Noel King

From "The Lovely Bones" to "What Dreams May Come," our popular conception of heaven is becoming increasingly beautiful and irreligious.

Today is Good Friday. Christians believe that on this day, Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross. This Easter Sunday Christians worldwide will celebrate Christ's resurrection. The Catholic Church may very well be hoping for a minor healing miracle of its own as a decades-old sex abuse scandal continues to plague church leaders in the U.S. and abroad.

The city of Memphis was recently dubbed "the hunger capital" of the U.S. That's because a poll co-sponsored by Gallup and the Food Reasearch Action Center that was released earlier this year showed that more than a quarter of people in the Memphis Metropolitan Area had trouble putting food on the table in 2009.

An Iraqi election committee attempted to bar six members of parliament from taking their newly-won seats on Monday, saying they had ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party; and another 42 newly-elected members of parliament may find themselves on the chopping block as well. The commision's move dealt a blow to Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya party, which won a narrow majority of seats in Iraq's March 7th

• TAKEOUT: Chicago Public Radio's Rob Wildeboer reports on the difficulty that a Chicago federal court is having as it determines how to prosecute Tahawwur Rana, who was accused of involvement in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Prosecutors have a considerable amount of information that they say will help tie Rana to the crime - but the evidence is classified.
  
• LISTENER TAKEOUT:  Yesterday, we asked whether the American education system could take a lesson or two from highly performing schools overseas. Listeners from around the country called in and posted on the web with your takes on that question. While all of the advice is good, some of our listener's innovations will surprise you.

UPDATED 7:30 PM

Noel King, on The Takeaway’s evening shift, with a few stories we’re following for tomorrow.

Half of all babies born in developing nations today will live to be one hundred years old. We ask Duke University professor James Vaupel and documentarian Neenah Ellis to imagine a future where mid-life crises happen at fifty, “kids” move away from home at thirty and “teenage” rebellion lasts for two decades. Producer Chang Lin is combing our rolodex to try and find a centenarian.  

In Philadelphia flash mobs – a type of performance art where big groups of people meet up and do something in unison – have turned violent, forcing the city to enforce an existing curfew. What’s to blame? Teenage boredom? Or something deeper? New York Times reporter Ian Urbina has the story and Kevin Bethel from the Philadelphia Police force tells us how Philly PD is responding. And producer Arwa Gunja has booked a young pizza deliveryman from Philadelphia who was caught in one of the mobs.

Plus, Palestinian Islamic group Hamas has become suspicious of Facebook and Twitter, ex-Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s charitable donations have come under scrutiny and Takeaway producer Anna Sale, who has spent a week with a medical mission in Haiti, joins us with another report from her trip.

POSTED 12:30 p.m. Alex Goldmark here planning our next show. 

We are still quite shocked by The New York Times report on how the Vatican failed to defrock an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, who sexually abused as many as 200 deaf boys. So we're looking into the reaction from Rev.. Murphy's old parish in Wisconsin. We're also checking in with a few reporters at the Vatican about how (or if) the Catholic Church is reacting.

Senior Pakistani officials, led by Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, are in Washington today for talks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But there are some questions around who is really running the show.

A high level U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Mexico today. The diplomatic meeting's guest list reads more like a war council – Clinton is accompanied by the Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various intelligence officials and follows the death of three people associated with the U.S. Consulate in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez earlier this month.

Journalist Charles Bowden has been reporting on Juarez for fifteen years. He is the author of a new book "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields."

A major part of the health care legislation that President Obama is expected to sign into law today focuses on cutting the skyrocketing costs of medical care. People with chronic diseases put a particular burden on medical services, and policy analysts say that getting better access to preventative care can drive down health care costs.

Today marks seven years since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In 2005, two years after U.S. and allied forces entered Iraq a U.S. presidential commission said intelligence that Iraq had WMD's was "dead wrong." The report also cast doubts on the integrity of U.S. intelligence on Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. Seven years later, we're taking a look at how the intelligence community responded and asking what changes they've made in the wake of this massive failure.

Tensions have been running high since Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new homes in disputed East Jerusalem during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden last week. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that ties between the U.S. and Israel remain strong, noting "we don't agree with any of our international partners on everything."

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is in Ciudad Juarez this morning, where three people affiliated with the U.S. consulate were killed over the weekend. The trip comes, not in response to this weekend's killings, but following the horrific massacre of at least 11 high school students at a party in Juarez in late January. Calderon is expected to announce an initiative to make city residents safer.

President Obama announced in his Saturday address to the American people that his administration will attempt to overhaul the controversial education policy known as No Child Left Behind.

On Thursday, House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to continue an investigation into the activities of Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) who resigned on Monday amid allegations of sexual misconduct. However, now that Massa has resigned, it is unclear whether the body responsible for the investigation, the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, must actually honor the House request to keep the investigation open. 

All this week on The Takeaway, we've been asking listeners to weigh in on what Haiti needs from the international community in order to move on from the devastating earthquake that struck two months ago. A few listeners homed in on one particular issue: jobs.

For almost thirty years, drivers in South Florida have been wondering about "Naked Carpet Guy," and last November, they voted to have WLRN's "Under the Sun" series find out. 

Vice President Joe Biden spoke in Israel this morning in a speech that was billed as one similar to President Obama's address to the Muslim world while in Cairo last year. But Biden's visit to Israel wasn't without incident.

Even after you restore safety and security, how do you begin to rebuild? Haitian President Rene Preval will meet with President Barack Obama in Washington today to discuss what Haiti needs two months after the earthquake that devasted large swathes of the country. Along with severe damages to infrastructure in the wake of the disaster, Haitians are trying to deal with economic issues — some of them pre-existent — brought into sharp relief by the quake. We're checking in with two people who have a birds-eye view of Haitian need, and how it interacts with that country's economy, past and future. 

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Afghan capital on Monday. Gen. McChrystal said the U.S. has all but routed the Taliban from their former stronghold of Marjah and that the military will now turn its attention to Kandahar — a key city that dwarfs Marjah in size.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are expected to go to the polls on Sunday for the nation's first full parliamentary elections since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. But with violence that some see as scare tactics possibly preventing the delivery of democracy, some in Iraq wonder if the U.S. forces should be extending their stay. Yesterday on CNN Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hinted at the possibility of asking the American military to stay in the country, but Gen. David Petraeus seems to be holding fast to the goal of an August transition.