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In the final installment of our Changing Face of America series on the changing face of sports and society, NPR's Uri Berliner travels to Orange County, California, to see how girls fast-pitch softball has changed. The game has become big business, with highly paid pitching and hitting instructors, and super elite travel teams that all but assure scholarships to major universities. But gone too are the days when softball was just a game, and many girls are feeling the pressure to succeed in the sport on and off the field.

The United Nations begins a special session on AIDS Monday in New York. The conference will call for governments and NGOs to contribute $10 billion annually to AIDS treatment and prevention programs. Lisa Simeone speaks with Thoraya Obaid, head of the U.N. Population Fund, about cultural considerations that come into play when dealing with reproductive and sexual activity.

David Greenberger reviews a new CD called "Rigging the Toplights" by a Chicago trio called Pinetop Seven. While many of the lyrics onthis album are dark and fearsome, Greenberger hears a strangely hopeful message in them. ("Rigging the Toplights" is released by Self-Help/Atavistic(ALP310). For more information, visit www.atavistic.com.

NPR Science Correspondent David Kestenbaum reports on a new technology that will affect how companies advertise.

While standard solar panels can provide electricity during the day, this device can be a "continuous renewable power source" during the day and at night.

NPR's Joe Palca sent us an audio postcard from Carnaval in Bolivia.

As part of NPR's Changing Face of America series, a report on how the practice of adoption is changing. Traditionally, adoptions have kept the identities of both biological and adoptive parents secret from each other. But increasingly families are entering into so-called "open adoptions" where they remain in some degree of contact with the birthmother as the child grows up. NPR's Neva Grant profiles a family in Portland, Oregon, that has two openly adopted children.

LaQuedra Edwards had put $40 into a lottery vending machine at a supermarket in Los Angeles when "some rude person" bumped into her, causing her to buy a different lottery ticket than she intended.

The top of 14,000-foot Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the big island of Hawaii, is one of the last best places to do astronomy. But astronomers now have devised a way to make "the seeing," as they call it, even better. Join NPR's Christopher Joyce for a visit to Mauna Kea.

NPR's Renee Montagne travels to Owensboro, Kentucky, to report on America's last public execution. In August of 1936, 20,000 people watched Rainey Bethea die by court order on the gallows.