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Renee Montagne talks with Rhea Paul, professor of communication disorders at Southern Connecticut State University and a researcher at Yale's Child Study Center, about Asperger's Syndrome. Paul explains the disability in the context of this week's StoryCorps installment that features a conversation between a child with Asperger's and his mother.

Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne read listeners' letters, including praise for stories on China and gardening in London.

Belarus will hold presidential elections Sunday, and the current president, Alexander Lukashenko, is widely expected to win. The European Union and the United States accuse Lukashenko of crushing human rights, and warn of new punitive measures if the election is declared unfair.

For the past two decades, Kurds have traditionally gathered in Halabja, Iraq, in mid-March to mark a grim chapter in their history: the day when Saddam Hussein's government unleashed a poison-gas attack that killed more than 5,000 people. Thursday, that normally peaceful commemoration turned turbulent.

President Bush's choice head the CIA, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, begins his confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) and senators from both parties are expected to grill Hayden on issues of privacy and national security, particularly the role of the NSA in collecting the phone records of ordinary Americans.

The Marine Corps announces a second investigation into the deaths of unarmed civilians in Iraq. The first incident -- which left 24 Iraqis dead in the town of Haditha -- happened in November. The second occurred in April, in a town west of Baghdad. Marine Gen. Michael Hagee flew to Iraq on Thursday.

World leaders are expressing outrage over an Israeli airstrike Sunday that killed more than 50 civilians -- many children -- in the southern Lebanese village of Qana. The pre-dawn attack flattened a building where several families had taken shelter. Grief and anger were evident and the scene of the bombing.

If the budget allows, the Census Bureau will be out with GPS devices in 2009 to pinpoint every American dwelling. The collected data is confidential, but some private companies might challenge that law.

Army Sgt. Tim Brumley says he had expected things to be pretty quiet in Afghanistan, where he was deployed last year after 10 months in Iraq. But he ended up losing his foot after being wounded in a major firefight with the Taliban.

Alaska's Stryker Brigade was scheduled to wrap up the state's biggest deployment since Vietnam, but instead the Department of Defense announced this week that the unit's deployment would be extended. One Stryker soldier is coming home. Sergeant Irving Hernandez was killed by sniper fire just a few weeks before his deployment was scheduled to end. Libby Casey of member station KUAC in Fairbanks has this remembrance.