Independence Day is a few days away. We break out the steaks, burgers, and hot dogs and fire up the story of the American grill with chef Steven Johnson. We also endeavor to do something never before heard on radio: grill littleneck clams.
Guests:
Steven Johnson, owner and executive chef at Rendezvous restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

By host Anthony Brooks:
It’s rare when a new singer comes along who evokes the sound, soul and passion of a time gone by, while making it all her own. It is rarer still when she’s just 17.
Sonya Kitchell grew up absorbing the great folk and blues artists of her parents’ generation. She’s already recorded a [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The big story that official Washington, the nation and much of the world is still digesting is the stunning rebuke the Supreme Court dealt the Bush Administration yesterday. The high court called the President’s plan for military tribunals at Guantanamo unconstitutional. That’s among the issues our weekly panel of journalists [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The Supreme Court has dealt President Bush a stunning rebuke in his efforts to expand his war-time authority. In a landmark ruling today, the high court says the Bush Administration over-stepped its constitutional authority when it set up military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Some 450 detainees, whom the government had called [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The New York Times’ decision to run a story about a secret government program to track international terrorist finances has sparked a noisy debate about national security, and the responsibilities — and rights — of a free press.
Conservative bloggers and commentators accuse the Times of “treason.” President Bush calls the [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
In his new book, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind calls the guiding principal of the Bush Administration’s fight against global terror “The One Percent Doctrine.” It says that if there’s a one percent chance that al-Qaeda can get weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. must respond to the threat as if [...]

In the era of cell phones, email, and MySpace you might think that Americans are more connected to their closest friends than ever. But in fact, they’re more alone. At least that’s the conclusion of new research.
According to the new study, one in four Americans say they have no one to talk to [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
For 41 years, reporter Joseph Galloway has covered America’s wars — from the first major ground offensive in Vietnam to the current war in Iraq.
Galloway has never permitted journalistic objectivity to hide his deep affection for soldiers. In Vietnam, he huddled in the muddy foxholes with the grunts, picked up a [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
Once upon a time Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa, its charismatic leader, Robert Mugabe, one of the heroes of post-colonial African independence.
But today, Zimbabwe is an economic disaster — with inflation running above a thousand percent. Farmlands lie fallow, food shortages are rampant. And The U.N. says half of [...]

By host Anthony Brooks:
By the time Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, the American economy was in a state of shock. The New York Stock Exchange was shut down, more than five thousand banks had failed, soup kitchens were working overtime, and the jobless rate in some cities ran as high as 80 percent.
In the [...]

By host Anthony Brooks:
Not long ago the head-lines from urban America were all about dropping crime-rates and dramatic reductions in homicides. But today, many cities across the country are being hit again by a troubling escalation of gun violence.
Mayors from Seattle to Milwaukee to New York are alarmed by what they say is a thriving [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
You might have thought that the debate over commercial whaling was over and that the battle to save the whales was won. Well, think again. At its annual meeting in the Caribbean this week, The International Whaling Commission shook up the politics of whaling — and shocked those who have [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
This week saw seven Marines and one Navy corpsman charged with murder and kidnapping in Iraq. It also featured a failed effort by Senate Democrats to set a date on the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The facts on the ground, and the politics of war and peace at home are [...]

By Anthony Brooks:
In America’s high-paced, strive-for-success-go-for-the-gold-meritocracy, it’s never too soon to start jockeying for advantage. That explains in part a booming industry that has many parents convinced that Mozart and inter-active alphabet games are as vital to their infants’ development as a mother’s milk.
Never mind that there’s slim scientific evidence that Mozart or a [...]

By Anthony Brooks:
Whether or not North Korea goes ahead with an apparent plan to test-launch a long-range missile, the threat to do so is escalating international tensions from Pyongyang to Tokyo to Washington.
Chief among the fears is that the test-launch could move the isolated Stalinist regime one step closer to being able to hit the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Scientists who believe we are on the road to an earthly hell of global warming — and that is the vast majority of scientists these days — are desperate to find a way to whack America with the two-by-four that will really wake it up to the danger they see. It’s been [...]

Preparations for the potential fallout from global warming were underway this week on the arctic island of Svalbard, in Norway.
That’s where the construction of a new “doomsday” vault, a “Noah’s Ark” of agriculture, that will house and safeguard all known varieties of the world’s crops began this past Monday.
Guests:
Cary Fowler, Executive Secretary of The Global [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Barbaric” is the word out of Iraq today. As in barbaric torture of two captured US soldiers, their unrecognizable bodies apparently recovered Monday night south of Baghdad, at the end of a road so booby-trapped with bombs it took twelve hours for a recovery team to work its way to the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Just weeks after US-led forces toppled the Taliban in January 2002, young Rory Stewart stood at the western edge of Afghanistan, ready — incredibly — to walk in the winter through mountains, across a famously rugged country torn by decades of infamously brutal war.
The young Scotsman was no naive fool. He had [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
He was the boy genius who made billions, the proudly geeky face of Microsoft who set out to put a personal computer on every desktop, and his own software on every computer.
Now Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has announced he’ll be stepping back at Microsoft and stepping into fulltime philanthropy on [...]