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Solodkov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, says many homebuyers were motivated by the much cheaper interest rates on dollar mortgages. Still, frustrated homebuyers like the Novikovs say the government should help them. They're part of an emerging Russian middle class who saw a vote for President Putin as a vote for prosperity that would allow them to move up in the world, and the fact that they're willing to take to the streets to protest suggests that they want to hold the government to that promise. The combination of a weaker ruble plus inflation is hitting hardest at another important segment of Putin's political base - retired people. Vasily Solodkov says many consumer goods in Russia are imported, including much of the food, and that's hitting the typical retiree...

Well, I got a loaner set from 3M, which is one of the main suppliers to the military of these things. And they really do cut the loud stuff. I mean, even clapping hands, it just - boom - dampens it down. And you can hear fainter sounds than you might hear with your own ears. I took them in the backyard late at night, listened to frogs and bugs and things and people moving around in the next yard. But it's harder to pick out where those sounds are coming from. You know, it kind of changes the directionality and limits that. The human ears are well designed for that, and these things aren't quite there yet. But if you're aware of the limitations and when it makes sense to wear them and when it doesn't, they seem like they can be a pretty important tool.

For influenza, since the majority of transmission is through the air, we can probably not do much in terms - yes, we can avoid certain rooms, but just not touching something is not so easy because we have to keep breathing. At least, some of us want to do that. So the best, probably, is still vaccination. This is really a way of avoiding influenza. It's not a perfect vaccine, but it is really probably the best way of preventing influenza. Unfortunately, it is an under-utilized or under-used vaccination. And I really feel that people should consider taking the vaccine and, by virtue of doing that, have a good chance not getting influenza. It is not 100 percent, but it's still a very, very good way of preventing the disease.

Well, he's going to try to make it different. Again, the zero-sum thinking, if they're winning, we're losing. Second, a reorientation of our politics. Both parties have been pretty pro the post-World War II institutions, the pro - the institutions of globalization. He clearly is going to be opposed to them. There are not many people in this country or in this government at least who agree with him. Even within his own Cabinet most do not agree with him. And so one of the things that'll be interesting to me, there was sort of a slight difference - or a large difference between Trump the inaugural speaker and Trump at the luncheon who was very much the insider, palsy (ph) palsy with all the insiders. And so when push comes to shove on foreign policy issues, is he going to side with Gen. Mattis and some of the insiders who are much more pro-globalist, or will he stay with Steve Bannon? That, to me, is one of the large foreign policy questions.

I can't wait to take my family. But I was a filmmaker before I started working in education. And so for me, I kind of come to this, like, I've got a little secret on this one. My very first mentor was this fabulous woman named Carol, and she was a producer. And she was, like, everything to me. And she talked all the time about her son. And she talked about the fact that her son was an incredible storyteller, and she couldn't wait to see what would happen with his life. And her son was J.J. Abrams. And so whenever - I know everybody else is looking at "Star Wars," like, this great movie that's going to come out. But for me, when I see it, I think of a mom who really believed in her kid. And when I see his name come across the screen and when I see the interviews, all I can see is a mom who believes so deeply in her son's vision and his talent and she supported him. And here he is now, giving us, like, one of the greatest stories that we'll ever be able to share with our kids.

I was in an IDP camp in Pader district and the word went out, and so I started doing interview after interview, and I realized that each story was very similar to the next and to the next, of mutilations and of suffering. And I went outside and there were literally hundreds of people lined up, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to tell me their story. I heard that the cutting had begun again by the Lord's Resistance Army. That means that there was an order given that people should be cut--their lips, their nose, their ears, their fingers. Came across two women in St. Joseph's Hospital in Kitgum. They told me a story about how they both lived in an IDP camp, and they were out of the camp, the LRA rebels came, about 50 people were abducted, and someone ran and, as an example, a young boy, about 11 years old, they said, cut their lips and their ears off. When I was photographing them, one of the women started to cry. And I asked her `Do you have hope for peace in the future?' And she said, `I don't know. I don't know if peace is possible. But what I do know is that when I'm finished here, when I'm healed, when I leave this place, I will go back to the IDP camp, care for my children, and live the rest of my life in poverty.'

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Violence in Syria continues to escalate. Every day thousands of refugee flee into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, but for the first time in months, there's an opportunity to form a government in exile that could open room for diplomacy. So far Turkey, France and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have recognized the newly formed National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. The United States and the European Union have not, at least not yet. And so far it's not clear that this new group can effectively unite the often fractious opposition.

Don't talk to black people like black people. In other words, take your message of the importance of passing economic reforms, such as the tax cuts, or talk about the need for national security reforms and what it means to be at war here in the United States at the dawn of the 21st century. But in years past, I think many Republican politicians have made the mistake of going in the communities of color only during election times, talking about welfare reform, justice reform. Talk about bread-and-butter issues that are discussed around the kitchen tables of all communities in the United States. Those will resonate in communities of color. But Republicans, again, have made the mistake of talking to black folks like black folks, and I just think it alienates a very important sector of our American society.

We've gotten nothing from the Americans, says Abdullah Khan, also from Helmand. He adds: The infidels should leave Afghanistan. We don't like them. Chances are, both these men and their families have received U.S. donations. But with the anti-American climate in Afghanistan - even before the Quran burnings - USAID has been keeping its logo off the aid it gives because of the danger it might pose. Even for a refugee, it's not safe to bed down on a blanket with a big American insignia on it. After the killings of American servicemen deep inside the Afghan interior ministry, some are wondering if the same danger applies to NATO advisors.

You know, Magdalena and I are now convinced in looking back that our love was already bonded before I was diagnosed. But I am - I was afraid that she would end up having to take care of me. Fortunately, she did not have to do that because I arrived at Carville at a very unique time when they were experimenting with quite a bit of medication and as a result, I was able to avoid all of the physical disabilities that normally come with the illness. As you can tell from my earlier comments, I still have many scars in my soul, but the visible scars right now are from my waist down, primarily on my legs.

The hearings start on Monday, and, Alex, there was supposed to be a vote on the nomination as early as January 17th. Now already you're hearing from Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, that the Democrats will use their prerogative, which is to ask for at least a one-week delay because the sense is that Alito--or, as the Democrats regularly refer to him in conservations, Scalito, suggesting that he is the equivalent of Antonin Scalia--that he is a stealth candidate, that he is mild-mannered in demeanor but that he is a man who is strongly opposed to abortion, strongly opposed to affirmative action and a big supporter of presidential authority. So given the conversations that are already taking place in Washington at a high level over national security, wiretaps without warrants, his insistence in previous rulings and his work when he was at the Justice Department that the president should have ultimate authority is going to be a real point of controversy in his hearings.

Well, Prime Minister Netanyahu has certainly stressed how dangerous he feels Iranian threat is and he's - from his perspective. He is in the Middle East. He's in the region. His proximity to Iran is much closer. He views the Iranian nuclear issue with a greater degree of urgency just by his circumstances, geographical situation and so forth. And he feels Iran, particularly the rhetoric that's coming out of Iran, married to an increased capability in terms of nuclear science as an existential threat to his country. And I think you can count on him to emphasize those points. I think, from everything that you see in terms of his declarations that are becoming more emphatic, he seems to feel that time is even less of a commodity than President Obama does. So that's essentially the disharmony between these three powers. They all think they have - Iranians certainly think they have time. The president think time is running out for a diplomatic arrangement, and President Netanyahu feels that time perhaps has already ran out for such diplomatic niceties.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. There was a real funny story, but that is in Greece. We were preparing for a very crucial game, a quarterfinal game that we needed to, you know, to win to progress and move on. And I had actually left my jersey. I was, you know, getting ready for the game. I left my jersey back at the Paralympic Village. And, you know, as soon as I found out, you know, I immediately, you know, told my coaches and team leader. And, you know, they got in contact with our security liaison at the time, and he got on the horn with his cell phone and also email. And he actually coordinated with the Athens police, who then went to the Olympic Village, in our living quarters.

