Radio news from Wave Farm‘s WGXC 90.7-FM in the Hudson Valley, New York. PLAY AUDIO (3:34) Paul Lewis and Dan Roberts in The Guardian report that on Sept. 25, several Senators combined various legislation recently being proposed to rein in United States government surveillance, into the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Mark Udall (D-Colorado), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) introduced the bill. The Act would prohibit the NSA's bulk collection of phone records of Americans under section 215 of the Patriot Act, and close a so-called "back door" that potentially enables the NSA to intercept the internet communications of Americans swept up in a program protected by Section 702 of the of the FISA Amendments Act. Russia Today reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who is the chairperson of the Senate Intelligence committee, will introduce a weaker bill that would not limit the current scope of NSA surveillance. Howard Reich in The Chicago Tribune reports that among the 24 winners of the 2013 MacArthur Fellowships, or “genius grants,” announced on Wed., Sept. 25, there are several radio-related artists. Each winner receives $625,000 over a five-year period, with no strings attached (an increase from the $500,000 amount of previous years). Since 1981, the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships have been selected by a secret process for which no one may apply. This year's winners include 13 men and 11 women, from 32 to 60-years-old. Some of the notable winners: Jeremy Denk, 43, New York, is a concert pianist who plays standard repertory and 20th-century works, and writes in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications. Carl Haber, 54, Berkeley, Calif. Experimental physicist Haber has invented new means for recapturing fragile aural documents. Recordings made on wax cylinders, lacquer discs, and other historic technologies have been retrieved by Haber and colleagues using a non-contact technique that transforms visual data into a digital sound file. Vijay Iyer, 41, New York. Jazz pianist brings the sounds of his Indian heritage in jazz improvisation and composition. Dina Katabi, 42, Cambridge, Mass. Katabi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her collaborators have created ways sending radio waves faster, more safely and more securely. She has, "shown that Wi-Fi signals can be used to read the movement of a person's body, enabling a computer to receive instructions delivered by gesture rather than by keystroke." Friday Morning Quarterback, a radio trade magazine, reports that radio consultant firm Mark Kassof & Co. has revealed a portion of its annual ListenerThink P1 study, and the research shows that 70 percent of 18- to 64-year-old radio listeners agree with the statement: "If you couldn't listen to radio, you'd feel something important was missing from your life." Only 27 percent disagree, while 3 percent don't know. The study also said that 53 percent of 18-64-year-olds agree strongly or slightly that, "radio isn't as good as it used to be." The findings are based on 989 online interviews with radio listeners in the U.S., conducted in September.