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That's a dilemma that Kentucky officials are trying to change by dealing with issues behind the troublesome behavior of young people. Besides truancy, there are four other common status offenses - breaking curfew, underage drinking, being incorrigible or ungovernable and running away. Status events complaints against juveniles reached their peak in the early 2000s and have been on the decline. But Kentucky still detains juveniles who refuse to follow a judge's order more than any other state except Washington, which is now phasing it out. The Fayette Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Lexington, Ky., is just down the road from the horse stables at a nearby adult prison. On this day, six of the 40 detainees are females. One is serving 30 days for habitual truancy and contempt of court. Superintendent Alichia Stanley leads the way down the yellow cinder-block hallways.

Absolutely. And this fascist, airbrushed tendencies from this administration is--this kind of tactic, this kind of mind-set, is just the kind of thing that I think people find very, very troubling about this administration. It all seems very Big Brother. You know, things get airbrushed out of the official record. And airbrushing the war dead out of a war is just--it's just--you know, it's straight out of "Jabberwocky." Who do they think they're kidding? And it does a terrible disservice to the military, I think. And it's very babying. It's like, oh, the American people's will will buckle if we see these dead--these coffins. And we're not seeing dead bodies. We're seeing coffins, you know, draped with flags and guarded by these wonderful American hunks, you know? So the tendency of this administration I find just very, very troubling.

Nick Ut was the Associated Press photographer who took that picture. At the hospital, he was told that the little girl was beyond help. He demanded they treat her anyway. And Kim Phuc survived, despite burns that covered over half her body. Ut's editors made an exception to a policy preventing frontal nudity in photos and went ahead and published it. Known simply as napalm girl, the photo transcended the divisive debate about the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War and it crystallized the barbarity of war. It earned Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize, and a lifelong friend in the little girl he saved.

I also wanted to reflect on - the first caller talked about his restaurant, and in fact the case that I wrote about in Arizona that is an example of what the federal government is doing is interesting on that front because this was exactly a restaurant in a chain of restaurants, the Chuy's Mesquite Broiler chain, and these employers had quite consciously and knowingly hired kitchen workers who were illegal immigrants. And they had two sets of books, or at least this is what the federal government is alleging, and so they were paying the kitchen workers who were out of status, they were not paying them overtime, and they were paying them in cash under certain circumstances.

Here's a multiple-choice math problem: Let's say you have a fifth-grader who asks you for help with her homework. Her assignment is to create a stem and leaf plot of the birthdays of each student in the class, and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest. If so, which month? Do you A, stare blankly; B, just Google stem and leaf plots; C, say, why do you need to know that, honey; D - sounds good - D, just shrug and say, I must have been sick the day they taught it in my math class. Of course, your children's homework can be confounding these days. Maybe we can blame it on changes in the way children are being taught math, which can make you feel like you're not very good with numbers.

Senator - meaning Jack Reed and Carl Levin. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, our leader, had a similar piece of legislation back in the spring. And I think every time we do it, we pick up more Republicans and we make some progress, but it's slow, it's incremental, and it's frustrating, but that's the nature of the Senate. I do think, though, that there is - and I've been very critical the president will continue to unless and until he changes his policy. But while that's going on, well, we've got to make it every clear the difference between his policy and what we stand for. There are a lot of Republican senators - I wouldn't say a lot, it's a few right now - that are considering other ways to get to a consensus that would mean a real change in course to get to 60 votes. So we're going to keep working with them and keep working with our Democratic colleagues to change the course of this war.

Hi. I was kidnapped by my father when I was three-and-a-half. This was like 1954. I also had a brother that was a year old and a sister that was two-and-a-half years younger. She was like a year. And we were taken to Canada and hid out on the woods. And for six or eight months, my father and his mother - my grandmother - brainwashed us about how horrible my mother was. And, you know, would tell stories about the country mouse and the city mouse. Everything was great in the country, everything was horrible in the city. Of course they lived in the country and we lived in Kansas City, in the city. And, you know, even as going so far as to, you know, anti-Semitic stuff. That the Jews killed Christ and all kinds of just twisted stuff. And the comment I wanted to make is that an experience like that definitely stays with you your whole life. I'm 55 now and I didn't even realize I had a problem with it until I was probably 24, 25.

Yeah, if you take a look at the punishments that modern states have to invoke, there isn't a difference in terms of the variety of punishments that are available. Prison is at the top of the things that we can do. It's the most serious, and it's also incapacitated. Everything else finds a compulsory service (unintelligible) is considered much less drastic. And the big difference between the United States and other developed countries is not that we have different kinds of punishments, but that we use the severe punishments much more. The imprisonment rate in the United States is five or six times the imprisonment rate in other developed countries that we like to compare ourselves to.

My mother chose to give birth to me and accepted one set of burdens and gifts. If she'd had an abortion, she'd simply have had a different set of burdens and gifts. So my story doesn't support a political agenda, but I hope it makes an argument for care and consideration. Last year I miscarried in the middle of a step aerobics class and I was really scared that the loss of my child would, in some way, awaken latent feelings about my mom's choice. I thought I might mourn the miscarriage as a real death and judge my mother for what she almost did. But that didn't happen at all. Instead, my miscarriage just felt disappointing, like a job I'd applied for, really wanted but not gotten. I've thought a lot about this, and here's how it makes sense to me. If you plant 100 seeds in your garden, you can expect to find healthy plants growing from about three of them. Some seeds will die because of forces completely beyond your control and some will die because you're a bad gardener. Well, I'll just have to live with that.

What we're seeing so far is the results this holiday season are not similar to pre-recession but they're certainly better than what they were. We're moving in the right direction. We're seeing an upward visibility to price points in terms of consumers being accepting of a little bit of a higher price point. And what we're seeing is the fact that the deals that we're seeing today, yes, they're a little bit sharper than what they were pre-recession, but the traffic is there. So I'd say we're seeing just as much traffic but the markdowns are little bit deeper than what they would have been before the recession.

I guess my thoughts on the matter are these - I think that it's very possible that this is a mechanism, an evolutionary mechanism, that's in place that is induced during situations when a female is basically shut out from contact with other males. In other words, under extreme situations where the female is not having an opportunity to mate, evolutionarily, it is given the shot, the opportunity, then, to parthenogenetically reproduce. Of course, there's a risk and a real cost in doing so, and that cost is reduction of genetic diversity. You're only going to get one parent's worth of genes and genetic material. And so this, of course, is what leads to inbreeding, and from an evolutionary standpoint, it's not a positive step because there's less viability of the offspring.

I don't know if it's exactly feminism, but that is a very interesting way of thinking about it because it's certainly true that if anybody is stuck in these stories, helpless in various cycles of doomed violence or just a kind of fatalism, it's the boys. It's the boys and the men. In one of the stories in the middle of the collection, the girl who is looking after the protagonist baby, she's ironing - got piles of ironing but she's also got textbooks 'cause she's going to go back to college. And there's another girl in another story, who's off to higher education. It's the girls who seem to get out and make their escape. I have no idea whether that represents the reality of a sociology in temporary Ireland, but it's certainly - that's Colin Barrett's story about the genders.

All right, so it's an important that they do here. Okay, I'm going to -before we get to talk with David Bookbinder, and get into the issue. We're coming right up against the break. I am going to get to our break and come back and talk more with Marlo Lewis, Jr., senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. He laid out the opening salvo here in a little debate about the future of whether CO2 should be regulated by the EPA. Next up would be David Bookbinder who's senior attorney for the Sierra Club. Stay with us will be right back talking about the Supreme Court, and should it or should it not force the United States Government to regulate carbon dioxide. Stay with us, we'll be right back.

And you remember the formulation. Somehow I thought the formulation sounded on paper a little bit tortured. My heart tells me - I can't quote it exactly - but my heart tells me that I did nothing wrong. Still, my head acknowledges that we made mistakes. And yet somehow or other for Ronald Reagan, that was an honest explanation of what had taken place. He felt he did nothing wrong. He was now - he now understood that it represented violating his own pledge never to deal with terrorists. So the administration from the get-go insisted on cooperating or announced and then did cooperate with the investigations. And then in some way, there was a horrible period. It was weeks, not months, but weeks in the White House when the president was - the one time during the administration when the president seemed low. Polls are against him. He felt that the American people no longer trusted him. And there was a horrible time when everyone in the White House felt he has to say something.

I guess the answer is it's theoretically possible. But it's hard to imagine the circumstances under which it could have occurred. So you have weapons that are called sonic cannons, for instance, that fire very loud, very audible sounds, cause pain. They're mostly used to fend off pirates on the open seas. But you would know if a weapon like that was used. And then you have ultrasound, which is sounds that are too high for us to hear them. And in fact, doctors sometimes use ultrasound to kill bits of brain tissue if they're causing a problem. But ultrasound is really hard to even get through a patient's skin and bone, let alone through a wall or a window or something where it could hurt somebody. So another possibility...

You know, Kelly, if Trump really believes what he said there, his capacity for creating a mythical world exceeds that of J. K. Rowling or C. S. Lewis. I mean, you could not have imagined, as David suggested, a worse week than he's had this week, even his leading defenders and apologists - you think of RNC chair Reince Priebus - are enraged and apoplectic. And I do think - you know, this term has been overused about Trump - but I think it - there really was a tipping point. And I think it was the attack on the mother of a slain veteran where people accepted all kinds of things from Trump, but when he went after her, I think that began to raise all of these questions, both of character and even of his psychological state that David referred to. He's in a big - he's in big trouble now.

