, and that's a new boss because the nation has decided they want that to be the new boss. So, you better pay attention to them.

Well, I think it's important and necessary if we're going to be focused on wages, rather than specifically focusing on living wage, which I think is an appropriate standard. But the reality is what you need is an economy that will pay decent wages and support families, which means that you have to create an economy with innovative and creative jobs. And one way that you can do that, Neal, is to create an energy secure America. I think there is enormous opportunity here in the United States of America if we have a comprehensive, significant energy policy that focuses on conservation. And what that means, it means different standards for automobiles. It means different materials, it means different construction techniques, different manufacturing processes, renewable fuel and renewable energy. A whole host of new opportunities there.

Here's an email from Abhu Bakir(ph) in Khartoum. In the case of Darfur, Sudan, it will help the situation on the ground if the Obama administration adopts a policy that focuses on the people of Darfur and applies equal pressure on both the government and the rebels. Previous attempts at peace talks have failed in part because all the pressure by the international community has been on the government, while the rebel groups seem to be under no pressure to talk. The deteriorating humanitarian situation doesn't seem to give the rebels, and certainly not the government, enough motivation to bring a timely end to the conflict. Jendayi Frazer?

Well, earlier there were charges that attacks on the Indian embassy in 2008 and 2009 were directed by the ISI. But after that, there hasn't been that kind of charge. There's been the charge that the Americans have been pushing Pakistan to go into North Waziristan, which is this tribal area where the Haqqanis are based and where their major sanctuary is. The Pakistanis have been resisting, saying they can't do it at the moment, they don't have enough troops, their hands are tied. And this kind of, you know, back and forth has been going on for nearly three years now, and it's very clear, I think, to the American military that the Pakistanis are not going to go into North Waziristan, and they're not going to deal with Haqqani.

Tonya Walker had been unable to evacuate her home before the storm hit. The last time her mother spoke to her, Tonya had been watching the water flood into her house, and then the phone line went dead. Betty Higgins was distraught, sure that Tonya was gone. We are happy to report that Tonya Walker did survive the storm, found at a shelter in Mississippi. We reached her and her mother in Florida, where they're now living an hour's drive away from each other. Betty Higgins told us it was the weekend after the storm hit when she finally heard word of her daughter.

Senator Ensign from Nevada, who had his own problem earlier. And I agree with David that this affair seemed much more serious than - and the problem Senator Ensign has a more serious because they seem to be linked to money and other things. But the Republican Party's latest new idea is open marriage. I mean, I hate sex scandals, even though I follow them intently. And I wish we could collectively back away from them. But, that would probably be -require politicians to be more reluctant to trot out their perfect families and also they'd have to stop publicly judging the rest of us.

In the course of this - before he started, he released that manifesto, as Frank Stoltze mentioned, on Facebook, and in the - during the manhunt, the Los Angeles Police Department said we are going to reopen the investigation of the case in which he complained about racism and about he was fired for questioning a superior who had, he said, kicked a suspect and abused a suspect and by - for reporting it he was fired. It was not a case, clearly, that his name would ever be cleared. He already was a suspect, I think, in three murders by then. But why would the Los Angeles Police Department reopen this case in the middle of this manhunt?

At the state level, there is still some hope. Brown was decided in 1954, and it required integration. Just 20 years later, in 1974, the Supreme Court decided perhaps the second biggest significant school desegregation case to the harm and detriment of integration, called Milliken v. Bradley. And what Milliken said, from Detroit, Michigan, is that you could not extend the remedy of integration beyond the city/suburban district. And that's, as Professor Orfield points out, the beginning of the apartheid, that they created this kind of invisible wall between the suburbs, and the minority people were increasing in the inner city, and they said, this is the wall and we cannot extend integration beyond it. Then came 1990, as you said, it was the Dow case from Oklahoma, in which the court said that for the districts that were formerly (unintelligible) by law segregated, they could now eliminate their burden of a court order if they could show that any resulting segregation that's continuing is due to, quote, demographics of just where people move and just kind of innocently where school districts build schools. But all of the factors of where people move with banks, and loans, and mortgages, and housing, and jobs, and transportation are all the result of government planning. So, segregation, for the most part, doesn't just happen; it's created by a number of government policies. But the court put on blinders and wouldn't look at.

It's - certainly managing expectations is an ongoing challenge. I think the earlier you try and predict things, the more likely you are to be wrong. You'll either be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. And I say that very clearly to families and sometimes even patients. It is simply guesswork early on in the individual case to try and guess what will be. Now, that said, we know that more likely than not, there will be, if she is to have lingering significant problems, they're most likely going to be in the area of language, maybe some vision, maybe some other aspects of cognition or memory or behavior and likely some problems with dexterity or function of her right arm?

Well, I think the most important thing that we can say and should say is to reassert our values. Our values at Emerson are a deep and abiding commitment to diversity and inclusiveness. We believe that the diversity of ideas and people acting together in shared interests informs who we are as a community. We tried not to overreact while making clear that we will not be intimidated by these groups, that we will stand together as a community no matter our political affiliations, whether one is a Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or independent, and that all of us want to denounce these hateful acts.

OK. Well, it starts off - it only takes about a minute or so. It says: Time has flown by so fast. It's easy to get swept up in the lack of normal responsibility. In the last week we stayed in an amazing squat, so much good food and living room picnics, seven of us at one point, as well as a dog named Hamburgers. We were on the fifth floor of a very nice apartment complex, making it easy to keep our filth and debauchery hidden from our society and police. The fancy apartments across the way could see straight in, and I wondered what they must have thought of us. Maybe some envied us, some disgusted. I'm not sure.

And - but basically, they're on your side, whereas when you're doing anything for pleasure, they're not on your side. They're full of envy and resentment and wondering why you're taking up space in the culture, and - whereas their cleaning up the yard, putting away the porch furniture and raking the leaves is not getting equal attention, even though it's much harder work. And so you have to make sure that horrible things happen to you. And my wife is pretty easygoing. My kids are cute - so I think. And, you know, sometimes it's hard to engineer the disasters you need.

Absolutely. And most - everyone I went - talked to when I would go to the protests, when I would go the Pearl Roundabout were Shia. And some of them have done well financially, but they feel that they're very heavily discriminated against, especially for jobs. They can't join much in the police force or the military, can't participate in those things. And people would often say, you know, they would go for job interview, and someone saying you have the wrong name. And they would either not get an offer or not be able to, you know, get a decent job at a different place.

I mean, we're suffering. African-Americans, blacks are suffering just like everyone else. You know, for me this is the Great Depression, OK? I look around my neighborhood and it is worse than I've ever seen it. We are interested, we are invested in this campaign because we see this as hopefully bringing an end to the situation that we're in right now. You know, the only thing that I can really say on that is what I said earlier, which is that I've seen young brothers and young sisters who have never been involved in politics, never even cared, paid attention, didn't even know who their councilperson was, let alone, you know, who represented them in Congress, now paying attention and getting involved and invested, because they too are feeling the effects of what's going on in the economy. But one point that I didn't make that I wanted to make earlier on the immigration issue was that I'm, you know, ecstatic that Hillary Clinton had so many Latino supporters. But, you know, we have to also remember that, you know, Senator Barack Obama is a descendent of an immigrant, OK? I think he is also quite capable of recognizing and understanding the issues that immigrants in America are dealing with. And I wouldn't discount him on that.

Now, we received hundreds of questions, and we can't possibly get to all of them. But most of the questions could be grouped into a few categories. So we tried to pick broad topics that represent all those questions that arrived in our inbox, and let's get right to it. The first question comes from Jason Burt(ph) of Maple Valley, Washington. He says, I'm still puzzled at how the downturn of the subprime mortgage market has had such a dramatic effect on big financial institutions like Bear Stearns, if the subprime mortgages are only a small portion of the American housing market and even smaller portion are in jeopardy of default. How is this problem causing so much financial difficulty for banks and investment companies? Adam, so could you give us a basic explanation of how the subprime crisis became such a huge problem? I know this is very complicated, but if you could do this briefly for us.

Yes, I will. I - there's been some pressure on me at the school board level to bring it to a vote quickly. And I'm not willing to do that, because it took me quite a while to come to this conclusion, because I resisted it so much, because I like the game so much and it helped me so much. So I'm going to try to give the school board about six months or a year to try to get it figured out. I'll keep sending them literature, and by this time next year, I will bring it to a head. My school board term ends in December of 2013. I'm not running again, not because of this issue. I just decided when I ran that I would give it one term. And so I'll bring it to a head. I'll bring it to a vote by December of 2013.

Well, I would say that there were some uproar inside the intelligence community against the chief of Mossad, who was forced to step down after the incident, a few months after or a year after. When Benjamin Netanyahu ended his term, the chief of Mossad made gone. But I would say that the fact that these people were pictured, the fact that their photographs were published, caused a sort of a national pride that these people, the Israeli James Bond, the Israeli hit squad, they looked like the son of the - of our neighbors. They looked like the guy who served with us in the army. They looked like the nephew that we know from the streets in Israel.

Or even privately. I think, you know, if we're honest with ourselves, what do we talk about when we're just amongst our friends. And so, for example, a lot of my white conservative friends, they do complain about affirmative action or blacks have unfair advantages here or there. Now, none of us would ever say this publicly, but a lot of those associations are there in a negative way, and I think when we - I think it's a little bit disingenuous to jump all over people like Michael Richards or Mel Gibson and act like we're shocked, like we can't believe anybody would think that. Well, we know people think it. What's shocking is anybody would say it, but again, under extreme duress, losing your temper, alcohol, something like that, it does come out. And I think rather than berating these guys, we should take a deeper look at our culture and say why is that? Why are those associations - 50 years after the civil rights movement - why do we still have those associations? It's kind of upsetting in a way, but on another hand, it's a good excuse to look at it again.

And the individual leadership skills that those young leaders have developed. I agree completely with Allan on that. And there's a real concern among those veterans who I talked to as they look at returning to Fort Hood, Texas where I spent some time myself where the big questions are going to be whether the tanks are parked in straight lines, particularly as - which is hard to do with a 70-ton toy, particularly as sequester eliminates training funds. And it's really important. I really want to take this opportunity to let the American people know that if their armed forces are called upon right now, they will be less ready than they should be.

Johannes Krause is a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His specialty is studying ancient DNA. And he thought that could confirm that Neanderthals were missing the modern gene for language by looking directly at DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones. Now, one of the things that make studying ancient DNA tricky is you want to be sure it hasn't been contaminated by modern DNA. Just touching an ancient bone fragment can leave a trace of modern genetic material. So Krause has set up a collaboration with Spanish anthropologist who had just come across a new deposit of Neanderthal bones. The Spanish team went to extraordinary lengths to avoid contaminating their bone samples.

Izzy - everybody called him Izzy - Izzy chalked up many important stories in a career that latest over 60 years. More often than not, they were the product of painstaking research in public documents. He was the first with correct news about U.S. underground atomic testing. He was among the first journalist to question the Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted massive U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Izzy Stone died in 1989. Now there's a new biography of his life and work. If you knew Izzy Stone, or if you have questions about his life and his work, give us a call. Our number: 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. You can also send us questions by e-mail. The address is talk@NPR.org.

He stops talking and stares into the distance. He does that a lot during his narrative. Idris was arrested nine days ago, just after the protests against Gadhafi began in the East. He says he's been an activist for many years, and he was well-known to the local branch of internal security. His body bears the scars of previous abuse at the hands of Gadhafi's men. He shows us cigarette burns and slash marks on his arm where he says he was cut during other incarcerations. After his most recent arrest, however, he was put to work. He's an engineer who works in IT, so he was forced to inspect the computer files of suspects held in detention by the tech-illiterate security guards. He continues in Arabic.

Yeah, well, the voice - you know, she was, as Steven kind of hinted, a shameless flirt, actually something, you know, people forget. And she could manipulate that, saying tough things in a velvety burr. She had that actually in common with Ronald Reagan. I doubt if he was a shameless flirt. My now late lamented friend Christopher Hitchens wrote memorably, actually, of losing an argument to Margaret Thatcher and kind of nodding to her. And she said: Bow lower. And he bowed. (Unintelligible) was very much a flirt, even - particularly then. And she said, no, bow lower still. And he obeyed her absolutely.

