All Things Considered

There they go again — those 17 federally appointed experts at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are telling American doctors and patients to stop routinely doing lifesaving tests.

Or at least that's the way some people look at the task force's latest guidelines on prostate cancer screening, which say doctors should stop doing routine PSA tests on men of any age. (The task force earlier recommended an end to testing of men over 75.)

A federal task force has concluded that men over 50 don't need a regular blood test for prostate cancer. Millions of men get the test every year. The task force says too many unnecessary treatments are being performed because of the test.

Today at All Things Considered, we continue a project we're calling NewsPoet. Each month, we bring in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end of the day, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's stories.

Transcript

GUY RAZ, HOST:

And if you're just tuning in, this is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.

Here's a terrible statistic: Once a veteran is home from Iraq or Afghanistan, he or she is more likely to die by suicide than from injuries sustained in the combat theater. There is new research that suggests those injuries may actually be contributing to the suicides.

Adam Lambert captivated America in 2009 when he almost won American Idol. Lambert was brash, likable and glamorous, but he soon became better known for being the first openly gay Idol contender.

Though Lambert finished as the runner-up, his popularity and talent won him a recording deal. He released his second studio album, Trespassing, this week — just a few months after his 30th birthday.

John Mayer is one of the biggest-selling artists of the last decade — and with love interests like Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, one of its most pursued by the media. In 2010, he gave a pair of interviews to Rolling Stone and Playboy that shocked readers with sexually aggressive and racially insensitive language. Mayer seemed to be self-destructing in full view of his fans.

The blowback was intense, and Mayer pulled way back from the spotlight, rejecting almost every interview request. But this spring, he's started to come out of his shell to promote his first album since the controversy: a tender, introspective collection called Born and Raised.

German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has died — he was 86. Fischer-Dieskau began performing in the 1940s and had a career spanning five decades. He was perhaps best known for his interpretation of Franz Schubert's "Winterreise."

It was almost one year ago that the space shuttle Atlantis rose into the sky on a pillar of flame for the last time. The shuttle program ended forever with that mission. American astronauts were left to hitch rides on Russian space capsules, and American kids were left with no tangible direction forward for their dreams of a high-tech, space-happy future.

Tomorrow morning, the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral so that supplies can reach the space station.