大象传媒

"Move Over, Andrew Jackson. Harriet Tubman Is Coming to the $20 Bill." That's how the New York Times reported the decision of the US Treasury to put a black woman who helped hundreds of slaves to freedom on the front of all new twenties. Stephanie Folling, in the MA program in African American Womenist Pedagogy at the University of Maryland, College Park, gives us her reaction.

Research has found that companies whose directors are connected to winning gubernatorial candidates immediately increase in value - by an average of more than 200 million dollars. They are also more likely to receive state subsidies, loans and tax credits. 157 elections were examined over 11 years. We hear from the man who carried the research, Dr Bang Dang Nguyen, a finance lecturer at Cambridge University's Judge Business School.

A train carrying 2.5 million litres of drinking water has arrived in a drought-stricken region of western India. The government says a quarter of the country's population - an estimated 330 million people - are now affected by drought, following consecutive insufficient monsoon rains. Richard Mahapatra, at the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, explains the gravity of the situation.

We examine the candidacy of the man leading the Republican race, Donald Trump. Few have studied him as closely as Gwenda Blair. She's an investigative journalist and the author of not just a biography of the man but a dynastic history as well. She's met and interviewed Mr Trump many times over the years - so we ask her whether time, money and now presidential ambitions, have changed him.

All this and more discussed with our two guests on either side of the globe: Sushma Ramachandran, former Business Editor of The Hindu, in Delhi and August Turak, entrepreneur, executive and author in Raleigh, North Carolina.

(Picture: The new $20 featuring Harriet Tubman may look like this)