Well, first of all, with driver's licenses, there's reasonably high standards that actually relate to what you're being licensed to do. You have to demonstrate in an actual motor vehicle that you can safely handle that vehicle and abide by laws and do so safely. In 30 states that require a permit to carry a concealed firearm - in 23 of those 30 states, there's some safety training requirement. But in only 13 states do you even have to fire a weapon. And of those 13 states where you have to fire weapon, you really don't have to demonstrate that you can handle a gun in the common scenarios that you might encounter when you're carrying a gun around with you in public places. And then there are 12 states that have absolutely no permitting standards whatsoever, nothing even remotely equivalent to a driver's license in those states.

Yes it is. It's - a number of ships have been taken over the past several months from - ships from countries. This is the first time that an American ship with an American crew has been taken. So this is something different. There's a great concern about this at the Pentagon. A lot of meetings have been going on among other government agencies about this latest development, about an American ship being taken. And a number of the ships from other nations have been taken, again, over the past several months. And the owners have generally paid a ransom of millions of dollars, in some cases.

But I haven't run the bases in years now and our cards are packed neatly away in the basement. My dad recently had a knee replaced too. The surgery went well but when I called a few days ago, his voice was thin and vulnerable. He asked for a pep talk like he used to give me before each at bat through the fence. I told him if he took it easy and use the cane, he'd be up at them in no time. Pretty lame as pep talks go, but what I really wanted to do was just sit beside his hospital bed, popped in "The Natural" and tell him if Roy Hobbs can come back, so can you. So dad, this is for you and maybe if you're feeling up to it when I'm home in July, we can dig out our mitts and have a catch.

Toshi Reagon, did you have to be there? Ms. T. REAGON: No, you didn't have to be there. I mean, you didn't have to be there, and I do think mom has - mom said it so perfectly. I think there's this idea that when it comes from other generations that struggle and especially with the civil rights era, you know, it made so many changes but it could be this perception that you say, oh, your time is better than ours. You have it better than we do, and I don't think that's right. I think every era, every generation, has its unique battle, its unique struggle. As human beings, we are constantly in the fight for righteousness. If we didn't consistently, in every era, fight for righteousness, the world would be a dark and horrible place.

Well, I think that, again, she wouldn't have liked that. What she wanted was to be treated as royalty. People often times said she could be stand offish, a little bit arrogant, condescending. But I think it, what it really was, was that was Mrs. King, having suffered the trauma of her husband's assassination, raising the four kids, all the rest, really wanted to be treated as someone with great dignity. She wanted to be the Queen in the African-American community. And I think that what we saw yesterday in part was that. But when it got beyond that to the political stuff, I think she would have been very upset. She's just wanted to be honored in that moment, and so for her, I think the politics would have been the wrong note out.

He did, and he had a very ambivalent relationship to university-trained scientists. He would hire them, he would use them, but he would also upon occasion find ways to humiliate them, mocking their university training, which he viewed as inimical to practical understanding. For example, he gave one of his - this is a very early Ph.D. scientist - an assignment to measure the cubic area of a light bulb, and the assistant spent all night doing complex calculations. And in the morning, he presented his findings to Edison, and Edison said, well, here's a simpler way. And of course he went over to a faucet and filled it up and...

I don't think anybody knows yet how long and exactly what the mechanics were. And you now have people who have seized his firm, basically going through papers, trying to figure out how on Earth so much money passed through, how much it was, what happened. But I think the general explanation, if his quick comment to the FBI is to be believed, is that he just simply kept raising more money from new investors and paying off old investors as they wanted their money back. So, it's one of the oldest schemes in the book, and it is absolutely remarkable that it lasted this long and got this huge.

Hi. Thanks very much. It seems to me that cities are logical early adopters for a lot of alternative vehicle technologies, given that buses and garbage trucks and the like run on predictable routes and have a kind of a limited range. And so I'm wondering to what extent you guys are going to do something along those lines. And also it seems that if you could come up with some sort of preferred parking arrangement in congested areas that would encourage the development of small, low-emission urban vehicles and maybe even provide charging facilities, that also might be an interesting thing to consider.

