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NPR's Melissa Block talks with Seth Coleman, lead author of a study on the mating preferences of female bower birds to be published Thursday in the journal Nature. He says older female birds respond more to strong character traits in their male mates than the shiny objects or ruffled feathers that younger male birds may try to woo them with.

Jean Kilbourne, author of Can't Buy My Love -- How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, says the media have created an ideal of beauty for young girls that is dangerously unachievable. Kilbourne speaks with NPR's Susan Stamberg in the second in a series of conversations on the nature of beauty.

Ecologist Suzanne Simard shares how she discovered that trees use underground fungi networks to communicate and share resources, uprooting the idea that nature constantly competes for survival.

Carrie Kahn of member station KPBS in San Diego reports that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has invited a representative of the Mexican government to open an office inside the San Diego border station. The idea has drawn strong opposition from inspectors who work at the station and from conservative critics who see the move as a violation of national sovereignty.

NPR's Vicki O'Hara reports on the mounting woes of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The latest blow came earlier this week with the arrest of a senior INS official in Hong Kong. The official, based in Honduras, allegedly was running an operation which was smuggling illegal aliens from Asia through Central America and on to the US. The scandal comes on the heels of charges that INS officials in California and Miami have sought to deceive Congress and the public about their operations.

the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In the year ending September 1996, right before the presidential election, the INS granted a record one-point-one million citizenships...that's triple an average year. Only later did they find out that about 10,000 new citizens had previously been arrested or convicted of felonies.

NPR's Peter Kenyon reports that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is changing the procedures it uses to screen immigrants before granting them citizenship to ensure that convicted felons and other criminals do not get through. Republicans had charged before the election that the Clinton administration was rushing through thousands of citizenships to boost the voter rolls with new immigrants who might vote Democratic. As a result of the rush, several cases of convicted felons being granted citizenship by mistake were uncovered.

A federal judge today denied a motion by Reform Party presidential candidate Ross Perot to stop the presidential debates next week unless he is allowed to participate. Attornies for Perot and Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin argued that it was unconstitutional for them to be excluded from the debates because they met all of the objective criteria set out by the Commission on Presidential Debates. NPR's Kathleen Schalch reports.

Independent producer Wes Horner takes us to New England to find the source of those Thanksgiving Day cranberries. In the town of Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod, we meet cranberry growers Albion and Sheila Rich. We learn about the family business at their roadside fruit stand. Also on the Cape is naturalist Howard Irwin, who gives us a tour of the natural cranberry bogs in the dunes of Provincetown, Mass.

Congress and many states are trying to require restaurant chains to post nutritional information on their menus in an effort to combat obesity. The restaurant industry opposes such mandates, arguing that the market will naturally respond to consumer demand. The popular restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday's already has. NPR's Patricia Neighmond reports.