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Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has been in office for three months, and despite his claims that he's fighting drug violence with a new strategy, there are no signs the situation is any better. The president prefers to focus on Mexico's economic potential and has been touring the country, giving pep talks wherever he goes.

The task of choosing the next pope falls to 115 red-robed cardinals, known by the faithful as the "princes" of the Catholic Church. Their average age is 72 — and they are all men. We examine how they came to have this massive responsibility, and how some Catholics resent their exclusive monopoly over electing pontiffs.

For only the second time ever, the Securities and Exchange Commission is charging a state with fraud, for allegedly misleading investors about the health of its pension funds. The SEC says the state of Illinois did not properly inform investors that its pension funds were significantly underfunded when selling bonds from 2005 to 2009. This is the latest fiscal black eye for a state with a pension shortfall approaching a whopping $100 billion. The state has agreed to settle the charges.

Journalist Susan Spencer-Wendel was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in 2011. In her new memoir, Until I Say Good-Bye, she describes a year spent living with the disease but devoted to joy: traveling, visiting friends and family, and accepting her fate with grace.

Herbert Gronemeyer, the best-selling German recording artist of all time, has compiled English versions of his greatest hits for his first U.S. release, I Walk.

For their popular podcast, two longtime friends sit down at a kitchen table and share little-known anecdotes and historical facts about New York. Its bare-bones production hasn't hurt its popularity — it's been downloaded 5 million times in the past five years.

After Snowquester fizzled, Scott Simon muses that snow forecasts falling so flat is a sound reminder, during a time of national debate, that experts can be wrong.

An Egyptian court upheld death sentences for 21 people for their role in a deadly soccer riot in Port Said. Saturday's verdict comes amid a continuing political crisis that deepened this week when another Egyptian court cancelled planned parliamentary elections for next month. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Leila Fadel.

In 2006, right-handed pitcher Juan Sandoval was accidentally blinded in his right eye when he was shot as an innocent bystander. Now Sandoval is back pitching, trying out for the Tampa Bay Rays. Host Scott Simon talks with him.

Steve Inskeep speaks with James Dobbins, a former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo, about U.S. military assistance to opposition movements in other countries. So far, the Obama administration is only providing Syrian rebels with medical and food supplies. Dobbins is the director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center.