Well, some of them, I know, have either called or e-mailed or written to Senator Begich's office or Senator Murkowski's office. And I know that, you know, they, of course, they've talked about it at the Chamber of Commerce. They've talked about it at, I'm sure, in their own conversations. I don't know exactly what they're doing. But a lot of them are a little upset. Alaska's financial situation was, until the price of oil went down recently, a little isolated from the national financial bubble collapse. But now that the price of oil is back down, Alaska's economy is taking a hit, too.

And, again, it's anecdotally the story happened to myself and my friends. We were staying in a small town in Spain. And the point was not to charge around Spain and see it, the point was really just to get away from everything, turn the phones off and just hang around for four days and just, you know, chat around the table in a small town. And that's what we did. And coincidentally, there was fiesta on, including the bullfighting and the release of bulls onto the street, which came as a shock the first time. Just walking down the street, maybe 11 in the morning, looking for somewhere to have a good cup of coffee and the bulls came running around the corner.

Will Harris completely transformed his farm to live in harmony with nature. And now nature is sticking its head into his body cavity and eating his financial guts out. Federal law prohibits killing bald eagles. But last year, Will was granted a special permit to harass them. So now he's trying all these ways to basically make the eagles go away. He bought one of those giant inflatable people you see outside car washes, got a noise cannon. And Will's poultry manager, Jeff Lackey, showed me one other thing they're trying. We drove out to a flock of chickens, spotted an eagle, and Jeff pulled out this, like, cap gun and some ammunition.

They come from an industry-funded group called the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which operates similarly to the board that rates movies. The ESRB was founded in 1994 amid chatter that the government would start to regulate game makers. Software developers aren't required by law to submit their games to the ESRB, but many retailers only sell titles that receive a rating from the board. If a company does ask for a rating, it must comply with the rules of the ESRB or face penalties, which can include cash fines and product recalls. When submitting a game for the board's scrutiny, the developer fills out a questionnaire that describes potentially offensive material, especially sequences involving sex, drugs or violence. The company must also supply the rating board with the scripts for any scenes with dialogue and material like song lyrics. The package sent to the ESRB includes a videotape showing the game's basic plot and each questionable scene. Such videos can be several hours long, but they don't include every single scene and level in the game because that would often take 50 hours or more.

Well, it's part propaganda. Now, let's take hacking Brad Pitt's website. Angelina Jolie, an actress, is also a U.N. ambassador and she visits refugee camps. So, she went to southern Turkey recently to support Syrians fleeing an army crackdown. The hacking is part warning and part accusation. But more important, this campaign tries to appeal to young Syrians who haven't joined the revolution yet. You know, we are hip, we are cool too but hacking into secure websites is a valuable skill. And there seems to be sharing of that skill between the so-called Syrian Electronic Army and the Syrian Intelligence Service in tracking and arresting activists.

You voted against the Immigration Bill, HR-4437. That was the one back in December that really, I think, sparked all of this debate and a lot of the anger, because it would make felons of illegal immigrants. You're against that. The White House, apparently, thinks that it is going to get some sort of progress, and that Congress is going to help a bit with this. But what about in the House? There's a statement from Roy Blunt, the House majority leader for the Republicans, saying that he doesn't think that the House Republicans are ready to cooperate. What's your sense of the way people are going there?

I definitely think that there's probably a misperception about how common it is because of that shame and the silence, the fact that just victims and even into adulthood, they don't want to talk about it, even to their own spouse or to their own children. And I think that it is more common. I think that the extreme cases are not as common. But it's something that people tell me it crops up in the workplace, you know, later on in life. And in every segment of society, it seems, you can find bullies. And I think it's much more pervasive than people have realized, probably.

