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The smaller-than-normal crowds at Mardi Gras this week symbolize the lingering impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans' economy. The city's hotels are struggling to recover, but a shortage of workers is hampering their comeback.

Camps in Kenya house 140,000 refugees from civil war and deprivation in Somalia. There is fear that extremist Islamist groups will find recruits amid the stagnant life in the camps.

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.

For many along the Gulf Coast, the holiday season brought a welcome chance to see family. But it didn't stop efforts to rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Between events, the Bordelon family has been stripping out and cleaning up their two-story home in their St. Bernard neighborhood.

The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars cleaning up highly toxic plutonium waste in Hanford, Wash., where much of the fuel for the nation's nuclear weapons was produced. Over budget and behind schedule, the project has ground to a halt. Some worry the government will give up on cleaning up the site completely.

Mike Wallace has been on the CBS News program 60 Minutes since it debuted on Sept. 24, 1968. Wallace talks with Steve Inskeep about his past -- and the future of broadcast journalism.

Dr. Richard Collins grew up in a small upstate New York town, where his father practiced medicine. But as Collins told his grandson Sean -- a medical student himself -- that didn't keep him from orchestrating pranks when he was a student.

Singer Donovan Leitch is known best by his first name alone. He has a new box set, Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan. It's a remastered CD/DVD set which covers his work from 1964 to 2004.

Bullies are everywhere, especially online. That's why Stuart Duncan created AutCraft: a Minecraft server where kids with autism can play freely.

Twenty-five years ago this week, China invaded Vietnam. But the border war between the two ended quickly, with the Chinese retreating after heavy losses. In a series exploring China's relations with its neighbors, NPR's Michael Sullivan reports the two are gradually strengthening their cultural and economic ties.

Poet W.S. Merwin talks about his memoir, The Mays of Ventadorn, that covers his time in the French countryside. Merwin lived in southern France during the 1950s, and became enchanted by the language of the Troubadours, poet-musicians from 800 years before.

Forty years ago Thursday, radio storyteller Jean Shepherd took a crowded bus from New York City to participate in the March on Washington. The next day, he went on the air and shared the experience from his perspective in the crowds. He had been surprised by the good-natured attitude of most of the demonstrators, and by how they had been received by regular people walking around in the city. We hear an excerpt from his broadcast of Aug. 29, 1963.

Most American men over 50 get an annual blood test, called a PSA, that is thought to indicate whether they may have prostate cancer. But a new study questions the accuracy of the widely used test and raises questions about how best to screen for the cancer. NPR's Richard Knox reports.

Flipping a coin may not be the fairest way to settle disputes. A team of mathematicians claims to have proven that if you start with a coin on your thumb, heads up, flip it and catch it in your hand, it's more likely to land heads up than tails. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.

In Finding Neverland, his latest film, Johnny Depp plays Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. NPR's Elizabeth Blair speaks with Depp about Barrie and some of the other eccentric characters he's inhabited.

A new exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art examines the lifelong relationship between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. It pairs works by the two artists, showing how they influenced each other despite their very different styles. David D'Arcy reports.

Erik Prince, the founder of security firm, Blackwater USA, is before a House oversight committee Tuesday on Capitol Hill. The hearing offers a rare public glimpse at the media-shy Prince.

Republican Senator Pete Domenici announces his retirement Thursday in his home state of New Mexico. John Dickerson, with the online magazine Slate, talks about the rash of retiring Republicans.

For some actors, the Method has become an ossified idea instead of an evolving system -- which is what Stanislavsky first envisioned it to be. Now some actors and writers are trying a number of approaches that put a writer's words front-and-center.

Joshua Dimina, a refugee from the Republic of Congo, is spending his first Christmas in the United States. He talks about what it's like to be alone in a new country, after he was forced to leave behind a profession and a son.

Rachael Scdoris will begin a snow-bound trek Saturday, one of more than six dozen mushers in the grueling Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. While the course is difficult enough, the 20-year-old Scdoris faces another challenge: She is legally blind.

For the first time ever, scientists from around the world convened a meeting dedicated solely to animal acoustics -- how animals use sound. NPR's Christopher Joyce attended the meeting and reports on what scientists were listening for, and why.

The final round of the national spelling bee will be on prime-time television Thursday night. As the preliminary rounds were held Thursday afternoon, elementary- and middle-school spellers sighed and fretted their way through words that could trip up spellers of any age.

National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence Mike Fay is tracking the migration of elephants on a conservation mission in Chad. He spoke recently with Alex Chadwick as he watches three lions eating a young elephant they recently killed.

Susan Stamberg talks with three independent booksellers about their choices for summer reading, which range from historical novels to short story collections.