Hearing: Jets Might Have Prevented Mortar Attack on Benghazi Compound &Report on Military's Growing Number of Sexual Assaults Draws Presidential Rebuke & After Emotional Benghazi Hearing, GOP Promises 'Investigation Is Not Over' 7&8MAI13

THE PBS NewsHour covered another House hearing yesterday, 8 MAI 13 on the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi last September. They are flogging a dead horse, and it is all for political gain. Watch the video of the "testimony" and you'll notice the the number of Representatives attending and wanting their face time for the cameras. Then watch the video of the Senate hearings on the problem of sexual assault in the U.S. military held the day before, 7 MAI 13, just days after the Pentagon officer in charge of addressing this problem was arrested in Virginia for sexually assaulting a woman in public, in a parking lot. There are maybe two or three politicians at the hearing, all women. THIS is damning evidence that most in Congress could care less about the growing problem of sexual assault of men and women in all branches of the U.S. military, and if they don't care it is doubtful this issue will be addressed with the aggressiveness needed to change the culture that tolerates sexual abuse. 

Hearing: Jets Might Have Prevented Mortar Attack on Benghazi Compound

BY: NEWS DESK

The burnt U.S. consulate in Benghazi a day after the attack. Photo by Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images.

Updated Wednesday 3:40 p.m. ET:

Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Tripoli, Libya, during the time of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, testified at a House hearing Wednesday that a second mortar attack on the compound might have been prevented if his calls for jet fighters had been heeded.

There were two waves of attacks on the U.S. facility in Benghazi the night of Sept. 11, 2012, that ended up killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Hicks said he was told the fighters could reach Libya in several hours to try to fend off attackers, but U.S. military officials later said it would have taken more like 20 hours since the aircraft weren't on alert status. (Read his full testimony.)

Video streaming by Ustream

Wednesday's House hearing on Benghazi compound assault. 
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/

THE MORNING LINE -- May 9, 2013 at 8:57 AM EDT

After Emotional Benghazi Hearing, GOP Promises 'Investigation Is Not Over'

BY: CHRISTINA BELLANTONI AND TERENCE BURLIJ

Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, testifies Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Photo by Jeffrey Malet.

Last year's attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, have been the subject of presidential debates, a report from an independent review board and on Wednesday, compelling testimony at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The hearing was fraught with emotion and political theater as Republicans leading the investigation sought to pin blame on President Barack Obama's administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Lawmakers grilled witnesses over what happened in the hours after the attacks that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Former Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks choked back tears as he detailed his surprise at initial suggestions the events of Sept. 11, 2012, had any link to backlash against an anti-Islamic film.

House Republicans who have had five different committees examining the attacks charged in their own report that the Obama's administration "willfully perpetrated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative."

The panel's ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijiah Cummings of Maryland, complained about the nature of the queries. He called the hearing part of "a full-scale media campaign that is not designed to investigate what happened in a responsible and bipartisan way" but is instead intended "to smear public officials." Others suggested the new focus on Clinton was more about her possible 2016 presidential ambitions than on seeking answers.

Wednesday's hearing was just the latest in a lengthy battle on the issue between Republicans in Congress and Mr. Obama. The administration's response to the attacks cost Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice a potential promotion to replace Clinton after some Senate GOP lawmakersexpressed concerns about her statements following the events.

Hicks has been dubbed a "whistle-blower." The New York Timessummarizes his emotional testimony:

During a chaotic night at the American Embassy in Tripoli, hundreds of miles away, the diplomat, Gregory Hicks, got what he called "the saddest phone call I've ever had in my life" informing him that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was dead and that he was now the highest-ranking American in Libya. For his leadership that night when four Americans were killed, Mr. Hicks said in nearly six hours of testimony, he subsequently received calls from both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama.

But within days, Mr. Hicks said, after raising questions about the account of what had happened in Benghazi offered in television interviews by Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, he felt a distinct chill from State Department superiors. "The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning," said Mr. Hicks, who has been a Foreign Service officer for 22 years.

