Pope John Paul II has been given his last rites as his health condition is reportedly deteriorating due to an infection that is causing high fever and a rapid drop in his blood pressure. The 84-year-old spiritual leader of one-billion Catholics has been in frail health for the past several weeks and suffers from Parkinson’s [...]

By the end of her life, everyone knew her name and her story. Today, Terri Schiavo died in a Florida hospice 13 days after the feeding tube that had kept her alive for the past 15 years was disconnected.
The case drew worldwide attention and raised awareness about issues of death and dying. As the political [...]

CNN and Italian news agencies are reporting that an unnamed Vatican source said Pope John Paul II has been given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church as his heath is deteriorating.
Jeff Israely, Rome bureau chief for TIME Magazine, reports on the latest from the Vatican.
Guests:
Jeff Israely is Rome bureau chief for TIME Magazine.

The Presidential commission charged with investigating intelligence failures in the run up to the U.S.-led war in Iraq issued its final report today, charging that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” in its assessment of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological pre-war weapons programs.
Officially called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding [...]

West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich warns that America — from the White House right down to popular culture — has fallen dangerously in love with the idea of military might. It has become, he says, a country seduced by war.
In his new book, “The New American Militarism,” the soldier-scholar describes it [...]

When Birmingham, Alabama, girls’ basketball coach Roderick Jackson noticed that his team had to practice on bent rims in a non-regulation gym, while the boys’ team got to use much nicer facilities, he cried “foul!” As a result of his complaints, he says he was fired.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that Title IX, the [...]

Most Americans experience the criminal justice system from a distance. They watch the 24-hour news channels that cover the latest “trial of the century” or the highly-rated prime-time dramas such as “Law and Order.”
But the reality of what goes on inside America’s criminal justice system is very different. Just ask the millions of Americans who [...]

The Supreme Court today handed down a key ruling on workplace age discrimination. The 5 to 3 decision ruled that workers can recover damages from their employers for harm caused by age discrimination, even if the harm was not deliberate. It also moved the threshold for such cases down to cover any worker over [...]

Twenty-seven-year-old Harvard economist Roland Fryer grew up poor and black, in a family that was falling apart. His mother abandoned him. His father drank heavily and beat him. Fryer sold drugs and carried a gun. Then, at age 15, after he got pulled over by the police and then let go, he decided [...]

The insurance industry’s most powerful figure for decades has retired under pressure. Maurice “Hank” Greenberg said yesterday he is stepping down from insurance giant AIG as Nonexecutive Chairman, just two weeks after his ouster as the company’s CEO.
Ben White, Wall Street correspondent for the Washington Post, discusses the significance of Hank Greenberg’s resignation at [...]

Famed attorney Johnnie Cochran died of a brain tumor at his Los Angeles home today. He was 67. The charismatic, natty dresser and passionate defense lawyer is best known for representing O.J. Simpson in the former football player’s double murder trial.
Throughout his career, Cochran, the great-grandson of a slave, took on cases with racial [...]

The headlines about eye-popping CEO pay packages just keep coming, even when CEOs don’t deliver. Between 1993 and 2002, public companies paid $260 billion to their top five executives. From 1998 to 2002, executive pay amounted to 10 percent of aggregate corporate profit.
What do companies get in return? Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, authors of [...]

The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan is alleging that the United States is essentially outsourcing torture to Uzbek authorities. Craig Murray says that the U.S. has handed dozens of terrorism suspects over to Uzbekistan, an authoritarian regime that community employs torture. He also alleges that British and American intelligence officials routinely cite information from Uzbek [...]

The line in the sand is clear. In 1994, the U.S. ratified a U.N. convention that said torture, by any person of any government for any reason, is illegal. Yet, since 9/11, at least 28 prisoners of war in U.S. military custody have died since 2002.
Seventeen U.S. soldiers involved in the murder of three prisoners [...]

Today in Baghdad political leaders held last-minute talks before tomorrow’s National Assembly meeting. More than two months after the election in Iraq, the National Assembly plans to take the relatively small step of deciding on its speaker. The Assembly is still quite far from appointing a president and forming a government.
Rod Nordland, Baghdad correspondent [...]

