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Daniel Schorr says that as an agreement on Hebron draws near, both the Israelis and the Palestinians are attempting to put their own spin on the reasons for the delay.

Commentator Captain Rosemary Mariner calls for a return to the concept of "vertical accountability" in the military. Recent allegations of sexual misconduct in in Army training schools violate one of the most basic moral concepts in the military; if these are allegations are true, we should be disciplining people at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom.

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced in New York today the details of a $4.8 million settlement for victims of radiation experiments. The experiments were conducted during the Cold War, without the appropriate informed consent of the participants. It is hoped the settlement will restore confidence in biomedical research...confidence that was tarnished by these experiments. NPR's Margot Adler reports.

Conservatives are outraged at a California judge's decision to prevent the enactment of California's anti-affirnative action referndum. They say the will of the people shouldn't be overruled by the courts. Commentator Jacob Weisberg points out inconsistencies in their argument and explains that the conservative dislike for judicial activism was born in the political climate of the 1980s and needs rethinking.

Defense Secretary William Perry said today the U-S has not yet determined who was responsible for the June 25 bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. airmen. "We have reached no conclusions about who was responsible for this," Perry told reporters in response to questions about Washington Post report that Saudi authorities had arrested 40 people and were convinced that Iran backed a broad conspiracy in the attack. NPR's Martha Raddatz has a report.

Critic Bob Mondello has a review of the new Baz Luhrmann film, "Romeo and Juliet." The script is faithful to the language of the Shakespeare play...the characters all speak in Elizabethan English...but the setting has been moved to the present-day. Mondello says that the imagery and use of modern sets is somewhat discordant and unsettling, but that the story has lost none of its power.

- Daniels talks with NPR's Jennifer Ludden in Kigali, Rwanda about the escalating turmoil in Zaire. Fierce gunfighting in the town of Goma, forced international aid workers to flee the area today leaving some one million refugees without adequate food or water.

NPR's John Ydstie reports the unemployment rate remained unchanged in October at 5.2%. But the economy did manage to generate a healthy number of new jobs -- business payrolls were up 210,000 for the month. There were several other reports on the economy today...the last batch of information before the Presidential election next week.

At a meeting in Bethesda, Maryland today, researchers presented evidence about how our mental state can affect our physical bodies. In one study, researchers showed that happily married couples had weakened immune systems after a fight. So if you're going to have a fight with your spouse, you'd better button up your overcoat. NPR's Michelle Trudeau reports.

NPR's David Molpus reports that the South, like the rest of the nation, produced mixed messages as far as electoral results are concerned. Democrats picked off a couple of Republican freshman in the House, but Republicans did better in open seats...and the GOP also picked up 2 Senate seats in Arkansas and Alabama. Meanwhile, black candidates who used to represent majority-minority districts did better than expected--despite redistricting, all five won relection, including Cynthia McKinney of Georgia.

Senior news analyst Daniel Schorr says that the United States seems to have shirked its role as world peacekeeper lately, and thus diminished its role as the one remaining superpower.

For the past two weeks, NPR's Mike Shuster has been travelling through the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, following the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road... from Iran through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and now Tadjikistan, which has been embroiled in a civil war since 1992. He spoke with Robert Siegel from the town of Garm, about 100 miles east of Tadjikistan's capital, Dushanbe. He says that the people in Garm are proud of their new-found independence, but are struggling to rebuild a city that has essentially collapsed with the departure of the Soviets and a four year civil war.

The BBC's Daniel Lack reports from Islamabad on the ouster of the government of Benazir Bhutto. A caretaker Prime Minister and nine cabinet members were sworn in this morning to replace the Bhutto government, which has been accused of widespread corruption. She is currently under an unofficial form of house arrest.

Two airplanes collided today in the skies over New Delhi, India, and more than 350 people are feared dead. A Saudi Boeing 747 carrying 312 passengers had just taken off from Indira Gandhi International Airport when it struck a Kazak Airlines plane trying to land with 39 people. This could be the third deadliest crash in aviation history. Lea Terhune reports from New Delhi.

Noah talks with NPR's Jennifer Ludden about conditions in the eastern Zairean city of Goma, recently captured by Zairean Tutsi rebels. The rebels escorted foreign journalists into the city today. The city is for the most part calm, though reporters were only allowed to see certain areas. Goma is the site of camps housing hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees; the battle for the city left the refugees cut off from food and medicine.

- Daniel talks with NPR's White House Correspondent Mara Liasson about the response of the Clinton campaign to questions about DNC fund-raising tactics. President Clinton says he and the Democratic National Committee have played by the rules in their fund-raising efforts.

- On election night, news networks will be predicting winners hours before polls close around the country. Daniel talks with Curtis Gans about the effect of these projections on voter turnouts. Gans is the Director of the Non-Partisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. He says many studies show a decline in voting on the West coast after networks begin projecting winners, which could make a big difference in this election.

It's been five years since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it will take many more years to undue much of the ecological damage done during Soviet rule. Case in point: one of the greatest environmental disasters in the world today is the drying up of the Aral Sea in central Asia. In the 1950s, when the Soviets decided to increase their cotton crop, two rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea were used to irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; the flow of water to the Aral Sea was reduced by ninety percent with disasterous results. NPR's Mike Shuster visits an Uzbek town that used to one of the Aral Sea's biggest ports--now the sea is thirty miles away and the town of Mujnak (Moy-NAHK) is plagued by both massive unemployment and serious health problems brought on by the Aral's demise.

NPR's Ted Clark reports that the US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians will get under way Tuesday as forecast, but the talks will begin with both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat meeting separaely with President Clinton before any face-to-face meeting between the two Middle East leaders can take place. Even as the meetings in Washington were being prepared, however, US administration officials were lowering expectations that even the previously-agreed-to Oslo Accords could be reactivated.

The town of West Hartford, Connecticut, is running out of burial space. NPR's Margot Adler reports on a novel approach to the problem, which secures more burial space while providing the living with a new spot for their picnics.