One privilege of being a journalist - and it IS a privilege - is the opportunity to ask questions when you meet really fascinating people. Recently we drove in convoy with a group of others from one end of Jordan to the other - from Aqaba, to The Red Sea, Jerash, The Dead Sea, Kerak, Bethany and Amman and more. It is a fabulous, hospitable country, full of warm lovely people with hugely interesting stories some of which will be brought to you here as well as broadcast over the air.

In the first of these, we came across a New Zealand-born woman, Marguerite van Geldermalsen, who was selling souvenirs among the lost boys and camels. She turned out to be a nurse who had travelled with a friend to Jordan in 1978 only to end up falling in love with a Bedouin and living in a cave, yes a cave, with him in Petra. She is now the author of a wildly successful book, 'Married to a Bedouin' and this is a taste of her story.

Marguerite's book is published by Virago Press and is widely available in paperback. Visit www.marriedtoabedouin.com for more info.

Diane Wilson is a 60-year old mother of five children, one of whom is autistic, as well as a fifth-generation shrimp fisher out of Seadrift, Texas. As an environmental activist, she has successfully taken on companies like Formosa Plastics and Alcoa, for their pollution of Lavaca Bay in the Gulf of Texas, as well as Union Carbide for its polluting plant in Bhopal, India. She is also a co-founder of 'Code Pink'.

In her first very successful memoir, 'An Unreasonable Woman', she explained how she was led into activism. Now she talks to KGNU's Claudia Cragg about her latest memoir, 'Holy Roller' published by Chelsea Green out of Vermont. This retells Wilson's life as a 9 year old child brought up in fundamental Evangelism, a religion which she then completely shunned, but which combined with her Grandfather's Cherokee mysticism made her, she says, the activist she is today.


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Poet and Activist Anne Waldman has been a vocal proponent for feminist, environmental, and human rights causes since the 1960s. She also established The Naropa School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, with the late Allen Ginsberg.

In the US Presidential Campaign, some of those who say they espouse feminism seem to now embrace the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, Gov Sarah Palin from Alaska who is running alongside Senator John McCain. Claudia Cragg recently spoke with Ms Waldman about her new highly political CD, 'Matching Half' and a book to be published soon by Penguin, 'Manatee Humanity' and also on the meaning of feminism in US politics as she sees it (and whether or not Palin matches up to that standard). She also explores how she, as a feminist and activist, thinks people must contribute to the election and its successful outcome.

In this September 2009 interview, author Francine Prose talks with Claudia Cragg about 'Goldengrove', an emotionally powerful novel about adolescent love and loss. Focusing on a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister, this masterful coming-of-age work is radiant with the possibility of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life. At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend.

Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life

The New York Times bestselling Prose is author also of a number of other works including Reading Like a Writer and A Changed Man. Prose was born April 1, 1947, Brooklyn, New York) and, since March 2007, she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991.

She sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award. Her novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on collegecampuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

She is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for the cinema by Nancy Savoca. Another, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.

8-8-88: Burma's Pro-Democratic Uprising and the Atrocities That Followed

Twenty years ago today the military dictatorship which continues to rule Burma brutally crushed a pro-democracy uprising known as "8-8-88" – killing an estimated 3,000 people in 6 weeks. Leaders of that 1988 student-led uprising have been imprisoned since last summer's widespread civic disturbances along with more than 1,000 other long term political prisoners including the opposition's National League for Democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate who remains under house arrest on the orders of leader General Than Shwe. On this anniversary of the Burmese Uprising, FSRN will travel to Thailand - where the largest number of Burmese refugees are located and hear from survivors of the massacre. Then we'll go to Berkeley, CA, home to many Burmese who also fled the violence. First, from Bangkok, Claudia Cragg reports.

Click here for newscast for Friday, August 8th, 2008 for the story which follows from Africa Jones in Berkeley, CA.

Today is the 20th anniversary of events that took place, with massive street demonstrations, on 8th August 1988 in Rangoon which was in the midst of a general strike.

Tens of thousands of protesters had turned out on to the streets, calling for democracy, human rights, the resignation of the government and an end to the centrally-run economic system. The demonstrations which had begun after a period known as 'The Rangoon Spring', began to spread to dozens of other places around the country.

