Credit Sam Evans-Brown / New Hampshire Public Radio
In Durham, N.H., Oyster River Middle School seventh-graders Patrick Beary and Morgan Bernier play with StoryKit, a free app that helps middle-schoolers put together simple presentations, and elementary students make storybooks.
Credit Sam Evans-Brown / New Hampshire Public Radio
Oyster River Middle School has invested in a wide range of mobile technology in the classroom. Even so, Oyster River's bring-your-own-device policy is seen as a way to ensure that kids are using technology every day, as teachers assume they'll do after they graduate high school.
If there is one thing that the mobile-computing era has made clear, it's that kids love touch screens. Because those touch screens — smartphones, iPads, Kindles and the like — are an inevitable added distraction to the classroom, schools across the country are struggling to deal with the growing prevalence of the technology.
But a growing number of schools are embracing these hand-held, Internet-ready devices by creating policies that put them to use in the classroom.
Love songs are like the meat and potatoes of most rock and pop music, but sometimes you need something different. For the band Delta Rae from Durham, N.C., inspiration for new material comes from stuff like graveyards and being stuck in the wrong job.
Delta Rae is a six-piece band that includes three siblings: Ian, Eric and Brittany Holljes. Their music is like a kind of modern folklore.
On a farm in Waitsfield, Vt., in 1945, a Merchant Marine cook named Ralph Ellison was resting after his tour of duty.
"One morning scribbling, I wrote the first sentence of what later became The Invisible Man: 'I am an invisible man,' " Ellison recalled in an interview for National Educational Television.
He wrote that his protagonist — a Negro, as Ellison always put it — was young, powerless and ambitious for the role of leadership, a role at which he was doomed to fail.
Richard Aoki was known as the "minister of education" for the Berkeley, Calif., chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Credit AP
The Panthers were fundamentally a political party. Here, Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard calls for a new U.S. Constitution from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on June 19, 1970, to guarantee all Americans the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — rights they say blacks had been denied.
Credit AP
Bobby Seale, Panther chairman and co-founder, campaigns on a rush-hour bus in Oakland, Calif., on April 13, 1973, to be Oakland's mayor. He lost, coming in a close second place, showing the strength of the party in the city where they formed.
Credit Walt Zeboski / AP
On May 2, 1967, Black Panthers amassed at the Capitol in Sacramento brandishing guns to protest a bill before an Assembly committee restricting the carrying of arms in public. Self-defense was a key part of the Panthers' agenda. This was an early action, a year after their founding.
Credit Rusty Kennedy / AP
Huey Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., with Bobby Seale. This 1970 photo shows Newton in Philadelphia.
Credit Jim Palmer / AP
Black Panther members stage a protest outside the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco on June 27, 1977. The Canadian government detained Huey Newton as he returned from self-imposed exile in Cuba to stand trial for a 1964 murder. He was not convicted.
Credit AP
Police display guns and ammunition seized by officers on April 16, 1974, when 14 Black Panther Party members were arrested at the party's precinct headquarters. Bobby Seale called the raid a plot to discredit them, timed to hurt the organization's chances of winning a majority of seats in next year's City Council.
Credit Courtesy of Seth Rosenfeld
Click on the documents above to read excerpts from Richard Aoki's FBI file.
Credit AP
The iconic panther symbol was first used by Eldridge Cleaver as part of a Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party organized to represent African-Americans in central Alabama. In the picture is Jesse Favor, a candidate for Lowndes County sheriff in 1966.
Credit AP
Chicago police remove the body of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was slain in a gunbattle with police in Chicago on Dec. 4, 1969, when police tried to search the group's office. Hampton was one of several Black Panthers who were killed in shootouts with police.
Credit David Fenton / AP
Two young men are shown at a May 1, 1970, rally in support of Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale and other Panthers in New Haven, Conn., who were being tried for the murder of a fellow Panther who confessed to being a police informant.
Credit Courtesy of Harvey Dong
Aoki was an avid firearms collector and military enthusiast. After high school, he joined the Army and later was a reservist.
