On the 15th day of protests demonstrators in Cairo's central Tahrir Square are calling for a new push to oust Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Thousands of people still occupy the square.

It’s been fifteen days since the protests in Egypt began and even longer since voices of dissent erupted in Tunisia. Across the Arab world, there have been unrelenting calls for democratic reform. However, some claim that Islam and democracy are too incompatible to function together. Can an Islamic state embrace democracy?

Americans have started buying again; this past December, they pulled out their credit cards, and charged their holiday gifts. There's currently $800 billion on credit cards. This may be good for the economy, but it is it good for your wallet?

Recently we learned that the Program for International Student Assessment exam, or PISA, ranked U.S. children as below average in math and average in science. Next year's PISA will feature a new section on financial literacy, perhaps another thing American children need to bone up on. We asked you: At what age should children learn financial literacy?

Many nations in North Africa and the Middle East are no stranger to election results that seem less than democratic. In 2006, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh won re-election with seventy-seven percent of the popular vote. In 2005, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak took eighty-eight percent of the vote. And in 2009, Tunisia's now ex-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali commanded nearly ninety percent of the vote.

It may be hard to imagine a country in the same region where a free, fair and transparent election results in more than ninety eight percent of people voting for the same outcome. But that's exactly what happened in Southern Sudan, where 98.83 percent of nearly four million voters chose separation from their countrymen to the north.

With the United States engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and facing diplomatic standoffs with nations like Cuba and Venezuela, Americans can tend to feel culturally isolated from some countries. A new business in Pittsburgh is trying to change that - through food. The Conflict Kitchen serves meals from countries that America finds diplomatically tricky, and by doing so, hopes to bring further awareness about cultures that might otherwise seem foreign. The BBC shares the story.

Remember that international exam last month that embarrassed a lot of Americans? The scores, you might recall, ranked U.S. children firmly below average in math and finally, after years, average at science. The test is called the Program for International Student Assessment exam, or PISA. And as it so happens, next year’s version of the PISA will feature a new section on financial literacy. But why financial literacy? And how well (or not well) will American kids do this next time around?

What do you think? Should kids be required to learn financial literacy? Why or why not? At what age do kids need to learn financial literacy?

Donald Rumsfeld's eight hundred page memoir is released. At the same time, there's also a new novel that imagines Rummy kidnapped and subjected to harsh interrogation. In headlines, we go back to Egypt, where protests continue.

The Egyptian police has rounded up human rights activists, protest organizers and journalists without formal charges. Most arrests have reportedly lasted fewer than 24 hours. However, arbitrary arrests are not new in a country where law enforcement has sweeping powers under a state of emergency that's been in place almost non-stop for the past 30 years. Daniel Williams, a senior researcher in the emergencies division of Human Rights Watch, was held captive by the Egyptian army for 36 hours. His experience changed the way he viewed the army and it's role in the crisis in Egypt.

As protests continue into a fifteenth day in Egypt, the Egyptian government has again postponed plans to reopen the country's stock exchange. Meanwhile life on the streets of Cairo has not fully resumed. The BBC's Kevin Connolly reports from Cairo on the country's uncertain future. "The egyptian government this week is doing what it can to create the impression it's presiding over a return to normality," he says, "but in truth, no one is sure where this country is going. they just know it's not going back to the old realities."

Republicans are planning to undo as many of the Obama administration's regulations as they can. This includes regulations on Wall Street, health care and the EPA and greenhouse gasses. Republicans are calling these regulations "burdensome" and are creating a bill that will strip the EPA of any power to regulate greenhouse gasses or climate change.

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know…"

That’s former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, talking about what we know and don’t know, with regard to weapons of mass destruction. But when it comes to the secretary himself, what do we know?

Google executive Wael Ghonim was released yesterday from Egyptian prison. It turns out that he was one of the main forces behind the Facebook and YouTube campaigns that helped drive the protests in Cairo. However, in an emotional interview, Ghonim told an Egyptian television station: "I'm not a hero. the real heroes are the youth who are behind this revolution. By God's will, we are going to clean this country of this rubbish.”

Many pinpoint the start of the Civil Rights movement in the United States to Rosa Parks, refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, back in 1955. Over half-a-century later, African-American and Latino communities are still struggling with unequal transit systems.

Google executive Wael Ghonim's emotional inteview with Egyptian television has helped reignite Egypt's protests. Tahrir Square continues to be the epicenter of the protests in Egypt, with one of the biggest crowds yet converging on the square. For an update, we hear from the BBC's Jon Leyne.

This is the sixth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

In this episode, we get the latest from the streets of Cairo, where protesters have been reenergized after the broadcast of an interview with Wael Ghonim, a young Google executive credited with stoking the pro-democracy movement on the internet, who was freed after being detained for 12 days; we ask Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, if Wael Ghonim is a revolutionary leader or merely a messenger of the people; and, in an except from today's Takeaway, Human Rights Watch's Daniel Williams gives his own harrowing account of being held for 36 hours in captivity in Cairo.

(Watch Wael Ghanim's interview with Egypt's DreamTV after the jump.)

He thinks of himself as just another body among the faceless masses gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square, demanding a new era in his nation's politics, and a better future for all the people of Egypt. Yet, it was a heartbreaking interview with Wael Ghonim, broadcast on one of Egypt's satellite channels last night, that drove thousands of Egyptians to march on their Parliament for the first time, refueling Egypt's two-week-old pro-democracy movement.

Ghonim, a marketing executive at Google, has become the face of the internet-based youth movement calling for the ouster of Egypt's autocratic leader, Hosni Mubarak. Using social networking tools like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, Ghonim helped inspire the protests that have brought a government thought to be stable to its knees, and became a symbol of that government's repression when he disappeared for twelve days.