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And Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is back in the U.S. He flew from Germany to San Antonio, this morning, where he will be treated and reunited with his family. The controversial prisoner swap that brought him home was not the first attempt to free him from a Taliban-affiliated group known as the Haqqani Network. In 2011, discussions began over a swap that would have been part of a much bigger peace deal. But the Taliban eventually walked away from it. The man who initiated those talks is Marc Grossman. He was then the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ambassador, welcome to the program.

Well, I think this is a great victory for good sense. I mean, at least we have a structure that begins to match the strange new financial world that we have out there. And we had a long period where we said these markets could regulate themselves. That was a bad idea. And I think what's striking in the politics of this is, the normal view in Washington is the House passes something very liberal, and the Senate makes it a little more conservative. In this case, this reform got tougher, if you will, more progressive in the Senate, and I think that reflects how much has changed on this issue over the course of the year.

Oh, thank you Mary Ann. Actually, it is a conscious decision. The name of my catering company is Alchemy Caterers, and my tagline is: changing the way you experience food. And I believe if I am clear when I am making the food, the healing comes through me to the person who is eating it. And I don't know what that healing is supposed to be, but I am open to that transformation taking place. So, I talked about a little more on the show because I want people to be conscious of that process. And I always say, if you're not in a good mood, the only thing you should make is a reservation.

I'm going to talk about the power of a word: jihad. To the vast majority of practicing Muslims, jihad is an internal struggle for the faith. It is a struggle within, a struggle against vice, sin, temptation, lust, greed. It is a struggle to try and live a life that is set by the moral codes written in the Koran. In that original idea, the concept of jihad is as important to Muslims as the idea of grace is to Christians. It's a very powerful word, jihad, if you look at it in that respect, and there's a certain almost mystical resonance to it. And that's the reason why, for hundreds of years, Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad, their daughters as much as their sons, in the same way that, say, Christians name their daughters Grace, and Hindus, my people, name our daughters Bhakti, which means, in Sanskrit, spiritual worship. But there have always been, in Islam, a small group, a minority, who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith, or the faithul. And some of these people believe that in that struggle, it is sometimes okay to take up arms. And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country, in their minds they were fighting a jihad, they were doing jihad, and they named themselves the Mujahideen, which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad. And we forget this now, but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country, in America. We thought of them as holy warriors who were taking the good fight to the ungodly communists. America gave them weapons, gave them money, gave them support, encouragement. But within that group, a tiny, smaller group, a minority within a minority within a minority, were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad, and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden, and he refined the idea. His idea of jihad was a global war of terror, primarily targeted at the far enemy, at the crusaders from the West, against America. And the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous, so monstrous, and had such great impact, that his definition was the one that stuck, not just here in the West. We didn't know any better. We didn't pause to ask. We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad, then that's what jihad must mean. But it wasn't just us. Even in the Muslim world, his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance. A year ago I was in Tunis, and I met the imam of a very small mosque, an old man. Fifteen years ago, he named his granddaughter Jihad, after the old meaning. He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life. But he told me that after 9/11, he began to have second thoughts. He worried that if he called her by that name, especially outdoors, outside in public, he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden's idea of jihad. On Fridays in his mosque, he gave sermons trying to reclaim the meaning of the word, but his congregants, the people who came to his mosque, they had seen the videos. They had seen pictures of the planes going into the towers, the towers coming down. They had heard bin Laden say that that was jihad, and claimed victory for it. And so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears. No one was paying attention. He was wrong. Some people were paying attention, but for the wrong reasons. The United States, at this point, was putting pressure on all its Arab allies, including Tunisia, to stamp out extremism in their societies, and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the Tunisian intelligence service. They had never paid him any attention before — old man, small mosque — but now they began to pay visits, and sometimes they would drag him in for questions, and always the same question: "Why did you name your granddaughter Jihad? Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons? Do you hate Americans? What is your connection to Osama bin Laden?" So to the Tunisian intelligence agency, and organizations like it all over the Arab world, jihad equaled extremism, Bin Laden's definition had become institutionalized. That was the power of that word that he was able to do. And it filled this old imam, it filled him with great sadness. He told me that, of bin Laden's many crimes, this was, in his mind, one that didn't get enough attention, that he took this word, this beautiful idea. He didn't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be, and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad. But the good news is that the global jihad is almost over, as bin Laden defined it. It was dying well before he did, and now it's on its last legs. Opinion polls from all over the Muslim world show that there is very little interest among Muslims in a global holy war against the West, against the far enemy. The supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling. The supply of money — just as important, more important perhaps — the supply of money to this activity is also dwindling. The wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous. What does that mean for us in the West? Does it mean we can break out the champagne, wash our hands of it, disengage, sleep easy at night? No. Disengagement is not an option, because if you let local jihad survive, it becomes international jihad. And so there's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world. In Somalia, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden. They use his rhetoric. They even use the brand name he created for his jihad. So there is now an al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, there's an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, there is an al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. There are other groups — in Nigeria, Boko Haram, in Somalia, al Shabaab — and they all pay homage to Osama bin Laden. But if you look closely, they're not fighting a global jihad. They're fighting battles over much narrower issues. Usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism, or it's a power struggle. More often than not, it's a power struggle in one country, or even a small region within one country. Occasionally they will go across a border, from Iraq to Syria, from Mali to Algeria, from Somalia to Kenya, but they're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy. But that doesn't mean that we can relax. I was in Yemen recently, where — it's the home of the last al Qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack America, attack the West. It's old school al Qaeda. You may remember these guys. They are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here, and they were using the Internet to try and instigate violence among American Muslims. But they have been distracted recently. Last year, they took control over a portion of southern Yemen, and ran it, Taliban-style. And then the Yemeni military got its act together, and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out, and since then, most of their activities, most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis. So I think we've come to a point now where we can say that, just like all politics, all jihad is local. But that's still not reason for us to disengage, because we've seen that movie before, in Afghanistan. When those Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union, we disengaged. And even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne, the Taliban had taken over in Kabul, and we said, "Local jihad, not our problem." And then the Taliban gave the keys of Kandahar to Osama bin Laden. He made it our problem. Local jihad, if you ignore it, becomes global jihad again. The good news is that it doesn't have to be. We know how to fight it now. We have the tools. We have the knowhow, and we can take the lessons we've learned from the fight against global jihad, the victory against global jihad, and apply those to local jihad. What are those lessons? We know who killed bin Laden: SEAL Team Six. Do we know, do we understand, who killed bin Ladenism? Who ended the global jihad? There lie the answers to the solution to local jihad. Who killed bin Ladenism? Let's start with bin Laden himself. He probably thought 9/11 was his greatest achievement. In reality, it was the beginning of the end for him. He killed 3,000 innocent people, and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion, and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream. He condemned himself to operating on the lunatic fringes of his own community. 9/11 didn't empower him; it doomed him. Who killed bin Ladenism? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it. He was the especially sadistic head of al Qaeda in Iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not Americans but Iraqis. Muslims. Sunni as well as Shiites. Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims. Who killed Osama bin Laden? The SEAL Team Six. Who killed bin Ladenism? Al Jazeera did, Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic, because they circumvented the old, state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people. Al Jazeera brought information to them, showed them what was being said and done in the name of their religion, exposed the hypocrisy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and allowed them, gave them the information that allowed them to come to their own conclusions. Who killed bin Ladenism? The Arab Spring did, because it showed a way for young Muslims to bring about change in a manner that Osama bin Laden, with his limited imagination, could never have conceived. Who defeated the global jihad? The American military did, the American soldiers did, with their allies, fighting in faraway battlefields. And perhaps, a time will come when they get the rightful credit for it. So all these factors, and many more besides, we don't even fully understand some of them yet, these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Ladenism, the global jihad, you needed this group effort. Now, not all of these things will work in local jihad. The American military is not going to march into Nigeria to take on Boko Haram, and it's unlikely that SEAL Team Six will rappel into the homes of al Shabaab's leaders and take them out. But many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before. Half the work is already done. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The notion of violent jihad in which more Muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited. We don't have to go back to that. Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways. And the Arab Spring has produced governments, many of them Islamist governments, who know that, for their own self-preservation, they need to take on the extremists in their midsts. We don't need to persuade them, but we do need to help them, because they haven't really come to this place before. The good news, again, is that a lot of the things they need we already have, and we are very good at giving: economic assistance, not just money, but expertise, technology, knowhow, private investment, fair terms of trade, medicine, education, technical support for training for their police forces to become more effective, for their anti-terror forces to become more efficient. We've got plenty of these things. Some of the other things that they need we're not very good at giving. Maybe nobody is. Time, patience, subtlety, understanding — these are harder to give. I live in New York now. Just this week, posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage. But in all the many years that I have covered the Middle East, I have never been as optimistic as I am today that the gap between the Muslim world and the West is narrowing fast, and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that, because I know there are millions, hundreds of millions of people, Muslims like that old imam in Tunis, who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original, beautiful purpose. Bin Laden is dead. Bin Ladenism has been defeated. His definition of jihad can now be expunged. To that jihad we can say, "Goodbye. Good riddance." To the real jihad we can say, "Welcome back. Good luck." Thank you. (Applause)

Well, I don't think that that is a particular advantage to either one in the Republican primary. I always suggest to potential candidates that want to distance themselves from their party's president in seeking the nomination, that they ought to go ask Al Gore how that worked for him. No matter what kinds of problems the incumbent president of your party's having, it's better to have been a supporter than not. Tommy and Colin Powell, however, are not opponents of George Bush. I have a soft spot in my heart for Tommy because we were once roommates at the University of Wisconsin. But, I think, that his difficulty is even greater than Jim Gilmore's is because he - because it's harder for him to carve out a position to which people might, eventually, rally. On the other hand, he figures he is close to Iowa and what the heck.

From NPR News, this is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz. At some point this week, the road to economic recovery screeched to a halt at the edge of a cliff. The Dow saw its biggest two-day drop since 2008. The IMF cut its forecast for global economic growth next year. Europe is teetering closer to a possible banking collapse. Oh, and Congress, still no agreement on funding the government through next year. And that means in about a week, it could shut down. And all of a sudden, talk of a double dip recession is very real, which brings us to our cover story.

This is Morning Edition from NPR News. Steve Inskeep is on assignment. I'm Renee Montagne. Good morning. Governments in Europe this morning are moving to implement their own versions of a bank bailout program. In London, it was announced that three British banks are receiving more than $60 billion from the government in new capital. And the 15 European countries that use the Euro as their currency have a new bailout plan worked out at an emergency summit this weekend in Paris. The European program is meant to revive credit markets that have essentially been paralyzed in the last weeks. NPR's Tom Gjelten is in Frankfurt, and that's the financial capital of Germany, and he joins us now. And, Tom, how is the European plan going to work?

