By host Tom Ashbrook:
This coming Sunday is Daylight Savings Time. “Spring ahead.” Everybody up an hour earlier, no matter what the clocks say. But the fact is, Americans are way ahead of the clock this year — getting “up and at ‘em” earlier and earlier in the pre-dawn morning.
A 24/7 global economy, more [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Word this week is that three little piggies in American labs have been cloned and genetically engineered to produce Omega-3 fatty acids. That is, pigs genetically engineered to become squealing little factories of heart-healthy bacon.
Omega-3 is the stuff that makes fish and walnuts so good for your heart. Some people [...]

Earlier today, American reporter Jill Carroll was released unharmed.
The 28-year old journalist was working for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor newspaper when she was kidnapped on January 7th, 2006 in a bloody ambush in Baghdad.
Correspondent Borzou Daragahi describes the latest from Baghdad.
Guests:
Borzou Daragahi is Baghdad correspondent for The Los Angeles Times.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian, made it out of Afghanistan alive by the skin of his teeth this week. The Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity was temporarily released as insane and flown secretly to Italy, while many Afghans clamored for his execution for leaving Islam.
The whole world was watching — American [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Human denial and inertia can have awesome power, but so can human insight and gumption. For two decades, Americans in particular have lived in debate and denial about global warming. Well, the debate is over, and the warming is on.
We’re on our way to the hottest planet in a million [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A big new report out this week says that thousands of American schools have found one way to try to raise reading and math scores: cut back on teaching everything else. President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program punishes schools that don’t hit their marks on reading and math test [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Late last year, then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon handed his country a political earthquake with the creation of a new centrist party, Kadima, dedicated to a withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and to fixed borders, imposed unilaterally if necessary, against the Palestinians.
Then Sharon slipped into a coma, and the Palestinians [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In 1991, struggling with poverty, a huge population, and a tough policy of one child per family, China loosened its adoption laws. In a culture that favors sons, that meant girls were up for adoption. And, very quickly, a great wave of international adoptions of Chinese girls by American families followed.
Today, [...]

Last month at the Olympics, Toby Dawson won a bronze medal in freestyle mogul skiing. Abandoned as a toddler in Seoul, he was adopted by an American couple and raised in Vail, Colorado.
Sports Illustratred senior writer Rick Reilly says that Dawson’s victory is a much bigger story than a race down the mountain. For Reilly, [...]

While uproar continues throughout the nation, one section of society is given time to exhale — briefly. Social service groups will not be penalized for helping illegal immigrants.
In a hearing yesterday, the Senate called for amnesty for groups like the Catholic Church, who provide refuge for aliens. That, however, is only one aspect of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
By a vote of 12 to 6, the US Senate Judiciary Committee drew a chasm through Capitol Hill yesterday on immigration.
The sweeping immigration bill reported out with a thumbs up by the all the committee’s Democrats and four of its divided Republicans, would legalize the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants and open [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Francis Fukuyama was a big dog in the pack of neo-conservatives that pushed for years for the U.S. to get tough on Saddam Hussein. The celebrated author of “The End of History” was a big-name thinker in the neo-con clubhouse.
Now, Francis Fukuyama is bailing out. Somewhere, he says, the neo-cons [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The headline is perplexing. Creekstone Farms of Kansas wants to test all the beef it processes for mad cow disease. And the United States Department of Agriculture says no. To many Americans, that is perplexing.
Mad cow has left 150 humans in Europe with brain-wasting disease. Creekstone isn’t saying everyone [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was dark and cold and Bruce Stutz needed renewal badly. The former editor-in-chief of Natural History magazine grabbed an old Chevy and hit the American road, on the blooming trail of spring.
For a whole season, he chased it — the bursting with life surge and crest of the season of light’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Attention all air travelers. Heads up. The leg room is lousy, the meals are gone, on-time arrival feels like an oxymoron and now this: a major move is afoot to unleash non-stop cell phone use on passenger airplanes in mid-flight. Cell phone use free-for-all at 30,000 feet.
New technologies [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Sociologist Annette Lareau spent years parked in the middle of the intimate family lives of American families — upper middle class, working class, and poor. Treat me “like the family dog” she told them, as she watched, up close, how these families raised their children.
What she found were large and consequential [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Recently retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor is a cool and sober Arizona ranch-raised Republican. And the remarks the first woman on the high court made this month in Washington sound for all the world like the timeless warnings of America’s founding fathers: defend the balance of powers, always watch [...]

