First, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to French actor Gerard Depardieu. Now, Putin is hobnobbing with the actor Steven Seagal. The star of Under Siege toured a new sports facility with Putin, who used the occasion to call for reviving a Soviet-era fitness program in which kids threw javelins, learned to ski and fired guns.

Reba Williams of Columbus, Ohio, finished her last class back in 1925. But the 106-year-old didn't receive her high school diploma until Wednesday. Her daughter told the Mansfield News-Journal that young Reba, who was a good student for all 12 years, was headstrong. She refused to read a book assigned by her teacher that she'd already read and didn't like.

Tim Harris had wanted to open a restaurant for as long as he could remember. In 2004, with help from his father, Tim, who has Down syndrome, opened Tim's Place in Albuquerque, N.M. He calls it the world's friendliest restaurant, and doles out hugs to customers six days a week.

Science writer Carl Zimmer says we're not going to bring back dinosaurs. But we might be able to resurrect other extinct species.

Mississippi State University defied its state's unwritten rule of never playing against a team with African-Americans. Its 1963 NCAA tournament match against Loyola University, which had four black players in its starting lineup, became a symbol in the effort to overturn Jim Crow policies.

The wildly popular game has been downloaded 1.7 billion times. Now, the company that brings these birds — and the pigs they love to hate — to your phone is launching an animated series, which will be distributed via television and app.

The Earned Income Tax Credit has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

U.S. officials and security experts regularly highlight the cyberthreat, but they also note that the prospects of a major cyberattack are remote. Cyberespionage and "nuisance" cyberattacks may be a problem now, but all-out cyberwar is not.

A giant reservoir of natural gas lies under the ocean floor, and no one had successfully extracted it until this week. Japanese engineers pulled it up through a well from under the Pacific. But there are still lots of unanswered questions about the viability of this new gas supply.

Drinking four cups of green tea or one cup of coffee per day were each associated with about a 20 percent lower risk of stroke. That's according to a study of more than 82,000 men and women in Japan.

Next week marks the anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court decision that says defendants facing substantial jail time deserve legal representation in state courts, even if they can't afford it. Now, many lawyers say the system for providing defense attorneys for the poor is in crisis.

Anat Admati, finance professor at Stanford and co-author of a new book on American banks, argues that banks carry too much debt and have too little equity. Government support allows them to hide their risky behavior, distorting the economy as a whole, she says.

Last year, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it lost $6.2 billion in a hedging strategy gone awry. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has spent months investigating how the losses occurred, and on Friday, it will publicly grill some of the executives involved.

Ten days after his death, Hugo Chavez's remains are being moved to a museum after being on display at a military academy. The government has been debating what to do with the body long term. His political heirs simply say they want to keep his memory and image alive.

Touch-screen devices have opened up video gaming to a whole new demographic: cats. Cat-food company Friskies has already made a few tablet games designed specifically for cats to play. One features virtual fish swimming around, taunting kitties to paw at the iPad screen. If you don't believe it, go to YouTube.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is drawing a huge crowd of politicians, activists and Republican presidential hopefuls, all looking to break the Republican Party's recent string of presidential election losses. It kicked off Thursday with speeches by two young senators interested in the White House — Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Steve Inskeep speaks with Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, who has been investigating the relationship between the gun industry and the National Rifle Association. Gunmakers and the gun lobby are often seen as partners, in lockstep. But Barrett says the relationship is not always so amicable.

The Transportation Security Administration says starting next month, it's OK to bring small knives aboard passenger jets. The new policy is a result of the agency's shift from focusing on objects that might pose a threat to focusing on people. But many flight attendants, a few airlines and some lawmakers are pushing back against the new policy.

Winning over young voters is one of the biggest challenges facing conservatives. At this year's CPAC, there's an extra push to counter the advantage Democrats have enjoyed with voters under 30 in the past two presidential elections.

Next week, President Obama makes his first trip to Israel since becoming president four years ago. To get the Israeli perspective on what lies ahead, Steve Inskeep speaks with Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren.