Pakistani Taliban, Steph Curry, Child Soldiers, Buses to Showers

03/30/16 • 103 min

Pakistani Taliban (1:03) Guest: Michael Kugelman, Senior Associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center The Taliban in Pakistan set off a bomb near the swings in a park in Lahore, Pakistan on Easter Sunday, killing 72 people and injuring hundreds more. Most of the dead are women and children picnicking for the holiday. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the massacre at a school in 2014 killed 134 students – the Pakistani Taliban claimed that one, too. Who is this group? What are its goals? And why is it going after children? Steph Curry (17:23) Guest: Tim Bontemps, National NBA writer for The Washington Post The mere mention of “Curry” has the power to make pro-basketball fans salivate. We’re talking Steph Curry, league MVP and point guard for the Golden State Warriors, which are on six wins away from having the best NBA season of all time. One sports announcer called Steph Curry “the baby-faced assassin” – his accuracy is deadly from the three-point line and beyond. Curry went on to make ten of the fifteen three-point shots he took in that game last month against the Magic. He’s amazing to a watch, a fan favorite, to be sure. And he may also be changing the game of basketball. Child Soldiers: Girls in Warfare (34:11) Guest: Liz Jevtic-Somlai, PhD, Visiting Professor of Political Science at BYU A few years ago, a campaign group called Invisible Children released a movie that went viral – it’s been viewed more than 100 million times and came with a call to action: help catch infamous African warlord Joseph Kony. That was 2012 and Joseph Kony is still free, still kidnapping children to make soldiers of them. Boys only 7 or 8 years old, given weapons, forced to commit atrocities. But not just boys. Visiting BYU political science professor Liz Jevtic-Somlai says the role of girls as child soldiers is often overlooked or misunderstood. Her research indicates girls are also some of the most challenging child soldiers to rehabilitate once the conflict ends. Buses to Showers (51:35) Guest: Doneice Sandoval, Founder and CEO of Lava Mae You know what it feels like when you’ve been on traveling by plane for a really long day or – or out camping for a few days – without access to a shower? And how everything just looks better in the world once you’ve had a chance to get clean? People who are homeless rarely have that chance. In fact, in San Francisco there are an estimated 3,500 people living on the streets and only seven places that offer showers for the homeless. History of Street Food (1:18:52) Guest: Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food History at the University of Toronto-Scarborough Growing up in small town America, the notion of eating something from a vendor with a cart on the street was foreign to me, unless you count the ice cream truck in summer. But visit any major city in the world and you’ll see food being sold on the street: crepes, noodles, waffles, knishes, kebabs, tacos, or tamales. Taste the street food and you’ll get a taste of a community’s culture, ethnic influences and history.

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U.S. Financial Warfare, Dogs, Women's Suffrage

U.S. Financial Warfare (1:03) Guest: Juan Zarate, Former Assistant Treasury Secretary and Deputy National Security Adviser Some of the most powerful weapons the United States has to fight terrorists and keep rogue regimes in line comes not from the Department of Defense, but from the US Treasury Department. Bad guys need money to do bad things. So, in the days after 9/11, the United States unleashed a batter of tactics aimed at tracking Al Qaeda’s financial footprints and freezing it out of the financial system. These same weapons are now being used on ISIS. They were also key in convincing Iran to dismantle its nuclear program. Man’s Best Friend (19:22) Guest: Robert Losey, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Do you have a dog? Do you treat it like a member of the family? Let it sit at the table or sleep on the bed? Recent excavation of cemeteries in Siberia that date back 7,000 and 8,000 years finds this closeness between man and his furry best friend is an ancient one. Anthropologist Robert Losey has unearthed the remains of dogs closely resembling modern Siberian Huskies buried for their own sake – not just as companions to their owners in the afterlife. From the Vaults: Women’s Suffrage (32:17) Guest: Connie Lamb, Senior Librarian in the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU In a campaign year that features Hillary Clinton so prominently, we’d like to explore for a moment early political milestones for women, when they first had to fight for the right to vote, not to mention hold office. Archive.org: Utah woman's sufferage song book

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Palestinian Hope for Peace, Crane Migration, Web Therapy

Palestinian Hope for Peace (1:02) Guest: Zaid Malhees, Senior at BYU studying Genetics and Biotechnology There is so much conflict in the world today, physically and rhetorically. Zaid Malhees is a young Arab born in East Jerusalem, raised in Ramallah in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. Growing up he needed a permit to cross into the part of Jerusalem where his aunt lives, where he was born. He felt treated as a second-class citizen. He understands the hate that has driven decades of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. But he also has hope – and hearing him talk about it is both inspiring and enlightening. Crane Migration (19:22) Guest: John French, PhD, Biologist and Director at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center The brilliant-white whooping crane is among nature’s most majestic birds and the tallest in North America, standing nearly five feet. They’re also endangered. So for the past 15 years, government biologists have been breeding whopping cranes in captivity and teaching them to migrate south to Florida in what seems like an outlandish experiment: Picture a guy dressed head to toe in a white suit to hide his human-ness – he even has a fake beak on his white-hooded head. And he’s leading a flock of cranes to their southern destination in one of those tiny, super-light-weight aircraft that’s more like a bicycle with wings. And the craziest thing is that it worked, but not without consequences. Web Therapy (36:51) Guest: Connie Guille, MD, Psychiatrist and Faculty Member at the Medical University of South Carolina The people we rely on to save our lives are one to two times more likely to end their own. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says 300 to 400 physicians die by suicide each year. A web-based therapy program proved effective in reducing the risk of suicide among medical interns and residents studied by psychiatrists at the University of Michigan and the Medical University of South Carolina. Among other things, they found that 30-minutes of web-training on how to identify and copy with negative thoughts and feelings was enough to cut the rate of suicidal thoughts in half for these young doctors. Education in Post-NCLB Era (51:54) Guests: Vernon Henshaw, PhD, BYU Education Faculty and Retired Superintendent of Alpine School District; Suzanne Bolingbroke, Director of Literacy for Alpine School District; Suzanne Parker, Instructional Coach and Literacy Specialist for Provo School District An era ended in mid-December when Congress passed – and the President signed – a law called The Every Student Succeeds Act. It replaces the No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted in 2002 and for more than a decade would come to define – and to some defile – America’s system of educating its youth.