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The Texan senate has just passed legislation that鈥檚 expected to shut down most of the state鈥檚 abortion clinics.听Clinics currently operating can鈥檛 meet the new regulations outlined in the bill which also dictates when abortion pills are taken and bans abortions after 20 weeks.听The bill in Texas came to the world鈥檚 attention after Democratic State senator Wendy Davis, staged a marathon filibuster by talking for 11 hours to stop the bill reaching the state governor鈥檚 desk.听And it鈥檚 not just Texas - many other states across North America are planning new regulations and others are locked in legal battles over women鈥檚 access to abortion. 听Juliet Eilperin from the Washington Post explains why opposition to the bill failed to stop the new legislation.听

Jane Campion is the most visibly successful female director working today. Perhaps most famous for her acclaimed film The Piano.听She was recently head of the jury for the Cin茅fondation and Short Films sections at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.听 She joins Jenni to discuss her new series Top of the Lake on 大象传媒 Two.

Award-winning performance artist and her 9 year old niece Taylor are on a mission to听launch their own pop star role model named Catherine Bennett. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model is a social campaign, documentary, theater show and education project which attempts to create an alternative pop star and take on the global tween machine at its own game. Catherine does not wear skimpy clothes or sing about boys and sex. They join Jenni to explain the idea behind the experiment, its aims, and how they created the character of 听
Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model is at the Almeida Theatre on 19听and 20听JulyLatitude Festival on the 21听July and at the Pleasance Dome at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for all of August.

For US听folk-Americana singer songwriter听Patty Griffin, her new album American Kid is a highly personal work, which has been described by one critic as 鈥渁 triumph of powerful, profound songwriting.鈥� A Grammy award winning artist, the album honors the life of her World War II veteran father, and was written when he was about to pass away in 2009. Here in the UK as she embarks on tour, Patty Griffin joins Jenni Murray to describe the very personal story of her album, and to play the track Ohio, live in the studio.

Patty Griffin鈥檚 new album American Kid is out now on Columbia, and she will be playing a string of live dates across the UK from Friday, the Cambridge Folk Festival on the 26 July, and the Royal Festival Hall in London in November.

The Sleep Room is a ghost story written by former clinical psychologist . It鈥檚 based on the true events of a psychiatrist who put patients to sleep for months and gave them electric shock treatment while they were sleeping in order to help them recover from depression, schizophrenia and other mental health conditions. The hospital was in London and the majority of the patients were young women. The last real life sleeping room closed down as recently as 1972. Frank Tallis discusses why he decided to write a supernatural thriller on this subject.