Wuhan's newest attraction is Han Street, a shopping complex that stretches several football fields, features fancy faux European architecture, and is filled with stores featuring foreign brands from Dairy Queen to Zara.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
The central Chinese city of Wuhan has a population of 10 million people, more than New York City. Both Chinese and foreigners are flocking to Wuhan, the GDP of which is expected to double in five years.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
The central Chinese city of Wuhan has a population of 10 million people, more than than New York City. Wuhan's economy is growing at a rapid clip, and the local government is building three subway lines in order to help ease traffic congestion and commute times.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
Yun Peng, 26, moved to Wuhan seven years ago from western China for school. Now, he has a local girlfriend and plans to stay because of the many opportunities he sees.
China became a majority urban country this year. No nation has shifted so quickly from rural to urban than China, where more than half of the people now live in urban areas.
Everyone is familiar with megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, but they are just a tiny part of China's urbanization story. The country has more than 160 cities with populations of a million or more — places most of the world is only vaguely familiar with, if at all.
Mike Cannata with 2-year-old Bella. Mike and his wife, Barb, brought Bella home from Bulgaria this past spring after spending five years attempting to adopt.
Credit Courtesy of the Cannata family
The Cannata family at their home in rural Pennsylvania. Mike and Barb Cannata's second adoption experience was much more difficult than their first.
When Barb and Mike Cannata adopted their first daughter from China almost a decade ago, the process was smooth and relatively quick — just 17 months from start to finish.
Now a chatty and confident 9-year-old, Emma is an accomplished equestrian with her show horse, Ajax. But the family had trouble explaining to Emma why it took so long to get her a little sister.
When the Cannatas decided to adopt again in 2007, Barb Cannata says, everything had changed. They ruled out China early on.
Credit Richard Bain / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
The Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, is the main venue for the town's annual Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The town lies on the Avon River — just like Shakespeare's British birthplace — and had schools named after Romeo and Juliet before the festival started in 1953.
Credit Brian Santa Maria / iStockphoto.com
This summer, NPR's Destination Art series is going off the beaten path to visit small to midsize North American cities that have cultivated lively arts scenes. We want to hear from you! Where's your favorite art hot spot? What makes it unique? Tell us about it.
Credit David Hou / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Cara Ricketts plays Innogen in Cymbeline, one of three Shakepeare plays produced for this year's festival.
Credit Peter Smith / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
For the first Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1953, a circus tent was brought from Chicago and raised on a hillside.
Credit Cylla von Tiedemann / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Mike Shara (left) as Cornelius Hackl and Josh Epstein as Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker, a play Thornton Wilder rewrote into its current form 50 years ago in Stratford .
Most theaters let audiences know the show is about to start by blinking the lights. Stratford's Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, is a bit more festive. Four burgundy-uniformed buglers and a drummer quicken the pace of hundreds of theatergoers who've been ambling up the hill from the banks of the Avon River. When curtain time arrives, a cannon will boom.
There's always a line at the Boulangerie Cauvet on the corner of rue St. Charles in Paris's 15th district. In their family owned bakery, Esmeralda Cauvet and her husband Cyril sell around 800 croissants and 3,500 baguettes a day.
In the kitchen, head pastry maker Pierre Gibert still rolls his croissants from triangular strips of dough. "The key to a good croissant is good ingredients and a high quality dough. You have to knead it, let it rise and roll it a second time in butter. That's what gives a croissant its flaky quality," Gibert says.
The Mom and Dad's Record Collection series on All Things Considered continues with a memory of music and family from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and authorLeonard Pitts.
Pitts says his childhood mischief was set to the music of Nat King Cole, often courtesy of his mother's own voice. One afternoon, he remembers, she was singing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" while he played out back.
Militiaman from the Ansar Dine radical Islamic group ride on an armed vehicle between Gao and Kidal in northeastern Mali in June. Jihadists currently control the country's north.
Credit Habibou Kouyate / AFP/Getty Images
Mali's interim president, Dioncounda Traore, disembarks from a plane at Bamako airport last month. Traore returned to Bamako amid tight security following a two-month stay in Paris for medical treatment after being savagely beaten in the aftermath of the country's coup.
A rebellion in northern Mali, followed by a military coup in the south, has shattered the veneer of stability in a country that was hailed for 20 years as a model democracy in turbulent West Africa.
Now Mali is facing twin crises, prompting regional and international fears that the north — currently controlled by jihadists — is a terrorist safe haven. And the politicians who are meant to be fixing the problems are bickering.
The last couple of years have certainly felt unusually hot in many parts of the U.S., but are they really all that unusual?
Many people wonder whether a warming climate is turning up the temperature or whether it's all just part of the normal variation in the weather. Among scientists, there's a growing view that these latest heat waves are indeed a result of climate change.
Jan Ebeling rides Rafalca in the equestrian dressage competition at the 2012 Summer Olympics on Aug. 2. Rafalca is co-owned by Ann Romney, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Credit Markus Schreiber / AP
Rafalca's owners, Ann Romney (from left), Elisabeth Meyer and Amy Eberling, applaud after their horse's performance in the equestrian dressage competition at the Summer Olympics on Aug. 2.
Credit Julie Rovner / NPR
College student Celia Rozanski rides Jasper at a horse show sponsored by the Potomac Valley Dressage Association.
In July, the financial fortunes of the presidential candidates continued along their new trajectories, with Republican Mitt Romney's money-raising efforts outpacing President Obama once again.
Indeed, groups supporting Romney raised one-third more than Obama's re-election effort for the month.
Romney, the all-but-official Republican nominee, actually collected less in July than he had in June, but only slightly. His campaign announced Monday that its overall take for July was $101.3 million.
