NPR News

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.

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.

Today at All Things Considered, we continue a project we're calling NewsPoet. Each month, we bring in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end of the day, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's stories.

The popular HBO series Game of Thrones, adapted from the books of George R.R. Martin, is one blood-soaked power play after another. But in a world where brute strength can be the difference between life and a slow death, one of the show's strongest characters stands less than 5 feet tall.

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.

U.S. diplomats were relieved this weekend when China allowed a prominent dissident, Chen Guangcheng, to fly to New York with his family.

China, too, is presumably happy that Chen is no longer in the country doing his advocacy work. Chinese exiles tend to fade into obscurity when they leave the country, and Beijing might be counting on that to happen with Chen.

But social media may be changing this equation.

Why did the chicken cross the road? That's just about the only bit of chicken-related trivia not answered by the cover story in Smithsonian magazine's new food issue this month.