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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. In Britain, the radical cleric Abu Hamza has lost his final battle to avoid extradition to the United States. Britain's high court judges ruled today that Hamza and four other suspected terrorists must now be sent to the U.S. to face trial on terror charges related to al-Qaida. That ends a legal battle that, in Hamza's case, has lasted nearly 14 years. Vicki Barker reports from London.

For the past decade, al-Qaida has been a top-down organization.

Letters seized at Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan showed that he was a hands-on manager, approving everything from operations to leadership changes in affiliate groups.

But there's early intelligence that al-Qaida may have had a small role in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, on Sept. 11.

If al-Qaida involvement is confirmed, it may signal that al-Qaida has changed.

The news that the cost of personal genome sequencing will soon drop as low as $1,000 has generated a quite a bit of interest and concern — from medical researchers, biotech companies, bioethicists and the average consumer alike.

NPR's Rob Stein explored many of the implications of this technology in his four-part series "The $1,000 Genome." They're complicated, to say the least.

The parents of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University student who committed suicide soon after he found out his roommate had used a webcam to spy on him kissing another man, have decided not to sue anyone involved in the case.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports:

The Ebola outbreak in Uganda, which started two months ago, has come to a close.

"The Ministry of Health [of Uganda] has been very prudent of declaring the outbreak over," Gregory Hartl, a World Health Organization spokesman, tells Shots. The last case was detected over 42 days ago — or twice the incubation period for the hemorrhagic fever — so new infections are highly unlikely.

Longtime PBS anchor Jim Lehrer was heavily criticized for his role in moderating the first presidential debate on Wednesday.

Today, the Commission on Presidential Debates defended him, saying the format of the debate was intended facilitate a long discussion on each subject.

Whole genome sequencing has become an essential tool for researchers. But slow speeds and high costs have helped keep the technology from becoming a routine diagnostic test for doctors.

But that's starting to change. And results from two studies published this week suggest that in-depth personalized genome sequencing could be inching closer to clinical reality.

Turkey fired across its border into Syria again today in retaliation for a mortar shell that landed inside its borders.

The AP reports:

"The Anadolu Agency quoted the governor for Hatay province as saying that Turkish troops 'responded with fire' after the mortar round landed in a rural area of the province that borders Syria. No one was reported hurt.