For the last 18 years, the Essence Music Festival has been the go-to event for African-Americans, especially African-American women. For three days in New Orleans, hundreds of thousands show up for R&B and gospel concerts and panels on politics, financial planning and parenting.
If it's a party, as creator George Wein describes it, it's a party with a purpose.
"New Orleans is a party city and they party," Wein says. "People party here. If you go to the hotels — 40-floor hotels — [there's] like 40 floors of parties."
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has announced that he opposes the expansion of Medicaid as provided in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the creation of state insurance exchanges. Melissa Block talks to Emily Ramshaw, editor at the Texas Tribune, for more on what Perry's announcement means for Texas.
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.
Mark McCowan, 47, was diagnosed with the worst stage of black lung only five years after an X-ray showed he had no sign of the disease.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
Men wait for the Beckley Black Lung Association meeting to begin. A fight for safer regulations dramatically decreased the hazards of mining.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
Miners who were turned away by other doctors often went to Donald Rasmussen, a pulmonologist, to learn whether they might have the disease.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
Miners waiting for their examination. After years of decline in black lung there has been a sudden surge in diagnosis, especially among younger miners.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
East Gulf, one of the largest mining companies in the area of Rhodell and Beckley, W.Va., in 1974.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
Miners undergo tests in the black lung laboratory at the Appalachian Regional Hospital.
Credit David Deal for NPR
Coal miners are tested for black lung at a clinic in West Virginia.
Credit Jack Corn / US National Archives
A miner at the black lung laboratory in the Appalachian Regional Hospital in Beckley, W.Va., has his lung capacity tested. Blood samples were also taken and his heartbeat was monitored while walking on a treadmill. These and other tests were used to determine if miners had coal dust particles in their lungs.
Credit David Deal for NPR
Patty and Gary Quarles lost their son, Gary Wayne Quarles, in the explosion at Upper Big Branch mine. Their son's post-mortem diagnosis indicated he had black lung, a puzzling finding since he was only 33.
Credit David Deal for NPR
Donald Rasmussen, 84, is a pulmonologist in Beckley, W.Va. He figures he's tested 40,000 coal miners in the last 50 years.
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.
A professor at The University of Texas has figured out how to intercept drones while in flight. Todd Humphreys and his team taps into the GPS coordinates of a civilian drone and can alter the flight path, even land it. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz speaks with Humphreys about how he did it and the dangers that hacking can present.
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.
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.
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.
