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NPR's David Welna reports on the alternative budget being proposed by congressional Democrats. Objecting to President Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut, Democrats on Capitol Hill call for $900 billion in tax cuts, with more relief to those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. The action comes as the House Ways and Means Committee took up the Bush proposal.

The House of Representatives approved today the main portion of President Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut. Republican leaders were exultant about passing the president's prize proposal in record time. The vote followed party lines, despite weeks of courtship by the White House. And the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of centrists is insisting on modifications. NPR's David Welna reports.

More than 230 people are dead following Saturday's 7.6 magnitude earthquake in El Salvador. The country is still digging survivors out of a massive mudslide in the suburb of Santa Tecla, but the search is slowly turning into one of recovering bodies. Host Lisa Simeone speaks with reporter Michael Lanchin in El Salvador.

Grace Spruch has a thousand stories about the squirrels she's been inviting into her fifth floor Greenwich Village apartment. She shares some of those stories -- and squirrel time -- with NPR's Margot Adler. (6:00) Squirrels at My Window: Life With a Remarkable Gang of Urban Squirrels, by Grace Marmor Spruch, is published by Johnson Books. ISBN # 1555662579.

The bell at First Congregational Church in Woodbury, Connecticut rings every hour. It's been doing that for 150 years. Now, the town council is considering putting a stop to the bell's ring between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m. Residents are complaining the bell is keeping them awake. Noah Adams talks with Mark Heillishorn, pastor of First Congregational.

NPR's David Welna reports from Orange, Texas, where a dozen residents took part in a role-playing exercise as a congressional committee trying to divvy up the federal budget. The group concluded that the $1.6 trillion tax cut proposed by President George Bush wasn't a prudent idea until the national debt is paid off.

NPR's Nina Totenberg reports on a Supreme Court decision that hospitals cannot reinstate a practice of testing pregnant patients for drugs and turning over the results to the police, unless they get the woman's permission first. The justices ruled 6-3 that testing women who did not understand that the results could be used to prosecute them was a violation of the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches.

It's been 6 months since a tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter of a million people in a dozen countries. As NPR's Margot Adler reports, the billions of dollars in aid that have poured into those countries is only beginning to make a dent.

Actress Lauren Ambrose plays daughter Claire Fisher on the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. Also a classically trained opera singer, Ambrose appeared on stage last year in the Sam Shepard play Buried Child at London's National Theatre. (This interview originally aired July 6, 2005.)

Executive producer and actor Jeff Garlin and actress Susie Essman discuss the hit HBO comedy series. Garlin plays Larry David's affable best friend and agent. Essman plays Garlin's wife — with a no-nonsense attitude and a foul mouth. This interview originally aired on Sept. 6, 2007.