By host Tom Ashbrook:
In January, the Marines called it Al-Qaeda propaganda. Now, almost 6 months later, it’s an American nightmare. An alleged massacre of civilians in the insurgent hotbed of Haditha. Twenty-four in all. An old man in a wheelchair. A begging father. Mothers. Children — girls — aged 14, 10, 5, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Dr. Bill Thomas may change your life, or at least the end of it. Thomas is a rebel and a visionary who doesn’t like the way old people get warehoused in America. He doesn’t like the nursing home layout, the smell, the food, the loneliness, the boredom, the way elders get [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Every man is, or wants to be, an idler,” wrote the great Samuel Johnson in 1758. And he surely could have added every woman, too. From Johnson to Jack Kerouac to Ferris Bueller and the great age of Slackers, the appeal of lounging, loafing, goofing off, and vegging out has [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart is a Scoop Jackson Democrat who wants American liberals to stand up, suit up, grab their ideals and their guns, and win the war on terror. Conservatives can talk big and shake the stick, but they can’t win this one, he says. They’re too arrogant, too [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Pop music critic Karen Shoemer was a postpunk, indie rock kid who had never thought twice about Patti Page, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Fabian, Frankie Lane — the demigods of the sugar-sweet 1950 teen pop music that her parents grew up on.
Then, one day, she desperately needed to understand her parents’ first [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Romans served them at orgies. Cassanova ate fifty before breakfast. You may love them or hate them.
New York built a city on the briny bivalve — the oyster. At one time, biologists reckoned half the oysters in the world grew in the estuary waters of New York Harbor. The rich [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The slap-on yellow ribbons of war support are fading now. Not quite as many on bumpers on the road. The country’s tuned in to “Lost” and “Idol” and “Desperate Housewives.”
But in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fighting and dying go on in dusty alleyways and high mountain passes far from home and, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you’ve ever wanted to see Washington at full boil, this was the week to do it — action, aliens, heads of state, cash in the freezer, and Congress on the war path.
We had George Bush standing down on “dead or alive” and “bring it on.” Hillary Clinton was standing up [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Pulitzer-prize winning reporter David Remnick took the top editing job at the New Yorker magazine nearly seven years ago. But he can’t stop grabbing his notebook and heading out of town.
He’s out with a big new collection of intimate profiles of the great and powerful and out-of-power, from Vladimir Putin to [...]

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed 450 graduating seniors at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. As he congratulated the students and their families, he reminisced about his undergraduate years at City College of New York in Harlem, NY.
Hear an excerpt from Powell’s commencement address.
Guests:
Colin [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you’re a man or woman of the people and you want to know where the masses were last night, that’s simple: they were watching American Idol.
At least 30 million viewers, or perhaps more tuned in. They cast 63 million votes — more than any US president’s ever had, crowed host [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
June 1st, the opening day for hurricane season, is just around the corner, and the debate over whether the Gulf Coast is ready for another Katrina is all too real.
In New Orleans, where mayor Ray Nagin has just be re-elected, they’ve been practicing evacuation. Along the Mississippi, the Army Corps of Engineers [...]

In preparation for hurricane season, home insurance agencies have started to adjust their premiums. Rates are dropping in the Midwest and the West while rates are on the rise in coastal areas from Texas to Cape Cod.
Joseph B. Treaster, financial reporter for the New York Times, has been following what he calls “the Katrina effect” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Twenty-five years ago, in 1981, the Center for Disease Control reported its first cases of AIDS. It was a mystery killer. It looked like pneumonia. It looked like skin cancer. It looked like the problem of a handful of gay men.
A quarter century on, at 25, AIDS is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When the poachers came into Zambia’s Luangwa National Park, they were deadly effective and completely merciless. With their AK-47s and meat racks and tusk carriers to haul ivory off the savanna, they slaughtered 93 percent of the park’s once thriving elephant population.
Then came a UN crackdown on the ivory trade — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“We’re there,” said President Bush yesterday. After the naming of a new full-term cabinet in Iraq, Bush proclaimed: “We have reached a turning point in the struggle between freedom and terror.” Well, maybe.
After many such proclamations over the last three years, Americans might be forgiven for not dancing in the streets [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist Gary Shteyngart immigrated to the United States from Leningrad , of the former Soviet Union, when he was seven years old. While he was growing up in the USA, his home country was breaking up – from the exhausted Soviet Union into wild and woolly post-Soviet disunion.
Gangsters, crime, illicit fortunes and [...]

Pomp. Circumstance. Controversy. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice speaks at Boston College. Her selection as commencement speaker was controversial on campus.
Hear an excerpt from Rice’s address.
Guests:
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice speaking at Boston College.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says it’s not an epic, winner-take-all battle. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said last week that keyword search, the cornerstone of the booming Google empire, is not the only way to find what you need when it comes to information.
But if you want to understand the future of [...]

Microsoft and the cable giant MTV Networks have opened a new front in the battle for online music delivery. Their new service, URGE, is subscription based: you pay a fixed monthly fee to rent unlimited access to the service’s music library. It’s a direct challenge to the Apple iTunes software that has been so [...]