South Carolinians are voting today in the GOP primary, which some pundits see as the candidates' last stand for getting the GOP nomination to run in the general election.

On weekends on All Things Considered today, host Guy Raz talked with Danielle Vinson, the chair of the political science department at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., about what is often considered "dirty" South Carolina primary politics.

The third major contest of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign — South Carolina's primary — is being held today and we're live blogging as the news comes in. As we post, you'll get a message alerting you that there are new updates. Just click on that message and the news should flow right into the box below.

The third major contest of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign is being held today in South Carolina and as we did during the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, we'll be helping out the NPR elections team by live blogging as the news comes in.

North and South Korea are still officially at war, even though a truce was declared more than 50 years ago. As a result, there are upwards of 22,000 North Korean defectors now living in South Korea. The journey across the heavily guarded border is treacherous and often deadly. It's been just over a month since Kim Jong Un rose to power after his father Kim Jong Il's sudden death and there are some reports of would-be defectors being shot down while trying to flee the impoverished nation.

Let me take a second here.

Not very long, was it?

But a second tied up delegates to the UN's International Telecommunication Union, who postponed a decision this week on whether to abolish the extra second that's added to clocks every few years to compensate for the earth's natural doddering.

The earth slows down slightly as we spin through space. No one falls off, but earthquakes and tides routinely slow the earth by a fraction of a fraction of a second, which makes clocks minutely wrong. If not corrected, it could make a minute of difference a century.

The race for the 2012 Republican presidential campaign has been anything but predictable.

It's been the first contest in memory, for instance, with a candidate, Mitt Romney, who was reputedly the inevitable nominee but so suspect in many Republicans' eyes that they kept searching for an alternative. That has led to nearly every candidate in the crowded field, at one time or another, challenging for frontrunner status.

The final results for Egypt's parliamentary elections are in, and while there are no surprises, the Muslim Brotherhood exceeded expectations by capturing 47 percent of the vote.

The final election results were read out Saturday with little ceremony, but the final tally cemented what most people in Egypt already know: Islamist groups are the new political powerhouse in post-revolutionary Egypt.

One hundred years ago this week, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole with a small crew of men. They all perished on the return trip. In 2008 on Weekend Edition, NPR's Daniel Zwerdling reported from the South Pole on Scott's tragic journey. To mark the 100th anniversary, we reprise that story.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Time now for your letters.

(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING AND MUSIC)

SIMON: Last week, we spoke with Clay Johnson, an open-source advocate and digital strategist, about his new book, "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption."

CLAY JOHNSON: You know, our minds are really wired to be affirmed and to be told that we're right. And that's the central premise of "The Information Diet." It's really, who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right?

Conference championship Sunday is almost as big as the Super Bowl, but without all those distracting halftime wardrobe malfunctions. Host Scott Simon is joined by NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman to discuss the upcoming games.