�if the guards at the checkpoints decided to defend themselves? And they had a shoot-to-kill order to do that. So we were very careful to make sure that we were on top of all the news there was to come. Then I went home. And on the way home up Schoenhauser Allee in East Berlin, and that crosses a street called Bornholmer Strasse. And in East Germany on a Thursday night, it's usually a very dark. Nothing's ever happening. And I looked down the street, and there were Trabants, this plasticized, pressed wood two-stroke probably(ph) smoke-belching car parked everywhere, which is very unusual. And then I looked down the street about three or four blocks to the checkpoint itself, and there was a camera on the other side and people yelling, tor offnen: open the gate. Open the gate. I thought at that point I knew that something was going to happen. I hope that it wasn't a shoot-to-kill order being executed, but I knew that seeing the television on the other side, that the television was record what was ever happening. I rushed home, got on the phone, woke up the ambassador, called West Berlin and called White House again to say we'd like to revise what we had just said.

Stanford economist Robert J. Flanagan published "The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras," a book based on his study of the finances of more than 60 top orchestras. He resists using the term tipping point, but he says the funding model for orchestras has always been problematic, and the economic downturn brought things to a head. Many communities established orchestras in the 1960s and '70s aided by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the philanthropic support of foundations and individuals. However, costs increased, and orchestras have become more dependent on those donations to keep ticket prices affordable. Flanagan says many orchestra boards also wanted to be generous to the musicians in the orchestras they loved. ROBERT J. FLANAGAN: And, of course, there are two signatures on every collective bargaining agreement, so some of it reflects what the musicians push for, but some of it reflects what management seeks to sign off on. And it appears that over the years, many collective bargaining agreements have provided for more expense than the communities in which the symphonies are located can afford.

Well, for one thing, we have learned lots of lessons about communicating. We're in the communications business, and yet the ability to communicate failed us almost completely. Through various serendipities we were able to get out an electronic edition of the paper for the three worst days, but in some cases we had to knock on people's doors and see if there was a telephone landline or drive to a remote town in Louisiana in order to phone in stories to our temporary offices in Baton Rouge. We have a rather elaborate plan in place for this next season, but we recognize also that you can't always be fighting the last war. And who knows what kind of disaster, God forbid there be a next storm, but if there is, it may come from an entirely different direction or it may have a different sort of flooding, it may hit in a way that just - the best laid plan has to be nimble and flexible.

Vargas broke the law and should be punished accordingly. He should be fined, deported and sent to the back of the line of those waiting to enter under the law. Thank you, NPR, for not attempting to editorialize this story to make it sound as if he were anything other than the criminal that he is. But Judy Roarer(ph) of Oakland disagrees. She writes this: The point is not the laws he broke and the mea culpas we, the documented, demand. It is that our immigration system is incredibly broken. And she goes on to write that it took tremendous courage for Vargas, who is gay, to come out again, this time as undocumented.

Okay, Ray, thanks very much for the call. Wiretapping and Extraordinary Rendition, the transfer of terrorism suspects to third countries are among the clandestine programs the government has launched to wage what it describes as the war on terror. Because the programs are so secret, it can be difficult to judge whether or not they are legal. The administration argues secrecy is needed to preserve the usefulness of those programs, and that State Secretes Privilege is a valuable tool. Joining us now is Bryan Cunningham, a principal at the law firm, Morgan & Cunningham, a Denver-based law and homeland security firm. He was previously deputy legal advisor to the NSA from 2002 to 2004, and a senior CIA officer and federal prosecutor in the Clinton Administration. He joins us from the studios of Colorado Public Radio in Denver. Nice to have you on the program today.

He made a big mistake, and he knew that he made a big mistake. He - the black soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War were very heroic. And, in fact, Roosevelt had said this to Booker T. Washington in a private meeting. So inexplicable why he said that, but he often made, you know, errors like that. And he did retract that one. He was not as apologetic later on during the Brownfield incident, and he never retracted that. But I think that we have to look at the whole life, and it was very kind of moving to me that at the end of his life, Roosevelt's one desire was to lead a troop of African-Americans in World War I. And that was denied him. He considered too old, but that was his ambition.

Well, I think that's right. If you accept the president's grand dream, these were inspiring speeches 'cause they operated at a very high level. Yes, we're all for democracy. We'd like the United States to expand democracy. If you were looking for specifics about how we were going to achieve that victory that the president talked about over and over and over, there wasn't much beef there. I think, like it or not, the truth is that the president has a year to achieve a result there, to persuade Americans that it's worth keeping our troops there. The key is whether these elections held today help produce a government that gives the Sunni minority, once dominant in Iraq, a sense that their rights and interests will be protected. I agree with David that it's largely about how that balance is achieved and also whether they produce a coalition government or a kind of quasi-fundamentalist government sympathetic to Iran. It was inspiring to watch Iraqis try to take control of their destiny. I think the key is whether this will not be one of those one-election, one-decision, one-time situations that ends up installing a government that never goes to the voters again. And, of course, can the insurgency be pushed back? Senator Joe Biden said in Iraq today that we don't want to replace dictatorship with chaos, and I think that's a good point.

And this is what he found: Despite the fact that azodicarbonamide is not approved for use in European countries, there are no studies showing it causes asthma in people who eat bread made with it. The reports about breathing problems came from factory workers who have breathed in high levels of the compound. He also looked for evidence that azodicarbonamide, or its breakdown products, relate to cancer. He says he found a few studies. Mice were exposed to high doses, nothing close to the tiny exposures people get from bread. Now, Justin has no connection to the bread industry. He just considers himself a kind of concerned citizen scientist. And his conclusion?

Well, hands down, no matter the juxtaposition of your candidate or the charisma they may or may not have, it always comes down to two things, and that's the verbal and the non-verbal. So, starting with the non-verbal, you've got to make sure that your candidate is ready to stand 90 minutes under hot bright lights, answering intense questions. So, what they do, and this is how they did it with the Joe Biden team in Delaware this week, they take a hotel ballroom, they actually put in a stage, two lecterns, the same height as they will be that night, you've got your sparring partner playing the position of the opponent, and you're there under the lights, and you go for 90 minutes at a time so you're in top form. Sarah Palin's been out at John McCain's ranch in Sedona, Arizona, and actually doing her debate prep outside. But they still have those lecterns, and you know, the sun's pretty hot out there as well.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me: You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs. They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner. They go to bed at night wondering what they're going to find for breakfast. And this is a situation that's been chronic for 20 years. A South Korean teenager, 18-year-old male, is about five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. And there are many soldiers who are only about 4'6". The height requirement is supposed to be 4'9". That's the size of my 12-year-old son. But they can't find enough people who are that big. The situation is very desperate.

Well, the fact is that a surge is not the suggested solution of the Iraq task force. It is not the suggested solution of Joe Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations. It is not the suggested solution, frankly, if you read the results of the elections, of the American people. It is a time buyer, and there are several answers to the questions you've raised that are being given by people. One answer is any increase, but let's take the surge idea, means that you can assume even increased number of U.S. casualties. Why? There are more people, more targets, more of our folks in uniform - they're on the streets. And secondly, of course, a surge has to assume an even more aggressive posture.

And there was a funny, little, wrench-shaped piece of bone sitting on the ground, and I knew it immediately it came from an elbow. It was so tiny. My first thought it was from a monkey, but when I kneeled down, picked it up, looked at it, I could see that it had the anatomy of your elbow, my elbow, the elbow of a human ancestor. And I realized in that noonday sun at that moment, there at my feet, was my childhood fantasy that I had dreamed about since I was a young teenager, finding an important, ancient, human ancestor.

