Environmentalists in New Jersey and New York are fighting proposals to build offshore terminals to store liquefied natural gas (LNG). Hear why ExxonMobil and private investment firms want the terminals to be built, and why many are concerned about the terminals’ potential impact. David Byer is Water Policy Attorney for ...

Could termite guts hold a solution to global warming? Some scientists think that a better understanding of how termites devour wood so efficiently could eventually allow us to create valuable biofuel. Phil Hugenholtz is head of the Joint Genome Institute’s Microbial Ecology Program and is involved in mapping ...

With the Beijing Olympics underway, everyone’s talking about how air pollution there is affecting athletes’ performances. But how is it affecting Chinese children’s physical and intellectual development? Dr. Frederica Perera, director of Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, joins us to explain how China’s pollution problem may be poisoning ...

As Haiti’s food prices skyrocket, many poor Haitians are resorting to eating mud cakes - the cheapest way to quell hunger in a country whose food import bill will leap 80% this year, the fastest price jump in the world. Rory Carroll is a correspondent for the Guardian.

Judge Juan Guzmán had supported General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup that toppled democratically-elected President Salvador Allende and left thousands of others dead or disappeared. But when in 1998 Judge Guzman was assigned the first criminal cases against Pinochet, what he learned about the past changed his mind about the General, ...

During 2006 and 2007, the Department of Interior awarded over $430 million in small business contracts to corporate giants like Xerox and John Deere. We look into how that happened, and whether that’s part of a larger pattern of directing small business money to large corporations. Lloyd Chapman is president ...

Many women in post-war Liberia are jobless and lack decent housing and medical care. Compounding the problem are the more than 30,000 women and girls who served with fighting forces in Liberia’s recent wars. They were constant targets for rape and sexual violence. Find out how former female Liberian soldiers ...

Georgette Gagnon, Africa program director for Human Rights Watch, gives us an update on the latest from Khartoum. We’ll talk about the ongoing proxy war between Chad and Sudan, and the recent ICC request for a warrant of arrest for Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir on charges of ten ...

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, former leader of the Haitian paramilitary group FRAPH, went on trial earlier this week in New York. But he’s not being tried for his human rights violations – he’s on trial for mortgage fraud! After fleeing Haiti to avoid a warrant for his arrest, he lived a ...

By 2020, it’s estimated that the US will be short 1 million nurses! On Underreported, Suzanne Gordon, of the University of Maryland and UCSF Schools of Nursing, and John Buchanan, Director of the Workplace Research Group at the University of Sydney, discuss how nurse-patient ratios are partly responsible for ...

The world’s weakest and failed states can disrupt the stability of other countries all over the world. The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine have released their fourth annual Failed States Index. Patricia Taft, senior associate at the Fund for Peace, joins us ...

When Francisco Goldman's book The Art of Political Murder was published in the U.S., it had ripple effects in Guatemala, where the book was used to prove points by warring factions in the country's civil war. Nathaniel Popper has written a new article, "The Novelist and the ...

Horseshoe crabs predate dinosaurs by more than 100 million years. They’ve also saved more than a million human lives thanks to a substance in their blood that the medical industry uses to fight infections! Find out why the horseshoe crab population has been in a downward spiral since the mid-1990s, ...

Somalia has been mired in war for 17 years. On Monday night, a peace deal was signed, but some rebel factions have already denounced the deal’s terms. David Shinn is former director of East and Horn of African Affairs for the U.S. State Department. He’s currently adjunct professor at George ...

Last week, Nepal officially abolished its 240-year-old monarchy. Now Nepal’s ex-king is vacating his palace, and the country’s political parties are squabbling over power-sharing in the new government. Journalist and photographer Thomas Laird has reported on Nepal for both Time and Newsweek; he lived in Nepal for more than 30 ...

Lebanon’s new President, Michel Suleiman, has just taken office after a 6-month presidential void. We find out more about why President Suleiman has become a symbol of unity, and whether he can help heal the country's deep divisions. Dr. Fawaz Gerges is an author, Mideast scholar and ...

The longest-serving inmate in the United States prison system is William Heirens, also known as the Lipstick Killer for the message left scrawled in lipstick at a crime scene. He’s been continuously incarcerated for 62 years and counting. Journalist Adam Higginbotham tells us about Heirens’s many years in prison. His ...

America's last herd of wild buffalo are in Yellowstone. When they wander outside of park limits, they are vulnerable to "hazing" - i.e., capture and slaughter - because ranchers and the Montana Department of Livestock fear that the buffalo can transmit brucellosis to cattle. But some scientists and activist groups ...

A new study by University of Virginia researchers suggests that air pollution interferes with bees’ and other insects’ ability to follow the scent of flowers to their source, which interferes with the pollination process. UVa’s Department of Environmental Sciences Professor Jose D. Fuentes explains more about their findings and what ...

Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for two people for their alleged role in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. But Sudanese authorities have not only refused to arrest and hand over the two suspects, they have given one of them increasingly prominent public ...