Brutality in Syria, Harassment at Fox, The Future of Library Design

Coming up on today’s show:

• A day after a suspected chemical attack killed scores of people, a major conference on Syria is kicking off in Brussels. Six years into this brutal war that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, what can the international community accomplish? For answers we turn to Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014, and currently a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C.

• Louisa Loveluck, Middle East correspondent for The Washington Post, has reported extensively on Syria and has documented systematic torture within the walls of military hospitals in Syria. She’s conducted dozens of interviews and shares first-hand testimony of Mosen al-Masri, a detainee and survivor of torture inside a hospital known simply as 601.

• Senate Democrats are vowing to filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and Republicans are promising to invoke the “nuclear option” to change the rules once more. Todd Zwillich, Takeaway Washington correspondent, brings us the latest on the showdown from Capitol Hill.

• Matthew Smith is one of the youngest conductors to lead a 75-piece orchestra. He debuted this weekend at the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, where he led a performance of Johann Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus. Along with Derek Williams, a conductor and his teacher, 11-year-old Matthew Smith weighs in today on The Takeaway. 

• What works and what doesn’t when it comes to designing libraries and other cultural buildings? Author and Architecture Critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen joins The Takeaway to discuss public libraries and the future of design. 

• The New York Times reports the top-rated cable news network and its popular host Bill O’Reilly have paid $13 million to settle claims of sexual harassment. O’Reilly denies these claims. Gabriel Sherman, National Affairs editor for New York Magazine, and author of “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided A Country,” discusses the latest slew of sexual harassment allegations against Fox and its big names, and the culture of the network.

• In early April 1994, the government of Rwanda embarked on a campaign of genocide, killing more than 800,000 people and raping up to 250,000 over the course of 100 days. A new documentary called “The Uncondemned” tells the story of a group of lawyers who sought to make rape a crime of war. Michele Mitchell, director, writer, and producer of the film, and Pierre Prosper, lead attorney on the Rwandan genocide rape case and the first lawyer to try rape as a war crime, weigh in.