Talk of the Nation

Transcript

JOHN DONVAN, HOST:

Twelve years after the war began, Afghanistan's president announced Tuesday that Afghan forces officially assumed control of security for the country. U.S. and NATO troops will remain until the 2014 deadline, but the Afghan military is now expected to fight without NATO support.

Nearly half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world are expected to vanish in the next 100 years. One of them is Athabaskan, a language of the Siletz tribe in the Pacific Northwest. Bud Lane, vice chairman of Siletz tribal council, explains the importance of language diversity.

Parents have always had to break hard news to kids, from family hardships to national tragedies. Now there are more ways for children to learn about news faster — through 24 hour news and social media. So, what's changed in how parents broach these subjects? How can media help, or hurt?

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. For the past several weeks, we've taken the opportunity to reconnect with some of our favorite guests and colleagues in a series of conversations looking ahead. Today, longtime NPR New York correspondent Margot Adler, who's filed stories on hundreds of New Yorkers over the years: AIDS activists, street musicians, cops, environmental visionaries, and a guy who will move your car at exactly the right moment to take full advantage of opposite-side-of-the-street parking laws.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested for comparison against a national database. The decision raises major questions about how law enforcement and criminal justice processes will change.

In her book Cows Save The Planet, journalist Judith Schwartz argues that the key to addressing carbon issues and climate change lies beneath our feet. Schwartz says that proper management of soil could solve a long list of environmental problems.

"The thing to realize is that while we think about this as a sky thing — that it's all about all the fossil fuels that we're burning and all that spewing into the atmosphere — it's actually also a ground thing," she tells NPR's Neal Conan.

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan.

In Tehran today, the first news conference of Iran's president-elect ended abruptly when a man in the audience jumped up to protest the absence of the man many believe was elected president four years ago, Mir-Hossein Mousavi has been held under house arrest since 2011. And after the interruption, President-elect Hasan Rouhani left the stage and state television pulled the plug on the live broadcast.

Since his days as head of the Solar Energy Research Institute under President Jimmy Carter, Denis Hayes has been pushing to add more renewable energy sources to the country's energy portfolio. Hayes discusses the current U.S. market for renewables such as solar and wind, and gives his take on where he sees America's energy future headed.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Think for a minute about the victims of climate change. You might envision the polar bear, right? You see a lot of that in the news, atop a block of melting ice or - where there's no ice to grab onto, or the great ice sheet covering Greenland drip, drip, dripping away, or the tiny island of Tuvalu whose people and beaches might soon be swallowed by rising seas.