Lambada joins pop, jazz meets rap and flamenco gets an R&B makeover. On this week's Alt.Latino, breathtaking new songs bring together an unusual mix of genres.

The sport — yes, sport — of monster truck driving has come a long way. What started in the late '70s as intermission entertainment for tractor-pulling competitions is now a multimillion-dollar industry that tours the world. "We are a show," says veteran Rod Schmidt, "but yet we're racers."

A little more than a year ago, NPR launched the Road Back to Work series, following six people in St. Louis who started 2011 unemployed and were searching for work. Like so many Americans, the people we followed have had difficulty getting health coverage, even after returning to work.

This week All Songs Considered: an exclusive premiere from M. Ward's upcoming album, an electronic maven with a knack for pop songcraft, and a surprise pick from NPR's backyard.

The protracted negotiations have brought up dark memories, especially between Greece and Germany. In the central town of Distomo, site of a Nazi massacre in 1944, the past is still painfully vivid but there's hope for a European future.

The eurozone crisis has focused attention on debt-burdened Greece. Meanwhile, Portugal is seen as the international creditors' poster-child for obediently slashing spending and welfare benefits. But Portugal's national debt continues to grow, and it's mired in recession and unemployment.

Soprano Joyce El-Khoury and tenor Brian Jagde are young, fresh-faced opera singers at the dawn of promising careers. Here, their deliciously sung Puccini reverberates off the walls of NPR Music.

Back when refrigeration wasn't up to modern standards, Fat Tuesday was a time to clear the house of rich, indulgent foods. A Swedish church in Portland, Ore., keeps the Swedish version of the baking tradition alive, if not the religious observance.

Do-it-yourselfers have made everything from bamboo bicycles to 3-D printers, but nothing as ambitious as the Open Source Ecology project. On a farm in northwest Missouri, tractors and other industrial machines are made from scratch, with detailed plans on how to do it yourself shared online.

Every answer consists of two adjoining U.S. states. Each clue is a four-letter word formed by one or more letters starting one of the state names plus one or more letters starting the other state name. For example, given "mist," the answer would be "Mississippi" and "Tennessee," or "Missouri" and "Tennessee."