New Orleans, with its famous French Quarter is still loud, wild and rambunctious. People are still allowed to drink alcohol in the streets and they party accordingly. But there is a different feeling here since Hurricane Katrina. Somehow, it feels the like fun and frivolity have been minimized. There are not as many people vacationing here, and therefore, not as much business. As a result, many clubs, bars, and restaurants are in trouble, if they haven't closed already.

Case in point, the Deep South Lounge, a bar in the French Quarter. The owner, Louis, opened it up a few years ago. Business had been booming. He bought a mechanical bull, encouraged bachelor and bachelorette parties, and was having the time of his life with jam-packed weekends in his business. But then came Katrina, and with it, an exodus of locals and the disappearance of tourists. Louis told me he would gross about $4,000 on a good weekend night. Last weekend, he only grossed about $600. He can no longer afford to stay open, so this week he decided to shut the doors on his dream business.

Other businesses are also having a tough time making a buck, but some are sticking it out due to deeper pockets or deeper resolve. The Voodoo Barbecue's business is down 50 percent from last year, according to the owner, and she's now digging into her financial reserves to keep it open. But she and her employees say they believe the city -- and their business -- will come back.

City officials tell us they expect a rebound and are encouraged that conventions are starting to return to New Orleans. But it could be three or four years before the comeback is considered complete, providing there are no more Katrinas.

And that is the underlying fear here. Odds are there won't be another Katrina-magnitude storm here for a long time to come. But as we enter another hurricane season, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone here who doesn't think about that possibility.

One of my professors in medical school once told me that "the very measure of a society is how well they take care of their sick." His words have stayed with me throughout my medical career, and I heard those words again as I reported from New Orleans hospitals this week.

Nearly nine months after Katrina, it is as dangerous as ever to get ill or injured in New Orleans. In a city that once boasted the famed Charity Hospital, a mammoth trauma center that took care of the indigent and the ignored by the thousands, there are now only hastily thrown together emergency centers with limited beds and dangerously low staffing.

As I surveyed the hospital situation, I calculated that at noon on Tuesday, there were only eight hospital beds available in the entire metropolitan New Orleans area. One bad pile up on I-10 and New Orleans would in crisis mode again.

Charity is still standing, but it is empty and devoid of any life. And there are no plans to resuscitate it. When I asked one man sitting out in front of the hospital what he thought of the situation, he looked up and said, "A lot of people were born in Charity and a lot of people died there." So true, but now it is the hospital itself that has died. While there are plans to build a new Charity, a sort of Charity 2.0, it may take more than seven years for that to happen.

If there was one word to describe the hospital system in New Orleans today, it would have to be "waiting." If you are riding your bike and fall and break your collar bone, you will wait at least 12 hours. Step on a rusty nail in the morning and you shouldn't plan on seeing a doctor until the late evening. Swallow 100 Tylenols in an attempt to kill yourself and the doctors will act more quickly to save you, but then you will have to wait.

Ambulances roar up to the hospitals with sirens blaring, but I was stunned to learn it may take up to three hours to even bring the patient into the emergency room. Many patients simply lie on gurneys in the hallways that line emergency rooms throughout New Orleans with no place to go.

I wish I could say things were going to get better and that there was a master plan to improve medical care in New Orleans. Truth is, after interviewing haggard doctors at a few different hospitals, most think it is going to get worse before it gets better. As the city repopulates, there will be even more injured and ill with the same lack of resources.

My professor from medical school would be disappointed in New Orleans today. The frustration is palpable and it seems the only thing everyone agrees on is that something has to change. So, what would you suggest to try and take care of New Orleans' neediest?

The rise of The Da Vinci Code phenomenon -- book and now movie -- began with the dropping of a name that, unequivocally, means genius: Leonardo da Vinci. So we decided to take a look at the person behind that name.

Born to an unwed mother in a town outside Florence, Italy, da Vinci displayed extraordinary artistic talent as a child and as a young adult was already producing masterful drawings, sculptures, and paintings.

But his range of talent went far beyond art alone. He was also a scientist who made contributions to biology, geography, botany, geology ... the list goes on and on.

And as an inventor, da Vinci drew intricate designs for flying machines, palaces, tanks, submarines, and so much more, long before the technology even existed to implement some of his ideas.

And, by the way, he also created what might be the most famous painting of all time: Mona Lisa.

If I created a list of the top ten most significant figures in the history of this world, I would assuredly put Leonardo near the top. Who else would you put on the list?

It's been a really interesting week for me. Surreal, to say the least.

Writing a book can be a very personal act. There are many long hours of staring at a computer screen, many hours with nothing but your thoughts. Then the book is done, and copy editing is complete, and it disappears for a while.

You know it is out there somewhere being worked on by printers and publishers, but you are thankful it is done and use the extra time you suddenly have to catch up on sleep. Then, a few weeks before the book is released, you get your first copy.

It's startling, really, to see your words bound, packaged, printed neatly on a page. But it is still very personal somehow. It is not in bookstores. No one is talking about it. This week, however, all that changed with the release of the book.

On Tuesday, I was on Oprah, and I know a lot of you watched, because many of you have written to me about it. I continue to be amazed by Oprah's talent and was really touched that she had read the book so thoroughly and was so passionate about it. I will sit down with Larry King soon in a program that will air sometime next week. And then more television appearances will follow.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten from you on the book. I've already received a lot of letters and emails from people sharing their own experiences of loss and survival. Many of the notes are very moving, and if there is a common thread in them, it is the lingering power of grief, and the determination it takes to get through it.

I wish I could respond directly to all of your notes, but it would be virtually impossible to do so. Please know that I appreciate the many responses you have sent to me via this blog and in other ways. Thank you.

Most Americans last saw Al Gore on December 13, 2000. That's when he ended his concession speech by saying, "And now, my friends, in a phrase I once addressed to others, it's time for me to go."

But look at Al Gore today. Magazines are running articles on "The Resurrection of Al Gore" (Wired) and "The Comeback Kid" (New York). His new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," opened this week, and it's drawing good reviews: "A necessary film," writes A.O. Scott in The New York Times. For an Al Gore movie, that's a rave.

Could this be Al Gore's moment?

Since 2000, the former vice president has been traveling the world delivering lectures on the threat of global warming. More than a thousand lectures, in fact.

"I set myself a goal to communicate this real clearly," Gore says as the movie shows him trudging through airports, carrying his own bags. "The only way I know to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family."

He means it. At an advance screening in Washington last week, Gore was asked why his lectures had not gotten much press attention. "I deliberately kept them off the record," he said. "I wanted to preserve the intimacy of each occasion."

Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender saw Gore's talk and said to himself, this has got to be a movie. "We need to get millions of people to see it," Bender told CNN. "So we filmed him all around the world -- in China, all over the country, doing this presentation. It's truly phenomenal. It's going to blow your mind."

A lecture by Al Gore?

"The message is one that is serious and urgent and complicated," Gore said at the Sundance Film Festival in January. "They have made it entertaining and enjoyable and funny and really watchable."

How did they do that? By doing what Hollywood does best: Telling a story.

