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Liane reads from listener letters and e-mails.

Will a new, 200-million dollar motor speedway revitalize the fortunes of Kansas City, Kansas? Local officials and residents hope so, since taxpayers have picked up most of the tab for the Kansas Speedway, which can accomodate 75,000 spectators. While some predict an economic boom from the new track, other are not so confident. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.

NPR's Emily Harris reports on today's rally by the National Organization for Women. Called Emergency Action for Women's Lives, the rally is targeting Senators who have the power to appoint Supreme Court Justices, and marks the beginning of a four-year campaign.

Don Covay wrote hit songs made famous by Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, Wilson Pickett and others. Now nine years after a stroke, Covay talks to Liane about his new album Ad Lib on Cannonball Records http://www.cannonballrecords.com/. He's also nominated for a W.C. Handy Award in May.

Liane speaks live with NPR's Don Gonyea from Quebec for the latest on the summit meeting.

Liane Hansen speaks with singer/songwriter Joe Jackson, who performs a selection from his new cd, Night and Day II (Sony Classical SK 89261) for us in NPR's Studio 4A. Jackson made a splash in 1979 with his seminal new wave album, Look Sharp! and soon branched out into jump blues, reggae, jazz and classical forms. His latest recording picks up where the 1982 album Night and Day left off, full of musical portraits of New York City eccentrics.

Linda Wertheimer talks to Nicholas McGegan, music director of the Gottingen Festival in Germany. He will conduct Gloria in Excelsis Deo, a composition for soprano and strings by George Frideric Handel, which has been rediscovered in a London library. Handel scholars in England and in this country have examined the work and believe that it is an authentic Handel piece and probably one of his earlier works.

As an agnostic singing in a choral society each week, Stacy Horn is often puzzled by the words and their meaning, but loves the music. She says she respects people who believe in the words behind the music -- despite no connection to them. Horn is the author of Waiting for My Cats to Die: Morbid Memoir.

NPR's Jim Zarroli reports that the blue chip Dow Jones industrial average has not declined at the same rapid clip as the battered Nasdaq during the recent stock downturn. But today the Dow fell very sharply and slipped below the 10,000 mark for the first time in five months, fresh evidence that pessimism about stocks is increasingly broad and deep.

NPR's David Welna reports on the partisan debate raging on Capitol Hill over the turmoil in the stock market and what that could mean for President Bush's tax reduction program. Republicans insist that if the economy is faltering, tax cuts need to be implemented without delay. Democrats argue that the falling stock prices mean it would be too risky to pass a 10-year tax cut plan, given the fact that there is no way to know whether the administration's long-range projections on the economy are accurate.