Yeah. This is - that's right. I mean, we think of aspirin as a sort of this inert drug in our medicine cabinet that's no big deal to take. You have to be really careful. Aspirin is a very powerful drug, can have all sorts of effects, and nobody, based on this study, should just go out and start taking an aspirin on a daily basis. What they should do is go to talk to their doctor and find out if, based on their risk profile, the risk for cancer versus the risk for heart disease versus the risk for liver disease, whether it make sense for them to start taking aspirin on a regular basis.

But retrofitting is expensive. And California currently does almost nothing to incentivize or help homeowners pay to retrofit their homes for wildfire safety like they do for earthquakes. A bill to create a $1 billion fund to do just that has stalled in the state legislature. The need is enormous. California has the nation's strictest building standards for fire protection, but that's only for homes built after 2008. And this is a major problem. Reports show that more than half of the homes built to those stricter codes survived the Paradise Fire, while nearly 80% of the homes built before 2008 burned. Shaye Wolf is a climate scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity.

A lot of people, including myself, can report that they certainly are not getting enough sleep. Whether it's restless leg syndrome or sleepwalking, what's keeping you up at night? And I don't need to know all of your personal problems; just talking about, you know, what kinds of things--what kind of sleeping problems you may be having, 'cause that's what we'll be talking about for the rest of the hour. And if you want to get on that conversation, give us a call. Our number is 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. Let me introduce my guests. Robert Stickgold is associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has joined us many times on SCIENCE FRIDAY, and he's in the studio on the campus there.

Well, at long last, we do seem to have arrived at the magic moment. The debate will continue today at 5:30 Eastern time. There will be a roll call vote to get all the senators in place. And then they will continue the debate tonight, perhaps all night, as Whip McConnell was saying a moment ago. They may go all night, they may not--we'll see if that really takes place. And sometime around 11:00 tomorrow when the necessary amount of time has passed, they will have a vote on cloture--that is, to cut off the current filibuster possibility on the judgeship of Priscilla Owen, appeals court judgeship. Then, if there are not 60 votes to do so, which there will not be--we know that much for sure--then they will have a dramatic moment in which Vice President Cheney, acting as is his right to be the president of the Senate, he will say that in his opinion, as he reads the rules and the Constitution, it is not necessary to have 60 votes to cut off debate on a judicial nomination, that that's a special case under the Constitution. The Democrats will object to that, there will be a vote on that ruling by Cheney, and it will probably be extremely close. If it's 50-50, the tie will be broken by Mr. Cheney. Presumably, he will vote to uphold his own ruling.

Well, that's nothing new. I mean, the New York Yacht Club held the America's Cup for 132 years. And, like now, they picked a challenger of record and of course, they didn't pick someone who was going to be antagonistic. They picked someone who they thought was relatively friendly. And they negotiated rules that, you know, there was certainly a degree of home-court advantage. What Bertarelli did in 2007 was, he picked a club that was not just friendly, it was almost sort of a fiction. It was a club that had never had a race. It did not have members. It didn't have yachts. It's not what most people would think of as being a yacht club. And importantly, yacht clubs are the only entity that can challenge for the cup.

So one of the ones I wanted to focus on was the Pell Grant Program. Over 70 percent of HBCU students are recipients of the federal Pell Grant. So the thing I say - you have basically under-resourced institutions that are the ones that are trying to serve the most under-resourced students and families. Investing in that program really can change generations. And so that was very important for me to share that with the secretary of education and some of the key areas that were represented. Office of Management and Budget was there as well. But that's very important, so we've got to invest in our young people. I mean we invest in everything else, and usually education is last.

He says it's not like the cops give receipts. Just how much extortion is costing Mexico is difficult to track. The nonprofit Transparency International in Mexico did a survey on bribes paid for 35 municipal services. On average, Mexicans paid 165 pesos, about 15 dollars a bribe. Annually, extortion cuts into 14 percent of a family's income. Executive director Eduardo Bohorquez says extortion comes in all sizes. In the big metro centers like Mexico City, small bribes or tips are a way of life. You pay them for everything from securing a parking spot on a public street to getting the trashman to pick up your garbage, even though the service is included in your property taxes.

That's a great question. We have a program we call BoGo, Buy One Give One. Well, the customer is actually - the buying customer is an American. And our lights are much, much better than single-use disposable flashlights, which, obviously, are obsolescent within a few hours, 15 hours or so. And then those batteries, normally, here in the U.S., gets thrown in the landfills, which contaminate our groundwater. And so we have a program, this Buy One, Give One BoGo, where an American buys a light for $25 and they get a great light that lasts for two years before the batteries need to be rechanged - and that's every single night of use. Put that $25 in the BoGo program, buys a second a light - add no more money - and that light is delivered to one of my nonprofit partners in Africa or a place - some place else in the developing world. And we also give the nonprofit a dollar. So our customer is the American and our second customer or the grantee is normally somebody living in Africa that can't afford to light itself.

Right. So he has this whole collection of different embryos at different stages, and they - you measure age of embryo based - its postovulatory age. So it's very hard to tell exactly when the embryo was conceived, but you can kind of estimate based on ovulation. And so you look and you can see after 28 days what it looks like, after 42 days. And he's put together, actually, these sort of amazing time lapses so you can watch these changes over time. And in talking to Smith, he's really thought a lot about what - why we have such a strong reaction to looking at embryos, and he's found this firsthand. I mean, and he gets emails all the time and sort of unpacks these questions, like, you know, is it - when you look at these pictures, does it strike you as more human or less human than you would have imagined, he asks. This is what he asked audience when he shows them. What is your experience with seeing these pictures in the past? You know, he said imagine 300 or 400 years ago, would - how would people imagine what an embryo is? This is a technologically...

I think the national figures, unfortunately, are factors in every race. What my job is is when I talk to voters to let them know that elections are a decision and a choice between two candidates in a certain branch of government. Now, independence, as it pertains to going in both directions, including the direction of the White House, is very important because my belief as a problem solver - a member the problem solvers caucus - is that we are checks. We believe that checks are what this system is designed to have. But a check has to go in both directions. If you have a situation where you have President Trump in the White House and Nancy Pelosi as speaker, you can't just have a check going in one direction. The check's got to go in both directions.

Well, first thing we have to say is something in the neighborhood of 40, 50 to a $100 billion must be spent on foreclosures. And it must be done this way - we're going to use the FDIC Sheila Bair plan because she has shown working with IndyMac that she knows how to do loan modifications. And that has to be written into the bill. And then the other thing that you have to do is, you have to develop criteria for who is going to get this money and why they're going to get it, what kind of reporting they have to do, and some prohibitions against being able to get the money if you don't do certain things. For example, we can't be giving bailouts to CEOs who have big stock options and bonuses and all of that has got to be written into the tough legislation.

Well, I mean, it's - there's a couple of things going on here. One, I think, that certainly we have to understand BET is a publicly run company and so their eye is always on the bottom line. And they're going to do what they need to do in order to make money and continue to be in business, so on and so forth. On the other hand, I mean, it just shows a complete lack of imagination, I think. And I think that it's very important that in 2007, black folks start looking at new paradigms. One of which I would submit is black rock and looking at what that represents to people and the possibilities for a new future, a new way to be a new - new way to be in the world to be black, to be men and women in 2007. And I think that we really need to start talking about some other ways to be other than this sort of lowest common denominator type of program.

That is correct. We heard it from our senior political leader out there and we heard it from our senior military leader. In fact, he repeated it yesterday. Where we now need to take the next step is with Iran. If we now negotiate directly, if necessary, with Iran and Syria, letting them know that there is a date certain where we won't be there, and that they have an interest in not leaving behind a failed state - I asked the senior political advisers out there, does Iran want a failed state if we're not there? The answer is no. They don't want, Syria and Iran, a proxy war between the respective Sunni and Shia populations. When we're not there, as great as we are doing, this is a civil war. And as General Petraeus has said, in the long term only political reconciliation will bring about stability. Our military can't fix this. But a date certain and working with the Iranians and Syrians to use their leverage over the extreme elements there, this is a strategy to improve our security.

They used lasers like any good scientists would. And what they did was they basically have these two long tunnels at a right angle. It's kind of an L-shape. And they shoot lasers down each one. It's all a bit complicated. But basically, these are like rulers. And they can measure tiny stretching and squishing of space. They've actually got two of these rulers. One's in Washington state and one's in Louisiana. And so both of them saw the signal. The signal was about the size of one one-thousandth of a proton's diameter. So that gives you an idea of how tiny these waves are.

Yeah, Rachel, and I have to say, being in Houston, watching families just worried about getting their - you know, their kids to safety, it's hard to remember there's so much other news out there. But the story is important. I mean, it's escalated tensions in a very direct way - North Korea flying a missile over Japan. This is the first time North Korea has launched anything into Japanese airspace since 2009. It's a slap in the face to the international community, which, as we know, recently passed a series of sanctions on the North Korean regime. The U.N. Security Council is expected to hold an emergency meeting later today to talk about this launch.

Yeah, so the way it works is the image is taken in several filters. The filters sometimes happen to be red, blue and green filters, in which case we can actually reconstruct the real colors of the image, if you like. Sometimes we take an image in wavelengths that humans cannot see, like ultraviolet light or infrared light, like heat radiation. In those cases, we need to represent the light that we cannot see with our eyes with something like red or blue or green. In that case, we call it false colors. This particular image actually was taken with a channel that looks at visible lights and with the right filters, so this is probably as close as you can get to something that you might call real colors.

From the studios of NPR West, in Culver City, California, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Arun Rath. Last weekend, the news was focused on Las Vegas where a husband and wife went on a shooting spree, murdering two police officers and a shopper at a local Walmart. By days end, five people were dead, including the shooters. We've since learned a lot about the suspects' anti-government and anti-law enforcement views. Investigators have also been focusing on time the couple spent at a recent armed standoff at the cattle ranch east of Las Vegas, owned by Cliven Bundy. NPR's Kirk Siegler is just back from Nevada where he spent the week reporting on the shootings and also traveled to the Bundy ranch. And, Kirk, first of all, what is the connection between the shooters and the events that had been unfolding out at the Bundy ranch?

Yeah, this is a successful strategy for women candidates, it seems. There is research showing that when male candidates make sexist remarks as a way of going after their female opponents, that it works. The female opponent, you know, lose standing with voters. However, if the women bite back and point out that, you know, being called an ice queen or compared to a prostitute is sexist and out of bounds, then the voters come back to them. And so this has really played out well, I think, for Meg Whitman in this election season. The remark by Jerry Brown's campaign aide that Rebecca referred to earlier came up at a debate that Brown and Whitman had. And Brown got kind of defensive and prickly. He didn't give a kind of straightforward simple apology. And Whitman took umbrage on behalf of women everywhere. Now, she's still behind in the polls. She may not win the race, but, you know, as a viewer, I certainly understood, as a woman, why she was taking him on in the way she did.

