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A day after the White House released a briefing document on the al Qaeda threat that President George Bush received a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush says the brief lacked "actionable intelligence." Security experts say the paper leads them to question the Bush administration's judgment of the information. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reports.

NPR's Bob Edwards talks with Walter Slocombe about reconstruction efforts and the state of security in Iraq. Slocombe is former Senior Advisor for Defense and Security Affairs Sector to the Coalition Provisional Authority for Iraq.

U.S. and allied forces clash with supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The worst violence was near the southern city of Najaf, where 20 Iraqis were killed when al-Sadr's supporters opened fire on a Spanish garrison near the city. There was a similar demonstration in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. The violence flared after U.S. forces detained an associate of Sadr. NPR's Philip Reeves reports.

Barry's new book is The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. In 1918, the influenza virus emerged, and in the next year killed millions of people. He writes "before that worldwide pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history." Scientists are still trying to figure out why the virus spread so rapidly and killed so efficiently. The story has relevance today as scientists believe we are due for another flu pandemic. Barry is the author of four other books including Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.

Search technology, once relegated to library science departments and remote corners of computer science labs, went mainstream with the Internet, spawning such once-giant brands as Lycos, AltaVista and Yahoo. These engines proved that the Web could be indexed, but they failed when it came to giving users what they wanted.

An increasing number of federal agencies are following the lead of the Department of Homeland Security in hiring privacy officers to oversee the use of personal information collected from citizens. NPR's Larry Abramson reports.

Apple retail employees in Towson have formed CORE, the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees. They sent a letter to Apple's CEO saying the majority of employees at the store support forming a union.

Cole is an authority on modern Islamic movements. He is professor of modern Middle East and South Asia history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam. The book collects some of his work on the history of the Shiite branch of Islam in modern Iraq, Iran and the Persian Gulf region.

Sullivan is the author of the critically acclaimed books, The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt. His new book is Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. One reviewer writes, "in prose worthy of Joseph Mitchell, a... skittering, scurrying, terrific natural history." Sullivan is a contributing editor to Vogue and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

He made the pop charts over and over again during the 1970s and early '80s with his love ballads like Mandy, Looks Like We Made It, I Write the Songs and Copacabana (At the Copa). Before becoming a singer, he was Bette Midler's accompanist and arranger. He has a new CD Barry Manilow: 2 Nights Live and a DVD Ultimate Manilow (Rebroadcast from March 21, 2002).