I mean, it could. I think Russia is hurting. It's said that it's going to impose sanctions on the U.S. economic ones. I don't know what those are going to be. There's not that much it can do. It doesn't have that much leverage. So right now, I think it will focus on just being, again, the major power in the Middle East that all the countries there talked to on making sure that Assad, you know, prevails, and with this heightened level of rhetoric with the U.S., but - and you've heard that from Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump - still trying to keep open the possibility of an off-ramp so that the U.S. and Russia can sit down together.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. A nursing home is almost always the last resort. We've all heard stories of abuse, neglect and institutional indifference. Despite those concerns and more, they provide the best or the only affordable option for an estimated one and a half million moms, dads and grandparents, and a glance at the demographic curve suggests that those numbers will balloon over the coming decades. Of course many nursing homes are well-run facilities where dedicated staff take great care of patients, but even the best are institutions, hospital-style facilities where patients rise, eat, sleep and take medication on a rigid schedule. Now an effort called the Green House Project provides much smaller and more flexible facilities where residents feel less like they're in an institution and more like they're at home. They're not called patients, for one thing; they're called elders. We'll talk to the director of that project in just a moment.

Well, you know, in the simplest terms, the union here is fighting for its life, you know? There's a lot of pressure on them to help the companies move forward and do better. On the table in this particular negotiation was, of course, wages, always a big union negotiating issue. But the biggest, I think, was the issue of legacy health care, the health care requirements that retirees have. And in both of the contracts so far, both for Chrysler and with GM, we had sort of a monumental shift in the way that's going to be handled now. The unions are going to administer those plans and manage the money forms. So these are pretty big developments here.

If I were to become emperor of the world for a day, I would mandate that every, I don't know, elementary or junior high school would teach aggression recognition management or some correlation so that we, the potential perpetrators, have the skills prior to getting into these involvements. I'm here to tell you that when your toes are standing on the edge of that dark hole and you make that final decision, you know, away from punching the walls to punching flesh or something, it is terrifying. And I can completely understand how people do not change after that. I'm so grateful that I had the support and encouragement to stop before that happened.

Well, as it seems with everything these days, it all goes back to this global credit crunch that we're in the midst of. Back in June, Home Depot agreed to sell its construction supply unit to a group of private equity firms, including Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group. And the price they agreed on at the time was $10.3 billion. Now, the way these deals work is that the private equity firms borrow money from investment banks who then repackage those loans and sell them to investors in the form of bonds. And as you know, in the last few months the demand for any kind of debt that isn't backed by the federal government has really fallen off because of the subprime mortgage meltdown. And investment banks have become wary of taking on that kind of debt for fear they'll get stuck with it. So reports say to keep them from walking away from the deal, Home Depot agreed to cut the sale price by 18 percent and to guarantee some of the debt used to fund the deal.

This is Talk of the Nation, I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Where do we draw the line between our private and public selves? In the age of YouTube and Facebook, what, if anything, is really private anymore? All of us wrestle with these questions. Are the answers different if you're a public person? A famous writer, let's say. How much of your own story do you put in a novel, and what about the lives of your friends and your family? Is it ever right to expose private stories for the public good? And what about the difference between writing itself, best done, many say, alone, and the public appearances, interviews, and celebrity that can be so critical to a writer's success? Today on the program, three prominent writers join us to talk about private stories and the public good, and they'll take your calls. Later on in the program, reviews of "Grand Theft Auto IV." But first, the relationship between our personal and our public lives: is it ever all right to tell private stories if it's for the public good? We want to hear from callers, listeners, who've had that experience in their lives, who've told private stories for what they thought was the public good. 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also tell us your story on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.

Well, I don't think that - I understand that point very - this is the 24th District in New York, around Syracuse. And a lot of times, third-party candidates will get 5, 6, 7 percent in the polls weeks out. And then on Election Day, they maybe get only 1 or 2. But in a race that's supposed to be this close - two years ago when Ann Marie Buerkle was elected over Dan Maffei, she won by 648 votes. I mean, that's how close every race is. But with redistricting, the seat has been made a little more Democratic. She's probably the most vulnerable incumbent member of Congress of either party in New York State. She has a tough road ahead of her.

My research lab sits about a mile from where several bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon in 2013. The surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Chechnya, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Now, when a jury has to make the decision between life in prison and the death penalty, they base their decision largely on whether or not the defendant feels remorseful for his actions. Tsarnaev spoke words of apology, but when jurors looked at his face, all they saw was a stone-faced stare. Now, Tsarnaev is guilty, there's no doubt about that. He murdered and maimed innocent people, and I'm not here to debate that. My heart goes out to all the people who suffered. But as a scientist, I have to tell you that jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody ever. Neither can I, and neither can you, and that's because emotions are not what we think they are. They are not universally expressed and recognized. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable. We have misunderstood the nature of emotion for a very long time, and understanding what emotions really are has important consequences for all of us. I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years, and in my lab, we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions. We have scrutinized the human body in emotion. We have analyzed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects. We've scanned hundreds of brains, and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years. And the results of all of this research are overwhelmingly consistent. It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you, but they don't. You might believe that your brain is prewired with emotion circuits, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not. In fact, none of us in this room have emotion circuits in our brain. In fact, no brain on this planet contains emotion circuits. So what are emotions, really? Well, strap on your seat belt, because ... emotions are guesses. They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do. Now, if that sounds preposterous to you, or, you know, kind of crazy, I'm right there with you, because frankly, if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself, decades of evidence for myself, I am fairly sure that I wouldn't believe it either. But the bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth. They are just built. To see what I mean, have a look at this. Right now, your brain is working like crazy. Your neurons are firing like mad trying to make meaning out of this so that you see something other than black and white blobs. Your brain is sifting through a lifetime of experience, making thousands of guesses at the same time, weighing the probabilities, trying to answer the question, "What is this most like?" not "What is it?" but "What is this most like in my past experience?" And this is all happening in the blink of an eye. Now if your brain is still struggling to find a good match and you still see black and white blobs, then you are in a state called "experiential blindness," and I am going to cure you of your blindness. This is my favorite part. Are you ready to be cured? (Cheers) All right. Here we go. (Gasps) All right. So now many of you see a snake, and why is that? Because as your brain is sifting through your past experience, there's new knowledge there, the knowledge that came from the photograph. And what's really cool is that that knowledge which you just acquired moments ago is changing how you experience these blobs right now. So your brain is constructing the image of a snake where there is no snake, and this kind of a hallucination is what neuroscientists like me call "predictions." Predictions are basically the way your brain works. It's business as usual for your brain. Predictions are the basis of every experience that you have. They are the basis of every action that you take. In fact, predictions are what allow you to understand the words that I'm speaking as they come out of my — Audience: Mouth. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Mouth. Exactly. Predictions are primal. They help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way. So your brain does not react to the world. Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world. The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions. So to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page. But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. This time, you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements like the curl of a lip or the raise of an eyebrow. And that stone-faced stare? That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation. So the lesson here is that emotions that you seem to detect in other people actually come in part from what's inside your own head. And this is true in the courtroom, but it's also true in the classroom, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom. And so here's my concern: tech companies which shall remain nameless ... well, maybe not. You know, Google, Facebook — (Laughter) are spending millions of research dollars to build emotion-detection systems, and they are fundamentally asking the wrong question, because they're trying to detect emotions in the face and the body, but emotions aren't in your face and body. Physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning. We have to make them meaningful. A human or something else has to connect them to the context, and that makes them meaningful. That's how we know that a smile might mean sadness and a cry might mean happiness, and a stoic, still face might mean that you are angrily plotting the demise of your enemy. Now, if I haven't already gone out on a limb, I'll just edge out on that limb a little further and tell you that the way that you experience your own emotion is exactly the same process. Your brain is basically making predictions, guesses, that it's constructing in the moment with billions of neurons working together. Now your brain does come prewired to make some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body. So when you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort. But these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer. But they have very little detail, and you need that detail to know what to do next. What do you about these feelings? And so how does your brain give you that detail? Well, that's what predictions are. Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do. And sometimes, those constructions are emotions. So for example, if you were to walk into a bakery, your brain might predict that you will encounter the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I know my brain would predict the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate cookies. And our brains might cause our stomachs to churn a little bit, to prepare for eating those cookies. And if we are correct, if in fact some cookies have just come out of the oven, then our brains will have constructed hunger, and we are prepared to munch down those cookies and digest them in a very efficient way, meaning that we can eat a lot of them, which would be a really good thing. You guys are not laughing enough. I'm totally serious. (Laughter) But here's the thing. That churning stomach, if it occurs in a different situation, it can have a completely different meaning. So if your brain were to predict a churning stomach in, say, a hospital room while you're waiting for test results, then your brain will be constructing dread or worry or anxiety, and it might cause you to, maybe, wring your hands or take a deep breath or even cry. Right? Same physical sensation, same churning stomach, different experience. And so the lesson here is that emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think you do. I don't mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel the way that you would change your clothes, but your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life. So if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience. So here's an example. All of us have had a nervous feeling before a test, right? But some people experience crippling anxiety before a test. They have test anxiety. Based on past experiences of taking tests, their brains predict a hammering heartbeat, sweaty hands, so much so that they are unable to actually take the test. They don't perform well, and sometimes they not only fail courses but they actually might fail college. But here's the thing: a hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety. It could be that your body is preparing to do battle and ace that test ... or, you know, give a talk in front of hundreds of people on a stage where you're being filmed. (Laughter) I'm serious. (Laughter) And research shows that when students learn to make this kind of energized determination instead of anxiety, they perform better on tests. And that determination seeds their brain to predict differently in the future so that they can get their butterflies flying in formation. And if they do that often enough, they not only can pass a test but it will be easier for them to pass their courses, and they might even finish college, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential. So I call this emotional intelligence in action. Now you can cultivate this emotional intelligence yourself and use it in your everyday life. So just, you know, imagine waking up in the morning. I'm sure you've had this experience. I know I have. You wake up and as you're emerging into consciousness, you feel this horrible dread, you know, this real wretchedness, and immediately, your mind starts to race. You start to think about all the crap that you have to do at work and you have that mountain of email which you will never dig yourself out of ever, the phone calls you have to return, and that important meeting across town, and you're going to have to fight traffic, you'll be late picking your kids up, your dog is sick, and what are you going to make for dinner? Oh my God. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with my life? (Laughter) That mind racing is prediction. Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you experience as wretchedness, just like you did with the blobby image. So your brain is trying to explain what caused those sensations so that you know what to do about them. But those sensations might not be an indication that anything is wrong with your life. They might have a purely physical cause. Maybe you're tired. Maybe you didn't sleep enough. Maybe you're hungry. Maybe you're dehydrated. The next time that you feel intense distress, ask yourself: Could this have a purely physical cause? Is it possible that you can transform emotional suffering into just mere physical discomfort? Now I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks and talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or any kind of serious condition. But I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine, and that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently. And all of us can do this and with a little practice, we can get really good at it, like driving. At first, it takes a lot of effort, but eventually it becomes pretty automatic. Now I don't know about you, but I find this to be a really empowering and inspiring message, and the fact that it's backed up by decades of research makes me also happy as a scientist. But I have to also warn you that it does come with some fine print, because more control also means more responsibility. If you are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside your brain somewhere and which trigger automatically, then who's responsible, who is responsible when you behave badly? You are. Not because you're culpable for your emotions, but because the actions and the experiences that you make today become your brain's predictions for tomorrow. Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we're to blame but because we're the only ones who can change it. Now responsibility is a big word. It's so big, in fact, that sometimes people feel the need to resist the scientific evidence that emotions are built and not built in. The idea that we are responsible for our own emotions seems very hard to swallow. But what I'm suggesting to you is you don't have to choke on that idea. You just take a deep breath, maybe get yourself a glass of water if you need to, and embrace it. Embrace that responsibility, because it is the path to a healthier body, a more just and informed legal system, and a more flexible and potent emotional life. Thank you. (Applause)