Yeah, Yeah. I think, one--first of all, I think there is the frank education. I've gone, walked through neighborhoods with Congressman Elijah Cummings in Baltimore. The frank answer is it's wrong to make money off your brothers and sisters by selling them addiction, and that's unacceptable; that's not a way out. But we have to work on education. We obviously want to continue to give people a sense of opportunity. We obviously want to make sure that we're protecting kids in times when they can be led to after-school or unsupervised activities that get them into trouble. But I see the effort to have outreach. We're financing community coalitions that bring together the community, and we focus many times on young people because we know that they're the ones that have to be put on the right track and protected from the harm here. So I think there are progress. It's community by community. We have to be making sustained and real and aggressive progress, but we also have to be willing to see that if things are going to get better, we need people to stick out a hand and say, `How can I help?'

I hear a lot of comment from your previous remarks about this is delayed and that's delayed, and we need time to--but it's six months and looks like that there's some infrastructure would have been put in place by now by somebody to make sure that this money goes to these people. I mean, he's talking about the fishermen that don't have a boat and don't have a wife and children and they're beside themselves and they don't have any house to live in, and it look to me by this time that there's some kind of infrastructure--the Peace Corps or somebody. If the nations are sincere about helping fellow man, that something should have been in place by now.

The president could raise taxes, but it is in this sense not realistic to talk about that. Congress doesn't want to. Congress isn't going to give the president tax increases. And the president is right when he says that the economy is the golden goose that produces all the revenues. But there's another question in all this, and that is that Congress has been considering additional tax cuts. Many in Congress want to pass new tax cuts as part of a Katrina stimulus package for the economy. Plus there are tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 that are scheduled to expire in 2010, and the president wants to make those permanent. So that's yet another issue about taxes.

And this went on for about, I don't know, two or three minutes. And finally, the other penguin - I think it was his mate, and the other two little penguins were sitting there looking - and she pecked him on the rump. And so he backed off, and then he kind of just backed off a little bit and then turned around. And the one little penguin baby, he looked like he wanted to come up and rub his beak in my hand, too. But to this day, out of all the hundreds of amazing experiences - in fact, I've actually written the "Ugliest Man in Montana" story for Bicycling years ago. But anyway, that story down there in Antarctica on my bicycle was one of the really highlights of my life on a bicycle across six continents.

No, it means the following. Jack Kennedy - I talk about in the book - Jack Kennedy was able to take every shot at him from Richard Nixon and throw it back at him. He actually did a wonderful lampoon of this, a burlesque, he'd say to crowds, hundreds and thousands of people, he'd say, Richard Nixon accused me of being - accused Harry Truman of being a traitor, accused Lyndon of being an ignoramus. Then Lyndon says he accused me of being ignoramus. Now, he accused Lyndon of being an ignoramus. He listed all the attacks - idiot, barefaced, liar - and he threw them right back at Nixon in a way that it was so funny that even if I were Nixon I'd have to laugh. It was so good. I think Barack Obama has to take on Bill Clinton not Hillary. The smart move here, take on the big guy. Because if you take on Hillary, he'll come to her defense. Say to Bill, you said the other day - I think it was four, five days ago - that you were more experienced than I was when you finally ran for president in '92, and you would have been wrong to run in '88. Well let me tell you something. Your experience backed us in two wars in the Persian Gulf, and you're wrong. Those wars have not helped us out. Your experience has run against us and hurt our country. I'll take my inexperience to your experience.

The way to describe it, I think, is that it's a very tightly edited version of who she is. She has mostly stuck to pretty anodyne topics. She's anti-childhood obesity, she's pro-veteran. But the Michelle Obama that her old friends remember, that people knew in Chicago, she was a really incisive social critic. She knew how to drive an argument home. People liked her both in the workplace and socially because she was so frank. One of my favorite Michelle Obama quotes - this was something she told us that the Times in 2008 is - she said, you know, I don't like corporate diversity workshops. She was talking about the fact that they can have kind of an artificial feel. She said, you make real progress when somebody is honest enough to say something that's really uncomfortable. Of course when you're a candidate's wife and when you're first lady and the first African-American first lady to boot, that is very, very hard to do. So we saw her play it safe. She used to remind me - I would watch her speeches, and I would think this is like watching an incredibly high-level gymnast execute a routine she has practiced. She is going to go out there and nail every move, and then she's going to get off the floor immediately.

Uh-huh. My Aunt Gladys did not leave her room from the Nixon administration until shortly after the attacks of September 11th, when Betty died, Grandma Betty died, her mother died. She took to her bed for various reasons sometime in the mid '70s and pretty much stayed in her room her entire adult life. And she came out of her room to attend the funeral of my grandma Betty, her second parent. I always felt in some way that she's the key to the whole story, that there was a sort of a Citizen Kane-like quality to the story, and that Aunt Gladys was the key to unlocking it. And Aunt Gladys in some way was guarding her parents. She was guarding access to her parent's love. And in some way all the kids were fighting for the blessing of the parents. And Gladys was like in the desert sitting next to the well. And the well contained the love of the parents.

For Hillary Clinton, I would think, given the fact that she still remains frontrunner, we could talk about what these polls mean, you know, all these months in advance, but the fact that Hillary Clinton does seem to have a healthy lead over her - the rest of the field, she probably wants as many candidates as possibly to just, you know, have a big field. Whereas John Edwards and other candidates - like John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson - they would love to shorten the field, at least get rid of the Kuciniches and the Gravels who are not showing so well in the polls and so they can go after the sensible frontrunners like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Yeah. He was a gamer. He's from Maryland. His car was here in Jacksonville. Police believe that he stayed at a local hotel. And there's a video of him playing the game, Madden. It's circulating on Twitter. And announcers are talking about his personality, saying - describing him as someone who wants to keep to himself, focused on the game, hard to get him to talk to you. So that's sort of all we know about him. We know that he used a single handgun at least. We don't know much more about how he got the gun or where he got it or when. So those are questions we're hopefully going to get the answers to today.

...we still keep telling ourselves the same stories, whatever culture we're in and whatever period of history we're living in. And you can see mythology as an early form of psychology. All these stories of gods and heroes going down into the underworld, threading their way through labyrinths, fighting and struggling with demons and monsters--these were never intended to be taken literally. But they were telling people how they cope with their own labyrinthine inner worlds. They had to fight their own monsters in order to achieve some kind of peace and harmony. So yes, I think the history of myth is a history of the interior development of humanity; of how we try to make sense of our puzzling and beautiful world.

Yes. That he felt like maybe we need to nullify the Fourth Amendment. And let me just say this, I think Ms. Sotomayor and even Justice Kennedy is fairly strong in the Fourth Amendment for a conservative. These five, I think, will continue to go against these - see, I'm hearing conservatives talk less government, talk strict constructionism. They're not strict constructionists. They're not strictly interpreting the Fourth Amendment at least. And I think Ms. Sotomayor will be strong on the Fourth Amendment, will stand up for our civil liberties. And as a strong proponent of the Fourth Amendment - that's what I'm watching her on - she - if you want to call her a strict constructionist when it comes to the Fourth Amendment, she is.

Well, I think the Republicans probably would love this to come to a vote, because they would love to put Democrats on record on this. Because Nancy Pelosi, when she became speaker following the 2006 elections, she said from the beginning that impeachment is off the table, when Dennis Kucinich tried to impeach Vice President Cheney. Of course, that would make Nancy Pelosi bump into the leadership. Several months ago, it was thrown to the Democratic-controlled judiciary committee, where it went nowhere, and most people assume this will go nowhere as well. But there are a lot of Democratic activists who are really angry about this, because they felt that the 2006 elections meant that there would be a change in war policy. And one of the ways that Kucinich, at least, sees it - the way of that happening is to impeach the president and the vice president, which, of course, is not going to happen.

There is help, and it is not enough. What we are facing in Somalia is not only the restrictions and limited number of people available. We are talking about a country where development pretty much stopped for big parts of it. So roads are a problem. The local hospitals are in terrible shape. So we are paying a big price of Somalia being allowed to turn into a failed state. But, on a more positive note, there are some encouraging data of people being reached, and we are talking about close to a million Somalis are being reached, but a million against 3.7 million Somalis at risk.

