NPR News

As 2011 winds down, Morning Edition is looking at music we missed over the past 12 months. Gregory Douglass is a pianist and guitarist from a small town in Vermont who blends electronic pop with folk and rock. At 31, he has already recorded eight albums, most of them released on a label he founded.

Douglass creates the sort of textured sound that you'd think comes from a big-budget studio, but he's on his own. His fans pre-order his albums before they're recorded, which helps pay his production costs. His latest is titled Lucid.

Let the buses roll. A week before Iowa caucus-goers start the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were starting cross-state bus tours on Tuesday (although Gingrich's would be an abbreviated tour, The Des Moines Register reported.)

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

This year, the federal government gave billions of dollars of stimulus money to medical providers to help speed up their use of electronic health records. The idea is for doctors to coordinate care better so that patients can see their charts online, and to allow clinics to grade their doctors.

Oregon is ahead of the curve. Sixty-five percent of clinicians have electronic medical records, compared to about 45 percent nationwide.

Host Robert Siegel speaks with New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz about the lawsuit against the NFL by former players who have had concussions.

The funeral of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is expected to begin Tuesday night, East Coast time. NPR's Anthony Kuhn is watching events from South Korea, and speaks to host Robert Siegel from the capital, Seoul.

Listeners weigh in on a story about more and more hospitals in Massachusetts saying no to early deliveries; and an interview about the biopic My Week with Marilyn. Host Robert Siegel reads listeners' emails.

Host Robert Siegel speaks with Cassee Cain and Ziyuan Liu, who recently won the team portion of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. The high-schoolers from Oak Ridge, Tenn., modified the Kinect device for Microsoft's Xbox 360 in order to analyze human gait. Cain and Liu hope to use the device to diagnose and treat medical problems that affect movement.

It's been another warm, rainy day in much of the Northeast, with temperatures in some areas topping 40 degrees. If you hate shoveling snow, or paying big heating bills, that's good news. But for people who love winter sports — and for thousands of businesses that rely on snow for winter tourism — this month's October-like weather has been painful.

Arab League monitors visited the central city of Homs, an opposition stronghold, besieged and under bombardment by the Syrian army until the monitors showed up. Syrian army armor was withdrawn from the city streets ahead of the visit, but activists say they expect a resumption of the army offensive as soon as the monitors leave. They also complain that they have not been allowed to meet with the Arab League team.

All this week, we're highlighting moments from each of the presidential candidates' stump speeches. Today, we hear from Rick Perry in Muscatine, Iowa.