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From the 1950s through the 1970s, millions of students in driver's education classes watched films that offered a grisly brand of highway safety education -- they used actual footage of bodies twisted by car crashes to instill the fear of reckless road behavior. A new documentary called Hell's Highway tracks the history of these shock-value films. NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with director Bret Wood.

Personal accounts and reflections of individuals affected by the Iraq war. Mandy Terc is a master's student in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. The 25-year-old Chicago native is in Beirut taking Arabic classes and working on an oral history project about Palestinian refugees. This week, Terc attended a candlelight vigil in downtown Beirut. She was with a few of her American friends, each holding a sign with a message protesting the war in Iraq. Her sign read "Americans Say Regime Change Starts At Home."

An Israeli woman and a Palestinian man find lifelong friendship in a search for understanding. In The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan ties a story of two families and the house that connected them, to the history of the Mideast conflict.

In 2002, a federal judge ruled that the "under God" portion of the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of church and state. An uproar ensued. But as Richard J. Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, points out in his book, those words were not included in the pledge when it was written in 1892 — they were added in 1950. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.

Danny Perasa proposed to Annie, his future wife, on their first date 27 years ago, and she accepted. The Brooklyn couple's story is the latest from StoryCorps, a project that records oral histories at New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

Journalist Pico Iyer has a long history meeting with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet who lives in exile in India. Iyer joins Fresh Air to discuss how the Dalai Lama is responding to the current Tibetan uprising and protest against Chinese rule.

Bernard Madoff has pleaded guilty to all 11 charges in the largest fraud case in Wall Street history. The former New York money manager is accused of stealing billions of dollars from thousands of investors in what he himself has described as a Ponzi scheme.

American Floyd Landis has been stripped of his 2006 Tour de France championship title for using banned drugs during the race. Runner-up Oscar Pereiro of Spain was pronounced the new winner. It is the first time in the more than 100-year history of the tour that a victory has been revoked by a doping scandal.

History was made Wednesday in Denver as a major political party for the first time nominated a black man to be president of the United States. Barack Obama will accept the nomination Thursday at the pary's convention. Early on, his campaign was propelled by his opposition to the Iraq war, but it succeeded for reasons well beyond the war.

Police in India have been conducting tests on two men accused in one of the most gruesome cases of serial rape and child murder in the country's history. The tests include administering so-called "narco-analysis" drugs — or, as some put it, "truth serum."