I think Peter is exactly right. I think what you saw here last night was - what is new here is the president, President Obama, spent the first four years after getting elected trying desperately to play an inside game, partly because he had to. They were just enormous problems that needed immediate attention and big complex legislation moving. And so constant discussion with policy wonks and congressmen and so forth, and lobbyists and trade groups and so forth. He has shifted now and said, you know, I can't get anything done playing an inside game. Republicans are not going to go for what - my agenda. If my agenda is going to pass, it's going to be because I can create out there in the country, in key constituencies, among teachers, among young people, among people in the swing states, enough pressure that we can maybe get something done. And that's what we saw.

Yes, I do listen to NPR and I love NPR. But I do feel like the media did not do us justice in the subprime crisis. And I am still surprised - I did my own research to try to figure out what happened - and I'm surprised that no media service that I've found so far has reported on the last administration's policies that were pushing the housing bubble. The - America's homeownership challenge that the Bush administration put together, where he met with the 24 largest banks and asked them to loosen credit standards. They - he had the - he challenged the banking industry to get 5.5 million subprime minority a month and he asked them to come up with creative loan packages to do it. So you're playing the riskiest people and the riskiest loan products. And nobody's really reported on that yet.

South Waziristan is the wildest, most rugged landscape imaginable. It's a place that even the intrepid British explorers often feared to enter. I'm told that old British maps of that area, when you get to South Waziristan, you just see a lot of white space because it wasn't well mapped. To get to Wana(ph), which is a military garrison deep in South Waziristan, I flew in a Pakistani trainer, tiny little plane, and we couldn't fly directly, point to point, from Pashawar, because that would take us over these Mehsud areas, these tribal badlands where al-Qaida is hiding out, where the Taliban leadership hides. We had to go down to zigzag and make a dog leg. So we landed there. This Pakistani major general served me tea after my arrival with an orderly dressed in white gloves and a marvelous uniform with a red sash. It was like going back 100 years. But he told me, and others told me, that the Pakistani army is now ready to go on the offensive against the Taliban, they're ready for a tough campaign. A lot of people are going to get killed in this campaign and they know it.

Well, Neal, I would say that the picture is, in some ways, a little mixed. The labor market for new high school graduates in the last five years has been very difficult relative to where young people were at the end of the boom of the 1999, 2000. Job prospects for teenagers and young adults fell far more precipitously than for any other age group in the economy. In the last year, though, for the first time since 2000, we began to observe an improvement in the ability of teenagers and young high school grads to get jobs, and we expect that this summer will be also a little bit better than what situation - and this fall will be a little bit better than what it was last year. But that'll still put young people at - still fairly far down where they were.

You know, about six, seven-plus years ago, you are correct, Neal. The average video game sounded like what we - what I like to refer to is good humor truck music, you know, music done on Casios predominantly by employees. And one of the things - when I got first hired at EA, one of the first things that the then-president of the company said to me is you'll know you'll have succeeded here if every internal audio guy hates your guts, because basically, it was going to be my job to stop them from making music. And what we did was we started utilizing the real estate in video games to do what MTV and radio had done for all us and older generations for decades before. You know what? I'm listening to you guys talking, and I think that it's a very simple equation. The bottom line is you bring music to where people are versus where they're not. We were all brought up in a radio-driven society. You listen to - I was brought up outside of New York, so I would listen to the rock radio stations there, and that's where I first heard about the Police. That's where I heard about whatever - U2. Then, came the MTV generation and it was obviously very visually oriented. And a whole new generation was brought up, expecting a visual attachment. Thus, came the Duran Durans and eventually the Nirvanas.

A Pentagon spokesman, Major Paul Swiergosz, declined to speak on tape about why, if it has nothing to hide, the Defense Department is blocking testimony. Swiergosz would say only, quote, "We have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in any public forum." That left the one Pentagon official who did testify today in the hot seat. William Dugan is a retired Air Force colonel now responsible for the oversight of intelligence activities at the Defense Department. Dugan described his knowledge of the Able Danger program as `very limited,' and his response to many of the questions aimed at him was `I don't know.'

Yeah, we have looked, we have had some questions about consumer's attitudes, sort of what motivates their attitudes. One of the things that I think is a big difference between what we've seen in Europe and what we're seeing in the United States is the degree of confidence that American consumers have in our regulatory agencies. To underscore something that Doug said earlier, that is why it's so important to make sure that we have a regulatory system in place that's able to, that has the tools that it needs to ask the questions, and you know, get the right answers. But consumers, you know, by far find FDA, for example, as the most trusted source of information about food and agricultural biotechnology.

Well, this is, you know, that's a big question. That's a, you know (unintelligible). I'm not 100 percent, you know, sure that anyone has actually answered that quite yet. It's, you know, it's - the key thing that, you know, everyone will keep saying in the industry is (unintelligible) convenience. You know, there's this weird notion – we can factor(ph) that people love the mobiles phones, and they have to make payments, so they'll love using the mobile phones to make payments. I don't think the connection is necessarily that one to one. Now, where it does become more interesting is exactly what, you know, Google is doing. I think very much the big attraction is when you can add in that extra functionality like, you know, these handsets, these cell phones which everyone has, they're becoming increasingly powerful. It's not just about making the payments anymore. It's when you can suddenly start tying that into your location, you know, and (unintelligible) programs you may have. It could even be identification, kind of access control. And, you know, it all starts tying together. It all starts becoming very personalized.

All right. In case you are just tuning in, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. We are talking about religion and outreach. How religious organizations deal with non-profit or even for-profit approaches to their communities. We were just hearing from Kenneth Behr, the president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. We also have Leon Henry who heads the Catholic charities organization Our Daily Bread in Baltimore, and Pastor John Hunter, senior minister at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. Let's turn to the idea, Pastor John, of businesses. Are all of your businesses run as non-profits or with all the work that you do in housing, are some of these for-profit corporations?

Well, I think one of the major things is that we spent a lot of time a couple of weeks ago on Phil Mickelson winning the Masters and that this was supposed to be a victory for women, because his wife Amy was fighting breast cancer. And I'm sure at some level that it was inspirational. But the real victory is in the reaction that both the police, and I think the public to a lesser extent, and the league, I don't think that they view this anymore as we did a few years ago, when Kobe Bryant was in his problems with sexual assault and during his rape case. I think that what you see now is that there's certainly a low tolerance for the - for players acting and behaving in a certain way.

Exactly. But you know, had he done it the next day, somewhere else, I don't think you would have heard the firestorm at all from anybody. I think it really was about place and time and opportunity and, you know, what you could have done with that, you know, with that world stage on that day, when everybody was really looking for him to come out and distance himself from Reverend Wright. There were other opportunities there on that day. But again, I think it's indicative of people really just having a real difference, you know, a reasonable difference, in how to win at this point. And I think that's what the real argument is about, that Jesse Jackson and those who are on the more left side of the Democratic Party, particularly those who are African-American activists, and you know, not just African American but other activists and people who are, you know, very much active in the community and in social programs, have a fundamental problem with this idea that he is moving to more of a centrist position.

I'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective. I'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule. So, I'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language, and so it's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk. I want to warn you about that. So, I do want to say, at the outset, that I think compassion's great. The golden rule is great. I'm a big supporter of both. And I think it's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths. At the same time, I think religions don't deserve all the credit. I think nature gave them a helping hand here. I'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are, in a certain sense, built into human nature. But I'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature, you realize that just affirming compassion, and affirming the golden rule, is really not enough. There's a lot of work to be done after that. OK so, a quick natural history, first of compassion. In the beginning, there was compassion, and I mean not just when human beings first showed up, but actually even before that. I think it's probably the case that, in the human evolutionary lineage, even before there were homo sapiens, feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool, and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened. It happened through a principle known as kin selection. And the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then, in the end, the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself. So, from a biologist's point of view, compassion is actually a gene's way of helping itself. OK. I warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy. I'll get there — I hope to get a little fuzzier. This doesn't bother me so much, that the underlying Darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level. Actually, I think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family. That's the bad news. The good news is compassion is natural. The bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family. Now, there's more good news that came along later in evolution, a second kind of evolutionary logic. Biologists call that "reciprocal altruism." OK. And there, the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor. Again, I know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past, but from a biologist's point of view, this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too. It's not that people think that, when they feel the compassion. It's not consciously self-serving, but to a biologist, that's the logic. And so, you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies. I'm sure a lot of you, if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them, you feel really bad. But if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you've never heard of, you can probably live with that. That's just human nature. So, it's another good news/bad news story. It's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic. The bad news is this doesn't bring us universal compassion by itself. So, there's still work to be done. Now, there's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism, which I think is kind of good news, which is that the way that this is played out in the human species, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule. I don't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes, but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, no exposure to ethical philosophy, and you'll find, if you spend time with these people, that, basically, they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished. And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes. So, they do understand that if you want to be treated well, you treat other people well. And it's good to treat other people well. That's close to being a kind of built-in intuition. So, that's good news. Now, if you've been paying attention, you're probably anticipating that there's bad news here; we still aren't to universal love, and it's true because, although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural, it's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule. I mean, for example, none of us, probably, want to go to prison, but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison. Right? So, we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated. Now, we have a rationale for that. We say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison. None of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion. We have the capacity to carve out exceptions, put people in a special category. And the problem is that — although in the case of sending people to prison, you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule — that in everyday life, the way we all make these decisions about who we're not going to extend the golden rule to, is we use a much rougher and readier formula. Basically it's just like, if you're my enemy, if you're my rival — if you're not my friend, if you're not in my family — I'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you. We all do that, and you see it all over the world. You see it in the Middle East: people who, from Gaza, are firing missiles at Israel. They wouldn't want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, "Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category." The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, "Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves." So, it's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world's trouble. And it's natural to do that. So, the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not, by itself, going to bring us universal love. It's not going to save the world. Now, there's one piece of good news I have that may save the world. Okay. Are you on the edges of your seats here? Good, because before I tell you about that good news, I'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain. So, I hope I've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world. It's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about. It's just a quick introduction to game theory. This won't hurt. Okay. It's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. If you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies, the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation. And if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies, it's a zero-sum situation. So, what do those terms mean? Basically, a zero-sum game is the kind you're used to in sports, where there's a winner and a loser. So, their fortunes add up to zero. So, in tennis, every point is either good for you and bad for the other person, or good for them, bad for you. Either way, your fortunes add up to zero. That's a zero-sum game. Now, if you're playing doubles, then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you, because every point is either good for both of you — positive, win-win — or bad for both of you, it's lose-lose. That's a non-zero-sum game. And in real life, there are lots of non-zero-sum games. In the realm of economics, say, if you buy something: that means you'd rather have the merchandise than the money, but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise. You both feel you've won. In a war, two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game. It's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them. So, there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life. And you could basically reformulate what I said earlier, about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed, by just saying, well, compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies. The deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels. So, kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic. With zero-sum channels you would expect something else. Okay. So, now you're ready for the good news that I said might save the world. And now I can admit that it might not too, now that I've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff. But it may. And the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness, these webs that can be these channels for compassion. You can go back all the way to the stone age: technological evolution — roads, the wheel, writing, a lot of transportation and communication technologies — has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances. That's the story of civilization. It's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state, the empire, and now here we are in a globalized world. And the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness. You've probably heard the term "interdependence" applied to the modern world. Well, that's just another term for non-zero-sum. If your fortunes are interdependent with somebody, then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them. And you see this all the time in the modern world. You saw it with the recent economic crash, where bad things happen in the economy — bad for everybody, for much of the world. Good things happen, and it's good for much of the world. And, you know, I'm happy to say, I think there's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass. I mean, if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II — look at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs, really without giving it much of a thought — and you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence. Any form of interdependence, or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. So, I think that's good. And the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat. And there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people aren't aware of. For example, probably a lot of American Christians don't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with Muslims halfway around the world, but they really are, because if these Muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it, that's good for Americans, because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten American security. If they get less and less happy, that will be bad for Americans. So, there's plenty of non-zero-sumness. And so, the question is: If there's so much non-zero-sumness, why has the world not yet been suffused in love, peace, and understanding? The answer's complicated. It's the occasion for a whole other talk. Certainly, a couple of things are that, first of all, there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world. And also, sometimes people don't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world. In both of these areas, I think politicians can play a role. This isn't only about religion. I think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships, Economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on, in this regard. And politicians can be aware, and should be aware that, when people around the world are looking at them, are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation — like, say, America, or any other nation — human psychology is such that they use cues like: Do we feel we're being respected? Because, you know, historically, if you're not being respected, you're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum, mutually profitable relationship with people. So, we need to be aware of what kind of signals we're sending out. And some of this, again, is in the realm of political work. If there's one thing I can encourage everyone to do, politicians, religious leaders, and us, it would be what I call "expanding the moral imagination" — that is to say, your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances. This is not the same as compassion, but it's conducive to compassion. It opens the channels for compassion. And I'm afraid we have another good news/bad news story, which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature. That's good, but again we tend to deploy it selectively. Once we define somebody as an enemy, we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes, just naturally. So, if you want to take a particularly hard case for an American: somebody in Iran who is burning an American flag, and you see them on TV. Well, the average American is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person. And if you tell them, "Well, they think America disrespects them and even wants to dominate them, and they hate America. Has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly"? You know, they'll resist that comparison and that's natural, that's human. And, similarly, the person in Iran: when you try to humanize somebody in America who said that Islam is evil, they'll have trouble with that. So, it's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it doesn't naturally go. I think it's worth the trouble because, again, it just helps us to understand. If you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags, it helps to understand what makes them do it. And I think it's good moral exercise. I would say here is where religious leaders come in, because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think. I mean, religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business. It's their great calling right now, to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they're in the same boat. I would just sum up the way things look, at least from this secular perspective, as far as compassion and the golden rule go, by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature. It's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed. And it's going to take real work to change that. But, nobody ever said that doing God's work was going to be easy. Thanks. (Applause)

Oh, I think the play that - the thing that I've written that I'm proudest of is the musical that I wrote with Jeanine Tesori called "Caroline, or Change," which was in New York and on Broadway and has been done all over the country and very successfully. It was in London, won the Olivier Award for best musical at the National Theatre in London. And I think "Caroline" is maybe - I feel proudest of that, of anything I've written. My new play, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures," had a very successful run at the Public Theater this past year, and I'm working on new - a couple of new productions of that play. And I think it's a - it's sort of a big and dark and interesting new thing.

I've been seeing photographs and talking to people and trying to video whenever possible. It is very hard to even reach the area right now. The aftershocks - we're talking about 230 aftershocks. There are even (unintelligible). I saw that, throughout the day, the roads are completely destroyed. And the commercial areas - basically the heart of the city - is absolutely destroyed. I know of a person that has a business there and has no way of even reaching to the it's because area rubble. And it was - she's completely - in complete despair trying to see if there's anything left of her business.

Well, you know, we've been stymied by politics for the last four years or at least two of the four years, and the dynamics may change in January. On the other hand, some of the realities are still with us. The Senate is somewhat more Democratic, with the election of two new members, who'll be up 55 out of the 100. The House is going to remain Republican, and although Democrats picked up a few seats, the dynamics are largely unchanged in both chambers. And so unless there's a real wakeup call for the leaders, I think we've got a problem.

Well, what we're interested in, really, and we're continuing to report, is the overall national sludge policy. What we found interesting about this study is that you have researchers backed by government funding operating on the assumption that sludge is good enough to eat. And what we found was that this was indicative, I guess you could say, of a broader policy aimed at promoting and finding broader uses of sewage sludge. There are these different classes, and I understand the arguments back and forth on Class B, Class A, etc, etc. But, you know, at root, all this material that we're talking about in this particular case comes from a waste water treatment plant in Baltimore. Like every other city, it takes in tens of thousands of organic pollutants, heavy metals, pathogens, PCBs, etc. It sends them to processes. This fertilizer we're talking about is a more highly treated form. However, at root, nobody can say on any given day what exactly is in this stuff. CHIDEYA; Well, John, thanks a lot.