Director Davis Guggenheim said, "One of the things I wanted to do was tell his personal story, why he's so invested in this, why these facts and figures are so interesting to him." He added, "It all goes back to his life on the farm and tragedies in his family and the 2000 election. The process was very much an intimate storytelling experience."

The film includes the story of Gore's sister's death from lung cancer. "That's one of the ways you don't want to die," Gore says in the film. "The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that produced the cigarettes that produced the cancer. It was so painful on so many levels. My father -- he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped."

The filmmakers refuse to call it a "political" film, because they see the picture's message as unifying. Guggenheim said, "Gore frames it not as a political issue but as a moral issue, something we should all really think about no matter who we are."

Ok, but does President Bush plan to see it?

"Doubt it," Bush said. He explained, "We need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better and at the same time protect the environment."

These days, some Hollywood liberals have doubts about Hillary Clinton. Is she selling out? Can she be elected? Al Gore is emerging as their dark horse. After all, they say, he's been elected.

The Clinton legacy was something of a problem for Gore in 2000. A lot of Democrats believe Gore lost because he tried to distance himself from Bill Clinton. But you could also argue that Gore lost because he couldn't distance himself from Bill Clinton, even though he tried. That's why Gore put Joe Lieberman, Clinton's severest Democratic critic, on the ticket.

If Gore and Hillary Clinton were to run in 2008, both Democratic contenders could claim the Clinton legacy -- the former president's wife and his vice president. On the theory that a helpmate is closer than a running mate, Hillary would probably have the stronger claim. That could liberate Gore to run against Sen. Clinton from the left.

"He has a true vision," producer Bender told CNN. "He's strong. He doesn't equivocate. He's great on all the issues. He's passionate. He's funny, and he's grounded."

Funny?

Well, Gore did appear on "Saturday Night Live" recently, where he pretended to be speaking as the president elected in 2000. "We have way too much gas," Gore said. "Gas is down to 19 cents a gallon, and the oil companies are hurting. I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash."

Gore calls himself a recovering politician, but adds, "There's a danger of a relapse." He said on NBC's "Today" show, "I'm not at the stage of my life where I'm going to say, 'Never in the rest of my life will I ever think about such a thing.'"

Talk about a smart marketing strategy: The film is coming out at the perfect moment. Millions of Americans are angry at President Bush and worried about energy.

The film is not overtly partisan, but few viewers will miss the visual cue after Gore says, "I was in politics for a long time. I'm proud of my service." The next shot shows the terrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina, an event some people believe hurt President Bush.

Would Americans really elect a president who served eight years as vice president, then ran for president and failed, and then was out of power for eight years?

It worked for Richard Nixon, because the moment was right.

The cries of the women in a tiny hospital are as harrowing as they are haunting. I will never forget what I felt when I walked into a hospital room filled with the walking wounded in the town of Bukavu in Eastern Congo.

"This a pain worse than death," says 28-year-old Henriette Nyota. She's one of hundreds of women who've sought treatment at Panzi Hospital for a crime that continues to be committed here on an almost daily basis -- multiple rapes by men in uniform with the intention, aid workers say, of destroying their child-bearing capabilities.

The story is as complicated as the Congo itself. The men in uniform are members of Congo's recently integrated army. Some of the men are from one ethnic group and they're raping and mutilating women from a different ethnic group in ways that can only be described as barbaric and medieval. After all, this is peacetime Congo. The civil war that killed more than three million people ended nearly three years ago. This isn't supposed to be happening today.

"These animals insert knives and other sharp objects into the women after raping them continuously for days at a time," says Dr. Denis Mukwege Mukengere, the lone physician working here. He's just finished a six-hour operation to repair one woman's uterus. She'd walked 300 miles to get here, exhausted, traumatized and overcome with excruciating pain.

"They seem to do this to prevent another generation of warriors from being born," Dr. Mukengere tells us.

He takes us on a tour of his hospital. Outside, in the corridors, new arrivals have just been dropped off by a Good Samaritan. I count a dozen of them, some with infant children, others too old to have children, all victims of unimaginable atrocities. He counsels them in his slow, methodical way and asks his small army of nurses to assist them. He's a kind of Mother Teresa, a person who has come to help the helpless. This hospital has become a haven for Congo's suffering masses, an oasis surrounded by horror and hatred.

We enter one of six wards dedicated to victims of sexual violence. Dr. Mukengere introduces us to 19-year-old Helene Wamunzila. She first came here five years ago after being raped repeatedly. Dr. Mukengere was able to stitch her back together and eventually discharged her. He says she cried the day she left, pleading with him to let her stay here because she said the evildoers were waiting for her back in her village. He didn't listen then and now regrets his decision. She's returned, badly mutilated physically and permanently scarred psychologically.

"I wish I'd let her stay," he says, shaking his head.

Victims of these horrible atrocities lie helplessly in bed, colostomy bags hanging below. Hanging over their heads is the fear that not only might they not be able to have children, but that they may have contracted HIV/AIDS, an almost guaranteed death sentence in this part of the world.

"Four out of 10 end up being HIV positive," Dr. Mukengere tells us. "It's almost as though God is punishing these people in the worst possible way."

Rose Mujikandi, 24, tells us 14 men broke into her parents' house two months ago. She says they killed her father and mother, two brothers and infant sister, but not before they had their way with her.

"It's the last thing my father and mother saw before they were killed. Can you imagine living the rest of my life knowing this is the image they went to heaven with?" she asks, tears streaming down her face. "But I have faith in God. What happened to me happened for a reason," she concludes.

In an open-air recreation area, more women, hundreds of them, talk quietly among themselves. They see Dr. Mukengere and one of them breaks into song. The others follow, but some are too traumatized to think of singing. The song is as haunting as it is defiant. I ask the doctor what it means.

"They're telling the men that they will never be broken, that their spirits will never be broken," he says.

The song ends and I turn to one of the women. She's using a cane to walk because of the damage she's received from days of multiple rapes and mutilation. She gives me her name only as Tintsi and says she's 21 years old. She was brought here by her relatives on a stretcher for a short distance, she says, only 25 miles. She tells me she was gang-raped by 15 men for eight days and eight nights. She just recently began walking again and the cane helps her get around.

"They can destroy my womanhood," she says, "but they can never destroy my spirit."

I ask her where she gets her strength and I almost know what she will say before the words leave her mouth.

"God," she whispers. Then, as if for emphasis, she cries aloud, "Only God can save the women of Congo." The women around her applaud. Some shake their heads in agreement. Others simply stare straight ahead.

I turn to Dr. Mukengere and ask him why everyone here refers to God after being the victims of such atrocities.

"God is the only thing they can hold on to that no one can take away from them. They've lost their dignity. They've lost their womanhood. They have nothing left," he says. "But if you ask me, God forgot about Congo a long time ago."

I wonder if he believes this. If he did, would he be here doing what he's been doing every day for the past three years?

I turn to leave this place and can't help feeling sick to my stomach. Every time I feel things are getting better on this continent that I grew up in, this land I proudly call my home, this place that has so much to offer, I'm confronted with the stark reality that all is not well in the place many people proudly call "Mother Africa."

