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Karl Rove was actually the subject of an inquiry by the first President Bush when he--in the early 1970s when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Karl Rove, at the time, had--was a candidate for the leadership of the College Republican organization, and the election was disputed. Rove was accused in essence of dirty tricks, of encouraging espionage on other candidates, and there were delegate selection contests. The battle was so fraught for this organ--the chairmanship of this organization that it fell to the Republican National Committee chair, George H.W. Bush, to rule to decide the dispute. He reviewed the case, reviewed it pretty closely actually, assigned an FBI agent to question Karl Rove, and he came away convinced that Karl had done nothing wrong, but he was impressed by Karl Rove's drive and intellect and hired him right away as an aide to the Republican National Committee.

I think that one of the great works of humankind runs below an airport runway in Sarajevo. Sixty-six feet of a 3,000-foot-long tunnel built during the Siege of Sarajevo have been restored. Twenty years ago this weekend, the city was surrounded by Serb armies, who rained down mortar rockets and sniper fire. United Nations soldiers, called Blue Helmets, arrived as peacekeepers, but they became targets themselves, and mostly just oversaw the siege. When some Sarajevans tried to flee across the runway into free Bosnian territory, they were shot down by Serb snipers. U.N. soldiers had orders to stop them. The world saw the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and mixed-ethnic people in vivid living color. But Europeans looked and saw the ghosts of World War I. Americans saw the ghosts of Vietnam. We changed channels. So Sarajevans began to dig. Miners, plumbers, and engineering professors clawed the tunnel out of the ground with shovels, kitchen spoons and fingers. They propped up the earth with old car doors and tires because Sarajevans had cut down all the trees in the city for heat. One side dug from free Bosnian territory, one side from the besieged city. They couldn't use radio to coordinate - that would have been heard by the Serbs or Blue Helmets - so men and women died running across the runway in the dark just to whisper: We went another foot today. Water flooded the tunnel. Shells shook the earth, trapping those who dug. But the tunnel became a lifeline out of the longest siege of modern history. It brought out sick and wounded, and eventually brought in tons of food, bandages, bullets, onions, apples, antibiotics, cigarettes and condoms.

Well, we started with businesses that have their national or global headquarters in Atlanta, businesses that have stepped up before: Home Depot, the Coca-Cola Company, Georgia Power, the Southern Company. There was a broad group of businesses who stepped forward when asked to help us guarantee a loan, and then who actually came forward to pledge. Then joined by companies that were not headquartered in Atlanta like Wal-Mart, Bell South, and AT&T -which are in a merger. Both came through in a very big way. And many individual philanthropists who live in Atlanta, who have made their fortunes in Atlanta -like Tom Cousins and Tom Glen, John Williams - there was a broad base of people including Herman Russell, and then our very own Tyler Perry, who is a movie producer.

Yeah, when I had this write-in effort in New Hampshire in 1992, yeah, I came in about 51 percent of my votes were Republican, 49 Democrats. And the explanation's really quite simple. I don't campaign in generalities. What I do is I go down where people live and work and say, look, you're a Republican. You don't like federal regulation. Right, I don't like federal regulation. You have a car? Yeah. Well, if the auto company discovers a serious dangerous defect in your car after you bought it and the auto company doesn't recall it, would you favor the government requiring General Motors or Ford or VW to recall it? Most of them say yes. That's the difference. When you have a general ideological divide, you bring it down and shove aside some of these manipulative ideologies and what follows - red state, blue state, you know, the right-wing, left-wing because we're all so focused on the clashes and the disagreements. And there are disagreements, obviously, between left and right. But the number of emerging agreements as corporations become more and more powerful, you're getting more visibility and more of this rumble from the people.

Well, you know, so far the answer is no for a couple of different reasons. First of all, the state of Texas controls the offshore territory, all the way to 10 miles out, making it very hard or at least harder for the federal government to step in if it wanted to, and so far it doesn't seem to want to. And second, Texans appear to be in favor of this. Remember, they're used to seeing oil and gas rigs in the Gulf. It's not a foreign concept to them, like a windmill might be to somebody in Nantucket. So the developers don't see much opposition to obtaining the federal permits that they're going to need. And what's even more interesting here is that the movement to wind energy gained momentum when a fellow named George Bush was governor.

They don't, because you can't really predict a tornado season the way you might look long range at a hurricane season, sort of taking in the ocean temperature and things like that. We've had a couple of mild years, the last couple of years for tornadoes, and meteorologists say it's seasonal. This year is going to be a tough year most likely, and one of the things that a meteorologist told me, I found very interesting, is that unlike the plain states, tornadoes in the South are hidden in rain columns, which means you're looking at thunderstorms and watching to see if the thunderstorms are starting to turn and go in the direction a wind column. And in the plain states you can, it's flatter, it's drier. You can see the tornado coming often times from miles away. In the South they're buried in these thunderstorms and so you're looking for these little hints of a tornado starting to develop. And I'm new to the area and for me it's been interesting sort of figuring out what are the signs, the hail stones, the skies getting gray.

And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And this from Cheney(ph) in Portland, Oregon. I came out at 29 years of age with two children. My ex-husband outed me to my family in Nebraska. My mother responded by trying to take my children from me, refusing to return them while they were on a visit. I was forced to fly to Nebraska, take my children out of my mother's arms while she tried to call the sheriff. I fled the state in the dead of night to avoid having to fight for custody in a conservative state. This all happened 25 years ago.

Well, you know, one of the things that is worth looking at here is the composition of this change in the insurance rolls because the Congressional Budget Office says that there'll be an initial impact where there is a decline in 14 - of 14 million in the number of people who have insurance. But it also says that the bulk of that is because you're no longer going to be levying fines on people for not having insurance. Are those people who are going to leave the insurance rolls not because insurance has been stripped from them but because they have voluntarily chosen to drop insurance - are they really going to hold that against the Republicans?

My question is, when items like this become part of the futures market, does it not create a distorted outlook on the actual price in the consumption by the consumer? For example, like, when oil became part of the marketplace, then we see that the price of fuel goes up based on potential disasters - or so-on and so-forth - and never really recovers back to where it should be. And would that not be the same for the housing market, where the actual value based on the raw materials and everything dictates the price, or the demand in this specific area?

Well, this is a connection that has long been reported about. So it's not exactly as if I found it, however, I did go to learn a little bit more about it, and that is gum arabic. Now, this is something that you might not have heard of but it's something that you have touched and eaten and smelled and tasted your entire life, I guarantee you. Now, this is a resin. It's a sap that comes from the Acacias Senegal tree, which grows all over Africa and also in India and, you know, in Latin America. But in Sudan, their trees make the best resin, the highest quality resin. And this resin, it's used in all things, Farai. It is an emulsifier of the highest quality, which means that it keep things together. It keeps ingredients together in just about everything and sort of suspend it indefinitely.

It was definitely much harder to get jobs. I felt like I was working to make about $12 an hour for work that I used to get, you know, 50 to $60 an hour to do. It was very demoralizing (laughter). I think in 2011, I had talked to my business partner, and we both said this wasn't worth it anymore. And we couldn't sell the company, so we just kind of sold off the assets. I just kind of quit everything, and for the first two weeks, it was absolutely wonderful. No more headaches, no more phone calls. But you know sitting home and watching TV in your underwear is only fun for so long. I would say about week four I really kind of start to feel like a loser. And then I really started thinking hard about what I was going to do next.

A lot of Americans, according to the polls, are growing to accept same-sex marriage, whatever their politics or faith. The politicians of both major parties may simply be trying to keep pace. Many of them have said that personal experience, especially with their children, has caused them to see the issue in a new light. When President Obama told ABC News last fall that his position on same-sex marriage was evolving, he cited his daughters. Malia and Sasha, he said, they've got friends whose parents are same-sex couples. And frankly, that's the kind of thing that prompts a change of perspective. Former Vice President Dick Cheney was probably the first major political figure to explicitly support same-sex marriage, in 2009, saying, I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. His daughter, Mary Cheney, lived in a committed relationship for many years and is now married.

Well, this has been happening for decades, yet it has spiked. And Japanese experts have several different theories as to why. Some say that the people on board may have been trying to defect as Kim Jong Un, the country's leader, has effectively militarized and closed the border with China, which is a more common route for defectors. There is also a professor in Tokyo who I think has the most compelling theory. His name is Satoru Miyamoto, and he believes that the number of ships washing ashore spiked in 2013 after Kim Jong Un put out a call to expand the fisheries industry to increase revenue for the military. He said that the order prompted scores of soldiers to go out on old boats without proper navigation equipment and, in some cases, no fishing experience onto what is, really, a perilous body of water - the Sea of Japan - in November.

I was going to say this. When I think about race, it's similar to what Mary and Joe said. I find that - and I'm a futurist - I mean, you know, I look at things long term - 20, 25 years out - but I'm struck by, at age 55, how even at age 55 I still live with ghosts, and they show up in the most unusual places. I remember not long ago, when my wife and I were helping a young member of our church whose wife had died unexpectedly, early mother, and they had children left, and so my wife and I were going to help them, help the two boys to buy some suits while the father was away. One of the kids had to go to the rest room suddenly, and all I could remember - well, you know, look, this is a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, and I asked the woman who was waiting on us, where was the bathroom. She pointed in the direction and so we headed off. What happened to me was…

Oh, that's great. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for joining us, because I know it is three o'clock in the morning there, so not easy for you to be up at that time. Anthony, I wanted to ask you, you know, because there's news coming out of Beijing today about what's going on with press coverage. The Olympic Village Press Center opened on Friday, and reporters are complaining that their access to the Internet is restricted. They're having a hard time getting to sites like Amnesty International's website, Radio Free Asia's website. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

So one of the earliest states to close is Virginia. And Democrats are expected to pick up at least a seat here in the D.C. suburbs that went for Hillary Clinton really big. But there are two other big, competitive tossup seats, and if those go their way, it's not a good omen for Republicans. The same in Georgia - there's two seats in the Atlanta suburbs. If they lose those, again, not sort of a good indicator. One of the biggest hints, I think, come in New Jersey. The polls close there at 8 p.m., and Democrats are favored to pick up two open seats. But if Republicans lose two toss-up seats, that could indicate they're on the way to big gains.

I think Kevin's absolutely right, especially if you look at head-coaching positions and, you know, athletic director, assistant athletic director positions. White women have benefited from Title IX in that respect much more than women of color have despite the fact that they're coaching teams that mostly do - are comprised of women of color. You know, the other side of that, of course, is, you know, not to get into who's the more oppressed minority kind of thing. If you look at salaries compared to what their male counterparts are making, you know, everybody still has ground to make up when it comes to catching up to the white men in these fields.

Yeah, well, the story starts actually around 2005, when a colleague of mine, he's a paleobotonist, went to the mine for the first time, and he found some fossil leaves. And that was the first clue for looking for something else. We said if we find fossil leaves, maybe there are more things there. And I went to the mine to collect everything that was on the field, and in particular we were focused on the bones, so fragments of animals. And so the story started in 2005, when I started discovering turtles and pieces of bone of turtles and also fragments of crocodiles. And even for that time, I had the opportunity to discover the first vertebrae of titanboa, the largest snake so far known.

That's right, Robert. I went to the school today. I arrived here, you know, after the shooting, obviously. And there were still a lot of parents and students and just, you know, neighborhood people - the school was in a really nice, quiet neighborhood of Toulouse - still standing out the street. And I spoke with witnesses who actually saw it. And they said about 8 o'clock in the morning, you know, tons of students and their parents were out in front of the school because actually, it was a pickup point for a bus to another Jewish school, just for younger children. This was like, a middle school, and people would bring their smaller children to go to a - take a bus to a, you know, an elementary school.

The world strictly speaking, nanotechnology is, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The way to think about that it's in the order of a ten-thousandth of a hair, that kind of number, or a hundred-thousandth of a hair, depending upon how small your hair is. But it's very small. It's in the ratio of an inch to the diameter the width of the United States. But another way of thinking about it is that a nanometer, a few atoms put together make up a nanometer so that when you talk about one, two nanometers, you're talking about small molecules. When you talk about 50 nanometers, you're talking about things that are impossible to see by anything to do with the naked eye, anything to with a light microscope. Only very specialized techniques can, quote, see things in those dimensions. So the easy way of thinking about is really, really small.

