By guest host Jane Clayson:
To date, the Iraq War has left more than 25,000 wounded. It’s the first war in which 90 percent of the wounded survive their injuries. But it also means there are more veterans with amputations, brain injuries, and post-traumatic stress disorder returning home than ever before.
A new HBO documentary [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The news did everything but take a vacation this week.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales bowed out. A bathroom sting and now Idaho Senator Larry Craig is fighting for his job. President Bush talked compassion in New Orleans but tough on Iran.
Quarterback Michael Vick plead guilty. A love-struck astronaut plead temporary insanity.
Fred Thompson [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
If you want to grow up to be rich and famous, turn up the heat. Celebrity chefs are white-hot.
Emeril, Rachael, and Alton are cooking up more than Louisiana garlic bread, 30-minute meals, and the science of sandwich making.
They’re rolling in dough, baking in big bucks with TV shows, best-selling books, personalized [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Mother Teresa, the diminutive nun who devoted her life to the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta, is expected to be declared a saint later this year by the Vatican, a mere ten years after her death.
She was one of the world’s great examples of how deep faith can [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
We all – some more than others – do it: the Freudian slips, the malapropisms, and spoonerisms, the ums and the uhs.
You say: “I caked a bake” and your friends laugh. President Bush “misunderestimates” and Senator John Kerry has it out for the “Wasabi Muslim Fundamentalists.”
But why do we misspeak and [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
In the race for ‘08, strong and smart women and one ex-President are a force on the campaigns. The compliant spouse, neatly coiffed and smiling in the background, is a thing of the past.
The candidates’ spouses are giving their own speeches and playing the politics, but moreover, they are making [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Mothers and fathers, your heads have got to be spinning.
You’ve been told your children will grow up emotionally empty drug addicts or worse if you don’t get on the floor with them and play with their trucks dolls and trains. That they won’t grow up smart or competitive enough [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
U.S. politicians have been up in arms recently about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Everyone agrees he needs to hurry up and make progress. And some, like Senators Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton, say he’s ineffective and should go.
But there are questions about whether it’s still America’s role to recommend regime [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Brands like Gucci and Prada and Louis Vuitton carry price tags that would eat up most people’s monthly paychecks. The ads tell you luxury-grade goods are worth it but what if it’s all a big lie?
Behind those Italian labels, those claims of Old World craftsmanship, is just a lot of [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales brings a sudden end to a long legal soap opera.
Gonzales has been President Bush’s most trusted legal advisor since their days in Texas. But in the end, he was marred in accusations of purging disloyal U.S. Attorneys, and perjuring himself before Congress.
Critics said it [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
On the far side of death, nobody knows what happens. Everyone has an opinion, or a belief. But what about the near side of death — the moments in which we die, the minutes in which we are first dead? Could science reach into that near terrain?
For thousands of years, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Floods and heat this week in the Midwest. The space shuttle back on Earth. Wall Street calmed for the moment. And the big guns coming out on Iraq.
Top Democrats and Republicans call for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki to step down. Maliki fires back that he can [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Americans’ impressions of the Amish tend to run hard and fast to stereotypes: wholesome horse-and-buggy barn-raisers or holier-than-thou cult of the past that cheats with chainsaws when you’re not looking.
The beards and bonnets and old-fashioned ways are endlessly alluring, and confusing. Is this the simple life that would save the planet [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ninety percent of the cocaine in the U.S. comes in through Mexico, most of our imported marijuana, and tons of methamphetamines. That flow has created giant drug cartels and a drug war in Mexico: murders, kidnappings, beheadings, police station shoot-ups.
Now, that drug war is coming across the border, too — into [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We’re in the height of hurricane season now, August to October, and that’s not news to Jamaica or Mexico’s Yucatan, where Hurricane Dean has been tearing up the coast in recent days.
Mexico got lucky with Dean. It was the third most powerful hurricane to make landfall since 1850. The damage [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Lesson number one out of the disaster at Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine: take too much out of a mountain, or out in the wrong way, and the mountain comes down. And the deeper you are in your search for coal, the more mountain there is to fall.
With coal prices high [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Roy Berkowitz-Shelton was 50, he told his wife he was a woman — and probably always had been. Not in any way you could immediately see, but deep inside — a woman in a man’s body.
Now, the marriage is effectively over. Roy is “Deborah” — Dr. Deborah Bershel. Her [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
2006 was a very big year for Democrats, taking back Congress, spiking the dream of the permanent Republican majority.
2008 could be even bigger for the Dems. The war in Iraq is so unpopular. The White House looks within their grasp, and so does a bigger majority on the Hill.
But what vision [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A hundred and fifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision that many scholars see as the worst in its history.
The Dred Scott decision of 1857 found that all “negroes,” even the free, and all their descendants, were not due the status of “citizen.” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”, 1957: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.”
“On the Road” became the Bible of the Beat [...]