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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]