We need to do more. We need to take care of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters and our grandmothers. Most of all we need to make life better for the generations that are yet to come.

We'll have to start somewhere, and the Congo it seems, is as good a place as any.

After watching Jeff Koinange's story on air or reading his personal take here, many of you are probably wondering how you can help. Here are two organizations working in Congo:

The Swedish Pentecostal Mission -- PMU
Contact person: Marie Walterzon
Tel in Congo (243)-81-318-6246

TEARFUND -- A British NGO
Contact person: Tilly Leuring
Tel in Congo: (243)-997-089-850

It's now a little more than five months until the November elections. President Bush continues to take it on the chin in the polls, as does Congress. The number of competitive seats in the House continues to rise, according to the Rothenberg Political Report, and the Democrats are leading Republicans on every major issue, including terrorism.

The environment for the Democrats couldn't get much better. So why is it that when we asked people on the street yesterday what the Democrats' plan for America was we encountered responses such as "I have no clue -- to be honest, I have no clue what they're doing"?

It could be because the Democrats have yet to articulate anything that resembles a substantive plan. Oh sure, there have been bits and bites, but there's yet to be a clear election-year agenda. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says "there's plenty of time for specifics - the election is a long way off."

But if they hope to prevail in those exceedingly tight Congressional races, how long can Democrats continue to get by solely on rhetoric like Senator Harry Reid's declaration that "We as Democrats are declaring our commitment to change"?

For a while longer, according to Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, whom many Democrats say is the guy driving the bus this year. Emanuel hears the calls from inside the party to lay out -- as quickly as possible -- a Democratic version of the Republicans' famous 1994 "Contract With America."

But he's keeping his powder dry for now, recalling that the Contract was released just six weeks before the '94 election. To do it now, he fears, would leave an agenda open to dissection and scrutiny, Republican attacks and inter-party fighting for a long time. Plus, what would be left to do in the fall?

The danger for Democrats, however, is that Republicans have been pretty effective at labeling them as the "party with no ideas, failing to articulate any core principles or governing philosophy."

Of course, that's merely a strategy to draw them into the debate. But as we saw in August of 2004, when John Kerry's campaign sank amid a barrage of unanswered attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, sometimes you need to put some meat on the bones if you hope to have a chance of fighting back.

It takes about one-and-a-half hours to drive from the center of Rome to the tiny town of Viterbo, Italy. With reporter Delia Gallagher, photojournalist Claudio, and our driver, Alfredo, we made our way through the hills of this ancient Etruscan town on our way to see a man with a very controversial cause.

Luigi Cascioli is suing the Catholic Church. He says he wants them to show proof that Jesus Christ actually existed.

As we drive up the road to his old stone house, my first impression is that this lifelong atheist is not at all what I expected. I'm not sure why. Perhaps as a Roman Catholic I thought he'd have horns and a tail? Instead, a robust, friendly septuagenarian approached the car to welcome us, accompanied by his dog, Pluto.

He says he has dedicated his life to bringing down the Catholic Church, and he's spent years of his life researching his subject. He says there was, in fact, no Jesus, but a military man named John of Gamala who lived in the time of Christ. And, he claims, it was the gospel writers who turned that mere mortal into the character of Jesus, a figure powerful enough on which to base an entire religion.

Cascioli's lawsuit is based on two points of Italian law. One makes it illegal to "abuse the popular credulity." The second outlaws impersonating another person. The chain-smoking, former construction worker speaks only Italian, and he doesn't mince words. He calls the Catholic Church leaders "con men," and says "they take advantage of the popular belief."

He began his case in 2002, suing a local Viterbo priest, Father Enrico Righi. He says he chose Father Righi because the law prevents him from suing the Pope, who is a head of state. But his case was rejected by the Italian courts time and time again. So why is Luigi Cascioli so interesting now? Because the European Court of Human Rights has agreed to consider hearing his case.

That means, at some future date, leaders of the Catholic Church may be called upon to present hard evidence that there once was a man named Jesus Christ. The question is, in this age of DNA testing and CSI drama, how do you prove a man existed more than 2,000 years ago using nothing but the written word?

Imagine owning a winning lottery ticket, and carrying it with you for decades, but not knowing you had it. Riches could lie ahead, opportunities might abound, but you don't know about the possibilities, until someone brings it to your attention. So it was for Wilfredo Garza, a man whose life is now changed forever.

Garza has lived for 35 years, much of the time wishing he could become an American citizen. He was born in Mexico to an American father and was raised in Mexico, always assuming he was Mexican. But at a chance meeting last year, Wilfredo learned from an immigration attorney that just like his dad, he was an American citizen.

Garza is a working man with almost no formal education and has long figured the best future for him was in the United States, not Mexico. For years, he and his brother crossed the Rio Grande almost daily, sneaking into the United States. Garza was deported on four separate occasions, but managed to swim back into the United States each time.

Eventually, Garza and his brother scraped together enough money to buy a small ramshackle home in downtown Brownsville, Texas. Wilfredo is proud to have worked hard for everything he owns. He says he didn't cross the river looking for handouts; he came to work and work hard. On a good day, he says, he'd make $25 to $30 a day.

Garza puts a unique face on our immigration crisis. He's an immigrant who really wasn't. But through his story, his struggle, we learn just how important it is to be "an American."

After many long months and many long hours of writing, my book "Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival" is in stores today. It's a very strange feeling.

In many ways, I've been writing this book in my head for the past 15 years, ever since I became a reporter. But it wasn't until Hurricane Katrina that I actually started putting it together on paper.

In those dark, difficult days in New Orleans, I started to worry that when the floodwaters receded, and the convention center was cleaned up, people would move on and forget what had happened.

I know we all like to say, "Oh, we could never forget such a tragedy." But the truth is tragedies are forgotten all the time. The media moves on, and so do people's lives.

I suppose that's just the way it is, but I didn't want the heroism, the heartbreak, the compassion, the negligence to just be forgotten, so I started writing about what I was seeing behind the scenes, the kinds of moments and conversations that never make it on television.

I first started working as a reporter soon after graduating from college. I couldn't get an entry level job at ABC News, so I came up with my own plan. I figured if no one would give me a chance, I'd have to take a chance.

With a fake press pass made by a friend and a borrowed video camera, I left the United States to report on wars around the world. In retrospect, it was a foolhardy thing to do, but I was young and didn't feel like I had any other options.

Since those early years, I've visited a lot of countries in conflict, and have seen people lose their lives because of the color of their skin, the ideas in their heads, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I've worked in Somalia, South Africa, Haiti and Rwanda, and in all these countries, in all these conflicts, I've been awed by what humans are capable of doing to one another -- acts of terrible barbarism and brutality, yes, but also acts of kindness and courage.

In the far reaches of the world, you see what truly lurks in the inner reaches of the human heart, and those lessons were something I wanted to write about.

When I was a child, my father wrote a book about growing up in Mississippi. I remember when I was about eight years old and couldn't sleep, I'd go into his study late at night as he was typing his book and curl up in his lap. Laying my head against his chest, I could always fall asleep listening to the sound of the typewriter and the steady beat of his heart.