Let me add very quickly, Neal - this is Tavis is here - that the great presidents - we want Obama. We want Barack Obama to be a great president. But great presidents aren't born. They are made. They have to be pushed into their greatness. There is no FDR without A. Philip Randolph. There is no LBJ without Dr. King. You have to push these presidents into their greatness. There is no Lincoln without Frederick Douglass that Dr. West referenced early. So if you care about Barack Obama, you want him to be a great president, you got to push him, usher him into his greatness. And you do that by holding him accountable to do what he said he was going to do.

Well, I guess as a teenager I really wasn't sure who I was or where I fit in. Being that I'm from a multi-ethnic African-American family, it was real hard for me to make friends and to feel included within my community, and I used food as a way of, I would say, trying to find a place for myself to fit in as well as disappear. And when I say disappear, for me it meant not having people see me, not having people be able to make fun of me, to pick on me, to see the flaws that I was seeing within myself.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan from the Aspen Ideas Festival. After terrorists smashed planes into buildings, after a suicidal gunman murdered students and instructors on a bucolic campus, after millions of gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, after shock gave way to grief and anger and blame, Kenneth Feinberg's phone rang, and he got the job of figuring out how to compensate the victims. Starting with the Agent Orange settlement in 1984, he's developed a unique specialty: the difficult, often contentious and politically charged work of figuring out who gets what. If you've ever received restitution, we want to hear from you. Was the process fair? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation from our website. That's at npr.org. And we'll get questions from the audience here in the ballroom at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen.

And I think that goes to regardless of the level of street credibility you may have in the civil rights movement, or in putting people together and witnessing things in the '60s - regardless to that, it speaks to the nature of being in the Senate for 30 years. And I really think that when it comes down to it, when you're a career senator or a career legislator, people don't tend to look to you to be president because you're not in the position where you make executive decisions. You're full of talk that says, well, I proposed this. I called for this. But you're never in a position where you say, I took a stand and made this happen. So I think that that eventually, that's going to come up and - although he might be bolstered by the two cardinal rules that you gave him that might save him from a political misstep in the future.

Well, it must be said that President Bush has been very unpopular, almost everywhere outside the United States. And that you can simply assume that almost any change would result in the improvement of America's relations with the outside world. But especially I think in the case of Senator Obama, who talks more like a European let me say than McCain does. He talks in moderate terms who deal with his problem with, none of his business of unconditional this or that. I think that everywhere from London to Tehran, that America's relations will begin to improve if and when Obama's elected.

That's the title of Abigail Pogrebin's new book. She joins us in just a moment. Later, Jazz Trumpeter Terence Blanchard returns to the program. His new CD is called, "Choices." But first, life as a twin. And we want to hear from twins today, identical and fraternal and from parents of twins and siblings of twins. What was your experience like? Tell us your stories. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Abigail Pogrebin is with us from our bureau in New York. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

That's true. They've blocked the establishment, but that's pretty much a symbolic gesture. You know, it's easier to find pornography that it is to find Maureen Dowd's columns, which suggests that maybe Times Select is the answer. To pornography. I don't know, you know, the pornography problems. It is, and I'm starting to sound like the Family of Coalition or something, but the governments really haven't done much in the Western world about it, and there's kind of an acceptance. And I think that's - in the next 10 years whether, you know, maybe society just thinks porn isn't a problem anymore. It's completely different than it was 30 years ago. And I think that's something that's happened.

You know, we have more people knocking down the walls to be narrators because their children tell them their voice is wonderful and they don't realize the long hours of studio time and the challenge that it is to actually knocking out a great audio book. Producers, there's always more opportunities. The challenges are there. If you're looking to do a book that's been published, then you need to clear the rights with the publisher who did the print book. You have to figure out, you know, who you're going to have narrate and what sales -what channels you can use to sell it. But it's an open industry and our website, audiopub.org, can tell a lot of people the basics of audio book industry and how to break in.

Yes. Actually, we play the big role in telling to our American colleagues about the Iraqi culture. There are areas and neighborhoods in Baghdad for instance that were very sensitive to go to. So before that, we would talk - we would sit and talk to our American colleagues and tell them about how they should behave, whether they should shake hands or not, whether -if they are offered to drink some tea, for instance, they should drink it. It's kind of like a cultural thing. And this leaves a very good impression on - towards the interviewee and it makes it so much easier to build this kind of confidence and trust between the American reporter and the Iraqi person they are interviewing.

According to icasualities.org, which has traced and analyzed all 2,100-plus American fatalities during the Iraq War, at least 678 deaths, more than a quarter of the total, have come from IEDs. And the number is rising. In October 2004, 13 soldiers were killed by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. In October of this year, 59 were killed by IEDs, according to the group. The 10 buildings at the facility, new and freshly whitewashed, look more like suburban Pensacola than they do the chaotic urban environment of Baghdad. But one instructor standing inside an echoing cinder-block building made to look like an airport ticket office, insists that the buildings are a big improvement over traditional explosives training out on a firing range.

But we don't want to, I don't think, confuse the actions of the military with the policy that has gotten us into the mess in the first place. I think that's what most Americans are. And as we think about, you know, the larger context of how the military looks, the military, obviously, has to be very aggressive in how it pursues the charges against these troops because the military has to think long-term. It has to think about the next war. And as Joe is talking about the close-knit brotherhood, that's very important. But you have to have military cohesion within the unit's discipline, and this doesn't reflect very well and there's - on our -

Well, I would like to just say, you know, that we really want people to eat more whole grains. It has more fiber. And people eat so few. Right now we're in a culture where people eat really less than one serving a day. If you look at kids, an adolescent it's like half a serving. So getting people to eat whole grains and making products they'll actually consume is very helpful. And if you look at some of the physiological effects of, like, extruded cereal, as far as cholesterol lowering, it does the same as oats that are - you know, the regular oatmeal. So I think that that effect of processing, just because to process foods is how we get those to market and where people can actually consume them.

I would not. We have boxes of them in our office that, if anybody wanted them. Every student in the student activities fee pays for a book. So it's not that they've made an effort to come out and pay for a book and just forget to pick it up. Every student on campus who pays their student activities fee for the year has paid for their yearbook. They don't know it because a lot of people come up to me and are like, wow, when did we sign up for a yearbook? And I'm like, well, it's in your student activities fee. You have to pick it up when they are available. So I - one copy is enough for me. We keep several copies in the yearbook office, and then, of course, we have the boxes of books that are stacked in our office.

Well, in some ways, it's the flipside of the message that he's delivering to the Afghans and to al-Qaida. While for them, he's stressing the U.S.'s ongoing commitment to that country, for an American audience, he really wants to stress that combat is winding down. Already, we've seen about 10,000 of the surge troops that were sent in under Mr. Obama leave Afghanistan. Another 20,000 are set to come home by September. And, of course, combat is due to end in 2014. For a war-weary public, though, that may not be fast enough. There was a Gallup poll a couple of months ago that showed that fully half of Americans would like to see an accelerated timetable. About a quarter like the 2014 schedule, and only about one in five want a more open-ended commitment to see the mission through to some indefinite end.

That's true. The national polls do not mirror the polls that you see in Iowa and New Hampshire and that is one of the reasons why these two early states have taken on probably an even more important role in this election. Everybody hates Iowa and New Hampshire, they think too much attention is paid to these states. All these other states have moved up their contests closer to Iowa and New Hampshire in an attempt to capture some of the limelight and have some influence. All that does is have the unintended consequence of making these two states all that more - much more important. And that means the candidates are pouring on the time, effort, money, staffs in the state. But you're caller's absolutely correct. In Iowa, it is a statistical tie for first place between Clinton, Edwards and Obama. Edwards had been in the lead, but now it's a tied race.

Coffee says a similar report after Enron's demise bolstered the shareholder's suit against it and ultimately aggrieved investors collected more than $7 billion in settlement money. Using this kind of postmortem bankruptcy report as evidence to negotiate a higher settlement is one thing, using it to get a criminal indictment is another. Jacob Frenkel doesn't believe the report alone suggests anyone's at risk of winding up behind bars. Frenkel is a former prosecutor and ex-enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission and now a defense attorney. He says the report's strongest language calls Lehman's executive's actions grossly negligent and materially misleading.

You need to drive the vehicle that you want to buy. So if you want a certain package, if you want a certain engine, make sure you drive that one. And don't drive something else just because it's closer to the lot or it can be a quicker test drive. You want to make sure that it's the car you want because that's the car you're going to buy. You're going to be spending a lot of money on it. So this is why it's important to schedule the appointments so that they have that car already pulled out and ready for you.

Absolutely. I mean, the cliche about David Cameron, the stereotype is that he's just a complete creature of the establishment, of the Conservative establishment. He went to Eton, the exclusive private boys' school. He went to Oxford. And although he has modernized the Conservative Party, I think everybody thought he was just going to be, you know, a little bit like another conservative in government. Events and, of course, the result of the election have forced him into a new situation. And as he said at the news conference yesterday, he said we looked at it. We looked at whether we could be a minority government and we just thought, you know, that's just not going to work. That's not what I came into politics to do. I wanted to come into politics to make a difference and make a change. I talked to Mr. Clegg. We looked at each other and we said: Let's do it. Let's try it. And it really is, if it works, it is a revolutionary thing in some ways here in Britain, and a huge surprise to everyone.

Ed, I am one of the eight people in our legislative branch of government to be fully briefed on this very important program. Yes, it's a classified program. And it's classified because, for it to, to be protective of you and your listeners, as they sit in, in their homes or drive their cars right now, if it is not classified and you give the playbook to the enemy, all of a sudden, people are at higher risk for terrorist attack. Period. I believe the program is lawful, it is constitutional, and I absolutely know that it is protective of Americans. And it is important to have this program for the safety and security of the American people.

Senator Specter, now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, did not press the point, and the question remained unanswered. Later in the day, a panel of Alito's current and former colleagues on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals testified for him. Judge Edward Becker, the former chief judge of the court, called Alito a man of unfailing honor and decency. `He's not an ideologue, not a movement person,' said Judge Becker. Judge EDWARD R. BECKER (Former Chief Judge, 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals): He is a wonderful partner in dialogue. He will think of things that his colleagues have missed. He is not doctrinaire but rather is open to differing views, and will often change his mind in light of the views of a colleague.

They told me it's been a crisis that's been five years in the making. When Bobby Boutris was initially assigned to check on Southwest's engine maintenance - that was back in 2003. He says the company's paperwork was so bad, he couldn't tell what was being done and what wasn't being done. He went to his supervisors and informed them of the problem. And he told them they needed to send Southwest what is called a "letter of investigation," which is a fairly serious action under the FAA's rules, but it's required under these circumstances. But Boutris' supervisor, the man named Doug Gawadzinski, we just heard him referred to, refused to allow him to do that. And Boutris says this was the beginning of a trend that Gawadzinski got in the way of his investigations and sides with the airline.

