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A powerful House subcommittee has voted to kill a program that helps poor people with AIDS pay for housing. NPR's Vicky Que examines the Republican rationale for the vote, as well as warnings from AIDS activists that the measure is likely to throw thousands of infected people into shelters, increasing the danger of tuberculosis in those facilities.

Daniel talks to Gregory Williams, author of the book, "Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black." The book deals with Williams' discovery, as a ten-year-old Virginia schoolboy during the 1950's, that his father was really black and he, therefore, was also black. Williams recounts his ostracism from white society, his personal conflicts and his ultimate embrace of his black identity.

Daniel visits an exhibit of household items from Elizabethan England at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Curator Leena Cowan Orlin says that it's relatively easy to imagine what life was like back then because a detailed inventory was kept of every item in the home.

As the House prepares to vote on rolling back the "Great Society" welfare programs of the 1960's and to give states the power to run their own assistance programs, one state-based program -- child support enforcement - is likely to become a federal one. NPR's Peter Kenyon examines this exception to the devolutionary trend.

This past week, dieters learned some bad news: even if you lose weight, your body will still fight to return to its old weight. Gwen Machsai reflects on the endless battle over weightloss.

Daniel talks with Bowdoin College economics professor Rick Freeman about how one goes about doing a cost benefit analysis. The Republicans would like to pass legislation that could require such an analysis for every federal law that would have a major economic impact. Mr. Freeman explains exactly how the process works.

On this the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Daniel talks to Frank Snepp, an analyst for the CIA in Viet Nam about the final hours of the American pullout from that city.

Daniel talks to Norman Mailer, author of "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery." Mailer had access to the KGB documents on Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union, and he talked to many of the people there who knew Oswald.

NPR's Renee Montagne reports from Los Angeles on how much the O.J. Simpson trial is costing. No one knows how long the trial will take, but cost estimates now are about 700-thousand dollars a month.

- Danny speaks with Walter Adams, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, about corporate mergers and takeovers. This week, Lee Iacocca and Kirk Kerkorian mounted a bid to takeover the Chrysler Corporation, an effort that recalls the merger mania of the 1980's. Adams says corporate takeovers, by and large, don't do the country any good, for they don't as a rule add to the productivity and creativity of the economy.