Grand Avenue Project Developer Chosen; Pesticide for West Nile Virus; Instant Run-Off Voting Comes to San Francisco; Nuclear Non-Proliferation in N. Korea and Iran; Your Own Words
Grand Avenue Project Developer Chosen
A joint city and county authority in Los Angeles selected a New York developer, Related Companies, to take on the Grand Avenue Project. Part of the redevelopment of downtown LA, the Grand Avenue project will develop two city and two county parcels of land on Bunker Hill, putting retail space, offices, a boutique hotel and more in the heart of downtown. Eli Broad, Founder of the Broad Foundation, civic leader and philanthropist, and Joel Kotkin, Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation, join Host Larry Mantle to discuss what happens next.
Pesticide for West Nile Virus
In most areas of the country where West Nile Virus is prevalent, vector control authorities have used mass aerial pesticide spraying to kill infected mosquitoes. California is using only controlled ground level spraying that is targeted to affected areas. Larry Mantle talks with Anthony Cornel, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Entomology, UC Davis, and Min-Lee Cheng, PhD, District Manager of the West Valley Vector Control District in Chino, about the pros and cons of the limited spraying method being used in Southern California.
Instant Run-Off Voting Comes to San Francisco
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a landmark initiative two years ago, designed to change the way voters cast their ballots. It allows city and county elections to be decided without a run-off. Larry Mantle speaks with Chris Collins, Co-Coordinator for the Electoral Reform Working Group for the Green Party of California, and Michael Alvarez, Professor of Political Science at Caltech and Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, about this novel way of electing county officials.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation in N. Korea and Iran
Recent newspaper articles say that the Bush administration’s diplomacy to stop nuclear weapons programs in N. Korea and Iran has failed, as both countries continue to pursue nuclear weapons programs. Israel has said that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, which is considered close to having enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb. Meanwhile, experts think that North Korea already has between two and six nuclear weapons. Jim Walsh, director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, joins Host Larry Mantle to discuss where the United States, and the global community, can go from here.
Your Own Words
Barbara Wallraff, language columnist for the Atlantic Monthly and King Features Syndicate, has a new book. Your Own Words (Counterpoint) explains in depth that there often is no single right answer for questions of punctuation and word usage. Answers to these questions can depend on which dictionary you use. Barbara Wallraff joins Host Larry Mantle to discuss the nuances of language usage. Charles Harrington Elster, author of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Verbal Advantage, and other books on language, also joins the conversation.