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By the time Father Lawrence Murphy died in 1998, it's alleged, he had sexually abused more than 200 children. Many of them must have seemed ideal victims: Students at St. John's School for the Deaf in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1974, they possessed limited ability to communicate with others. Commonly in that period, the boarding school's pupils had hearing parents who didn't know American Sign Language.

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I'm joined now here in the studio by Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Ambassador Oren, welcome to the program.

MICHAEL OREN: Good to be with you, Melissa.

BLOCK: I want to ask you about that call-up of 30,000 army reservists. That does signal an escalation. What can you tell us about that?

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We turn now to Ireland and a controversy over a young Indian woman there, who died after being refused an abortion in a hospital.

As NPR's Philip Reeves reports, her case is reigniting debate over the near total ban on abortions in Ireland.

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We're going to follow those Palestinian rockets that Anthony was talking about from Gaza into the fields, streets and homes of Israel. Israeli police have confirmed that rockets hit central Israel today, close to Tel Aviv, for the first time. Sheera Frenkel reports from one southern city where three civilians were killed today in their apartment.

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

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I'm Melissa Block. And we begin this hour with new fighting in an old conflict. Israeli war planes struck targets across the Gaza Strip today, while Hamas militants and their allies fired rockets at several Israeli towns. One rocket landed on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv. Three Israeli civilians were killed in one attack and at least 19 Palestinians are known to have been killed in Gaza, with many more injured.

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

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And I'm Melissa Block.

Fault lines are forming in the Republican Party over comments from Mitt Romney about why he lost last week's election. In a conference call yesterday, with some of his biggest donors and fundraisers, Romney said President Obama won by bestowing gifts on targeted groups, including young people and minorities.

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We're going to dig into some of those policy differences now between Republicans and Democrats. When it comes to reducing the deficit, both sides insist it's time for compromise. But President Obama says tax cuts for the richest Americans must end.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to the top two percent, what I'm not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don't need it.

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I will never be a Hall of Famer and will never lead the league in strikeouts. So begins the memoir published earlier this year by R.A. Dickey, starting pitcher for the New York Mets. How wrong he was. Dickey had a remarkable season this year. Not only did he lead the National League in strikeouts, he also led in innings pitched, complete games and shutouts. And yesterday, the perfect ending to a season not even Dickey could have imagined. He received the highest honor for a pitcher: the Cy Young Award.

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President Obama visited New York today, touring sections of Queens and Staten Island that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. He promised the federal government will help people rebuild and, more immediately, help restore necessities that many have done without for more than two weeks now.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There's still a lot of cleanup to do. People still need emergency help. They still need heat. They still need power. They still need food. They still need shelter.

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That resignation of David Petraeus, a retired four-star general, has raised a fundamental question: Is something wrong with the top leadership of the military? For months now, one high-ranking officer after another has gotten into trouble on charges ranging from sexual misconduct to the misuse of government funds. So today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called for an ethics review of the senior officer corps. NPR's Tom Bowman has that story.

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

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And I'm Melissa Block.

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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

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And I'm Audie Cornish. Three congressional hearings, two of them closed to the public, focused today on the September 11th attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans were killed in those attacks, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. As NPR's David Welna reports, the only open hearing today on Benghazi turned into a political slugfest.

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To understand what the environmental impact of the BP oil spill has been over the last two years, we turn now to Dr. Jim Cowan. He is a professor of oceanography and coastal science at Louisiana State University. Dr. Cowan, welcome to the program.

DR. JIM COWAN: Happy to be here.

CORNISH: So you've been out on the water examining the impacts of the spill since the early days. What were the sort of concerns at first and how has that changed over time?

It's New Year's Eve at The Blue Whale, a "live jazz + art space" in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles. Founded in 2009 by singer Joon Lee, this is a listening room. There's food at the bar, poetry (Rumi!) on the ceiling, and wall-to-wall people. The Blue Whale has been sold out for days, and the phone keeps ringing off the hook because everybody wants to be on the air, cheering for Billy Childs live on NPR's Toast of the Nation.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered a review of military ethical standards. The order comes just days after CIA Director David Petraeus stepped down because of an extramarital affair.

The Washington Post reports, however, that Panetta was in the process of ordering this review despite the Petraeus scandal. The Post adds:

Climate change and the environment were not major topics of the presidential campaign. And on Wednesday, President Obama said that while he believes more needs to be done to address what's happening, he won't "ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change."

This interview was originally broadcast on Nov. 8, 2005.

When Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg were working on the film Lincoln, they had many conversations with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is about Lincoln's relationship with his cabinet. Both her book and the film showcase Lincoln's remarkable political skills.

There's mixed reaction this afternoon to the news that BP has agreed to a deal with federal authorities to pay $4.5 billion in criminal and civil penalties related to the 2010 Gulf Oil spill.

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This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Violence in Syria continues to escalate. Every day thousands of refugee flee into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, but for the first time in months, there's an opportunity to form a government in exile that could open room for diplomacy.

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This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. As the holidays get underway, retailers go on high alert against shoplifters. Cases spike at this time of the year, and they're expected to raise losses for the year to nearly $35 billion.

Two sources tell NPR that four more BP employees will be charged in relation to the BP oil spill, which dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The individuals facing manslaughter charges are former BP well managers Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza. Another high ranking official, David Rainey, the former head of Gulf of Mexico exploration, will be charged with downplaying the spill to lawmakers. One more lower ranking BP employee will face insider trading charges.

The Chicago-based record label Thrill Jockey, led by founder Bettina Richards, has been presenting music on its own terms since 1992. Like any great independent label, it's difficult to identify the core "sound" of its releases, but its fans can easily identify its curatorial spirit. This is by design. "The way I listen to music, there are no categorical limits," Richards says.