In "Texas Hold 'Em," the singer is accompanied by a banjo. It's often thought of as a quintessential Americana instrument. But the history of the banjo tells a different story.

The Nkamira Transit Center is home to thousands of refugees who fled violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The decades-long conflict is a legacy of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

That's the finding of a new study in Bangladesh, which gave reading glasses to hundreds of people and then measured their earnings.

Senegal's youngest ever president has been sworn-in after a dramatic prison to presidential palace rise to power.

It bills itself as a "world-class African city" but these days residents say it's anything but — with the collapse of the water system and frequent power outages.

Anthropocene refers to the age of humans — the things we've done to Earth. Geologists just rejected a proposal to declare an official "Anthropocene epoch." But everyone agrees: Damage has been done.

An 8-year-old child is only survivor. The passengers were headed to an Easter festival before the bus plunged off a bridge on a mountain pass and burst into flames.

With a dramatic jump in cases — and a strain of mpox that is deadlier than the virus that went global in 2022 — specialists are scrambling to reign it in.

Islamic insurgents and other heavily armed groups have increasingly turned to kidnapping to get money. They abduct individuals, families and even large groups and then demand to be paid to let them go. We hear the story of one family, whose life has been turned upside down by a kidnapping.

Nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren have been released, more than two weeks after the children were seized from their school in the northwestern state of Kaduna and marched into the forests.

Like many countries in Africa, The Gambia has a law criminalizing the practice of female genital mutilation. Now, amid a religious backlash, it could become the first country to repeal its ban.

Senegal will finally go to the polls this weekend, in a vote that was delayed, then reinstated. A beacon of relative stability in a restless region, its democratic resilience has been sorely tested.

Physician Céline Gounder traveled to India and Bangladesh to bring back unheard stories from the eradication of smallpox, many from health workers whose voices have been missing from the record.

How did the soda giant from America come to be seen as "local" in Africa? And what has the impact been on the continent for worse and for better?

In 2011, the world was shaken by the Arab Spring, a wave of "pro-democracy" protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The effects of the uprisings reverberated around the world as regimes fell in some countries, and civil war began in others. This week, we revisit the years leading up to the Arab Spring and its lasting impact on three people who lived through it.

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