Child Labor, Middle East, Breast Cancer Treatment

Guest: Charita Castro, Division Chief for Research and Policy in the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking at the U.S. Department of Labor The latest report on Progress Against Child Labor from the International Labour Organization documents a positive trend downward in the prevalence of child labor globally. Even still, there are an estimated 168 million child laborers worldwide and half of them are forced to do hazardous work and the U.S. Department of Labor has released a report documenting the worst forms of child labor around the world.

Guest: Richard Paul Evans, a New York Times best-selling author known for his book The Christmas Box and more recently the Michael Vey series. Michael Vey is a superhero in the X-Men vein. He is an awkward teenager who struggles to keep his super-human power in check and secret, because what teenaged boy wants the world to think he's a freak, right? But Michael's amazing ability to channel electricity isn not the only thing he wrestles with - he also has Tourette's and that battle may just be larger than the rest.

Steen Madsen, Professor at UNLV and the chair of the Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Science People have long imbued gold with mystical powers of immortality. Ancient alchemists ate it in search of longevity. There is a researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas working on a technique to prolong life in cancer patients that promises to work much better than simply eating gold. Dr. Steen Madsen is chair of UNVL's Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences and lead author of a study published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering that proposes sending nanoparticles of gold into a type of brain tumor that is today an almost certain death sentence for its victims. The nanoparticles of gold congregate around the tumor and help amplify the effects of lasers used to kill the tumor. The primary challenge is how to get the gold into the tumor.

Guests: Josh Gubler, BYU political science professor John Macfarlane, adjunct professor of political science at UVU Steven Lobell, political science professor at the University of Utah Iran and the US, along with five other world powers, have worked out a tentative agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program. But as they say, the devil is in the details and the next few months will prove critical in securing a final deal. Just today Iran's supreme leader sounded pretty pessimistic in talking about the deal's prospects. Meanwhile, Yemen is quickly become the next site of regional conflict, with Iran backing Houthi rebels that have taken over most of the country and Saudi Arabia leading a bombing campaign to fight back the Houthis. Power dynamics in the Middle East are shifting and progress made after the Arab Spring appears to be dissipating.

Guest: Patricia Ganz, medical oncologist and director of Prevention and Control Research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center As if being diagnosed with breast cancer weren't bad enough, treatment by chemotherapy is notoriously devastating. And then comes "chemo brain." Cancer survivors post-treatment often complain of cognitive difficulties - and for a long time, doctors chalked it up to a patient's imagination. But Dr. Patricia Ganz of UCLA's Schools of Medicine and Public Health has some new research that validates the reality of "chemo brain" in breast cancer patients - and perhaps more importantly, offers some hope for addressing the problem.