Week in the News | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2010

Friday, October 13, 2006 at 10:00 AM EDT

Week in the News

By host Tom Ashbrook:

This has been an interesting week, to say the least. It started with a big bang in the mountains of North Korea. An atomic bang, said Pyongyang — and what are going to do about it? President Bush’s response? Not military, he said in the Rose Garden.

On Iraq — there is word that Bush family “main man” former secretary of state James Baker is ruling out victory. On the hustings, there are more bad midterm poll numbers for the GOP. Republicans in Washington are still slogging through Foley and Abramoff.

In New York, a Yankee flyer’s bad end spooks the country. Google pays $1.65 billion dollars for YouTube – a company only nineteen months old!

Hear about this week in the news.

Guests:

Barbara Slavin, diplomatic correspondent USA Today

Kenneth Walsh,Chief White House Correspondent for U.S. News & World Report

Jack Beatty, On Point News Analyst, senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly

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Jazz Great Sonny Rollins
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

We’ll talk with tenor saxophone great Sonny Rollins about his six decades at the pinnacle of jazz.

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Ireland’s Epic Boom and Bust
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

For more than a decade Ireland boomed. It was Europe’s Celtic Tiger. Then it came crashing down. We’ll look at Ireland’s wild rise, and what went wrong.

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Ben Zimmer on Language
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Blogger and lexicographer Ben Zimmer takes over William Safire’s language column. We’ll catch the new wave of American language.

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Will the Dodd Bill Do the Job?
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Senator Chris Dodd finally unveils his bill to rewrite the nation’s Wall Street regulation. Is it tough enough to do the job?

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IED’s in Afghanistan: Hard Numbers

The Department of Defense provided On Point with some statistics about IED attacks in Afghanistan, where there has been an increase in the use of such weapons over the past 14 months. It’s striking to see the spike in numbers — from 2,677 IED incidents in 2007 to 8,159 last year.

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Christopher Hill: U.S. Troop Withdrawal ‘On Schedule’

U.S. Ambassaor to Iraq Christopher Hill spoke with On Point live from Baghdad today as early voting gets underway, part of the run-up to Sunday’s elections. “So far so good,” Hill said, despite scattered violence. Hill said that the plan to withdraw U.S. combat troops by Sept. 1, and to leave only a residual advisory force of 50,000 or fewer, remains “very much on schedule.” Observers worry that a spike in violence could derail that timeline.

The Supreme Court’s Radio Silence

For radio listeners, a key element of our conversation about the Supreme Court gun-rights case was conspicuously absent: the audio recording of the oral arguments. Here’s why.

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