NBCUniversal has released a report evaluating NBC News and its handling of the Matt Lauer sexual harassment scandal. The report says employees were reluctant to file formal complaints in part because Lauer frequently engaged in sexual banter and flirted with female colleagues. Yet the report also says there's no proof executives knew of his misconduct and that there's no broad acceptance of sexual harassment at the network. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has been reporting on this. He's on the line from New York. And, David, we'd heard many times in news reports that Lauer's behavior was essentially common knowledge. So how were executives unaware?

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. It's Wednesday, Political Junkie day. Ken Rudin is with us, as always. You can keep up with his blog when you're not catching him here on the radio at npr.org/junkie. And much of the buzz in Washington this week about the Supreme Court, specifically who President Obama will name as a replacement for Justice David Souter, who plans to retire. To talk more about the nomination and the confirmation process, we're joined by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson. From 1979 until 1997, he represented the state of Wyoming and served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he joins us now by phone from his home in the Cowboy State. Senator Simpson, nice to have you back on the program.

I think more and more they are involved, and one thing about advertising people, if there's money to be made, they'll get over their hang-ups, and they realize that there's quite a huge amount of money to be made in the Hispanic market and the African-American market. And to your point, it is harder for a brand to have a centralized message because now they have agencies that specialize in digital, specialize in Hispanic. It used to be the main advertising agency's job to kind of be the shepherd of a given brand. Now it's almost the responsibility - it is the responsibility of the chief marketing officer at a brand because he or she is the person who decides what partners they're going to play with and to make sure that they all get along.

Yeah. So this is General Michael Flynn. He's Trump's pick for national security adviser, and he spoke with the Russian ambassador by phone at the ambassador's request, according to Trump aides, on December 29 which was the day that the Obama administration announced it would impose sanctions and expel 35 Russian diplomats. There's other reporting, including from The Washington Post and Reuters, that it wasn't just one conversation, but several conversations. But Trump's spokesman Sean Spicer insists that it is doubtful that they discussed the sanctions and says that it was really just about logistics for after the inauguration. The reason that this matters is that it raises questions about whether Flynn was trying to influence the Russian response to the American sanctions and also whether he was sort of conducting foreign policy as a private citizen because President-elect Trump isn't president yet.

I think the issue of negotiating to save the life of a citizen is incumbent upon any government to try to. The question is, what are the principles within which this negotiation takes place and how far anybody's prepared to go. It's interesting; in this conversation nobody ever mentioned, in my view, what is a very discriminating element of this case, and which is where this five Taliban's already been sentenced according to a due process of law. Because if that is the case, we are speaking about one situation. If that was not, then we are speaking of a different situation. Many years ago I found myself exactly in that position. It was in Lebanon. It had to do with German hostages, and I was asked to switch two German hostages, which are clearly innocent bystanders, so to speak, for two Lebanese individuals who had been sentenced for terrorist activities in Germany. And I simply refused to do it, even under pressure by my boss at the time, Boutros-Gali, the Secretary General of the U.N. It took longer time but eventually they came out.

The turning point came during a long family car trip to visit grandparents when her brother pushed the eject button on the car tape player, seized the cassette and hurled it out of the window with astonishing swiftness. Since we were speeding along in the New York State Thruway at the time, we couldn't stop and retrieve the tape. We all traveled along in sweet, though shocked, silence for the rest of the trip after her cries of protest waned. It was a good lesson in democracy of the airwaves as the tape was ultimately replaced and played with moderation. I think I can still sing every word of that song, and I bet everyone else in the family can, too. Joan was not the only one subjected unwillingness - unwillingly to "Thriller" nights and days. Matt(ph) from Denver wrote us, when I was about 10 years old, we just moved in to a new house and we had a contractor fixing things up for us. My sister, mother and I were crazy for the "Thriller" video. One day in the summer, it came on MTV, my mom went to get the contractor and forced him to sit with us and watch the whole 15-minute video. I can still remember his bewildered smile as he sat and watched Michael Jackson sing and dance with the zombie dance troupe while my mom talked with him about how great the video was. I could almost hear him thinking, please, God, let this thing end so I could just go back to hanging the freaking dry wall.

So I think for me at the elementary level, it's a little bit different because we focus on making sure that the students feel safe, feel protected, feel loved. It's very, very difficult to look a 6- or 7-year-old in the eye and tell them everything's going to be all right when you're just not sure yourself if, in that situation, it would be. In my first year of teaching, Sandy Hook happened. And I'd been a teacher for three months, and we had a class meeting the day after Sandy Hook. And I will never forget that moment as long as I live because my students knew that they were the same age as some of the victims. And one little boy looked me in the eye and he said, Miss Plum, if that happens, are you going to cover us with your body like that teacher did? And ever since he asked me that question, I've kind of played it over and over in my head - this idea that this is the expectation. The expectation is, without question, we will lay down our lives.

Myth number three. There is such a rush on salsa and chicken wings that on game day they're nearly impossible to find. Not at all true. Sure, snack food sales do go up prior to the big game, but not enough to cause serious shortages. Seattle men don't rush out to buy nibbles, but they do stock up on something else. Thank you cards. What better way to let your buddy know you had a great time at his Super Bowl party? Guys here will sit down and write out a short note on a tasteful card saying, Hey, it was so fun to reconnect with you and catch up on our relationships. I'm ahead of the crowd and already have my thank-you cards, and I won't forget to compliment my host on his choice of paper plates and plastic dinnerware.

Well, the reaction from those I've spoken to here has actually been pretty critical. Some local Jewish community leaders wrote a letter to the president asking him to condemn white nationalism more bluntly before coming to Pittsburgh. We've spoken to a lot of people here and heard from local leaders who say they've been troubled by the president's rhetoric just this week - you know, his campaign speeches attacking the press, talking about immigrants and undocumented workers in the past. But he plans to arrive tomorrow with the first lady. I should say that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders spoke really emotionally about this today at the press briefing. She said, we all have a duty to confront anti-Semitism in all its forms.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Barack Obama wants an economic recovery plan that includes as much as $300 billion in tax cuts and aims to create three million jobs as well. The stimulus package could total to $775 billion, and Democrats in Congress say they could send it to the new president's desk less than a month after he takes office. Most Americans agree the government should do something to keep the country out of a deep, long recession, but questions include how much and to what purpose. We'll ask two economists what they think, and we want to hear from you. What kinds of jobs, doing what, how could the stimulus spending help you? 800-989-8255 is our phone number. The e-mail address is talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org, and click on Talk of the Nation.

I'm a heterosexual female, and I practiced safe sex when I was having like, casual relations. I'm in a relationship right now where it's a monogamous relationship, and we've been together for a while. But I think because I'm in my mid-40s, I have experience with - two of my friends passed away from AIDS. And I think now, people - the younger folks - I know it sounds silly - the younger people just don't - it's death is so far away now. And they don't have any friends that have died from it. So they don't understand how serious it is.

I would say not just President Trump and his administration but really of the entire American political-intelligence-journalistic elite over the last year. You know, this was - and that was true the day we published it. Harry Reid had written an open letter to Jim Comey that referred in sort of a coded way to the dossier. Senator John McCain had handed it over to the FBI. And the top intelligence officials in the country had briefed then-President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump on it. And all of these sort of actors were making decisions based on what they knew about this document. And at that point, you know, basically everyone other than the American people was in on this.

Lieutenant Colonel Jones says the biggest challenges continue to be drawing soldiers who are ending their active-duty service into the Guard and recruiting those with no prior military service. For the fiscal year ending September 30th, the National Guard and Reserve are at 77 and 80 percent respectively of their overall recruiting goals. But Lieutenant Colonel Jones points out that on the retention side, the National Guard is at 105 percent of its goal and going up this month, helped in part by a boost in re-enlistment cash bonuses. He believes the worst of the recruiting woes for the Guard may be over. Lt. Col. JONES: I believe in August and September, you're going to see an actual increase for three consecutive months, which is going to help us going into '06. We didn't have that last year, and we really had the trends going the opposite direction vs. this year they're going in a more positive direction.

This was called a working meeting. The president said he wanted to hear lawmakers' ideas for the stimulus - including those Republicans who've complained about being left out of the drafting process. The GOP lawmakers came armed with their own suggestions for boosting the economy, mostly in the shape of tax cuts. And the president acknowledged at the top of the meeting, but tried to downplay, the differences around the table, saying were united in their commitment to getting something done quickly. After the meeting, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she expects to see more bipartisanship, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said he does expect to see a bill passed by that self-imposed deadline of the President's Day weekend.

We come to know and care about these two men, so the thought of their death and the deaths they are committed to inflict horrifies and saddens us. The scenario becomes increasingly terrifying, as personal and organizational forces come to bear on their decision in ways no one had anticipated. What makes "Paradise Now" so effective from beginning to end is its determination not to take sides, not even by so much as a wink. The human equation is always uppermost in director Abu-Assad's mind. This film understands how impossible it is to be an individual having to decide, starting with yourself, who shall live and who shall die. It is the question for our times.

Of course it is. My wife, Angel, had been considering leaving this country if necessary. But she really has no choice but to use medical cannabis. It's not an option for her. If she didn't have cannabis, she would probably no longer be with us. Certainly, she would not be able to function as a wife, as a mother. She couldn't even hug her children when she was paralyzed before finding the cannabis uniquely was the one medication that worked for her. She was confined to a wheelchair for four years. She's decided now that the United States is her country. She instead is going to stay here and fight to try to change these unjust laws. The fact of the matter is, the federal government is playing politics with patients' lives. And it is choosing to ignore the scientific and medical facts that cannabis is a good medicine for many patients. We've just got to bring the laws of this country up into the 21st century. And now is the time for Congress to act.

Yes, this is a little bit of a distinction. Had they actually used the U.S. attorney for Virginia, who had sort of jurisdiction over this because the CIA is in Virginia, he would've been called a special prosecutor because he was not appointed. Mukasey said, out of an abundance of caution, he wasn't going to appoint this Virginia U.S. attorney. Then we have this John Durham here instead. And John Durham is actually quite well-known. He was a prosecutor who was involved with the FBI mob informant case in Boston, which is a very controversial case. And he also sent several Connecticut public officials to prison. His office has not commented on this yet.

So we're going to look back at some of these stories and other stories that made headlines. Well, things like the shuttle launch. Remember the shuttle launch, still plagued by falling foam off the shuttle? We have the continuing 80-year-old debate over teaching creationism in public schools that's got a lot of attention this year, as did testimony over the nature of science that was heard in a Pennsylvania courtroom about the teaching of intelligent design in Dover, PA. That was very, very interesting, especially what the judge said at the end. So we're going to be running down the science headlines today, taking your calls about science stories you found interesting in 2005. I'm sure, as we do every year, you're going to come up with stuff that we just are not going to include, and we'd be happy to hear from you about that.

