NPR News

Filipe and Mireille took their four young children and fled violent militias and civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo nearly five months ago.

They flew to Ecuador, then traveled on foot across Central America to reach the U.S.-Mexico border, where they waited for weeks in a long line of asylum-seekers before being allowed to cross and make the last leg of their journey.

Finally, they reached their destination: a makeshift emergency shelter in Portland, Maine — a converted minor-league sports arena now filled with cots. Filipe describes it as "paradise."

This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem.

It all started on a Tuesday night, when I came home from work to an unmistakable absence. My brown-and-white pit bull mix, Maizey, wasn't at the top of the stairs to greet me. Instead she was in her bed, shaky and confused.

When I tried to get her up, she stumbled, nearly falling over while standing still. Walking to the vet, she leaped like a puppy chasing imaginary balls.

Later, at the 24-hour veterinary clinic in San Francisco's Mission District, the staff ran some tests and determined Maizey was in no immediate danger.

Former Interpol President Meng Hongwei has pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, China's state-run newspaper People's Daily reported Thursday.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of China's Communist Party charged Hongwei with abusing his posts within the Communist Party between 2005 and 2017 to garner special benefits, promotions for his wife, and to collect bribes totaling more than 14 million yuan.

Gary and Celeste Havener live 40 miles outside of Laramie in southeast Wyoming. They spend a lot of their time growing vegetables and riding horses across the prairie.

A few weeks ago, Celeste fell off her horse.

"[I] had a very ungraceful dismount and tweaked my knee pretty good," Celeste says.

Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That's according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.

As a child, Jason Marsalis watched old television shows as much for the music as for anything the characters were doing onscreen. 

A mix-up and a bad photo contributed to a gunman shooting retired Red Sox player David Ortiz by mistake, instead of his intended target in Santo Domingo, Dominican officials announced Wednesday.

Surveillance video from the evening of June 9 shows a man who approaches Ortiz, a legend in his native Dominican Republic, and shoots him in the back at close range as Ortiz sits at a bar's outdoor table in the country's capital.