He was soon given a scathing review of his management style, he said, and was later "effectively demoted" to desk officer at headquarters, in what he believes was retaliation for speaking up.

White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed the hearing as "part of an effort to chase after what isn't the substance here."

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler looked at the details emerging from the hearing and ticks off the facts coming from each side.

On Wednesday's NewsHour, Kwame Holman reported on the hearings. 

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/republicans-use-benghazi-hearing-to-pressure-administration.html#more

Military's Growing Number of Sexual Assaults Draws Rebuke

Published on May 7, 2013

A new Pentagon report finds the official number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military rose to nearly 3,400 in 2012, while up to 26,000 cases went unreported. Ray Suarez talks to Time magazine's Mark Thompson about whether adjudication of sexual assault up the military chain of command affects the number of crimes reported.

http://youtu.be/hc4VfBIR0OI

Transcript

RAY SUAREZ: The problem of sexual assaults in the nation's armed forces is getting worse, and maybe much worse. The issue drew the national spotlight today and a presidential rebuke.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We're not going to tolerate this stuff, and there will be accountability.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Let's start with the principle that sexual assault is an outrage. It is a crime. That's true for society at large, and if it's happening inside our military, then whoever carries it out is betraying the uniform that they're wearing.

RAY SUAREZ: The news of growing sexual assaults in the military raised the president's hackles at a news conference with the president of South Korea.  

RAY SUAREZ: Mr. Obama spoke as an annual Pentagon study reported sexual assaults in the military rose from just under 3,300 in 2012 to nearly 3,400 last year. But it also found that up to 26,000 cases went unreported.

At a Senate hearing this morning, the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mark Welsh, struck sparks with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, suggesting it's not always a commander's fault if victims don't come forward.

WATCH: Survivors Share Experiences of Sexual Assault in the Military

GEN. MARK WELSH, U.S. Air Force: The things that cause people to not report are -- primarily are really not chain of command. It's: I don't want my family to know. I don't want my spouse to know or my boyfriend or girlfriend to know. I'm embarrassed that I'm in this situation.

It's the self-blame that comes with the crime. That is overridingly on surveys over the years the reasons that most victims don't report. And I don't think it's any different in the military. Prosecution rates in the Air Force for this crime ...

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, D-N.Y.: I think it's very different in the military. I think you're precisely wrong about that. Everything is about the chain of command.

RAY SUAREZ: The president said today the military has to exponentially increase its efforts to address the problem. And Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced he's issuing new orders to change the culture in the ranks.

DEFENSE SECRETARY CHUCK HAGEL, United States: Together, everyone in this department at every level of command will continue to work together everyday to establish an environment of dignity and respect, where sexual assault is not tolerated, condoned or ignored.

RAY SUAREZ: The Pentagon report came just days Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, who runs the Air Force unit on sexual assault, was himself arrested for allegedly groping a woman. And, in February, Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms overturned a captain's conviction on aggravated sexual assault.

Now Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is holding up Helms' nomination for vice chair of the U.S. Space Command. She spoke at today's hearing.

SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL, D-Mo.: The general said, no, no, we believe the member of the military. That is the crux of the problem here, because if a victim does not believe that the system is capable of believing her, there's no point in risking your entire career.

RAY SUAREZ: In response, lawmakers are pursuing multiple kinds of legislation on the problem. One could strip commanding officers of their ability to reverse convictions.

I'm joined now by Mark Thompson, the Washington deputy bureau chief and national security correspondent for TIME and writer of the Battleland blog.

And, Mark, you have seen the reports. You have seen the Pentagon's self-reporting on this. Does that 26,000 unreported assaults a year look like a solid number? Where does it come from?

MARK THOMPSON, TIME: Well, it's an extrapolated number, Ray, from anonymous phone surveys done by the Pentagon of military people. And so it's sort of squishy to begin with.

What's particularly striking about the number, of course, is from 2010 to 2012, that number grew by 35 percent, whereas the hard number, the number of cases that actually were brought forward by people complaining about sexual assaults in the military only went up by roughly six percent from 3,200 to 3,400.

