State and National News

NPR announced today that it has hired news application editor Brian Boyer to lead a new "news apps" team dedicated to bolstering NPR's storytelling with even more interactive components. That means more data-driven reporting features like this Poisoned Places map and interactive visuals similar to the work for the recent series The Fracking Boom.

Warning: This post, about a song by Balthrop, Alabama (a 10-piece Brooklyn band, not a extremely musical township), includes numerous instances of coordinated jazz hands and chorus line kicks. The band's new song "You've Gotta Be Gay," is filled with theatrical sounds from all different places and times: stomps, grunts and rattles from a 1930s chain gang, a tinny player-piano from an old-timey saloon and an accordion out of every stereotypical Parisian boulevard scene.

At 60 degrees north, at high noon on January 6, in Finland, I saw the sun six degrees above the horizon and truly realized we live on a sphere. Some 10,000 years ago a people speaking a non-Indo-European language, the Finns, migrated into this northern land.

For these past 10,000 years an oral tradition of folk tales and songs called the Kalevala has been kept alive by the people. Generation after generation the Finns sat knee to knee, facing one another, hand holding hand, next to the fire, rocking, telling the tales. For 10,000 years.

President Obama said the U.S. was making "diligent progress" in their negotiations with Pakistan over the reopening of a crucial supply line into Afghanistan.

Obama said he didn't think that issue would be solved by the end of the NATO Summit in Chicago, but "we are making diligent progress on it."

Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari met on the sidelines of the summit. Obama said while their talk was brief he "emphasized... Pakistan has to be part of the solution" in Afghanistan.

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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is stepping down after three contentious years on the job. NPR's Tamara Keith reports.

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We're going to stay on campus for another minute or two, to hear a sampling of advice from this year's class of commencement speakers, including President Obama and Mitt Romney.

MITT ROMNEY: Sometimes, as Dr. Victor Frankel observed in his book for the ages, it's not a matter of what we're asking of life but rather, what life is asking of us. How often the answer to our own problems is to help others with theirs.

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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish. Now to the sentencing of Dharun Ravi. He's the Rutgers University student who was convicted in a high profile cyber-bullying case on charges including a hate crime.

Ravi could have faced as much as 10 years in jail. Today, he was sentenced to far less: 30 days. He first got into trouble for using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate at Rutgers and then tweeted about it. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself soon afterwards.

The SpaceX unmanned rocket will try to lift off again, after its first attempt was scrubbed a half-second before launch on Saturday.

So much for compromise.

A total of 43 Catholic educational, charitable and other entities filed a dozen lawsuits in federal court around the nation Monday, charging that the Obama Administration's rule requiring coverage of birth control in most health insurance plans violates their religious freedom.