Morning Edition

Health officials in Kenya say reducing the transmission of HIV among gay men is a central part of their national AIDS strategy. But they face serious challenges, including the fact that homosexuality is still a crime in the East African nation.

HIV rates among gay and bisexual men in Kenya are far higher than the national average.

Groupon and Living Social have sold tens of millions of daily deals and are now a major force in retail. But they rely heavily on getting businesses to offer their goods and services at deep discounts. In exchange, businesses hope for payoff in the form of return customers.

Sometimes, though, the flood of extra business causes more problems than it solves.

Deal-Hungry Crowd

Ailie Ham had just opened Creative Hands Massage in Washington, D.C., when she decided to offer deals through Living Social and Groupon last year.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. Twitter is going to the dogs. Yesterday, Patch, a Jack Russell terrier, boarded a train near Dublin. When the train staff discovered him, they posted his picture on Twitter. It was re-tweeted more than 500 times. Within a half hour, his owner saw the photo and tweeted: That's my dog. Then she opened a Twitter account for Patch, in case he should go missing again. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is adding staff to its hospitals to meet the mental health needs of vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As Erin Toner of WUWM in Milwaukee reports, some clinicians say the help cannot come soon enough.

ERIN TONER, BYLINE: The VA hospital in Milwaukee is a hectic place. On most mornings you have to circle the parking lots over and over to find a spot. Luckily there's valet service if patients would rather leave the parking to someone else.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

On the day after the Fourth, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

And I'm Linda Wertheimer.

It was especially easy for some Americans to see the fireworks last night. They had no competing source of light.

INSKEEP: Brilliant displays lit up cities like New York and Washington, but across Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey, about a quarter of a million homes still have no electricity.

Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney spent his July Fourth holiday marching in a New Hampshire parade, and backtracking statements a top adviser made about the individual mandate in the Obama health care law.

There was something for almost everybody in Wolfeboro's Independence Day parade: a local brass band, bonnet-wearing Daughters of the American Revolution, a Zumba instructor shimmying across the bed of a pickup truck, and even a Jimmy Durante impersonator, complete with prosthetic nose.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

In Britain today, parliament continues its hearing on the interest rate scandal at Barclays Bank. This week, several of the bank's top executives resigned, including the chief executive, Bob Diamond. Yesterday, parliamentarians quizzed Diamond for three hours.

NPR's Philip Reeves is in London, where he says outrage is growing.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with the back story on VIP loans.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WERTHEIMER: A former mortgage company, Countrywide, used a VIP loan program to buy influence with members of Congress, staffers and other officials, including a number at Fannie Mae, the government backed mortgage giant central to Countrywide's business. That the bottom line of a new report out today from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

In the 1960s, Al Black could be found cruising up and down Route 1 in his blue-and-white Ford Galaxy — with a trunk full of wet landscape paintings.

At the time, he was a salesman who could snatch your breath away and sell it back to you. As artist Mary Ann Carroll puts it, he could "sell a jacket to a mosquito in summer."

"A salesman is a con-man," Black readily admits himself today. He's a storyteller. And does he have stories to tell.

In a stretch of sandy wasteland, Hisham Sadowi, 12, smacks a tee shot across a makeshift golf course in Benghazi, Libya.

On this course with no grass, local rules allowed him to place the ball on a little square of artificial turf he carries around.

Hisham dreams of becoming a professional golfer, and he stops briefly to speak to us. We asked him who his favorite golfer is.

"Tiger Woods," he exclaims.

There's so much water in, around and underneath New Orleans, that the dead spend eternity in tombs above ground.

Most of the tombs now have a similar design: On top, there's space for a wooden coffin or two, and at the bottom lies a potpourri of decanted family remains. Sooner or later, whoever is up high must vacate and settle lower, making room for the newly dead. That's how families stay together — in a desiccated jumble of grandpas, grandmas, siblings and cousins.

New Orleans now has the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Most of the killings are concentrated in the city's poorest neighborhoods — places like Central City, just a few blocks north of the stately mansions that line St. Charles Avenue.

The city's mayor is launching a new program aimed at cracking what he describes as a deeply rooted culture of violence. But victims complain that a failed criminal justice system has left the streets to vigilante justice, with innocent residents caught in the crossfire.

A Wounded Neighborhood

In 1835, Washington, D.C., was a city in transition: Newly freed African-Americans were coming north and for the first time beginning to outnumber the city's slaves. That demographic shift led to a violent upheaval — all but forgotten today.

Few of the city's buildings from that time remain, but you can still sense what it was like, if you sit in a park by the White House, as NPR's Steve Inskeep did with writer Jefferson Morley.

Sometimes history is made in the most unlikely of places.

This summer, the community of Idlewild, Mich., once known as America's "Black Eden," is celebrating its centennial — and its place in American history.

Located about 30 miles east of the larger resort city of Ludington, tucked away in the woods of the Huron-Manistee National Forests, the town was once a go-to spot for summer vacations. It was a resort unlike any other in the United States, however, and was, in essence, the town that segregation built.