US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad says “the crisis is over,” after watching the country teeter all weekend on the brink of explosive civil war.
But few others are so sure. Since the golden dome was blown off the Shiite’s Samarra shrine last Wednesday, Baghdad’s main morgue has filled with hundreds of bodies — shot, knifed [...]

With its 800,000 citizens, South Dakota may be one of the smallest states in the nation, but it made a big noise last week.
The South Dakota legislature has passed a bill that would virtually ban abortion. Straight out. No matter how old or young the woman. No matter if the pregnancy was the result of [...]

Maverick Californian Republican Pete McCloskey’s bio sounds like a page from history, and it is.
He graduated from high school the year World War II ended. A highly-decorated US Marine, McCloskey led bayonet charges in the Korean War.
He joined the US Congress in 1967, tangled with Richard Nixon over the war in Vietnam.
McCloskey retired years ago [...]

With all the hullabaloo in Washington over Dubai port operators and Iraq war woes, President Bush may glad to get out of town this week - and he’s getting way out of town, to India and Pakistan.
Half a world away, booming India is emerging as a new partner and a new challenge — as a [...]

If you think the banjo is limited to folk and country music, then you probably don’t know much about Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. The group has been recording and touring for much of the past 15 years, and in that time Bela Fleck has pioneered a genre that is difficult to label — because [...]

Roughly 120 people have died in sectarian violence since the bombing Wednesday in Baghdad that destroyed the golden dome of one of Shiite’s most holy shrines. Many worry this could be the spark that ignites an all-out civil war in Iraq.
Sunnis announced Thursday they would withdraw from talks to form a new government in protest [...]

The push to ban gay and lesbian adoption is becoming the next battle in the nation’s culture wars. Efforts are underway in some 16 states to pass laws or constitutional amendments to prevent same-sex couples from adopting.
Activists are hoping the issue will do in 2006 what the campaign against gay marriage did in the last [...]

Cellist Matt Haimovitz was the first classical musician to play at New York’s CBGB nightclub. As a child prodigy, he’s performed with the finest orchestras around the world.
Now, in his mid-thirties, Haimovitz prefers to bring his music to the more intimate settings of bars, nightclubs and small coffee houses. He also tries to stray [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
“Bridge & Tunnel” is the Broadway play that brings together a cast of American immigrants for an evening of open-mike poetry.
The characters include Mohammad Ali, the Pakistani emcee who loves bad puns and frets about an interview with the department of Homeland Security, the elderly Lorraine Levine, who remembers when suburban [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
A political storm swirling around the sale of U.S. port facilities to an Arab owned company has united Republicans and Democrats in a Casablanca movie-type moment.
We’re shocked, they say, shocked that President Bush would allow Arab ownership of these terminals. Never mind that almost a third of all port facilities [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
Owning a second home has long been a part of the American dream, but lately many Americans are finding their dreams overseas.
We are not talking about the very rich with homes in Tuscany, Provence or the Caribbean. We are talking about middle-income Americans finding deals in places like Argentina, Panama, [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
Almost six months after Katrina struck and the levees failed, New Orleans is in the midst of its annual Mardi Gras celebration. This year’s party is scaled back, with fewer parades, fewer tourists and of course, a dark and somber backdrop. Just blocks from the parade routes and the Bourbon Street [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
According to one sleep expert, “Sleep is the new Sex. People want it, need it, and can’t get enough of it.” The same could be said for the pills Americans are popping in huge numbers in their search for that illusive night of sleep. Americans filled some 42-million [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is in the Middle East today, tackling the delicate issue of Hamas. It may be her toughest assignment yet. Since it won parliamentary elections last month, the militant Palestinian group has represented a vexing problem for American diplomats and a challenge to the Bush Administration’s [...]

The relationship between religion and government has sparked one of the loudest American debates for more than 200 years.
James Madison argued against the “unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians” who favored government-established religion. Thomas Jefferson wrote of building that wall of separation between church and state.
Most historians accept that these views reflected the founders’ personal [...]

After a decade of stunning success reducing violent crime across much of America, there’s a new crime wave shaking the peace of many neighborhoods coast to coast.
While violent crime has been at historic lows in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles, it’s rising sharply elsewhere. Homicides jumped almost 50% in Milwaukee last year; [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Muslims world’s “cartoon riots” have continued this week. More protesters are dead in Pakistan, foreign company buildings have gone up in flames, and madrassas have been emptying their students into the streets to rage.
Novelist Kiran Desai looks on with a knowing eye. Her first novel, “Hullabaloo in the Guava [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The headlines say too many American college graduates can’t do the basics such as calculate a tip at the restaurant, make sense of a newspaper editorial, or balance a checkbook.
Cartoonists have had a field day with that. Others want action. Some want standardized testing — the kind of testing that the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a heads-up moment last week in America’s march into the arms of Ritalin. An FDA advisory panel, by a narrow vote, recommended a “black box” warning on Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, and the whole family of stimulants used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The risks: heart attack, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
According to the latest poll, 55 percent of Americans now think going to war in Iraq was a mistake. More oppose the war, and even more disapprove of President Bush’s handling of it.
Torie Clarke says it doesn’t have to be this way. Clarke was chief Pentagon spokesperson during the Afghanistan [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For decades in 20th century America, retirement looked pretty darn good — Social Security, a pension, a well-deserved place on the links or at the Peanuckle table. People looked forward to it.
Today, retirement can look terrifying. Pensions — out the corporate window. Social Security — who knows? The affluent [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ok, the vice president shot a man. On the one hand, this is just a very sad story that anybody — or at least any hunter — could identify with. Hunting buddies out shooting quail, and one shoots the other instead. Not good. Just brush him with bird shot and it’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The fundamental rules apply, as time goes by, we know. And yet, when it comes to love and the dance of the sexes, the rules can apply in very different ways in different generations.
Grandpa came courting. Mom and dad got funky, and maybe divorced. Gen X was disillusioned. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Conservatives are not supposed to be cuddly, or even particularly nice,” wrote conservative icon George Will last fall, at the height of national dismay over Hurricane Katrina response and Iraq chaos. “They are, however,” wrote Will, “supposed to be competent… they are supposed to have an unsentimental commitment to meritocracy and excellence.”
And [...]

