The Story on WUNC

Host Dick Gordon calls Issa Touma in the city of Aleppo, where he has reached him several times over the past year. He says sometimes the electricity is cut for days and there are bombings and firefights. In these times, the sounds of Aleppo intensify and he is hearing families fight and begin to fray.

This is a video from a workshop organized by Le Pont, the only cultural organization still operating in Aleppo:
 

Last Friday, Carlos Warner called one of his 11 clients in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and offered to help negotiate the end of a hunger strike that detainees are holding. But the client, Fayiz al Kandari, declined his offer, and asked why the U.S. Army will not talk directly to them.

From 1976 to 1986, a violent criminal terrorized communities across California. He became known as the Golden State Killer, and was linked to at least 50 rapes and 10 murders. For years, his whereabouts were hazy.

Then, the writer Michelle McNamara started the blog True Crime Diary, where she and a community of fellow obsessives started piecing together clues that had long been passed over by authorities.

Most of us don’t expect to be sent to jail for failure to pay our parking tickets. But in several counties across Ohio, courts are jailing men and women who cannot afford to pay their fines.

Dick Gordon, host of The Story, speaks with Jack Dawley, who’s been to jail three times for failure to pay. He says he’s never seen a judge or been given any opportunity to explain to a judge that he simply cannot afford to pay.

Charlie Haughey returned home from Vietnam with almost 2,000 photo negatives of his fellow soldiers.  He put them in a box and left them there for 45 years, untouched, until a friend encouraged him to digitize them.

In this edition of The Story, Charlie says seeing them brings back the war, and "things I did not take pictures of. And there are some that are, to me, just the scariest pictures in the world."

Two years ago, when members of an elite Navy SEAL team stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and took out the leader of al-Qaeda, they ended one of the biggest manhunts in American history.

But for a small group of analysts at the CIA, bin Laden's capture was the culmination of a two-decade search that began long before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even as they are mourning the dead from the massive explosion in a fertilizer plant in West, residents are returning to their homes.

In the latest edition of The Story, host Dick Gordon speaks with people as they are still making sense of the disaster, including Nita Gerik, a longtime resident and widow of the fire chief, and her son Jim Gerik, who traveled from Dallas to oversee donations for the community.

As news of the Boston Marathon bombings emerged, people at the scene took pictures, tweeted and shared police wanted posters on their phones.

On this edition of The Story, guest host Sean Cole sits down with Brooke Gladstone, host of NPR's On the Media, to figure out what people got right and what they got wrong. She says it’s normal for people to want to know everything right away, but that stories have to be in context and checked out.