Well, the president's critics say that pressing a foreign country - in this case, one desperate for U.S. help against an aggressive Russia - to dig up dirt on a political rival is an abuse of power. And they say that if the president, as he is alleged to do, held up congressionally appropriated aid to use as a cudgel over Ukraine - so in other words, he's holding up this aid for his own personal political benefit. That's also an abuse of power. Now, the president, as you said, admits that he did talk to the Ukrainian leader about investigating but then-Vice President Joe Biden's son. He said at one point yesterday he'd be happy to release the transcript of that phone call. Then later in the day, he backed off and said, well, my aides and I will make a determination about that.

...kind of one of the indicators. There's Coakley and then defeat in Massachusetts and then the governor. It was a, you know, sign of the wave. But you don't see that. Even in the Virginia governor's race, it's very, very close with two arguably flawed candidates. So I don't see a huge amount of evidence either way. It could obviously shift. We just released a congressional battleground poll through Democracy Corps and showed that the overall partisan environment looks pretty close to what it looked like in 2012. So this notion that Vin raised, which is true, that often in midterms who want to go against the party of the president, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence in that. In fact, there seems to be real erosion in the Republican brand around mostly obstruction and sort of preventing things from getting done in Washington. It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem, you know, driven by House Republicans. And, you know, if immigration reform fails, it will be another piece of evidence that that's sort of how they operate.

Well, I'm still learning, you know, about it myself. And I totally agree and second everything that Byron said. And I think it's great that, you know, that now we're empowering a lot of - you know, anybody can tell a story. And it's really interesting, 'cause it's making the world smaller. And we're learning more, and we're learning more about different cultures around the world because of this, because of this access. And I'm still, you know, learning about digital filmmaking myself. But, you know, I kind of like the old-fashioned way. I like going with my cameras, and I like, you know, sifting through and logging and, you know, really discussing every single clip with my editor. You know, I like the pain. I don't know what it is.

Right. Well, the U.N. press conference was the first sort of sign that I thought, oh, my god. This is sort of unlike any other scandal I'd covered. Because I covered 2008, and you remember Sarah Palin. Bristol Palin had an illegitimate child, and there was Obama and Reverend Wright, and those scandals were largely, sort of, driven by political enemies. But the email scandal just, sort of, engulfed everything, and I think I had, naively, underestimated the kind of the machine at work behind the Clintons, both in terms of how these things fueled right-wing media, but also the - you know, the mainstream media, and how we all became just absolutely transfixed by this story.

Hi. We have had so many road closures. On last weekend, there were 10 pages of road closures out here. Every major roadway seems to be going north or for me going east, and some people going west which is shut down. Almost - I had a hard time getting around just getting past the Fox River, getting over, because it's just every major roadway around us was just shut down. And it's just - what we found is going down but it's still - you just don't know which way you can go and people aren't coming up and people are coming down.

And you know, I had just shaved my head. I had been skateboarding around town. So here's this sweaty, reasonably bulky guy on a skateboard sitting eye-to-eye with this little girl in a summer dress, and she's being just as assertive as I could ever be. And so I end up, you know, getting a little riled up. I'm like, no, it's not a trick! There's no smoke or mirrors. And she looked down at - I wear a shoe, kind of, with a Birkenstock sole and a leather exterior around myself to just kind of protect me when I'm running around, and she looked at it, and she was like, take off the tire. It was like a really funny kind of confrontational moment there.

Well, without using the pejorative, in the tank, I mean I have to defend my brother and myself against that. I think it's quite true. For instance, President Obama is enjoying a honeymoon at the moment. Everybody understands that this great, huge crisis was one that he didn't create. I mean he inherited. And so people are giving him some running room. And he has for many obvious reasons, come to the presidency with an historic win to his back. But I say the people who complain about the White House Press Corps right now, because they're a bunch of good people, just wait a while. All presidents begin to get in trouble and all presidents begin to the point where they could be criticized fairly.

Well, I'll give you three. One of them is, I think it's the single best thing the Democrats can do to assure Obama's re-election. I realize that Hillary's 64 percent - or whatever they are - approval ratings would not hold up in a campaign; that's unrealistic. But they are high. She is, you know, by some counts, the most admired woman in America, certainly the most admired member of the current administration. She brings a lot to the party. She would, you know, electrify a lot of voters - turn some off, of course. The Clintons come with baggage. But she would, I think, excite a lot of women, but not just a lot of women. So that's point number one. Point number two is, you know, maybe they do and maybe they don't need to do something like this to assure Obama's re-election, but there's a case to be made for running up the numbers, running up the score, which I think she would do. So there would be - it's an opportunity for the president to claim not just a victory, but a mandate, and maybe to carry some House and Senate seats with him. And then the third would be, that it would anoint her as the heir apparent in 2016, to run for president herself.

Well, it's hard to tell right now. This split that's unfolding certainly lessens the support and the legitimacy of al-Qaida as a force for Iraqis. But the same time, al-Qaida in Iraq remains a very potent, well-financed force that's attracting fighters. And the other big issue here is that the Sunni Kurds who are splitting are not united, and they are politically alienated. So any sort of, sort of, success, if may call it, really hinges on the ability of these insurgent groups to blend in into the political process, to be given certain assurances that they will receive some sort of benefits from the government, perhaps, even amnesty for the insurgency that they've been fueling for the past three or four years. This split, which is the most decisive one since the 2003 invasion, it's still unclear what effects it's going to have on United States and the Iraq government and its ability to bring stability to Iraq.

And I think other groups are looking at, you know, viral infections, for example. With our gut-on-a-chip, we're hoping to study Crohn's disease. Where it's known in Crohn's disease, there are three major contributors. One is inflammation, and we could add white blood cells, for example. The other is the microbiome, the microbes living in the gut. The other is peristaltic-like motions - again, mechanics. And so we can control all three of those. And the great thing about the chips is that we can start with the simplest model, and we can add that complexity if we don't get physiological relevance, where in animals, there's so much going on.

But actually what I think is going to be the major applications for clocks like this aluminum ion clock, which was part of the relativity experiment, and similar clocks that NIST and other organizations are working on, are not necessarily to measure time directly but to measure other quantities. So by looking at the ticking rate changing, by having the clock moved up just one foot, basically what you're doing is measuring the change in gravity, and right now, people try to measure changes in gravity for everything from looking for minerals under the ground, for example oil is less dense than rock, so there's a very slightly - there's a very slight reduction in gravity if you happen to be above a source of water or oil or other minerals, and you can detect that without having to dig holes down deep into the earth.

Yes. Absolutely. DEET has been the gold standard in repellency for many, many years now. And recently, there have been other compounds like piperidine, which is present in the market. Now, one of the main problems with these types of repellants, in particular in being able to be widely used in the tropical countries and also actually here in the United States or in Western Europe, is that you have to apply copious amounts of it directly onto your skin. And believe it or not, to us, it might sound affordable, but it's out of reach for the common people in tropical areas because of the amount that you need to lather on.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Frank Stasio in Washington. It would be hard to find anyone in the world who hasn't heard of Osama bin Laden. But as much as we know about what he's done, we know very little about who he really is. Reporter Peter Bergen analyzes world terrorism for CNN. He is one of the few Western reporters who's actually spoken with bin Laden. He's out with a new book that tries to get at the personality of this complex and infamous figure. He's done it by talking with people who were and are close to bin Laden and by gathering tape and quotes from other news sources. "Osama bin Laden I Know" is the title of the book. Author Peter Bergen is my guest today. And we welcome your calls at (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

But my quest to make sense of the report from the Heart Association has left me with a really bad case of information overload. For answers, I turned to a hormone doctor who looks at how dietary and environmental chemicals affect humans. Regarding the health benefits of soy, the doctor said the jury is still out. One woman, for example, will tell you that is does wonders to modify her hormones and reduce hot flashes, but another lady will tell you all soy milk ever gave her was gas. Unconvinced, I needed my own findings so I did research on my wife who's been an extraordinarily good mood lately, something I was chalking up to her hormones finally getting on an even keel. You've been in my soy milk? I asked. I drink regular milk, said Pam, still being sweet. Meaning the folks from the Heart Association must be right.

