In mid-December, Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox announced he was stepping down to take a job with the National Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program. Cox was instrumental in rolling out LEAD in Albany. Cox recently sat down with WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Dave Lucas to talk about his time as chief.

Newschannel 13 meteorologist Paul Caiano delivers the Midday Weather Summary for Tuesday, January 3, 2017.

The Vermont Supreme Court will hear arguments this afternoon in a case that challenges outgoing Governor Peter Shumlin’s ability to appoint a new justice months before the position is actually vacated.

  From the domestication of the bird nearly ten thousand years ago to its current status as our go-to meat, the history of this seemingly commonplace bird is anything but ordinary.

How did chicken achieve the culinary ubiquity it enjoys today? It’s hard to imagine, but there was a point in history, not terribly long ago, that individual people each consumed less than ten pounds of chicken per year. Today, those numbers are strikingly different: we consumer nearly twenty-five times as much chicken as our great-grandparents did.

Collectively, Americans devour 73.1 million pounds of chicken in a day, close to 8.6 billion birds per year. How did chicken rise from near-invisibility to being in seemingly "every pot," as per Herbert Hoover's famous promise?

Emelyn Rude explores this phenomenon in Tastes Like Chicken.

John Nixon, the former CIA analyst who conducted the first prolonged interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. forces, speaks publicly for the first time about this historic episode in his new book: Debriefing the President: The Interrogation Of Saddam Hussein.

Nixon offers not only an intimate and personal portrait of the Iraqi dictator, but new revelations about what he learned from Saddam and in his subsequent briefings of President George W. Bush and top administration officials—including Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. 

Nixon also provides fresh, deeply informed perspectives on why U.S. policies in Iraq and the broader Middle East have failed so badly, and why the CIA and other parts of our intelligence establishment urgently require major reform. 

    This week's Book Picks  come from Phil Lewis of The Bennington Bookshop.

List:
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Bailey
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis (paperback out 1/10)
Exit West by Moshin Hamid (avail in March)
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (avail in May)
A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming (avail in February)
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen (avail in February)

The president-elect lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.

In today’s Congressional Corner, Massachusetts Congressman Richard Neal concludes his conversation with WAMC’s Alan Chartock.