The race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is fixing to get, as we Southerners tongue-in-cheekly say, about as slippery as a greased pig in a hog wallow. Nasty as a old possum in a croaker sack. Murky as South Carolina swamp mud.

The Republican primary focus is shifting to the South, where folks talk and act different from the rest of the country. And where they look for different characteristics in candidates than other regions of the ...

The arrest of four executives of Megaupload, a major Internet file-sharing site, has triggered an online backlash and raised fresh questions about electronic piracy and copyright violations. What's behind the controversy? NPR asked two experts to help clarify the facts behind the arrests.

Robert Siegel interviews filmmaker Lavinia Currier about the music used in her film Oka!, which depicts the journey of Louis Sarno, who traveled to the Central African Republic as an ethnomusicologist to record the music of the Bayaka pygmies. Like Sarno, the Oka! film crew traveled to the Central African Republic with sound engineer Chris Berry, who developed a portable sound studio specifically for recording music in the field. Berry taught the Bayaka how to use multi-tracking equipment to compose their own songs.

One of the largest file-sharing sites on the Internet, Megaupload, was taken down following a criminal indictment charging racketeering and copyright violations. Apparently, the group known as Anonymous retaliated with denial-of-service attacks on the Department of Justice website. This came a day after a massive Internet protest against proposed anti-pirating bills.

As our friend Micki Maynard at Changing Gears says, "forget live streams watching the giant panda in Edinburgh, or the weather in Chicago. The newest Internet plaything is the Wisconsin Web Cam."

Palestine might not seem like a breeding ground for race car drivers. After all, the area is dotted with checkpoints and roadblocks, hundreds of obstacles that can cramp a driver's ability to explore a car's limits.

But that hasn't stopped a group of Palestinian women from driving very fast, winning races and making a name for themselves along the way.

Scientists have said that they are voluntarily putting some controversial bird flu research on hold.

The move to suspend the work for 60 days comes in response to critics who say their work is dangerous.

People rarely get sick with bird flu, caused by the H5N1 virus, and when they do, they're generally not contagious.

We wouldn't want to say that $7,922,500 isn't an awful lot to pay for one set of four books.

But we do have to point out that it's not a record.

Thursday, we previewed the Christie's New York auction of a rare set of John James Audubon's Birds of America. As we reported, there was talk that it might fetch more than the record $11.5 million paid for another full set of the books in 2010.

A judge in New Zealand today ordered that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (a.k.a. Kim Schmitz) and three others remain in custody at least until a bail hearing on Monday as the legal process of possibly extraditing them to the U.S. to face copyright infringement and conspiracy charges got underway.