Writing my own book has been a very difficult process for me. As I said earlier, it feels strange to suddenly have it enter the marketplace, because it is in many ways a very personal book. It's not only about the tragedies I've covered as a journalist; it's also about the losses in my own life that propelled me to go overseas in the first place.

I will be on the Oprah show today. This will be the first time I will talk about the book in any detail in a large public forum. I don't really know what people will make of it. I do think that loss is a bond all of us share and one many people can relate to. If you choose to read the book, I'd love to hear from you.

Click here to read an excerpt from "Dispatches from the Edge"

Let me just say first that I am not an early riser. But how often does one get the opportunity to fly out into the Gulf of Mexico and land on an oil platform?

That's how I spent most of my day yesterday -- up at 5 a.m. and straight to a waiting chopper with some folks from Shell Oil.

Shell has about six deepwater floating oil platforms in the Gulf, including one called the MARS platform, which was the biggest oil producer in the Gulf before Hurricane Katrina. The storm caused MARS' daily production to drop from 140,000 barrels of oil to zero.

We had hoped to visit MARS yesterday, but we couldn't because it had just started producing oil and natural gas again. While an estimated 15 percent of the Gulf's oil rigs are still down, the MARS rig is expected to be at full production in June.

Shell says it has spent nearly $300 million on Gulf recovery because it believes there are at least 71 billion gallons of oil out there waiting to be drilled.

With MARS off-limits, we toured the similar Ram Powell oil platform instead. It was humbling to stand on this structure, which is about the size of a football field. The oil rig that is clamped to the platform weighs as much as two 747 airplanes.

While walking around the rig we had to wear hard hats, safety glasses and steel-tipped shoes. And the stairs -- oh my! There's no elevator, so getting around is a workout.

Here's something that surprised us -- Shell wanted to periodically test the camera we were using to shoot this story. They were afraid the camera could give off a spark and cause a fire as it mixed with the gases in the air. So they monitored the camera and the gases as we walked around the platform.

We spent about an hour touring the rig and then climbed back aboard our helicopter for the hour-long flight back to dry land.

It is springtime, and here on the Pentagon beat we're watching with interest the so-called "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. Every spring, as the weather warms up, the Taliban come out of the hills and start mixing it up again with U.S. and Afghan forces.

I was just in Afghanistan in late February and early March. During the visit, U.S. and NATO commanders warned me it was going to be an active spring. Sure enough, their intelligence was correct. Taliban forces have moved into the south of the country flush with money and new weaponry.

The U.S. military doesn't like to get involved in body counts. You know, "We killed more of them than they killed of us, so we win." Vietnam proved that's the wrong measure of who is winning. That said, U.S. commanders do point out the Taliban has suffered "extraordinary losses" in the past three or four weeks, including some mid-level Taliban leaders who were captured or killed.

The Sunday night/Monday morning strike near Azizi in Kandahar is the latest example. It looks like up to 80 people might have been killed when U.S. Air Force A-10s strafed and bombed Taliban positions. Kandahar is one of three southern provinces where the Taliban have come back stronger than they were last year.

The locals say many of those killed were innocent civilians, including women and children.

The U.S. military says it thinks most victims were Taliban fighters or civilians with "terrorist ties." The military says it does not target civilians and insists it takes all reasonable measures to prevent unintended civilian deaths. But it's also not willing to let the Taliban have safe havens in civilian homes.

Here is a statement from the Combined Forces Command, Afghanistan: "The Coalition only targeted armed resistance, compounds and buildings known to harbor extremists. Coalition forces must retain their ability to defend against fire emanating from known enemy positions."

And here is a possible translation of that statement: "If you hang with the Taliban, you may die with the Taliban."

What do the latest skirmishes with the Taliban mean? Are the Taliban staging a comeback in Afghanistan? That is difficult to say. But one thing is clear: The war here has become a test of wills as much as a test of firepower.

Walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, a 34-hear-old Mexican native named Flor tells me she is simply grateful to have her freedom.

Four years ago, Flor says, she was lured from her home in Mexico by people who promised her free passage to the United States, legal entry, and a good job as a tailor near Los Angeles.

When she arrived, however, she was immediately enslaved in a sweat shop and forced to sew 18 hours a day, sleep in a storage room, and eat little, she tells us. She says her boss told her she could go nowhere until she paid $2,600 for her transit into the country.

"She threatened me," Flor says, sighing, thinking of her mother and children still in Mexico. "She said if I tried to escape...somebody who I loved would pay the consequences."

This modern slave trade -- "human trafficking," as it is called -- is considered the third largest criminal industry in the world; behind only drugs and gun running.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates 18,000 people a year are brought into America this way -- half for the sex trade, half to work in homes, on farms, on construction sites, and in restaurants and factories. Federal officials say they are in communities everywhere.

Flor was lucky. After one-and-a-half months, she escaped captivity, she says, and after much adjustment became convinced that U.S. authorities would sympathize with her plight and help her.

She is now living here under a special visa developed for the victims of trafficking. She's trying to bring her children in too. But she says she is haunted by something her trafficker told her.

"She said, 'Dogs have more rights in this country than we had,'" Flor tells me.

"What did you think?" I ask.

"In some ways," Flor murmurs, "She was saying the truth."

What do you think?

If you're in this country illegally, and you want to do the right thing by applying for legal status, here's some advice from an immigration lawyer: Don't; don't ask the government for legal status; don't tell them you're here.

That's from Jose Hernandez, an immigration lawyer, who says he often tells illegal immigrants, "There is nothing I can do for you. Do not even look for answers. There's nothing that can be done for you."

The story we've been reporting for "360°" is a sad one. It started 17 years ago, when a 14-year-old Mexican girl named Maria Christina Garcia ran away from home. She tells me she was running from an abusive father.

Garcia crossed the border into California in the back seat of a friend's car at San Ysidro. She found work at a Taco Bell, and later a Target, and then at a large hospital. She gave birth to two sons -- both American citizens, now enrolled in good public schools in Orange County -- and kept a tidy apartment in a nice neighborhood.

But she made one very big mistake: She believed a storefront immigration consultant could help her get legal status. She paid this consultant $8,000.

Prosecutors now say the whole thing was a fraud, a nasty fraud, because in addition to taking her money, the immigration consultants told the U.S. government all about Maria Christina. She's about to be deported. The government told her she has just over a month left in this country.

She was the victim of an immigration fraud scam so common that her current lawyer rolls his eyes when he describes it. "What they tell them is: 'In 90 days, I can get you a work authorization, and within about a year, year-and-a-half, you will be able to get your green card.'"

As Hernandez tells it, the immigration consultant first applies for asylum in Maria's name. That application is quickly denied, because illegal immigrants from Mexico are generally not eligible for asylum.

The case is then turned over to an immigration court, which begins deportation proceedings. Because that sometimes takes a long time, and because the U.S. government believes in due process, an immigrant in deportation proceedings can be eligible for a temporary work permit.

This is what Maria got, and immigrants fight for these permits because they can use them, legally, to get a drivers license and a valid Social Security card.

