All Things Considered

Bernard Farrell obsesses over every bite he eats, every minute of exercise he gets, and everything that stresses him out. And, more than anything else, Farrell obsesses over his blood sugar.

He has to. Farrell, 55, has Type 1 diabetes.

"Pretty much everything affects our blood sugar," says Farrell, of Littleton, Mass.

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."

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.

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's new novel, The Colonel, tells the story of an Iranian military figure whose personal life demonstrates the strains in the social and political order of his native land.

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.