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The New Hampshire House will likely vote next week to ask the federal government to rescind a rule forcing insurers to provide contraceptives to employees of religious organizations. House Speaker William O'Brien says he'll also work to undo a similar state law. 

O’Brien told the house state and federal relations committee it's unconstitutional for governments, federal or state, to tell insurers to offer contraception to workers at religious organizations.

Revulsion kept early humans from eating spoiled meat, or snuggling up to people covered with oozing sores. Today, some cultures prize cheeses writhing with maggots, or drink liquor made from fermented saliva. This is not a trick to get you to “eeewww” but a way to evoke the visceral nature of disgust, which as Rachel Herz found, is powerful enough to convict suspects, incite genocide, and make us writhe and wretch within seconds. 

With developers pumping out an estimated 2,000 applications daily for use on smart-phones and tablets, reviewers and web-critics are keeping busy sorting out what’s worth downloading, and what’s worth squat. 

When you’ve got a few extra bucks burning a hole in that wallet, what better place to spend it than your local mall? These cavernous halls of commerce give us The Gaps, J-Crews, and Sunglass Huts we love so dearly. Ahhh, can you smell the Cinnabon?

The state legislature is once again looking at whether the Granite State should join twenty-three others in adopting so-called “right to work legislation” which governs unionization.   But this effort narrowly failed last  year, and this year, opposition remains strong.  We’ll talk with two national experts about  the economics and politics of “right to work”.   

Guests

The New Hampshire House has passed a bill giving lawmakers final say on collective bargaining agreements with the State. The legislation is just the latest effort by Republicans in Concord to rein in the costs of public employee contracts.

"This gives the legislature the ability to look at an entire contract and say whether it is fair, and whether we should fund it," says Republican Neil Kurk of Weare.

Top house and senate republicans are at odds over constitutional amendments designed to keep government small. 

The state senate's proposed constitutional change would require a 60 percent vote by lawmakers to increase state spending beyond the rate of inflation. As passed by the house, the proposal would have required that same super-majority to borrow money or raise taxes.

According to Senate President Peter Bragdon the senate version amounts to common sense -- low taxes, he says, result from low spending.

The New Hampshire Senate has approved a constitutional amendment to give the state more leeway in how it distributes school aid. 

The amendment would make it easier for lawmakers to target money to poorer communities but not explicitly undue the Claremont rulings that require the state to fund an adequate education for every child. After the vote Governor Lynch described the proposal as “a significant milestone.”

One year after the Arab Spring, protestors in Syria are uploading videos and images of the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown of the opposition. The use of new technologies to spread messages and unify resistance against authoritarian regimes is by now familiar. Five centuries before demonstrators tweeted from public squares in the middle-east, an obscure minister and theologian named Martin Luther exploited the social media of his time to challenge entrenched power. We know, at least, how that revolution fared.

Typically winter hikers try to balance what they need with not turning themselves into recreational beasts of burden. But when searchers from New Hampshire Fish and Game head into the mountains they don’t have the luxury of light weight.

They have to be ready for almost any contingency including uncooperative if not perverse weather.  And, that translates into pounds.

“I’d say my ruck weighs approximately fifty-five pounds,” says Conservation Officer Brad Morse, who often heads into The White Mountains looking for a lost or injured hiker.

Between documents, e-mails, instant messages, news feeds, Facebook and browsers, on-screen real estate gets a little crowded. Multitaskers keep up with the deluge with bigger screens, riding hard on the tab key, and increasingly, a multiplication of monitors. Many data crunchers preach the benefits of having two, or even three screens operating simultaneously in their workspace.

“Critical infrastructure” once referred to things like roads, bridges and power plants. But today, the term includes the unseen digital networks that control our visible world. An easy way to protect this infrastructure from hackers is to simply keep it disconnected from the internet, but it turns out many of those systems indeed are connected to the web, unbeknownst to the people that operate them. Joining me to talk about this is Kim Zetter, senior writer for Wired.

An agreement involving national banks and state attorneys general penalizes banks for improper mortgage and foreclosure practices and offers relief for homeowners. Yet some say it leaves far too many without recourse. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has another plan to offer further help. We’ll see how these initiatives might affect New Hampshire. 

Guests

Opposition to the Northern Pass Project has inspired lawn signs, bumper stickers and even legislation.   Avid hiker Larisa Dannis has taken her protest of the proposed 180 mile transmission line through New Hampshire’s North Country to the top. 

Every year Governor Lynch has been in office there’s talk that this is the year an education funding constitutional amendment finally passes.

But amendment supporters say this time – for real - the stars are almost in perfect alignment....almost...in perfect alignment.

The GOP-dominated state Senate is poised to overwhelmingly pass the education funding amendment.

Senate President Peter Bragdon expects some 15 Republicans to support the Senate version.