I'm sitting in Los Angeles in Santa Monica in one of Wolfgang Puck's restaurants. And he walked by and I introduced myself. And the appetizer was clearly enough for two, three people. And I asked him, how did we end up like this? And he said something - he knew exactly that it was sugar, fat and salt that stimulate people for coming back for more and more. But he said something that's still sticks in my mind. He said: We did this together. Once we understand that our behavior is becoming conditioned and driven and we're laying down this neural circuitry and we're laying down this neural circuitry for a lifetime, the business plans of the modern American food company has been to take fat, sugar and salt, put it on every corner, make it available 24/7, make it accessible all the time - gas stations, in your cars -make it socially acceptable to eat, to make it into entertainment.

I would have to say that the Northport public school system from Northport, Long Island was my awakening, my focus, and the thing that kept me on track. I had the Northport elementary, junior high and high school music department. Esther Scott, who was my music teacher who really got me, saw me and celebrated me, that's what I had. And then, of course, we had the Patio Players. So I think the equivalent of the Donna Reed Performing Arts Center would have to be the Patio Players, which was a group of kids that got together and put on great, big, Broadway musicals in -on Cathy Sheldon's patio, and then, finally, in the East North Virginia High School and Middleville High School. So that would be my equivalent.

Well, the two parties that lead the coalition government are meeting today and they're discussing that matter. And they're also discussing the other really crucial issue here in Islamabad. And that is whether they are going to fulfill or how they're going to fulfill their pledge to restore the judges who were sacked by Musharraf when he declared a state of emergency late last year. That issue is a particularly controversial one, especially amongst the lawyers who took to the streets last year after Musharraf began to try to move against the chief justice of this country, and who feel very passionately that the judiciary now must be restored.

Oh, my goodness. I keep hearing people say when we're - when I'm reading the comments. The comments are - when you're talking about black people, or Hispanic people, or Asian people, there are these broad blanket statements. And so I think that what people of color fight every day is this invisibility. You don't want people to look at you and then superimpose all of those issues that you may be dealing with, with race, or those perceptions that you have about black people, or whoever, just on you. And so this whole idea of racial reconciliation, I mean, wouldn't it just be lovely if people can see people as individuals? And that's a - I think we're a long way away from that. I think that's kind of what the caller is talking about...

Oh, sure. Yeah. The - and actually, just to go back, we can actually squeeze more out of this particular scenario. And it would be useful to that, I think, at some point. It takes incrementally more and more work, more time, more analysis to do a little bit better. So at this point, we don't really have a lot of pressure to push the precision too much on this topic, but we could, if we really wanted to. So there are other extinctions in the geologic record and, for example, at the end of the Paleozoic Era, the so-called Permo-Triassic boundary, which was actually the largest, most profound extinction that we know of in the history of life. That happened about 252 million years ago. And it is associated with a very large - what we call flood basalt problems, of huge outpouring of magma that happened in Siberia, at, as far as we know, exactly the time, same time. So when I say as far as we know, what do I mean by that? Well, right now, you know, we're talking about a level of synchrony that set about the 100,000-year or maybe 50,000-year level. And it would be nice to be able to refine that a little bit. So one of the things you want to know is if, in fact, volcanism - and we think this is a factor at the end Cretaceous as well. We think volcanism is very likely to have been a factor in the earlier pre-impact environmental stresses.

Hi, thanks for the show and highlighting this important point. Very quickly, what I want to say is, I'm just very surprised, up until this point, neither the NGOs in the U.S. or the, you know, the other civil liberty union or any national organization have been able to stop this here in the U.S. or - that's not case even abroad. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, Geneva Conventions, I mean, laws that have been broken by the U.S. government since then and up until this point nothing has happened. And since, like, these people are being deported to countries where they're going to, most likely - it's like they pay for their sentence here in the U.S. by spending five years, and then they're released because they're not a threat to the U.S. government and its ally, but then they go back to this country and, basically, that's the end of their lives. They'll never live a normal life again. So I'm not surprised, like the guy from Algeria who's fighting now, not wanting to go back because going back to Algeria would probably be worse than staying in Guantanamo, and that's kind of crazy.

He's going to have to, I think, improve his name recognition, you know. We live in a very huge state. People call it a country really, and there's a big divide between the north and the south. I grew up in southern California, and I live in northern California. So I think I have a pretty good sense of the whole state, but I don't think very many people do. And there's a real media and cultural and political divide between not just the north and the south, but also the coast and the inland region. So I think you've really got to get out there and meet people over a long period of time to help them get to know you better.

Well, the state bar is considering three main charges against Mike Nifong. First, he's accused of making prejudicial statements to the media about the three players. But more significantly, he's charged with withholding evidence that was favorable to the players and lying to the court. One of the things that's happened so far during this hearing has been a lot of discussion about some DNA tests that Nifong had ordered - tests that seemed to support the players' claims of innocence. The players' lawyers are saying that Nifong basically sat on those results for months, that Nifong didn't share them with the defense team until defense lawyers themselves basically stumbled onto them. Now Mike Nifong himself, we should say, has not yet had a chance to rebut those charges at the hearing. That'll happen some time in the next couple of days.

Basically being a borrower is not a bad thing to be in an inflationary environment. I mean, one of the things that we've seen the last couple of years, we've seen people go out and borrow huge amounts of money to buy homes, you know, and if we're feeling moralistic, we'd like these people to be punished for their excesses. But the reality is, if we get a burst of inflation, all those people who have gone out and borrowed lots of money, particularly if they've borrowed it at fixed rates, are actually going to be in great shape because they're going to have this great low-interest loan in an environment where inflation and interest rates are going up.

The Ministry of Defense - the Ministry of Defense. There were allegations that there was a difference in fuel contract for three years, which was roughly estimated at $1 billion and that the difference between the contract that was accepted and the other bids were $211 million. I canceled it. I rebid the entire process, and I suspended all the officials who were engaged in it. So there's a full investigation of everyone underway. We are going to save the Afghan treasury and the American public, who are underwriting the bill, hopefully tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And in the process, now we have changed the procurement system, the way we purchase goods. It is reviewed by a committee with impeccable credential for honesty, and I personally review the ultimate contracts with a core group of officials under my own chairmanship.

For the future, for Spanish radio, no. I believe it's going to continue to grow. I believe we do have a certain pride for Latino inherent, you know? And there's a difference between Latino Chicano, and between a first generation - I am a part and a consequence of the need to immigrate to another country. My mother brought us when I was ten years old to California. I could tell you that I know firsthand what it is to be called mojado, and be proud of it; because you understand that it was not by choice. But what do you about it? Do you turn your back and you thank God because you had the opportunity to immigrate, learn the language and have a career, and earn a, well, salary? Or do you try to do something? I believe that is - ought to be our responsibility in radio. And that's going to be the future for Spanish radio, to be able to pick up the microphone and be able to educate our people with issues that are harming and threatening our Latino. It doesn't mean if it's Latino firsthand generation or a fifth generation Latino. I think we have a huge responsibility to educate our people.