In early June 2018, I landed at Kansai airport in Japan, with a full day of travel ahead. A few hours later, I was sitting on a Shinkansen – the high-speed train connecting Osaka to Tokyo. Jetlagged, I tried to concentrate on the countryside as it streamed by at over 300 km per hour. Water was everywhere: a steady flow of wetlands, historical paddy fields, embankments. It was a watery procession, occasionally interrupted by a tangle of power lines and packed houses, the scars of centuries of hydraulic struggle. What I saw was the symptom of a universal story. All societies are locked in a dialectic relationship with water over time. It falls from the sky, comes from the sea, flows over land: floods, droughts, storms are expressions of Earth’s climate. People respond, finding solutions to protect themselves. It is a story of action and reaction, of water encroaching on daily life, of catastrophic failures, of people organising to shift water’s course or hold its force at bay. What propels this story forward over centuries is the fact that the solutions of any age are transformed – or rendered obsolete – by the changing expectations of those who follow, in a never-ending human dance with water. Night Rain at Karasaki by Utagawa Hiroshige. Courtesy The Met Museum, New YorkThe traces of that dance are etched into the landscape and institutions of society: the memory of what past generations did shapes what current generations can do. The question, in an age of unprecedented climate change, is whether this past has anything to contribute to the struggle we face. As the floods and droughts that define the extremes of everyone’s water experience become more frequent and intense than ever before, what role does our historical relationship with water play? As the music changes, do the steps we learnt over centuries help us in this new dance with water? Answering this question is harder than one might think: the traces of past water solutions are often hard to detect. During the 20th century, most rich countries deployed exquisite skill and vast resources to sever their relationship with their water past, creating the illusion that water on the landscape is nothing more than a modern, inert stage on which life plays out at the rhythm of the industrial economy. They wished to engineer away water, along with its unpredictability, burying it under a modern control of nature. For the most part, they succeeded. No one in London (or anywhere else in the developed world beyond the UK, for that matter) wades a river going to work. The ancient tributaries of the Thames – the Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn and the Westbourne – are lost inside the city’s sewers. In the US, Manhattan has forgotten flowing water altogether, as ‘Manahatta’ – the island once watered by countless streams and springs – lies under a thick layer of 20th-century architecture. Most citizens of Tokyo or Osaka experience water from taps, a familiar jutting feature of bathrooms or kitchen walls everywhere in the rich world. But as the train sped through Japan’s constructed landscape, I realised that its relationship with water had a singular characteristic. Water, though controlled, had not disappeared. Japan’s millennial landscape proudly bore centuries of visible scars from fighting with it. The past was in full view. Its legacy – the paddy fields, river development, levees constructed over centuries – seemed to be still central to the security infrastructure of the present. Japan is not entirely alone in having integrated its water past visibly into the present. The Dutch, for example, rely on centuries of water management and associated historical infrastructure in their modern relationship to water. It is inevitable: the Netherlands is at the mouth of continental rivers and much of it is well below sea level, facing the same existential problems it faced in the 10th century. But it is an exception, alongside a few places like Venice, the ancient water city. The country is supplied by infinite moisture In most countries, water management is a modern solution to a contemporary problem. For the most part, the historical plumbing of Europe’s landscape is buried under the cultivated fields of a land that enjoys a benign climate. Places with far more complex hydrology – India, the Amazon, even the Western US – once had rich Indigenous traditions of water management, but colonisation all but erased them. Modern infrastructure is a discontinuity entirely unrelated to their hydraulic past. China and Russia were transformed by communism’s 20th-century ideological enthusiasm for hydraulic engineering. Almost everywhere, water’s past is archeologically interesting, culturally important, but appears to be functionally obsolete, making it hard to read in the present. But not in Japan. Conditions there are an unusual mix of difficult hydrology and historical continuity. The climate of this large, rich country is among the most diverse in the world, stretching from fully tropical latitudes at roughly 20 degrees north (south of Okinawa) to 45 degrees north, at the tip of Hokkaido, where midlatitude storms dominate. Its topography adds complexity. During the rainy seasons, water collects in about 3,000 unforgiving, short rivers, draining all sides of the young, steep mountains that cover most of Japan’s territory, leaving marshes and swamps on what little flat land is left. The country is supplied by infinite moisture, surrounded to the west by the warm waters of the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, and the Pacific to the east. It is as if someone cut out the middle of the continental US, squeezed east and west coasts together, and drenched that thin strip with more water than the US or Europe receive at similar latitudes. These conditions produce singularly complicated water problems. Tokyo’s metropolitan area, for example, is home to more than 37 million people, among the largest in the world, crammed in one of Japan’s few lowlands. It receives as much water as famously wet tropical locations such as Darwin in Australia. Because Japan is on the edge of the ‘Ring of Fire’ (the seismically active Pacific Ocean rim), Tokyo’s infrastructure is at greater risk of earthquakes than San Francisco or Los Angeles. Its citizens face typhoons as much as people in Florida risk hurricanes, and tsunamis as destructive as those that threaten Alaska or Hawaii. Delivering any illusion of water control in these circumstances is an extraordinary challenge, one that has accompanied Japan for centuries. Indeed, Japan is one of the few developed nations that exhibits a long history of adaptation to these unusual conditions. Its history is on display in what one can see from the train: centuries of evolution in a remarkable environment. As the bullet train sped through the glistening countryside, I wondered how these layers of water history – the paddy fields, constructed wetlands and more – would behave when marshalled to defend Japan from a changing climate. Would that history reveal itself to be an ally? Or would it fail, proving that modern infrastructure is the only answer? As the frequency and intensity of storms, droughts and floods change, what does the resilience of the past tell us about the challenges of the future? These would have remained jetlag-fuelled musings had it not been for the events that unfolded only a few weeks later. On 29 June 2018, three weeks after my train ride, Prapiroon was born as a tropical storm east of the Philippines, 400 nautical miles south-southeast of Okinawa. It headed west, then veered north, as these storms often do, aiming for Korea and Japan. Three days later, on 2 July, it had grown into a typhoon. Over the following three days, climate change conspired to turn Prapiroon into one of the most destructive typhoons to ever hit Japan. The Arctic had been unusually warm that summer – an event widely attributed to the increasing temperature of the planet. This had an unexpected effect. Ordinarily, weather in the mid-latitudes – the latitudes of New York or Hokkaido – is a sequence of high- and low-pressure systems, roughly 1,000 km wide, slowly drifting from west to east across our weather maps. That summer though, high temperatures over the polar region halted their parade in the Pacific, turning them into standing waves, ridges and troughs in the atmosphere that produce persistent, immobile areas of high and low pressure. Other moving air masses tend to interact with these standing waves as if they were actual mountains and valleys. As Prapiroon passed over the East China Sea, heading north towards the Tsushima Strait, a filament of air wrapped itself clockwise around the stationary high-pressure centred north of Japan, flowed around it, reaching Prapiroon from the southeast, drawing moisture from the warm water of the south and rapidly fuelling its core. Everybody was caught by surprise as the skies of southern Japan came crashing down By 3 July, Prapiroon, strengthened by the added moisture, was just west of Kyushu, ominously skirting around Japan’s southern prefecture. By 4 July, it entered the Sea of Japan, east of Korea. As it moved northward towards Hokkaido, it pushed against the stationary high pressure to the north, squeezing against the mountain of air. Updrafts lifted ever more water into the atmosphere. Climate change and Japan’s unique water geography had conspired to create a perfect storm. On the fifth day of July, it started to rain. A lot. Torrential rains overwhelmed the country. Everybody was caught by surprise as the skies of southern Japan came crashing down. The reports of the Meteorological Agency read like a blow-by-blow war bulletin. Soils were already saturated due to a wet June. By the end of that first day, floods and landslides had multiplied. On 6 July, the Meteorological Agency issued emergency evacuation orders for more than 2.5 million people. A further 4 million were advised to follow. From Shikoku in the west to Honshu in the east, almost 2 metres of water dropped from the sky. When the authorities gave the order to evacuate, many were caught unprepared. Most people did not know where to go or ignored warnings. Roads went under water. In some areas, floodwaters reached 16 feet, forcing people to scramble for the roofs. The hardest hit, Hiroshima and Okayama, cut utility services almost immediately. Some 300,000 homes lost water supply and electricity instantly, as supermarkets ran out of food. On Sunday 8 July 2018, as waters receded, Japan’s then prime minister, the late Shinzo Abe, warned of ‘a race against time’ to rescue survivors. The evacuation was difficult, as one of the richest countries in the world resorted to jerry cans and portable toilets to assist its own citizens in makeshift refugee camps. Many faced sanitation and heatstroke problems. When it was all over, more than 8 million people had been told to evacuate across 23 prefectures, and 225 had lost their lives. By September, insurance companies had paid more than 60,000 claims. Insured losses amounted to $2.5 billion, and the total economic costs neared $10 billion. A wealthy, powerful nation had been rattled to the core. So far, this has been the modern story of this typhoon. But when Prapiroon poured water over countless paddy fields and wetlands, it also crashed into some of the most universally recognisable, historical features of the country’s water landscape. The force of water awakened Japan’s past, as countless rice farmers bore the brunt of the typhoon’s force. Rice is Japan’s primary staple and depends on plentiful flowing water. It came from afar, from the middle Yangtze valley, where it was domesticated possibly before 5,000 BCE. It then spread into the Korean peninsula, crossing from there into Japan around 300 BCE. With rice, Japan’s landscape went through a profound water transformation. Swamps and flooded marshlands turned into productive fields, and eventually into paddy fields. As the population grew, hills and mountains were converted too. But because sloped terrain cannot hold the depth of water needed to grow rice, streams were transformed into terraced paddies, giving rural Japan its characteristic landscape. To prevent armies from covering great distances on foot, rivers were left shallow Then, in the 8th century, Japan’s political system began to evolve towards the rise of the shogunate in the 12th century, by which time power was divided: Kyoto was the seat of the Japanese emperor, but the shogun – the government’s principal executive – was based in Edo (today’s Tokyo). This division of power belied a deeply fractured country. For centuries, much of the nation was ruled by feudal lords, each with their own army of samurai, the famous warrior class. The landscape reflected this fragmentation. In theory, all land in Japan belonged to the emperor. In practice, the roughly 300 lords held all the power. Peasant farmers had rights to cultivate certain plots, if they paid their taxes as a large fraction of the rice yield. Fukeiga, Rice Planting In Rain by Utagawa Hiroshige. Courtesy the Library of CongressBecause much of the military resources was in the hands of the feudal lords, the shogun needed to protect himself by pre-empting any large-scale organised military campaigns. To prevent armies from covering great distances on foot, rivers were left shallow, unnavigable, unfit for transport, and the construction of bridges was forbidden: the only option for crossing was to do so on someone’s back. Thus, Japan committed to centuries of landscape fragmentation. The product of these economic and political processes over centuries – over a millennium, in this case – are the many small, intensively cultivated patches of land that Prapiroon encountered on its way to wreak havoc. Rice farmers were the first victims of the 2018 floods and suffered some of the worst impacts. Around Hiroshima, for example, 90 per cent of paddy fields were destroyed. In Japan, water had created the opportunity to build a rice economy, supporting the country’s development over time. That same development also set the stage for Prapiroon’s first victims. Today’s impacts were not just a failure of modernity: they were the consequence of choices made long ago. Not everything in Japan’s historical relationship with water was overwhelmed by the typhoon’s wrath, however. Kyoto, the ancient capital, told a different story, one that dated from the 17th century, when Japan fell under the powerful Tokugawa Shogunate. At the time, the country’s economy began growing, becoming more integrated. A wealthy merchant class emerged. Land holding concentrated. Wealthy farmers turned into moneylenders, acquiring the rights to land by providing mortgages to impoverished farmers. Capital accumulation made the first investments in infrastructure possible. The shogunate encouraged trade, particularly with Vietnam: mineral resources from Japan in exchange for silk and other goods from Asia. As a result, the port of Osaka became a strategic coastal centre. But Kyoto, which sat upstream of Osaka, could not benefit from the port’s success because its rivers, as most rivers in Japan, had been left too shallow to navigate. At best, timber could float downstream. Everything else had to be carried by road. Suminokura Ryoi – a wealthy 17th-century Kyoto entrepreneur, who came from a family of moneylenders and doctors – knew that improving fluvial infrastructure would allow him and others in Kyoto to capture the wealth flowing towards Osaka. He had money. He transformed the city. Kyoto’s ability to deal with nature’s onslaught was a consequence of investments made three centuries earlier First, he cleared a segment of the Katsura river that runs through Kyoto, allowing for the transit of flat riverboats. In a significant feat of civil works, he then forced the redirection of the Takase to join with the Yodo and run through the centre of Kyoto parallel to the Kamogawa. The resulting channel allowed timber, firewood, charcoal and other goods to be transported to and from Osaka. Then, he opened the Fujikawa River and the Kamogawa waterway. Suminokura’s investment was amply paid back by the concession of shipping rights he acquired from the emperor, which gave him the monopoly of this infrastructure. Suminokura’s projects amounted to a re-plumbing of the city of Kyoto and the surrounding landscape. In water security, ‘path dependence’ is pervasive. But path dependence – the fact that the present is highly dependent on choices made in the past, under different conditions – does not necessarily lead to vulnerability. The unintended consequences of past decisions are not always bad. When the flood waters of 2018 washed downhill, Suminokura’s canals provided routes that drained the city of water, ensuring it remained more or less unscathed. Kyoto’s ability to deal with the onslaught of nature had been the consequence of investments made three centuries earlier, and which had begun with a re-engineering of Kyoto’s rivers to serve the city’s economy. That re-engineering had turned into a safety valve that helped protect it from harm. In 2018, Thailand earned naming rights for the typhoon. It was an extraordinary coincidence that they chose to give it a name of great consequence for its victims. Phra Phirun was the Thai god of water, rain and the oceans. In the ancient Vedic text of the Indo-Aryan tradition, the Rigveda, he is Varuna, the god responsible for providing water to animals and crops, a divinity that made its way into Japanese Buddhist mythology as Suiten, Varuna’s Japanese name. Suiten was then absorbed in the Shinto tradition, Japan’s indigenous belief system, with the name Suijin. The continued reverence for this divinity in Japan – and for the related Ryujin, the dragon god of the sea – is testament to the fact that water is central to Japanese identity. It is the same cultural role that made water a favourite subject for Ukiyo-e, the woodblock printing genre that enjoyed great fortune during the Tokugawa Shogunate, producing some of the most iconic images of Japanese art, such as the celebrated 19th-century print The Great Wave by the artist Hokusai. During the last centuries of the shogunate, the sophistication of Japan’s relationship with water grew alongside its aesthetic fascination for this existential substance, setting the stage for the country’s modern landscape as a mix of historical and modern infrastructure. Again, Kyoto’s story illustrates the profound path dependence of this extraordinary journey. Suminokura’s 17th-century canal system played a central role in Kyoto’s economic efflorescence, becoming a springboard for subsequent industrialisation. Eventually, Kyoto’s vibrant textile industry transport needs outgrew the canals that Suminokura had built. If Kyoto was going to take advantage of global markets, it needed more and larger transport infrastructure. But, for that, it needed more water. An entrance to one of the tunnels of the canals that connect Lake Biwa with the city of Kyoto, Japan, c1919. Photo by George Rinhart/GettyLake Biwa, about 15 miles east of Kyoto, was a 4 million-year-old tectonic lake that could provide water to increase navigability in Kyoto’s waterways. The question was how to take the water over, or through, the mountains that separated the great lake from its potential uses. While damaged, Kyoto’s canal system allowed the floodwaters of 2018 to flow through the city Discussions about a Biwa canal had been ongoing since the 12th century, but nothing had come of them, as the project seemed far too expensive. Then, the 1867 International Exposition in Paris fuelled a Western craze for everything Japanese – potentially an enormous market for Kyoto’s textiles – and the economic incentives to capture that opportunity became too strong to resist. The time for the Biwa Canal had finally come. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, power was re-centralised away from the shogun into the hands of the 16-year-old emperor, Mutsuhito. The Meiji government committed to modernising the country, abolishing feudal domains and the samurai class. Ownership of all farmlands was given to farmers, whose names were inscribed on title deeds. People were free to buy, sell and mortgage real estate, creating a modern market, in this land of water. The fifth article of the Charter Oath with which the imperial family was restored to government declared that ‘knowledge shall be sought throughout the world in order to promote the welfare of the empire.’ Western experience was making its way into the country. For example, in 1882, Ito Hirobumi, who would become one of the most prominent prime ministers of the age, travelled to the US and Europe to study local constitutions, selecting the Prussian model – limited parliamentary powers and a powerful emperor – for Japan. The same happened for water. In 1888, the Japanese engineer Tanabe Sakuro visited the hydropower station in Aspen, Colorado in the US. At the time, hydropower was the new, dominant generating technology, making rivers the blueprint of industrialisation. In the late 19th century, this technology was in its infancy, but Tanabe’s gift must have been foresight. He proposed a canal to connect Lake Biwa and Kyoto, incorporating Pelton wheels to harness its hydropower. Under those terms, a scheme that had always seemed impossible – the Dutch consultant Johannis de Rijke doubted it could ever be financed or the costs recouped – became viable. Tanabe was awarded the direction of the project. He created a modern integration of water control, transport infrastructure and energy generation. To overcome the mountain ranges that sat between the lake and the city of Kyoto, he designed three tunnels – one of them the longest in the world at the time – dug using a mix of ancient Japanese and modern Western technology, so that wooden canal boats transporting rice and other goods came down from the lake. By the early 20th century, the project generated enough electricity to bring streetlights and streetcars to Kyoto, powering its mills. Delivering security means recognising the dialectic relationship that all generations have had with water Tanabe’s project was the beginning of Kyoto’s hydraulic transformation. It introduced an idea of landscape that Tanabe had seen in the Western US, and kicked off Japan’s water modernisation, integrating its past with the future. By the time the 2018 floods happened, the country’s Water Agency in Kyoto had at its disposal the legacy of centuries of infrastructure development: the historical infrastructure, legacy of Suminokura’s 17th-century canals, and the modern infrastructure that had begun with Tanabe’s projects. The stock of landscape interventions had increased the resilience of Kyoto. While damaged, Kyoto’s canal system allowed the floodwaters of 2018 to flow through the city, leaving its buildings mostly unscathed. Prapiroon hit the city hard – Kyoto was one of the heaviest-hit prefectures – but the infrastructure that made Suminokura rich and Tanabe famous contributed to saving Kyoto. Japan’s experience, so evident in the landscape that entertained me as I travelled through the country in early June, turned out to hold a crucial lesson. Water comes from the sky; it comes from the sea; it flows over land. When it does, delivering security means recognising the dialectic relationship that all generations have had with water. Japan’s story reveals just how profound that dialectic is, how deep its roots are, and how unexpectedly consequential it can be. Most countries have forgotten their water past. But hidden behind the dams, levees, canals and countless wetlands and fields that have replumbed the world in the past century lie deep, complicated grooves: the foundations of contemporary water security. Below the surface, Europe’s landscape still bears the scars of choices made over millennia. Italy’s northern plains drain water along canals designed by Roman farmers, medieval monks, or dug by the Venice Republic during its inland expansion. It is this dendritic, historic system that feeds – or starves, as the drought of 2022 in the Po River has so plainly shown – the grains and vines grown here today. The German villages that, in the summer of 2021, were tragically engulfed by the Ahr, a tributary of the Rhine, were settled centuries ago, when proximity to the dangerous river was a matter of economic survival. The mid-stem of China’s Yellow River travels 10 metres above ground. Thousands of years of hydraulic control on the Loess Plateau have forced the river to flow ever faster, scouring sediment and dragging it downstream. When the latter eventually settles, accumulating on the riverbed, it condemns China to build ever-taller levees to chase its Mother River as it rises towards the sky. And the great Mississippi, Old Man River, exists as the lymphatic system of the plains that once supported complex civilisations, whose legacy of corn and maize cultivation seeded America’s breadbasket. Japan’s lesson is universal: vulnerabilities and solutions develop – sometimes unexpectedly – over long periods of time. A society’s survival depends on protecting itself from the first, and taking advantage of the second. When it comes to its functional role in society, the landscape spans both space and time. Its hydraulic design, which emerges over successive generations, has no single planner, but constitutes a complex, sophisticated infrastructure that is inextricable from society. As nations face a renewed fight to confront the overwhelming power of water in a changing climate, it is essential that they recognise their evolving relationship with water. We are bound to history through our inescapable dialectic with water. We dance with water over time. And it is a dance that matters a great deal.

As patients, we usually remember the names of our doctors, but often we forget the names of our nurses. I remember one. I had breast cancer a few years ago, and somehow I managed to get through the surgeries and the beginning of the treatment just fine. I could hide what was going on. Everybody didn't really have to know. I could walk my daughter to school, I could go out to dinner with my husband; I could fool people. But then my chemo was scheduled to begin and that terrified me because I knew that I was going to lose every single hair on my body because of the kind of chemo that I was going to have. I wasn't going to be able to pretend anymore as though everything was normal. I was scared. I knew what it felt like to have everybody treating me with kid gloves, and I just wanted to feel normal. I had a port installed in my chest. I went to my first day of chemotherapy, and I was an emotional wreck. My nurse, Joanne, walked in the door, and every bone in my body was telling me to get up out of that chair and take for the hills. But Joanne looked at me and talked to me like we were old friends. And then she asked me, "Where'd you get your highlights done?" (Laughter) And I was like, are you kidding me? You're going to talk to me about my hair when I'm on the verge of losing it? I was kind of angry, and I said, "Really? Hair?" And with a shrug of her shoulders she said, "It's gonna grow back." And in that moment she said the one thing I had overlooked, and that was that at some point, my life would get back to normal. She really believed that. And so I believed it, too. Now, worrying about losing your hair when you're fighting cancer may seem silly at first, but it's not just that you're worried about how you're going to look. It's that you're worried that everybody's going to treat you so carefully. Joanne made me feel normal for the first time in six months. We talked about her boyfriends, we talked about looking for apartments in New York City, and we talked about my reaction to the chemotherapy — all kind of mixed in together. And I always wondered, how did she so instinctively know just how to talk to me? Joanne Staha and my admiration for her marked the beginning of my journey into the world of nurses. A few years later, I was asked to do a project that would celebrate the work that nurses do. I started with Joanne, and I met over 100 nurses across the country. I spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses for a book and a documentary film. With my team, we mapped a trip across America that would take us to places dealing with some of the biggest public health issues facing our nation — aging, war, poverty, prisons. And then we went places where we would find the largest concentration of patients dealing with those issues. Then we asked hospitals and facilities to nominate nurses who would best represent them. One of the first nurses I met was Bridget Kumbella. Bridget was born in Cameroon, the oldest of four children. Her father was at work when he had fallen from the fourth floor and really hurt his back. And he talked a lot about what it was like to be flat on your back and not get the kind of care that you need. And that propelled Bridget to go into the profession of nursing. Now, as a nurse in the Bronx, she has a really diverse group of patients that she cares for, from all walks of life, and from all different religions. And she's devoted her career to understanding the impact of our cultural differences when it comes to our health. She spoke of a patient — a Native American patient that she had — that wanted to bring a bunch of feathers into the ICU. That's how he found spiritual comfort. And she spoke of advocating for him and said that patients come from all different religions and use all different kinds of objects for comfort; whether it's a holy rosary or a symbolic feather, it all needs to be supported. This is Jason Short. Jason is a home health nurse in the Appalachian mountains, and his dad had a gas station and a repair shop when he was growing up. So he worked on cars in the community that he now serves as a nurse. When he was in college, it was just not macho at all to become a nurse, so he avoided it for years. He drove trucks for a little while, but his life path was always pulling him back to nursing. As a nurse in the Appalachian mountains, Jason goes places that an ambulance can't even get to. In this photograph, he's standing in what used to be a road. Top of the mountain mining flooded that road, and now the only way for Jason to get to the patient living in that house with black lung disease is to drive his SUV against the current up that creek. The day I was with him, we ripped the front fender off the car. The next morning he got up, put the car on the lift, fixed the fender, and then headed out to meet his next patient. I witnessed Jason caring for this gentleman with such enormous compassion, and I was struck again by how intimate the work of nursing really is. When I met Brian McMillion, he was raw. He had just come back from a deployment and he hadn't really settled back in to life in San Diego yet. He talked about his experience of being a nurse in Germany and taking care of the soldiers coming right off the battlefield. Very often, he would be the first person they would see when they opened their eyes in the hospital. And they would look at him as they were lying there, missing limbs, and the first thing they would say is, "When can I go back? I left my brothers out there." And Brian would have to say, "You're not going anywhere. You've already given enough, brother." Brian is both a nurse and a soldier who's seen combat. So that puts him in a unique position to be able to relate to and help heal the veterans in his care. This is Sister Stephen, and she runs a nursing home in Wisconsin called Villa Loretto. And the entire circle of life can be found under her roof. She grew up wishing they lived on a farm, so given the opportunity to adopt local farm animals, she enthusiastically brings them in. And in the springtime, those animals have babies. And Sister Stephen uses those baby ducks, goats and lambs as animal therapy for the residents at Villa Loretto who sometimes can't remember their own name, but they do rejoice in the holding of a baby lamb. The day I was with Sister Stephen, I needed to take her away from Villa Loretto to film part of her story. And before we left, she went into the room of a dying patient. And she leaned over and she said, "I have to go away for the day, but if Jesus calls you, you go. You go straight home to Jesus." I was standing there and thinking it was the first time in my life I witnessed that you could show someone you love them completely by letting go. We don't have to hold on so tightly. I saw more life rolled up at Villa Loretto than I have ever seen at any other time at any other place in my life. We live in a complicated time when it comes to our health care. It's easy to lose sight of the need for quality of life, not just quantity of life. As new life-saving technologies are created, we're going to have really complicated decisions to make. These technologies often save lives, but they can also prolong pain and the dying process. How in the world are we supposed to navigate these waters? We're going to need all the help we can get. Nurses have a really unique relationship with us because of the time spent at bedside. During that time, a kind of emotional intimacy develops. This past summer, on August 9, my father died of a heart attack. My mother was devastated, and she couldn't imagine her world without him in it. Four days later she fell, she broke her hip, she needed surgery and she found herself fighting for her own life. Once again I found myself on the receiving end of the care of nurses — this time for my mom. My brother and my sister and I stayed by her side for the next three days in the ICU. And as we tried to make the right decisions and follow my mother's wishes, we found that we were depending upon the guidance of nurses. And once again, they didn't let us down. They had an amazing insight in terms of how to care for my mom in the last four days of her life. They brought her comfort and relief from pain. They knew to encourage my sister and I to put a pretty nightgown on my mom, long after it mattered to her, but it sure meant a lot to us. And they knew to come and wake me up just in time for my mom's last breath. And then they knew how long to leave me in the room with my mother after she died. I have no idea how they know these things, but I do know that I am eternally grateful that they've guided me once again. Thank you so very much. (Applause)

Well, I must say I've been very, very honored that I was chosen 24 years ago. For the past 24 years, I keep on saying, it's great to be the first but, you know, I don't want to be the only. And so now it is wonderful to see a woman on a national ticket. And this election, in particular, to me, is important because one way or the other we're going to see a historic first. So, for our country either one of these two historic candidacies, to me, is very, very important because one of them is going to actually make it.

Well, I talked about this at some length with Sesame Workshop's CEO, Jeffrey Dunn. And he said that "Sesame Street" was trying to follow the practices and habits of its actual viewers, children. It had experimented with PBS over the last year with a 30-minute version and a 60-minute version. It found, actually, a heavier usage - according to what I was told both from PBS and from Sesame Workshop - found heavier usage with a shorter show. And because so many young viewers are coming to it first through apps - you know, presumably on their parent's smartphones or iPads or what have you - they're watching it in shorter increments. They may not be watching it in even 30-minute lengths.

Well, it means that party has far more of a salience than race. When you look at black voters, black voters of course gave Blackwell - Ken Blackwell in Ohio 20 percent of their vote, Lynn Swann 13 and Michael Steele 27. Those are relatively good numbers, but they're still relatively low when you look at what blacks gave to the Democrats. That's an average of about 20 percentage points - 10 percentage points for all candidates. So blacks are still very firmly in the Democratic column and they take their interests very seriously. And in this race, we're talking about very hot-button, strong issues, like the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and those things. It really trumped a lot of the local issues.

Well, that's the big question. I do think that the open question is whether or not the average voter will care, but I also think this is one of the key issues that John McCain is going to use to attack Obama, not fundraising but, can you trust him? Will he do what he says is going to do? And you know, until now, Barack Obama has presented himself as the kind of candidate who will take a principled stand and will forgoes things that may be advantages to him as a politician in favor of being honest with voters and being a different kind of leader. And what he's shown right now is that he's doing the kind of thing that the Clintons used to do, which is, you know, say one thing and then do another if it becomes politically more advantageous. So, I think he's going to have to be careful about making moves like this, even when they make sense. And the other thing we have to watch is who will be donating to his campaigns, I mean we're assuming that he's going to get a lot of his money from the Internet because that's where he's gotten it before, but if he forgoes public financing and some of the controls that come with it, who knows where this money is going to come from.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. With recovery scarcely begun, the effects of Hurricane Katrina continue to add up. The Congressional Budget Office estimated today the storm could cost the country 400,000 jobs in the coming months and slow economic growth for the rest of the year. President Bush today asked for another $51.8 billion in hurricane aid. That's in addition to the $10 1/2 billion Congress approved last week. He may eventually ask for $100 billion on top of that. And, on the individual level, federal officials announced plans today to give every Katrina survivor a $2,000 debit card. Floodwaters continue to recede in New Orleans amid some confusion about Mayor Ray Nagin's new evacuation order. Something like 10,000 people may still be in the city. Police say they will not force anyone to leave, at least not as yet, and will continue to supply food and water. National Guard commanders say they don't take orders from the mayor. We'll get an update from New Orleans later this hour.

Russia faces its largest public protests since the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago. The latest demonstration came over the holiday weekend. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Moscow on Saturday. They disagree with elections allegedly rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin's party and they disagree with Putin's plan to return to the presidency after getting around a term limit rule by switching to prime minister for four years. We're going to talk about this with Lilia Shevtsova, the senior Russia analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She's in Moscow. Welcome to the program.

Well, I haven't done research specifically on Suzuki. But there is a lot of research that suggests that babies are tuned into music and rhythm from a very early age - maybe even from literally, the time they're born. And infants already, for instance, can kind of sense whether a musical phrase ends the way that it should - that make - in a way that makes sense. And babies bounce and play and hum and dance from the time they're very early. Someone asked recently: What kind of music do they like? And I said, they like a song that you can dance to. But don't we all?

Tabib says the leaders of the rebel's Transitional National Council or TNC must move immediately from Benghazi to Tripoli, get out to the Great Man-Made River and figure out what is wrong. The rebels, however, are only beginning to consolidate control over the capital. Neighborhood militias are manning checkpoints in the streets. And with the ousted Gadhafi government on the run, aid groups say it's difficult to figure out who they should coordinate with to provide humanitarian assistance. On the streets, rumors are rampant that the retreating Gadhafi troops poisoned the city's water supply or blew up key parts of the infrastructure. There are conflicting explanations even from the TNC as to what's going on. A spokesman for the rebels in Benghazi says the TNC did shut off the water to check if it had been poisoned.

Bethesda in the state of Maryland is the kind of safe, upscale Washington DC suburb that well-educated, high-earning professionals retreat to when it’s time to raise a family. Some 80 per cent of the city’s adult residents have college degrees. Bethesda’s posh Bradley Manor-Longwood neighbourhood was recently ranked the second richest in the country. And yet, on 11 March 2011, a young woman was brutally murdered by a fellow employee at a local Lululemon store (where yoga pants retail for about $100 each). Two employees of the Apple store next door heard the murder as it occurred, debated, and ultimately decided not to call the police. If the attack had occurred in poor, crowded, crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro, the outcome might have been different: in one series of experiments, researchers found bystanders in the Brazilian city to be extraordinarily helpful, stepping in to offer a hand to a blind person and aiding a stranger who dropped a pen nearly 100 per cent of the time. This apparent paradox reflects a nuanced understanding of ‘bystander apathy’, the term coined by the US psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané in the 1960s to describe the puzzling, and often horrifying, inaction of witnesses to intervene in violent crimes or other tragedies. The phenomenon first received widespread attention in 1964, when the New York bar manager Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered outside her apartment building in the borough of Queens. Media coverage focused on the alleged inaction of her neighbours – The New York Times’s defining story opened with the chilling assertion that: ‘For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks.’ Over the years, that media account has been largely debunked, but the incident served to establish a narrative that persists today: society has changed irrevocably for the worse, and the days of neighbour helping neighbour are a nicety of the past. True or not, the Genovese story became a cultural meme for callousness and man’s inhumanity to man, a trend said to signify our modern age. It also launched a whole new field of study. Fascinated by the Genovese case, the psychologists Darley, then of New York University, and Latané, then of Columbia, ran a series of telling experiments in the late 1960s. The most famous exercise took place in a room into which smoke would be piped. Research participants were taken inside, where they might be left alone; with two other participants; or with two researchers masquerading as participants oblivious to the incoming smoke. The majority of participants (75 per cent) who were alone in the room reported the smoke; by contrast, only 10 per cent of those in a room with two seemingly unobservant researchers reported it. Darley and Latané attributed this to two factors: one was the ‘diffusion of responsibility effect’, where the presence of others leads individuals to assume that someone else will help or already has. The other factor was ‘the power of social norms’, in which people observe others’ reactions to evaluate the severity of a situation. Their findings played out with chilling consistency through the years. In 1987, a college freshman at the University of New Hampshire was gang-raped by three fellow students. One of the perpetrators bragged to passersby in the hallway as the rape was occurring, yet no one (including the floor’s Resident Advisor) intervened or called the authorities. In 2009, up to 20 people watched a 15-year-old being gang-raped outside a high-school dance in Richmond, California. Nor is this a problem only in Western countries. On 13 October 2011 in Foshan in the Guangdong province of China, a two-year-old girl wandered away from her family’s hardware store into a nearby alley and was hit by a passing van. While Wang Yue lay injured in the street, 18 people passed by without stopping to assist her. She was eventually hit by a second vehicle, which also did not stop. Almost 10 minutes after the incident, a passing trash collector finally moved the little girl out of the street and called for help. A week later, the little girl died in a hospital. The incident sparked a great deal of hand-wringing about the decline of morality and community in China, along with a debate about the changes wrought by the country’s rapid urbanisation and increasing emphasis on individual wealth over the communist ideal of universal equality. There’s something in the culture – there’s this magical, mysterious part of the culture that breeds helpfulness The events were so horrific, in fact, that the work of Darley and Latané couldn’t really account for the phenomenon in full. Why, in the face of such devastating violence, were otherwise ‘good people’ looking the other way? One issue worth exploring was the long-standing idea, perpetuated by the Genovese story, that big cities breed apathy, even callousness. The theory turns out to be flawed – city size played a role, but not the most important one. Robert Levine, a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno, has evaluated ‘helping behaviours’ in cities all over the world. In each city, Levine and his team have run a series of experiments in which bystanders have the opportunity to help or not help a stranger. In one experiment, for example, researchers feigned a leg injury and dropped a large pile of magazines in view of a passing pedestrian, visibly struggling to bend over and pick them up. In another, researchers feigned blindness at a street crossing, held out their cane and awaited assistance. Still other experiments were simpler – researchers dropped pens or stamped-addressed envelopes and tracked whether a bystander tried to return the pen or mail the envelope. Results challenge the long-standing assumption that big, anonymous cities are destined to be full of unhelpful people. In his 1994 paper on helping behaviours in 36 cities in the US, for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, some smaller places such as Paterson in New Jersey and Shreveport in Louisiana ranked low on Levine’s helping index. Meanwhile, the most helpful city internationally, of the 23 he and colleagues studied for their 2001 paper for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, was Rio de Janeiro – population some 6.5 million today. ‘There were some big cities that were helpful, and some small cities that weren’t helpful,’ says Levine. ‘And that would indicate that there’s something in the culture – there’s this magical, mysterious part of the culture that breeds helpfulness. The opposite of what I was taught growing up in New York, which was not to help. That you’re not a bad person if you don’t help.’ One explanation for the ‘magical, mysterious part of culture’ that Levine talks about could lie in how strongly a society values conformity over individualism. More individualist cultures, such as the US and much of Europe, value individual achievement and identity over group identity; members are expected to look out for themselves and challenging social norms is often admired. Collectivist societies such as China, on the other hand, tend to value conformity and loyalty to the family or group over individual achievements or desires. While members of collectivist societies are often expected to look out for fellow group members at all costs, they’re also strongly discouraged from challenging social norms. Collectivist cultures more closely resemble our nostalgic memories of small-town living where neighbours watched each other’s children and pitched in on each other’s farms – and, presumably, called the police if their neighbours were being brutally stabbed to death. Brazil, for example – home to the most helpful city in Levine’s research – has a strongly collectivist culture. But it’s more complicated than that. Collectivist cultures also place a premium on conformity. So while individuals in collectivist cultures might be more likely to step in to help a member of their in-group, that helpfulness might not extend beyond their group, particularly if intervention violates a strong social norm such as loyalty or obedience to superiors. A 2012 paper in the journal Social Development compared behaviours in two different countries, individualistic Italy and collectivist Singapore. While bullying was more common in Italy than in Singapore, Italians, especially girls, were also more likely to defend the victims and engage in active intervention. In other words, the rugged individualists were more likely to buck prevailing social norms and help someone in need. So how does all this help to explain the new bystanders – those who do nothing to stop online bullying or brutal college campus rapes? On 11 August 2012, a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in Steubenville, a small town in Ohio, by two local football players – over the course of many hours and at several different locations. Throughout the evening, one perpetrator sent text messages describing the crime, along with nude pictures of the victim to friends. Onlookers at the scene took videos and shared them, too. All of which means that numerous partygoers and others were aware of the incident and failed to report it or assist the victim. The events of that night baffled most of the US public, but when viewed in a different framework, the inaction of recent bystanders to sexual assault and bullying makes sense. Fraternities, the military, and sports teams such as Steubenville’s hometown football team, are mini-collectives within the largely individualist society of the US. And mini-collectives, just like more traditionally collectivist societies, are apt to value conformity and punish or ostracise those who defy the group’s social norms. knowing every single witness or partygoer won’t save a rape victim if all of those witnesses are bound by strong social norms that discourage intervention Alan Berkowitz, a California psychologist and expert in rape prevention, told me that would-be bystanders can’t help but weigh up the consequences of defying social norms. ‘When you’re in the moment, all the barriers come into play,’ he says. ‘You’re afraid of embarrassing someone else, you’re afraid of being retaliated against, you think that other people aren’t bothered. When you’re in a very powerful peer group, like a group of young men – the most important thing that young men are taught is to fit in with other young men.’ Social norms themselves aren’t necessarily good or bad. But in some collectivist cultures, social norms may pressure members to look the other way, especially when it comes to sexual assault. Steubenville in Ohio isn’t New York City, where the Kitty Genovese narrative implied that city size and anonymity caused callousness on a massive scale. The Steubenville tragedy demonstrates how flawed that assumption is. Even knowing every single witness or partygoer won’t save a rape victim if all of those witnesses are bound by strong social norms that discourage intervention. And the advent of social media has only magnified the bystander effect, creating more bystanders and offering those same bystanders a protective cloak of invisibility, sometimes anonymity. On the night of the Steubenville assault, someone posted a photo on Instagram of the victim, unconscious, being carried by her wrists and ankles by the perpetrators. One of the perpetrators and various witnesses sent numerous text messages to friends, along with a photo of the victim, unconscious and nude, together with details of the night’s events. Yet another witness reportedly took a cell phone-video of the unconscious girl being sexually assaulted, although he claimed to have deleted it the next day. And there was a particularly horrifying YouTube video of someone describing the sexual assault and mocking the victim as ‘dead’. We’re seeing social and other electronic media being ‘used in the moment, and in the cover-up as well’, I was told by Jackson Katz, the co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention, one of the first US bystander intervention training programmes. The Steubenville perpetrators, for example, relied heavily on text messages in their effort to cover up the assault. Trent Mays, one of the perpetrators, sent a message to one friend, saying: ‘Just say she came to your house and passed out.’ In other messages, Mays tried to convince the victim not to press charges, writing: ‘This is the most pointless thing. I’m going to get in trouble for something I should be getting thanked for taking care of you.’ This type of cyberbullying, in which bullying either occurs exclusively online or accompanies in-person attacks, has also increased and has, in a few instances, resulted in tragic suicides. Throughout 2009, Phoebe Prince, a student at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, was bullied both in person and online. Fellow students allegedly threw things at her, knocked books out of her hands, harassed her in hallways and the school library, and called her an ‘Irish slut’ and ‘whore’ on Twitter, Craigslist and Facebook. On 14 January 2010, after a particularly difficult day of bullying, Prince went home and hanged herself. The internet has dramatically increased the number of potential bystanders to bullying and sexual assaults, which only serves to exacerbate the diffusion of responsibility – the more bystanders, the less likely that any one person will take action. Instead of a few witnesses in a school hallway or at a drunken party, anyone with a cell phone or Facebook account can now receive pictures of a sexual assault in progress, or witness cyberbullying on a Facebook page. how can you avoid being the kind of passive bystander who watches an inebriated young woman led upstairs at a party? It’s also hard to ignore the fact that people just seem to be meaner online. The clinical psychologist John Suler of Rider University in New Jersey attributes the often excessively harsh or aggressive behaviour of people online to something he calls the ‘online disinhibition effect’. The crux of the theory is simple: it’s easier to be nasty when you can’t see the person to whom you’re being nasty. ‘People don’t have to worry about how they look or sound when they type a message,’ writes Suler in a 2004 paper for the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior. ‘They don’t have to worry about how others look or sound in response to what they say.’ So how can you avoid being the kind of passive bystander who watches an inebriated young woman led upstairs at a party, or a little girl injured on a busy road? In recent years, researchers have finally begun to tap years of studies to answer the question of how to reverse the bystander effect and spur onlookers into action. Bystander intervention training has become the next frontier in bullying and violence prevention – and a major focus of funding from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent years. The programmes, while relatively new, focus on countering the five barriers to intervention that Darley and Latané outlined way back in 1970: the bystander must notice the situation, recognise that it requires an intervention, feel personally responsible for intervening, choose a method of intervention, and complete the intervention. Given the important role of culture, many programmes focus on changing social norms by creating a different kind of peer pressure, so bystanders do the right thing. ‘How does one go out and change a norm?’ asks Levine, whose research on helping behaviours within cities led him to work with the Heroic Imagination Project, a San Francisco-based effort to combat the negative effects of conformity and obedience. ‘We try to use the same forces that drive us to conform, and now we try to flip those forces and create a new conformity pressure that will lead in the right direction,’ he explains. Another programme, Katz’s Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), works with opinion-leaders – favourite coaches, teachers, athletes, fraternity presidents – to change those social norms. The thinking is that if the ‘cool kids’ can be convinced to stand up to sexist or homophobic jokes, or challenge a frat brother or fellow team member who’s about to take advantage of someone, their communities will gradually evolve to encourage intervention. Katz, an educator long involved in the fight against sexual violence, says: ‘The question isn’t, what do we say to young men on a high-school football team? Rather it is, how do we get into these systems? How do we hold the leadership accountable?’ Meanwhile, the California psychologist Alan Berkowitz uses a programme he calls the Social Norms Approach, originally developed to discourage excessive alcohol consumption on college campuses. The strategy there is to place perceived social norms under the microscope, exposing the dynamic of the bystander effect as it unfolds. A grasp of the phenomenon helps individuals see, more clearly, when someone is crossing the line, and provides the strength and impetus to intervene. Nobody thinks they’re the kind of person who would stand by while a woman is raped in the room next door ‘If you ask men: “Would you personally respect someone who intervenes in a potential sexual assault?”, they overwhelmingly say yes,’ explains Berkowitz. ‘But they don’t believe their peers share that belief. There’s a gap between what people believe and what they think others believe.’ The hope is that, by convincing young men that they’re not the only ones worried about that girl their fraternity brother is trying to take upstairs, you will increase the likelihood that someone will intervene. Bystander intervention training programmes also aim to provide would-be heroes with the tools to act safely and effectively. ‘Most people think they only have two choices – intervene physically at point of attack, or do nothing,’ says Katz. ‘Our job as educators is to provide them with a menu of choices, so people can think through them and have options when the pressure’s on.’ For the shy, the socially pressured and the seriously cowed, Katz and others advise intervention through distraction – telling a would-be rapist that his car is being towed or that he is needed elsewhere actually works as an intervention. They are also advised to seek intervention allies: a potential victim’s group of girlfriends can help to rescue her, as can authority figures or police. Reversing the bystander effect and turning more of us into proactive guardians of the public good is going to take some work. ‘How is it possible that, in 2014, you still have dozens of colleges and universities without any mandatory sexual assault training?’ Katz asks. ‘Nobody thinks they’re the kind of person who would stand by while a woman is raped in the room next door, yet these incidents continue to occur,’ Levine says. ‘We have a lot of data on this. When you ask, most people will give you an explanation of why they wouldn’t stand by in these kinds of situations – because they’re religious, because they respect women, the list goes on. You have to teach people about the illusion of personal invulnerability – most people don’t think they are the kind of people who would just stand by and do nothing. But they are.’