It's interesting, you mention that in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a writer named Jay Bookman raised exactly that point: I can't say that I think Troy Davis, scheduled to be executed this week, is innocent. My best guess is he isn't. My best guess, having reviewed as much of the evidence as I can, is that Davis probably did kill MacPhail. But there is no DNA evidence in the case, no fingerprint evidence to substantiate the fact. The case is based almost entirely on testimony from eyewitnesses that, in some cases, has altered over the passage of time. Davis should not be freed, the writer continues. The minimal doubt that may exist about his guilt does not rise to the level needed to justify overturning his conviction. However, the sense of closure and justice that would be provided to some by his execution does not outweigh the possibility that we would be compounding one tragic killing by committing another.

My main comment is to say that there is a certain element at all rallies which is to evoke emotion. To get people fired up and to get people charged up. I disagree with almost everything that the McCain supporters are screaming out and for the screaming in general. But you know, I am sure that it happens at other rallies. I know that Obama supporters scream nasty things. The McCain supporters scream nasty things. But I did noticed on several occasions where McCain actually shot them down. The rallies are rallies, that's the point. Everybody even says, you know, come on let's get - let's rally, let's go do something. So I think that hitting that emotion on a specific candidate might be misplaced. The candidate themselves isn't necessarily in control of every single person that screams something and that's the point of this season. As you said, only 50 percent of people are going to turn out to vote any which way at all, so,

Getting more ethanol to consumers would also help cutback carbon dioxide, the main planet warming gas that comes from burning oil or gas or coal. But some say ethanol isn't nearly enough. Among them is the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, with several members from industry, as well as utilities and environmental groups. They issued a report yesterday calling for mandatory limits on carbon dioxide - not just from cars, but from power plants that use coal or natural gas. President Bush had adamantly opposed mandatory carbon limits. And even if the president does propose some new efforts to control CO2, it may not be the White House but Congress where the action will take place. That's the view of climate group member Fred Krupp, from Environmental Defense.

Yeah, no - absolutely. You know, paid sick leave is a big issue. We're seeing, you know, many employers, you know, trying creative solutions right now, creating pools of unused sick days that employees can tap into, you know, making sure that vacation time is utilized if, you know, further time is needed. And the other thing that we're also seeing is, you know, employers are concerned if you have a healthy employee whose healthy child is out because their school is closed, how do you accommodate them, you know. So now you have people who otherwise could show up to work but can't because of other reasons. So how do you make sure that they're able to still be productive, whether remotely or, you know, come up with creative alternatives to allow for that as well.

I would like to remind him that Ethiopia is a country of 74 million people and the regime in Addis Ababa who are now behind the most of the problems in Somalia, that the (Unintelligible) regime - they make up only 3 million out of the 74 million in Ethiopia. So they have a tremendous problem within Ethiopia. So in order to hide that they are trying to divert attention from their massacre like in the Ogaden region, which is the eastern part of Ethiopia and which is being a sort of conflict. Somalia and Ethiopia, you have to mention went to war in 1964 and 1977 over the Ogaden region. And this still remains the fundamental issue between the two countries. And without a clear resolution to this crisis in the Ogaden region, there will be no peace in east Africa as a whole. I would like to - can I say one more thing?

Well, that is exactly the right first question to ask: `Should I sign up or not?' And that might depend on whether or not you have another source of coverage. People who have employer coverage or veterans, another source of coverage that is considered at least as good as the standard Medicare drug benefit, might well want to stick with what they have, but most people on Medicare do not have that kind of coverage, and that's a group of people who should think long and hard about signing up. And there are strong reasons to sign up. There's kind of a carrot and a stick. The carrot is they do get insurance. If they're low-income, they get fairly substantial help. And anyone gets help just at the idea of, the notion of having insurance. But there's also the stick, which is if they don't have other coverage, they will pay a penalty for late enrollment, and it's a penalty that they repay if they change their mind and sign up in the future. And it's one that would--they'd pay for the rest of their lives on Medicare.

Well, a little bit of background. I was actually going to law school when (unintelligible) versus Connecticut came down, the Connecticut State Supreme Court case that originally kind of set the stage for this whole changing of public opinion. And what's interesting to me and something that I've always wondered about with DOMA, with some of the research I did when I was a student, and Justice Kennedy specifically picking out the federalism issue - DOMA in my mind and my understanding of it is unique because this is one of the few times that the federal government has enacted a statute that specifically deals with something that has been explicitly reserved to the states to determine in the past. And it also hints at a problem with the common law concept called conflicts of laws, which allow the states to determine which laws from other states they're going to recognize.