We send all of our audio files via computer as well, through file transfer protocol, FTP, and you can do it from a rolling bus, as long as you've got one of those, you know, air cards, either, you know, Verizon or Sprint or one of those that you plug into the side of your computer. So if there's digital cell service and your battery is juiced on the computer, you can generally send, you know, as long of a story as you have produced, I mean, a five-six minute story. The other thing is, there's - with each campaign, with the Obama campaign, it's called the soap box. There's a company that provides Wi-Fi service that we pay for, and there's the soap-box guy who's right in the bubble with the rest of us. And it doesn't matter where the high school gymnasium or farmer's field or whatever it is we land in for an event, within five minutes he's had an ISDN line, you know, dropped in advance, and he's got Wi-Fi up for us all, so we generally all have high-speed Internet, even in the most remote places.

Rusbridger didn't name names but there are numerous reports this morning that the prime minister, David Cameron, ordered the U.K.'s most senior civil servant, the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to pressure the Guardian to hand over this material. Government sources are reportedly confirming that this is actually right. The government's line is that it would have been highly irresponsible not to approach the Guardian, as this could involve a threat to national security. It's using a similar argument, by the way, to justify the detention of David Miranda under antiterrorism laws. Basically, if it was believed Miranda had highly sensitive stolen information that could aid terrorists, this could be a threat to national security and to lives, so the police did the right thing. Now, Cameron is doubtless hoping that this will convince those here who see this incident as the misuse of antiterrorism laws by the government to intimidate and silence journalists who are tackling issues of critical importance.

I'm standing on Yerba Buena Island, it's a massive rock that sits between San Francisco and Oakland in the East Bay, and it's the halfway point of the Bay Bridge. And I'm looking out over the site, where early Monday morning, a semi-truck filled with pears flew over the guardrail of the bridge and plunged 200 feet, killing the driver immediately. The fiery accident occurred when the driver hit the S-curve, a new section of the bridge that was set up over the Labor Day weekend, as part of the project to repair and replace the bridge. And since then, there have been more than 40 accidents, although this was the first fatality. Officials say it could have been prevented.

My name is Roni Zulu. And Zulu is a name--a last name that I took. My original given name, I researched it and it's German. But I'm a black man. I wanted my name to reflect my heritage, so therefore I changed it to do so. I identify myself as an urban shaman. I am a tattooist, but people come to me for more than just getting tattooed. They're coming to me for spiritual reasons. This is like someone going to church because I'm not tattooing Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck on people. People are coming to me to get spiritual markings, things that have to do with their ancestry, things that have to--commemorate the birth of a child, a death of a family elder, that type of thing. So it puts me in a position that is more than just commercial. It's far more spiritual.

We've been hearing about the South China Sea in recent months, through which about 20 percent of the world's commerce passes. China has been aggressively building out islands to buttress its claims there, which, in turn, has led to confrontations with the U.S. and other countries. There is also a court battle going on, a case by an international tribunal in The Hague brought by the Philippines against China. It challenges China's claim on most of the South China Sea, and it's due to be decided tomorrow. China's basis for its claim mostly is history. NPR's Anthony Kuhn joins us now to explain China's view. Good morning.

He said he wouldn't sign any plan that wasn't deficit-neutral. Former Rep. SANDLIN: Well, it's not. That's right. He wanted to bend the cost curve, and he wanted a bill that works. The Blue Dogs have led the fight and carried the mantle for the White House on making sure that we have a plan that's deficit-neutral. Without those cost reforms, it's estimated that the cost to the budget, it would grow about one-third - to about one-third of the budget by 2020, and the government can't keep that up. So I think it's important to look at things such as the Cadillac plans, to look at finding…

(Laughter) Well, the idea of this referendum, David Cameron thought, was to settle this issue for a generation. And essentially, it's a question of - this is really happening because there's a question of party management. David Cameron's Conservative Party has been split on the question of Europe for the best part of 30 years. And over the last 10 years, a growing number of them have actually wanted to leave the European Union altogether. And in the end, he had to cede this referendum. Now, David Cameron, I think, thought that he could win this relatively easily. And I think he thought that anything more than a 10 point margin of victory would put the Euro skeptics back in their box and keep this issue off the agenda for a generation.

Well, I understand it. But is that the only criteria? How it affects readiness at this particular moment? If it negatively affects readiness for six months but improves it a year down the road, would that be okay? Ret. Adm. JOHNSON: Well, I think, I mentioned the three Rs. For us, it affects recruiting, it affects retention and it affects readiness, all those factors. And we have to consider all of those in a well-balanced force. For instance, if parents are unlikely to recommend that their children go into the service, we lose the opportunity to recruit some very fine, outstanding people.

Well, Bay is a professional poker player who used to run an illegal poker game and would call Wylie in to see if anyone was cheating. He could notice who it was, and it usually was and it was usually cops. And they'd have to pay off the police benevolent association so no one would get in trouble. And Bay was also like his real estate attorney at one time and all that, and so now they are best buddies. And Wylie worries about Bay, in fact, that he can't keep himself away from the poker table. But Bay is successful at it and makes his living that way.

Yes. I mean, he's not an elected president. He's somebody who inherited his post. They had to change the constitution because he was under age. And when he came in, there were a lot of - there was a lot of optimism about him being young and having studied in the West and having been sort of exposed to Western ideas and wanting to reform Syria. And he has achieved quite a lot of reforms there. I mean, in the sense that Syria is a much different place now than it was, say, in 1997, '98 when it was more like a East European-style of Stalinist country where you needed a license to have a fax machine or a typewriter. And there was no freedom speech and only the official media was accepted, and the rest closed.

Sure. You know, one of the things you might do, Gail, to get that started is you might work with that university nearby to create a public observing evening in which you could invite people from the community to come to the event. And then what you could do at the event is you could find out how many people that come might be interested in joining an astronomy club. And there you could have your--you know, the basis of your membership that you could use to actually begin this club. And you know, the clubs are always organized around that mutual interest that people have to observe or to participate in any of the other associated activities. So you could schedule a few of those in another location, using that telescope that you have, and then find other people who also have telescopes that would come to the university to take a look through that telescope.

If I were - I think the free speech movement in Berkley was a very good analogy by Margot. They had a single goal too, in the beginning, and that was to be allowed to have free speech on campus and set up tables. I think the anti-war movement is similar in that you had a single goal, and that was to end the war in Vietnam. It became an umbrella that brought in disparate groups, from those who wanted to fight imperialism and racism, those who want to - who called for victory for the North Vietnamese through the National Liberation Front. But in the end what brought the groups together was a single goal, and that was to end the war. So it's not clear to me what the single message of Occupy Wall Street is, and perhaps Margot and Todd have something to say about this.

I think that's, again, based on the statistic of going into this game he's 11-11 in the playoffs. Now, I get that, and I get the fact that he could be called the greatest player ever if he loses. But, you know, there is something too. There's been a backlash. There had been so many people writing that how could you even question Peyton Manning's legacy. Win or lose, he's one of the greatest. Yeah, but win, he is the greatest. It's the funny thing about legacies. I mean, two Super Bowl wins are an amazing accomplishment. If John Updike had won one Pulitzer Prize instead of two Pulitzer Prizes, that would be less notable. And it's weird - I was thinking about actors and directors and Pulitzer Prizes - the work was already done. So, in the case of, you know, an artist it's just someone looking at it and saying, oh yeah, you deserve a prize. But with Manning, this is his work. So, if the working isn't as good, it's like saying, well, if John Updike didn't write "Rabbit, Run," would his legacy be a little worse? I think it would be a little worse. I think that's fair.