Well, I think, Mos Def is reflective of a lot of people who want to be seen as being able to speak on issues just beyond what they do for a living. I mean we see this all the time with athletes who are asked of their opinions on things. And there's no reason to believe that these people have anything intelligent to say. But we listen to them all the time. We give them a lot of credibility and putting them on shows like this, only adds to the confusion. Now, you know, as a black scholar who engages in scholarship, I can't help but shake my head sometimes when I see Cornel West, the man from whom I have a tremendous amount of respect, and other black scholars who continually get -put on television and radio programs to speak their mind. And there are others like us who had just as much to say, some of which is probably more intelligent and certainly more accessible to the masses, often get shut out. And so what Cornel West does, particularly in - and this needs to be put in context, he is an Obama supporter. He has endorsed Obama and is working on behalf of his election, you know.

No, that's why I want my one shot at the end so I can end on a positive note on David Obey, but I've lost that chance now. I love David Obey because he was a very serious old-fashioned legislator. He could be very ornery. He could be ornery about his opponents, ornery about the press, but he was an old fashioned progressive who cared a lot about using the tools you have to create a little bit more social justice. And he was an equal opportunity, ornery guy. I was told that a reporter asked him, are you dropping out because of your difficult relations with the press. And he replied, what makes you think you're that important?

I'll take the food for thought. I'm a member of the International Spa Association. That's a pretty high-end spa group. And that market's OK, but other trade shows I would do, people would walk up and they'd say, oh, is this a black skin-care company? And I'm thinking, well, everybody has skin, irrespective of who you are - because they see me there. Even though the woman on the cover, model is - she's kind of every woman. She's actually Filipino and German, but people can't tell her background. But when they see my face there, they assume it's a company just for African-American skin, which is not the case.

Well, you know, I never really thought about it when I was overseas because when I drove this car, I was in a sea of other similarly sized cars. But now that I've had the car in Los Angeles, I must say, you know, when a big pickup truck comes up behind you, it crosses your mind. For the record, the company says these cars are incredibly safe and durable. It's built - the skeleton of it is what's called a tridion safety cell, and that's this black part, this sort of black yoke that you see around the car. It's constructed in such a way that it will absorb all kinds of high-energy impact and distribute those forces around the cabin. Still, you know, you are pretty much hanging out in the elements in this car. It's somewhere between a car and a motorcycle.

And I should clarify - Otis is the name I decided on when I made it a personal pet project to round Otis up and bring him to the shelter. This led to several days' worth of Coyote and Road Runner situations, including one that had me sprinting down the back alley with a leash, a jar of peanut butter and a schnauzer just a few yards ahead of me. I had a lot of time to focus on this task since my wife had moved across the country to Washington, and I was still looking for a job out there. After day two or three, she gently suggested that perhaps the Otis mission had just a little bit to do with the stress of a job search, and I conceded she may have been onto something. A neighbor and I finally rounded Otis up, and I confirmed after repeated calls to the shelter that he found a happy home with a family somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. But I hate to tell you, America's only elected dogcatcher did not get that same happy ending. It turns out it is against Vermont law for a town to elect its own dogcatcher without state approval.

Oh, for sure, for sure. That's what happens there. I mean, if anybody actually went to this forum, it's on a day to day basis, the kind of things that go on. Most of them - I mean, I'll be the first to admit they're politically incorrect. A lot of them can be in bad taste, but it's - I mean, this is a forum that Abraham chose to be a part of. These very same people that make these jokes in any other section, in any other scenario would have been the first one to, you know, jump to it. But, it was such a shame that he chose to reach out in that section. I mean, it's a horrible shame. And like I said, we would have done something a lot sooner if anybody could have. It was completely anonymous. There was no information. It just took one kid to remember, one of the thousands and millions of people in this forum, he recognized him and remembered, hey, you know, he put his number out there a year ago, and he dug that up from a year in the past. And from a different context, the very fact that Abraham was on that forum - I mean, if we had found - that kid had found that number sooner, the very fact that he was on that forum could have actually saved his life.

The economy begins to erode much earlier than that when, in fact, President Mugabe was following the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank with structural adjustment. In pursuing that path, he antagonized broad sections of his population who then started to rise and challenge him, including challenging constitutional reforms he was proposing. In the face of this defeat, President Mugabe, who, up until that point, have had a close working relationship with the white farmers, then joined hands with those who had been demanding a land redistribution and moved against the white farmers in a very, very calculated move in order to secure support for his continued stay in office. And that it is, in fact, the case that the cronies, that his close allies were some of the chief beneficiaries of this redistribution.

Consider the case of General Mehdi al-Gharwari, a former high-ranking Interior Ministry official. Iraqi prosecutors suspect he was one of the masterminds behind an infamous prison in the basement of one of the ministry's buildings known as Site 4. During the sectarian violence of 2005 and 2006, hundreds of mostly Sunni detainees were tortured there. Before investigators could formally bring charges against the general, the current minister of the interior invoked 136B. The general is now dividing his time between the Green Zone and Cairo -untouchable, a free man. Judge Faiq says he has been campaigning against the law for years.

This email from Selene(ph) Jupiter, Florida. The pundits are going to say the decision opens up huge concerns for anyone who registers and uses an online account or a social networking site or anything else, because that violation of a site's terms of use can lead to a similar fate. I don't agree. I don't think this case will be used as a precedent towards those ends, rather I believe the jury made their decision based on the fact that intentional psychological harm was inflicted by Drew and her accomplices on Megan, but they could not hang their hats on a law that prohibits such an act because none exists. Therefore they hung their hats on the violation of MySpace service and accordingly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That's it. That's what it comes down to. So, Andy I guess the question I know people are worried about if this is a precedent. Are they right to be?

I'm actually in Egypt a few weeks ago, and I was kind of on an independent fact-finding mission. And we were actually looking for a lot of the same questions that are being discussed as far as women's rights and the currently elected parliament. And actually on the first day that parliament was there, on January 23rd, we were actually there in the opening session of parliament, outside, and we were discussing some of these issues. And we kind of felt that there was a large degree of skepticism from many of the women activists that were there as far as change occurring in the system towards reforming women's rights and actually advancing women's rights and women's representation in parliament.

That's exactly the point, Ira, you put your finger right on it, there's something unknown. It's not like the body is the experiment of nature with a natural virus like we've done with polio and with measles and with other virus vaccines that we've been so successful in developing. The body's natural response serves as, you know, your first solid experiment. The body already tells you that it can make a good immune response. Unfortunately with HIV, that doesn't happen and we have to figure out why. So, we don't have the experiment of nature to help us along, because the experiment of nature has actually failed. The body does not do a good job in protecting against HIV.

Well, there will be some hangover from this drought. There's no doubt. And we've seen that already with the carryover in, say, the southeastern part of the United States, which was really the story last year with Atlanta, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico in particular, and Texas being the number one cattle-producing state. This year it shifted with a very low snowpack situation in the Rockies, which is - we're feeling some of those effects now. This next winter is critical for two things. One, we need a much better snowpack to refill reservoirs because the demand has been so high this summer. If we had gotten a cooler summer, low-demand summer, that might have eked us out an extra year. Now we're much more reliant, I think, on a big snowpack here. And secondly, we need the pattern to shift for the rest of the Midwest and plains that can irrigate to get those soils saturated during our downtime, to recharge our batteries going into next growing season.

For that same spirit is embodied in the community here at Fort Hood, and in the many wounded who are still recovering. As was already mentioned in those terrible minutes during the attack, soldiers made makeshift tourniquets out of their clothes. They braved gunfire to reach the wounded and ferried them back to safety in the backs of cars and a pick-up truck. One young soldier, Amber Bahr, was so intent of helping others, she did not realize for some time that she herself had been shot in the back. Two police officers, Mark Todd and Kim Munley, saved countless lives by risking their own. One medic, Francisco de la Serna, treated both Officer Munley and the gunman who shot her.

Yes, yes, yes. Well, you first have to make the star. So as the gas gets cooler, the gas condenses, clumps together, gravitation acts on it. And at some point you kind of have a gas ball there that is dense enough that it can - as it - and then it keeps falling together based on gravity, and that heats it up in the very core, whereas the outsides are still rather cold. And then at some point, nuclear fusion starts to burn and to ignite, and only then we actually call it a star. But you have to get to that stage. You have to make it small enough and dense enough in the center that hydrogen burning, so hydrogen gets converted to helium, can actually begin.

It's a fascinating thing that you bring up. One of the things that I think my father was most excited about when - you know, medicine is always moving forward, and no one can be a master of everything, was that there are things that I do that certainly he did not do. And I think - I know he was looking forward to the opportunity to let me take those things over. We had many conversations about this, that he was going to scale some things back because, quote-unquote, the younger guys, being me, were here and ready to do those things, and led to some really great dinner-table conversation.