So even though they are getting more reports, those that are unreported are going up even faster.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, a number of unreported cases nine times larger than the number of reported cases ...

MARK THOMPSON: Right.

RAY SUAREZ: ... is that bigger than the service chiefs even realized at first?

MARK THOMPSON: Well, I think, number one, it is bigger than what you see in the civilian world, where the proportion of reported is an order or two bigger than what you see in the military.

But this is not a new problem. This is a longstanding problem. I was on this show 16 years ago talking about it. It remains a problem, what's happening. You have got about 14 percent of the military in uniform that are women, and all of a sudden, with these female senators, several of which we just saw, this is not being able to be ignored by the chiefs, the secretary of defense or anybody else.

It seems like we may have reached a turning point this weekend with the arrest of this Air Force officer.

RAY SUAREZ: Today, at the news conference at the Pentagon, the general in charge of overseeing the management of this problem flipped this on its head in a way and said that part of it is that there's more reporting.

MARK THOMPSON: Yes, I think ...

RAY SUAREZ: So, this is good news, that they're changing the culture.

MARK THOMPSON: Yes, to go back to what I just said, the math shows that it's going up faster in the unreported realm than in the reported realm.

We see this throughout the military whenever there's a bad problem, be it mental health issues, PTSD, anything that has to be self-reported. Whenever the numbers go up, the Pentagon is always very quick to say, it's because we have removed stigma, we have put signs all over the bases and posts encouraging people to come forward.

And I think there is some truth to that, but essentially it remains a huge problem and they're just getting at a bit of it by reducing the stigma.

RAY SUAREZ: And, at the same time, the arrest of the Air Force's senior officer in charge of getting those numbers down, arrested himself during an accused sexual assault.

MARK THOMPSON: Yes, I mean, that is the problem. That's what stunned everybody I spoke to at the Pentagon over the last couple of days.

I mean, a couple of things about Lt. Col. Krusinski's case. He was picked for that job specifically. And people I talk to suggest, well, he couldn't have been -- you know if someone is right for such a sensitive post. The Air Force put him in that post. A lot of people are asking questions about that now.

And we're just going to have to -- the Air Force has asked to take this case away from Arlington County, which is where the Pentagon is located, and prosecute it on their own. We will learn what happens on that score come Thursday.

RAY SUAREZ: You mentioned the female senators. There are also more members of Congress willing to push back on this issue, including a legislative attempt to take the adjudication of these issues out of the chain of the command. What does the Pentagon say in response?

MARK THOMPSON: Well, Sec. Hagel was asked about that today. He doesn't like it. He wants it to stay within the chain of command.

The advocates of change are saying, now, listen, we're not going to take it out of the Pentagon. We're going to keep it in the Pentagon, but it is going to be staffed, for lack of a better word, by a professional force of military sexual trauma advocates, who will be fair, won't be affected, because they won't be in the chain of command of the victim or the accused.

And victims there, advocates believe, will be able to get a fairer shot at their day in court.

RAY SUAREZ: How is this handled in other country's militaries, where they have an even higher percentage of women in the ranks?

MARK THOMPSON: Yes. It doesn't -- it seems to be a particularly -- particularly nagging problem in the U.S. military, just as gays in the military were a big problem here, and it wasn't a problem anywhere else.

I don't know if it's something in the American psyche or something in the American military, but it's a particular combination that has generated this for a long time.

RAY SUAREZ: Mark Thompson, thanks a lot for being with us.

