Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste reads from her latest novel on the second night of this year's Calabash festival. Mengiste says the audience at Calabash is one of a kind.
Credit Hugh Wright /
Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes (left) facilitates a discussion with author and sociology scholar Orlando Patterson at this year's Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica.
There's a stretch of beach in the small Jamaican fishing village of Treasure Beach where booths sell poetry books right alongside jerk chicken, and local villagers mix with international literati. On a weekend in late May, some 2,000 people sit entranced as author and poet Fred D'Aguiar reads them his work from a bamboo lectern.
States are banding together to try to combat prescription drug abuse. Doctors in many states check a database before prescribing medication. But there's no way for doctors who live on the border to check neighboring states. Now there's a move to change that.
Joseph Ochieng, 18, gets circumcised at the Siaya General Hospital in western Kenya.
Credit Jason Beaubien / NPR
A health worker in western Kenya talks to young men about the benefits of male circumcision.
Credit Jason Beaubien / NPR
Outreach workers are trying to persuade local fishermen to get circumcised.
Credit Jason Beaubien / NPR
At Osindo Beach, local fishermen come in from fishing on Lake Victoria. Some fishermen are reluctant to get circumcised because they would miss three days of work.
The African nation of Kenya is attempting to get more than 1 million men between the ages of 15 and 49 circumcised by the end of 2013. If successful, this could be a groundbreaking effort in the fight to curb the spread of HIV.
Around the time I turned 12, I figured out exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an alcoholic.
I didn't actually know what it meant to be an alcoholic, but I knew that one day, I would drink copious amounts and dash around the streets of Paris, preferably in the company of bullfighters, bankrupts, impotent newspaper correspondents, and morbidly depressed, exotically beautiful divorcees.
Feng Jianmei and her husband could not pay $6,000 in fines for violating China's one-child policy. In June, when she was seven months pregnant, local officials abducted her and forced her to have an abortion, her family says. The case has provoked widespread outrage.
Credit Peter Parks / AFP/Getty Images
People wait to have their blood pressure checked in Shanghai in April. China's one-child policy is more than just a human rights issue; demographers warn that the low birth rate will result in a shortage of workers to drive the economy.
Credit Peter Parks / AFP/Getty Images
A mother and child walk in Shanghai. China's one-child policy has been in place since 1979. There's now a debate about whether the policy should be eased or dropped.
Credit Mark Ralston / AFP/Getty Images
Young and old exercise at the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing in October. Experts say China's health care costs will be difficult to fund due to the population imbalance.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
Zhang Yanyun paints buildings in east China's Jiangsu province. He has three kids, but wishes he only had one because raising a child in China has become so expensive.
Credit Liu Jin / AFP/Getty Images
A mother feeds her child in Beijing, Oct. 24, 2011. Experts say many Chinese do not want to have additional children, regardless of official policy.
Deng Jiyuan and Feng Jianmei, a couple from northwest China's Shaanxi province, have a 6-year-old daughter. Under China's complicated birth calculus, they were barred from having another child. But they tried anyway.
"We planned this pregnancy because our parents are old, they want us to have another child," Deng, 30, explained by cellphone last month from his home in Shaanxi.
That decision led to a sequence of events that has ignited a firestorm and renewed debate over the country's one-child policy.
Susan Underwood prices fireworks, while her husband Michael (left) and Clint Simmons pace themselves with a snack and TV last month at their tent along Highway 416 in Sevier County, Tenn. Over in Middle Tennessee, the drought has led city leaders to ban fireworks this year.
Freddie Bowers and his dad, Larry, have sold fireworks in LaVergne, Tenn., for a lifetime. But, the sparklers are off limits this year since the region has had the hottest streak in recorded history and several small fires in the area have been blamed on fireworks.
For people in the fireworks business, Christmas usually comes in July. Only this year, three-quarters of the country are experiencing some level of drought and from the Mountain West to the Southeast, cities are temporarily banning fireworks.
Former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond leaves Parliament amid a crowd of reporters in London on Wednesday. Diamond, who resigned Tuesday, was questioned about a growing interest-rate manipulation scandal.
The fallen leader of Barclays Bank got on the hot seat before members of the British Parliament on Wednesday. Robert Diamond, an American, resigned Tuesday as CEO of the bank — the latest executive to lose his job over an interest-rate manipulation scandal.
The scandal has not only consumed Barclays, it also threatens to engulf other international banks — and high-ranking government officials, too.
Diamond started his career at Barclays on Independence Day, exactly 16 years ago. On Wednesday in London, he set off some fireworks all his own.
Moshe Rute smokes cannabis at the Hadarim nursing home in Kibutz Naan, Israel. In conjunction with Israel's Health Ministry, the Tikkun Olam company is distributing cannabis for medicinal purposes to more than 1,800 people in Israel.
Credit Baz Ratner / Reuters /Landov
A worker tends to cannabis plants at a plantation in northern Israel. Researchers say they have developed marijuana that can be used to ease the symptoms of some ailments without getting patients high.
Israel has become a world leader in the use of medical marijuana. More than 10,000 patients have received government licenses to consume the drug to treat ailments such as cancer and chronic pain.
But while the unorthodox treatment has gained acceptance in Israel, it still has its critics.
Susan Malkah breathes in the cloud of smoke from a plastic inhaler especially formulated for medical marijuana use. She has a number of serious ailments and is confined to a wheelchair.
The Highwaymen are a group of African-American artists based in Fort Pierce, Fla., who began painting in the 1960s. (Clockwise from top left: Harold Newton, James Gibson, Mary Ann Carroll and Al Black are just a few.)
Credit Courtesy of the A.E. Backus Museum and Gallery
A.E. Backus with friends in his Fort Pierce studio
Credit Jacki Lyden / NPR
Highwaymen paintings hang in the background at Jetson's Appliance store in Florida.
Credit Alfred Hair / Courtesy of Gary Monroe
Credit Courtesy of the A.E. Backus Museum and Gallery
Spanish Bayonets on the Indian River. This painting by A.E. Backus suggests an influence on The Highwaymen
Credit Courtesy of Mary Ann Carroll/Gary Monroe/University Press of Florida
A painting by Mary Ann Carroll, one of 26 painters known as The Highwaymen, who were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004.
Credit Courtesy of Gary Monroe
Mary Ann Carroll is, to this day, the only female member of The Highwaymen. She is also a pastor, when she isn't painting, at her own church in Fort Pierce, Fla.
In the 1960s and '70s, if you were in a doctor's office, or a funeral home, or a motel in Florida, chances are a landscape painting hung on the wall. Palms arching over the water, or moonlight on an inlet. Tens of thousands of paintings like this were created by a group of self-taught African-American artists, concentrated in Fort Pierce, Fla.