When a New York Times reporter asked George Mallory in 1923 why he’d want to scale Mount Everest, the British mountaineer is said to have replied: ‘Because it is there.’ A year later, Mallory perished in a fall within sight of Everest’s summit, but his quip lives on as the hackneyed rationale for mountain-climbing. The banality of those words, however, obscures a truly profound question: why is Everest – or any mountain – there? Quite apart from the topographic and meteorological challenges they present, mountains have long posed intellectual difficulties for those who have pondered their meaning and origins. Following a trip to the Alps in 1671, the English theologian and natural philosopher Thomas Burnet described the montane landscape with revulsion, remarking that its ‘vast undigested heaps of stone’ defy any ‘tolerable account of how that confusion came in nature’. Seeking to understand why such atrocities would even be part of Creation, he noted with scholarly astuteness that mountains are absent from the first chapter of Genesis, and thus not original features on Earth, though they had apparently come into being in time for Noah and crew to wash up on the slopes of Mount Ararat. In his treatise Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681), Burnet suggested that the primordial Earth had been a smooth ‘mundane egg’ that cracked and released the Noachian deluge. Mountains were the resulting scars on the face of the Earth, their stern presence a reminder of, and punishment for, Man’s iniquity. Burnet’s ideas are easy to ridicule, and were treated with particular scorn by Charles Lyell, one of the 19th century’s founding figures in geology. But as Stephen Jay Gould argued in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), Burnet’s approach was rational, in that he was attempting to integrate sacred and secular knowledge into an internally consistent narrative. In fact, Burnet was correct on two counts: mountains are not primordial features; and mountain-building does involve disrupting the Earth’s outer ‘shell’ or crust. My own field, known as ‘structural geology’, concerns itself with the deformation of the planet’s crust, though of course we have long since abandoned notions of a primeval egg. The discipline is not as arcane as it might sound. We map active fault zones that generate earthquakes and ancient ones that host ore minerals or act as traps for petroleum. We help with the safe siting of large infrastructure projects such as tunnels, bridges and dams. And we document the way mountains grow. Still, as recently as 1962, the year I was born, and less than a decade after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay successfully scaled Everest, geologists still had no clear understanding of how mountains came to be there. At a time when the first test rockets for the Apollo programme were being launched, the origins of some of the most salient features on the surface of the Earth were no better understood than those on the Moon. In the preface to a 1963 graduate-level textbook, the geophysicist Adrian Scheidegger wrote this gloomy assessment of the state of ‘geodynamics’, or the application of mechanical principles to the deformation of the Earth’s crust and mantle: Geodynamics is an old science. Most of the basic theories have been conceived in principle in the 19th century and not many fundamental ideas have been added since … geodynamics has been a highly speculative subject for about 100 years and it is not likely that this situation will change during the next 100. It is also unlikely that many basic new ideas will be added in that time interval … There seems to be no chance of settling the fundamental questions for a long time to come.As it happens, the scientific paper that sparked the modern plate-tectonics revolution – an understated three-page article in Nature positing the phenomenon of sea-floor spreading – was published later that same year, cracking open the century-long impasse in geodynamics, and unleashing a flood of new scientific insights into the workings of solid Earth and the origin of mountains. Scheidegger’s words now seem almost ironic, like the heavy-handed foreshadowing of an amateur screenwriter. But it is fascinating to listen in on the conversations among geologists who studied mountains in the century before plate tectonics. Many field-based geologists did excellent observational science that remains useful today, even though they laboured under a limiting interpretive paradigm. In contrast, some of the most prominent geologists of the time, less concerned with the messy ground truth of rocks than with staking a claim to a grand unifying theory, contributed to an elaborate fiction about the genesis of mountains that is almost as risible as Burnet’s erupting egg. Their ardent adherence to this theory exposes a basic tension in the study of the Earth: whether it can be understood like the cosmos, subject to timeless laws, or more like a language, evolving and idiosyncratic. The discipline of geology as a distinct branch of science began with stratigraphy – the study of layered sedimentary rocks. But rock outcrops are discontinuous; erosion erases strata, and soils and vegetation often obscure them, leaving only peephole views of the stony subterranean archives. Around 1800, the English canal digger William Smith (1769-1839) recognised that distinctive fossils occurred in the same vertical sequence in excavated bluffs from Somerset to Kent, like page numbers that allow reconstruction of a shredded manuscript. This made it possible to correlate strata in England and Wales with those across the Channel, and eventually around the globe. In the United States, geologic mapping proceeded westward with the inexorable expansion of white settlements in the early 19th century. East-coast geologists noted that stratigraphic units in the mid-Atlantic states could be traced hundreds of miles inland. For example, golden sandstones quarried in Wisconsin in the Midwest for ornately gargoyled buildings were once called the ‘Potsdam Formation’ because they clearly correlated with rocks found near Potsdam in New York State. But these roving early stratigraphers discovered that, as one followed particular layers eastward from the midcontinent, there was an important change: their thicknesses grew by an order of magnitude. In the Midwest, where the strata were flat-lying, they were thin, while in the Appalachians, where they were folded and contorted, they were very thick. This (accurate) observation was the seed for a collective hallucination about mountain-building that would persist for a century. James Hall (1811-98), the state palaeontologist of New York, the first president of the Geological Society of America, and an honorary foreign member of the Geological Society of London, first articulated in 1857 the idea that there could be a causal relationship between thick piles of sediment and the formation of mountain belts. Hall declined to explain in any detail why piles of sediment would necessarily fold themselves, but he alluded to gravitational instabilities within a shivering mass of watery clay, silt and sand. Hall’s idea was adopted and expanded by James Dwight Dana (1813-95), a Yale professor and author of the definitive encyclopaedia on minerals, Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy (1848), still in print today, in its 21st edition. He conjured up a phenomenon and gave it a ponderous name but was vague about the mechanism behind it Dana coined the terms ‘geosyncline’ and ‘synclinorium’ for the deep troughs that received the sediments that would become the crumpled strata in mountain belts. The term ‘syncline’ was already in use for U-shaped folds in rocks, and its antonym ‘anticline’, for arch-shaped folds. Dana’s neologisms suggested down-warping on a grander scale that could encompass the smaller buckles and crinkles within a mountain belt. He also recognised that Hall’s original conception of mountains spontaneously generating themselves from unstable heaps of sediments in crustal depressions didn’t fully explain their defining characteristic: their high elevations. Somehow, geosynclines had to be pushed up into lofty heights, which by analogy he named, inelegantly, ‘geanticlines’ or ‘anticlinoria’, without any suggestion for how these might arise. Like Hall, Dana conjured up a phenomenon and gave it a ponderous name but was vague about the physical mechanism behind it, leaving lesser geologists to puzzle over exactly how the great Dana’s ideas might be manifest in the particular mountain belts they studied. In spite of its lacunae, by 1895, geosynclinal theory had become mainstream geologic dogma, and Dana’s Manual of Geology (1863), another bestseller, was the authoritative textbook of the day, influencing generations of geologists-in-training. In the fourth edition of 1895, Dana wrote: The great facts to be explained in a theory of mountain-making relate: 1) to the preparatory geosyncline and its load of strata for the mountain structure; and 2) to the mountain-making events – the upturning, flexing, and faulting of the strata.The second ‘great fact’ reflected the emergence in the 1880s of the new subdiscipline of structural geology, which was developing its own methods and vocabulary to describe the geometry of deformed rocks. In the Alps, the Appalachians, the Scottish Highlands and the Canadian Rockies, hardy field geologists created detailed maps and cross-sections of complexly faulted and crenulated rocks. The cross-sections – small masterpieces in ink and coloured pencil – are profile views of mountain belts as they would appear if cleaved vertically across their grain. These depictions of the mountains’ interiors showed unambiguously that the rocks in all of the ranges had experienced significant amounts of horizontal contraction. The faults (fractures along which slip has occurred) invariably recorded ‘reverse’ or ‘thrust’ displacement, in which the upper block, or ‘hanging wall’ has been shoved up an inclined fault surface, like a mover pushing a piano up a ramp into a van. The carefully drafted (and scaled) cross-sections made it possible to ‘undo’ the buckling and fault-stacking graphically, restoring the rocks to the geometry they’d had at the time of their deposition, and allowing geologists to estimate the amount of lateral shortening they’d undergone as the mountains grew. Such horizontal contraction was hard to explain in a scientific paradigm in which the crust was assumed to be pinned in place, and deformation was thought to be driven solely by the vertical force of gravity. In one herculean field season in 1886, for a survey commissioned by the Canadian government, the young geologist R G McConnell mapped an 80-mile transect through the heart of the Rockies from Banff in Alberta to Golden in British Columbia. Virtually all of McConnell’s observations, on the sedimentary rocks, the fossils they contain, the complex ways they are faulted and folded, and the relationships between the erosional topography, the hot springs and the structural features, have proven durable. His inferences about the origin and magnitude of shortening in the Rockies were particularly astute: The thrust producing these crust movements and dislocations came from the west, and must have been highly energetic in its action, as some of the breaks are of huge proportions, and are accompanied by displacements of many thousands of feet. The faulted region is now about 25 miles wide, but a rough estimate places its original width at over 50 miles, the difference indicating the amount of compression it has suffered.Today, a major fault that creates the first prominent cliff one encounters in travelling west across the Alberta plains is named for McConnell. When continents were considered rooted on the globe, the source of such lateral force was a mystery Meanwhile, in the Scottish Highlands, the geologists Benjamin Peach (1842-1926) and John Horne (1848-1928) were undertaking a similar survey of the much older Caledonian mountain belt. Although they didn’t get around to publishing their masterwork until 1907 – preferring ambles about the open countryside to the tedium of setting words on paper – they had by 1888 documented dramatic crustal shortening in the Inchnadamph district of northwest Scotland. Peach and Horne showed how small features observed at the scale of a single outcrop were often microcosms of the geometry of the mountain range as a whole, presaging Benoît Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals by almost a century. And they described the distinctive ‘architectural’ style that is now recognised in most mountain belts: the imbrication of fault-bounded rock slices, with the stratigraphic sequence repeated over and over in a tilted stack, like slabs of crusty snow in front of a plough. At about the same time, the US geologist Bailey Willis (1857-1949) was studying folded rocks in the central Appalachians in Maryland and Virginia, and attempting to recreate their deformation in a scale-model apparatus in which layers of coloured beeswax representing the rock strata in miniature were progressively compressed in a glass-sided box with a moving wall driven by a hand crank. His systematic investigation of the relationships between rock strength, layer thickness, degree of shortening and fold wavelength anticipate modern computer models of ‘orogenesis’ or mountain-building. In each of these mountain belts, it was undeniable that a powerful horizontal force had acted upon the sedimentary masses of the ‘geosynclines’, shoving rocks long distances and shortening them by as much as 50 per cent. But at a time when continents were considered to be rooted permanently at the same locations on the globe, the source of such lateral force was an almost insurmountable mystery. This is the point where geology left solid ground and stepped for several decades into the realm of the fantastical. The most popular explanation for the intense squeezing that the structural features in mountains so clearly recorded was the contraction hypothesis, which posed that the crust of the Earth was shrinking. Dana was an early advocate, together with the Alpine geologist Eduard Suess (1831-1914), who was also the first to recognise palaeontologic similarities among the southern continents and to postulate that they were once part of a single ancient landmass, Gondwana. The idea of a cooling, shrivelling Earth was consistent with the cutting-edge science of the day, Lord Kelvin’s thermodynamics. Kelvin had been the bane of geologists for much of the second half of the 19th century, with his pronouncements that the Earth could be no older than about 40 million years, based on its present-day heat flow and elaborate, mathematically intimidating calculations of its cooling rate that few geologists could understand. By the end of the century, however, most geologists had resigned themselves to a foreshortened timescale, and internalised