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

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Audie Cornish and Melissa Block talk to NPR correspondents covering the New Hampshire primary. NPR's Don Gonyea is covering the campaign of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. NPR's Robert Smith is covering the campaign of Texas Rep. Ron Paul. NPR's Tovia Smith is covering the campaign of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. And NPR's Andrea Seabrook is covering the campaign of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

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More than half of states had forced sterilization programs at one time, but few were as aggressive as North Carolina's. Some 7,600 men, women and children were sterilized by that state's eugenics board up to the mid 1970s. Sterilization was seen as a way to control welfare costs and improve the caliber of the population. Well, today, a task force in North Carolina took a step toward becoming the only state to offer compensation to eugenics victims.

From member station WFAE, Julie Rose has the story.

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.

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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 U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday testing the constitutionality of a Bush-era regulation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to punish broadcasters with stiff fines for the fleeting use of vulgar language or nude images. The FCC's rule applies only to radio and over-the-air TV networks — like Fox, ABC, NBC and PBS — but not to cable TV.

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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.

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And I'm Melissa Block.

Now a story about the challenges of military communication on the battlefield.

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO COMMUNICATION)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Roger, stand by. I believe (unintelligible) trying to push traffic for you.

BLOCK: This is radio traffic from an Army convoy in eastern Afghanistan that's having trouble communicating.

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO COMMUNICATION)

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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.

A defiant Bashar Assad addressed the nation for the first time in seven months Tuesday, making clear he has no intention of halting the violent crackdown on anti-government protesters and renegade soldiers. Assad lashed out at the Arab League, which has deployed monitors in Syria to oversee implementation of a peace plan. Two of those monitors were reported lightly wounded Tuesday in an attack near a northwestern city.