A few times a year, various representatives of NPR Music head off to music festivals, sometimes to webcast or broadcast the events and sometimes to scout for tomorrow's obsessions. The loftiest goal we set for our scouting jaunts — whether at South by Southwest in March or at CMJ in New York each fall — is to come home smitten with a new band or singer we'd never heard of a week earlier.

Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who has cultivated a following among some social conservatives in his party, said Monday he was officially entering the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Santorum never really gave politics watchers any reasons to doubt he would enter the wide open race for the GOP nomination. His interest in the White House has long been known though his resounding 2006 Senate re-election defeat at the hands of Democrat Sen. Bob Casey placed more than a little speed bump in front of those plans.

In his day, Austrian-born Robert Fuchs was known more as a distinguished pedagogue than as a composer. He counted Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Franz Schmidt, Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold among his students.

Sprouts from an organic farm in Northern Germany, thought to be a source of the Escherichia coli outbreak sweeping the country, may not be to blame after all.

Finished tests of 23 samples (out of 40 taken) from a farm located between Hannover and Hamburg failed to detect the outbreak strain of bacteria, officials in the German state of Lower Saxony said. Additional tests are under way.

Bidding on TV broadcast rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics will take place Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland, and there seems to be a decent chance that NBC — working without longtime NBC sports chief Dick Ebersol, who recently resigned after failing to reach terms with the leadership that came in when Comcast took over — won't be the winner, for the first time since CBS carried the Winter Games in 1998.

After nearly two years in prison on a gun charge, former New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress was released this morning.

Now, the watch is on to see if he plays in the National Football League again.

There is, of course, recent precedent to cite. After nearly two years in prison on a conviction related to dog fighting, quarterback Michael Vick, once a star with the Atlanta Falcons, returned to the league in 2009 and to stardom with the Philadelphia Eagles.

In what The Associated Press decribes as a "strong voice," former International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn this morning pleaded not guilty to the charge that he attempted to rape a maid at a Manhattan hotel last month.

As the AP adds, "the 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn is on house arrest under armed guard. The French politician resigned his IMF post after his May 14 arrest."

After a hiatus caused by traveling, royalty, and other inconveniences, the morning roundup returns.

In the beginning, God created light and dark, severed day from night, land from sea, and created all the birds of the air, fish of the sea, and plants and animals of the world. Then he created Adam and Eve in His very image and set humanity in dominion over all of creation.

We of the Abrahamic religions were, and many remain, enchanted. In the West, this enchantment lasted until the 16th century with the black and white magi. The former sought by occult magic to stand nature on her head and wrest their due.

The deaths of five American troops today in central Iraq makes for an awful milestone. It is "the single largest loss of life for the American military in Iraq in the past two years," The Associated Press notes.

And, "the deaths raised to 4,459 the number of American service members who have died in Iraq, according to an Associated Press count."