You know, this book doesn't deal with the nitty-gritty of the treatment. This is from years beyond. The first book, "Time on Fire," has a lot of that information and stuff that I did, from dancing in my room, to putting notes on the door not to be disturbed, to insisting on the privacy to have sex with my girlfriend when I was, you know, institutionalized for months at a time. This book is really about the journey away. You know, it takes place from being cured on, and starts with me getting cast in the Broadway production of "Six Degrees of Separation," which was my first real, big, comeback thing. So, the happy part of that is, you know, I know Neal wanted to concentrate on the misery, but it really does find its way to some great beauty and a fantastic marriage and relationship.

Bill Kling was a 26-year-old student in Minnesota when he started a small college radio station that would become Minnesota Public Radio. He would go on to launch Garrison Keillor and "A Prairie Home Companion," Marketplace and PRI. He figured out that listeners would buy CDs and T-shirts and founded a separate company for that. He also helped launch NPR in 1970. At the end of this month, Bill Kling steps down as the president and CEO of MPR and American Public Media - not to retire, but to take on a new mission. As local newspapers cut staff and coverage, Kling sees both an opportunity and an obligation for public radio stations. If you'd like to talk to Bill Kling about the future of public media, we want to hear from you, 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Bill Kling joins us now from the studios at Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. Nice to have you on the program.

It sure is. But watch what he's not saying, and that is that the war in Iraq is a mistake, or that we should be pulling out of there. What he's doing is very cleverly getting behind the national sentiment - sort of, three in five Americans really turning against the war. But since he's been, you know, very clearly ideologically behind the war, he's saying right. What I'm objecting to is the way the Bush administration implemented things. And there he's really got a solid backing of the American public behind him. People are split on what to do about it. Are we better off staying there or pulling out? But the people seem to be solidifying behind the view that it is become something of a debacle.

It was really hard for me to bring it up with my family - even harder than to bring it up with complete strangers, you know, because they were part of that experience. And what's really become amazing is that once I did start talking about it, I realized that my family did not feel the way that I thought they felt about me. They really supported me and loved me, and they were part of that experience with me because they wanted me to go on with my life. And they thought it was the best thing, and I appreciate that they were there for me. The difficult part of my experience was the silence around it. It wasn't that I felt that people outside in the world would judge me as much - as much as I felt that I couldn't talk about it with the people who were closest to me in the world.

And, again, the way she relates it is so funny because it's just egg whites. And she starts to have visions, though, of this egg white creature finding its way down the stairs, through the kitchen, you know, out into the streets of Tribeca, you know. Probably Robert De Niro's going to see it and wonder who the hell they hired to be their pastry chef. And she runs downstairs and finds Gerry Hayden, who was the chef du cuisine at the time at the restaurant. And she's just screaming, doesn't know what to do, doesn't know what to do. And he just looks at her as--he can't believe she's asking him this question and says, `Turn off the mixer,' which she had forgotten in her moment of panic, which again she knew this, but she was so freaked out--was that if you just turn off the mixer, this would--the volumizing would cease. And she had forgotten that, just as she forgot that if you leave egg whites to whip endlessly, they'll go way beyond what most people have probably seen and they'll go to, you know, eight times--I think eight times their volume is the--for the factor. So she runs upstairs and shuts it off. And the kind of funny PS to the story is, you know, Gerry and some of the line cooks come running up to help her because she seemed so alarmed, like the world was ending. And they all just start laughing, and it became this very funny sort of in-joke there. And then years later she and Gerry reconnected at the James Beard Awards in New York and got married. So that's...

OK. One of the things--the story that came out when this mission was opened up was that it had this beauty salon, it had this fancy gym, and it was the Hilton for the homeless. Well, the gym isn't even open yet, but the guys there were so excited about this gymnasium and the basketball team that they're going to have when the gym is functional, that as I was walking by at about 10:00 at night, a couple of them--a guy named Taj Kennedy(ph), another guy named Philip Powers(ph)--they were standing there playing an imaginary game of basketball with each other. By the way, Alex, the basketball here is referred to as the pill. And they got in an argument about an imaginary foul in an imaginary game of basketball. Unidentified Man #1: All right. Throw me the pill.

Well, you know, he was back. In June he actually made an announcement that there will be a new what will be called Cloud Storage for iTunes. What this means is essentially you'll be able to store your music and your movies online and access them from anywhere. So yes, there seems to be a plan moving forward. But here's the thing about Steve Jobs. This is the guy who took all of the record companies who were afraid of the digital space, he got them all together and got them to join up on iTunes. And he's probably been working as well with some of the film companies and the other content providers. As we move forward in this space, as more and more people go to the Web, go online for their movies, their film, their music, it's getting more and more competitive.

I agree partly with what Mr. Nye is saying. And I agree killing civilians does radicalize moderates, but so does showing a soft hand and showing that the radicals - like Hezbollah - have momentum. That radicalizes moderates, too, in the Arab-Muslim world. I saw this firsthand in Iraq. When the insurgency has momentum and looks like it can attack with impunity, the moderates begin to bet on the insurgency and say well, at least they're reliable. At least they have the upper hand. The Americans or the Israelis or whoever it may be look weak, I should bet on the extremists. And so, this dilemma, this scenario that Mr. Nye is describing actually cuts both ways, unfortunately.

Also the issue that neighborhood watch was designed to build community and bring people together and get them to work together, and it's very difficult - and to work with the police. And the assumption that folks want to work with the police and want to report crimes to the police is questionable in many neighborhoods today. We have a sort of growing movement, a no-snitch culture, for example, that says don't work with the police, they've been bad to us in the past. And so there's a lot complications with the program in higher-crime neighborhoods. Therefore, it has in practice turned out to be a program designed largely in middle-class neighborhoods, largely white neighborhoods where they're trying to defend their neighborhood against any kinds of declines or inclusions that may occur.

Well, I went to Greece years ago, kind of a - as an extended tourist, and ended up teaching college English and humanities on a Navy base and - actually, a number of bases - back when there was plenty of money in the military to pay for tuition. And I worked mostly in a small Navy communications station. And it was a small program, so I was really the only English teacher for a long time. I had amazing students who actually thanked me quite a lot because they had never have the experience of writing or reading literature, and appreciated it. But mostly, I realized that English is the kind of subject that takes experience and years to sink in, literature and even writing. And so most of my students who are in the military got transferred. I didn't get to hear thanks later unless they happen to be transferred back, or civilians. And then sometimes they'd say, do you remember you said six years ago in that class? So I think English teachers get thanked in the long term because it's experiential. It's not just factual.

Sherif was to become the first ambassador to Iraq from an Arab country when he was kidnapped on Saturday. In the statement, al-Qaeda in Iraq said the envoy represented a tyrannical government allied to the enemies of Islam. They said his death was punishment for being an ambassador of infidels. Sherif was formerly based in Egypt's Israeli Embassy. The group posted a video, as you mentioned, showing the blindfolded hostage, but it did not show the killing. Now this group has beheaded several hostages in the past. It's headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the most wanted men in Iraq. And it has to be said when it was announced that he had been captured by this group and no demands had been made for his release, it was pretty clear that he was going to be killed fairly quickly.

I think while the administration probably wouldn't like to hear it characterized this way, I would say that these terms of reference are structurally similar to what we did in the framework a decade or so ago, which is to say that the idea here is still a step-by-step quid pro quo, where the North Koreans give up their nuclear program and in exchange, they get certain benefits. I thought a decade ago that was the best way to deal with this problem, and I think it's still the best way and I think we're headed down the right path. Whether we'll get all the way down the path is another matter.

And, of course, Norbit's true love in the movie, played by pencil-thin Thandie Newton, had to be light-skinned with long, straight hair. It's another easy jab around color and there's still widespread belief that light skin is more desirable. But then again, maybe Eddie and Charles Murphy did know what they were doing. If we believe that humor is our salvation in times of tragedy, maybe he was just trying to do his job, looking for points of pain and trying to make them funny. He failed, but still. Maybe that's why the plus-size black woman in front of me in the theater who guffawed loudly surprised me. She told me after the movie that she was actually disappointed and just trying to make the best of a bad situation. It was the end of a long, hard work day and she just needed a good laugh.

So if you think you know the answer or, oh, the answers, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Besides Alexander Haig, the last secretary of state to try but never be successful in an attempt at political office. So in the meantime, as we mentioned just a moment ago, the Senate has passed the tax extensions, the Bush-era tax extensions - overwhelmingly, 81 votes for, in the end. But it's interesting. There are proposals to change this in the House of Representatives. The minority leader, John Boehner, says ah, wait a minute, it's a package deal. But is he talking to Democrats, or is he talking to conservatives?

Absolutely. In Mississippi, casinos have to be anchored in the water, so they're all barges. And there are 12 of them along the coast, and they all sustained heavy damage. One of them actually, The President, was ripped from its mooring and tossed across US 90 into a Holiday Inn. I spoke to the CEO of Treasure Bay yesterday and he said that not only are these people going to have to rebuild their homes and their lives, a lot of them are going to have to do it without jobs because those casinos employ 15 to 16,000 people on the coast. That's direct jobs, and it's hard to estimate how many jobs are indirect from that.

