Japan is firing three top nuclear energy officials, nearly five months after the country suffered the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident of 1986. And Banri Kaieda, the industry minister in charge of energy policy, said that he will resign as soon as he replaces the officials.

"I'm planning to breathe fresh air into the ministry with a large-scale reshuffle," Kaieda said at a news conference. "I'll have new people rebuild the ministry."

Antidepressants have become some of the most commonly used drugs in the United States, yet most of them aren't prescribed by psychiatrists.

And what's more, almost three-quarters of the prescriptions are written without a specific diagnosis, according to a new study, raising the question of whether antidepressants are being prescribed too often.

Fifty years after it was brought back from extinction, a Southern flower has taken another step toward survival, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to take it off its Threatened and Endangered Species list.

The Tennessee purple coneflower is only the fifth plant ever to be removed from the list due to recovery. The move, announced Wednesday, will become official on Sept. 2.

Host Michel Martin and Al Jazeera International's Aberrahim Foukara discuss the charges former Egyptian President Mubarak is facing, and what his trial means for the governmental transition in Egypt and the wider Arab Spring.

The trial of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had served longer than any other ruler of Egypt in modern times, began Wednesday in Cairo. He is charged with ordering the killings of hundreds of protesters, and could receive the death penalty if convicted.

Host Michel Martin speaks with young Egyptian activist Wessam el-Deweny about seeing the once mighty Mubarak wheeled into the courtroom in a cage.

At one point this morning, the Dow Jones industrial was down 350 points, mirroring the drop in Standard & Poor's and most stock markets in Europe. As the Los Angeles Times puts it, today the market came down from yesterday's U.S.

Virginia Tech was put on lockdown earlier this morning after police received a report that a man was walking around campus with what looked like a handgun "covered by a cloth of some sort."

The university in Blacksburg, Virginia was the site of a 2007 shooting rampage. Officials issued a warning and told students to lock doors and stay inside.

There are two main issues dividing Republicans and Democrats, and the House and Senate, from reaching agreement on reauthorizing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration: a policy on forming unions and subsidized flights at smaller regional airports.

In an interview with The New York Times, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, said his father's government was aligning itself with radical Islamists among the rebels.

The Times reports: