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After the four-day hostage crisis in Algeria, the death toll has risen to at least 81. Algerian forces that were searching the natural gas plant in the Sahara that was taken over by Islamist militants found at least 25 more bodies on Sunday.

George Saunders has long been praised in literary circles for his short stories that deftly combine the absurd with the mundane. But now the author has caught mainstream attention with his newest collection, Tenth of December.

Modern society has become adversarial in its relationship to nature, Yale scholar Stephen Kellert argues, having greatly undervalued the natural world beyond its narrow utilty. In his new book Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World, he tells stories of the environment's effect on us, and ours on it.

With just a couple of days before President Obama receives his second inaugural parade, weekends on All Things Considered host Jacki Lyden speaks with James Fallows of The Atlantic about whether we can expect Obama's second term to fall into the same patterns as previous second-term presidents. Historically, the second term has an emphasis on foreign policy and is often riddled with scandal.

The news blackout that Algeria has imposed on the hostage crisis at a gas plant was agonizing for some families with loved ones in danger.

The Inquisition revolutionized record-keeping and surveillance techniques that are still used today, says Cullen Murphy. His book God's Jury draws parallels between some of the interrogation techniques used in previous centuries with the ones used today.

How The Big Lebowski's Dude is schooling us all in the ways of the Zen. Its all in the abiding.

The National Book Critics Circle has announced that two feminist literary scholars, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, will receive a lifetime achievement award. Critic Maureen Corrigan says their groundbreaking 1979 book, The Madwoman in the Attic, changed the way we read.

A helicopter flying across London seeking to land due to bad weather clipped a crane atop one of the city's tallest residential towers and fell into a street crowded with rush hour traffic. The pilot and one person on the ground died, and 13 others were injured.

In the modern era, legislative attempts to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill are nearly half a century old. In many ways, we've made little or no progress. There are numerous reasons for this failure and those reasons explain why the odds of success of any new legislative initiative to the problem of mentally ill having access to guns is very, very low. These challenges explain why none of the three of the most prominent recent mass shooters — Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza — would have been affected by any current legislation involving the mentally ill and guns. Loughner had not met the conditions necessary for reporting his name to the federal database and he obtained weapons legally from a dealer. Cho was not deemed at imminent risk of causing harm, and was not involuntarily committed, and he was therefore not reported. Lanza does not seem to have been involuntarily committed, either, and, in any event, he didn't buy guns from a dealer — he simply took guns belonging to a family member.