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Last year, Tennessee dropped some 200,000 people from TennCare, its health plan for the poor and uninsured, and reduced benefits for hundreds of thousands more. In Cocke County, one of the state's poorest, the repercussions are felt far and wide.

For millennia, observant Jewish women have made monthly trips to a ritual bath called a mikvah for a kind of spiritual cleansing. In recent generations, the practice was dismissed by liberal Jews as demeaning. Now, some feminist Jews are reinventing the ritual.

U.S. and Iraqi forces launch an operation to take control of the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Violence there has taken a high toll on U.S. forces; it's considered one of the most dangerous places in Iraq.

The general public might recognize Wayne Hale as that NASA manager on TV who talks about ice-frost ramps and the aerodynamics of foam. But for thousands of NASA workers and their friends, Hale is known for his thoughtful and lyrical emails reflecting on life at the space agency.

Tulane University in New Orleans held its graduation ceremony Saturday after a traumatic year. Students who held on through Katrina and nine months of recovery heard advice and admonitions from former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

Ernesto Miranda, aka "Smokey," was a co-founder of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha gang in Los Angeles. At 38, he was studying law and working to keep kids out of gangs. All that ended Saturday night, when he was shot to death, apparently in retaliation for his anti-gang efforts.

There are plans to bring a new dump to Uniontown, Ala., where the county commission approved the project because the area desperately needs jobs. Commentator John Fleming says this is the kind of case that has been labeled "environmental racism."

In the first part of a two-part interview, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins guides us through the new spoken-word four-CD box set Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006.

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the population of the United States is becoming much more diverse, due in part to a significant increase of American-born Hispanics. Farai Chideya talks about the report with Greg Harper, a demographer at the Census Bureau, Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, and William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Everyone suddenly wants to learn Mandarin Chinese. The problem is that there are few credentialed teachers. Now the Chinese government is making plans to develop teaching partnerships with U.S. public school districts.