NPR News

Many have had good fun at the expense of Big Tex, the 52-foot cowboy that burnt down in Dallas today.

But Big Tex was an institution, an icon of the State Fair of Texas, as big and bold as the great state itself.

NPR's John Burnett, a Dallas native, remembered him on All Things Considered today. He told this story:

Grizzly Bear began in 2004 as a bedroom project for Ed Droste. By 2006, Droste had a full band alongside him: Daniel Rossen, Christopher Bear and Chris Taylor. They released Yellow House the same year, but it was 2009's Veckatimest that propelled the group to worldwide fame.

Circumcisions have been virtually suspended in Germany for the past four months. The practice was effectively banned after a regional court in Cologne ruled that circumcision amounts to assault.

That controversial ruling this summer alienated the country's 120,000 registered Jews and 4 million Muslims, who saw it as a violation of religious freedom. It also fueled accusations of intolerance in a country still haunted by its Nazi past.

By this point in the campaign season, the presidential polls may have your head spinning. Romney's up 7 points in one, Obama's up 3 in another ... and on any given day, a dozen other polls are swirling, each offering a different take.

For nearly three weeks, the benches at the back of a federal courtroom in Minneapolis were filled with local Somalis. The man on trial, Mahamud Said Omar, was accused of conspiring to help a terrorist group recruit some two dozen young Minnesota men to fight a holy war in Somalia.

It took a federal jury just eight hours to convict him of all of the five terrorism charges leveled against him, but the verdict is only the beginning for the Somali community in the Twin Cities.

For all the attention paid to women in this race, there's another gender gap — with white men.

The Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned in northeastern Florida on Friday, where thousands of men had descended on Daytona Beach for the annual motorcycle festival Biketoberfest.

A bunch of them were at Willie's Tropical Tattoo smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and listening to music.