The Story on WUNC

It was a Sunday night early last January, and Benji Smith and Emily Lau were celebrating their honeymoon aboard the Costa Concordia cruise ship.

They were traveling near Tuscany when it happened: The ship scraped a rock that tore through its hull, flooding its engine room, and sending the ship tilting onto its side. More than 4,000 people were on board.

In the weeks after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School this past December, President Obama began talking about tightening gun control – and firearm sales boomed. Larry Hyatt runs Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, N.C., and he says that he’s seeing a growing demand for "high capacity" guns and that he’s selling as much as he would over Christmas. He stocks 7,000 guns in his store, making it one of the biggest in the country. He tells host Dick Gordon about the one thing he’d like to see changed in Washington.

Andrew Chin, a.k.a. Brushy One-String, had a vision as a child where he was playing a guitar with just one string. Since then, he’s crafted a unique style playing on one string, blending in his percussive style and utterly original voice.

As the details about three rescued women in Cleveland, Ohio unfolds, we offer a story from contributor Scott Carrier. He lived in Salt Lake City when 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted and then lived basically in plain sight for months. He says that we can be blind to what is right in front of us.

Alan Smith spent 14 years teaching philosophy and literature to violent criminals in a prison in England until he realized he was changing, slowly "becoming more of the prison than I wanted to be," and had to walk away.

Bangladesh’s garment factory collapse at Rana Plaza has put pressure on U.S. companies to respond.

Charles Kernaghan has been working for years to push companies and governments to prioritize the rights of workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

On this edition of The Story, he talks with host Dick Gordon about the string of recent tragedies and the complex web of forces that make change so difficult.

Late this March, Daniela Pelaez, 19, traveled from her college in New Hampshire to Washington D.C. to sit down with senators and representatives and remind them of something she’s become known for: she’s in the country illegally, there are millions like her, and they want to ask for help.

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.