the idea that Earth was getting inexorably colder, on its way to eventual heat death. According to the contractionists, mountain ranges were like the wrinkles on a raisin, and ocean basins were the inward involutions (in Suess’s view, Gondwana had not broken up; rather, down-warped areas had been inundated by the sea). Objections that some parts of the Earth’s crust showed signs of having been stretched, rather than shortened, were conveniently dismissed. The shrinking-Earth hypothesis acquired renewed credibility for another generation of geologists when the German geologist Hans Stille (1876-1966) wrote his opus Die Schrumpfung der Erde (1922), a sonorous synthesis of contractionism with geosynclinal theory. In that and subsequent work, Stille introduced a scholarly taxonomy of geosynclines that seemed to be an orderly Linnaean-like classification but in fact created chimeras that geologists would chase unproductively for decades. There were ‘orthogeosynclines’, the proper ones, made of rocks that could be folded and that usually consisted of two subparts: a ‘eugeosyncline’ with volcanic rocks, and a ‘miogeosyncline’ without them. And there were ‘parageosynclines’, which didn’t quite measure up to the ideal, in that they were constituted largely of crystalline ‘basement’ rocks that were not amenable to folding. Stille further proposed that periods of mountain-building, or ‘diastrophism’, were episodic and global in nature – ie, that stresses would build in the contracting shell of the Earth until widespread failure occurred. There is a wrinkle ridge on the Moon, Dorsa Stille, named for him. Stille, who would live just long enough to witness the plate-tectonic revolution, is best remembered today as a staunch ‘fixist’ who discredited the ideas of the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), who dared to suggest to geologists that they had missed something obvious: continents had moved. But Wegener’s most vituperative critics were in the English-speaking world. The publication of his remarkable book The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915) – a compendium of evidence that continents drifted, collided and broke apart – was spectacularly ill-timed, given the antipathy for all things German in the US and Britain during the Great War. This, combined with the irksomeness of someone from outside geology once again claiming to have revealed a great truth about the Earth, caused most geologists to treat Wegener’s ideas with disdain. Current geology textbooks, in their brief historical reviews of tectonics, typically depict geologists’ 50-year rejection of continental drift as a rational scientific response, pointing out that Wegener did not have a plausible mechanical explanation for how or why continents would move about the globe. This is true. But if geologists of the time had looked honestly at the evidence Wegener presented, they might have been motivated to discover the mechanism for themselves. Wegener himself freely admitted that he didn’t have an answer to the question, stating near the end of his book: The determination and proof of relative continental displacements as shown by the previous chapters, have proceeded purely empirically, that is, by means of the totality of geodetic, geophysical, geological, biological and palaeoclimatic data, but without making any assumptions about the origin of these processes … The Newton of drift theory has not yet appeared. His absence need cause no anxiety; the theory is still young.The best suggestion that Wegener had for the impetus behind continental motion was the admittedly half-baked hypothesis of ‘Polfluchtkraft’ or the ‘pole-fleeing force’, the tendency for crustal masses to slide toward the equator as a result of the slightly oblate shape of the Earth. And even if this had been enough to shuffle continents about the globe, it was hard to imagine what exactly they were moving over or through. Newly declassified naval data revealed for the first time the strange world of the abyssal ocean floor As a result, geosynclinal theory prevailed through the 1930s to ’50s, with further elaborations made as needed to account for new geologic information. Charles Schuchert (1858-1942), another Yale geologist, president of the Geological Society of America, and an expert on brachiopod fossils, contributed the concept of offshore ‘borderlands’ to explain the evidence that in some cases sediments had, problematically, come from the seaboard side of geosynclines. An imaginative palaeocartographer and devout continental ‘fixist’, Schuchert also drew maps with slender land bridges that provided safe passage for Gondwana’s land animals unlikely to have managed the swim from South America to Africa. Still, one of the most prestigious awards bestowed by the American Paleontological Society is named for Schuchert. Geosynclines reached their apotheosis with the publication of a Geological Society of America special volume, North American Geosynclines (1951) by Marshall Kay, a stratigrapher at Columbia University. The masterwork was reissued in 1955, and again in 1958. Much influenced by Stille’s efforts to tame unruly nature through classification, Kay added further entries to the lexicon of geosynclines, illustrating his impressive command of Greek: ‘taphrogeosynclines’ were fault-bounded; ‘zeugogeosynclines’ formed on formerly stable continental crust; ‘paraliageosynclines’ were shallow and coastal, marginal to the real thing. Some contemporary geologists grumbled about the absurd proliferation of prefixes, but few, particularly in the US, were ready to cry that the esteemed professors had no clothes. A lone exception was the British geologist Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) who as early as 1929 proposed that convection cells in the mantle – like rolling wheels beneath the crust – could be the motor for both Wegener’s continents and the explanation for mountain-building. But even he declined to push the idea too hard, opting to present the most fully developed version of his theory in his geology textbook (like Dana’s, much reprinted) rather than face the savagery of peer review. Meanwhile, in his 1963 treatise on geodynamics, the pessimistic Scheidegger gave sober analytical treatment, with carefully drawn diagrams and pages of equations, to the stresses in geosynclines, the geometric details of contractionism and, perhaps to demonstrate his broadmindedness, the potential magnitude of ‘Polfluchtkraft’. Scheidegger’s book had just been printed when ‘the Newton of drift theory’ appeared (as Wegener had predicted) in the guise of newly declassified naval data that revealed for the first time the strange world of the abyssal ocean floor. Bathymetric charts and corresponding maps of the magnetic properties of deep-sea rocks provided the critical clues to the mechanism for moving the continents. That is, seafloor spreading, in which fresh volcanic ocean crust is continuously produced at submarine ridges, and then forced outward as successive batches of basaltic magma rise. But it took several years before the complementary process, subduction, was understood, and this, at last, provided an explanation for how mountains grow. When seafloor basalt is around 150 million years old, and hundreds of miles from its natal ridge, it has become about as dense as the underlying mantle, and sinks back into Earth’s interior at a slant, pulling the rest of the plate behind it like a blanket sliding off a bed. Holmes had been right – mantle convection was the key, but the convection cells were not deep subterranean rotors – they included the crust. (And to be fair to disciples of geosynclinal theory, the vertical pull of gravity is, in the end, responsible for horizontal plate motions.) The process of subduction recycles ocean crust and generates devastating earthquakes, but over longer timescales is a constructive phenomenon, since it sets the stage for mountain-building. Many subduction zones occur close to coastlines, as in the case of western South America, where part of the floor of the Pacific Ocean plunges eastward beneath the continent. In such a setting, if a subducting slab of ocean crust is towing a continent, an eventual head-on collision between landmasses is inevitable. That’s why Peach and Horne’s Scottish Caledonides, Willis’s Appalachians and Mount Everest itself are there. Can we find any trace of geosynclines in all of this? The seminal observation that sedimentary sequences in mountains tend to be thicker than in continental interiors was accurate, but today we recognise that this is because sediments accumulate on continental shelves, which are simply the leading edge when continents collide. As Peter Coney, a structural geologist at the University Arizona, noted wryly in 1970: ‘Saying geosynclines lead to orogeny [mountain-building] is like saying fenders lead to automobile accidents.’ In truth, we have not yet achieved a full Newtonian understanding of mountain-building, because, like Leo Tolstoy’s unhappy families, mountain belts are each contorted in their own way. Their architecture depends on so many antecedent variables: the specific geometry of the tectonic convergence, the particular rocks involved – each with their individual biographies. Many of the great mountain belts in the world, like the Andes and McConnell’s Rockies, haven’t involved actual continent-on-continent pile-ups. In the case of the Canadian Rockies, it seems that a series of smaller unsubductable factors such as Hawaiian-type islands or orphaned continental fragments might have careened into western North America and raised the mountains. The Colorado Rockies, somewhat younger, are strange because they formed far inland from the plate boundary and don’t seem to have involved a collision at all. Instead, the cause of crustal shortening might have been subduction of a still-buoyant ocean plate that refused to go quietly into the mantle, raising welts in the continent above. Erosion and tectonics interact in a complex manner in which cause and effect become blurred In the past decade or so, we have gained an appreciation for how mountain-building is not in fact driven purely by tectonics but by the subtle interplay between tectonic processes and the external agents of erosion even as mountains are forming. Some of these insights have come from a new generation of scale models that, together with computational ones, allow us to watch mountains growing in real time. Among the most elegant ideas to emerge is ‘critical taper theory’, which posits that the outer part of a growing mountain belt – where shelf sediments are shoved up onto the adjacent continent – can be approximated by a wedge of sand being pushed by a bulldozer blade. At first this seems counterintuitive since, unlike sand, rocks have cohesion; but as tectonic shortening builds mountains, the rocks caught up in the deformation are on the verge of failure everywhere, at every scale, and thus effectively like a granular mass. With continued squeezing, this ‘orogenic wedge’ grows toward the continental interior as new material is added by imbricated faulting at its toe – precisely the geometry that Peach and Horne observed in the Scottish Highlands. To a first approximation, the shape of the wedge – the ‘critical taper’ – is a function of just two variables: the friction at the base of the thickening rock pile, and the average strength of the rocks themselves. If the basal friction is low and the internal strength is high, a mountain belt will be wide but not particularly tall. Conversely, high basal friction and low rock strength will create a narrow, but lofty range. However, even as the mountains are growing, erosion is altering the shape of the wedge, and might cause it to become ‘subcritical’, or too thin for its particular combination of friction and rock strength. As a result, new faults and folds will form within the wedge to restore it to its equilibrium shape. The astounding implication of this is that a mountain belt in an arid climate with low erosion rates can actually have a simpler cross-sectional geometry than one in a wetter climate where erosion forces continuous faulting and folding to maintain the stable wedge shape. In other words, climate-dependent erosion can dictate the internal architecture of mountains, in addition to sculpting them from the outside. But of course, mountains themselves can influence climate, so erosion and tectonics interact in a complex manner in which cause and effect become blurred. Together, these forces acting from within and from without create the horns, hogbacks, chimneys, spurs and summits that are so irresistible to climbers. After a century-long reign, geosynclinal theory fell precipitously from grace, and soon became something of a shameful secret, an episode of mass hysteria during which several generations of geologists spent their careers studying unicorns. Today, most geology students have never heard the word geosyncline, and maybe that’s just as well. Can anything useful be abstracted from this regrettable intellectual cul de sac? Any field that concerns itself with entities that evolve must constantly navigate between the general, timeless laws that shape them and the specific ‘timeful’ paths by which they unfolded (or, in the case of mountains, folded). The environmental physicist John Harte in 2002 described this as a ‘synthesis of Newtonian and Darwinian worldviews’. The timeless, ‘Newtonian’ habit of mind seeks patterns that reveal universal laws, attempts to remove ‘noise’ from ‘signal’, and is typically reductionist, predicated on the idea that the ‘closer you look, the simpler things get’. In contrast, the timeful, Darwinian view, celebrates idiosyncrasy and contingency (what Gillian Beer calls the ‘prodigality’ of nature), disdains oversimplified caricatures of natural phenomena, and finds that complexity grows with increasing scrutiny. Neither is the ‘correct’ view of the natural world, but both are essential. Without the filter of a framing theory, the firehose of information from nature can be too great to process. On the other hand, intellectual preferences for simple explanations can lead to dangerously blinkered vision. The geologists who advanced geosynclinal theory were motivated by the Newtonian instinct, correctly detecting a pattern common to many mountain belts, but prematurely seeking generalisations about these prodigal natural phenomena – and then reifying their inventions through a lexicon that over time became realer to many geologists than the things it was meant to describe. Fortunately, nature will always be messier, subtler, richer – and far more interesting than our cartoonish depictions of it. How wonderful to know that we live on a planet that is not shrivelling in its old age, but is vibrantly alive and self-rejuvenating, stirring its interior, reworking its surface, recycling its crust, and raising new mountains. Why study mountains? Because once they weren’t there.

It sure did. Much of Darwin's work, in fact, was based on an idea of what humans might be like in societies, so Darwin was not completely separated from these ideas, but they were extended onwards after his death, towards the end of his life, by other people to suggest that - putting it very crudely - might is right, that the economic structures of a society should be adjusted so that competition could flourish in an unfettered way, and that those people who succeeded in the competition for existence in the economic and political world, those nations that succeeded in that kind of competitive struggle, were by definition therefore the fittest. Now these are difficult and dangerous ideas. We know they all came to a head in the Second World War, and I think we find it very objectionable now to discuss and address Social Darwinism as if it were still a living thing.

Mr. O'REILLY: You know, there is definitely fear, and there is risk, but there's a really great point that was made, I believe, by Joe Trippi when we had him on stage at our Web 2.0 summit back in November. He was talking about something that happened in politics where, I forget the name of the fellow, but one of the senators had fall asleep in hearing, and he lost his seat as a result; as least Trippi thought so. That was one of the factors because of the YouTube video of this event that was, you know, very, very widely distributed, used by his, you know, his competition and it played a role in his defeat. But this happens all the time. You know, these guys are up for 30 hours, and yes, they fall asleep. So, the first time it's caught on video, it's a sensation, the second time, a little less so, and eventually, people go, OK, yeah, that happens. Right.

Sure. And again, this sort of goes to what I was saying before - is that if these are the concerns that are going to hold us back from adopting new technologies, we're well past the point of being able to contain that issue. If you had a solar flare, I think the least of our concerns would be whether or not our trucks crashed on the highway. You know, you'd have planes falling out of the sky. You'd have the stock market crashing. And this sort of ties into a lot of the concern over cybersecurity - is that I don't think we really expose ourselves to any more vulnerability by introducing more science, more technology and more digitization into our economy and our society. We passed that threshold probably 10, 15 years ago. It's time to start thinking about the benefits that these can bring.

I think it's pretty much healed. We have done a lot of things in the last year that will help heal that. We worked with - the American University Women have put together a program to help mentor young Latinas and we have a special Marshalltown education partnership with the hospital and the college that would encourage any person who's - be the first person to go to college. If he wants to do that, he can sign up in the eight or ninth grade. You got to keep an attendance, a very positive attendance. Some mentoring, good grade point and he'll get free college education at Marshalltown community of that college. So we've done a lot with the business people as well, and I think that we've been pretty successful in bringing the community back. There was no question -great fear right after the raid. But that's disappearing.

In Zimbabwe today, a development that could lead to the end of a political crisis. President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have signed a deal to set the terms for formal talks, and they've agreed to start talking. Those negotiations would be aimed at creating a power-sharing government. It was the first time in a decade that the two men have met face to face. The recent presidential race between the two involved brutal attacks, largely by Mugabe supporters, and the killings of dozens of people working for the opposition. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is following this story and joins us now.

Well, as we said in our report, that this is clearly an area that must be strengthened. Again, the nature of these injuries really will require families to fundamentally change their roles. Many family members end up really quitting their jobs, relocating to wherever their loved one is, and becoming a primary caretaker. The only way that that can happen is if the family receives the support they need to make this work. So the specific recommendations include extending the Family Medical Leave Act for up to six months for spouses and parents of the seriously injured and looking at other programs to support them in term of direct transportation and other kinds of social service supports that go directly to the family members, not to the injured soldier.

He's been on the wrong side of several defining hot-button issues, whether it's abortion or gun control or taxes. His temperament is not ideally suited to a president of the United States, whether it was skipping the Fox debate or alleging that he really did win Iowa. And finally, that he hasn't been campaigning as a conservative. And the conservatives' critique of the federal government is that it's too big. It has become unbounded by the structures of the Constitution. And we won't have more effective government until we have more limited government. And Trump's critique is a different one, which is that we are governed by idiots, and if you just gather the best tacticians and experts, it can be made to work much more effectively.

So last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report from their student loan watchdog. And it studied these very problems. And it found that many students who actually told their loan servicer, look; I think I qualify for Public Student Loan Forgiveness; what do I need to do, they weren't told that maybe they had the wrong loan type and that they could consolidate and qualify. They just didn't know. Borrowers often weren't told they were in the wrong repayment plan, which meant that the payments they were making wouldn't count towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So some borrowers would actually go years making payments on time, but the payments wouldn't count. In fact, some of these problems were so widespread that recently Congress actually created a new pot of money for some of these people who have been making payments and just got caught up in the confusion.

Chan Van Son(ph) is a couple crocodile short. In fact, he may be a couple thousand short - but he's not sure yet - after a flashflood over the weekend at the crocodile farm he manages in Khanh Hoa Province, about 20 miles from the popular beach town of Nha Trang. Crocodiles are farmed in this part of the world for their skin and their meat. And the Yang Bay farm is one of the largest around - home, Director Chan says, to about 5,000 crocodiles - or at least it was home until this weekend when the crocs flew the coop.

There's been speculation, but there's no specific indication of that. And you know, it's not entirely clear that that would make a lot of sense. The office is full of career prosecutors who if there was any messing around, you know, it would not surprise me that they would object or resign under protest. It would be very hard to have that happen. There are also pending trials, and there are pending investigations. And a couple of them are very well known. The mayor of New York, Mayor de Blasio, has been under investigation for his campaign financing techniques and some of his associates. The mayor, by the way, has denied any wrongdoing and has been cooperating with the investigation.

Yes. So we certainly answered the first question about where it is. And the question of what it is, is going to involve, you know, lots of research for, you know, which we hopefully will get lots of scientific funding for over next years. It does give us a few, sort of, tantalizing hints about what it might be and what some of the properties are. I mean, for example, one of the questions about this dark matter is - let me just emphasize, we're really starting at the very beginning. We have a very little idea what this substance is, even though it completely dominates the massive, or the budget of matter, in the universe. So one of the tantalizing hints that it give us is to do with the dynamical temperature of the dark matter. In other words, how, sort of, warm or cold it is. If it's so warm - is these lightweight particles, which whiz around the universe and end up just moving really fastly, or fast, or hustle and bustle. If it's cold, it's sort of sits more sedately where it's put and just stays there.

Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. A bit later, we'll talk about air pollution and the Olympics and a tiny microscope with big power. But up first, finding - a finding here that's very interesting that could be a dream come true for all you couch potatoes. elite athletes and people who, for various medical reasons, cannot work out - I mean, you physically can't get the exercise that you need or you want - a team of researchers found drugs that provide the benefits of exercise without the sweat and the effort, or at least with less sweat and effort. In the laboratory animals that were tested on them, the drugs essentially tricked muscles into thinking that they had exercised. One boosts the effects of exercise to increase endurance, while the other does the same, minus any effort at all. The researchers say these drugs, if they work in people - and that's a big if - if they work in people as well as they do in mice, could help people with various muscle diseases or other medical conditions that make exercise difficult. And on the other end of the scale, they could be used for abuse. It could be abused by athletes, you know, these elite athletes who want to improve their performance, or any busy person who has a hard time getting a workout and wants to just take the pill instead.

Hi. I am a recent law school graduate, but I have represented asylum seekers both in immigration court, and I've also worked for an immigration court. And I just think it's really important to reiterate: There are a lot of people who come here with meritorious claim for asylum who are not sophisticated or not English-speakers, and frequently are pretty afraid of government. They have a lot of reason not to trust government, and it takes them more than a year to figure out here what my rights are. And the senator who is opposed to having - to extending this one-year bar, said, oh, well, there are these excuses, these kind of extraordinary circumstances or achieved circumstances. Those are extremely difficult to get, and saying I didn't know I have these rights is not sufficient. So I feel pretty strongly the one-year bar to be abolished - if not, extended significantly.

It's possible. There's - they were just in talks with the Spaniards and several dissidents are being released in the coming days. For the most part, Cuba won't negotiate what goes on internally. It will talk about external issues with the United States. And I just want to say, you know, responding to what Jaime Suchliki was saying is that it's in the United States' interest to change its policy. It did not - doesn't necessarily have to correspond to a change in Cuba. We have our own motivations for that, not the least of which is that the next president will be looking at Cuba and a revolution that's been there for 50 years and looking at a policy that has basically failed for 50 years. If that's not a reason to try something new, I don't know what is.

