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NPR's Eric Westervelt examines the debate over academic standards at the two-year schools.

Chris Nuttall reports from Ankara, Turkey, on an effort by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to convince a group of Turkish Kurds to leave their camps in northern Iraq and return to Turkey. The Kurds have been in the camps since 1994 when they fled fighting between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatist guerrillas.

NPR's Nina Totenberg reports that the Supreme Court today heard arguments on whether Paula Jones' sexual harrassment suit against President Clinton can go forward while he is still in office. The court has ruled in the past that civil suits cannot be brought against a sitting president if they involve his official actions, but Jones' says that Clinton harrassed her while he was still governor of Arkansas. The president's attornies argued today that any suit against the president could interfere with his official duties and should be delayed. Jones' attornies said the president had same responsibilities as other citizens.

Federal researchers are reporting that the rate of sudden infant death syndrome has fallen by one-third over the past two years. They're giving credit to a national public awareness campaign that is teaching mothers to position infants on their backs when they sleep. NPR's Michelle Trudeau reports.

Commentator David Greenberger proposes a new unit of measurement to gauge how old we are: dog lives. The average dog lives 12 years. A 12-year-old is one dog year old. A 25-year old is 2 Dog Years 1. This is an attempt to reverse the business of dog years - which translates each year into seven.

Robert talks to David Courtwright, the author of the book Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City. Courtwright argues that young single men are the group most likely to commit violent acts and communities with a high ration of young single men have a violence rate that is much higher than the norm. In some frontier communities where mining and ranching were the main economic engines, there was a very high gender ratio... sometimes forty men for every woman...and as a result, also a very high violence rate.

NPR'S Wendy Kaufman reports that Boeing and McDonnell Douglass have expressed confidence that the merger they announced yesterday will be approved by federal regulators. Experts agree, since the Pentagon has been driving much of the consolidation in aerospace, and they predict that odds the federal government will find a way to sign off on the proposed merger. But final approval is far from a sure thing.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports that two months of protest against the Milosevic government in Belgrade Serbia hasn't changed anything in Serbia...but it has caused a ripple effect in the rest of the Balkan peninsula. Demonstrators in Bulgaria and Albania are in the streets protesting against their governments. The reasons aren't exactly the same in each country, but the underlying themes are: improved economies and democratic reforms.

Journalist MARTIN MAYER. He writes about finance, advertising, education and law, but his expertise is in finance. His written many books. His latest: "The Bankers: The Next Generation: The New Worlds of Money, Credit and Banking in an Electronic Age" (Dutton) is a rewritten, updated version of his best selling book on banking which he wrote 20 years ago

NPR's David Welna reports from Havana that Cuban President Fidel Castro is defiantly insisting that he will not permit further political reforms, despite expectations raised by Castro's recent meeting with Pope John Paul the Second. Cuba is also under fire from Europe, particularly from longtime ally Spain, for its lack of democratic freedoms. In the latest sign of his hardline stance, Castro today oversaw a huge parade of military hardware, the first such display in Havana in ten years.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from Belgrade where demonstrators marched through cold, blinding snow to protest the government of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the beginning of the second week of marching. At first the marchers were protesting an annulllment of municipal elections November 17th, but the protest has grown into demands for the ouster of Milosevic.

Marianne Jennings feels that men who were geeks in high school have a strength of character unknown to the handsome varsity stars of yesteryear. She'd take a chess-club geek over the school quarterback any day.