MARK THOMPSON: You bet.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june13/military_05-07.html

Comic Legend Jonathan Winters Dies at 87 (VIDEOS) 12APR13 & Jim Lehrer Interviews Comedian Jonathan Winters 21OKT1999

I loved Jonathan Winters, he is the kind of comedian that could make all of us laugh, and he would laugh with us. On a day like today, with the Boston Marathon bombing all over the radio and TV and net, I thought, with no disrespect to those killed and injured and the suffering of so many, that some might just enjoy the chance to laugh, and remember what seems to have been simpler times. This from PBS, and I have to say, the opening of this first video always makes me laugh out loud. Thank you Mr Winters, may you rest in happy peace...

http://youtu.be/gugEmSCpLRE

Published on Apr 12, 2013

Pioneering comic Jonathan Winters brought his own brand of wild, improvisational stand-up to television in the 1950s, and continued to perform for nearly five decades. Winters died Thursday at the age of 87. Jeffrey Brown remembers the comedian with a look back at his career and an interview excerpt with JIm Lehrer from 1999.

http://youtu.be/CI2jRUNKrzA

Published on Apr 12, 2013

Jim Lehrer talks to comedian Jonathan Winters, the 1999 winner of the Mark Twain Prize from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This interview originally aired Oct. 21, 1999. Winters died April 11, 2013, at age 87.

http://youtu.be/wjpyztgCq8w

Published on Apr 12, 2013

A selection of comedic moments from the career of Jonathan Winters, who died on April 11, 2013.

Related obituary: http://nyti.ms/1596otd

April 12, 2013

Jonathan Winters, Unpredictable Comic and Master of Improvisation, Dies at 87

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Jonathan Winters, the rubber-faced comedian whose unscripted flights of fancy inspired a generation of improvisational comics, and who kept television audiences in stitches with Main Street characters like Maude Frickert, a sweet-seeming grandmother with a barbed tongue and a roving eye, died on Thursday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 87.

His death was announced on his Web site, JonathanWinters.com.

Mr. Winters, a rotund man whose face had a melancholy basset-hound expression in repose, burst onto the comedy scene in the late 1950s and instantly made his mark as one of the funniest, least definable comics in a rising generation that included Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart.

Mr. Winters was at his best when winging it, confounding television hosts and luckless straight men with his rapid-fire delivery of bizarre observations uttered by characters like Elwood P. Suggins, a Midwestern Everyman, or one-off creations like the woodland sprite who bounded onto Jack Paar’s late-night show and simperingly proclaimed: “I’m the voice of spring. I bring you little goodies from the forest.”

A one-man sketch factory, Mr. Winters could re-enact Hollywood movies, complete with sound effects, or create sublime comic nonsense with simple props like a pen-and-pencil set.

The unpredictable, often surreal quality of his humor had a powerful influence on later comedians like Robin Williams but made him hard to package as an entertainer. His brilliant turns as a guest on programs like “The Steve Allen Show” and “The Tonight Show” — in both the Jack Paar and Johnny Carson eras — kept him in constant demand. But a successful television series eluded him, as did a Hollywood career, despite memorable performances in films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Loved One” and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.”

Jonathan Harshman Winters was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Dayton, Ohio, where his alcoholic father (“a hip Willy Loman,” according to Mr. Winters) worked as an investment broker and his grandfather, a frustrated comedian, owned the Winters National Bank.

“Mother and Dad didn’t understand me; I didn’t understand them,” he told Jim Lehrer on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in 1999. “So consequently it was a strange kind of arrangement.” Alone in his room, he would create characters and interview himself.

The family’s fortunes collapsed with the Depression. The Winters National Bank failed, and Jonathan’s parents divorced. His mother took him to Springfield, where she did factory work but eventually became the host of a women’s program on a local radio station. Her son continued talking to himself and developed a repertory of sound effects. He often entertained his high school friends by imitating a race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

A poor student, Mr. Winters enlisted in the Marines before finishing high school and during World War II served as a gunner on the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard in the Pacific.

After the war he completed high school and, hoping to become a political cartoonist, studied art at Kenyon College and the Dayton Art Institute. In 1948 he married Eileen Schauder, a Dayton native who was studying art at Ohio State. She died in 2009. His survivors include their two children, Jonathan Winters IV, of Camarillo, Calif., known as Jay, and Lucinda, of Santa Barbara, Calif.; and several grandchildren.

