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Jazz percussionist Mongo Santamaria dies on Feb. 1 at 85. Santamaria scored a Top-10 hit with his version of Herbie Hancock's jazz-funk classic "Watermelon Man" in 1963. He also wrote the song "Afro Blue," later performed and made famous by John Coltrane. NPR's Elizabeth Blair has a remembrance.

U.N. arms inspectors search Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's main palace for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, top U.N. nuclear monitor Mohamed ElBaradei warns Iraq that it must cooperate more intensely with arms inspectors. NPR's Lawrence Sheets reports.

NPR's Ron Elving profiles Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK), the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, who will have a critical role in helping President Bush try to get his budget through Congress. Nickles has been in the Senate since the early years of the Reagan presidency. Sen. Nickles has made elimination of the estate tax a top priority.

The director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory resigns, along with his top deputy, amid Department of Energy accusations that managers ignored fraud and theft by lab employees. The DOE spends $1.5 billion a year to run the lab, birthplace of the atom bomb. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.

African-Americans are traditionally among the Democrats most loyal voters, with more than 8-in-10 voting for the party nominees in recent presidential elections. But blacks are less likely than whites to vote. In an election as close as this, turning up the turn out among African-Americans is a top priority for Vice President Al Gore's supporters. From Chicago, NPR's Phillip Martin reports on the get-out-the-vote effort, and the Republican's parry.

Linda Wertheimer talks with Sebastian Rotella, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times in Lima, Peru, about the four-month-old manhunt for Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's former chief of the National Intelligence Service. He says that top officials fear Montesinos could still threaten the country's fragile democracy as long as he's still at large. Eighty investigators are looking for him.

The two men, who happen to acrobats, walked up 100 stairs together outside a Spanish cathedral. One brother was upside down with his head balancing on top of his brother's head.

Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, denies media reports that the Bush administration is postponing the creation of an transitional Iraqi authority. In the northern city of Mosul, Bremer meets with the city council billed as postwar Iraq's first elected body. Hear NPR's Guy Raz.

Host Robert Siegel talks with NPR's Guy Raz about Thursday's re-opening of Iraq's criminal courts. An American adviser says Saddam Hussein and top associates in the Baath Party could be put on trial in Iraq. There have been protests in Baghdad -- most recently Wednesday by a group of Iraqi doctors -- against the rehiring of Baath Party members for government posts.

Bids are expected to top $11 billion in the sale of Univision, the dominant Spanish language media outlet in the United States. But the network's next owners will face big challenges. There is more competition than ever from newer Spanish media. To keep its dominance, Univision seeks to attract and keep, younger, bilingual Latinos.