There's no evidence she was covert, said Jeffers, or that the government was seeking to protect her identity. But prosecutor Fitzgerald countered that Libby's own CIA briefer told him after the Novak column was published that this was a very serious matter that could lead to an agent's harassment, torture, or death. Defense lawyers also pointed out that Libby had talked to eight reporters in June and July of 2003, reporters who testified he did not tell them about Mrs. Wilson's identity. Prosecutor Fitzgerald countered that the vice president had chosen the reporter he wanted to leak to in order to rebut charges of twisted intelligence.

Absolutely. You know, across the country. Bill Clinton, remember was our first black president - ha, ha - according to Toni Morrison. But a lot of folks would say, yeah. He certainly had that kind of rapport with the black community, and those alliances still continue. And look to our friend Rahm Emanuel - Congressman Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who has been very close with the Clintons for years, was right there in the White House staff and now has been helping Barack Obama. As he says, he's going to hide under his desk until the primaries are over. I mean, which way does he go?

Let's pull out a little bit to the political picture. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and also ones on the campaign trail are looking at a bunch of options to see what they can do to give the economy a jolt. So there's a plan for one-time rebate checks, extended unemployment benefits, higher food stamp payments. The president announced that he's considering a range of options. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has gotten into the mix. In your opinion, let's just break them down one-by-one, those three proposals. What might they do to the economy? One-time rebate check, what would that do, basically, where you're getting a little bit of money back for just one quick pay-your-bills moment?

Let's say I'm the victim. They tell me that I can get involved in this for no money down, no loss to myself, and they're going to obtain properties and then sell them at a profit, and I will receive a piece of that profit. I make my credit information available to them. They then obtain a mortgage in my name for a dollar figure much, much higher than they have agreed to buy that property. Say they had made an agreement to buy this house for $100,000, had it appraised at 200. They get me a mortgage for 80 percent of 200 - which is 160 - they pocket the 60. And then they might do that for four or five houses.

Alex, in our last broadcast, we did a little story - really, it was only about a minute long, about what we thought was an interesting event, a special moment that only true wire heads could appreciate. Last Friday, some of the digiratti were celebrating 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0 in Unix time, which occurred at 6:31 P.M. Eastern Time. Unix time is a way programmers measure time, with seconds ticking away one by one, since what is called the Unix epoch was established at midnight 1970, Greenwich Mean Time. I told you this was geeky. On Friday, the seconds added up to that magic number, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0.

Well, I think, you know, obviously at this stage it's all a lot of speculation. But I think whereas, you know, earlier if you remember those kind of attacks and the school siege in Beslan or the theater siege in Moscow back in 2002, you know, a bunch of terrorist acts that hit Moscow over the years. And they were often tied to the Chechen independence cause which gradually took on more and more of a kind of Islamist bend to it. But in recent years, I think the Chechen cause has kind of morphed into, you know, we've seen a lot of the Chechen commanders go and find Syria, pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. And then we've also seen people from those poor republics of Central Asia like Kyrgyzstan, also hundreds of them ending up fighting in Syria and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State as well. And we've also had reports of people perhaps not dissimilar to the suspect here of the young Uzbek or Kyrgyz men who come and work in terrible conditions in Russia and end up actually getting radicalized inside Russia. So, you know, again, bit too early to tell. But that might sort of turn out to be something that - a similar case here.

Well, every time there's an effort at campaign finance reform or lobbying reform people get very nervous because it does affect them, and they're--always the law of unintended consequences always affects things so that they think they're changing something for the better to clean things up and sometimes it opens a loophole that makes things worse. And that's happened both with political action committees and with soft money, then unregulated money, and then they try to patch that hole and another one opens up. But I would disagree with the caller about her complete cynicism about the Congress. The truth is the most powerful single lobby in Washington is the AARP--the old folks' lobby. And that's because old folks vote. It's not that they give a lot of money; they're tight. But they do vote and they vote in large numbers and they vote their interests. So members of Congress do respond to the public if the public makes their views well-known.

Yes. There's the other theory that's much simpler, which is just that he wasn't in a good mood. He read something, and he impulsively reacted. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It certainly called further attention to the alleged Russia connection, and it drew attention away from what was supposed to be a week about the new Obamacare replacement law. Today, Sean Spicer briefed off-camera. As you said, Trump hasn't been seen. And Cabinet Secretaries Kelly, Tillerson and Sessions walked off the stage without taking any questions at that new executive order unveiling. Would they have done that without Trump's tweets - probably not.

Serious to the tune of $2 billion paid out since YouTube launched Content ID a decade ago. One billion of that has come in the last two years. But according to the Recording Industry Association of America, last year revenue from Google-YouTube went up 17 percent while the number of plays on YouTube went up over 100 percent. And Content ID doesn't work for Google search, which artists say continues to bring up links to sites that list pirated versions of their songs. Congress is in the midst of a process of evaluating the copyright laws and is expected to unveil an outline for reforms in the fall. Laura Sydell, NPR News.

Professor J. BROOKS FLIPPEN (History, Southeastern Oklahoma State University; Author, "Conservative Conservationist" and "Nixon and the Environment"): Indeed, he was, Miss Elliott. Teddy Roosevelt was president in the early 1900s; the West was closing up. It was obvious that we might run out of the resources we need; and so a movement grew to use the resources we have wisely, and this is the dawn of the conservation movement. And he pushed Congress to enact some important legislations - the Newlands Reclamation Act provided for the construction of dams and canals. He used antiquity's(ph) act to expand - acreage in the national forests. It went from 42 million to 172 million during his presidency. He added 51 national wildlife refugees, and he organized the first conservation conference. So he really put it high on the national agenda.

Welcome to "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do." I don't have children. I borrow my friends' children, so — (Laughter) take all this advice with a grain of salt. I'm Gever Tulley. I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. So we build a lot of things, and I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders. So if you're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. (Laughter) You know, we live in a world that's subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations. There doesn't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get. We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10. So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp, or not made out of round plastic, they'll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can. (Laughter) So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safety, and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. The book is called "50 Dangerous Things." This is "Five Dangerous Things." Thing number one: Play with fire. Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. Whether we remember it or not, it's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, playing with fire. This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire, about intake, combustion, exhaust. These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You don't know what they're going to learn from playing with it. Let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. (Laughter) Number two: Own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing. (Laughter) Your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you're given. You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. And it's a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives — like, as soon as they're toddlers, they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10, and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. You lay down a couple of very simple rules — always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it — and these are things kids can understand and practice with. And yeah, they're going to cut themselves. I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. But you know, they're young. They heal fast. (Laughter) Number three: Throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things, and like muscles, if you don't use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time. But when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain, too. So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability. And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practices also help kids develop attention and concentration skills, so those are great. Number [four]: Deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my school, and we'll take it apart with them. Even if you don't know what the parts are, puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart, and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them. And that means that eventually, they can understand all of them. It's a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. Number five: Two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Laughter) There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own — in this case, digital media. It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. You've just broken a law. Technically, the RIAA could come and prosecute you. It's an important lesson for kids to understand, that some of these laws get broken by accident, and that laws have to be interpreted. That's something we often talk about with the kids when we're fooling around with things and breaking them open, and taking them apart and using them for other things. And also when we go out and drive a car. Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate — (Laughter) For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. This is a great stage for a kid. This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs, these big things in the outside world, that they're trying to get a grip on. A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. And that really gives them a handle on a world in a way that they don't often have access to. And it's perfectly legal. Find a big empty lot, make sure there's nothing in it, and that it's on private property, and let them drive your car. It's very safe actually. And it's fun for the whole family. (Laughter) Let's see, I think that's it. That's number five and a half. OK.

