April 9 - Obama Backpedals on Venezuela; Lessons From the Tsarnaev Sentencing; Why Desert Cities Are Running Out of Water

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the White House’s attempt, ahead of the summit of the Americas, to backpedal on its recent designation of Venezuela as “an extraordinary threat to U.S. national security”. Virginia Lopez, a Caracas-based journalist who covers Latin America and Venezuela for Al Jazeera English, joins us to discuss the meeting between an emissary of Secretary of State Kerry and Venezuela’s Foreign Minister and the ten million signatures that Venezuela’s President Maduro will present to President Obama at the summit in Panama demanding that Obama rescind his executive order sanctioning Venezuela.

Part 2

Then we look into the possible lessons that could be learned from the sentencing of the surviving Boston bomber who will likely get the death penalty for an act of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. Haroon Moghul, a Fellow at Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, joins us.  He has an op-ed at CNN “How to Prevent More Tsarnaevs” and we discuss how there are many young men and women like Tsarnaev in many countries, including the United States, who threaten America and Americans and will continue to do so, unless we understand what radicalizes Muslims.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the best-selling author Les Standiford, about his new book “Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles”. With California and much of the South-West in a prolonged drought, we will examine the repercussions of having vast metropolises in the desert which depend on imported water that we are running of.