Las Vegas is a long way from the Himalayas, where Ranita Ray grew up in a boarding school close to the Nepalese border. But poverty is universal, and studying it is Ray’s specialty.

A particularly amazing scene unfolded this week at UNLV’s Barrick Museum, where noted art conservator and curator Billie Milam Weisman worked alongside Jerry Schefcik and Aurore Giguet and an assortment of handlers to remove a giant, vigorous and densely textured abstract painting by Ali Smith.

On a Friday night in early January, the driver of a Lexus sedan was heading east on Tropicana Avenue past Decatur Boulevard when a pedestrian tried to cross the street outside of a crosswalk. He was struck by the Lexus, taken to UMC and pronounced dead. It was one of the first auto-pedestrian accidents of the year in Las Vegas.

The war in Afghanistan has not ended with the democratic state that the United States had hoped to leave behind. Right now, the government is negotiating to ensure some security and stability after American troops leave in 2014. So what went wrong? And what can be done now? Vanda Felbab-Brown will be examining those questions at UNLV on Wednesday and she joins us ahead of that lecture to look at problems in America's longest war.