WYPR

Who’s to blame for the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession? There were billions in losses, yet no high-profile participants in the 2007-2008 disaster have been prosecuted. But some of the companies are suing each other now. AIG sued Bank of America for $10 billion this week, claiming massive fraud when the bank sold mortgage securities that were built on toxic assets. And Goldman Sachs has been sued over its sale of mortgage-backed securities to now-failed credit unions.

The weekly Midday news review sticks to one big subject -- the financial crisis and its economic and political ramifications, in Maryland, across the country and abroad. We're joined again by Baltimore Sun business columnist and blogger Jay Hancock, and by Herb Smith, longtime political observer, professor of political science at McDaniel College and co-author of the forthcoming "Maryland Politics and Government: Democratic Dominance".

In May, international tennis star Novak Djokovic claimed his remarkable run of tournament wins had been due to his special, gluten-free diet. Djokovic changed his diet last year after his nutritionist carried out tests and established he was intolerant to gluten, the protein in cereal grains. Today, a look at the growing appeal of gluten-free, not just as a dietary regimen but as business. The Gluten Free Registry  lists more than 19,000 “gluten-free friendly” establishments throughout the world.

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler joins Dan to talk about same-sex marriage in Maryland, a recent $500,000 penalty ordered against a Cambridge, Maryland country club for dumping raw sewage into the Choptank River, and a landowner education campaign on natural gas drilling contracts in western Maryland.

When a young lawyer named Barack Obama Jr. wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, he relied on dim memory and family lore to describe a parent he hardly knew. But our second-hour guest, Boston Globe reporter Sally Jacobs, trekked from Boston to Hawaii to the bush country of Kenya to construct a fascinating portrait of Barack Obama, Sr.

In riot or revolution, the Tweets must flow, says the network's co-founder Biz Stone. “Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users.

Midday's collaboration with Foregn Policy magazine continues. 

This hour:  

• SYRIA CIVIL WAR with Blake Hounshell, FP managing editor
• THE LIST with Josh Keating, FP associate editor
• THE SOVIET COLLAPSE AND THE ARAB SPRING, comparative history with Susan Glasser, FP editor-in-chief

In another of our collaborations with the editors, staff writers and contributing writers of Foregn Policy magazine, Midday looks at an array of hot international stories, including the U.S. and European economic crises.

This hour:

John Fritze, reporting from Washington for The Baltimore Sun: "The House of Representatives approved a bipartisan deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling Monday in a vote that splintered the Democratic and Republican members of Maryland's congressional delegation and pushed the months-long battle toward a climax in the Senate on Tuesday."

Who would have thought that Joe Ehrmann (co-founder, Coach for America), the bruising defensive tackle who once played for the Baltimore Colts, would decades later offer a heartfelt template for coaches to be more compassionate leaders? After all, it was the author, an admitted drug abuser while he played, who once said he wanted to knock Jets quarterback Joe Namath's head clear off his shoulder pads. "I...was not trying to be entertaining. I meant it. I thought that way and I played that way," he writes.