What makes a great leader today? Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. But that's kind of an image from another time, and what's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming. We conducted a study of 4,000 companies, and we asked them, let's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs. Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles. That means that despite corporate training programs, off-sites, assessments, coaching, all of these things, more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders. You may be asking yourself, is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 21st-century leader? The odds are, probably not. Now, I've spent 25 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders. I've worked inside Fortune 500 companies, I've advised over 200 CEOs, and I've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine. But a few years ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation. I noticed that, despite all the efforts, there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals. One story was about Chris, a high-potential, superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails, destroying unrecoverable value. And then there were stories like Sidney, the CEO, who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders, but only one of the top 50 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives. And then there were stories like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that's surprised by a market shift, finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business. Now, these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions. Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow? One of the things that I did, I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories, that I left my job so that I could study this full time, and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies, countries and nonprofit organizations. And so I did things like travel to South Africa, where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political, social and economic context. I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who, despite very limited financial resources, were making a huge impact in the world, often bringing together seeming adversaries. And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders, the moves that they made, and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure. And then, when I returned to work full time, in this role, I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions. Now, from all this, I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently, and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential. I want to share some of those with you now. ("What makes a great leader in the 21st century?") In a 21st-century world, which is more global, digitally enabled and transparent, with faster speeds of information flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix, relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader. In fact, traditional assessments like narrow 360 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives, lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are. Leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions. Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life? The answer to this question is on your calendar. Who are you spending time with? On what topics? Where are you traveling? What are you reading? And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities, and then making a decision to do something right now so that you're prepared and ready? There's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting, here are trends that impact me, here are trends that impact another team member, and they share these, and then make decisions, to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move. Great leaders are not head-down. They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it. The second question is, what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network? You know, we hear often about good ol' boy networks and they're certainly alive and well in many institutions. But to some extent, we all have a network of people that we're comfortable with. So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you. And those differences can be biological, physical, functional, political, cultural, socioeconomic. And yet, despite all these differences, they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal. Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are. Third question: are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past? There's an expression: Go along to get along. But if you follow this advice, chances are as a leader, you're going to keep doing what's familiar and comfortable. Great leaders dare to be different. They don't just talk about risk-taking, they actually do it. And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid. Now interestingly, the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network. They're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap. And it's a leap, not a step. More than traditional leadership programs, answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 21st-century leader. So what makes a great leader in the 21st century? I've met many, and they stand out. They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)

I think it's going to have a tremendous impact. I think the fact that these individual institutions that you're talking about, financial institutions that are there, and you're right, that are predominantly responsible for the majority of all of these risky financial tools - both derivatives and others - are, you know, now are going to have to be fully transparent. They are going to have to have full reporting. They're going to have to clear a tremendous number of these transactions that are going to have to be both cleared or exchange traded, which we know is going to have a good, positive impact on eliminating systemic risk in our financial system. And I think it's going to be a great opportunity for us to put our economy back on track and to give consumers and investors greater confidence in the marketplace and in financial institutions.

Well, you know, that's an interesting question that had not come up during this time. I would think that that would be OK right now, particularly with so much need. For example, I don't stop tithing during the fast. So I think that is an exemption to the fast. But when it comes to birthday parties and weddings and anniversaries, you can't take a gift if it comes up during the - cash. And I get a lot of pushback from this, as well. But, you know, as a mother of three kids who've been to a lot of birthday parties, you know, what do these kids really need? Most kids - I'm talking middle America, I'm not talking people, you know, really struggling. But most of us know when we go to these parties, those kids don't need anything that you're bringing to their party. And most people who are getting - wedding have already set up their households, and they're already doing their thing and they don't need my crockpot, you know?

Here's an op-ed that appeared in the Savannah Morning News yesterday: Many death penalty foes are appalled by this outcome, which is their right, but capital punishment is still permitted in Georgia. The place to fight the death penalty is before the Georgia Legislature, not the courts. There's no question that Davis has been well-served by some highly skilled attorneys who oppose the death penalty. They have filed numerous appeals regarding the trial and the testimony. Their zeal has been impressive. But facts are facts, and the law is the law. The death penalty, once administered, can never be rescinded. That's why appeals are automatic - why it's wise to take a close look at every case. Davis was the beneficiary of several close looks. Now, perhaps "justice can be served," quote, unquote. That, some people would say, 20 years of appeals and 20 years of looking, well, enough is enough.

If expectations are low for moving a lot of merchandise, that begs the question of how much the deal will benefit Best Buy. CD's don't generate huge profits to begin with. Only 16% of the company's revenue comes from entertainment software like CD's. According to Best Buy's last earnings statement, that means CD's are loss leaders. They're not big money makers themselves, but they draw people into the store; sometimes long enough to fall in love with an expensive plasma TV, which is how Best Buy makes most of its money. According to Aram Sinnreich, a music industry analyst with Radar Research in Los Angeles, the loss leader phenomenon means big retailers like Best Buy have to calculate very carefully what they're going to sell in their stores, because every square foot affects profit margins. Sinnreich says, with respect to CD's that often means appealing to the lowest common denominator of taste.

That's exactly - I mean, David's exactly right. There is - you know, the - I've always said that the biggest sort of bias in the media is more a class bias than it is an ideological bias. And I think that the Trump phenomenon came as a surprise, although again, I think we should look back. And when you saw that the Republican Party has depended for so long on white working-class voters and has delivered remarkably little, an explosion like this should have been foreseeable. But no one expected that Donald Trump would be lighting the stick of dynamite.

Yes, Kristi definitely described you as a Marine's Marine and how do you stay in touch with the people in your unit? Staff Sgt. MARINO: Basically, I use the MotoMail system. I do care packages every month for my guys. I know how important it is to get a letter from home or, you know, to get that that box of goodies from home whatever it may be. Anything you get over there from home, it could be the smallest thing, it means the world to you. It's like Christmas day every single time you get a package. It's such a morale booster.

You know, growing up, literature and books were really important to us, me and my brothers. And I got "Huckleberry Finn" when I was kid and I probably read it 10, 13 times since then. You know, the thing about the book that really changed my life growing up was I was in a really racist town. And there was race riots against the black kids in the school. You know, in "Huckleberry Finn," it's just a story about a poor, little white kid in the South, instead of turning in this runaway slave, he becomes his best friend, you know?

History is full of footnotes and missed opportunities. Thomas Jefferson gets the credit for writing the Declaration of Independence, but it wasn't his work alone. He was on a committee of five appointed by the Continental Congress on June 11, 1776. With Jefferson - John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. Jefferson wrote a rough draft and presented it to the other four. Seventeen days later, they presented their draft to the Continental Congress. There were edits, debates then final approval on, yes, July 4. Most of the changes to the document were cosmetic except one. In the list of grievances against King George III, there was a section denouncing slavery. It was penned by Jefferson, a slave owner, and part of it went like this...

Well, this is where the story gets complicated. You see the violence ostensibly began when a local gang called the Mungiki reached a standoff with about 30,000 small bus drivers in the region. Now the Mungiki had been extorting money from the bus drivers for some time now. Everyday depending on the route, the Mungiki collect up to the 200 Kenyan shillings from each bus. And that's somewhere between $3 and $4. It doesn't seem like a whole lot of money, but think about it, it's per day, there are tens of thousands of buses on the line and so over a year, this ends up to a multimillion-dollar business for the Mungiki. Now, back in March or earlier this year, the Mungiki reportedly doubled its rate, its daily rate from the bus drivers. And that's when the bus drivers fought. And this is the first time that there's ever been any kind of real resistance to the Mungiki. And the Mungiki have decided to strike back and to strike back very fiercely because they want to send a message apparently. And they're believed to be behind the gristly murders of a number of bus drivers and bus crews.

Well, some of them have track records now in the Cuban government. I mean, you have someone like Carlos Lage, who's Secretary of the Council of Ministers, kind of the ranking technocrat, as it were, in the top Cuban leadership. He's 54-years-old, he's been in charge of the Cuban economy. He is certainly a competent person and has, as I say, he has a track record of achievement. I mean, he's not a fool by any means. You have Felipe Perez Roque, who's the Foreign Minister. A very young man, 41-years-old, so he was born after the revolution - came to power as Fidel's personal secretary at the age of 21. He is someone who completely owes his position in Cuba right now, to his closeness to Fidel Castro. And I think there it would be - he's someone who's mentioned as being a logical person to play a leadership role in the days after Fidel is gone. But how can someone who doesn't really have any authority, outside of what Fidel has bestowed on him, have much of an independent base to operate? I think that's a really important question.

