Hundreds of people are fleeing the northern Syrian city of Jisr al-Shugor, in anticipation of an expected military assault there. The BBC's Owen Bennett Jones speaks with us from the border of Syria and Turkey. 

Today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will address a joint session of Congress and meet with President Obama. It’s her first U.S. visit since her re-election for a second term as German leader. The speech ties in with upcoming festivities in Germany to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But it will also focus on Germany’s contribution to the Afghan conflict – a highly controversial war back in Germany. To bring us the latest poll numbers and the feeling on the ground in Germany, we speak with Irwin "Bud" Collier, professor at the Free University in Berlin.

President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to the Nobel Committee in Oslo. We talk with the BBC's Lars Bevanger in Oslo, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley and New York Times correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg for their reactions.

Taking a closer look at how the decision was made for President Obama to win the Nobel Peace Prize, we talk again with Paul Martin, professor and director for Human Rights Studies at Barnard Colleage at Columbia University. We also talk with John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., who served under President George W. Bush.

"The Jay Leno Show" premiers on NBC tonight at 10:00 pm EST, and planning for the prime time premiere has gone on for months. We look at the lead up to the launch of a new late-night show with someone who has done it several times: Mitch Semel, network executive and  president of Semel Media. We also speak to TV blogger Delaina Dixon of delainadixon.com to find out if the buzz around "The Jay Leno Show" is justified.

View an interview with Jay Leno about his new show:

This week's look at family issues tackles the impact of technology in the household. Blackberries, laptops and mobile phones may increase access to knowledge, but do they isolate children from their parents? We talk about this with Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and author of the book "Simulation and its Discontents." We're also joined by Lisa Belkin, who writes the blog Motherlode for The New York Times.

It's Friday, which means new movies are opening nationwide. Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday, joins us with a few of the films in theaters this weekend. His picks? Tim Burton's return to animation in 9, a remake of the 1956 crime film noir Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, and Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself.

We also hear from Karina Longworth, editor of SpoutBlog, who's at the Toronto Film Festival in Canada. She has the latest on the next flock of films heading this way, starting with The Men Who Stare at Goats, a film with an all-star cast including George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey. (The trailer is above.) 

Here's the Trailer for Tim Burton's 9:

Fans of the "The Da Vinci Code" have waited for years for more of Dan Brown's mix of mystery, religion, history and art. At long last (and just a few years overdue) the sequel, "The Lost Symbol," will finally come out next week. It follows Brown's hero-savant Robert Langdon to Washington, D.C. for another mystery.  People are hungering for clues as to what's in the new book, so we speak to an expert: Dan Burstein, who has made a career dispelling the myths and interpreting the clues in Brown's work. Burstein even sold over 50,000 copies of "Secrets of the Widow's Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to The Da Vinci Code" (edited by Burstein and written by David Shugarts), where he attempted to figure out what might be in the much-anticipated sequel ... despite the fact that it hadn't been published yet. His latest book, "Secrets of The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide," is due out in December.

It's not definitively known whether cell phone radiation has a detrimental effect on health. While scientists try and figure it out, non-profit watchdog Environmental Working Group just released an analysis of 1,000 different cell phone models and their radiation levels. We talk with Richard Wiles, the group's spokesperson; and Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, an online publication that covers radiation issues.

If you're in the market for a new phone and concerned about radiation – though we should point out there's no firm evidence yet saying whether you should or should not be – you may want to consider Samsung, which has the phones that head the Top 10 list for lowest radiation. For more information, read the Environmental Working Group's rankings.

Call it Big Brother or call it being a conscientious employer, but there's a new kind of software that monitors your use of email and online messaging: how many messages you send, how often, and when. It's called Cataphora and it also looks at instant messaging, word processors, and keycard use, to find out how useful an employee you are. We talk with Cataphora's CEO, Elizabeth Charnock, along with Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties.

Forbes estimates that Shawn Carter, better known as Jay-Z and the man behind such classic hip-hop songs as "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" and "Hard Knock Life," rakes in about $82 million a year. Admittedly, a lot of that annual income stems from his former day job as CEO of Def Jam Records and as the owner of the New Jersey Nets. But! The world mostly knows Jay-Z as a rap star. (And maybe as Beyonce's husband.) David Wall Rice, avid hip-hop listener and professor of psychology at Morehouse College, joins us to put the "best rapper alive" into a broader context. (Read Rice's latest blog post, "Jay-Z Grows Us Up," about the new album.)

