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Polls show that Americans are worrying more about their personal privacy. With easy access to personal information via the Internet and computer databases, are threats to privacy worse than ever? NPR's Bob Garfield ponders privacy issues.

An industry trade group reported that manufacturing activity in the U.S. fell in July for the 12th straight month. In California's Silicon Valley, big companies that helped create the high-tech boom are shedding thousands of jobs.

In the first of a two-part series on the FBI's past directors, NPR's Barbara Bradley profiles J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau's best-know director. Hoover reformed the FBI's reputation for scandal and corruption and pushed it to a new position of prominence. But his accomplishments have been largely overshadowed by his later abuses of power.

This week, we take a look at the city of Buffalo, New York, both past and present. The tour begins with the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, which heralded Buffalo as the city of the future, a place where hydropower made the widespread use of electricity possible. Mark Goldman, author of City on the Lake: The Challenge of Change in Buffalo, New York, serves as Liane Hansen's tour guide of present-day Buffalo. Their first view of the city is from Canada, where Goldman says you can see Buffalo's long history layed out before you. Next, they venture down Main Street, where we meet singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who has based her company, Righteous Babe Records, in her hometown of Buffalo.

Scott talks with Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Roman Catholic nun who was tortured in Guatemala in 1989. She is the founder of Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.

In the fourth installment of her series on favorite summers, NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg talks with Andrew X. Pham about the summer he first returned to his homeland of Vietnam. Pham says that visiting the country 20 years after his family fled the Vietcong was painful and deeply cathartic. (7:37) {Book Information: Pham, Anderew X. Catfish and Mandala : A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999}.

NPR's Alex Chadwick continues the National Geographic-NPR Radio Expedition about the Tortugas Ecological Reserve near the Florida Keys. Chadwick talks with the scientists studying coral reef life in the underwater wilderness area, and tries not to get seasick.

One part hip-hop, two parts jazz and a whole lotta Philly — that's what happens when you mix three master musicians, unrehearsed jamming and a risk-taking producer. Scott Simon talks to bassist Christian McBride and producer Aaron Levinson of The Philadelphia Experiment about their experimental new album.

Back in the seventeenth century, explorers told of seas teeming with giant marine creatures. A group of researchers concluded that these were an accurate account of life in the oceans at the time. As John Nielsen reports, these fabulous aquatic ecosystems collapsed as humans started to hunt these creatures.

NPR's Barbara Bradley reports on the four directors who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation since J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI's most recent director, Louis Freeh, leaves a bureau clouded by scandal and accusations, but his predecessors didn't have an easy job, either.