By host Bob Oakes
The first Mardi Gras parade since Hurricane Katrina marched through New Orleans’ French Quarter this weekend, with their traditional barbed humor on display - even if many New Orleanians were not.
The bands played “Give Me that Mold Time Religion” and “C’est Levee” for the levees that did not hold. Mayor [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Rabbi Michael Lerner doesn’t mince words about the way he sees the world going. The political and religious right, he says, have made an unholy alliance and are bulldozing the American society toward a world that is militaristic, selfish and authoritarian, worshipping a Bid Daddy god and a Big Daddy government.
Lerner wants [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Oh, the pomp, the pageantry, the skaters, the skiers, the luge, and sneaky judges. You say Turin. They say Torino. It doesn’t matter. The Winter Olympics are here again.
Faster than you can say “extreme sports,” the new class of snowboarding, freestyling, short-tracking X-game events have put the USA in [...]

Two gold medals were awarded in the pairs competition at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. The scandal put skating on thin ice, and now, a new judging system is in place for the Turin Olympics.
“6.0″ or perfect scoring is out, and in its place is something that will take some getting used to, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On the front of eulogizing retrospection, it’s been the week of Coretta Scott King, and rightly so. But there’s another woman — another super woman — who died last Saturday having changed the world.
Feminist Betty Friedan blew the doors off the lives of quiet desperation of American women of the 1950s. [...]

George Deutsch, the 24-year-old presidential appointee at NASA, resigned this week when it surfaced that he never graduated from Texas A&M University as his resume indicated. He tried to limit scientists from speaking publicly, and ordered a Web designer to insert the word “theory” after each reference to the Big Bang.
His departure coincides with an [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On October 4, 1957, America’s cold war arch-rival, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik — the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth. The United States went ballistic with envy and fear. President John F. Kennedy announced America would go to the moon, and marshaled American science to that, and much more. The US [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was tough testimony in Washington yesterday on two key fronts of the war in Iraq. First, the insurgency: recent Bush administration comments have suggested the insurgency, while strong, may be ebbing. Newly declassified numbers released to the Senate yesterday suggest otherwise — that the insurgency has steadily grown in [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The headlines are almost surreal: “Deadly cartoon riot near US base,” says CNN.com. But the news itself is not funny. Afghan police fired into a mob of protesters trying to storm a US military base today, in fury over cartoon caricatures of the prophet Muhammed published in a Danish newspaper.
There have [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
They were still voting by candlelight in Haiti last night, at the end of a day of anger and confusion, long after the polls were supposed to have closed. Impoverished Haitians, determined to cast their ballots, scaled walls and broke down doors yesterday morning to confront tardy poll workers.
They were still surging [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Oprah Winfrey didn’t know. Quincy Jones didn’t know. Whoopi Goldberg didn’t know. Even Henry Louis Gates Jr. - academia’s “Captain Africa,” the man who edited the continent’s encyclopedia — didn’t know where his family, its genealogy and its genetics really traced to.
Like millions of African-Americans, their family stories, their family [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
All day yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spend hours justifying President Bush’s program of domestic eavesdropping without court warrants in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At the end of the day, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, put it this way: the Bush administration’s interpretation of law [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
History’s judgment on the presidency of George W. Bush may take a while, but conservative columnist Fred Barnes is ready now. Never mind the caterwauling of the establishment, says Barnes. Never mind the gripes of journalists and traditional Republicans and outraged Democrats, he says.
In his new book “Rebel-in-Chief,” Barnes describes the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Hearings will be held today before the Senate Judiciary Committee on President Bush’s domestic surveillance program. The logistical nuts and bolts — as far as they are known — are all about AT&T, MCI, Sprint and maybe others tapping government spies into international calls said to be monitored for terrorist connections. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Self-made billionaire Mark Cuban drives referees nuts. The super-rich, mega-manic owner of the Dallas Mavericks is famed, and infamous, for his courtside rants in the full lather of NBA basketball — and he’s got the million-dollar fines to prove it.
But now, Mark Cuban — entrepreneur and tech-visionary — is shaking up [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The lead story on page one of the New York Times last Sunday read: top NASA climate scientist says the Bush administration is trying to stop him from speaking out on global warming.
The scientist is James E. Hansen - NASA’s number one climate watcher, who says he’s been muzzled on a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Conservative Party Briton Chris Patten has had the kind of globe-straddling career that few public figures pull off anymore, spanning continents and remarkable moments in history.
He was the last British governor of Hong Kong, an outspoken British cabinet minister, a top official in the European Union. He’s now Chancellor of Oxford University, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In 1831, a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young United States, peered into its boisterous character, and wrote “Democracy in America,” the classic early yardstick of the country’s self-understanding.
In 2003 — on the far side of Franco-American meltdown and “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” — French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy was invited [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The urge is so strong, most people don’t fight it. In the presence of religion and religious icons — churches, temples, altars, scripture, holy relics from the Ganges riverbank to Rome — most people become reverent. Not Daniel Dennett.
Denett is a philosopher on a mission. His mission is to break [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a moment of sweetness last night as President Bush used the first words of his State of the Union address to mark the death of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King. And then, it was all business.
Fire and brimstone for radical Islam, for Iran and its nuclear ambitions, for [...]