Judge Juan Guzmán had supported General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup that toppled democratically-elected President Salvador Allende and left thousands of others dead or disappeared. But when in 1998 Judge Guzman was assigned the first criminal cases against Pinochet, what he learned about the past changed his mind about the General, and forced him to confront his own role in the tragedy. He joins Leonard, along with Elizabeth Farnsworth, director of a new documentary called "The Judge and the General." It airs on PBS on August 19 at 10 pm.

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During 2006 and 2007, the Department of Interior awarded over $430 million in small business contracts to corporate giants like Xerox and John Deere. We look into how that happened, and whether that’s part of a larger pattern of directing small business money to large corporations. Lloyd Chapman is president and founder of the American Small Business League, a non-partisan group advocacy group for small businesses.

Many women in post-war Liberia are jobless and lack decent housing and medical care. Compounding the problem are the more than 30,000 women and girls who served with fighting forces in Liberia’s recent wars. They were constant targets for rape and sexual violence. Find out how former female Liberian soldiers are struggling to piece together their lives again.

Jackie Redd served in Charles Taylor’s forces throughout her teens and early 20s; Florence Ballah worked as a cook and porter in Liberia’s rebel group ULIMO. Both were abducted in their early teens and subsequently joined fighting forces. Tania Bernath is Liberia researcher for Amnesty International.

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Sun., July 27

Georgette Gagnon, Africa program director for Human Rights Watch, gives us an update on the latest from Khartoum. We’ll talk about the ongoing proxy war between Chad and Sudan, and the recent ICC request for a warrant of arrest for Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir on charges of ten counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, former leader of the Haitian paramilitary group FRAPH, went on trial earlier this week in New York. But he’s not being tried for his human rights violations – he’s on trial for mortgage fraud! After fleeing Haiti to avoid a warrant for his arrest, he lived a comfortable life in Queens as a mortgage broker. Jennie Green is Senior Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued Toto Constant on behalf of 3 women who survived FRAPH’s campaign of violence against women.

By 2020, it’s estimated that the US will be short 1 million nurses! On Underreported, Suzanne Gordon, of the University of Maryland and UCSF Schools of Nursing, and John Buchanan, Director of the Workplace Research Group at the University of Sydney, discuss how nurse-patient ratios are partly responsible for the nurse shortage, and how that ratio needs to change in order to attract and retain more nurses. They are co-authors of Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care.

The world’s weakest and failed states can disrupt the stability of other countries all over the world. The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine have released their fourth annual Failed States Index. Patricia Taft, senior associate at the Fund for Peace, joins us to talk about where the worst failed states are, and how instability spreads from one country to another.

When Francisco Goldman's book The Art of Political Murder was published in the U.S., it had ripple effects in Guatemala, where the book was used to prove points by warring factions in the country's civil war. Nathaniel Popper has written a new article, "The Novelist and the Murderers," in the July 7th issue of The Nation about how a single book can have a dramatic effect on a country's political climate.

We'd like to hear from you. Has a single book had a dramatic impact on your own political views? Tell us about the book, and why you reacted so strongly to it.

Somalia has been mired in war for 17 years. On Monday night, a peace deal was signed, but some rebel factions have already denounced the deal’s terms. David Shinn is former director of East and Horn of African Affairs for the U.S. State Department. He’s currently adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

Horseshoe crabs predate dinosaurs by more than 100 million years. They’ve also saved more than a million human lives thanks to a substance in their blood that the medical industry uses to fight infections! Find out why the horseshoe crab population has been in a downward spiral since the mid-1990s, and what’s being done to save them. William R. Hall is a marine researcher at University of Delaware, which runs a horseshoe crab education website.