Faced with the same economic crisis currently gripping the rest of the globe, Britain has unveiled an economic stimulus plan of its own, with some striking similarities and differences compared to the American plan. The U.K. package offers cuts in the sales tax to spur spending among middle and low-income earners and raises the tax rate on the wealthy. The Takeaway also examines the short and long-term implications of President-elect Obama's recently-announced stimulus plan.

Taking on an issue like gun regulation in the US can mean political suicide for even the savviest of politicians. Nate Persily, law professor and political scientist at Columbia, joins the Takeaway to talk about what President-elect Barack Obama needs to know about gun policy during his first term in office.

At this moment in time, we’re going to interface with someone who will hopefully tell us why words adversely impact so many people. Are we annoying you yet? Jeremy Butterfield might know why. He’s the author of a new book called "A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare," which features the most annoying words and phrases in the English language

In another sign the English language is evolving, you can add a new word to your vocabulary: "cyberchondria." It's the term for what happens when you go looking up your health symptoms online and wind up coming to the worst conclusion. A new survey by Microsoft showed this phenomenon on the rise. The Takeaway is joined by Cary Cooper, professor of Psychology and Health at Lancaster University in the UK, to look at why you're as likely to conclude your headache is from a brain tumor as from caffeine withdrawal.

Ten years ago, Hugo Chavez became the president of Venezuela, and he's been working to increase his influence and profile ever since. The Venezuelan leader is the subject of a new PBS/FRONTLINE documentary which chronicles Chavez’s rise to power and how he uses his leadership style to hold on to the presidency.

Monday was a study in competing press conferences. One very popular president-elect stood surrounded by top minds as he unveiled his economic team, while one very embattled lame-duck president stood with his Treasury secretary and again promised improvement. President-elect Barack Obama may not be in office yet, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the reaction to his news conference when compared with President Bush’s.

The White House announced last night that President Bush would grant 14 pardons and commute 2 sentences before leaving office in January. The pardons did not include any of the high-profile defendants who have previously petitioned the Bush administration for help.

Now that it's possible to program unmanned combat vehicles to make decisions about where (and who) to strike in war situations, new questions of ethics have risen: In which situations can we allow robots to make their own decisions? Can we program robots to follow the Geneva Conventions? There is a more basic question, too: Do we even want robot soldiers?

As President-elect Obama prepares to take office, our neighbors to the south have a few suggestions for the incoming president. A new report from the Brookings Institution documents several of them: expanding free trade, changing the rhetoric on the war on drugs, even normalizing relations with Cuba. The director of the Latin America Institute at Brookings joins the Takeaway to discuss the possibility of new approaches to Latin American relations.

The man at the center of the current U.S. financial crisis is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Takeaway talks to New Yorker Staff writer John Cassidy, who profiled Bernanke for his latest piece, "Anatomy of a Meltdown."