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• SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) -- Historians know where Solomon Northup was born, where he lived and where he worked. They know whom he married and how many children he had. They know he played the fiddle and spent 12 years enslaved in the South before being freed.
• What historians don't know about the author of "12 Years A Slave" is when and how he died and where he is buried. It's a lingering mystery in the final chapter of the life of the 19th-century free-born African-American whose compelling account of enforced slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana was made into the Oscar-winning film of the same title.
• "That's sort of a big blank spot in the story, for sure," said Rachel Seligman, co-author of "Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave," published last year.
• This month, "12 Years A Slave" took home the Academy Awards for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actress. The accolades have sparked new interest in Northup's story, which was little known until recent years even in the upstate New York communities where he spent most of his life.
• Northup was born July 10, 1807, in what is now the Essex County town of Minerva, in the Adirondack Mountains. His father, a former slave, moved the family to neighboring Washington County, eventually settling in the village of Fort Edward, on the Hudson River 40 miles north of Albany. Northup married Anne Hampton in the late 1820s, and the couple lived in an 18th-century house in Fort Edward that is now a museum.
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• CUIABA, Brazil (AP) -- Pedestrians tiptoe across a road scarred with deep puddles, piles of gravel and a detour sign. Black oily slush leaves no room for missteps or steering mistakes.
• The debris in this small city in western Brazil is part of the grand-scale mess of unfulfilled promises. Unfinished infrastructure projects were supposed to create a new metropolis, with modern roads and a light-rail system to whiz passengers to the

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