NPR News

Alas, President Obama.

He: can't win for losing; is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't; is stuck between Iraq and a hard ... you get the idea.

Take the Libya intervention, for example. On the right, Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham gripe that Obama didn't order airstrikes on Moammar Gadhafi's air defense system soon enough. On the left, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich grouses that Obama should be impeached for calling the airstrike at all.

In the March issue of Wired magazine, Julie Rehmeyer dissects research on spamming from Berkeley's International Computer Institute and University of California San Diego.

First in a two-part series on private prisons

Prisons are filled with stress and violence; without proper supervision they can revert to primitive places. That's what happened at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, an NPR news investigation has determined.

As the nation's largest juvenile prison, Walnut Grove houses 1,200 boys and young men in a sprawling one-story complex ringed by security fences about an hour's drive east of Jackson. The State of Mississippi pays a private corrections company to run the prison.

A Michigan man "who blames the FBI for his father's murder and claims to be 'nominated President of the United States' was arrested Thursday on charges of planting a bomb last week at the McNamara Federal Building," The Detroit News writes.

If you follow tuberculosis news, there isn't a lot that's uplifting. It remains a stubborn menace in much of the world, and sickened 9.4 million people and killed 1.7 million in 2009.