The response from the authorities was brutal: thousands were arrested or killed by the police and army. The military established a new leadership body, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. The regime continues to this day led by General Than Shwe. The NLD (opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's independence leader Gen Aung San, continues under house arrest in Rangoon where she has mostly been held since July 1989.

Dr. Thein Lwin, (PhD), comes from a farming family in the Pegu area of Burma just 50 miles north of Rangoon, but he cannot return to Burma.

Like many other students who demonstrated against the military regime, he was thrown out of university in 1976, and was then arrested and imprisoned for his involvement with Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) from 1982-1984, and again in 1991. He eventually gained a degree and taught in a junior secondary school. But in 1993, under threat once more from the military regime, he escaped Burma and was granted political asylum in Germany, before studying education in the UK at Newcastle University's Centre for International Studies.

With Prospect Burma (www.prospectburma.org/) scholarship support, he gained an MEd in 1997 and a Doctorate in 2001 and started an initiative with the National Health and Education Committee of Burma (NHEC) - an exile organisation operating out of Chiang Mai. Now, though, he spends all his time  trying to improve the life of Burmese in refugee camps, and those internally displaced persons' coming in to Thailand from remote regions of Burma.

'A Prairie Home Companion' is Garrison Keillor's best known work, a very very long running radio series. In the autumn of 2007, Claudia interviewed him on his latest novel, 'Pontoon' and rather than leave it lying wasted on dusty audio shelves, it is posted here for you to share.

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer (especially for Granta) whose latest novel at the time of this interview was 'The Condition'. In this interview with Claudia Cragg, Ms. Haigh discusses this new work which relates the story of a dysfunctional New England family struggling toward normalcy with  the children of a resentful, controlling mother, Paulette, and a distracted, needy father Frank. Even during a childhood in idyllic Cape Cod, there are hints of a rocky future. At the core of this are explorations in fine prose of the family, identity, gender and rebellion, all woven masterfully into a compelling tale.

Ms Haigh also discusses her literary influences, the way she writes (in long hand for novels), her own family and the tendency of old boyfriends to try and spot themselves in her work.

Her first book, Mrs. Kimble, won the 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her second, Baker Towers, was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Both have been published in nine languages. Other fiction has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, Five Points, Good Housekeeping and other places. Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Jennifer Haigh is a graduate of Dickinson College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She now lives in the Boston area but says she "doesn't get out much". She maintains a large, lively circle of imaginary friends.

Believe it or not, the esteemed poet Pablo Neruda once called Isabel Allende "the worst journalist he had ever met..." This was because she had the affrontery to try and write his memoirs. Nevertheless, today Allende is the author of over a dozen books and memoirs of her own which together have sold fifty-one million copies.

Her debut novel in 1982, The House of the Spirits, told the tale of four generations of a Chilean family and at ths time of this interview her latest work was  a memoir The Sum of Our Days. This picks up the story where her last memoir, Paula, ended. She recently discussed politics and Pinochet, feminism, her home in Marin County with her second husband, the lawyer Willie Gordon and her extended family, the death of her daughter Paula, as well as the death of Willie's daughter, Jennifer. from a drug overdose and other details of her fascinating life with Claudia Cragg.

Allende started the Isabel Allende Foundation on December 9, 1996 to pay homage to her daughter, Paula Frías Allende who experienced a coma after complications of the disease porphyria placed her on a hospital bed. Paula was only twenty-eight years old when she died in 1992. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected.

Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. Well, the subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Times last week (Simon Winchester, New York Times, Op Ed, May 15th, 2008). I can only think those who responded with such vitriol to Winchester knew absolutely nothing at all about Winchester and his work, nor anything about the subject of his new book. In this latest opus, the award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Simon Winchester returns with the remarkable story of the growth of a great nation, China, and the eccentric and adventurous scientist who defined its essence for the world in his multi-volume opus, 'Science and Civilization in China'.

In an interview with Claudia Cragg, Winchester relates how most of us know that the Chinese invented a great variety of objects and devices long before they were known of in the West. Not simply famous things like gunpowder and paper, but also harnesses for horses which had a huge effect on the West when they arrived.

Why, though, did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is the so-called 'Needham Question', after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.

Needham was a British biochemist and was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese He was also cited by the United States during the McCarthy era for his investigation into the use of illegal weapons by the US on the Koreans in the Korean War.

Winchester, The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa is a writer and adventurer whose articles have appeared in such publications as the National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler . He has now written well over a dozen books on travel and history.