They are saying that Paul Manafort has been lying to the FBI and to the special counsel's office on a variety of subjects. As you said, as part of his plea agreement, Manafort had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, and that included testifying truthfully. The FBI apparently believes he has not done so. Now, so far, the government is not elaborating on what they believe Manafort is lying about. But they do say that they're planning to file a detailed pre-sentencing report that would spell out, quote, "the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies," including those that came after the plea agreement. So that'll be something to watch for.

Yes, I think it is, regionally and in Lebanon. It's also more divisive. You've got a lot of people supporting Hezbollah, but you've got a lot of people also who are either quiet or who are sitting on the fence or criticizing it in public. Partly because of the consequences of the war that the destruction that Lebanon suffered and the tension that it suffers today, many people blame Hezbollah for that and people criticize it. And, of course, other people criticize it because they see it as part of a regional alliance of groups and countries who are working together to challenge Israel and the United States, and some of the Arab leadership. So, politically, it scares a lot of people in the Arab world and militarily, it's a problem for Israel and others. So, it's much more controversial and much more out in the open organization now, especially in Lebanon, because it's reoriented itself, to some extent, to domestic political contestation. So, there's a much greater set of dynamics that are playing around Hezbollah now than there was a couple of years ago.

She is referring to the fact that elections for Parliament were expected to held in 2007. But because of a clash over electoral reform issues, the Amir abruptly dissolved Parliament and call elections with only about five weeks notice. One of the highest profile women candidates, Rola Dashti, says in addition to the time crunch, she is facing other pressures. Her posters and banners have been vandalized. She is rebutting what she calls false allegations that she says are being spread by her religious critics. But Dashti says her frustrations are more than overcome by the sight of Kuwaiti women embracing their new rights.

So he has said that he will go home to Vermont tomorrow, but then he'll keep campaigning in D.C. ahead of that city's primary on the 14th. That's the last Dem. primary. In a press conference yesterday, he got lots of questions about what comes next. And he really didn't give too much besides those details. He said lots of times that he can't speculate before those, like, results from California. But it's also important just to pause to note the success of his campaign. Regardless, lots of Americans voted for him, a self-declared socialist who had almost zero name rec (ph) just a year ago. He had huge rallies across the country for months. He raised tens of millions of dollars in small donations. So the question is now what that does for him next.

You know, I feel as though that this a stepping stone for more, for students, and not just African-Americans students, but people all over should be more culturally aware of what's going on in today's society. You know, I understand that, you know, we don't live in an utopian society, but at the same time, you know, as a student, you know, I just want to be able to experience, I just want to be able to experience certain things and, you know, for me to be involved in this, I feel as though that I'm actually making a difference because my voice, quote-unquote my voice is being heard and hopefully the right people are hearing this voice.

Sure. In one situation we had a large number of very unhappy employees with many symptoms being reported, and they were complaining of upper respiratory symptoms, wheezing, and nausea. And we found wet insulation that gave off a vomit smell, and we thought for sure that this was the cause of many of the symptoms. But once the source was removed, and ventilation improved, the employees were still unhappy. They continued to complain about their symptoms. So what we started to tease out of that was that there was much more going on than just the building dynamics. There was definitely an experience at work that was psychosocial.

Well, they definitely need to be held accountable and that's what I'm trying to do in the book, and holding accountable politicians of both parties. That's incredibly important right now. As we need solutions that I call in the book going beyond left and right, you know, we in the media are sometimes reflexively looking at every problem as having a left and a right. And yet a lot of the problems I'm addressing here have solutions that are beyond left and right. I mean, who doesn't want a thriving middle class? I mean, even if you are one of the one percent lucky enough to be making all the money you want, if the middle class disappears in this country and we do become a third-world country, who wants to live behind gates with your kids, you know, surrounded by security guards who protect them from kidnapping?

Oh, I hope no one gets that message, you know? What we're trying to say is that, you know - what's really striking is the different relationship with global climate change we see early in the penguin lineage. But, of course, you know, species and whole lineages change through times and there are some very important recent studies on global climate and living species of penguins. But our work doesn't weigh in on that. We're interested in, you know, as paleontologist, in what's going on over millions and millions of years and major changes over that time scale. And what's going on today is happening on a considerably different time scale. So we don't - we are no way implying that the living species that may be cold adapted won't be quite negatively impacted.

And remarkably, the court granted - this would never happen today - the court granted the writ that he filed, that is to review the case. They appointed - he went from no lawyer to having probably the best lawyer in the United States, Abe Fortas, who later joined the Supreme Court. But he was assigned to represent Mr. Gideon. And Fortas did. And the Supreme Court set aside its earlier precedents and held that in any serious case, a poor person who could not afford a lawyer was entitled to one. Gideon went back to Panama City. He was tried again, but this time he had a lawyer, Fred Turner. And at the end of that trial, he was found not guilty.

And so he started patching in little bits and pieces from other recordings from pianists whom he thought sounded rather like Hatto. And interestingly, he says that Laszlo Simon had the same teacher as Joyce Hatto. And then once he got the habit, as it were, it became more and more, longer and longer, portions. He stops in the letter just short of admitting that he lifted whole discs, although we have beyond any reasonable doubt, so they say, proof that he did that. But he does admit to, quote, that he has acted - I think the quote is, "I have acted dishonestly, stupidly and unlawfully."

It does. I mean, I can't lie to you. I try to make it less about me, and I try to make it more about other people and their lives and their experiences. And you end up realizing that you're carrying around a lot of things that other people have trusted you with and that you have an obligation to try to get it right. But at the same time, I've been blessed. I've been truly blessed with having the opportunity to put stories into the culture that other people seem to either actively ignore or be afraid to speak to. Compared to what other people do or compared to what my parents did so that I may do this, it's pretty easy.

Exactly. And it's a world, but it sees very, very, very, very rich people dealing with a great deal of money. And somebody steals that money, or, actually, a few different people steal that money. And when Zella gets out of prison, people start getting killed all over the place, and then Zella almost gets killed, and then Leonid almost gets killed. And he has to get involved. So, the novel more is about his personal life than it is about the crime itself. There's a few crimes in the book. But he's trying to - after being a bad guy for so long and trying to do right, which, I kind of, think of America traveling from the 20th to the 21st century. I think Leonid McGill is a good representation of my country. It's a difficult thing to do.

Elected four years ago in every ward and every voting precinct of the city. He really threaded the needle of the complicated racial politics of Washington, D.C., the complicated reform versus old style Democratic politics of Washington, D.C., and seemed to have everyone behind him. But over the last four years, he's done a lot of things that in some cases were seen as reformist, in other cases were seen as favoring his own friends and cronies - giving contracts to them, fighting with the city council, being in constant conflict with the people on the city council, who were eventually represented by Vince Gray, who was the nominee against him, who soundly defeated him.

Well, I think, essentially, we need to create a situation, to create conditions in the federal government where federal scientists can do their jobs. It's not that scientists are, you know, a special class or anything, but in fact, these are very important people in the federal government. They serve the American public. The work they do is important. And we need to give them conditions where they can be effective. Some parts of that are obviously giving them some basic protections. You mentioned whistleblower protections. Other parts of that have to do with transparency, increasing the, you know, we can't be everywhere. We can't be watching. So the point is if we open up the government, if we have these things more out in the open, then everyone can actually be a part of that conversation and part of the people watching.

And this was tough because for a start the animals had one thing on their - those male humpbacks had just one thing on their mind, and that was that female that they were chasing. And they - you know, you think of whales as being gentle giants, but these males were completely crazed, sex-crazed, and they were - you know, they go - they were swimming five or six times faster than they would normally swim, absolutely going hell for leather after this female. And we wanted to film it from the water level, from a boat. We also wanted to film it from above because there's a kind of a battle going on. It's basically the biggest bar brawl in nature because - and these males are crashing into each other and hitting each other with their fins and trying to push each under and blowing bubbles at each other.

I think that he's been drawn to - you know, during the war there's a certain amount of glamour, patriotic glamour, attached to the secret world. And one of the things that's going to happen to him in this story is learning that when you get involved in spinning some webs, you're inevitably going to get caught in them yourself. Mihai is an old hand at this. He works for Mossad. He's been getting Jewish refugees out. Istanbul was one of the very few escape valves that was still operating during the war, and he's experienced. He's hardened. And he realizes that not all is going to be as clearly black and white as it was for Leon during the war.

This is one of the signature injuries of this conflict. And it's a complicated one. Post-traumatic stress disorder may not leave any physical observations. So one of the things that we have to do is to absolutely improve the diagnosis of this disorder. And so every service member returning from the theater should go through a process to help screen and identify people who are at risk or who are actively suffering from the disorder. The second thing is that once it's diagnosed, we have to be prepared to be vigilant in managing the care because an individual may have mild symptoms of the disease within a few weeks after returning from the conflict. And those may become dramatically more severe in the next six months, a year or two years. The medical programs that had been set up traditionally really were focused on an individual encounter with the patient. What needs to happen, especially related to PTSD, is ongoing surveillance and appropriate management when required.

Quite frankly, we have a meth crisis in America that is knocking at the doors of homes across this country, and it's about to steamroll all of us, and the question is: Are we going to attack this before it runs us over, are we going to attack it aggressively, or are we going to rue the day and spend hundreds of millions trying to address it after it's moved into our suburbs and cities just as crack cocaine did and then we spent 10 or 15 years fighting it? We've had the warnings. It's moving into rural areas, it's moving into suburban areas, it's moving in some urban areas, and this is a freight train coming and we need to get at the front end of it.

Right. So it could be the election of a new sport. Say, if squash were to be invited into the games, and that's one of the three sports on the docket. But it could be the invitation of a very old sport, a sport that will be contested in 2016 and goes back to the ancient Greeks. Wrestling is seen as the strongest candidate. The elimination of wrestling in - at a preliminary vote, they told wrestling that they'd have to sort of reapply to get back in the Olympics, and wrestling got its house in order. And so now it's seen as the strongest candidate.

Those trucks - they remind me of the days with Robert Mugabe. They reminded me that if things change, nothing really changes. So if we continue to tell people that we are free and then we clamp down on them - it was unnecessary to use live ammunition on demonstrators. That's not what I expected. I expected the soldiers to come in. Even if the soldier had just come in, people would just stop without them doing anything. They - people would just stop. There was no chance to even negotiate. I didn't see any negotiating. I didn't see a president who said he's a president of the people and he will listen to the people. I wish and I hope this is the last time that we are witnessing something like this.

I think that's very likely the case. And, again, it's a question of degree. Senator McConnell may have aired from his predecessors mainly in being more blunt, because often, opposition leaders, you know, we're trying to get a newly elected president from being elected again. But two years is a long time in the business of this nation. There are lots of things the country has to do - economic matters and security matters, you know, you name it. And if it seems to be the case that for this next two years in American government become mainly a way of positioning the two sides for the next presidential election. That is not really very good for the country.