Looking Ahead

McCain to New Hampshire

March 12: Former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain will return to New Hampshire for two days of stumping and fundraising for Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte, who is vying to replace the retiring Sen. Judd Gregg. But while McCain is in the Granite State, he may still be thinking of his own race in Arizona where he faces a potentially difficult primary challenge from former congressman and talk-radio host J.D. Hayworth.

French go to the polls

March 14: Part one of France's two-part, regional elections begins March 14. The regional elections could provide a venue for French socialists to deal a blow to center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy. Socialists already hold power in 20 of France's 22 mainland regions-and a sweep of regional elections could set the stage for a serious challenge to Sarkozy in 2012. The second round of French voting will come on March 21.

Rock Hall of Fame

March 15: Swedish disco group ABBA and the Phil Collins--fronted Genesis will headline the 2010 induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Other inductees include British Invasion group The Hollies, punk rock pioneers The Stooges, and Jimmy Cliff, who helped take Jamaican music mainstream.

Dot-com turns 25

March 15: Twenty-five years ago today, a small computer manufacturing company in Massachusetts registered its website, symbolics.com, becoming the world's first .com. Decades later, there are more than 85 million registered .com websites and over 300 million .coms that have been deleted into the recycling bin of history. Nearly 90,000 websites come online every day.

March Madness commences

March 18: Not counting the March 16 play-in game, March Madness begins in earnest today. Around this time, newspapers and magazines will likely report that office pools cost U.S. businesses nearly $4 billion in lost productivity. But Slate.com columnist Jeff Merron argues those figures are highly inflated, saying they exaggerate the number of people who actually care whether Butler can pull off an upset. Another Merron argument: Those five minutes you took to check your alma-mater's score didn't subtract from your actual working hours, but from the time you usually spend checking your Facebook at the office.

Anniversary of the Iraq invasion

March 20: Despite now costing more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the Vietnam War, the United States' involvement in Iraq shows promise at the beginning of its seventh year. Citizens of the conflict-weary nation were scheduled to go to the polls on March 7 for a parliamentary election. And though President Barack Obama promised to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by August, Pentagon officials are already making contingency plans to stay past the deadline.