Here's a story that breeds some new life into an old mystery. Amelia Earhart disappeared on the second-to-last leg of her attempt to fly around the world in 1937. Theories about what happened are as wide-ranging and hotly debated as the conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination. When you sweep aside the more far-fetched scenarios that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were, say, captured by the Japanese or by space aliens, there are two leading theories of what happened to Earhart. The first is that they were killed when their plane, a Lockheed Electra, crashed into the ocean. Here's aviation researcher Ric Gillespie.

Anyway, this problem in folding is an extremely difficult one for all living systems to cope with, because these proteins have to arrive at these folds at an incredibly crowded environment. There's just - it's really packed inside living cells; it's just things constantly bumping into each other and into, especially, with newly made proteins that are very, very sticky and have a (unintelligible) what we call go off-pathway in this fold. So this problem is as ancient as life itself, because, of course, it's an aspect of decoding the genome and turning it into something useful, a useful protein. And living cells are always very, very crowded, because you get tremendous efficiencies out of having things so crowded. You can pass an electron from one protein to another. But it - they get this efficiency at a cost, and that is, it's hard for proteins to fold in there.

First of all, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say this is racism even, despite that the things that were happening were definitely racism. Like, there were slurs. And there were pulled-back eyes. And there were, like, singsong chants. And beyond that, you know, there was this additional layer of separation between my experience as a Korean-American and my parents' experience as white Americans. I really remember feeling as though I can't tell them. Like, it will hurt them. I have to protect them from this knowledge. And if I tell them, they might not understand anyway because they're white.

Right. You can't. I think people do - I think we're going to learn a little bit more about this as the primary season goes on. I think in the early - what we're hearing in the early primaries is we've got in Iowa and South Carolina, and then Super Tuesday, we've got a lot of Southern states. And so we hear a lot of God talk. What I'll be interested to see is whether there's a certain backlash as we get to those states that maybe are not so religiously oriented, or the Republican Party's not so dominated by evangelicals, for example. And I'd like to see if there's a little bit of pushback by people. Now, maybe that those people are just - the ones who don't like the God talk are Democrats, and they're going to vote for Mr. Obama anyway. I don't know. So I think this is a question that - and maybe John has some polling numbers about it, but I think this is something that has yet to play out.

Right. I mean, a lot of these - there are a number of different issues here. Obviously, the one gentleman who has this action against BP, I don't know whether - what the specific details there are. I mean, I think there are two main issues that are going on. First, obviously, if Rev. Jackson feels that he needs to put more pressure on BP to have them at least assess what their diversity goals are and so forth, I think that's fine. I think, though, the other part of this approach where they feel that there's -it's important for Congress to come in and put windfall profits tax on BP and some of these other companies, I just think it's incredibly ill advised. Because, I mean, I think it's just a failure to see how the market actually works. I think it's a failure of seeing how much focus is put into energy exploration and so forth...

I do. I mean, I noticed those $100,000-plus salaries for, you know, thirty-something principals myself. Not that I'm interested in principaling, but I'm saying, you know, that's a pretty good salary. And teachers are underpaid. I don't think there's any way around that. Given the stakes as between, you know, good education for a classroom full of youngsters and mediocre education for a classroom full of youngsters, the stakes that society has in that outcome being the first and not the second, $100,000 a year for somebody who can really do a good job running a public school, you know, it's cheap at twice the price.

Well, they are getting better. The problem is they're not good it's a little bit like a car going up a mountain and it's barely climbing the mountain. It's going up but it's climbing at a very slow rate. So when you look into the future and you say, how long will it be till we're back at full employment? We're talking years at this pace, and that's really very unsatisfactory. I mean, one way to look at it is this way. When the recession began back in 2007, there were about two jobless workers for every job opening. At the worst of the recession in 2009, there were more than six unemployed people for every job. At last count, there were like 3-3.5 for every job opening. Better, but definitely not good.

My idea is that Congress has already done what it needed to do. It enacted the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That statute already gives the administration all the tools that it needs in order to try Guantanamo prisoners who are accused of crimes. The thing that the administration doesn't like about it is that the system is not designed to produce convictions. It's designed to produce correct results. When the administration was testifying this morning in Congress, it was talking about the need to be able to admit hearsay evidence, the need to be able to admit evidence that had been coerced from prisoners. They never say that they admit tortured evidence, because they never admit that they torture. But they said today quite clearly - and Corrine was there, she can confirm this - that they still wanted to be able to do that. They don't want the prisoner to be able to see the evidence against him. They don't want any lawyers involved at the point of determining whether or not you can be detained forever as an enemy combatant. So the takeaway that I have is the administration wants to continue business as usual, but wants Congress to bless it at this point, and I think it's a very dangerous road for Congress to go down.

This is a major post, obviously a very popular major post, for training and mobilizing soldiers for the war in Iraq, including men and women in the National Guard and the Army Reserves. We're talking about the huge demand being placed on these reserve troops by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we're talking about the future of the Guard and reserves. In a few moments, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will join us. First, though, our guests here in the Timmerman Center are Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, the deputy commanding general, First Army at Fort Gillem in Georgia, and retired Maj. Gen. Michael Davidson, former assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for National Guard Matters. And if you have been deployed with the National Guard or the reserves, tell us your experience. Did you get what you expected when you signed up? Give us a call at 800-989-TALK. Our e-mail address is talk@npr.org.

Today the focus is on rehab and whether celebrities who check themselves in and out to mitigate every PR disaster are trivializing rehab for the people who really need it. Our guests are Dan Neil, a columnist for Los Angeles Times who wrote an op-ed about this, and Rob Martin, a substance abuse counselor with North Carolina Behavioral Health Services who counseled Dan Neil through rehab in 1989. And we welcome your calls. If you have questions about how rehab really works, if you've been there: 800-989-8255. E-mail is talk@npr.org. And Rob Martin, I wanted to get to Meg's question about commitment. A lot of people who are in rehab are committed through a court process or they're underage and their parents send them there. Is this a wise step?

So the seeds of this book really were planted within me 18 years ago. I've been carrying them and nurturing them for a very long time. In 2001, I was a young, queer immigrant woman here in the United States, and I was really urgently seeking a deeper understanding of my own country of origin, Uruguay, and how it connects to queer truths and histories. I was going through my own personal moment where my parents were disowning me and saying that I couldn't be both gay and Uruguayan at the same time. In Uruguay, it is true that, you know, 20 years ago, queer voices were much less visible. I mean, in all of my research of the dictatorship history, the queer stories are simply not recorded.

I - it's a little out of my ballpark. I actually just had an email from a nice gentleman who works on exactly this, so I can't answer the question specifically. But I know that there are lots of different technological applications to decipher science. Certainly, solving problems where the failure of one specific node in a network leads to catastrophic failure is a really important application. Getting things to move is one, is another application. You could think about flocks of drones that move together and, perhaps, even trying to get, say, driverless cars to move as a flock, that sort of thing. There are lots of people who are trying to apply these things to robots, to energy grids, to all the types of swarms - the artificial swarms that we have created ourselves.

Yeah, right. And I actually, I've seen a rocket booster re-enter. I thought it was just a very bright meteor, but then the next day I found out it was a booster. So these things happen without us knowing about it. And with ROSAT, we do know about it, and some things we do know about in advance, and ROSAT was a famous satellite. It weighs about two-and-a-half tons, which makes it about a third of the size of the satellite that came in last week – last month, but ROSAT is going to fall apart a little bit more. So there should be 30 pieces or so that will probably hit the ground intact. They have to understand how the spacecraft is put together and make models of what can survive re-entry, but the number they come up with is approximately 30.

Well, just on your show a little bit ago, you quoted the president saying that he would cooperate. It's to be seen yet whether or not he won't cooperate with these hearings. So as I said a little bit ago, there are six different committees. Now, I scratch my head and wonder of those six different committees - by the way, as I described before, the Judiciary Committee is the committee that has jurisdictions to pass articles of impeachment. But in this case, you have committees like the Financial Services Committee taking up the impeachment question. What in the world does the Financial Services Committee have to do with impeachment? That's because, again, this is all political. This is about Democrats that want to get in the evening news cycle and talk about impeachment and placate their left-wing base and diminish this president and cripple him going into the election in 2020.

Hi. I was just - my addiction started back with donating money to Al Gore, and constantly, I told work that I had other things going on Wednesdays so I had off in order to listen to Ken Rudin in order to find out if Al Gore was going to put his hat in. And it's continued to get worse from there. I tape it. I get up in the morning and I put on head phones to listen to NPR, not aloud. My wife has limited the amount of radio that I can get it, and it's - Last night, I went out with friends to a bar and I watched CNN, didn't to talk any of them. It's just - and I'm 29, so I'm probably considered still part of that youth votes but definitely...

Yes, as you know, Neal, basically, what we saw is that much of the Middle East, not only Iraq, but certainly Iraq, was one of the states which were born after the dismemberment, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was defeated by the Allies during the First World War. And as a result, we saw that increasingly many of these states emerged as a result of this dismemberment, and the new states were based--basically, Iraq was established from three provinces--Mosul, Basra and Baghdad. And the three states actually came together based on a historical legacy where there has always been--by the way, we did not--we never had a state of Iraq up until 1921. But we--you always had an Iraq for a very long time. Some historians say it goes back to that confederation of Sumerian city-states, but certainly there was a reference to Iraq in pre-Islamic Arab poetry, and during the early periods under Islam. But you never had a state. And the three states came together, these three regions, these three provinces, to form modern Iraq.

I know. What a benefit. You know, in the L.A. Times poll that was out this week, he has - it's 27 percent for Giuliani, but then 21 percent, right behind him, for Fred Thompson. And in the Wall Street Journal poll, Giuliani had 29 percent and Thompson there with 20. So Mitt Romney, John McCain, people who are in the race are coming in behind Fred Thompson. McCain's about 14 percent and so is Romney. So in the Wall Street Journal it was 12 percent for McCain, about 10 percent for Romney. So what you're seeing is Fred Thompson doesn't have to go through the debates and the possibility of any slip-ups or gaffes, and the level of media scrutiny might be a little less for him at the moment. Once he gets in, you can imagine it's going to intensify - lots of questions about the quality of the time he spent in the U.S. Senate, where he was not widely regarded as being an outstanding senator. And lots of questions about his personal life and all that; he has had cancer, as you know. So a lot of that has yet to come into focus.

Before Barger went any further, though, he told me something you often hear from people who work in the 3D printing world on the subject of printable guns. The threat is being overblown. Printing out a fully functional 3D gun isn't a cakewalk. You might have to spend $10,000 on a printer. You need technical chops and hours and hours of trial and error. For those hoping for the day when making a homemade gun takes hitting the play button on a desktop printer, Max Lobovsky has some news for you. He's the CEO of Formlabs, a billion-dollar 3D printing company out of Massachusetts.

I think we - I agree with Esteban that the technology is amazing. And what we're doing with research though is not always the same thing that what the consumer genomes companies are offering. And so we ought to make that distinction that what researchers look at is not always what the companies are looking at. And the claims that the companies make are sometimes somewhat overblown. And so the Federal Trade Commission, for instance, did a study in the early 2000s looking at the claims that companies were making and found that they were making either excessive claims in many cases or unjustified claims or claims that were so vague that they were completely unhelpful. So I just I think we ought to keep that distinction clear that there are lots of things that we do in research that have to do with ancestry or that take advantage of what we can tell about the genetics of ancestry. That's different than what's being offered to consumers in many cases.

I'm calling as the father of a hearing-impaired daughter, and like one of the previous callers, interested in where that person fits into the world. It seems that she's between two worlds in a very tough spot - is a wonderful person who chose to be part of the hearing world because she has a mission in terms the nonprofit world - got straight A's at University of Michigan and works - volunteers now for a nonprofit group, which she couldn't do if she were deaf - completely deaf. But she really, you know, doesn't feel welcome in the deaf community. She tried to be part of the deaf community in high school, but, you know, the hearing-impaired - hearing impairment versus deaf really was not a good situation for her, as people might guess.

It is very much, Alison. I think that - and Mickey would know well because she's out there in Michigan - I think that area has been suffering for a long time and now, workers in particular are just seeing something that even a year or two ago they didn't imagine. It's also very difficult because I think in that part of the country, if people want to move and they want to try and find other kind of work, the housing values have fallen so much that I think people are tethered to the area. So it cuts off their options and I think you can't sort of underestimate psychologically, the impact that that has on a region, people not being able to have other choices, being able to move and look for other opportunities.