Very dramatically and that's an incredible story here. Louisiana's past includes an awful lot of corruption in the context of voter fraud. And there was a bill that did pass to allow evacuees to vote at satellite centers, and to vote by mail. There was a huge fight between African- American legislators and others over some of those issues. It led to African- American legislators walking out of the session, after they tried to end the session unsuccessfully. And it's a good example of how stuck where we really are, or Louisiana is. It was African-American politicians making the same arguments they've always made, and that is you're doing this because you don't want us to vote. And the other side saying you know, you know, you don't understand that your history of voter fraud and the state's history of voter fraud is why we're doing this.

Well, actually it had a ball like that, but it was on a cable. I mean, this was a wrecking ball. I mean, I wouldn't do that. It was crazy. And he went down in a wrecking ball. And in fact the pressure pushed the cable down inside the pressure hull, and they - back then, this is in the '20s and '30s, they didn't have the technology for camera systems. So he literally shined - he had two portholes. He shined a light out of one of them and photographed with a camera with the other one. It was a hoot.

Well, Melissa, Senate Republicans - led by Arizona's John McCain - agreed they would essentially drop GOP filibusters against seven executive branch nominees for whom Majority Leader Harry Reid had demanded up or down votes. Reid had scheduled a series of votes today, to end those filibusters. And when the first vote was held this morning on Richard Cordray - who'd been blocked for two years from getting an up or down vote on his nomination to be director at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - 17 Republicans, including McCain, voted to let Cordray's nomination move forward along with all the Democrats. So that, in effect, confirmed that Republicans were sticking to the deal. Democrats, though, also made a pretty big concession by withdrawing two of these filibustered nominees whom President Obama had recess-appointed last year to the National Labor Relations Board. A federal appeals court has ruled those two appointments unconstitutional, and the matter's now before the Supreme Court.

MR. ROCK: Yeah, I don't think black bloggers actually monetize to the level that they should. There's a couple of people out there that are attempting to teach black bloggers how to monetize like the other bloggers that are actually getting political dollars as an example. There's a lot of political advertising out there. It's interesting that the black blogs as I've noticed aren't even getting the political ads from the Democratic Party. All right. I want to move on to a bit of fun. Of course, a mix of seriousness. There's a question posed on the economics blog Freakonomics, based on the best-selling book. How much does it cost you in wages if you quote, sound black? New research by the University of Chicago compared the wages of people who sound black when they talk to those who do not, and they found blacks who sound black earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than folks - black folks - who do not sound black.

Wonderful comments from the caller. You know, ethanol is not a scam in the sense that it does move your car. But if you look at the economics and the environmental impacts of how America makes ethanol - that is we tend to make it from corn because that's what grows well here - it's a pretty inefficient way to do ethanol. The Brazilians have a much more efficient way to do it using sugarcane. But here's the dirty little secret. We have imposed an import tariff that keeps out the Brazilian ethanol, or at least makes it much more economic, so we can protect our corn farmers who anyway get other kinds of subsidies from the rest of us. So the caller is right in the sense that there's something very suspicious, if not scam-like, about it. What Mindy pointed out, though, was that there is a future for the next generation kind of ethanol, the stuff that is using high-tech biotechnology methods it's called cellulosic ethanol. And that's maybe five to ten years down the road.

Well, to move to Forest, Mississippi, and have parents who are bankers. And obviously, that - the smallness and the intimacy of the environment, and the fact that he had financial support, have a lot to do with Donald. And so I know people will read the article and say: Well, this can't be us. But I think Caren and I feel that what that -what we're trying to indicate is that resources make a difference, and that the community makes a difference. And I know Pete Gerhardt believes very strongly that there are little towns - we have small towns everywhere we go. The bus you ride every day is a small town, and the supermarket that you shop in most of the time is a small town. And if the rest of us who occupy that small town can learn to roll with those who have autism, we're all going to be better off.

Well, you know, you've got to remember, Renee, that John McCain was never the choice of the base of the party. But he was seen, I think, ultimately as the Republican in this time when the Republican brand is in such disarray - when President Bush's ratings are so low - the Republican with the best chance to win in November. Now that there is a sense that the campaign is flagging, there's internal divisions, the Palin camp versus the McCain camp inside, and the Palin camp wanting to get more angry kind of populist appeals to the base. That is emerging on a much larger scale as people look forward and think about how will the Republican brand be defined afterwards? Is Palin going to be the carrier for the Republican brand in the future? Are there other younger people who have a different vision of what Republicanism might represent? That fight has already started.

Hi. I wanted to remember Helen Howard(ph). She died in July, and she actually died in DC. She was living with her daughter at the time. But when I was growing up, she was the organist and the music teacher for my church and for my grade school. And in November, we had a memorial service for her and dozens - numbers of her old students and kids that sang for funeral masses with her, who were all now in their 40s and 50s. We all showed up because she'd given us a lifelong love of music, of making the best of what you had in terms of a lot of small kids with voices singing in church.

I think it was a really interesting thing that he said. I'm going to quote here. Raul said, This is an opportunity to once again declare our disposition to resolve on the negotiating table the longstanding conflict between the United States and Cuba. Raul has never said anything like this before, where the eyes of the world through the international press were on them. And I think it can be interpreted as an overture to the United States. And I think the fact that Raul said it signals that Fidel, again, is not coming back. I don't think Fidel would have allowed a statement like that to be made, especially on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the revolution. I think it's significant. Although I don't think it will change the U.S. stance on Cuba anytime soon.

"Dissident Gardens" is a big novel. And in a country with a long and vocal history of support for big novels, it fits. The book feels profoundly American. Chronologically speaking, Lethem begins in the 1930s with meetings of the American Communist Party. He passes through McCarthyism, the hippie Age of Aquarius and the AIDS epidemic. He also goes abroad, to places like East Germany and war-torn Nicaragua. It's a lot of ground to cover, but Lethem is a skilled writer and it works. Holding the story together are two powerful women. Rose is a Communist firebrand. Her daughter, Miriam, is an activist. And circling around them are the men, Albert, Rose's husband, an aristocratic German Jew; Cicero, the black gay son of her lover; Lenny, the family's lustful cousin.

I think we have two problems that push you in very different directions. There's a short-run problem and a long-run problem. The short-run problem is that the lingering effects of a very deep recession. And from that perspective, you want to stimulate aggregate demand for goods and services to get unemployment down, so firms start producing and start hiring. The long-run problem is we have a government that clearly has a budget that's out of control. Even under President Obama's proposed budget, the debt to GDP ratio continues to rise even after the economy fully recovers. So we clearly have a long-term problem as well. And the tricky thing is to try to balance the short-run imperative and the long-run imperative.

I think that U.S. soccer is in a particular situation where they have the opportunity to be considered a hero and be considered a leader on this issue. And so I think in that way we definitely can move forward. And it can be healed, and it can be applauded, if done the right way. Obviously, as it gets closer to trial, it's probably going to get uglier. So I think that that will take more time to heal. However, knowing that U.S. Soccer is our employer and we want to represent our country on the highest level, and we want to move forward together, and we want to take more of a collaborative approach, you know, I'm hopeful in the next nine months that we can find a resolution that fits us both and that the women and the men are paid equal in compensation. If not then I can see it continuing on this path until trial.

We have an email from Sara(ph) in St. Louis, who says: I was well into adulthood when I realized my power as a middle child, namely my ability to defuse tense situations with humor. I often found myself quite literally in the middle of arguments between my two sisters. So to keep the peace, I would act silly or crack a joke. I suppose this became my default mechanism because I can remember several situations when I used this to ease the tension I sensed between my parents, too. No, I did not become a comedian. But as a teacher, I found this technique quite useful. And I still find myself resorting to humor when we're together as sisters and as a family.