At that point, says Hernandez, "Most of these immigrants think, 'We're on the right path. We're actually getting what we were promised.' Little do they know that in about a year and a half, they're actually going to be removed."

Maria's time is almost up. She's due to be deported in June, and it is very hard to get the government to change its mind about a deportation.

She's an emotional wreck. She has two American-born sons who are citizens. She is expecting a third child in July. She has health insurance and a doctor in California, and has neither in Mexico, where she will likely give birth.

She's thinking of leaving her children in California - their father lives here. They are well aware of what's going on -- her older son, 11-year-old Ivan, often refuses to go to school. He thinks the police might be coming for his mother, and he wants to be home to protect her.

"It may not be fair, but unfortunately, that's the law," said Jorge Guzman, who fights immigration fraud at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What happened to the people who allegedly defrauded Maria? Not much. The operators of La Guadalupana Immigration Services in Santa Ana, California, were charged with numerous counts of business fraud in state court in California, but the operators have disappeared. Authorities believe they left the country after ripping off 2,000 or more illegal immigrants.

We are broadcasting again tonight from the U.S.-Mexican border. Last night, we were at the spot where the border fence hits the Pacific Ocean.

U.S. Border Patrol agents tell us illegal immigrants sometimes try to swim around the fence, or surf around it, or boogie board around it -- just about every possible way you can imagine has been attempted.

As dusk fell last night, a group of Mexicans gathered on the other side of the fence, watching us broadcast, with the bright lights of San Diego shining on the horizon. Perhaps they were just curious, out for an evening stroll. Or perhaps it was something else that drew them to the fence.

We've been returning to the border a lot these last few months, and every time we go, we learn something new about the difficult situation down here.

It's easy for some people to criticize the Border Patrol, but the truth is, they work extremely hard at a somewhat thankless job. No matter how many illegal immigrants they catch and return, others get through, sometimes the same ones they just sent back over the border.

Most Border Patrol agents say they don't focus on that too much, otherwise they would feel like they are not making any progress.

For all the talk of fencing, border security as it exists right now really boils down to these agents, riding in SUVs, on horseback, ATVs, watching with cameras, night-vision equipment, around-the-clock, day-after-day.

Within the last several days, they've discovered two more tunnels underneath the border. "Gopher holes," they call them, because they are not particularly sophisticated tunnels.

We were here several months ago when they discovered "el grande" tunnel -- the 2,400 foot tunnel from a warehouse in Tijuana to a warehouse on the U.S. side. They've blocked that tunnel off now, but the memory of it remains.

To be inside that tunnel was fascinating. We saw the ropes that were used to carry bales of drugs. Examining the walls, we spotted markings made by the diggers.

The big tunnels cost so much to make its doubtful they are used by illegal immigrants, since that wouldn't be cost-effective. Instead, they are typically used to smuggle drugs, according to law enforcement officials. In fact, they found a large amount of marijuana in the 2,400 foot tunnel.

Tonight on the program, we are going to take an in-depth look at the problem of trafficking across the border -- sometimes the "product" being trafficked is drugs or sex; sometimes it is children. We'll also take a closer look at President Bush's visit to the border today.

Speaking of which, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the immigration debate as it's playing out in Washington, D.C.

Are lawmakers moving in the right direction? Is comprehensive immigration reform possible, all at once? Or do you think they should focus on border security first, and then consider what to do with the illegal immigrants who are already here, hiding in plain sight?

They live among neighbors who want them out of town. For Marvin Wyler and his two wives in the Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist enclave of Colorado City, Arizona, it is a nerve-wracking and depressing time.

You see, Marvin and his wives are some of the few people in Colorado City who no longer consider FBI fugitive Warren Jeffs a prophet. Although they used to follow him, they now consider Jeffs a fraud. This declaration has come at a cost.

Marvin, his wife Charlette, his other wife Laurie, and a late wife Esther have 34 children, and at least 110 grandchildren. But 10 of those children and a good number of the grandchildren are now out of their lives.

Warren Jeffs issued an edict declaring children should no longer talk with parents who are not loyal to the church. So nearly one-third of the Wyler children have completely cut off communication with their parents.

Marvin and Charlette tell me they occasionally run into one of these 10 children in this small town, and the children treat them like they are strangers.

We spent an evening with the Wylers. Three of the kids still live at home; two grandchildren were out jumping on a trampoline.

It seemed tranquil, but life here is now very worrisome for this family. Their house has been vandalized and church elders have told them to leave town.

But Marvin Wyler says he can't afford to leave, and besides, this is his home. His estranged children are still here and he has dreams of them coming back to their family.

So he'll wait it out, fearful of violence in Colorado City if and when Warren Jeffs is caught, but more fearful that he'll never have his children back because of beliefs that he helped them acquire.

Where in the world is Pringle, South Dakota? It's what we asked ourselves as we came out here to report on yet another polygamist compound.

Right here in Pringle, with Mt. Rushmore as a backdrop, we found another one of the "chosen places," a "Zion," where followers of Warren Jeffs are told they must be to attain salvation when the world ends. To his followers, Jeffs is a prophet. But to the FBI, he's a wanted polygamist and pedophile.

The town's residents tell us they're certain Jeffs has been in Pringle. That's why we're here. What we've seen is a polygamist village in the making.

As in Eldorado, Texas, another Jeffs stronghold we visited recently, his followers hide from us. But we were able to get within a stone's throw of his newest Zion, or at least the newest compound we know about. There could be as many as four others, and maybe more, scattered across the United States.

As we arrive, we see backhoes, heavy equipment, silos, a water pump, trailers. Nestled among them are three-story residences for men, women and children. Some residents of Pringle fear another Waco or Jonestown scenario. Local authorities seem confused by the presence of Jeffs' followers in their midst. Why here?

Tonight, we'll take you along for a ride to the polygamist compound and show you what makes these 100 remote acres amid the Black Hills of South Dakota the perfect setting for the fulfillment of Warren Jeffs' frightening prophecies about the end of the world.

Quick! Gator sighting. Get over to this address. A trapper is about to catch one.

That was the word from CNN's assignment desk. The timing was right on. No sooner did we make our way to the back of a lakefront Florida home, than we heard veteran gator hunter Todd Hardwick yell, "Gator up!"

The gator had been sitting at the bottom of the lake for about an hour, evidently hoping that the guy who'd been circling the lake's perimeter would go away.

When the nine footer came up for air, Hardwick's hook landed him and he reeled in the 200-300 pounder. Hardwick sat on the gator's back and taped its snout, while I held a "catch pole."

With three women fatally attacked in the span of a week in Florida (only 20 such attacks have been recorded in nearly 60 years in Florida), Floridians have been calling trappers around the clock to capture gators.

The trappers have a priority list. The longest ones and those who are spotted on land go first. Then the smaller and more remote ones follow.

There's no charge to call a trapper. They're given permits and processors pay them by the foot for what they catch -- from as much as $55-60 per foot to as little as $15 per foot when they're plentiful.

When the gators are killed, nothing is wasted, Hardwick says. The meat, the hide, even the skull are sold.

In case you're wondering what to do if you ever come across a gator, Hardwick says you should ignore the common suggestion to run in a zig-zag pattern. He says it's just an old wives tale. You can try running straight away, but gators are very quick over short distances.