Today an 8.7 magnitude earthquake struck off the West coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. The epicenter is very close to that of the earthquake of December 26th, 2004 that triggered a tsunami that left 300,000 people dead or missing across Asia. Fears of a new tsunami have pushed tens of thousands of Indonesians to flee [...]

In the 1990s, Americans looked like hands-down winners of the information age. But globalization, outsourcing, and the rise of new giants like India and China have people thinking again.
Author Daniel Pink says that the very set of skills, the fundamental way of thinking, that made America great in the industrial and information economies, was left-brained.
But [...]

First there was the movie, Jurassic Park, that imagined a world where great dinosaurs of the distant past were cloned into modern-day life, leaving a fictional scientist to worry about the consequences.
Then, last week came the public announcement that the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex had been found with its inside soft tissue intact. [...]

Among the major news of this past week:
1) Severely brain-damaged Terry Schiavo becomes the center of a political firestorm as Congress and the President intervene to try to get her feeding tube reattached. But the courts continue to side with Schiavo’s husband.
2) A 16 year-old goes on a shooting spree at the Red Lake Indian [...]

Historian and Bible scholar Jaroslaw Pelikan was sitting in Carnegie Hall 15 years ago listening to Handel’s Messiah, when he read a headline in the program notes that asked “Whose Bible Is It?”
In his new book, “Whose Bible Is It? A History of The Scriptures Through the Ages,” Pelikan takes a fresh look at the [...]

IMAX theaters throughout the Southern United States have decided to not run a new movie on volcanoes because it refers to evolution. The film represents the latest skirmish in the battle between science and religion that has been raging everywhere from science classrooms to Terry Schiavo’s bedside.
But do science and religion necessarily have to [...]

The markets were closed today for Good Friday, but earlier this week the Federal Reserve Board bumped interest rates up another quarter percentage point. And, for the first time in more than 4 years, Chairman Alan Greenspan warned about the risk of inflation.
Greg Ip, who covers the economy for the Wall Street Journal, explains [...]

Cities driven by the ideology of New Urbanism — an alternative to sprawl where people live near work and support neighborhood businesses — have experienced a huge boom in recent years. Now, however, they face a particular challenge.
In many cases, the urban pioneers drawn to the reinvigorated areas are singles who are not entirely [...]

For former Red Lake High School teacher Kent Nerburn , this week’s school shooting has been painful. He got the news in Oxford, England, where he is supervising a group of students from Bemidji State University traveling around Europe.
Cut off from the people he loves, he has been unable to reach out and [...]

A tragic school shooting, with nightmarish echoes of Columbine, has shocked a Minnesota Indian tribe and the nation this week. This past Monday, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, after killing his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend, opened fire at Red Lake High School in Northern Minnesota. He shot to death a security guard, a teacher and [...]

In Kyrgyzstan today, 5,000 protestors stormed the presidential compound in the capital city of Bishkek. Within hours of the largely non-violent revolt, the country’s president, Askar Akayev, had fled the palace and, reportedly, the country.
In an emergency session, the Parliament installed opposition leaders as acting president and prime minister, and gave them until Friday to [...]

They have taken the sports world by storm with their hustle and grit and consecutive upsets of national college basketball powerhouses. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers are the lowest ranked team remaining in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.
But their scrappy, never-say-die style of play is winning fans and striking fear across the country — especially [...]

Asra Nomani was born in India and raised Muslim in Morgantown, West Virginia. She became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Just months after 9/11, she was in Karachi, Pakistan when her friend and fellow reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed. Then the Muslim father of her child balked at marriage.
Now, Asra [...]

When Congress voted overwhelmingly early Monday to allow Schiavo’s parents to take their case to federal court, they did not act on majority public opinion, according to the polls. A series of surveys has taken the pulse of the American public on the issue.
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, describes the direction [...]

The Terri Schiavo drama, in all its complexity, goes on along with America’s charged debate over life and death issues. These issues, which once lived in Sunday sermons, are now ruling conversations at kitchen tables and workplace water coolers.
Terri Schiavo isn’t the only life and death issue that has Americans up in arms. There’s the [...]