There are a lot of buzzwords that come up during conversations about eating responsibly: organic, local, heirloom. Those terms are typically associated with food that is good – both for us and the earth. (Okay, maybe the organic cheese puffs aren't actually good for us.) But how far does local or organic get us in terms of building a globally sustainable food system? To find out more, we speak to James McWilliams, associate professor of history at Texas State University and author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. We also speak with Victor Davis Hanson, a former California raisin farmer and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.

The World Health Organization said last week that within the next 20 years, depression will become the largest health burden on society. But treatment for mental health is often underfunded, despite the fact that it drastically affects productivity in many countries.  We talk to Professor Cary Cooper, who teaches psychology and health at Lancaster University in Britain. We also speak with Dr. Shekhar Saxena, program manager of the WHO's Department of mental health and substance abuse.

As some public schools experience steep budget cuts, they turn to parents for help. Among other things, they're sending letters home, asking for cash to help keep school programs running. To find out what else schools are asking parents to do during a budget crunch, we talk to New York Times Motherlode writer Lisa Belkin, and Jody Becker, a mom and journalist based in Irvine, California who is helping her daughter's school.

Our Friday movie round-up looks at some upcoming films that defy being pigeonholed neatly into a single genre, from still-appealing-to-adults "kid's movie" Where the Wild Things Are, to horrific-sounding-but-not-actually-scary The Antichrist.  We're joined by Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday; and Karina Longworth of the daily movie site SpoutBlog.

Click through to see the trailers for the movies mentioned, along with other fall movies: The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Astro Boy, The Princess and the Frog, Jennifer's Body, and The Road.

Labor Day is the last big holiday weekend of the summer – a great time to get out there and see the last of the summer movies. We talk about what's coming out this weekend with Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday. He gives us his take on Mike Judge's new film, "Extract," and the latest movie to feature Sandra Bullock, "All About Steve." (Click through to see the trailers for "Extract" and "All About Steve.")

Once upon a time, internet-based phone service was "the future"; now tech watchers are wondering about its future survival. Online auction site Ebay announced this week that it's selling internet voice-and-video conferencing tool Skype for almost $2 billion. Were the two companies simply strange bedfellows? Or did eBay dump Skype because Skype's voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is no longer the frontrunner in voice technology?

We speak to Cliff Kuang, who's written about this for Wired magazine, and Takeaway technology contributor Baratunde Thurston, host of the new TV show Popular Science's "Future Of" and a former telecommunications analyst.

Read Baratunde Thurston's blog post about the back room deals that determine international call rates

When are you friends with somebody at work — and when are you just friendly? Sometimes it's hard to tell. And when it comes to office friendships, how much do you have to watch what you say or do with your colleagues, both face-to-face and online? We try to figure out the rules of mixing friends and family with work by talking with Kate Dailey, who writes The Human Condition blog for Newsweek, and Tina Wells, CEO of Buzz Marketing, who has employed a number of her siblings over the years. 

And, speaking of office friends, here's The Office, Friends-style:

On September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 93 was brought down by passengers in Southwestern Pennsylvania after the plane was hijacked. The federal government announced this week that it has finally reached a land deal—the Flight 93 National Memorial is set to begin construction this fall. We speak to two family members who were involved in the process: Patrick White, the cousin of Flight 93 passenger Louis Joseph Nacke II; and Carole O'Hare, the daughter of passenger Hilda Marcin, who sat on the design committee for the memorial. Patrick is leaving tomorrow on a motorcycle ride to retrace Flight 93's intended path from Newark to San Francisco.

Track Patrick White's motorcycle ride to retrace Flight 93's intended path.

We also talk to WNYC reporter Matthew Schuerman about why there has been no construction at the World Trade Center site in New York City, eight years after the attacks of September 11th brought down the twin towers. Is it money, politics, or both that are delaying re-building at Ground Zero?

Will Ted Kennedy's Senate seat be filled by another Kennedy? Both Joe, Robert Kennedy's son, and Vicki, Ted's wife, have been mentioned as possible successors, but how well would they fare in a special election? We ask longtime Boston journalist Christopher Lydon. He's a former public radio host who ran for mayor of Boston in the early 1990's.