At the urging of his wife, Mr. Winters, whose art career seemed to be going nowhere, entered a talent contest in Dayton with his eye on the grand prize, a wristwatch, which he needed. He won, and he was hired as a morning disc jockey at WING, where he made up for his inability to attract guests by inventing them. “I’d make up people like Dr. Hardbody of the Atomic Energy Commission, or an Englishman whose blimp had crash-landed in Dayton,” he told U.S. News and World Report in 1988.

After two years at a Columbus television station, he left for New York in 1953 to break into network radio. Instead he landed bit parts on television and, with surprising ease, found work as a nightclub comic.

A guest spot on Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” led to frequent appearances with Jack Paar and Steve Allen, both of them staunch supporters willing to give Mr. Winters free rein. Alistair Cooke, after seeing Mr. Winters at the New York nightclub Le Ruban Bleu, booked him as the first comedian to appear on his arts program “Omnibus.”

In his stand-up act, Mr. Winters initially relied heavily on sound effects — a cracking whip, a creaking door, a hovering U.F.O. — which he used to spice up his re-enactments of horror films, war films and westerns. Gradually he developed a gallery of characters, which expanded when he had his own television shows, beginning with the 15-minute “Jonathan Winters Show,” which ran from 1956 to 1957. He was later seen in a series of specials for NBC in the early 1960s; on an hourlong CBS variety series, “The Jonathan Winters Show,” from 1967 to 1969; and on “The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters,” in syndication, from 1972 to 1974.

Many of Mr. Winters’s characters — among them B. B. Bindlestiff, a small-town tycoon, and Piggy Bladder, football coach for the State Teachers’ Animal Husbandry Institute for the Blind — were based on people he grew up with. Maude Frickert, for example, whom he played wearing a white wig and a Victorian granny dress, was inspired by an elderly aunt who let him drink wine and taught him to play poker when he was 9 years old.

Other characters, like the couturier Lance Loveguard and Princess Leilani-nani, the world’s oldest hula dancer, sprang from a secret compartment deep within Mr. Winters’s inventive brain.

As channeled by Mr. Winters, Maude Frickert was a wild card. Reminiscing about her late husband, Pop Frickert, she told a stupefied interviewer: “He was a Spanish dancer in a massage parlor. If somebody came in with a crick in their neck he’d do an orthopedic flamenco all over them. He was tall, dark and out of it.”

One of Mr. Winters’s most popular characters, she appeared in a series of commercials for Hefty garbage bags, which also featured Mr. Winters as a garbage man dressed in a spotless white uniform and referring, in an upper-class British accent, to gar-BAZH. Carson kidnapped Maude Frickert and simply changed the name to Aunt Blabby, one of his stock characters. Mr. Winters said that the blatant theft did not bother him.

Mr. Winters often called himself a satirist, but the term does not really apply. In “Seriously Funny,” his history of 1950s and 1960s comedians, Gerald Nachman described him, a bit floridly, as “part circus clown and part social observer, Red Skelton possessed by the spirit of Daumier.”

He was hard to define. “I don’t do jokes,” he once said. “The characters are my jokes.” At the same time, unlike many comedians reacting to the Eisenhower era, he found his source material in human behavior rather than politics or current events, but in him the spectacle of human folly provoked glee rather than righteous anger.

In 1961 Variety wrote, “His humor is more universally acceptable than any of the current New Comics, with the possible exception of Bob Newhart, because he covers the mass experiences of the U.S. common man — the Army, the gas station, the airport.”

Mr. Winters did much of his best work in nightclubs, but he hated life on the road. In 1959 he suffered a nervous breakdown onstage at the hungry i in San Francisco and briefly spent time in a mental hospital. Two years later he suffered another collapse, and soon after that he quit nightclubs for good. From 1960 to 1964 he recorded his most-requested monologues for Verve on a series of albums, notably “The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,” “Here’s Jonathan” and “Jonathan Winters: Down to Earth.”

