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 [...]

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 [...]

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:
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 [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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:
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 [...]

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, [...]

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.
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 [...]