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NPR's Mike Shuster reports that despite all the missed signals, poor intelligence and lousy communication between counter-terrorist agencies, politics did play a role in early 2001 in the inability of the U.S. government to anticipate al Qaeda attacks in the United States. Testimony before the commission investigating the government's actions before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks paints a picture of an incoming Bush administration unwilling to see the threat from al Qaeda as urgently as the outgoing Clinton administration did.

In his newly released oral history, the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun describes the strange scene at the White House when President Nixon invited him to discuss his nomination to the court. Nixon quizzed Blackmun about his net worth and his wife's social skills. Four years later, Blackmun and the other justices had Nixon's fate in their hands when they weighed the Watergate tapes case. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports. (Voices of NBC's Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor courtesy of the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive.)

Experts estimate that nearly half of Boston adults are overweight. The numbers are the similar for most U.S. cities, partly because urban centers are designed to get cars moving, not people. Now, as Madge Kaplan reports from member station WGBH, Boston health activists are eyeing the land opened up by a brand new highway -- with calories in mind.

Plans for a $165 million Clinton presidential center are helping spark a construction boom and downtown revitalization in Little Rock, Ark. They've also stirred old partisan sentiments, spurring one group to plan a "Counter Clinton" library. NPR's Greg Allen reports.

The state of New York sues former New York Stock Exchange chair Richard Grasso and a former board member over the legality of Grasso's $187.5 million pay package. State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who filed the suit, called the arrangement "inappropriate and illegal." Grasso stepped down last September after his compensation caused an outcry. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

Western New York has been particularly hard hit by the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector and in recent years has lost thousands of jobs. But one local entrepreneur is finding success in resuscitating factories in the depressed region that others had written off. NPR's Jack Speer reports.

As the Democratic Republic of Congo struggles to recover from a five-year civil war, one priority is restoring a vital rail link in the central African nation's interior. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.

Months of bad news from Iraq have hurt President Bush's standing, with a new NPR poll of likely voters giving him a 50-percent approval rating, down from 53 percent in March. The poll also shows President Bush and his Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry in a statistical dead heat. NPR's Mara Liasson reports.

China's growing political and economic might is a matter of great interest to the nations that surround it. India -- the other Asian giant -- went to war with China and had a tense relationship with it in the last half of the 20th century. But as NPR's Michael Sullivan reports, tensions seem to be subsiding -- at least for now -- as both countries focus on expanding their economies.

As China opens up its markets to foreign goods, it's starting to have increasingly more in common with South Korea than its supposed brother in the North. And as NPR's Rob Gifford reports, South Koreans are eager to trade with China. But some worry that South Korea's economic infatuation with its neighbor is blinding it to the possible dangers of an emergent China.