The conventional television variety show did not suit Mr. Winters, but film did not seem the right medium for him either. Scripts stifled him. “Jonny works best out of instant panic,” one of his television writers in the 1960s said. He thrived when he could ad-lib, fielding unexpected questions or pursuing spontaneous flights of fancy. In other words, he made a brilliant guest, firing comedy in short bursts, but a problematic host or actor.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Winters was a frequent guest on “The Andy Williams Show,” “The Tonight Show” and “Hollywood Squares.” He played Robin Williams’s extraterrestrial baby son, Mearth, on the final season of “Mork & Mindy,” and he kept busy with voice-over work in animated television series and films. He also published a book of his cartoons, “Mouse Breath, Conformity and Other Social Ills,” and a collection of whimsical stories, “Winters’ Tales.”

More influential than successful, Mr. Winters circled the comic heavens tracing his own strange orbit, an object of wonder and admiration to his peers. “Jonathan taught me,” Mr. Williams told the correspondent Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes,” “that the world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of Jonathan Winters’s wife, who died in 2009. In 1948 he married Eileen Schauder, not Elaine. Additionally, a caption in an earlier version of a slide show featuring Mr. Winters incorrectly stated the recipient of an Oscar. Mr. Winters received an Oscar for Peter Ustinov.

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Jonathan Winters in 1999. More Photos »

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Jonathan Winters, 1925-2013

Highlights of Jonathan Winters’s Career

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• ArtsBeat: Remembering Jonathan Winters (April 12, 2013)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/arts/television/jonathan-winters-comedian-dies-at-87.html?smid=yt-nytimes&_r=0

VIDEO; HONOR ROLL OF THE SANDY HOOK SHOOTING VICTIMS 17DEZ12

FROM The PBS NewsHour. On occasion, at the end of the news broadcast they do the Honor Roll of members of the US Military killed in action. It is a silent tribute of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, showing the names of the fallen, their age and hometowns. On Monday night they presented a Honor Roll of the children and teachers murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School and in Newtown, CT. God be with these families and Newtown.

Published on Dec 17, 2012

In a special honor roll, we remember the 27 victims -- 20 children and seven adults -- of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn.

India's Massive School Lunch Program Aims to Curb Widespread Malnutrition 3OKT11

I saw this report on the PBS NewsHour on Monday, 3OKT11 and it grabbed my attention, actually made me sit up and pay attention because of this one statement concerning resistance to the law mandating the free lunch program....
"But the Supreme Court reaffirmed that fiscal constraints can never be allowed to come in the way of children's right to food, and if the government had to tighten their belt, that had to happen elsewhere."
WHAT A CONCEPT! Putting the needs of the least among us first and not last! From a country that isn't majority Christian! Here is the full story.....

Transcript

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we turn to India, where the economy is growing rapidly, but not fast enough yet to take care of its millions of poor and hungry children.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on a solution that's resulted in the world's largest school lunch program.

