In Scranton, Pa., city workers are fuming about their sudden pay decrease. The city's mayor says there isn't enough money to pay employees their regular wages. So, the most recent paychecks reflected minimum wage — no matter what workers' previous salaries had been.
Melissa Block speaks with Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about the deteriorating situation in Mali. Islamic militants in recent days have destroyed sacred tombs in the ancient city of Timbuktu. A military coup there in March created a power vacuum, allowing the rebel and Islamist groups to take over the northern part of the country. West African leaders this past weekend urged Mali's interim government to request outside military assistance.
The Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi has published nearly 10 works of fiction. His latest novel has been censored in his home country. It's called "The Colonel," and it is out in English, translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale.
Our reviewer Alan Cheuse says it quickly becomes apparent why the Iranian government blocked its publication.
The southern African nation of Botswana is grappling with a relatively new problem in the evolving AIDS pandemic: It now has a large group of HIV-positive adolescents.
The teenagers were infected at birth before Botswana managed to almost wipe out mother-to-child transmission of the virus. These children have survived because of a public health system that provides nearly universal access to powerful anti-AIDS drugs.
It wasn't supposed to happen to coal miners in Mark McCowan's generation. It wasn't supposed to strike so early and so hard. At age 47 and just seven years after his first diagnosis, McCowan shouldn't have a chest X-ray that looks this bad.
"I'm seeing more definition in the mass," McCowan says, pausing for deep breaths as he holds the X-ray film up to the light of his living room window in Pounding Mill, Va.
Liberia is launching its first large-scale military operation since the end of its brutal civil war. Liberia's army, which has been trained by the U.S. military over the last six years, is going after mercenaries and rebels who are using thick forest as cover from which to launch ambushes in neighboring Ivory Coast.
Back in 1912, Massachusetts became the first place in America to introduce a minimum wage, but it would take another quarter century before a national minimum wage was set.
President Franklin Roosevelt made it law in 1938, that any hourly worker had to be paid at least 25 cents an hour. It was revolutionary, and very few countries had anything like it.
Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz speaks with NPR's Kelly McEvers about her reporting trip to towns in southern Yemen, which recently came under fire from what are believed to be unmanned drones.
