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anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.
• But Mandela's condition could affect Obama's plans. The former South African president is gravely ill, and Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes said it would be left to the Mandela family to decide whether he is up for a visit from Obama this weekend.
• Mandela's legacy hangs over the entire trip, with Senegal among many African countries that have benefited from his example of a peaceful transition to power. "So much of the democratic progress that we see across the continent I think can be tied in some way to the inspiration that Nelson Mandela set," Rhodes said.
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Essay: In a challenging week, new doubts threaten 150 years of racial progress
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Take a glance at the anniversary calendar this year and it's clear that in America, racial progress comes in fits and starts.
• The Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves to be free 150 years ago. Within a decade, a trio of amendments to the Constitution made them citizens. Over the next century, the Supreme Court and Jim Crow segregation in the South snatched their rights away, Medgar Evers was murdered trying to get them back, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s populist protests yielded laws that restored them before King, too, was killed.
• Less than a year ago, the nation re-elected its first black president -- a step widely considered the culmination of all this labor.
• Yet in this week alone, a series of events illustrated just how fragile that progress really is.
• The Supreme Court chipped away at that King-inspired voting rights law and others on job discrimination and affirmative action, then punted them to Congress to fix -- a very divided Congress that has accomplished little since President Barack Obama first took office and which includes GOP conservatives who want to avoid voting on whether those who came to the U.S. illegally should become citizens.
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Victim's family says Texas' 500th execution was simply justice promised to them by state
• HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- Family and friends of Dorothy Booth waited 16 years -- enduring two trials and countless appeals -- for the measure of closure (Continued on page 30)
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