Around the Nation
6:26 am
Mon August 29, 2011

School Superintendent Gives Himself A Big Pay Cut

Larry Powell is superintendent of 325 schools in Fresno County, Calif. Powell is giving back $800,000 over the next three years. He wants to preserve education programs from budget cuts. He'll work his final three years before retirement making less than a starting teacher's salary.

Around the Nation
6:20 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Baltimore's Mayor Inadvertently Wakes Up The City

Some Baltimore residents were getting robocalls from the mayor around 4 a.m. Saturday reminding them that Hurricane Irene was on the way. The city's automatic phone calls were supposed to stop by 9 p.m. Friday, but a glitch kept them going through the night.

The Two-Way
6:15 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Irene: Not A Monster, But Lots Of Damage

Credit Sandy Macys / AP
Flooding Sunday in Waitsfield, Vt.

Originally published on Mon August 29, 2011 6:27 am

Hurricane Irene is gone, but she won't be forgotten anytime soon.

As NPR's Larry Abramson said today on Morning Edition, "Irene did not turn out to be the storm of the century" and many beach towns "were stunned by how lucky they were."

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Jon Hamilton is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. Currently he focuses on neuroscience, health risks, and extreme weather.

Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Hamilton was part of NPR's team of science reporters and editors who went to Japan to cover the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

Hamilton contributed several pieces to the Science Desk series "The Human Edge," which looked at what makes people the most versatile and powerful species on Earth. His reporting explained how humans use stories, how the highly evolved human brain is made from primitive parts, and what autism reveals about humans social brains.

In 2009, Hamilton received the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for his piece on the neuroscience behind treating autism.

Before joining NPR in 1998, Hamilton was a media fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation studying health policy issues. He reported on states that have improved their Medicaid programs for the poor by enrolling beneficiaries in private HMOs.

From 1995-1997, Hamilton wrote on health and medical topics as a freelance writer, after having been a medical reporter for both The Commercial Appeal and Physician's Weekly.

Hamilton graduated with honors from Oberlin College in Ohio with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. As a student, he was the editor of the Oberlin Review student newspaper. He earned his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, where he graduated with honors During his time at Columbia, Hamilton was awarded the Baker Prize for magazine writing and earned a Sherwood traveling fellowship.

Cokie Roberts a Morning Edition contributor.

At NPR she previously served as the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming.

From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting.

In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. The Roberts are also contributing editors to USA Weekend Magazine, and together they wrote From this Day Forward, an account of their more than 40 year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Roberts' number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, an account of women's roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts histories of women in America's founding era --Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008, also became instant bestsellers.

Cokie Roberts holds more than twenty honorary degrees, serves on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President's Commission on Service and Civic Participation. This year the Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend," one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.

David Greene is NPR's Morning Programming Host/Correspondent. In this role he is the primary substitute host for Morning Edition as well as Weekend Edition Saturday and Sunday. When he is not hosting he brings his deep reporting talents to these programs.

For two years prior to taking on his current role in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics, east to Siberia. During that time he brought listeners stories as wide ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian Babushkas. He spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli. He was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene's voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his four years covering the White House. To report on former President George W. Bush's second term, Greene spent hours in NPR's spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it's about the size of your average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay – and, of course, Crawford, Texas.

During the days following Hurricane Katrina, Greene was aboard Air Force One when President Bush flew low over the Gulf Coast and caught his first glimpse of the storm's destruction. On the ground in New Orleans, Greene brought listeners a moving interview with the late Ethel Williams, a then-74-year-old flood victim who got an unexpected visit from the president.

Greene was an integral part of NPR's coverage of the historic 2008 election, covering Hillary Clinton's campaign from start to finish, and also focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters' decisions. The White House Correspondents Association took special note of Greene's report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama, addressing the nation's racial divide. Greene was given the association's 2008 Merriman Smith award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America – with a recorder, camera and lots of caffeine – to learn how the recession was touching Americans during President Obama's first 100 days in office. The series was called "100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times."

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration's first term, and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper: Why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in government, Greene worked as the senior editor on the Harvard Crimson. In 2004, he was named co-volunteer of the year for Coaching for College, a Washington, D.C., program offering tutoring to inner-city youth.

Around the Nation
3:09 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Irene: Wet, Deadly And Expensive, But No Monster

Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 10:29 am

The remnants of Hurricane Irene moved north Monday into Canada, leaving behind a path of destruction after raking the mid-Atlantic and northeast, where residents faced damaging floods triggered by hours of torrential rains.

While Irene's maximum wind speed might not compare with other legendary hurricanes, the storm had tremendous reach. A couple of days after it beat up on North Carolina, it still had enough strength to pummel Vermont and other parts of New England.

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Around the Nation
3:00 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Big Apple Reboots After Shutting Down For Irene

New York dodged the big one as Hurricane Irene had pretty much petered out by the time it hit the city. Before the storm arrived, the entire transit system had been shutdown.

Around the Nation
3:00 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Hard Hit North Carolina Assesses Irene's Wallop

North Carolina's Outer Banks took some of the hardest pounding from Hurricane Irene. While the cleanup has begun, damage is still being assessed.

Asia
3:00 am
Mon August 29, 2011

Indian Officials, Anti-Graft Crusader End Deadlock

An aging anti-corruption crusader in India has ended a two-week fast. He and the government reached a compromise on dealing with officials and politicians who demand bribes. Millions were riveted by the standoff.

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