New labor law supported by French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, has sparked a string of violent riots in France. The proposed law would allow companies to fire young workers at will anytime during their first two years on the job.
In France, this is big. Proponents believe the law will help address the 20 percent [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
For all the political sound and fury over the off-shoring of American jobs to India, China and beyond, the coming great migration of American work to foreigners has barely begun, says Princeton economist Alan Blinder.
Soon, and for years to come, Americans will be astounded by the exodus of jobs to lower wage nations.
Essentially, [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
Time for us all to check our clocks on the departure of US troops from Iraq.
That development, said George Bush yesterday, will come under “future presidents, and future governments of Iraq.” In other words, January, 2009 at the earliest - nearly three years from now, when President Bush is no longer in charge.
In [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has whipped up a small storm in the last few weeks with his call for the new embrace of an old idea: manliness.
Men acting manly, says Mansfield, are what this world needs more of. John Waynes and Teddy Roosevelts, Papa Hemmingways and Schwarzeneggers who stride the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Talk about a fast-moving storm. For about five minutes, it seems in retrospect, America was up in arms in January over what look like a bought and paid for US Congress.
Republican congressman Duke Cunningham was headed for jail, with his yacht and his dirty millions. Super-lobbyist and Republican hot shot [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Albert Einstein was asked if he believed in God, the great 20th century scientist reached back to a 17th century philosopher for an answer. “I believe,” said Einstein, “in Spinoza’s God.”
Baruch Spinoza was the brilliant outcast heretic who broke open the doors to modern thought with his assertion that God [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s not easy prosecuting terrorism cases. In a drug bust, police can catch the dealers in the act. In terror cases, they can’t wait that long. But, even given the difficulty, the record of the Bush administration on going after terrorists after 9/11 is a record of remarkable flubs. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Maybe this was inevitable. First the “Leave it to Beaver” American family portrait gets torn up by divorce. Single moms prove they can do it alone if they have to. Then men and women reassess each other through the lens of women’s rights. And genetic science makes artificial [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Three years after Pearl Harbor, the Allies were in Paris, Hitler was on the run, and the German army was playing its last big card in the Battle of the Bulge. World War II victory was in sight.
Three years after American leaders launched Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive exploded. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to water, says environmental explorer Fred Pearce, world maps no longer really tell the truth. As nice and natural as they may look in the crisp blue colors of an atlas, the fact is that today, dozens of the world’s greatest rivers run dry long before they reach [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A new national security strategy report out today from the Bush administration makes clear that pre-emption is still very much in the Pentagon’s strategic arsenal. And key to that posture, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made abundantly clear, is America’s elite military commandos: Navy Seals, Rangers, Green Berets and more.
The country’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The latest news on bird flu today: it’s now in Sweden. Two wild ducks that were found dead there had been infected.
Two wild ducks in Sweden sounds distant, almost picturesque. But there is nothing distant in the warnings Americans are hearing this week about bird flu.
It will come to North America, probably [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s Africa, the dead and dying of Darfur in Sudan come powerfully to life. Sometimes literally. In another urgent Kristof column this week from the landscape of rape and murder, a corpse literally opens its eyes — not yet dead it turns out — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to hot buttons, immigration is a big one today. And the fear behind the fury over Mexican border fences and lost jobs has a lot to do with culture. Americans whose families immigrated before are wary of Americans whose families — often Latino — are immigrating now.
And [...]

Yesterday, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin introduced a resolution calling for President Bush to be censured for his domestic wiretapping. Feingold, a possible presidential candidate in 2008 said the president broke the law and violated the constitution when he authorized the National Security Agency to conduct a warrantless wiretapping program as part of the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For a decade and a half, the country has been debating school vouchers. And for that same fifteen years, the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin has been using public money to help poor families pay for private school.
School vouchers have been a conservative hobby horse for years, but very few communities [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For better and for worse, it’s a big sports moment. College basketball heads into its thrilling home stretch this week. Barry Bonds heads into a major league baseball storm over steroids. Spring training is in full gear. Baseball’s opening day is just weeks away.
And fantasy baseball — the “rotisserie [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
President Bush is back on the stump this week drumming again for support for the Iraq war. But in Congress, they’re looking at the bill. Another $67 billion in supplemental spending — mainly for Iraq — is up for a vote this week. With soldiers’ lives on the line [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Pop quiz time. For twenty points and a hall pass for a week, how did the first humans come to America? If you say across a land bridge from Siberia, you get an A for remembering what generations of kids have been taught. If you add “on foot through [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Dubai port deal may be the headline of the day, but just the other side of Dubai and Iraq war and Rove and Libby and the president’s lousy poll numbers, the sun is coming up on a whole new political day.
Standing front and center in the dawn light of the 2008 [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The story out of Brooklyn sounds like a cross between The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and Alistair Cooke put a face on it. The courtly British-born PBS host was one of a thousand dead whose bodies, prosecutors charge, were run through a funeral home turned chop shop in New York.
Bodies delivered [...]

After a long battle with Congress that went down to the wire, today President Bush will sign a renewal of the USA Patriot Act. The Republican-controlled Congress gave Bush the narrow victory there, but it is breaking ranks with the President, it appears, over the port deal.
Yesterday, a House committee voted 62-2 to bar the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to the Mideast oil money these days, the eight-billion-dollar Dubai ports deal now giving President Bush so much trouble in the US Congress is a drop in the oil barrel.
Surging prices for crude oil are turning the glittering cities of the Gulf oil states into new Xanadus. An ocean [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel’s most vivid first memories are of Kristallnacht, in Vienna, 1938 — Nazi police banging at the door, charging into his Jewish family’s little apartment; the color of the toy he was playing with as they banged.
Seven decades later, Kandel has given unique substance to the Holocaust mantra [...]

Gunmen wearing the uniform of Iraqi police commandos seized dozens of employees from the offices of a security company in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday, police sources said.
Megan Stack, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reports on the latest live from Baghdad.
Guests:
Meghan Stack, correspondent for The Los Angeles Times in Baghdad, Iraq.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It sounds like a Victor Hugo plot line. A poor woman, a mother, is sent away to prison for a couple years - maybe for stealing something she thought she needed. And while she is in jail, her children are taken away - forever. Put up for adoption. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Robert Greenberg may hold the future of advertising and marketing in his hands, but he didn’t start out as an ad man. Greenberg started out in media technology, making Superman’s movie credits rush at the audience and making “Alien” a high-tech dread-fest.
Now, Robert Greenberg is at the frontlines of the movement [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
“I’m trying to think differently,” said the president in India. And he meant think differently about nuclear weapons.
For decades, the United States helped lead the nuclear non-proliferation movement. Twenty years ago, huge numbers of Americans were standing up for a nuclear freeze.
In India, George W. Bush thought differently, accepting India’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Across every woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword, wrote Virgina Woolf. On one side lie tradition and order, where “all is correct.” On the other, a life that does not follow convention. And there, wrote Woolf “all is confusion.”
That’s where writer Elizabeth Gilbert set her compass. [...]