Alex, thank you for your service, and those are great comments. This shows I think that the strength of mind of our current military. I mean obviously, Alex is someone who has strong religious convictions on that that they tell him a certain thing about homosexuality and yet he has the openness of mind plus the experience. I mean he served with gay or lesbian members - I don't know which it was in his particular case - and he sees that we're able to work together on that. This generation has grown up very differently than mine. I mean, I'm an old guy. When I went to high school, there were no gays or lesbians. Of course, there were, but at that time, it was worse to be a gay or lesbian than it was to be a communist or Marxist or something like that. Now, this generation has grown up with images on TV, in media, they've known gays and lesbians high school, in college, stuff like that. There's an acceptance there and understanding. It's a very different age and it would be a mistake to impose, I think in essence, the prejudices of the past on the current military.

Well, I think if you look at how conservatives approach the Supreme Court vacancies, the answer to that question is clear. I mean, when they had the opportunity they chose John Roberts. And then when President Bush chose Harriet Miers, they demanded that she be rejected because she had an insufficient record and they got Sam Alito. Two very committed, clear right-wing ideologues with a long record of defending conservative jurisprudence. And there was a consensus that the president had the right to make those choices, and they defended the philosophy behind them. Democrats take the opposite position and say, we want to choose a stealth nominee, about whom there's no evidence in terms of her beliefs, who has no written record and therefore we don't have to defend any positions. And I think that's the way the Democrats get harmed is through the perception that they're afraid of their own belief system.

I - my memories of that Belmont Stakes, I watched it, too, when it happened. My memories of that Belmont Stake were much the same as your reviewer's in that I thought there was absolutely no way he could hang on, and he just kept running and running. It was so exciting to see. And I enjoyed the movie. But it was a Disney movie. It wasn't as - it wasn't as, in my mind, as entertaining a movie as "Seabiscuit" was. That said, it certainly prompted me to go back and start spending some time online to, you know, go to YouTube and look for their - look for the real race footage, because it was just an absolutely amazing time for anybody who was interested in thoroughbred racing. And, you know, at that point, I was a teenage girl. I just loved horses.

Well, as an orchid grower myself, I got addicted to orchids about 15 years ago, and there's a book and they talk about orchid addiction and all these different things. But the majority of the people here are fascinating. They're interesting. Their plants are phenomenal. Their plants, once an orchid blooms it often stays in bloom for two months, three months. It's not, you cut a rose, it's there three days and it's gone. I mean, that's not fun. You get this beautiful orchid, you put it on your kitchen and it's there for two months and it's phenomenal. And they come in every shape, size, color, and so do the people that love them, every shape, size and color.

As secretary of state, Clinton helped begin laying the groundwork for negotiations. Her initial remarks were cautious. But late last night, Clinton's campaign put out a lengthy written statement. In it, she said she supports the agreement and that with vigorous enforcement, it can make America and its allies safer. For President Obama, whether this deal goes down in history as a great diplomatic achievement depends on at least three things - whether Congress blocks it, who becomes the next president of the United States and, perhaps most significantly, whether the deal works like Obama says it should. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House.

Well, sure they did, but they have no choice. The defendant has an absolute constitutional right in the United States to testify, and, you know, I've reported many times, and I know that Mr. Moussaoui's, and they came out today, I mean, Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers didn't want him to testify, but it's really not their decision. He was determined to testify, and, you know, it's unclear what he was trying to accomplish today. He did say at other points, I'll tell you, very definitively that he does not want to be executed, that he wants, seems to, you know, want the jurors to sentence him to life in prison. And he affirmed that, he says anyway, that he was telling the truth when he testified earlier that he was supposed to fly a fifth airplane into the White House on September 11th, and he said that he feels if he tells the truth the jury will spare his life.

This is - again, you're describing an increasingly common phenomenon. You know, what we know is when times are hard and jobs uncertain, especially male jobs, women tend not to marry those men. But recent history shows us that they do have children with them. So family structure and family patterns usually change in periods like this, and they are quite clearly changing today. More people are having children before getting married or in the absence of getting married. And many people are also delaying childbirth. So we're likely to come out of this period, I think, with smaller families, with a lower rate of marriage. And you know, that can - certainly not in every case, you know, parenthood absent marriage can be a terrific solution for a lot of people. But in the main, when people have children out of wedlock, those partnerships tend not to last. And...

Well that's right, and so is her support among white voters - white Democratic voters, let's remember. No, Neal, let's be honest. It was the media that raised this question because it's a great little headline: Is Barack Black Enough? I mean, there were people I know who were champing at the bit for that - that raised that question, because I got called by them to be interviewed, and so did about every black pundit that I know. It's a convenient question, but it's misleading because - and again, this goes back to the point I raised in my earlier column about the education that's going to happen. Black folks and white folks are asking themselves, well, what is black now? You know?

It's fascinating. He doesn't talk about it at all, but he can point to certainly some successes in working with a Democratic legislature. I realize that we might not have a Democratic Congress if he were to win. But he has shown to be able to work with the other side, most notably on health care. This is a major achievement that remains popular and, by most measures, pretty successful in terms of achieving near-universal coverage here. So I think he would come in as he did as governor. He would come in as an outsider, somebody who is not beholden to, you know, special interests or does not have long-term relationships with lobbyists or other lawmakers. He might not even know their names. He comes in as the CEO. He's going to take charge, and he's going to lay out an agenda and, you know, push it through.

Hi. Thank you for having me on. I wanted to go back to one of the basic education issues that the author mentioned. I teach in the writing across the curriculum program at MIT, which integrates writing program, lectures and the technical courses. And as your guest said, yeah, I've almost never heard anybody on the scientific or technical faculty say that communication doesn't matter. What I see, though, is that when it's going - when communications instruction is going cost technical faculty something, chiefly time, then things become a little bit more difficult. These are very important skills except, when you say, well, I need this hour, this week. And at that point, it's a much more difficult sell for us.

Yeah, OK. So he's given the suicide note that the police have found. He's handed it, too, and it reads like this: To whom it may concern. To start off about this tragic story, my name is Chafin Halliday, my wife Krysia, my boys Brantley, 9, Briely, 8, and my daughter and my precious angel, Brianna, 4. People have put obstacles in my way and know who they are. I'm not insane. But this is no way to live like this. I have let my loved ones down. I have failed at fathership. I had to die. I deserved it. But to love them like I do and to live without them is too hard to bear, which is why we are dead and why we are together on the other side. I could not leave my babies with strangers. Yours truly, Chafin R. Halliday.

But it is not a conversation many in the gay rights community want to have. In fact, the Matthew Shepard Foundation released a statement accusing Jimenez of piecing together an alternative version of events based on, quote, "rumors and innuendo." We reached to Dave O'Malley, the lead police investigator on the case at the time. He, too, rejects the theory that this was a drug deal gone wrong. DAVE O'MALLEY: If Matthew had been a methamphetamine dealer, we'd had found that out. We would have investigated that part of it. That doesn't cause justification for what happened to him ultimately. If McKinney would have been under the influence of - in a meth-fueled rage of sorts, you know, that would have been appropriately investigated, and reported, in that manner.

It will. I mean, tens of thousands of migrants have been coming to the U.S.-Mexico border each month all year long. Most of them, as you say, Steve, from Central America, but also Cuba, Africa, South America. They're fleeing from violence and poverty to seek asylum in the U.S. And this Supreme Court ruling effectively means that those who've arrived since this new policy was announced in July can now be turned back with very few exceptions. So a migrant from Guatemala, for example, would first have to apply for asylum in Mexico and have their claim denied there before applying for asylum in the U.S. This new policy had been largely held up in court since it was announced. Shortly after the ruling last night, the administration said it plans to begin implementing it as soon as possible.

These additional efforts include making good food more affordable; also education and some good old-fashioned sales promotion. For instance, The Food Trust in Philadelphia is shifting gears a little. Instead of just trying to bring in supermarkets, it's working with the owners of hundreds of little corner stores, the ones that have a reputation for selling mostly junk food. The Polo Food Market at 10th and Brown streets, for instance, has a new, colorful refrigerator. It's on loan from The Food Trust and it's stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. Store owner Salinette Rodriquez says she always wanted to sell this kind of thing.

Yeah, this attack happened right in the middle of a four-hour humanitarian cease-fire. A couple of points about the cease-fire - it was announced about a half an hour before it was supposed to take effect. It was one-sided. It was unilateral by Israel. Hamas continued to shoot rockets into Israel - at that time about two dozen according to the U.S. military. And the cease-fire came with caveats. The military said it would not apply in places where Israeli troops were already operating, and it also said that Gazans should not go back into areas that the Israeli military had earlier told them to leave. So it was a little unclear exactly what the cease-fire meant. The information about it was distributed from the military mostly through Palestinian media. There weren't any leaflets dropped. On occasion during this war Israel's has dropped leaflets showing specifically where to go - what areas are considered safe.

But in order to build the rail, they had it just blast away - and remember, most of these is being done by hand - drilling into the rock by hand, settling dynamite charges that sometimes if you weren't careful, blew up prematurely with the loss of life. But the rock would explode - and again, by hand, sometimes with horse-drawn graters and scrapers, they clear away the rubble and move forward. There's a place in the very depths of the gorge that - it is so narrow that when the railroad first constructed the route through there, they built a bridge that actually was called the hanging bridge because it did in fact sort of hang on a network of trusses above the river.

At this point, it's sort of a suspension of time, and the characters are on stage. And each one of them has these different thoughts going through their head as the night progresses and everybody's sleep-deprived in this sort of dreamlike state. And what - and so the characters end up thinking out loud in sort of these little short soliloquies. And all Groves could come up with is, you know, these darn scientists. Boy, I can't wait to get rid of them, because they've been plaguing me and if, you know, we didn't need them for their expertise, they would have been out of here. And so he's sort of having this moment. And then following, there's a moment with Oppenheimer, where he's, you know, talking about memories, regrets, fears, spasms, afflictions, nightmares, rages and neuroses, and he's sort of coming to grips with becoming the father of such mass destruction.

Well, I think that's a problem for French banks and German banks too. What I do know is that it is true that we have a big debt that we cannot afford. We're talking about two trillion euros. But it is true that the collective wealth of the Italian families, 8.6 trillion. Berlusconi always quotes these, but he doesn't really makes sense because, I mean, you imply that the wealth should go from the families to this - to buying public debt, and that won't happen. But there is one crucial element and I sort of worked on this to absolutely certain, that the Italian public debt is structured in a way that its treasury has been pretty smart, that it's spread over a long time. So we don't have like a deadline every few months like the Greeks. So we can - we had a few - if we sort of put our house in order, we have, let's say, a few months to sort it out. It's not desperate.

This week's killings of Canadian soldiers - one run over by a car on Monday, one shot to death yesterday - brought to mind allegations of planned terror attacks in two other countries. Last month, Australian police charged a man they linked to ISIS with conspiring to commit demonstration killings in Australia. News reports there claim the conspirators spoke of abducting members of the public and beheading them on camera. Earlier this month in Britain, four men were arrested because authorities feared they may be planning an attack, also possibly a beheading. ISIS has urged sympathizers to commit random, public, gruesome acts of violence. So how do countries defend against that? Well, the answer, according Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, is they do it differently. Karen Greenberg, welcome to the program once again.

Well, there was the drop in labor demand in the United States. There was the quite opening up of doors for legal entry in the United States through temporary worker visas and also for citizen permanent resident visas. And in Mexico, the economy didn't stumble that badly when the U.S. recession hit. And so the Mexican economy is actually doing reasonably well. The narco violence in Mexico, to the extend that it hasn't any effect at all, seems to be deterrent, especially because it tends to be concentrated in the northern states, and so people stopped going northward. And finally, Mexican fertility has plummeted in the last two decades. So in the '70s, Mexican fertility was about 5.5 children per women. It's now down to around 2.2, 2.3 children per women, which is about the same as the United States. So Mexico's labor force growth is decelerating, and the number of workers entering the workforce every year is not growing rapidly anymore. In fact, it's slowing down.

This is NEWS AND NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. On today's roundtable, New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, reveals his new evacuation plan, and the NAACP takes on the fight for affirmative action. Joining us to talk about those stories and more, from our New York bureau is E.R. Shipp, professor of journalism at Hofstra University; and Michael Myers, Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Also with us, Glenn Loury--he's a very smart professor because it has about nine or 10 things here, you do at Brown University, Glenn, and I don't have time to tell every about them--but he joins us from member station WRNI in Providence, Rhode Island. I thank you all for joining us. Greatly appreciate it.

One of the concerns we have, of course, is both the overuse potentially of some medications as well as the tremendous underuse. And making sure that somebody is taking medication when they can truly benefit from it is a very important point. And it's true that a lot of the medications that are prescribed for depression and anxiety and other very common conditions--we don't truly know the mechanism by which they work and if they're fixing the problem, which is why you often see a combination of some of the medications which help alleviate some symptoms with talking therapies that can, as I said before, help people resolve their perception of the stress and to relearn how to put that experience, if it was a traumatic one, or a more routine things into perspective.

