Miles O'Brien

The votes are still being counted this morning after Iraq's national election yesterday, and results aren't expected until later this week. One of the key areas of voting in the country was the oil rich northern region of Kurdistan. Thanks to the area's oil reserves, the Kurds have exercised a significant amount of influence and power in Iraq's politics in recent years, often acting as a cohesive block. We're joined by Jim Muir, a BBC correspondent in Baghdad, who tells us more about the general election and the unique role Kurds are playing.

• WASHINGTON TAKEOUT: Health care is back on the front burner for President Obama this week, and today he travels to Glenside, Pa. to push health care at Arcadia University. Takeaway Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich tells us more.
• SPORTS TAKEOUT: In like a lion, march madness begins now that college basketball is heating up across the country. Ibrahim Abdul-Matin talks about the UConn women's basketball team tying their own record for consecutive wins, and number one team Syracuse losing.

Chelsea King, a 17-year-old girl from San Diego, was raped and killed last month by John Gardner, a man with a history of sex crimes. Gardner was previously incarcerated for molesting a 13-year-old girl in 2000, but was let out of prison early in 2005. The case has sparked a heated national dialogue about the strength of laws intended to protect children from sex offenders. And the question of where sex offenders should live has come up in Florida, as offenders there struggle to adjust to society after prison sentences.

A lot of people set their children in front of the television to watch educational videos and programming — from "Sesame Street" to "Baby Einstein" — with the hope that these shows will help their children to learn. But a new study out last week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, says these videos don’t actually make kids smarter, and may in fact impede their learning.

You’ll be hearing a lot about the winners of last night’s glamorous Oscars, but you may not hear about its millions of losers. A dispute between Cablevision and ABC left more than three million New York area cable subscribers unable to see last night’s awards ceremony.

Could you live without the internet for a whole week? No email. No Facebook. No TheTakeaway.org. If that thought fills you with horror then you'll feel for two families in South Korea—the “most wired” nation in the world, with the fastest broadband speeds and the highest percentage of its population online. As part of the BBC’s “Superpower” season, which is looking at how the Internet has changed the world, these two families were asked to cut themselves off from the Internet for a whole week.

In this week's agenda, Marcus Mabry, international business editor for the New York Times, and Jonathan Marcus, BBC diplomatic correspondent, look at what to expect this week. They'll look at the aftermath of Iraq's national elections, Vice President Biden's visit to the Middle East, and the latest news on financial reform.

If the Obama Administration gets its way, future moon missions are getting the ax, and manned space missions will be outsourced. Miles O'Brien, space policy analyst and former space and aviation correspondent for CNN, discusses the changing mission at NASA.

Frontline correspondent Miles O’Brien talks about the crash of Continental Flight 3407 outside Buffalo last February. While it was identified as a Continental flight, it was actually operated by Colgan Air, a regional carrier. Miles O'Brien investigates major airlines' outsourcing to regional carriers to cut costs in the Frontline documentary ...

The National Transportation Safety Board released its report on what it believed was the cause for Continental Flight 3407's crash in Buffalo nearly one year ago. After a year long investigation, the NTSB concluded the crash was caused by pilot error, and "complacency and confusion that resulted in catastrophe."

We continue our conversation with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

BBC World Affairs Correspondent Adam Mynott spent yesterday in a hospital in Port-au-Prince. He reports on the latest situation on the ground and how food is being distributed throughout the city.

"I think probably too much time has been spent setting up processes, securing sites, and deciding programs, and actually they should have simply dumped some food on the streets and allowed the people who are here, who need it desperately, to get their hands on it"

--Adam Mynott

Republican Scott Brown's victory in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race proved the power of independent voters, and the degree to which they are shifting away from the Democratic party, only a year after they helped propel Barack Obama into the presidency. We speak with Jay Campbell, a vice president at Hart Research, and with Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University.

We speak with best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert about her latest book, "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." To write the book, she had to wrestle with the fact that her first, wildly successful memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love," had been based on the premise of getting over a bad marriage and swearing off the institution forever, while her second memoir details her reluctant acceptance of marriage after all.

Click through for an excerpt of Gilbert's new memoir.

Citigroup announced its earnings this morning, ending a three-quarter profit streak with a $7.6 billion loss during the final three months of 2009. This as consumers still struggled to repay loans and the bank managed to repay its government bailout money.

A 2007 triple murder of a family in a small town in Connecticut horrified the state, and has become central to the debate over abolishing the death penalty.

Since last Tuesday, Americans have been bombarded with daily media coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. TV networks show image after image of death and destruction, while newspapers feature grave details. But the words and images that media outlets choose can themselves prove controversial. We take a moment in the midst of our coverage on Haiti to examine how the media has been covering the earthquake.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the White House cabinet member who would be in charge of administering any new health care system in the United States. But right now her department is focused on the relief effort in Haiti, with more than 250 of her department's personnel providing medical care to survivors in the quake-ravaged country.

It's been one week since the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, destroying much of the capital, Port-au-Prince and, according to some estimates, killing as many as 100,000 people. 

As the annual hajj pilgrimage begins, we check in with BBC reporter in Mecca, Shahzeb Jilani. We also talk with the State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Fa...