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A federal court has ruled that Oklahoma cannot implement a state ban on Islamic Sharia law. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a previous ruling blocking Oklahoma's Sharia ban.

Dirty words are once again front and center at the Supreme Court, which is considering a challenge to a regulation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to punish broadcasters for the fleeting use of vulgar language.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Last week in Boston, 7,000 mathematicians, math teachers and math enthusiasts from all over the world converged for something called the Joint Mathematics Meeting. Naturally, there was a lot of this...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: C plus S minus two.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, S is A plus B and C is two.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: Right.

BLOCK: But reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro also found a lot that he wasn't expecting.

Melissa Block talks with NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving about Tuesday's first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.

After months of campaigning and millions of dollars in TV ads, the first presidential primary is Tuesday in New Hampshire. Audie Cornish talks with NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson about what to expect when the results roll in.

When the current president of South Korea Lee Myung-bak took office four years ago, he turned a cold shoulder to engagement with North Korea. The conservative wing in South Korea opposed improving relations with Pyongyang. But that has proven to be an unpopular policy, and now Lee finds himself in the difficult position of appealing for closer ties in this unpredictable transition period in North Korea. Lee goes to Beijing Monday to seek Chinese backing for this policy shift.

The children of the Republican presidential candidates have been almost as present on the campaign trail as the candidates themselves. Sometimes they just serve as a backdrop on TV, other times as valuable surrogates.

In Israel, it might become a crime to use Nazi comparisons to criticize someone. As the AP puts it, a bill under consideration by parliament would "would impose penalties of up to six months in jail and a $25,000 fine for using the word 'Nazi' or Holocaust symbols for purposes other than teaching, documentation or research."

Not too long ago Nokia was the largest tech company in Europe. Its market cap rivaled Microsoft's. It helped create the mobile phone industry as we know it. But the emergence of a new generation of smartphones — led by Apple's iPhone and Android-based offerings from Samsung, HTC and others — left Nokia behind.

Eight colleges in Georgia will now become four, the State Board of Regents announced today. The move wil affect about 36,000 students and was proposed in an effort to save money.

Binge drinking in America looks to be an even bigger problem than we thought.

About 1 in 6 Americans, or 17 percent of the population, went on at least one drinking binge in a month last year, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That works out to 38 million people.

NPR's Neal Conan reads from listener comments on previous show topics, including the moment that changed your life, differences between identical twins, and a proposal for a new calendar.

Sites like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org are designed to verify political claims and hold politicians accountable. But critics say fact-checking entities are themselves biased. The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post discuss fact-checking in American politics.

Each year, film fans and studio executives travel to Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, a premiere showcase for independent film from around the world. Robert Redford, founder of the Sundance Institute, offers a preview of what attendees can expect at the 2012 festival.

The demonstrations that spread across the Middle East in 2011 unseated leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Yemen's president has agreed to step down and violence continues in Syria. NPR foreign correspondents discuss developments since the Arab Spring and what they mean for the region and the U.S.

The victims of a North Carolina program that forcibly sterilized thousands of people should receive $50,000 in compensation, a task force said Tuesday. The AP writes that this is first time, the state tries to make up for a eugenics program that ran from the 1930s until 1977.

Before any payments are made, however, the state Legislature must approve the panel's recommendation.

The AP reports:

Primary Day in New Hampshire turned into open season as GOP rivals launched a barrage of attacks seeking to undermine front-runner Mitt Romney, whose campaign hopes to live up to expectations that he will deliver a solid victory.

Not only does Romney need to win, he needs to win convincingly — holding challengers such as Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and a resurgent Jon Huntsman comfortably at arm's length.

I don't know about you, but when I spoon into store-bought ice cream or chomp into hot dogs, I don't consider it a risky activity, one that could land me in the dentist's chair with a broken tooth. But it turns out that this does happen. Even Costco, the giant warehouse retailer, says it's true.