Government & Politics

Commentator David Gurevitz shares his thoughts about the different perspectives athletes must cultivate while traveling the world to compete in the Olympics.

When he was 3 years old, Roach was taken from his Aboriginal family and placed with a white family, as part of an Australian assimilation program intended to dilute the aboriginal population. The policy, common practice until 1964, was neither publicized nor explained. At 14, he ran away to find his natural family, and spent ten years on the streets, mostly in Melbourne. He sang first for friends, and then was invited to sing in clubs and on radio. "Charcoal Lane," his acclaimed debut album, has just been released.

Since 1975, Rideau has been the editor-in-chief of "The Angolite," the prison newsmagazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he's serving a life sentence for murder. An eighth-grade dropout, he was convicted of murder in 1961 and spent eleven years on death row at Angola, where he taught himself to write. "The Angolite" has highlighted issues of execution and prison rape. For his writing, Rideau won the Sidney Hillman Award in 1981, the George Polk award in 1980, and the Robert F.

Anders' new film is "Gas Food Lodging," about a single mother and her two teenage children living in a trailer. Anders herself was a single mother on welfare with two teenage daughters. Previously, she collaborated on the film "Border Radio."

Terry talks with Nancy Wackstein, Executive Director of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association, a settlement house in New York City. Wackstein recently gave up her job as Director of New York's Office on Homelessness. Before that she was an advocate for the homeless at the Citizens' Committee for Children. Wackstein used to believe that the solution to homelessness was more housing; she now believes that housing alone will not solve the problem

Lieutenant Duvall is the founder of Cleveland's landmark sex crimes unit. She was one of the first woman street cops in the city, and one of the first women in the country to head a vice squad. A new biography has just been written about her, called "Working Vice."

Journalist Frederick Kempe is a foreign correspondent and Berlin Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He spent five weeks traveling thru Sibera and has written an account of it in, "Siberian Odyssey." In many areas, Kempe was the first American there. He visited a nomadic tribe of reindeer herders, a former Gulag site, and the site of a Stalinist mass grave, talking to survivors of the former, and children of victims from the later. Kempe made the trip shortly before the August 1991 coup that ushered out the Communist Party.

TV critic David Bianculli takes a look at the proliferation of coverage of the Democratic National Convention and the election more broadly.

Terry will talk to three people about the recent events revolving around RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug. The drug is in use in France and Britian but is illegal in the U.S. Two weeks ago, a pregnant woman, Leona Benten, tried to bring the drug into the country, but it was seized by authorities. The case is about to go before the Supreme Court. Today's guests include FDA spokesperson Gary Fendler, Simon Heller of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Leona Benten's physician, Dr. Louise Tyrer.

Journalist Nicholas Lemann is a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He's talks about how politicians need to stop pandering to the middle class at the expense of the working class and minorities.

John Powers, who's been a film critic for Fresh Air, is covering the Democratic National Convention this week for the L.A. Weekly. He tells Terry about what he's seen on the floor so far.

We talk with the new crime movie's director Carl Franklin's and screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton. "One False Move"is a low-budget movie about a drug deal gone bad, a brutal murder, and the dealers' flight from the police. Despite playing in only a few cities, it's getting critical acclaim.

Jacob Weisberg, deputy editor at The New Republic, talks about the Democratic Leadership Council. Both Bill Clinton and his running-mate Senator Al Gore are members of this group, which was founded seven years ago in an effort to bring the party closer to center. The DLC opposes what it sees "as an interest-group beholden party leadership," writes Weisberg.

Feminist, journalist and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich talks with Terry about the Clinton/Gore ticket. She's disappointed by the conservative currents in the Democratic party.

In the first ten years of the AIDS epidemic, the Food and Drug Administration approved only two drugs to treat the disease. Yet a third drug, approved last month, took only eight months. Health economist Peter Arno's new book, "Against The Odds" tells how AIDS activists have sparked sweeping reforms of the drug approval process, and sped up access to drug development for all illnesses.

Drakulic's recent book is called "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed." Now we'll talk to her about living in Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia. Refugees from nearby Sarajevo are flowing into the city from their civil war-torn country.

Critic Maureen Corrigan compares the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and George Bush by way of two new books: "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America," by Garry Wills, and "Bushisms: President G.H.W. Bush in his own Words," compiled by the editors of the "New Republic."

Phelps is the Supreme Court reporter who broke the Anita Hill story (along with NPR's Nina Totenberg) in New York Newsday. He's co-written an account of the Clarence Thomas hearings, called "Capitol Games," which looks at how the press failed to see the whole story of now-Justice Thomas, including just how conservative he really is.

Belzer talks with Terry about the candidates for president. He's performed off-Broadway, on radio, in movies, and on television.

Journalist Richard Ben Cramer won a Pulitzer Prize for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979. His new book, "What it Takes: the way to the White House," explores the lives of the candidates who ran for president in 1988, and tries to discover what made them think they could lead the United States.