A version of this story aired on the PBS program "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly."
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In thousands of schools across India, teachers will tell you to add one more R to reading, writing and arithmetic. Recess, they'll tell you, may be the most critical part of a student's school day.
That's because morning recess is when students are provided a hot meal, as are a few younger siblings who are allowed to come along.
Dinesh Sharma is the principal of this school in Rajasthan.
DINESH SHARMA, principal (through translator): In this school, only about five children in all are able to bring a lunch from home. We have about 300 children.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Anywhere from a third to 40 percent of the world's undernourished children live in India today, and about half of all children here have stunted growth.
Those grim statistics contrast sharply with the glowing ones on India's economy, a disparity of growing concern in the country, says social researcher Biraj Patnaik.
BIRAJ PATNAIK, social researcher: India finds itself acutely embarrassed. Its ambitions of being a global power are very poorly reflected in social sector indicators, and there is the acute embarrassment that the second-fastest growing economy in the world has almost half of its children malnourished.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In 2005, India's Supreme Court ruled for civic activists and ordered the government to ensure that every child gets a cooked meal in school.
Patnaik, who works for a commission that monitors compliance with the court order, says officials resisted at first.
BIRAJ PATNAIK: On the grounds that there was no infrastructure, that teachers would get overburdened, that India just didn't have the financial resources to start a program of this nature. But the Supreme Court reaffirmed that fiscal constraints can never be allowed to come in the way of children's right to food, and if the government had to tighten their belt, that had to happen elsewhere.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: With the stroke of a pen, the court ordered the largest school meal program in the world. That left the daunting task of implementing it, says Chanchalapathi Dasa.
CHANCHALAPATHI DASA, Akshaya Patra: The challenge in our country is how to deliver it and deliver it up to the last mile. That is the challenge, because a large country with 120 million children in hundreds and thousands of schools, that delivery is a genuine challenge.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Dasa's group, called Akshaya Patra, or Bottomless Pot, was among the first to step in. It was started in the '90s by a group of Hare Krishna devotees preparing a few hundred school lunches as part of the sect's call to service. Later when such meals became the law of the land, Akshaya Patra went to the government for funds to expand and to India's corporate sector for expertise.
CHANCHALAPATHI DASA: Passion alone is not enough. You need to have organization. You need to have organizational capabilities. You need to have management capabilities. Akshaya Patra has been a very unique marriage of dedicated missionaries and professionals coming with a heart.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And with their wallets. Among India's growing middle class, there's a dawning of philanthropy, he says. Many people are attaining wealth at a much earlier age.
CHANCHALAPATHI DASA: My parents probably would have a house -- we come from a middle-class family -- would have a house when they were probably 50 years of age.
In today's India, by the time someone -- and someone working in a software company in India -- by the time they are 28 or 30 years old, they already have a house, they have a car, and then what? They still have a lot of disposable income, and they are genuinely looking for opportunities where their money can be used well for social development.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Akshaya Patra is now the largest of several social enterprises doing school lunches. It serves 1.3 million children every day from kitchens like this one, efficient and productive as any in the world, says manager Govinda Das.
GOVINDA DAS, Akshaya Patra: We cook about 150,000 meals in three hours' time, and the ingredients that we use, something like 7,000 kilograms of wheat flour every day, and from that we make about 300,000 chapatis...
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Three hundred thousand?
GOVINDA DAS: Three hundred thousand flat-breads per hour.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Hours before students show up to school, workers begin feeding wheat flour into giant mixers. At the other end, flat-breads called chapatis emerge, 40,000 per hour, packed in spotless conditions.
In industrial-sized cauldrons, rice and a lentil stew called dhal are prepared. Flavoring varies by regional preference, but no animal products are used. Hare Krishna devotees are vegetarian in principle. So are most students, by economic necessity.
In Rajasthan's desert summer, school starts early, and the meals arrive as early as 9:00 a.m. In the four years since Akshaya Patra began catering in this area, the most visible impact is in school attendance. It's up 11 percent, no surprise to principal Madhu Kilani.
MADHU KILANI, school principal: Some of the students have -- their economic condition is so poor that at night also they are not able to eat food in their home, so they depend, many of their strength depend on their midday meal.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For the whole day's nutrition?
MADHU KILANI: Yes, for the whole day nutrition.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She says the students have more energy and improved concentration in class. For its part, Akshaya Patra plans to expand its lunch program five-fold by 2020.
Still, not all children, especially in the vast countryside, have benefited equally from the Supreme Court's order, says compliance monitor Biraj Patnaik.
BIRAJ PATNAIK: Jharkhand, for instance, is a state where I often visited, and I despair at the quality of the meals that are being served there. Even within states where the meals work well, in the more inaccessible and remote parts of the state, you have meals which are not comparable at all in quality to what children in the rest of the country are getting.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: "We like it," they responded when asked about their food.
But when I asked how many students have to go hungry on the days when there's no school, the response was also nearly unanimous. They all did. Despite the Supreme Court's sweeping order and large recent initiatives to address it, malnutrition remains a daunting problem. It is the root cause of 2,500 child deaths in India every day.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at Saint Mary's University in Minnesota.