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NPR's Cheryl Corley reports from Chicago on the questions being raised about the way the 2000 Census was conducted. Republican Congressman Dan Miller of Florida chairs the House Subcommittee on the Census. He says that irregular procedures and fraud may have increased the head count in several cities, where there was initial resistance to the Census. The cities include Chicago, West Atlanta, Las Vegas, Florence, Alabama, and Hialeah, Florida.

A team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed a new technique to recover information from magnetic tapes and disks. Noah talks with David Pappas, who heads that team, about the possibility that this technique could be applied to blank portions of the Nixon White House tapes, analyzed during the Watergate scandal. Recovering voices, he says, would be a long shot. But it might be possible to tell whether the tapes had been erased.

Bill Zeeble of member station KERA in Dallas reports that the city has a new record -- sixty-one days and counting without rain. The previous record was 58 days set back in 1934 and tied in 1950. The dry spell has hit North Texas farmers hard, and it is starting to occasionally impact the city's drinking water. It is also drying out the soil causing the foundations of many houses to settle and generating business for local foundation repair companies.

NPR's Chris Arnold reports on some entrepreneurs who expect major innovations in the way electricity is generated. One venture capital firm, Nth Power, is investing in new technologies that may produce more efficient, cleaner energy. Founders Maurice Gunderson and Nancy Floyd believe that deregulation of electrical utilities has great potential for everything from hydrogen fuel cells, to natural gas refrigerators that can cool food and heat houses at the same time.

NPR's Tom Gjelten reports that the Clinton Administration today cautiously welcomed Alberto Fujimori's decision to step down as president of Peru and hold new elections. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart called Fujimori's announcement "a step in the direction of full democratization" in Peru. But U.S. officials cautioned that they need more information on the position of the Peruvian military, whose support will be key for the country to move further toward Democratic reform.

NPR's Jack Speer reports the U.S. government had to correct its inflation numbers going back to January today, but the correction is a small one and doesn't change the overall picture of a strong economy with stable prices. The government's main inflation gauge, the CPI, was boosted by a tenth of a percent to 2.7% for the period January through August. Separately, the White House announced the budget surplus for the current fiscal year would be about $230 billion.

Seven House lawmakers are facing ethics complaints for violating the Stock Act, which polices insider trading, because of a recent bipartisan trend of lawmakers ignoring disclosure requirements.

Noah talks to Stacy Jessop, a teacher at Corvallis Middle School in CorvalLis, Montana, about being evacuated from her home to avoid an oncoming wildfire. She's now staying at a Red Cross shelter at Westview Middle School in the town of Hamilton, Montana. She says she could hear the fire roaring nearby as she fled her house with her family. She also describes an effort to retrieve her wedding ring and her family's pets.

Gay civil rights activist Candace Gingrich talks about Mary Cheney -- the openly gay daughter of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney. Ms. Gingrich says that Mary is now in a difficult position because her father supports a GOP platform that is hostile to homosexuals. Candace also talks about her experience having a brother -- former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- who is opposed to equal rights for homosexuals.

The Senate today passed a bill that would phase out the nation's inheritance tax over the next 10 years. The vote was 59 to 39 --- with 9 Democrats joining all but 4 of the Republicans in the majority. But the vote was not sufficient to override President Clinton's promised veto. before final passage, the Senate stripped all of its own amendments from the bill, so as to match the bill passed by the House and send the measure directly to the President's desk. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.