Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are at a standoff over the budget. If they can't find a way to negotiate, there will likely be a government shutdown.

House Majority Leader John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sat behind closed doors yesterday, trying to come to compromise over the budget, but leaders in both parties seemed to be bracing for a real government shutdown by the end of the week. President Obama urged both Democrats and Republicans to put aside petty differences and come to a compromise. If they don't, every federal agency will have to come up with a contingency plan, especially the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Personnel Management. 

Workers at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant say they've stopped a the leak that was sending highly radioactive water into the ocean. However, enough radioactive material has already flowed into ocean that it's worked its way up the food chain with fish 43 miles away testing for high levels of radioactive iodine 131. Ken Belson, reporter for The New York Times has the latest from Tokyo.

There are reports that president-elect Alassane Ouattara's soldiers have stormed the compound where former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has been holed up in a bunker. There were reports Tuesday that Gbagbo was negotiating his surrender. However, he then denied these reports. Will Laurent Gbagbo hand over power or try to lead the Ivory Coast deeper into a civil war?

Orchestras everywhere are struggling to stay afloat, but the challenges for the only symphony orchestra in Central Africa were different than those faced by Western musical groups. A new documentary film "Kinshasa Symphony" depicting the genesis and survival of the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra, which was set up during the 1998-2003 Congolese war, is playing this week at the New York African Film Festival. The Takeaway's Special Correspondent Femi Oke talks about the film and brings us details from some of its founders.

Every day between April and August, Philip Connors climbs a 55-foot tower and settles into a 7-by-7 foot enclosed platform for the next eight hours. The tower is in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, and his duty while there, is to look out for fires. But while Gila receives more than thirty thousand lightening strikes per year, Connors’s job is actually closer to Walden Pond than reality TV. Alone with nature, and his thoughts, he enjoys solitude, freedom and independence — independence which surely helped him complete a new book called “Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said “We want to give states the rights, the ability to customize their health care to meet their particular needs of their citizens and not give this one-size, cookie cutter, one-size fits all Medicaid program which is breaking. It's not working.” We take a closer look at Ryan's proposal to cut $6.2 trillion.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), unveiled his budget yesterday, proposing cuts of some $6.2 trillion over the next decade. Medicare and Medicaid will fundamentally change under Ryan's plan — with Medicare losing $389 billion, and $735 billion being cut from Medicaid. Todd Zwillich, The Takeaway's Washington correspondent details what parts of the budget will affect Americans the most. Theda Skocpol, professor of sociology and government at Harvard University, explains how Medicare and Medicaid will change under Ryan's plan.

In any other year, yesterday’s election for a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court would have been nothing more than a headline. But following the fierce battle over collective bargaining rights, the election turned into a heated political fight and possible referendum on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The election is still too close to call, explains Monica Davey, reporter for The New York Times.

When America intervened in Libya, we were told we were doing so for humanitarian reasons. President Obama declared “some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refuse to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” This sounds like as noble a reason as any to commit the nation to a military engagement; but, is it a realistic one?

It has been one of the most harrowing stories to come out of Africa in the recent decades: 27,000 young boys fleeing almost certain death or forced military service as child soldiers in a steady stream out of Sudan during it's 20-year second civil war, which started in 1983. In 2000, some 4,000 "Lost Boys" came to the United States in a resettlement program. Ten years later, many in America and around the world are reconnecting though a recently-discovered store of documents from aid workers in Africa. The discovery is helping them document their own lives as well as the lives of their friends. We listen to some tape on this story with help from Paul Adams at the BBC. 

"We've been regulating campaign contributions since 1907," The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin reminds us at a time when it seems like many of the regulations may be overturned. The Supreme Court has had some flare ups recently over the string of cases brought in front of the court. With Justice Elena Kagan, the Court not only has the largest number of female Justices on board, but also a four to five weighting of Democrat versus Republican appointments. Although the court looks different, says Toobin, the rule of five still applies.

There has been a series of confusing studies over estrogen. Many menopausal women went off the drug when increased rates of breast cancer were found. However, recent findings are challenging this conventional wisdom as a "major government study has found that years after using estrogen-only therapy, certain women had a markedly reduced risk of breast cancer and heart attack," according to The New York Times. The key, says Tara Parker-Pope, reporter for The New York Times, is that these women were only on estrogen, and not progestin. She explains the findings and what this means for women.