Search results for

August 2000: Trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea, 23 Russian sailors waited in vain for rescue. Eighty-eight of their fellow sailors were killed in an explosion aboard the submarine Kursk -- the pride of Russia's evaporating navy. All Things Considered host Robert Siegel talks with journalist Robert Moore about his latest book, A Time to Die, detailing the mistakes and political fumbles that led to the tragedy.

The 108th Congress has barely opened but freshman Rep. Max Burns is already running for re-election. The 54-year-old former professor and Fulbright Scholar figures he'll have to work early and hard to keep his seat. NPR's Juan Williams reports on the Georgia Republican's first days on Capitol Hill.

It's often hard to tell where Nicholson Baker ends, and the characters of his novels begin. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr profiles the author, who has a reputation for finding magic in the everyday moments of ordinary lives. Listen to Baker read two excerpts from his latest novel, A Box of Matches.

David D'Arcy reports on this year's Sundance Film Festival, widely regarded as the most prestigious showcase for independent films and documentaries, which opens tonight. One film features a handful of the 40,000 Cubans who left their island on rafts in the 1990s.

NPR's Michele Norris talks with Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, producers/directors of the POV documentary Two Towns of Jasper airing on PBS stations next Wednesday. Dow and Williams talk about how they each directed a separate film crew in Jasper, Tex., during the trials of three white men for the murder of a black man, James Byrd, Jr. He was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in 1998. Dow's crew of white filmmakers only interviewed white residents of the town. Williams' crew of black filmmakers only interviewed black residents of the town. The deliberate segregation of the film crews allowed residents to speak with a candor seldom seen on camera.

NPR's Michele Norris talks with Kathryn Blume, co-founder of The Lysistrata Project, a coordinated schedule of world-wide readings of the play Lysistrata on March 3, 2003. The ancient Greek play tells the story of a woman who organizes a stand against war, getting women on both sides of a conflict to withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to sign a peace treaty. She hopes the readings will mobilize an international theatrical voice against the Bush administration's war on Iraq.

In Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, a group of American fly fishermen and Russian scientists work to protect one of the world's last remaining strongholds of wild salmon, steelhead and trout. NPR's Elizabeth Arnold reports.

In 1992, the Academy Award for best documentary short subject went to Educating Peter, a film by producer/director Gerardine Wurzburg that followed a young boy with Down Syndrome through third grade in a regular class in his Blacksburg, Va. elementary school. Now Wurzburg follows up with Graduating Peter -- view clips from both of the documentaries, and learn more about Wurzburg.

NPR's Julie Rovner reports that with Republican control of the federal government, abortion opponents are looking forward to several victories this year. The first issue expected to pass both houses and to be signed into law is a ban on late abortions, which abortion opponents call "partial-birth" abortions. Other issues that will be debated include proposed laws to protect fetuses injured during violent crimes against pregnant women; a law barring adults from taking adolescents across state lines for abortions; and a law that would make it easier for hospitals and providers to decline to offer abortion services.

NPR's Joanne Silberner has the story of how the Bush administration is approaching talk about sex in anti-abortion campaigns. She reports on a case in which administration officials quashed a family education program aimed at parents. They found some of the language used in a video to be objectionable.