Yeah. Those things are all true, and in the long run that bodes ill. And so, you know, this is presumably why, in the last few years, Mr. Medvedev, who's I noticed, being left increasingly out of this conversation, he is still the president of Russia. Mr. Medvedev hasn't made much of this modernization campaign, sort of trying to point out that Russia actually doesn't have anything to sell other than raw materials and oil in particular. So, you know, that's certainly a challenge. As you mentioned, demographics and health are a challenge right now in Russia. It has negative population growth. And, you know, in the long run, to keep the economy moving, you have to have healthy people, as well, to work. And this has become a huge problem, as well, that Russia knows it has to attack. You know, in terms of oil peaking, they still have a lot of oil. And, you know, two or three years ago, they surpassed Saudi Arabia as one of the world's - as the world's largest exporter of oil. Oil prices are, you know, up near $100 a barrel again. So, you know, they're - I think, they'll be OK in the near term, but in the longer term, you're right. They had - they do have to find something else for their economy to do, and that is obviously a clear problem that Mr. Putin feels he himself must come back to solve for Russia.

The vast majority of those are already covered. That's one of the reasons that this is recommended, that those - that that's not really been an issue. That's obviously not a preventive health care issue. So that was not within the confines of what this was looking at, but that - but, in fact, that's one of - that's been one of the arguments for many years among women's advocates, that often, birth control is not covered, and yet men's erectile dysfunction drugs are. Viagra was covered, I believe, within a year of its being approved by the FDA. It was covered by something like 80 percent of all health insurers.

Well, no group is claiming responsibility. Usually, this kind of suicide bombing is blamed on Sunni extremists. The Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki had been cracking down on the Sunni Arab militias that had helped the U.S. military turn around the insurgency over the past two years. And many people had speculated there might be a backlash, and that this string of bombings this month could be it. There was an interesting comment today from General David Petraeus at a House committee hearing in Washington. He said that a network of Tunisian extremists, coming into Iraq through Syria, had been responsible for some of the recent bombings.

Dawn Turner Trice, a columnist who covers race relations at the Chicago Tribune, with us from Bosco Productions in Chicago today, And Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York Law School, also a history professor at Rutgers and author of the National Book Award-winning book, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," with us from our bureau in New York. Up next, home for the holidays: grandparents, kids, significant others. "Ask Amy's" Amy Dickinson on the sometimes tricky question of sleeping arrangements. If you'd like to join us, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the Talk of the Nation from NPR News.

Yes, sir. Thank you. I'm a criminal court judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I've seen numerous cases where there very much was reasonable doubt. And yet, the defense put their client on the stand, and their story was so outrageous. It was so fantastic that I was left with the impression that they must be guilty. There's no other reasonable explanation. And so as, you know, you look at the Sandusky case, eight accusers and all these facts, and you wonder, is there any story he could possibly author that wouldn't sound so fantastic and outrageous that wouldn't further convict him?

Yeah. Rich, I was going to say, it was two things. First of all, we don't know who edited this video. Andrew Breitbart said that he showed it as he received it. So, I mean, that could be a truth or - it could be a lie. But we don't even know who he did it. But Donna, I want to point the one thing that Rich said. I mean, again, you hear this thing over and over again, about a post-racial America, and we've heard this in January 28, 2009. That must drive you crazy, because there's more talk about race now in this post-racial era than we've ever had before, it seems.

How do you like your coffee - black with sugar, lots of milk, no sugar, hazelnut flavored, not so much? Well, how about your iced coffee? Me, I like a lot of ice. I can't stand it when a barista drops a few measly ice cubes into my cup, which melt before I've even finished the coffee. Make that drink really cold, I say. Give me some ice to chew on now. So I was doubly perplexed when I heard that a woman named Stacy Pincus has filed a class-action suit against Starbucks, claiming the coffee chain is cheating customers by putting too much ice in the iced coffee. Perplexed first because of my aforementioned preference for extra icy drinks, and second because - well, because this is ridiculous, isn't it? Are we such ineffective communicators that these days we can't just say not too much ice, please. Thanks so much. I appreciate that. Or in Starbucks lingo, light ice, please. Last time I looked, the Starbucks baristas were human beings who might just be won over by a polite request accompanied by a smile.

Only too vividly remember that line, as a matter of fact. And you know what? It was a great convention line, it was a great campaign line, and when I was director of speech writing for him, I was one of the people arguing he ought to stick to that line. But I lost that fight, and unfortunately in terms of policy, he chose to go another direction. And I think one of the things you've got to remember when you're putting together a speech like this tonight, or, you know, for anybody giving an acceptance speech is you'd better learn - you'd better decide to live with whatever it is you say that you're going to use as that central theme. I think it cost Bush his re-election in part, because he reneged on that promise. And it was so central to his message that it cost him dearly politically. So I think McCain has to - any candidate has to be careful what they promise, what they say, how they paint their vision, because you've got to live with it not only through the campaign, but through four years of a presidency.

Well, on to something very different and more fitting for a holiday, we received quite a bit of thanks for an awesome tip on how to peel lots of garlic at once. It involves pressing down hard on a head of garlic and then shaking it between two metal bowls, and the garlic is peeled in seconds. And it appears just in the nick of time for Heather Hathaway(ph) of Milwuakee, Wisconsin. She writes: as the story was playing, I was caramelizing my turkey giblets. Just as Guy shook his two bowls, I did the same with, I admit, a fair degree of skepticism and – voila – perfectly peeled cloves to put in my stock.

In August her son fled a Boko Haram attack on her hometown in neighboring Borno state and escaped to Mubi, but the attack on Mubi forced them to find yet another refuge, again trekking many miles to this camp in Yola. Hasan, like thousands of others, is appealing to the Nigerian government and military to put an end to the fighting and restore peace. Boko Haram's most notorious attack in April was the mass abduction of more than 200 girls from their boarding school. Now boys are again the target. The group, whose name means Western education is the sinful, says boys should receive only a Koranic education. Some have had their throats slit as they slept in their dorm beds. Girls are warned to give up their books, go home and get married. The Army announced last month that the missing schoolgirls would soon be released as part of a deal with Boko Haram. The group's leader tauntingly insists the captives have been married off to his fighters after converting to Islam. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Yola.

Yeah, it's a very dramatic development because the protestors decided to pull out from the Green Zone. And the Green Zone, it's home to the foreign embassies, the cabinet, the parliament. So they decided to pull out at a request from the influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And they are giving the politicians another chance to meet this month for - not just for changing the faces of the new ministers, but they need to feel great improvement, especially at the economic level. Otherwise, they threatened that they will come back to the Green Zone to stage an open sit-in. And also, they threatened to topple the three presidencies. I mean here the president of the republic, the prime minister and the speaker of Parliament.

It's an interesting life. I did it for three years under President Bush, and it's kind of a unique kind of journalism you perform in the White House press corps. You're kind of bubbled up, as we say, most of the time. You know, when you cover most beats, you kind of have the run of the place. If you cover Congress you move around the Capitol a lot and through the various House offices. But at the White House, you're kind of penned up in that White House briefing room, and you spend a lot of time trying to email and call White House aides to try to find out what's going on, and that's a pretty arduous task. So it's kind of a bubbled-up world, and obviously, you travel with the president, you know, almost all of over the globe, and so you're kind of a part of this traveling show, if you will. So it's an interesting life, but a pretty unique one journalistically. And it kind of - in some ways can be limiting journalistically, too, if you're not careful.

Well, for example, there's going to be, in creating this Gulf, there's a Gulf Opportunity Zone, which is taking the areas of the three states that were hit hardest and allowing firms to write off additional funds if they invest in the area. And one of the metrics is to allow for twice as much expensing as before if the firms invest there, from 200,000 rather than 100,000. There's also, I think, very important when they write the contracts for their infrastructure rebuilding to set the time lines and provide incentives for firms--construction firms to get the jobs done in time. This was a technique used in California after the Northridge earthquake and it was very successful.

It's not a cabinet level post. It's not, as you said, a household name; not up there with, say, Karl Rove or Karen Hughes or even Dan Bartlett, the communications director. But it does continue this litany, this sense that the team is departing the game. But now it's spreading over into this area that has been seen as, if you will, the strong suit of the administration, at least within the administration it so regarded - and that's national security, counterterrorism, homeland security. We still have Condoleezza Rice in place at State. We still have Steve Hadley as the national security advisor, but now we see his deputy, Fran Townsend, stepping away, not necessarily to take something else that is a terribly compelling and clear, immediate job. She's been looking for some opportunities. I guess we can assume now that she has found an opportunity in the private sector. But that all contributes to a sense of unraveling, or at least to a sense that the players are going to have to change and the president is probably going to need an index card just to walk into some of his meetings.

Well, I think that there's a certain amount of unity amongst the Republicans, I would say, coming out of the 2004 elections. And I think the unity started to fray over two issues closer to the end, obviously, over Iraq. But even early on I would actually point to something that actually the president did that I think began to sew some of the seeds of discontent amongst Republicans. And that was his attempt to reform Social Security, which, from my perspective as a conservative, I mean I thought was something of a valid attempt. But he didn't even seem to want to put down a marker as to what kind of a reform would look like, just sort of leaving it to the Congress.

They take the bombs off of the missiles. They disassemble the bombs, which means you take away the outer casing and the explosives from the actual nuclear material. Then you've got a hunk of highly enriched uranium metal, then they chop that up into essentially metal shavings, which they roast in an oven, and then they convert it into a gas form and they put it in a pipe, which then joins with a pipe that has much less enriched uranium and it mixes together and makes uranium with the enrichment that you need for a nuclear power plant, which is much less than the enrichment that you need for a nuclear bomb.

