NPR News

Editor's note: This report contains a racial slur.

Here's one thing historians know to be true about Harriet Wilson: Some indomitable part of her spirit allowed her to survive a life on the margins of American society.

A Libyan comedian previously based in Portland is taking legal action against U.S. Customs and Border Protection after he says he was illegally detained in Spokane.

Mohanad Elshieky says federal officers took him off a bus and questioned him at Spokane’s Greyhound station in January 2019.

A new federal grant aims to improve wildlife habitat and migration corridors in the Northwest. About $100,000 is going to a project related to a wildlife underpass that will be built under U.S. Highway 95 in North Idaho.

Valentine's Day is one of the busiest days of the year for those who work in restaurants. It's also a day that many in the industry love to hate.

R&B singer R. Kelly has again been charged by federal prosecutors in Illinois. Thursday's filing, which includes 13 charges, supersedes an indictment filed last July and accuses Kelly with sexually abusing another minor.

The minor added to Thursday's federal indictment in Illinois was about 14 years old when the abuse allegedly started in about 1997 and lasted for more than three years.

A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court decision blocking states' requirements that people must work in order to receive Medicaid.

Residents of Kentucky and Arkansas brought the action against Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, contending that Azar "acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner when he approved Medicaid demonstration requests for Kentucky and Arkansas."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed, writing in an opinion posted Friday that the secretary's authorization was indeed unlawful.

On a recent morning, Matt Marshall sat at a back table in Jim Bob's Chuck Wagon, a café in an old timber town about a half-hour outside of Seattle.

It was the eve of a political rally that Marshall had spent months planning. He scribbled last-minute notes in a homemade booklet, a Christmas present from his daughter. On the front, in black marker, she had drawn the logo of the Washington Three Percent, the name of her dad's militia.

Although, that's not the word he uses.

"We're absolutely not a paramilitary," he said. "We're a nonprofit corporation."

As of Friday, China had reported more than 55,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 1,300 deaths from the virus. In countries around the world, there are now at least 366 cases, including 15 confirmed in the U.S.

After years of trying, a Southern California aquarium has two very tiny — and very rare — bundles of joy.

Two weedy seadragons recently hatched at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. The delicate creatures resemble bits of seaweed and are distant cousins of the seahorse. And they're notoriously difficult to breed.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET

More than 1,700 health workers in China have been infected with the new coronavirus, according to Chinese officials. Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the country's National Health Commission, announced Friday that at least 1,716 health workers had confirmed cases — and that six have died from the disease now known as COVID-19.

Chunlin Leonhard spends most of her time alone in her room at a hotel at the Travis Air Force Base in California, anxiously reading the latest news about the coronavirus outbreak in China.

"I'm doing about as well as can be hoped for under the circumstances," Leonhard, 55, a New Orleans law professor, says during an interview over Skype.

Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET

The Justice Department announced Friday that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will not be charged following an allegation by the department's inspector general that he lied to investigators about a leak to the media.

In a letter to McCabe's attorneys, the department said that "based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed."

The decision is not likely to sit well with President Trump.

Updated 11:30 a.m. ET on Saturday

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper spoke Saturday about a newly reached deal between the U.S. and the Taliban to deescalate the longest-running war in American history.

The "reduction in violence" deal will take place over a seven-day period and ultimately will aim to bring the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan down to 8,600 from around 12,000 over the following months.

The 8,600 number will still include counterterrorism and training operations.

More than 1,300 people, almost all in China, have now died from COVID-19 — the newly minted name for the coronavirus disease first identified in Wuhan, China, that has infected more than 55,000 people.

Yet according to the World Health Organization, the disease is relatively mild in about 80% of cases, based on preliminary data from China.

What does mild mean?

And how does this disease turn fatal?

When Neylan McBaine told her friends in Brooklyn that she was moving to Salt Lake City a few years ago, she was shocked by the negative reactions she got. People warned her that Utah was unfriendly to women.

"I got a lot of comments that my girls were not going to be raised in an environment that empowered them," she said. "They were going to be told that they couldn't work, and would have no examples of modern women to look up to."

All this week, World Cafe has been taking you on a tour of the Charlottesville, Va., music scene with our Sense Of Place series. Next month we'll continue our musical tour of Virginia with Sense Of Place: Richmond.

How can more women allow themselves to experience sexual pleasure?

Eddie Chang and his three daughters lost a wife and mother when E.F. Wen died of colon cancer 10 years ago.

They're still grieving but are comforted when they read her old journals and share stories.

Eddie Chang visited StoryCorps in 2017 with his youngest daughter, Tria, now 36, to tell her the story of how he first met her mother.