Jen Poyant

Questions over whether the surge in Afghanistan is working are rising again, as are insurgents in northern Afghanistan, just as a new report out by the Pentagon highlights some progress in the south. One of the larger questions: Is that progress in one region coming at the expense of progress in others?

We talked yesterday with David Sanger, who writes for our partner The New York Times, about the very disturbing notion that North Korea has already become a nuclear power, and the possibility that Pyonyang could sell nuclear materials to enemy nations, or even terrorists. Sanger wrote his article with his colleague William Broad, who has another article in the Times today about whether Americans would know what to do in order to try and survive a nuclear bomb attack.

North Korea seems to have surpassed Iran, in its efforts to develop the advanced technology that produces nuclear material and weapons. According to David Sanger, chief White House correspondent for our partner The New York Times, senior American officials were recently stunned to see that North Korea is far more advanced in its nuclear ambitions than anticipated. The officials visited a new plant at Yongbyon, where North Korea's main nuclear complex sits.

Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan and famed diplomat, died of heart failure yesterday. He was 69. Holbrooke was the man that many presidents had turned to when they wanted to find a way to end a war. In the mid-1990s, Holbrooke helped broker the peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia. And right up until his death he was working on bringing stability to the Afghan-Pakistan region.

It may seem like just yesterday that you first heard The Sugar Hill Gang or Run DMC, but the hip hop business is pushing forty. For many of the years that hip hop has been around, Dan Charnas has been working in the business - as a scout, a promoter, and a journalist. Dan is the author of a new book called “The Big Payback: the History of the Business of Hip Hop.” Charnas walks us through some pivotal moments in the hip hop business, and how those moments have informed our culture and the entertainment industry.

When it comes to brands you find in the laundry aisle, Tide has been reinvented about a million different ways, whether as a more concentrated detergent formula, into a stain remover, or a fabric softener. There is one area of the laundry industry that has historically been very hard to corner nationally, however. Tide's parent company, Proctor and Gamble, now intends to take the brand into...dry cleaning. Can a major company like Tide replace mom-and-pop? 

Elizabeth Edwards died of breast cancer yesterday at the age of 61. Whether it was on the campaign trail, during her cancer treatments or on book tours, Edwards connected with a large number of people — even as she split from husband and former Senator John Edwards. 

The Justice Department and other federal agenceies are cracking down on would-be Bernie Madoffs of the future. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder tallied the results of a nationwide Financial Fraud Task Force that’s meant to target investment fraud and other Ponzi schemes.

Yesterday the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the biggest work discrimination lawsuit in American history. The suit’s plaintiffs accuse Walmart of having discriminated against hundreds of thousands of women across the country for pay and for promotions. Walmart says the suit has too many aspects to be deemed a single class-action.

Even though the immediate stakes are very high for both the plaintiffs and the defendant in this case, the long-term ramifications of the case could be long lasting, particularly for future class-action lawsuits.

The Presidential commission tasked with trying to find a way to stabilize and cut our deficit will vote tomorrow on its final recommendations. Theoretically, it would then go before Congress and President Obama for consideration.  The commission’s co-chairs, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, made waves earlier in the month by leaking their own controversial plan and encouraging members of the panel to adopt it. Yesterday, Bowles and Simpson brought a largely unchanged plan to the full panel.  Panel members then began indicating whether they’d vote for it.  

Members of the President's deficit commission are debating how to vote on a controversial plan to reduce the nation's budget deficit. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) says she plans to reject the plan put forward by the commission's co-chairs, Erskine Bowles, former Chief of Staff for President Clinton, and Republican former Senator Alan Simpson. Instead, she's offering an alternative plan which would sharply reduce spending at the Pentagon and raise corporate taxes, targeting windfall profits and excessive executive pay.

The hundreds of thousands of secret memos released by WikiLeaks this week shine a bright light on a world used to being away from the public eye. Some argue secrecy in diplomacy is important.On Monday, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton responded to the release by saying that "it is imperative that we have candid reporting from those who are in the field, working with their counterparts, in order to inform our decision making back here in Washington." But what would it be like if the art of diplomacy was always this open?

Significant leaks of government information used to come rarely, and frequently only after years had passed since the events they described. Of late, however, the leaks seem to have been coming more and more quickly ... and the information, at least in the latest WikiLeaks release, only months old. We talk with New York Times executive editor Bill Keller about what the recent spate of leaks portends for watchdog journalism going forward.

Read a full transcript of the interview.

All week long we have been talking about the idea of "home," and the physical attributes and emotional attachments we have to our homes.

We end our series by talking with artist and writer Maira Kalman. She is the author of “And the Pursuit of Happiness,” a compilation of her year-long journey for our partner, The New York Times, to explore her adopted home, America. Kalman was not born in the United States, but she traveled the country to fall back in love.

The day after the earthquake in Haiti, we spoke on the phone with France Neptune, an aid worker at the Haiti Foundation Against Poverty. He had been trying to reach his girlfriend, Mallery Thurlow, who was in the United States. Neither were able to reach one another, and Mallery was unsure if her boyfriend was alive and well. Live on the air, we were able to connect Neptune and Thurlow for the first time.

Today, we check back in with the couple who have since gotten married and continue their aid work in Haiti.

UN officials announced this week that cholera is now projected to spread across Haiti more than twice as fast as originally estimated, with more than 425,000 cases expected in the first six months since it appeared. The disease had officially infected 66,593 people and killed 1,523 as of Monday, according to the country's Ministry of Health.

Haiti has barely recovered from the January earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 people, and now the country is in the wake of a full blown cholera epidemic.  That has not stopped the Haitian government from taking on the mammoth task of reforming the country's education system.

Earlier this morning, we talked about the record breaking number of people around the world who are entering America’s green card lottery because they want to make this country their home. The sheer number of people applying for this lottery shows the continuing deep desire to immigrate here. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), of Iowa’s 5th District, will likely have a lot of influence on the Republican party's immigration policies. He’s lined up to become the next chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration when the GOP takes over the house this January.

The national media frequently paints Detroit as a near constant subject of sad stories during this ailing economy. But there are outliers in every struggling economy, and in this city there is a bright and beautiful outlier: The Detroit Opera House is not struggling at all.  It is thriving, thanks in part to the leadership of its director, David Dichiera.

The military government of Burma has released Aung Sang Suu Kyi, one of the country's most visible pro-democracy advocates and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She has spent most of the last two decades under house arrest, and re-enters the public eye just after another round of elections which outside observers deemed rigged. Despite the military junta's continued repression, Suu Kyi is calling for Western countries to increase their engagement with Burma, pointing out that sanctions over the last decades have not forced change.