FRESH AIR
Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, discusses this week’s long-awaited progress report from Gen. David Petraeus [pictured] and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top two American officials in Iraq. Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of the best-selling book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It’s just come out in paperback.
RADIO TIMES
Hour 1
Reaction to Iraq update to Congress. We’ll talk with Max Boot, a senior fellow in national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and is author of War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World, which has been released in paperback this month and from Paul Hughes, who in 2003 led the U.S. effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army. Hughes is a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace and appears in the new documentary on the Iraq war No End in Sight. Listen to this show via Real Audio | mp3
Hour 2
(Rebroadcast tonight at 11)
Forty years ago, a rookie cop named Walter Barclay was shot by William Barnes. Barnes served twenty years for the crime and is now charged with murder after Barclay’s recent death. We discuss the case with George Newman, criminal defense attorney practicing in Philadelphia for 32 years and Sayde Ladov, partner at Abrahams, Loewenstein, and Bushman. She is a former Bronx prosecutor. Listen to this show via Real Audio | mp3
THE WORLD CAFE 
Expansive and poppy, The A-Sides‘ music is positively cheerful, with a blend of silliness and sincerity that’s helped make the band a rising star. The A-Sides’ 2005 album Hello Hello received attention well beyond the band’s hometown of Philadelphia, and its new second album, Silver Storms, should reach an even wider audience.
According to The A-Sides, the band’s members wrote the songs and music “outside of movie theaters and on grandparents’ farms, in libraries and public parks, in basements and on beaches” over a period of two years, during which time their lives were filled in with bits and pieces of what the album would become. The new disc deviates from the Beach Boys-esque, ’60s-style pop of Hello Hello, but not too far: Sunny power-pop remains the order of the day.
THE A-SIDES: Live At The First Unitarian Church