August 18 - The Need for a Credible Inquiry and Justice in Ferguson, Missouri; There is a "There" There in the Indictment of Rick Perry; The Fate of the African Elephant Reaches a Tipping Point

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the on-going racially-charged situation in the divided city of St. Louis where the National Guard has been deployed following a week of protests and looting provoked by the shooting of an unarmed young black man by a white policeman who shot Michael Brown six times until he was dead. An expert on distressed suburbs and economic segregation among municipalities, Todd Swanstrom, a professor in Community Collaboration and Public Policy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, joins us to discuss how the rapid change in Ferguson from a majority white to a majority black community, as well as poverty and unemployment factor into this tense confrontation between angry residents and defiant local police, as the need for a credible inquiry and for justice to be served grows more urgent.  

Part 2

Then we examine the case of State of Texas versus James Richard “Rick” Perry, and look into the role of the Travis County DA’s office that contains the Public Integrity Unit that the governor is trying to defund. Forrest Wilder, associate editor of the Texas Observer, who writes the “Forrest for the Trees” blog, joins us to discuss his latest article at the Texas Observer, “What the Pundits Don’t Get About the Rick Perry’s Indictment” and how there may be more of a “there” there than the national press is reporting in terms of Governor Perry’s legal jeopardy.

Part 3

Then finally, with the fate of the African elephant reaching the tipping point where more are being killed by poachers than are being born in the wild, we speak with George Wittemyer, a professor in Colorado State University’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology who is the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to Save the Elephants in Africa. We discuss his new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that finds 100,000 elephants have been killed by poachers in the last three years, with Central Africa, the hardest hit, seeing a 64% decline in its elephant population in the last decade.