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The Senate agrees on a bill to create a Homeland Security Department after negotiating over labor issues for the new agency's staff. The House could vote on the measure today. NPR News reports.

It turns out the Jedi Archives depicted in the latest Star Wars film bear a striking resemblance to a storied library far, far away.

NPR's Michele Kelemen reports on the significance of the latest audiotape message from Osama bin Laden. U.S. experts believe it was the voice of Bin Laden on the Arabic language tape which aired yesterday on the al Jazeera television network. Until now, some experts had believed the al Qaeda leader was killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Robert Siegel talks with Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political scientist and expert on Islamic fundamentalists, about the language of the alleged bin Laden audio tape released yesterday.

There is some doubt over whether the voice on the tape is actually bin Laden. Lynn Neary talks with Steve Cain, president and CEO of Forensic Tape Analysis, Inc., about what sort of voice recognition techniques would be key to identifying whether the voice on a tape received by al Jazeera television is really Osama bin Laden. (4:15)

New York City is going to court in a bid to evict homeless people from shelters if they fail to find their own apartments quickly enough. It's a reaction to severe overcrowding at facilities where people wait for beds at shelters to open. NPR's Nancy Solomon reports.

Well to the east of Hollywood and the Golden Gate Bridge, there is another California -- the Central Valley, where farmers grow one-quarter of the food America eats. In the third of a four-part series on the future of the valley, NPR's John McChesney reports on how some organic farmers struggle while others thrive.

Burmese writer Pascal Khoo Thwe has written his autobiography From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey. (HarperCollins). Thwe grew up part of a tiny remote tribe in Burma which practiced a combination of ancient animist and Buddhist customs mixed with Catholicism. He was the first member of his community to study English at University. When a brutal military dictatorship took over Burma, Thwe became a guerrilla fighter in the movement for democracy.

On Capitol Hill today, politicians are holding yet another hearing about the risks of mercury. It's part of the latest wave of concern about mercury, which also turns up in fish, air pollution and in some vaccines. As NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, these fears have been around for hundreds of years.

Phoenix is more than happy to pass along some holiday cheer to Tucson.