States Search For Answers To Cheating Scandals

Cheating scandals have rocked a number of school districts across the country this year. The publicity is pushing states to look for better ways to detect and prevent tampering with the test results, and some say constant vigilance is required to guard against cheating. What happened in Atlanta is hard to imagine: Dozens of administrators [...]

Bling And Borscht: ‘Russian Dolls’ Play Up Stereotypes

Lifetime’s Russian Dolls is just the latest “reality” TV show to have a tenuous relationship with reality. It’s Real Housewives meets Jersey Shore meets Brighton Beach — a New York neighborhood full of Russian transplants. “It’s one square mile of Brooklyn, jampacked with crazy Russians,” explains one of the show’s characters. But residents of the [...]

Key Al-Qaida Operative Killed, U.S. Officials Say

U.S. officials say that a CIA drone strike Aug. 22 killed al-Qaida’s freshly minted second-in-command. Atiyah al-Rahman was a Libyan who was a key Osama bin Laden associate for decades. Al-Rahman was killed in Waziristan, Pakistan, officials say, and they seem fairly confident they got their man. There are often reports about drone strikes against [...]

Slow-Growth Economy Spikes Food Stamp Reliance

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to release its latest update on the food stamp program. It’s an important indicator of the nation’s economic health — and the prognosis is not good. Food stamp use is up 70 percent over the past four years and that trend is expected to continue. The [...]

An Anagram Challenge

On-Air Challenge: Every answer today is the name of a card name. You name the games from their anagrams. For example: “THIS” plus “W”. The answer is: “WHIST” Last Week’s Challenge: Take the name of an aquatic animal, in two words, six letters in the first word and four letters in the second. Remove the [...]

An American Rebellion, Sparked By Tough Times

A war is ending and economic times are tough. Taxes are high and property foreclosures common. Streets are filled with protesters. Sounds familiar, I know, but I’m not talking about today’s news. It was the Revolutionary War, winding down in 1783, and the national government was massively in debt and having enormous difficulty paying the [...]

Al-Qaida’s No. 2 Reported Killed By U.S. In Pakistan

U.S. Officials say that Atiyah al-Rahman, al-Qaida’s second-in-command, was killed last week in Waziristan, Pakistan, in a series of CIA drone strikes. Officials thought they had killed al-Rahman in a drone strike last year, only to have him reappear months later. But as NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports, this time officials seem convinced they got their [...]

Does Jobs Have Place In History Beside Edison, Ford?

Steve Jobs stepped down this week as CEO of Apple after running the company for nearly 25 years. The first Macintosh computer, the iPod audio player and most recently the iPad are just a few of the products Jobs created that have changed the way millions of people live their lives. Comparisons can be drawn [...]

Some New Yorkers Look On Irene’s Bright Side

Parts of New York City are under evacuation orders, with more than 370,000 people ordered to leave low-lying areas ahead of Hurricane Irene, expected to arrive Sunday. But on Saturday afternoon, at least, some residents were making the most of it. NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports for All Things Considered that “Frankly Wines, a small shop [...]

‘Flash And Bones’: A High-Speed Murder Mystery

The grisly discovery of a dead body stuffed in a 35-gallon drum full of asphalt and dumped at a landfill next to North Carolina’s Charlotte Motor Speedway kicks off Kathy Reichs’ new novel, Flash and Bones. Reichs, a forensic anthropologist, is the author of the books that inspired the Fox TV series Bones. Her latest [...]