On Thursday’s NewsHour…

HEALTH BILL’S IMPACT ON U.S. DEFICIT | President Obama delayed plans for an overseas trip again so he could stay and lobby for votes for health care reform. Congressional correspondent Kwame Holman reports. For more, Jeffrey Brown speaks with Neera Tanden, chief operating officer for the Center for American Progress and, until February, a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Gail Wilensky, an economist and senior fellow at Project Hope, an international health foundation.

THE CIA’S FIGHT AGAINST AL-QAIDA | CIA Director Leon Panetta claims the CIA has Osama Bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders on the run and attributed the success, in part, to improved relations with Pakistan. For perspective, Jim Lehrer speaks with Glenn Carle, a former CIA deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats and Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA team responsible for hunting Osama Bin Laden in the late 1990s and the author of a forthcoming book, “Osama Bin Laden, a Biography.”

ETHIOPIA’S HUNT FOR CLEAN WATER | Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on the shortage of clean drinking water in Ethiopia. It is the first in a series of stories about global water problems tied to World Water Day. His report is part of a NewsHour partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and National Geographic, which is devoting its entire April issue to the worldwide water crisis.

MARCH MADNESS AND GRADUATION RATES | As the annual college basketball tournament known as March Madness begins, a proposal to punish men’s college basketball teams that don’t graduate at least 40 percent of players is also under debate. Judy Woodruff speaks with Kevin Blackistone, a sports columnist with AOL Fanhouse and a professor of sports journalism at the University of Maryland.

We’ll have all that, plus Hari Sreenivasan will recap the day’s other top stories and highlight some of our Web content, including the highlight reel of the health care reform debate so far and a preview of Ray Suarez’s series of reports on Peru’s economic boom amid the global recession.