What you can do, if attacked, is "fight for your life," Hardwick says. Punch, kick, gouge out its eyes, and you might get it to back off. "Alligators like easy prey."

How would you feel if the author of a fiction book that's sold more than 40 million copies included you in it as a character, using your real name and job description, but never told you about it?

That's what happened to Maurizio Seracini, the only non-fictional character appearing in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's runaway bestseller about a fictional conspiracy to hide the "truth" about Jesus -- that he was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child.

In the book, clues about this conspiracy, which is supposedly perpetrated by the Catholic Church, emerge through the art of Leonardo da Vinci. The movie version of Brown's story premiers this week at the Cannes Film Festival.

When I met with Seracini in his breathtaking office just across from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, I thought he was joking at first. "You never met, spoke or e-mailed Dan Brown?" I asked. "Never had the pleasure," he replied.

In The Da Vinci Code, Brown describes Seracini as an "art diagnostician." With a title like that, I thought, you can't be a real person, or in any case that's not a real job. But Seracini's work not only exists, it's actually very important.

His office looks like a state-of-the-art laboratory, with machines you would normally find in a hospital. He uses them to study the origins of works of art, analysing the composition of the materials -- e.g. the wood, the paint, the wax, the canvass -- to establish how old they are and to advise curators and art galleries on how best to preserve them.

Seracini can certify scientifically whether a certain work of art was actually produced by Leonardo da Vinci or an impostor.

"How do you do that?" I asked. "It's simple," he replied with a broad smile. "I look for his fingerprints."

No wonder Dan Brown chose him as one of his characters. (By the way, if you have the book on hand, you can find Seracini in chapter 40).

When news emerged of President Bush's plan to use thousands of National Guard troops to secure the U.S. border with Mexico, my thoughts turned to Redford, Texas, a tiny town of about 100 residents along the Rio Grande. Nine years ago, this far-flung border town changed the way the United States protects its borders.

On May 20, 1997, Esequiel Hernandez Jr., 18, was herding his goats just a few hundred yards from his Redford home. He was carrying an antique rifle, a little firepower to protect his goats from coyotes.

What happened that day has been disputed by Hernandez's family, the U.S. Marines and the Border Patrol, but what is known is that four Marines were helping local authorities track drug runners.

The Marines were hiding in the low-lying brush in camouflage. They say Hernandez fired at them first, so they started tracking him through the rugged terrain, thinking he was a drug smuggler. Everyone agrees they were nearly 200 yards away. At that distance, says Margarito Hernandez, Esequiel's brother, he could not have known what he was shooting at, if he did shoot first.

A short time later, Hernandez was shot and killed by one of the Marines. The shooting sparked such intense controversy that the special task force of U.S. troops helping fight drug smugglers was pulled out of the border region. The Marines were cleared of wrongdoing, but the federal government paid the family almost $2 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.

Today, a humble white cross sits on the hilltop marking the spot where Hernandez was shot and killed. His family still lives in Redford. The idea of bringing the military back to the border has them nervous.

"Somebody else is going to get hurt. Some other parents are going to suffer the loss of a loved one," said Margarito Hernandez, as he walked me along the final path his brother took the day he was killed. "It's important for them to remember what happened to my brother."

Many residents of this border town repeated a common theme to us -- basically, "border culture" and "military culture" just don't mix. They say National Guard troops won't be trained well enough to understand the idiosyncrasies of border life. What do they mean by idiosyncrasies?

For the people who live here, there really isn't much of a border. Many families have loved ones on both sides of the border; the people look the same on both sides; they speak the same way; and they share the same culture. Residents here worry soldiers won't be able to tell the difference between who's breaking the law, and who's not.

It's Monday, and I'm on my way to the small town of Pendleton, Oregon, to interview a sheriff who, like a lot of Americans, is fed up with what he considers this country's broken borders.

In fact, he's so frustrated that he has sent a letter to Mexican President Vicente Fox demanding that the Mexican government cough up more than $300,000 for the jailing of illegal immigrants in Umatilla Country, Oregon.

This country has seen its Latino population soar in recent years. That has meant an increase in illegal immigrants taking up jail space, according to Umatilla County Sheriff John Trumbo. And Trumbo thinks the Mexican government should pay.

I've never really thought of Oregon as the type of place to draw a lot of illegal immigrants, but because of its large farms and agriculture industry, it does.

For tonight's show, we'll talk to Trumbo about his novel approach to the immigration issue and ask him what, if anything, he's heard from President Fox.

The sheriff's actions aren't going to endear him to the Latino population. According to the Los Angeles Times, many of the county's citizens are infuriated with him. We'll talk to some of them as well.

What do you think? Should the Mexican government help cover the costs of jailing illegal immigrants?

How bad has it gotten for President Bush? Bad enough that in the eyes of many Americans his predecessor, President Clinton, is looking better.

Our CNN poll, conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, asked people to compare the last two Presidents.

Which President do people think did a better job on the economy? The public picked Clinton by a mile -- 63 to 26 percent. For many Americans, the 1990s were boom years. "When he was President," a woman told us, "My business did well and I made a lot of money. I kind of miss that."

Who related better to problems affecting ordinary Americans? No contest -- Clinton over Bush, 62 to 25 percent. Clinton felt your pain. Clinton also raised taxes. Bush cut taxes. Who wins on that one? Surprise! Clinton, 51 to 35 percent on taxes.

After 9/11, national security became Bush's strongest issue. And now? People think Clinton was better on national security by a nose -- 46 to 42 percent. What happened? One word: Iraq.

Now for a tough test -- character. The character issue was crucial for Bush, who campaigned in 2000 on this promise: "When I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear not only to uphold the laws of the land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected."

So which President do Americans now consider more honest and trustworthy -- the man who said, "I misled people, including even my wife," or the man who said, "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it and we'll take the appropriate action"? A close call, but slightly more people say Clinton -- 46 to 41 percent. That's right, by a narrow margin, the American public now considers Bill Clinton more honest than George W. Bush.

Could Clinton nostalgia be setting in? Many respondents said yes, citing the former president's "agenda for peace" and "more social programs for those in need." Others talked about the "Clinton nightmare," like the man who called Clinton a "womanizing, Elvis-loving, non-inhaling, truth-shading, abortion-protecting, gay-promoting, war-protesting, gun-hating baby boomer."

Clinton divided the country politically. So did Bush. Who do people think divided it more? The answer is Bush, by a big margin -- 59 to 27 percent. The public sees President Bush the same way they once saw President Clinton -- as a divider, not a uniter.

In the shadow of the U.S. Capitol today, I stood between the warring lines of our national immigration debate.

The Minutemen, those advocates for rigorous enforcement of immigration laws, were rallying against any sort of amnesty program for illegal immigrants. A short distance away, protestors in favor of greater rights for immigrants were trying to shout down the Minutemen speakers.

The protestors called the Minutemen racists, Klansmen, Nazis, and repeatedly chanted at them in Spanish.

As I wandered among the Minutemen, however, they had little say about the protestors. One after another they repeated the basic tenet of their group: If a nation has laws about immigration, those laws should be enforced, period.

The folks who came to support the Minutemen were a mixed-lot racially -- mostly white, but some African-Americans, some Asians too. I don't think I saw any Latinos among them.

Many of the Minutemen took a couple of days off of work to drive to the Washington, D.C., for this cause. Some told me they'd never been interested enough in politics to do anything like this before.

And that caught my attention more than all the shouting, signs and speeches I heard, because generally, when ordinary folks care enough about an issue to abandon part of their ordinary lives to get involved, whatever that issue is, it is going to get bigger.

Standing by the Capitol on this spring day, I watched a small, heated confrontation, but I couldn't help but wonder: Will much bigger, more volatile clashes on immigration follow in the heat of the summer?

When Sgt. Billy Anders emerged from his prison cell in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I expected to greet a man filled with anger and resentment after a judge recently sentenced him to one year in prison for voluntary manslaughter.

For his own protection, Anders is serving this sentence in solitary confinement. He's locked in a concrete room with a small window 23 hours a day, surrounded by violent criminals, some of whom are on death row for heinous crimes.

As I greeted Anders, I found a former cop who seemed more concerned about how our crew was holding up in such a depressing place than with his own well-being. I sensed no prejudice or hatred from this cop who served 31 years on the force, just one year short of retirement.

During our two-hour interview, I looked for signs of malice in Anders' demeanor that might suggest he killed Earl Flippen, a former white supremacist, out of revenge for his partner's death. Anders shot Flippen just moments after Flippen killed his partner. They were responding to a domestic disturbance call in Cloudcroft, New Mexico.

We asked Anders to explain why he still felt threatened even after severely wounding Flippen and placing him in handcuffs. We asked him why his account differs so much from what appears in his patrol car video camera, which captured the incident.

Anders said he has little memory of his decision to pump a fatal bullet into Flippen's chest. He said he only wants the court of public opinion to consider the totality of the circumstances that led to the shooting, believing his life and that of a 3-year-old girl he was trying to save were in danger. Anders had already lost his partner. The girl's mom had been killed too.

Videotape can be a powerful witness, especially when it appears to contradict a police officer's account of an incident. In this case, it appears that Billy simply cannot justify his actions. Even his own team of investigators and the town's chief prosecutor saw a crime there. If the state didn't act, the feds were preparing to intervene.

After a distinguished career in law enforcement, and without ever firing a single shot on duty before this incident, Anders now spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, reading scripture, pondering why this all happened. He gets one hour a day to shower and shave.

Billy has accepted responsibility for his actions, and many residents in this remote corner of southern New Mexico's national forest consider him a hero.

In the meantime, he says he thinks often of that little girl's future, even as he struggles to find redemption at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe, the very same place that Earl Flippen, the man he killed, once served hard-time.

You may or may not agree with polygamist Warren Jeffs' lifestyle, and you may or may not think he is indeed the dangerous criminal the FBI says he is, but would you believe Jeffs and his followers are costing you money?

"Their religious belief is that they'll bleed the beast, meaning the government," said Mark Shurtleff, Utah's attorney general. "They hate the government, so they'll bleed it for everything they can through welfare, tax evasion and fraud."

It makes some sense. Polygamists have multiple wives and dozens of children, but the state only recognizes one marriage. That leaves the rest of the wives to claim themselves as single moms with armies of children to support. Doing that means they can apply for welfare, which they do. And it's all legal.

"More than 65 percent of the people are on welfare ... compared with 6 percent of the people of the general population," Shurtleff said.

Shurtleff hasn't filed charges against Jeffs or his organization, but he's investigating Jeffs for "cooking the books," avoiding taxes, and even setting up offshore accounts.

One thing we do know is that Jeffs and his followers have not been paying their fair share of property taxes.

A judge appointed accountant Bruce Wisan to take control of the group's $110 million trust. Wisan's biggest challenge: Collecting more than $1 million in overdue property taxes from polygamist property owners living in Colorado City, Arizona, where Jeffs' church is based.

"They've received benefits of living on trust land for free," Wisan said. "They didn't pay for the land. In many cases it was community efforts that built the house. So all they have to pay are utilities and property taxes and I don't think that's unreasonable."

We are out in Utah and Arizona looking for the other fundamentalist polygamist on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. The one whose name isn't Osama bin Laden. It's Warren Jeffs.

I spent some time recently in Saudi Arabia, where polygamy is legal, yet by no means universal. In Islam, a man is not supposed to have more than four wives. Interestingly, bin Laden's father had many more than that, but he got around this by frequent divorces. He ended up with more than fifty children. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz, also had a number of wives and several dozen children.

Back to where I am now, Utah, which happens to be another desert climate. (Does that have anything to do with polygamy? If so, I can't figure it out.)

I spent the day out here with a private investigator named Sam Brower, who has been looking into Warren Jeffs and his organization for the past three years. There have been a number of civil suits against Jeffs, and Brower has helped the plaintiffs in each, so he's spent considerable time and effort in trying to understand Jeffs.

Brower compares Jeffs and his church to the Taliban. They dress and act in a certain way, he says, and Jeffs controls the women and makes them subservient. This is all wrapped around Jeffs' version of a fundamentalist Mormonism. Brower says that in his opinion, Jeffs is also a terrorist, but his "terrorism is directed at his own people."

The big fear of course among the law enforcement community with Jeffs right now isn't about terrorism. Instead, the operative word is Waco. Everyone worries about what might happen if Jeffs gets involved in a big standoff. But that is a story for another day.

I said it often on the air Tuesday night, but I find it hard to believe that a religious sect like the one led by fugitive "prophet" Warren Jeffs has existed in the United States for so long.

We live in an age of information, where it's easy to believe everyone is connected by technology. But the longtime existence of Jeffs' organization, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, shows that not everyone is part of the same world.

There are plenty of religious orders in this country that choose to live in isolation. That's not why Jeffs is of interest to legal authorities. They are after him because he stands accused of heinous acts against minors, and essentially, running an organized crime outfit. His organization, which broke away from the Mormon Church decades ago, teaches polygamy as a way of life.

I keep staring at those pictures of women in long skirts turning away from the camera, the few grainy, telephoto images that we have of Warren Jeffs' thousands of followers. What must life be like in those communities?

I'm in Utah now, and am spending the day talking with people who once followed Jeffs' teachings. Other CNN correspondents have fanned out across this region to cover the story from different angles.

Gary Tuchman is in Arizona looking at a relatively content polygamous household. Randi Kaye is exploring the tax and welfare implications of polygamy. And Rick Sanchez is taking a closer look at "Yearning for Zion," a Texas compound where many of Jeffs' followers live.

We're broadcasting live from Utah tonight on this fascinating story. I hope you tune in.

I'm in the town of Eldorado in the Texas hill country today, trying to report on a bizarre, yet impressive compound of polygamists that rises out of 1,600 acres of brush and cactus. But I think it may be easier to penetrate Fort Knox than to get inside this place.

The compound, which is called "Yearning for Zion," is home to followers of Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader recently named to the FBI's 10 most wanted list. Some outsiders suggest Jeffs might be in there too.