But they have asked for time off, deliberating for only eleven days over three weeks. This past week, one of the defendants, Sunrise Lee, filed a motion asking to return home to Michigan to await a verdict there, saying it's too expensive keeping a hotel room in Boston. But the jury seems to be settling in. There are even reports about jurors getting gym memberships near the courthouse. One explanation for the long deliberations is that this is a complex case, with five defendants and numerous components to the racketeering charge. But Daniel Medwed a Northeastern law professor, says there's another theory floating around. During jury selection, the judge prioritized picking jurors whose employers would keep paying them during the trial.

…let me pose a question to you. The question really is about whether or not this procedure is a very rare procedure that only happens once in a while for the health and life of the mother and it's being used as a political tool? Or is this something that is common or overused? I think a lot of times when we talk about abortion in America, there's a difference between the mainstream number of abortions that are performed that are very early stage. But this late stage abortion ruling is really something that reverses an earlier Supreme Court ruling. So I guess a question I have…

Hercules, son of Zeus and champion of humankind, gazed in horror as he realized he had just committed the most unspeakable crime imaginable. The goddess Hera, who hated Hercules for being born of her husband’s adultery, had stricken him with a temporary curse of madness. And his own family were the casualties. Consumed by grief, Hercules sought out the Oracle of Delphi, who told him the path to atonement lay with his cousin, King Eurystheus of Tiryns, a favorite of Hera’s. Eurystheus hoped to humiliate Hercules with ten impossible tasks that pitted him against invincible monsters and unfathomable forces. Instead, the king set the stage for an epic series of adventures that would come to be known as the Labors of Hercules. The first labor was to slay the Nemean Lion, who kidnapped women and devoured warriors. Its golden fur was impervious to arrows, but Hercules cornered the lion in its dark cave, stunned it with a club, and strangled it with his bare hands. He found no tool sharp enough to skin the beast, until the goddess Athena suggested using one of its own claws. Hercules returned to Tiryns wearing the lion’s hide, frightening King Eurystheus so much that he hid in a wine jar. From then on, Hercules was ordered to present his trophies at a safe distance. The second target was the Lernaean Hydra, a giant serpent with many heads. Hercules fought fiercely, but every time he cut one head off, two more grew in its place. The battle was hopeless until his nephew Iolaus thought to cauterize the necks with fire, keeping the heads from regrowing. The dead serpent’s remains became the Hydra constellation. Instead of slaying a beast, Hercules next had to catch one, alive. The Ceryneian Hind was a female deer so fast it could outrun an arrow. Hercules tracked it for a year, finally trapping it in the northern land of Hyperborea. The animal turned out to be sacred to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and Hercules swore to return it. When Eurystheus saw the hind, he demanded to keep it instead, but as soon as Hercules let go, the animal ran to its mistress. Thus, Hercules completed his task without breaking his promise. The fourth mission was to capture the Erymanthian boar, which had ravaged many fields. Advised by the wise centaur Chiron, Hercules trapped it by chasing it into thick snow. For the fifth task, there were no animals, just their leftovers. The stables where King Augeas kept his hundreds of divine cattle had not been maintained in ages. Hercules promised to clean them in one day if he could keep one-tenth of the livestock. Augeas expected the hero to fail. Instead, Hercules dug massive trenches, rerouting two nearby rivers to flow through the stables until they were spotless. Next came three more beastly foes, each requiring a clever strategy to defeat. The carnivorous Stymphalian birds nested in an impenetrable swamp, but Hercules used Athena’s special rattle to frighten them into the air, at which point he shot them down. No mortal could stand before the Cretan bull’s mad rampage, but a chokehold from behind did the trick. And the mad King Diomedes, who had trained his horses to devour his guests, got a taste of his own medicine when Hercules wrestled him into his own stables. The ensuing feast calmed the beasts enough for Hercules to bind their mouths. But the ninth labor involved someone more dangerous than any beast, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Hercules was to retrieve the belt given to her by her father Ares, the god of war. He sailed to the Amazon land of Themyscira prepared for battle, but the queen was so impressed with the hero and his exploits that she gave the belt willingly. For his tenth labor, Hercules had to steal a herd of magical red cattle from Geryon, a giant with three heads and three bodies. On his way, Hercules was so annoyed by the Libyan desert heat that he shot an arrow at the Sun. The sun god Helios admired the hero’s strength and lent his chariot for the journey to the island of Erytheia. There, Hercules fought off Geryon’s herdsman and his two-headed dog, before killing the giant himself. That should have been the end. But Eurystheus announced that two labors hadn’t counted: the Hydra, because Iolaus had helped Hercules kill it, and the stables, because he’d accepted payment. And so, the hero set about his eleventh task, obtaining golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides nymphs. Hercules began by catching the Old Man of the Sea and holding the shape-shifting water-god until he revealed the garden’s location. Once there, the hero found the titan Atlas holding up the heavens. Hercules offered to take his place if Atlas would retrieve the apples. Atlas eagerly complied, but Hercules then tricked him into trading places again, escaping with apples in hand. The twelfth and final task was to bring back Cerberus, the three-headed hound guarding the underworld. Helped by Hermes and Athena, Hercules descended and met Hades himself. The lord of the dead allowed Hercules to take the beast if he could do it without weapons, which he achieved by grabbing all three of its heads at once. When he presented the hound to a horrified Eurystheus, the king finally declared the hero’s service complete. After 12 years of toil, Hercules had redeemed the tragic deaths of his family and earned a place in the divine pantheon. But his victory held an even deeper importance. In overcoming the chaotic and monstrous forces of the world, the hero swept away what remained of the Titans’ primordial order, reshaping it into one where humanity could thrive. Through his labors, Hercules tamed the world’s madness by atoning for his own.

That suggests a level of inclusion that we've never seen before. Now, I don't have the same politics as Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, but I want to suggest that it represents a particular shift. And part of what I'm suggesting is that the old racial politics, the theater of racial politics that has defined the way in which we have engaged the problem is no longer - not necessarily relevant - but is no longer effective in addressing the complexity. Now, if you can't agree with that, then we have ourselves a serious debate, and that's what we're trying to inaugurate. That's what we're trying to initiate, for us to begin to have that kind of conversation.

But not much. The Academy report says that if you worked at a rail stop where the canisters came through and stopped, in a year you might get the equivalent of a chest x-ray. The Academy did recommend further study in a couple of areas. One is long duration fires. In 2001, for instance, a train carrying hazardous materials caught fire in a Baltimore tunnel. It burned for days. The federal government has studied that accident and what it would mean for a train carrying nuclear waste. But the Academy says more work by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be a good idea.

Why do you think it resonates with swing voters? I think conservatives and liberals alike are little bit perplexed by the size of the bailout, and it seems preposterous to me that in the midst of negotiating with the United States government, not only with AIG, but Goldman Sachs and others, that these people could run up such a tab, and then still have their hand out to the Federal Government for assistance. I do think this warrants a closer look by the Treasury Department in an investigation, but it was a good moment for Obama to play in the populist theme that he's been expressing, and sadly, the economic malaise that seems to grip this country is to his political benefit. I only wish that both candidates could put partisan politics aside, and find a meaningful solution, one that will work for the American people, rather than using the financial crisis as one where they can play to their respective bases for votes.

JR.: The kids didn't care what I was doing on the weekends. They were more concerned with, like, why aren't you hanging out, you know, at this party and this and this, and so and so is going to be there. And I was like, yeah, I've got this gig on 6th Street. You know, like whatever. They weren't really that interested. So I would go down there and I would hang out with, like, Jimmy Vaughn or Hubert Sumlin, you know, Pinetop Perkins, all these great guitar players and blues musicians. And I would come back and tell these guys and they were like, who. You know? It was like have you heard the latest Dave Matthews record? And they're like, I'm listening to Outkast now or whatever. And so, that's what kids were listening to. They didn't really pay much attention.

Well, the big story - I think the big election story is what's going on in Ohio. It's Senate Bill Five, which on the ballot is issue two. This is a bill that the Republican Governor John Kasich, and the Republican Legislature put through that basically severely limits collective bargaining rights for public employees, And a lot of people are thinking that maybe the Republicans overreached because it has awakened a sleeping labor giant. Organized labor has pumped like 30 million dollars into defeating this measure, and again, if the Republicans had a big victory in 2010, talking about cutting taxes, cutting government, cutting spending, the Democrats could say if this measure goes down to defeat that the political obituary for organized labor is premature and Democrats and labor movement are back for 2012.

Well, I'm a product of Detroit Public Schools. In fact, I went to Mumford High School, and it was a great school, a great school. And I went on - all my brothers - I have six brothers. All of us went to college. I went on to finish pharmacy and also went to, in fact, the University of Michigan with dental school. I think your guest from Detroit is missing a few points, one in which about 20 years ago, citizens of Detroit saw that there were failures within the Detroit Public Schools, particularly with African-American males. They came up with the African-American male academy, and that was working. And one of my friends who ran that school was a guy named Ray Johnson(ph).

Exactly. I always try to give people their right to self-determination. But--and I don't take any side on this per se. But I do say--the side I take on it is that just because there was a conviction does not mean that the crime happened exactly as it did. I think that there are still some questions of what happened that night with Trooper Forrester and whether Assata defended herself or whether she executed the officer. But I think to put a million dollar bounty on someone and to encourage bounty hunters to go into Cuba, I think this is becoming more of an issue of a fugitive from New Jersey. It's becoming a global issue of what do we do. I think this is Cuban politics and what do we do when Cuba continues to look at the United States and say, `We're going to offer sanctity and sanctum to people who might even be criminals in your country.' I think it's a snub in their face. And I think that these dollars could be well spent finding some of the fugitives who are still within the country.

Well, he has to try to do something about the deficit that he comes into this convention with, although he is tied with the president in the polls, he does have poor likability ratings. No challenger since 1984 has come into their convention with higher negative personal ratings than Romney. So he wants to soften his image. You're going to hear from people who worked with him. You're going to hear from people who he helped through his church, people at the Olympics that he ran and you're also - starting yesterday in a series of television interviews, you've heard Mitt Romney and his wife Ann talk about some personal details. They shop at Costco. Romney irons his own shirts. So, he's going to be personalized and trying to counteract the image of a wealthy, out-of-touch plutocrat that has been painted by the Obama campaign.

Judy, thank you so much for sharing that story. We appreciate it. Let me share with the audience some emails that we have gotten. This one is from Dina(ph) in San Francisco: On this day, I would like to remember three good men and very dear friends whose lives ended decades too soon as a result of the killer we call AIDS. They are Corey Bloom(ph), Harry Fate III(ph) and Gary McBreyer(ph). You are gone, but will never be forgotten. This comes from Liz(ph) in Oklahoma City: Today, the day before what would have been his 41st birthday, I remember my favorite cousin, Andy(ph). Andy was a cowboy, the son of ranchers in rural southeastern Oklahoma. I remember his ability to tame wild things - snakes, deer, raccoons, squirrels - and his quiet but brilliant artistic ability. There was and is no sex education in the school he attended and no health care or insurance affordable to his family. He was sick with a mysterious illness for years, when he became incapacitated with fungal meningitis and died in 2005. I will always miss him. Liz in Oklahoma City.

Yes, our annual budget in these recent years has turned around 650 to 750 million US dollars in terms of field expenditures. These are in the 80 countries around the world that we work in. For instance, in 2004-2005, some of our largest operations were Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The donor bases that we have is through the fact that we have been mandated specifically through the Geneva Conventions by the community of states. Our main donors are state- and government-based, and then we have national societies of the Red Cross and Red Crescent around the world that are other contributors; the American Red Cross clearly among them. The greatest--the single largest financial contribution the ICRC receives from the United States of America. This has been a solid and sustained contribution over many, many years now which we believe expresses a strong level of confidence in the organization on the part of the United States. This is a relationship that we very much are committed to maintaining because this support has given us the possibility, in our own independent and neutral approach, to reach people that otherwise would not have been reached if it had not been for the way in which the US has supported this organization.

Which - it's a good point. They have to be. If the Trump Foundation pays for them, they have to be put to a charitable use, or else if Trump hangs them in one of his clubs, that's self-dealing - again, a violation of the law. We know we're one of those paintings is because last night Univision anchor and Miami (unintelligible) Enrique Acevedo heard about this, heard that it - that one of these paintings - that $10,000 one - might be at Trump's Doral Golf Resort in Miami. Enrique used points and bought a room, wandered around a hotel in the middle of the night, talked to the cleaning people. And they opened the door into the Champions Bar and Grill, which is a part of Trump's Doral Golf Resort. In that door was the paint - the $10,000 painting of Donald Trump hanging on the wall in Trump's for-profit business.

Yeah. And there are people that come here, and a few months after being here, supposedly on a political - getting away from a political regime - that are being prosecuted and give us access to papers. I mean, you know, Mexicans are getting papers. Salvadorians are getting papers. We come here with special circumstances, running away from a regime that oppresses us, and then we want to go back there and spend three or four months there every year doing business with Cuba. Many Cubans that go there, go there for business, not even to see their families. But they have to do to make money, and theyre here, instead of getting ahead here in the United States, they go back and spend their money there and they live here off the government.