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Volunteer "Minutemen" have spent the past three weeks on Arizona's border with Mexico, trying to deter illegal crossings. The group claims success. But other factors are also at play, including increased warnings by the Mexican government and traditional migration patterns that shift westward this time of year.

The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on the "Downing Street Memo," notes that suggest the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq months before the conflict began. The memo is from a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his aides in July 2002.

Much of the world's cotton comes from Texas, even though it's not a particularly great place to grow the crop. Big subsidies and heavy technology and R&D spending have helped the United States dominate the global cotton trade for two centuries.

The new CD by rapper Common, called Be, could be the best hip-hop release of the year, Will Hermes says. It's produced by grammy award-winning artist Kanye West, a longtime rap friend of Common, and a fellow Chicagoan.

The so-called "Downing Street Memo" — a secret British pre-Iraq war memo that some critics believe proves Bush administration officials "fixed" intelligence to build support for the war — gets a public hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill. But what does the memo, and the other leaked documents that support it, actually say? Alex Chadwick discusses the document with Slate defense policy analyst Fred Kaplan.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is on many bestseller and book club lists, and Haddon won the U.K.'s prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Joyce Yang won the silver medal at the Twelfth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, in Fort Worth, Texas. She visited NPR recently to play the opening movement from the French Overture by Bach, and "Reminiscences of Don Juan," by Franz Liszt.

The alleged mistreatment of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay sets off a heated Senate debate. Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, compared a description of mistreatment -- submitted to a Pentagon investigator by an F-B-I agent -- to actions carried out by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Some Republicans accused Durbin of maligning American military personnel.

Chicago Tribune national correspondent Dahleen Glanton talks about the trial of 80-year old Edgar Ray Killen, charged in the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi more than 40 years ago.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner says Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, is putting states in financial peril, especially as Congress eyes $10 billion in federal cuts. The Democrat is chairman of the National Governors' Association, which has developed its own plan for Medicaid reform.