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The Soviet Union's dominance of world figure skating collapsed along with communism. But since the last Winter Olympics, the Russian government has increased funding for the sport by a factor of 10.

A few weeks ago, Bob Rich was working as a school speech therapist. Now, instead of asking kids to enunciate vowels and consonants, he's asking grown-ups: paper, or plastic? NPR's Ketzel Levine continues a series on people reinventing themselves through their work.

The massive, fatal waves that resulted from Sunday's powerful earthquake in Southeast India are among the most destructive tsunamis of the past 50 years. Hear NPR's Jacki Lyden and Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center in Hawaii.

Spies spend their whole careers hiding secrets from family and close friends. Yet, when they retire, they don't necessarily disappear into history. Many of them turn around and publish memoirs. We discuss what's behind the urge to spy and tell. Is it bad for sources — or the agencies?

The Congressional Budget Office forecasts a deficit of $368 billion for the current fiscal year, a $20 billion jump from its prediction last fall. The numbers do not include the additional $80 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration has said it will seek from Congress.

Among the U.S. troops serving in Iraq, a small group of soldier-poets convene to share their verses. At Camp Victory, a U.S. military base at Baghdad's international airport, the "poetry jams" occur every two weeks.

In the West, new ways are emerging to make ranching compatible with preservation. For financial incentives, ranchers keep their lands away from developers and try to preserve fragile desert landscapes.

The Bush administration joins the British government in condemning an Irish Republican Army offer to shoot some of its own members as punishment for killing a man in Belfast in January. The family of the dead man rejected the offer and said fear of retribution is preventing witnesses to the killing from coming forward.

President Bush nominates Undersecretary of State John Bolton to be the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has been critical of the United Nations, but he insists his past remarks will not hinder his effectiveness as a diplomat.

Over the past three years, the U.S. has held dozens of suspected terrorists off the books, in a legal no-man's-land: Detainees have been treated in ways that mean they can't be prosecuted, begging the question of what happens to them now.