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In the third part of our series on the income gap, reporter Elaine Korry examines whether America is still the land of opportunity or whether that cornerstone of our national identity has been eroded by years of stagnant wages and a growing disparity in incomes.

Film critic Bob Mondello reviews "A Midwinter's Tale", Kenneth Branagh's behind-the-scenes farce about an English production of Hamlet.

Noah talks to the BBC's Chris Nuttal about a group of rebel Chechens who hijacked a Russian ship today in Turkey and are holding the passengers hostage.

Robert talks with journalist Tom Goltz about freedom-fighting Turks of Caucasian ancestry and the hostage crisis on the Black Sea. Chechens have taken 200 people hostage aboard a ferry boat and have threatened to blow the boat up once they reach Istanbul. Goltz spent the last four years in Turkey and the Caucasus and is writing a book about the wars in the post-Soviet Caucasus.

NPR's Brian Naylor reports a commission headed by former housing secretary Jack Kemp is recommending the current income tax system be replaced with a single rate system -- the so-called flat tax. The panel's recommendations come as the flat tax issue is a major topic of debate in the Republican presidential campaign.

NPR's Joe Palca reports that astronomers have found evidence for the existence of two new planets outside our solar system. Both putative planets are about 35 light years from Earth, and are orbiting stars at a distance that would allow water to exist on them. One appears to be orbiting a sun in the constellation Virgo, while the other appears to be orbiting a sun in the Big Dipper.

NPR'S Phillip Davis reports on growing opposition to a provision in the telecommuncations bill recently sent to President Clinton for his signature. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups say the bill's vaguely-worded ban against the transmission of "indecency" over the internet violates the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. They plan a legal challenge.

Commentator Marion Winik in her late 30's and PMS has set in. It makes her a total nut. One day she behaved so badly she called a parent counselor, the school counselor, her ob-gyn and almost called social services to come and take her away for being a bad parent.

Alan Cheuse reviews Mario Vargas Lllosa's new book "Death in the Andes". It's a political detective story set in his native country of Peru. (published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Film critic Bob Mondello reviews Clifton Taulbert's film memoir, Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored. The drama chronicles Taulbert's coming of age in the segregated South.

In New York City, dozens of pyschiatrists are volunteering to find and help homeless people suffering from mental illness. Reporter Richard Schiffman reports that they they are seeking out these non-traditional patients in some very non-traditional ways.

U.S.-Iran relations are expected to get even tougher when a new Iranian president takes office Thursday. He's a former prosecutor expected to take a hard line inside and outside the country.

Robert talks with Linda Wertheimer who is in New Hampshire following the campaign. She assesses the mood of Granite State, as well as the fortunes of the Republican presidential candidates in the run-up to the state's primary next week.

A conversation about legendary pool player Minnesota Fats who died this morning at his home in Nashville. Noah talks with Jim Murray, who's a columnist with the Los Angeles Times.

Commentator Mickey Edwards says that neither Congress nor President Clinton will decide the outcome of the current budget crisis. He says it is the voters who made balancing the budget the issue in 1994, and it is the voters who will rule on it in this year's elections.

The Zairean government today announced it was closing a refugee camp that is home to almost 2-hundred thousand Rwandan refugees. NPR's Michael Skoler reports that the government is trying to force the refugees to return to Rwanda. Many of them have been living in the camp for more than one year, and Zaire now says it can no longer afford to take care of them.

Commentator Michele Mitchell says the GOP has and has had for a long time a very sophisticated machine in place to attract young voters. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republicans have reached out to young people on campus, through lunches, happy hours and other events. The Democrats have no such machine, and in big states like California, the average age of registered Democrats is more than 65.

We ask a number of writers - specialists in mystery, science fiction, children's literature and magic -- to apply their craft to the unravelling of the case of a stack of subpoenaed Rose Law Firm documents that mysteriously appeared in a limited access White House residential room after they were long thought to be lost.

As part of our campaign coverage, we've been hearing from candidates as they travel around the country seeking support. Senator Robert Dole, in a speech to the Southern Republican Leadership conference last month in Mobile, Alabama, says he wants to eliminate the departments of education, commmerce, energy and housing as a way to downsize the federal government. He says the United States has lost prestige as the leader of the free world because we haven't had a foreign policy. Dole says as president, American soldiers would not serve under United Nations command.

Political newcomer Steve Forbes has surprised practically everyone by stealing some of Bob Dole's limelight, and by making his call for a "flat tax" a central issue in the campaign. In this profile, NPR's Melissa Block looks at Forbes's background: how he came to inherit the fortune of his father, publisher Malcolm Forbes, and how he's run "Forbes" magazine since his father died. His editorials in the magazine have shown his fixation of some of the same issues he's stressed during the campaign (the flat tax and opposition to government regulation). As a businessman, he's changed few things put in place by his father, but "Forbes" continues to be quite successful.