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Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race Thursday. It was a rare defeat for an otherwise successful businessman, politician and Olympic Games chairman.

With the 2004 presidential election centering on "battleground states" such as Florida and Ohio, Nebraska gets little attention. The Cornhusker State, with five electoral votes, has voted Republican in every presidential race since 1968. Hear NPR's Liane Hansen.

While many musicians love the Crescent City, few choose to stay after they become successful. The New Orleans-raised Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews comes from a long line of brass-band greats, but is quickly coming into his own with a jazz-funk group — and plans to stay.

Thailand has killed more than 40 million chickens this year in an effort to stop a deadly strain of bird flu that's killed at least 17 people in the country. But the virus keeps resurfacing. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.

Host Jacki Lyden speaks with editors of three small-town papers about what issues their readers care about this election season. Though some towns have historically had high voter turnout, the editors say this year voters are much more motivated by local issues than by the chance to choose a president. We hear from Tom Lawrence of the Whitefish Pilot, in Whitefish, Montana; J.D. Davidson of the Times-Journal in Fort Payne, Alabama and Ross Connelly of the Hardwick Gazette, in Hardwick, Vermont.

Mom and pop bookstores vie for your literary dollar this season, hoping you'll shop sooner rather than later. NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg talks to three independent booksellers about their best bets to expand the mind and open the wallet.

Time to read during the holidays, away from school and work, is a gift you give yourself, author and book critic Alan Cheuse says. His suggested list of 2005 holiday gifts includes tales of space, dinosaurs, music and a mystical poet.

On Opening Day of the baseball season, Liane talks with Jim Morris, a Texas high school baseball coach whose kids made a deal with him in the spring of 1999: they'd pursue their dreams, if he did, too. The former minor league pitcher, who'd retired a decade earlier because of injuries, went out for a tryout camp -- and found himself throwing the ball faster than he ever had before. Before the year was out, he was pitching in the big leagues for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, as a 35 year old rookie. Liane talks with Jim Morris, who tells his remarkable story in a new book, The Oldest Rookie: Big League Dreams from a Small Town Guy. (9:50) (NOTE: The Oldest Rookie is published by Little, Brown).

Many Democrats saw the unruly 1968 convention in Chicago as one of the reasons they lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon that year. That defeat and a landslide loss four years later led the Democrats to change the way they approached conventions.

Some of the most advanced climate models show global warming hurting agricultural production in the world's poorest regions. But Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA scientist who's studied this question for 20 years, has faith that solutions are within reach.