In another indication of the gathering strength of the insurgency, Taliban militants have taken control of a district close to the Pakistani capital. The district of Buner, home to almost one million, is just seventy miles from Islamabad and leads to speculation that the Taliban could be making plans for a move on the city. This increases concern that the government is unprepared to fend off the strategic advances of the Taliban. The bold move comes ten days after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari agreed that strict Islamic law, or Shariah, would be the law of the land in the Swat region of Pakistan, as part of a deal to appease the Taliban. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provocatively said she was concerned that Pakistan’s government was making too many concessions to the Taliban and emboldening the militants. For more on this story we turn to the BBC's Jonathan Marcus.

Things are not looking good for General Motors. The company is reportedly planning to shutter most of its factories in the U.S. for up to nine weeks beginning as early as next month. GM also reported that it does not plan to pay $1 billion it owes bondholders by June. And if that wasn’t enough bad news for the industry, Chrysler is now saying if it doesn’t get more money soon, it will go into de facto liquidation. To help sift through this latest chapter of bad news for the American auto industry The Takeaway is joined by Nick Bunkley, who writes about the auto industry for The New York Times.

Instead of spending his Earth day out in the wilderness, Vice President Joe Biden held an event at a bus depot in Maryland. He was announcing a plan to spend $300 million in stimulus funding for clean-fuel buses. While the money for this program was buried in the stimulus plan, Vice President Biden was seemingly excited to introduce the green mass transit program to the crowd in Maryland. The event marks the second time in one week that the Obama administration brought transit policy to the fore. We speak to Takeaway correspondent Andrea Bernstein to see "Amtrak Joe's" emerging portfolio.

If you weren't in Landover, Maryland yesterday, you can watch Vice President Biden's speech below.

Yesterday in an Earth Day pitch, the Obama administration and the Department of the Interior announced new rules that will help boost the development of offshore wind farms along our coastlines. But not everyone is thrilled about this supply of green energy because these offshore turbines are visible from the coastline and sometimes can be heard, too. Even Senator Ted Kennedy, one of President Obama's biggest supporters, is complaining about the disruption to the shoreline off of Cape Cod. Amy Myers Jaffe, associate director of the Rice University Energy Program and a fellow at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy, joins The Takeaway to talk about how much of an impact these offshore wind-turbines will could have on how we produce and consume energy.

Ski jumping has been in the Winter Olympics since the very beginning. Yet in those 86 years there has never been a women’s ski jumping event. That may be about to change. A group of women ski jumpers from all around the globe have formed a coalition and are suing the Vancouver Organizing Committee to try and get women’s ski jumping into the 2010 Winter Olympic games in Vancouver, Canada. Deedee Corradini is the president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA as well as the former mayor of Salt Lake City, UT, and was a pivotal part in the city getting the 2002 winter games. She joins The Takeaway with her thoughts on pushing this great leap forward.

To see the masculine side of ski jumping, watch the video below.

Americans have stopped moving! And the economy is to blame. While this isn't particularly revelatory, our partners at the New York Times are reporting that fewer Americans moved last year than in any year since 1962 and it seems to be directly related to the housing slump. The numbers also suggest that Americans were unable or unwilling to follow any job opportunities that may have existed around the country, as they have in the past. Sam Roberts writes about demographics for the New York Times and joins us to maybe help explain to us why we have stopped moving.

For more, read Sam Roberts' article, As Housing Market Dips, More in U.S. Are Staying Put in today's New York Times.

A donor’s conference for Somalia is underway today in Brussels. The United Nations hopes to raise more than $250 million to improve security in the anarchic nation. This comes on the heels of United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has said it is too dangerous to send UN peacekeepers to Somalia and that it could exacerbate the armed conflict there. Also attending the donor's conference is Somali President Sheikh Sharif, a former Islamist rebel leader elected in January at U.N.-brokered talks and widely seen as the best hope for restoring stability. While Somali gangs have made headlines seizing ships in the Indian Ocean, U.S. involvement in Somalia goes beyond our recent adventures with Somali pirates on the high seas.

The Takeaway is taking a deeper look at U.S. interests in Somalia with Bronwyn Bruton, a Somalia expert with the Council on Foreign Relations and with the BBC’s Mike Wooldrige in Brussels who is reporting on the donors' conference.

The American public is famously divided on almost every issue: from politics to war to the place of religion in society. But in the past five years there is one cause that has united Americans of liberal and conservative leanings and of Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths: outrage over the ongoing conflict in Sudan's Darfur region. Since former Secretary of State Collin Powell identified the conflict in Darfur as a genocide in 2004, we've been up in arms and out in the streets, demanding an end to abuses by the Sudanese government. But how much has our advocacy actually achieved? And can we accurately call Darfur a genocide? The Takeaway talks to Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of Government at Columbia University and author of the book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

It's a common assumption that plants grow best in clear sunny weather, but scientists say this isn't always the case. Research has shown that forests and crops can also thrive in hazy conditions because clouds and particles, that's right, pollution, in the atmosphere scatter sun light so that it bathes more leaves, enhancing photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn light and carbon dioxide into food. All this pollution we humans have created has dimmed the skies and this so-called global dimming actually increased plant productivity (in the photosynthetic way) by as much as a quarter from 1960 to 1999. That amounts to more than a ten percent increase in carbon dioxide storage, which is good! To help us see through the smog, Matt McGrath, BBC Science Correspondent, joins The Takeaway with this report.

This week may end with a new playbook for the credit card industry in America. President Obama summoned representatives from 14 banks that issue credit cards to the White House for talks today. But the legislative engine behind these changes is Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut, who has been pushing credit card regulation for a long time. He joins The Takeaway now to discuss the proposed changes to credit card accountability, responsibility and disclosure that he hopes to push through Congress. This bill would offer new consumer protections, including banning practices such as “any time, any reason” interest rate increases.

Bird strikes. The phrase entered most Americans vocabulary when Captain "Sully" Sullenberg landed an American Airlines plane on the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of ill-fated geese. Since then, the Federal Aviation Association has proposed keeping information about bird strikes including where and when they happen, secret. Presumably on the grounds that for pilots, hitting a bird is like a car hitting a squirrel. Tragic, but it happens. Yesterday Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood scrapped that. He says the public has a right to know. Bruce Holmes worked on air transportation systems at NASA Langley Research Center. He joins us now with his take on the move towards bird strike transparency.

Hopefully the birds don't take these things too personally: