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A Mars factory in Pennsylvania turns out millions of pieces of Dove dark chocolate using a secret method that preserves a compound found in raw cocoa beans. If Mars can harness that compound, chocolate may turn from a comfort food to a health food.

Don Knotts, the skinny, lovable nerd who kept generations of television audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, dies at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.

Susan Tedeschi is considered one of the best up-and-coming blues singers and guitarists. Her newest CD is called Hope and Desire. Music journalist Ashley Kahn spoke with Tedeschi about her career and her music.

Forty years ago, Arlo Guthrie dumped a pile of trash. The minor crime made him ineligible for the draft. In 1967, he immortalized the saga in "Alice's Restaurant." Debbie Elliott hears the story behind the song.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been distributing checks to families whose homes were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Cheryl Corley reports on one family's decisions on how to use the money they've received from the federal government.

The American poet Wallace Stevens died 50 years ago this year. Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.

Across the country, homes are beginning to take longer to sell, a sign that the hot real-estate market of the last decades is starting to cool. In the Boston metropolitan area, which has seen a faster appreciation of home values than most of the country, homes prices are not rising as fast they used to. Fred Thys of member station WBUR reports.

Canadians are voting in a national election and are expected to have a new prime minister by Tuesday morning. Polls show that Stephen Harper, head of the Conservative Party, is likely to replace Prime Minister Paul Martin. But it's not clear the Conservatives can win a majority in Parliament.

For months, Los Angeles city officials have complained that regional hospitals are dropping off their indigent patients in the city's tough Skid Row area. On Wednesday, a group of city council members released a videotape that seems to have caught one hospital in the act.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a plan that would give the nearly 12 million undocumented workers now living in the United States a path to citizenship. The debate now moves to the full Senate. NPR's Jennifer Ludden helps explain the politics and policies involved.