For the first time, an Arab woman has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, Saturday, Tawakkul Karman known as the "mother of Yemen's democratic revolution"-- shared the 2011 prize with two Liberian women, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, who helped lead the protests that ousted former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

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GUY RAZ, HOST:

Turning now to domestic politics. The Iowa caucuses are just about three weeks away now. Herman Cain is gone. Newt Gingrich is the new front-runner. And Mitt Romney is slipping somewhat in the polls. Meanwhile, the attacks among the GOP contenders are getting sharper. And against that backdrop, there's another debate tonight. This one at Drake University in Des Moines.

Tens of thousands of Russians turned out for rallies in Moscow and other cities Saturday to protest alleged fraud in last week's parliamentary elections. The protests appear to be the biggest mass demonstrations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Peter van Dyk reports from Moscow about the protest there.

Part of a monthlong series

Since Katrina, the Hispanic population in the New Orleans metro area has skyrocketed by more than 33,000 people. That's a 57-percent increase in the past decade, much higher than the national average.

They came for the construction jobs — and they've chosen to stay. Often, you can find about a dozen Latino men hanging out near a home improvement store looking for work near a mostly black neighborhood.

The nation's oldest black church reopens to the public this week after a $9-million restoration fueled in part by federal stimulus funds, and completed in painstaking detail despite the recession. Shannon Mullen tours Boston's African Meeting House with the woman who led the project.

Tea Party voters were expected to play a key role in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, but with movement hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry low in the polls, and Herman Cain now out of the race, the Tea Party vote remains very much in play. New Hampshire Public Radio's Josh Rogers reports.

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Chung Pei-Ma is a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, and she led the team that published the research which appears this week in the journal Nature. She joins us on the phone. Thanks so much for being with us.

DR. CHUNG PEI-MA: Thank you very much.

SIMON: So how inadequate was my explanation of black holes, and...

PEI-MA: No. That was beautiful. That was exactly what I was going to say, and I have nothing more to add.

SIMON: Well...

PEI-MA: We're finished.

Opposition politicians and press pundits in France warn that the Sarkozy-Merkel plan to save the Euro will make France subservient to Germany. They say France will lose its sovereignty by giving a German-dominated EU control over French fiscal policy. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley pounded the pavement of Paris for days, however, and could not find a single rank-and-file French citizen who shared these fears.

European Union leaders completed a marathon of treaty negotiations overnight to address the continent's debt crisis. Host Scott Simon checks in with NPR's Philip Reeves about how this new plan will impact Europe.

This week, the Senate blocked the confirmation of Richard Cordray, the former Ohio attorney general chosen by President Obama to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It boils down to yet another partisan fight: Republicans say the agency has too much power, and the White House says they won't weaken an agency that is supposed to protect consumers. Host Scott Simon talks with Joe Nocera, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.