No, I think this was a very important speech and he was not off on his own. I think this was a great emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Schumer was correct to say, I think, that if you are going to go through all the trouble of tax reform, why then use the money to cut the tax rates of the wealthy, which is essentially what would happen in a rate-cutting tax reform, when you need it to close the deficit. And I have also - and David and I have disagreed on this all year, I'm very skeptical you can raise a lot of money out of tax reform at this moment because we don't want to mess with housing or health care or state and local taxes. I think this'll help the process.

Yeah, absolutely, Rachel. So right now the Senate race is the tightest of the three races that you mentioned. The margin there is about 0.15 percentage point, differentiating between Bill Nelson and Rick Scott. And lawsuits are flying. Lawyers are coming in from all over the country. One of the lawsuits - basically what you're seeing is a battle of two narratives. Rick Scott, as you mentioned in that clip, is kind of - is really pushing a look at voter fraud without any evidence. He hasn't given any evidence to support these claims. But he - his lawsuits are really aimed at casting doubt on the process. One of the ones he filed this weekend is asking for law enforcement to impound voting machines in Broward County, in Palm Beach County, when they're not in use, seeming to imply that if the voting machines stay in the supervisor of election's office, that there could be some sort of issue or funny business.

Well that's a very good point. A characteristic of aging is that vulnerability to most causes of death increases exponentially. That means in people, your chances of dying of a wide variety of things double every eight or nine years, after age 30. And what seems to be happening here is that we're protecting against a wide variety of different causes of death. Now, how do I know this? Because we're using mice that die of a wide variety of different causes of death. They're intentionally genetically highly diverse. In that case, maximum lifespan integrates all the different causes of death. So if we increase maximum lifespan, they didn't die of a large variety of these things. We postponed death from a large variety of things and that's what makes us think we may have, in rapamycin, a drug which actually retards basic mechanisms of aging.

It's not how science works. I mean, it would be nice if it were so well-ordered and so thought-out and so carefully chronicled, but it's not. It's complete chaos most of the time. I mean, all of us, of working scientists, have told our graduate students at one time or another, well, look, let's get the data, and then we'll come up with a hypothesis, because that's sometimes just the way it is. In fact, I think a hypothesis is, in some ways, a bad idea for science; because a hypothesis is, after all, your best, cutest idea about how something works. And it's bound to buy us everything you do after that. If you have too strong a hypothesis, you become naturally invested in it. You're a person like anyone else, and so pretty soon you begin doing experiments that are likely to prove the hypothesis.

Well, what happens is that the beetles bore under bark, and into the phloem of the tree. And they bring with them a fungus, and it's actually the fungus that clogs the water-guiding tissue to the foliage. And they basically plug the water supply, if you want, to the trees. The trees dry out and in a matter of a few months, they go from green to red, to eventually a gray when the needles fall off, and the trees are completely dead. But basically, the tree that beetles overwhelm - the beetle in a matter of a few months, and the tree is dead.

Actually, it was the last year that I was an undergraduate, and you described it pretty aptly. What I found myself personally in the situation of, and I suppose a lot of young men who were sowing wild oats discovered this, is I had a situation as result of my one evening spent with this young woman, of having her very much in my life, more than I wanted her. And I got a call from a minister who said that she had tried to take her own life, and he said it's because she is nuts about you, and you have to come here and visit her.

That's right, and there's at least anecdotal evidence. Here's an anecdote of people who are not going and getting recommended tests and certainly preventive care would be the first thing to go. You're not sick, you feel healthy, you know you should get it, but its money out of your pocket that you may not necessarily, you know, want to spend or feel that you're able to spend right now. And those are the first things that are going to go. I mean, obviously if you fall down or slip on the ice and break your ankle, you're going to go and get that dealt with. But it's the preventive stuff, the stuff that you know you ought to get, that you feel like you can perhaps put off until maybe you feel like you have the money.