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Does the city of San Diego pay its workers too much, given the current fiscal crisis? Are city workers and their unions responsible for the financial trouble the city finds itself in? Vlad Kogan of VoiceofSanDiego.org discusses his study of the pay (including salaries, fees, wages, commissions and bonuses) of San Diego's public sector workers.

Many planetary scientists think that Mars may have once supported life — and possibly could again. In their search for signs of life, scientists are trying to target those parts of the planet that appear most hospitable to organisms.

President Bush visits the Enterprise, Ala., school where eight students were killed Thursday by a tornado. Some survivors from the school are asking how early school officials were aware of the danger from storms and if students should have been dismissed before the tornado hit.

Robert Siegel talks with John Emsley, author of The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, about the poisoning of Russian-spy-turned-Kremlin-critic Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko died last Thursday after being poisoned with radioactive Polonium-210.

The controversy over President Obama's planned appearance Sunday at the University of Notre Dame has highlighted the national divide over abortion. The visit to the Catholic school has provided a rallying point for the religious right — and spurred soul-searching on campus.

Birth Control and the Right

A party thought by many to represent neo-Nazi views won seats in state parliament elections held over the weekend in Germany. An attempt to ban the National Democratic Party failed three years ago. Now Germans are divided over whether to try again.

NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Baldauf about a new peace deal brokered in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, where Shiite Muslim militants have laid down their arms following a three-week standoff with Iraqi and U.S. fighters.

Many experts had predicted that the 2006 hurricane season would be devastating. But the storms never reached the number or intensity of those dire predictions.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to prod the Bush administration to be more aggressive in enforcing the Endangered Species Act. The lawmakers have accused political appointees of attempting to manipulate the work of government biologists — a point of view supported by a report by the Interior Department's inspector general.