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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.

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.

Though winding at times, Sam Knight's book is thought-provoking and deeply researched, presenting the oddity of realized premonitions while allowing readers to come to their own conclusions.

NPR's Bob Edwards speaks with Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, about the current poor health of oceans and how a proposed Oceans Policy Office might manage ocean health while balancing economic and environmental interests.

"Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure" opened recently in New York City. It features 200 never-before-seen and rare paintings, drawings and artifacts from Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age 27.

NASA and the European Space Agency are gearing up to bring home a pristine sample of Martian rock. But given the small chance of life on the red planet, they have to grapple with safety questions.

Despite gaining national traction in the 1970s, the history of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. goes back more than a century before the landmark Supreme Court decision.

You probably didn't know it but the Federal Reserve has a resident poet. Robert McTeer, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and a member of the central bank's policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, often puts his thoughts on the economy into rhyme.

NPR's David Schaper reports from Ellsworth, Wis., on the return of the U.S. Army's 652nd Engineer Company from duty in Iraq. The relatively small bridge-building unit suffered more casualties than any other Army reserve unit.

The "echo effect," the "snowball effect" and false assumptions -- these were some of the reasons why intelligence agencies around the world were, to use former chief weapons inspector David Kay's phrase, "all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. European intelligence is often derivative of U.S. intelligence, and vice versa, creating trans-Atlantic echoes that seem to corroborate each other. Israeli assessments got analyzed by U.S. intelligence, which tended to bolster the assessment as they were passed on to other governments, creating the snowball effect. And governments around the world assumed that because they could not prove that Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq must still have them. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reports.