Women and their children wait for medication and instructions on how to use it at the clinic in Dareta, Nigeria. Treating children with high levels of lead is a painstaking process that works only if their environment at home is free from lead.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Women and their children wait for medication at the clinic in Dareta, Nigeria. Treating children with high levels of lead is a painstaking process that works only if their environment at home is free from lead.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Ivan Gayton directs the mission for Doctors Without Borders in Nigeria. The nonprofit set up clinics to treat children sickened by lead poisoning from illegal mining activities. Gayton says this may be one of the worst cases of environmental lead poisoning in recent history.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Gado Labbo holds her 5-year-old son, Yusuf, at the clinic in Dareta. In 2010, when Yusuf first entered the clinic, he had a blood lead level of 150 micrograms per deciliter — 30 times higher than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers dangerous.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A health worker looks for signs of vision in the eyes of Yusuf Labbo. Severe lead poisoning has left the 5-year-old boy blind. He weighs just 22 pounds, can't speak or walk and spends most of his days clutched in his mother's arms.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Susan Lake, a nurse for Doctors Without Borders, goes over the list of pills for one of her patients at the clinic in Dareta. More than 400 kids have already died from lead poisoning, while thousands of others are stunted physically and mentally.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A local health official stands in the consultation room of a health clinic and hospital in Bagega, Nigeria. At first, miners in the region were processing lead-laden gold ore inside their homes. Doctors Without Borders persuaded most of them to move the processing to the outskirts of town.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Aishsa Yusufa stands against a pillar outside the Doctors Without Borders ward in Anka, Nigeria. The 4-year-old girl is enrolled in a program at the clinic to treat her for high levels of lead.
Across a swath of northern Nigeria, a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding, as lead from illegal gold mines sickens thousands of children.
More than 400 kids have died, and many more have been mentally stunted for life.
Doctors Without Borders, which has set up clinics to treat the children, is calling it one of the worst cases of environmental lead poisoning in recent history.
Bernard Goutier, 25, has served time in prison twice. He's now learning construction skills with Emerge Connecticut, which offers paid on-the-job training, literacy classes and support groups to ex-offenders.
Credit Courtesy of Justice Mapping Center
This map shows the cost of incarcerating all residents sent to prison in 2009 from each block in Brooklyn. Dark red blocks represent areas where the state will spend more than $1 million to incarcerate people sent to prison that year.
Credit Courtesy of the Justice Mapping Center
The cost of incarcerating residents from individual blocks in and around Brownsville. In response to the concentration of people on probation in Brownsville, the New York City Department of Probation used mapping to locate and launch the Neighborhood Opportunity Network, which connects probation clients with services, jobs and civic participation opportunities.
Credit Courtesy of Groundswell
The Brownsville NeON probation office partnered with the public arts group Groundswell to establish a community garden in Brownsville. Local probationers designed and created the garden and mural. Here, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, Vincent Schiraldi (second from left), meets with local advocates involved in the project.
Credit Shannon Stapleton / Reuters/Landov
The Brownsville section of New York's Brooklyn borough has long been considered one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. The Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center has been tracking the cost of incarcerating residents of neighborhoods like Brownsville, block by block, for almost 15 years.
Credit Uma Ramiah
Tywain Harris says Emerge Connecticut has provided him a place to go each day as he transitions from prison back into the New Haven community.
In many neighborhoods, hard truths about day-to-day life — like violent streets or crumbling schools — are readily apparent to residents, but less obvious to city and state officials.
Hard data can sometimes bridge that gap, helping policymakers better visualize which communities are doing well, and which may need additional help or resources.
Louise Erdrich's debut novel, Love Medicine, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Her other books include The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and The Plague of Doves.
In 1988, 13-year-old Joe Coutts is thrust into adulthood after his mother, Geraldine Coutts, is sexually assaulted. His story is at the center of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Round House.
Georgian billionaire and opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili (left) reacts with supporters at his office on Monday. Ivanishvili defeated Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in the election, clearing the way for a new government.
Parliamentary elections in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, delivered a resounding defeat for the ruling party of President Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday. Preliminary election results showed the opposition winning 57 percent of the vote.
A day later, the president conceded defeat. In a televised address, Saakashvili said he respected the decision of the voters, and that he would clear the way for the opposition Georgian Dream party to form a new government, a move that would install opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili as prime minister.
Certain truths about life in a neighborhood are readily apparent to people who live there, but less obvious to city and state officials. The Justice Mapping Center uses data to help bridge that gap with information about the prison system. By mapping the residential addresses of every inmate in various prison systems, Eric Cadora and his colleagues have made vividly clear a concept they call "Million-Dollar Blocks." In some places more than a million dollars are being spent every year to incarcerate the residents of a single Census block. Audie Cornish talks with Eric Cadora.
