All Things Considered

Mitt Romney's senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom sparked mockery and attacks from Romney's rivals with a comment made in an interview Wednesday morning. Fehrnstrom said Romney would move away from his conservative positions advanced during the primaries by hitting the "reset button," almost like an "Etch a Sketch." The comment underscored Romney's reputation for changing his position on important issues. Robert Siegel talks with Ari Shapiro.

For her 101st birthday last September, Mary Hardison took to the sky for her very first paragliding trip and soared to a Guinness World Record.

"I felt very serene, I looked all around, and looked at the buildings, looked at the mountains," she said.

With her family cheering hundreds of feet below, Hardison soaked in the view.

"There was a whole flock of little grandkids and great-grandkids that had signs that said happy birthday for me while I was up in the air," she said. "And I just enjoyed looking around."

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

And I'm Robert Siegel. The French newspaper Le Monde is calling it the interminable siege. Since early this morning, French police have been in a standoff with a man suspected of murdering seven people in the southern city of Toulouse, seven people in three different shootings. They were all killed in broad daylight and at point blank range. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is following the ongoing drama from Paris.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

We don't know how common the experience of Robert Collins was but in the age of social media, perhaps it was inevitable. Mr. Collins was a corrections officer in Maryland. He took a leave of absence after his mother died, and then reapplied for his job. And he had to go through a security interview.

During the interview, Mr. Collins was asked a question that he had never been asked before during the process. He was asked for his Facebook username and password. Robert Collins joins us from Towson, Maryland. Welcome to the program.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in two murder cases testing whether it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a 14-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole. There are currently 79 people serving such life terms for crimes committed when they were 14 or younger.

Seventy years ago, in the middle of World War II, a couple of hundred miles north of Toulouse, Claude Lanzmann was a high school student — and an assimilated French Jew. Every day he faced the risk of arrest.

When Lanzmann was a teenager, both he and his father independently joined the Communist Resistance. He writes about that in his newly translated memoir, The Patagonian Hare.

Few 20th century thinkers predicted the 21st century era of social media and the Internet better than Marshall McLuhan. Beginning in the 1960s, the Toronto-based philosopher and scholar began to theorize about how television and radio were changing society, creating what he termed the "global village."