When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car? Here's the problem facing Homer. And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain. So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory. If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car. It's named after Latin for "seahorse," which it resembles. And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons. So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food. So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here. And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click. So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment. And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location. And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here. So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, "Where am I now within my environment?" Place cells are also being recorded in humans. So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring. And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town. And place cells in their hippocampi would fire, become active, start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town. So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment? Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important. So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat's in. And when you expand the box, the firing location expands. The one below likes to fire whenever there's a wall close by to the south. And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box. So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you — extended buildings and so on — is particularly important for the hippocampus. And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around. So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around. And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart. So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around. We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments — or indeed, where your car would be. So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember. And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was. But on some trials, we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell. In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment. And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out. It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern. That guides you back to the location that you want to remember. But we also know where we are through movement. So if we take some outbound path — perhaps we park and we wander off — we know because our own movements, which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back. And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell. Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells. But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid. And if you record from several grid cells — shown here in different colors — each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells. So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one. So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment — a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles. And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment. Do people have grid cells? Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between. So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal. And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats. So back to Homer. He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked. And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells. He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells. Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire. And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car. And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there. Maybe it's been towed. But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it. So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example. So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them. So if this was happening, your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space. Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing. They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example. So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains. Thank you very much. (Applause)

It's really been amazing. Of course we've had all of these months to do it. I remember I was a teenager when Ruffian broke down. She was the filly who broke down in a match race against Foolish Pleasure. And she was put down the next day, but even then there was the same kind of outpouring of emotion. It's something that animals do, particularly thoroughbred racehorses who try their hearts out and who have a tendency to grab, you know, mostly little girls but not always, sometimes big girls and sometime even men. It's something that animals in particular, horses in specific, really grab in us.

Well, it is going to take time. But it also needs to be said that China is a much larger country than, say, the United States, where our per capita greenhouse gas emissions per person - pollution per person - is still four times larger than China's, 10 times larger than India's. So that needs to be a part of the mix because China is still developing. It still has about a hundred million people who are under China's poverty line. This is not to say that China is not a dangerous emitter and polluter. It is, and it's people's awareness of this. And their calls for a better life are China's primary driver. But it remains true, too, that per capita, China is poorer and is not nearly as wasteful and is not nearly as big a greenhouse gas emitter.

Well, it is an interesting moment, here. And we're going to hear later this afternoon from President Rouhani himself. His foreign minister, who's the former Iranian ambassador to the U.N., has already been behind the scenes, working here. He's been meeting with different foreign ministers. And he's going to meet in a group setting on Thursday with Secretary of State John Kerry. That was another announcement that President Obama said in this speech, was that he's asked Kerry to pursue the possibility of nuclear talks with Iran. Now, these aren't going to be one-on-one meetings, necessarily. This is going to be in a group. They call it the permanent five Security Council Members plus Germany, the P5+1. That's the group that's been negotiating with Iran over its suspect nuclear program.

From NPR News, this is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Joe Palca. In today's issue of the journal Science, scientists have published what they say is the most detailed map yet of human DNA diversity. That is how we differ and are the same as each other. To make the diversity map, the researchers took DNA samples from more than 900 people in 51 populations and looked at how their DNA differed. Having that information allowed them to do a number of things including figuring out how different populations related, how early human populations migrated out of Africa, and where to look for disease-related genes.

That's exactly what I was just saying in relation to everyday things that we do. Here I am. I'm sitting and talking into this microphone, chatting with you. My hands are going in all kinds of different directions. I'm taking notes. I'm using the fingers in my hands. There are bones and tissues and nerves. And robots are not - are pretty much unable to do most of that. Robots can speak with you sometimes, but we are such incredible creatures. I can walk down to the bank and get some cash out of a cash machine. Robots can't do that yet. These are just normal, everyday things that we do, and the best that a robot can do in many respects is vacuum a floor or scrub a window. And so we are very much far away from the multiple, multitasking human being perspective.

Exactly. So it could take weeks or months to convene people from up and down the East Coast. In recent years, there was a trick that the Democrats under Harry Reid began using under President George W. Bush, and that was the comment of these pro forma tricky sessions where they convened and then almost immediately adjourned so that the Senate would never technically be in recess. And so recent presidents, including President Obama, have said: This isn't a real recess. I'm going to go ahead and make the appointment. This panel of the D.C. Appeals Court essentially said: No, that's not the case. You can't do it. It's too much chicanery. It's been a long-standing practice. And if this ruling stands, it will be quite a change.

No. I think the only person who can get real traction on this issue is Arlen Specter because I think how this issue plays out depends on whether Senator Specter holds these hearings and ends up saying something like the following: Look, yes we need to change the laws but the President doesn't have the authority to do this all by himself. And there need to be some restrictions so we know our liberties are protected. If Arlen Specter does that, he drains a lot of partisanship out of this and creates the opportunity for a real debate. And President Bush is in a difficult position because if he says no, no, I already have all this power, then he moves to, I think, his weakest argument which is the President can be unconstrained in time of war. Even people who care passionately about protecting us, a lot of them don't believe the President should be unconstrained in his power.

Hi. I just had a comment. I was really surprised to hear that the statistics are showing that whites who are better educated are feeling more like the dream is still alive. Ive had the opposite experience that, you know, we were always brought up in my family, were a very multicultural family and that if you work hard, if you do the right thing, if you care about each other and you're respectful and you care about the environment, everything will work out. You'll improve your circumstances and those of other people. And its just not panned out. I think I feel more akin to the children of the '60s and the great disillusionment they wound up having with the kind of flower child movement than people in my own generation because I did all of the right things. I worked in high school. I went to college. I worked hard. I made great grades. I got full scholarships. And I am 35 years old and not able to find employment where I can afford to pay my mortgage. So it's very like, I feel very disillusioned with America and the American ideals where you almost feel lost and like you grew up in a culture where you were just kind of fed a load of malarkey and lied to. It's almost like when you find out that Santa Claus doesnt really exist.

It's pretty conclusive, I'd say, in terms of good news for the White House, for the president, for The Trump Organization. So, you know, I'm sure that Giuliani and Sekulow and the president's lawyers are very, very pleased with what's come out today, you know? The fact that - the only negative thing I would say - that one could say is, you know, the president has been somewhat equivocal about whether or not Russia interfered, you know? Mueller concludes that they did interfere. So if the president's going to accept the rest of the conclusions from the Mueller report, I think that's something he's got to accept as well. And, obviously, no collusion, no coordination with the Trump campaign. And as for the obstruction, you know, it's a pretty big issue. And for - the special counsel made the decision not to make a call on that. One could say that, perhaps, he felt it was too big, maybe not sure. It would not be unusual in a very high-profile case for main Justice to overrule a lower-level prosecutor in terms of this kind of call. And I've been very consistent in supporting the department, generally, with respect to this investigation. I've got a great deal of faith in Mueller. I've got faith in Rosenstein. I've got faith in Will Barr.

No, that's the point. No matter how many people you have in the study, by picking people who choose to do a certain thing, you're not looking at them at random. You're going to say we're going to look at every woman who takes hormone therapy or we're going to look at every man who runs five miles a day. And as soon as you do that, you select out a certain type of person who has a lot of things in common and a lot of things different to those people who don't run five miles a day or don't take hormone therapy. So it turns out, for instance, that women who take hormone replacement therapy are very different from women who don't, and they're different in a lot of different ways. They tend to be wealthier. They tend to be more health conscious. They tend to be better educated. They tend to have better, you know, doctors who are more interested in prevention.

Yeah, you know, Michel, I think what's important to keep in mind here is not just the election of Donald Trump but the fact that he has emboldened an entire subset of the American populace who now think that it's OK to bring Nazi flags to presidential rallies. We had a middle school in Royal Oak, Mich., where middle schoolers were chanting build the wall, build the wall. We've had numerous cases of alleged hate crimes against the American-Muslim community, predominantly Muslim women who wear the hijab, the headscarf, who have been targeted in places like Columbus, Ohio, Queens, N.Y., Gwinnett, Ga., Minnesota, Michigan, San Diego State University. Even my own sister who wears the hijab in the suburbs of Chicago, she has been verbally accosted twice by men in cars, and she was physically accosted by a woman in a store who elbowed her sharply as she walked across the aisle. And so, you know, for many minorities, people of color and other disenfranchised community, we're fearful and we're concerned that this has emboldened a subset of the American populace who's now going to lash out against these communities.

But then there's a proactive side, which is to engage constructively in some of the ways that you had mentioned in your setup, that insurers--their roots really go back to loss prevention and managing risk, not only passively waiting for losses to happen and paying claims, but, you know, getting involved in managing the risks. And so that could range from looking directly at emissions reductions and how that might come about, but also, you know, just better science, better data. We're flying partially blind here, the industry is, in the sense of not knowing all it could know about the current state of affairs and what the outlook is.

Thanks for taking my call, and I'm so excited about this topic. I'm an African-American female married to a Caucasian male, and we have a six-year-old son who blatantly wants to identify as Caucasian. And it's like - it's heart-wrenching for me, as a mom. It's like he's basically developed this self-concept, this association of African-American as negative, and he tells me all the time I'm white, I'm white. In fact, he told me recently somebody in school told him you're black, and he was like oh, no. And I'm like, that's not nothing bad. So I tried to educate him, but it just remains to be a difficult task in this day and age, and I think it's still hard - oh, go ahead.