President Bush met with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox in Texas today. The three leaders pledged to work together to create more secure borders and improve trade, and announced a new security and trade agreement, called the North American Alliance for Security and Prosperity. But there were tough [...]

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad at the Arab League Summit in Algiers today and reported that Damascus will withdraw from Lebanon in accordance with a Security Council resolution. But members of the Arab League deplored the meddlesome foreign powers and international pressure on Syria.
Hassan Fattah, a correspondent for the New [...]

In his new book “Return to Greatness: How America Lost its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It,” long-time political observer Alan Wolfe sees an America where partisanship trumps real patriotism, and knocking opponents down matters more than building up the country.
Wolfe argues that a place to look for a [...]

When U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq two years ago, soldiers weren’t the only ones who put their lives on the line. So did the several hundred “embedded journalists” who brought the drama of war directly to American televisions and newspapers.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter Katherine Skiba was one of those “embeds.” She was the only female civilian [...]

The human X chromosome, which women have two of and men only one, got its name because of all the puzzles it presented. But now, all those arguments about women and men could jump to a new level. A new article published last week in the journal Nature announced the sequencing of [...]

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan today proposed some of the most radical reforms in the international institution’s history. He offered up the list of possible changes for consideration at a summit of world leaders this September.
Maggie Farley, who covers the United Nations for the Los Angeles Times, describes the forces that brought Annan before [...]

Legendary cabaret singer Bobby Short died earlier today at a hospital in New York City. He was 80. Short was a fixture at his piano in New York’s Carlyle Hotel for more than 35 years. His heartfelt renditions of American standards and his sophisticated stage presence drew some of the country’s biggest [...]

For six years during the 1990s boom, Fortune Magazine crowned Enron America’s “most innovative company.” Then in the fall of 2001, it all came tumbling down. The end was a strange combination of scandal, tragedy, and farce.
For three years New York Times investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald dug into this business scandal, one of [...]

Forty-one-year-old Terri Schiavo has been diagnosed by doctors as “in a persistent vegetative state” for the past 15 years. Since 1998, her husband, Michael, has been fighting a legal battle to remove the feeding tube that is keeping her alive, a decision that her parents oppose.
Last Friday, a Florida state judge ruled in favor of [...]

Listen to a timeline of the past two years of conflict in Iraq, with the voices of newsmakers and everyday citizens.
Guests:

The day will come when the U.S. will leave Iraq, perhaps voluntarily, perhaps under duress. But how will it happen? How can it happen in the best-case scenario?
James Fallows wrote an article in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly titled “Getting Out Right” about a possible exit strategy from Iraq.
Hear a discussion [...]

Set to the sounds of haunting Iraqi melodies and U.S. soldiers’ rapping, the war documentary “Gunner Palace” is a visceral tour of American soldiers’ lives in Amidhiya, one of the most volatile neighborhoods in Baghdad.
The documentary tracks the 400 members of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment who occupied Gunner Palace, the nickname Americans [...]

Among the major news headlines of this past week:
1) The Senate effectively clears the way for oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge.
2) Baseball stars Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and Commissioner Bud Selig are among the witnesses called to testify before a House Committee looking into steroid use in the major leagues.
3) The feeding [...]

Wal-Mart announced today that it will pay $11 million to settle federal allegations that it knowingly had hundreds of illegal immigrants cleaning its stores.
Many of the workers worked seven days or nights a week without overtime pay or injury compensation. Overnight workers were often locked inside the Wal-Mart stores they cleaned. Wal-Mart’s fine is [...]

General Motors is perhaps the iconic American corporation. From Chevrolet and Cadillac to Saab and Hummer, GM makes more cars and trucks than any other company in the world.
GM has been one of America’s largest employers for decades. It is America’s largest private provider of health insurance. Its pension plans support hundreds of thousands [...]

Members of a House committee grill baseball executives and players about the use of steroids. The players subpoened include Jose Canseco, who admitted steroid use in a new book that implicates other players past and present.
The hearing was called over baseball’s steroid-testing policy, agreed to by owners and players under pressure from Congress but [...]