Politics & Economy audiobooks

Arizona Prisons

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Beyond BarsHow the head of Arizona's prison system is working to reform the state's corrections program and curb the number of repeat offenders. Jeffrey Brown has that story. Read more

Nelson Mandela - 1992 interview

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Nelson Mandela discusses his visit to the United Nations Security Council seeking peacekeepers to quell violence in South Africa. Originally broadcast on the MacNeil/Lehrer News hour on July 15, 1992. Read more

How Rust Belt City Youngstown Hopes to Overcome Decades of Decline

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Youngstown, Ohio is an upper-midwest city that has come to symbolize the nation’s distress of deindustrialization with high unemployment and crime rates. But after decades of decline, the city has plans to rebuild, remove blight and attract employers. On issues of poverty and opportunity in America, this is part of an ongoing series of reports... Read more

World Powers Look to Djibouti for Trade, Military Access

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Djibouti, a tiny country in Northeast Africa, is situated at the gateway to the Suez Canal, one of the world's busiest shipping routes. While its location is an economic commodity for a country that’s half unemployed, it also puts it at the center of a multinational fight against pirates in Somalia and terrorist groups. NewsHour Weekend Special... Read more

Little Rock Nine 40th Anniversary

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Jim Lehrer discusses the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine with Haynes Johnson, Kenneth Blackwell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss and Roger Wilkins. Read more

Female Marines Part 1

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Until recently, women were barred from U.S. military combat jobs. Today females are volunteering for the most physically and mentally grueling Marine roles. But is the Corps helping or hurting women recruits' readiness by separating training from males? In a two-part series, William Brangham follows three female Marine recruits as they embark on... Read more

As Venezuela's economy plummets, mass exodus ensues

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Despite having the largest oil reserves in the world, Venezuela’s economy is in a freefall, necessities have become scarce and tens of thousands of residents are fleeing across the border to Colombia. With support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, special correspondent Nadja Drost and videographer Bruno Federico report on the exodus. Read more

Killing of a Missouri teenager by police triggers unrest

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

The killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, has sparked outrage and protests. Brown, a young African-American man, was unarmed. Jeffrey Brown gets reaction from Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Greg Meyer, former captain of the Los Angeles Police Department. Read more

Lethal Injection

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Judy Woodruff talks to Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center and Jeff Middendorf of the State of Kentucky's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet about recent lethal injection developments. Read more

Taylor Branch: At Canaan's Edge

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Taylor Branch, author of At Canaan's Edge, the final installment of his three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr., discusses the civil rights leader's life and legacy. Read more

Guns Debate

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

California’s Armed and Prohibited Persons program has recovered more than 10,000 guns that were purchased legally, but by people who are now prohibited from owning them. Critics say the program is expensive and time-consuming. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports on whether other states could use the same model. Read more

Between vegetarian café and Trump café, a political chasm in Texas

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Three months since the election and a few weeks into the new Trump administration, recent public opinion polls show we live in a deeply divided country. So what are voters saying about the new president? William Brangham has a tale of two cafes in Texas, where he found strikingly different views and emotions about the state of politics. Read more

By staging war games, NATO members prepare for cyber attacks

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 5 minutes

Abridged: No

The world’s largest live-fire cyber defense exercise is helping NATO members prepare for cyber warfare. Over the last eight years, 22 NATO and EU countries have been practicing the scenario of a cyber attack in Locked Shields, a war game run by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent... Read more

For child migrants, desperate journey to freedom

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

The boat trip from North Africa to Italy has ended in death and heartbreak for many migrants. It has been especially tough on children, many of whom come by themselves. In the second of a three-part Desperate Journey series from the Mediterranean, Malcolm Brabant is aboard a Doctors Without Border ship when one trip ends with promise of a new... Read more

Emancipation Proclamation Celebrates 150 Years

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Issued by President Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation is one of the defining documents of American democracy and is rarely available for public viewing. Ray Suarez talks to Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard University about the importance of this artifact. Read more

New generation of war crimes investigators turn to high-tech methods

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Humanitarian crises like those in Syria’s Aleppo sometimes make headlines. But how do we identify such atrocities when they are occurring thousands of miles away? A new program at UC Berkeley is training students to leverage social media, geolocation and other high-tech tools to document human rights abuses, and their findings have been brought... Read more

To Combat Rights Abuses

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Spencer Michels reports on a non-profit company that uses high-tech tools to document brutality and human rights abuses around the globe. Read more

Major Reform for New Orleans Police

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

The Department of Justice announced sweeping reforms for the New Orleans Police Department. The mandates are meant to resolve issues such as unlawful arrests and the use of deadly force without cause. Gwen Ifill discusses the future of the NOPD with Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez and NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas. Read more

Kotz and Wilkins on Civil Rights

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

To mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Jeffrey Brown speaks with civil rights author Nick Kotz and Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University. Read more

Americans Still Struggling to Recover

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

The Obama administration announced the U.S. Medicare program is projected to remain solvent until 2026. Despite the positive sign, a Federal Reserve Study found Americans are still struggling to recover from the recession. Judy Woodruff talks with William Emmons, chief economist at the Center for Household Financial Stability. Read more

Do Innocent Citizens Risk Police Seizure of Their Property?

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Property seizure is a profitable practice for local law enforcement agencies, long used to deprive mobsters and drug kingpins. But the police can also take personal goods away from citizens who haven't been proven guilty of a crime. Ray Suarez talks to Sarah Stillman who investigated civil forfeiture for The New Yorker. Read more

Some Iraqi forces wage campaign of punishment against ISIS sympathizers

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

As the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State nears its end, a new campaign of revenge and retribution is underway by Iraqi forces against those suspected of fighting for or aiding the militant group. Human rights organizations report a number of extrajudicial killings, mass detentions and forced displacement. Special correspondent Marcia... Read more

Wisconsin group wants to turn student borrowers into activists

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Through the recession, college tuition skyrocketed at public universities to make up for flagging state funding. Some students who borrowed to keep up with rising costs face crushing debt repayments. Hari Sreenivasan travelled to Wisconsin to report on one group hoping to turn the state's student borrowers into a powerful voting bloc. Read more

GPS SCOTUS

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police violated the Constitution by attaching a GPS-tracking device to a car owned by a Washington, D.C., club owner, eventually leading to a cocaine-trafficking conviction. Jeffrey Brown discusses their reasoning and the implications with The National Law Journal's Marcia Coyle. Read more