So far, I've tried driving in. And I've played a game of cat and mouse with the people living inside, who run the other way when they see us. With our telephoto lens we watch them as they, in turn, watch us. It's eerie. Now, I'm trying to fly over the compound in a rented plane.

This place is amazing, like a small city surrounding a giant Masonic temple, where devout followers of Warren Jeffs believe they need to be to get ready for the apocalypse. Jeffs, who they believe is their prophet, has told them they need to be here when the world ends in order to start a new civilization.

Of course, in the meantime, Jeffs has a more pressing problem. He's running from the law for allegedly having sex with minors and arranging marriages between underage females and older men.

You see, these fundamentalists, who broke away from the mainstream Mormon church in the early 1900s, believe that in order to get to heaven each man must have at least three wives. And the more wives you have, the closer you are to heaven.

We've spent the day talking to law enforcement officials in the area, both local and federal. We asked: Why don't they go in and look for Jeffs? They tell us they can't until they are convinced he's there.

Will the compound eventually be raided? Is this going to be the next Waco? That's what residents here in Eldorado fear most. You'll hear from them and get a closer look at "Yearning for Zion" on tonight's show.

It was one of the harder interviews for us to arrange. Polygamists don't like to talk on camera. It is against the law in every state to have a plural marriage, and people involved in this lifestyle are constantly looking over their shoulders wondering if they might be arrested. Many of them have parents and grandparents who have spent years in jail.

But after weeks of negotiations, a group of polygamists who live near Colorado City, Arizona, agreed to talk to us for tonight's "360°" special on polygamy.

We went with one female polygamist to her home, and what a home it is -- 32 bedrooms, immaculately decorated, architecture that resembles Versailles. This is not the typical polygamist's home, but size is a great benefit in this kind of family.

Linda (who did not want her last name used to protect her family) was afraid to give too many specific numbers and details about her life. But she did tell us she lives with at least ten other wives, and has more than 30 children, nine of which she has given birth to herself.

Many of the wives in the house have paying jobs, she said. The husband they all share has a job they do not want to disclose. We also talked to one of Linda's teenage daughters. She said she is not sure if she will be a polygamist too, but claims it's the most normal lifestyle in the world.

In addition to Linda, we interviewed nine other male and female polygamists, all from different families, who say they have plural marriages because it's a religious commandment. They are fundamentalist Mormons, who believe the Mormon Church made a mistake more than a century ago when it banned polygamy. One woman said, "Why is love punished? That's what our lives are about. Love, love and more love."

The women acknowledge their husbands must have significant stamina. When we asked a question that a lot of us are curious about regarding how conjugal visits are determined, a woman named Joyce joked that whichever wife draws the short straw is the one who sleeps with the husband that night! But she then added in seriousness that it's all decided by good communication among the wives, who are her best friends, as well as their husband.

The people we talked to are not followers of Warren Jeffs, the man recently named one of the FBI's 10 most wanted, but they are not ready to vilify him until a jury finds him guilty. They dress conservatively and act conservatively, and say they are open-minded concerning how other people live.

But they do not believe the rest of society is open-minded enough when it comes to their lifestyle, which they say they are not willing to give up, no matter what the law says.

There are two things you need to really understand about New Orleans before you can talk about any issue there: 1) It is much smaller than you think and 2) Everything is about politics.

So when I tell you the murder rate is rising, but the chief of police doesn't think it's that bad, you can understand why people in New Orleans are starting to worry.

New Orleans has always been a high-crime city, but there was a big drop-off in the number of murders committed in the initial months after Hurricane Katrina. The flood that wiped-out large areas of this city also was credited with dispersing New Orleans' criminals.

But the effect appears to be temporary. So far this year, thirty-two people have been murdered in New Orleans; thirteen last month alone. In this city of 180,000 people, the result is murder rate comparable to some of the most crime-ridden areas of the country.

Last week, I sat down with Warren Riley, the new chief of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). He tried to explain how crime is not that bad in New Orleans.

The actual murder rate, he says, is lower than it was before Katrina wiped-out the population. He also tried to explain that the official estimate of the population -- 180,000 people -- is wrong.

Why? Because that figure doesn't count all the people who drive into New Orleans every day to work. It only counts the people who actually sleep in New Orleans when all those workers go home.

So the NOPD has decided to add a new mathematical twist to make its murder rate look better than it is. They add the daytime population to the nighttime population, then divide by two. That gives a much bigger population figure, and lo and behold, 32 murders in four months doesn't look as bad.

Despite trying to put a positive spin on the numbers, police officers admit there are indications that violent Latino drug gangs are following the heavily Hispanic labor force into the city. This is setting up the potential for turf wars with the mostly African-American gangs that dominated this city pre-Katrina.

The police force is short around 200 officers, and Chief Riley is asking the state for 50 or 60 troopers to help patrol the city's abandoned areas. Also, many police stations are still unusable, and the jail, courts and even patrol cars are in disrepair.

Chief Riley hopes to have his force back to around 1,600 officers in the next two years. Even so, he says he may need a force twice that strength to really control crime in New Orleans.

Is it 1994 again?

That's the question people keep asking those of us who keep an eye on the polls. You remember 1994: Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, the Republican Revolution. That was the last time angry voters rose up and overthrew the majority party in Congress. Then, it was the Democrats who lost. Now, it's the Republicans in peril.

The answer is that it sure looks a lot like 1994 in the polls. The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll shows Congress with a 25 percent job-approval rating. That's the lowest rating for Congress since -- gulp -- 1994.

Even though President Bush is not on the ballot this fall, midterm elections typically are strongly influenced by a president's popularity -- or unpopularity, in the case of President Clinton in 1994. Clinton's job rating at this time in 1994? Forty-eight percent. President Bush's latest job rating? Thirty-three percent. Double gulp.

Democrats need a net gain of six Senate seats and 15 House seats to retake control of Congress. It's hard to see that happening if you look at the Senate and House races one by one. But national polls suggest a rising tide of voter anger captured by the ancient political maxim, "Throw the bums out!" And a majority of incumbents -- that is to say, the "bums" -- happen to be Republicans this time around.

What are people angry about? Congress can't pass immigration reform. It can't pass a budget. It can't even control its own spending. Ethics? Don't get us started: Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham have pled guilty to various offences; Rep. Tom DeLay faces charges; and now Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat, is under investigation.

Can Congress do something about gas prices? Why, yes. The Senate Republican leadership proposed a $100 rebate for all Americans. That proposal got laughed off the agenda. It has become this year's symbol of an out-of-touch Congress, just as the Terri Schiavo case was last year.

Republicans console themselves by repeating the mantra, "All politics is local." Which is true, except when it's not true. It was not true in 1994. And maybe not this year, either.

I was working on a story in my office this past Wednesday when I received a call from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. I've been doing a lot of stories on immigration of late, and I thought that since the secretary is a Hispanic immigrant like me, that's what he wanted to talk about. Instead, we began chatting in English, Spanish and Spanglish about another pressing story.

He told me about a trade mission he's undertaking. That's where U.S. business leaders travel abroad