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Even as the companies enlisted by the government's Operation Warp Speed project to develop COVID-19 vaccines say they're making quick progress, details of their lucrative federal contracts have been slow to emerge.

Country music singer Jerry Jeff Walker, the man behind "Mr. Bojangles," died Friday after a battle with throat cancer. He was 78.

"He was at home until an hour before his passing," his wife of 46 years, Susan Walker, told the Austin American-Statesman. "He went very peacefully, which we were extremely grateful for."

Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET

A few dozen cars at a drive-in rally in suburban Pennsylvania honked in unison as Democratic nominee Joe Biden blasted President Trump's handling of the coronavirus. In North Carolina, Trump told a packed crowd: "COVID, COVID, COVID. By the way, on Nov. 4, you won't hear about it anymore."

Officials in Afghanistan say at least 18 people are dead, including schoolchildren, from a suicide attack outside of an education center in the capital of Kabul.

The country's interior ministry confirmed that more than 57 others were wounded Saturday after the explosion went off in a heavily Shiite neighborhood, The Associated Press reported.

Poland's president, Andrzej Duda, is in isolation after testing positive for the coronavirus, his spokesman announced Saturday.

"The president is fine," his spokesman, Blazej Spychalski, said on Twitter. "We are in constant contact with the relevant medical services."

Before embarking on a packed day of campaign rallies, President Trump stopped at a library in Florida's Palm Beach County on Saturday to cast his ballot.

"I voted for a guy named Trump," he told reporters.

While the president has voted by mail in the past, in recent months, he has decried the integrity of voting by mail, falsely asserting that it results in rampant fraud.

Alicia Garza was an activist and organizer for more than a decade back in 2013 when her social media posts — along with the hashtag drafted and shared by her fellow activists Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometti — helped start what is now the global Black Lives Matter movement.

It is one of the most visible social justice movements in the world, and since its creation, Garza has continued to work and think about how both liberal and conservative movements start, thrive and evolve.

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

After a wave of mass protests, and amid a pandemic, the people of Chile go to the polls Sunday for a historic referendum over whether the country should scrap its dictatorship-era constitution and write a new one.

Opinion surveys suggest the electorate will vote "yes," bringing an end to the 40-year-old charter that was imposed during the rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and has long been seen by many Chileans as the underlying source of many of their grievances.

There's a controversy in Gloucester County, New Jersey, that began at a football game on October 4. The national anthem was about to be played when the running back for the Gibbstown Falcons told his coach, Rashad Thomas, "I want to kneel."

Coach Thomas told his running back, "I'll kneel with you." An assistant coach joined them. Coach Thomas told his players that no one had to kneel, but soon the whole team had joined them, and held hands. They were teammates.

A lot is going on with Benson and Mike. They have explosive sex, but are not quite sure they get along, or where they're going.

Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant in Houston. Benson is a Black daycare employee who doesn't really care much for children.

Mike's mother, Mitsuko, has just arrived from Japan to visit. But Mike's about to fly off to Osaka to hold the hand of his father as he dies. So Mitsuko will bunk with her son's boyfriend. What could go wrong?

What could go right?

Even this spring, when New York City was at the center of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S, the city's public parks never closed. Instead, they became a place where people went for a socially distanced refuge, often escaping into music with their headphones. Ellen Reid has taken that experience one step further: The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has written new music for a GPS-enabled app called Soundwalk, specifically designed to accompany walks around Central Park.

The kids in I Am Every Good Thing are compared to the best things: moonbeams on brand new snow, the center of a cinnamon roll, a perfect paper airplane that glides for blocks.

When Derrick Barnes first started writing children's books 15 years ago, he didn't see Black kids — and Black boys in particular — being depicted in this way.

"Whenever you saw a black male character in children's books, he was either playing basketball, he was a runaway slave, or just visually looking very docile or assimilating," Barnes says.

Gen. Philip Breedlove is a retired four-star general of the U.S. Air Force and a former NATO supreme commander in Europe. He is now the distinguished chair of the Middle East Institute's Frontier Europe Initiative.

For many Americans wrapped up in the presidential race, it may have been easy to miss, but fighting is once again raging in the South Caucasus over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

It's time to gather the family together for the talk. Not that talk — the talk about what to do for Thanksgiving this year as the pandemic rolls on.

It has been months since many of us have seen extended family — we're longing to check in on aging parents, to see old friends from back home, etc. But even though Thanksgiving often conjures up pictures of big happy reunions, how safe is it to make them a reality?

A complicated but passionate love story with a plot ripped from the headlines, Snapped is the latest book in Alexa Martin's highly-regarded Playbook series. And once again, Martin delivers another heart-warming romance with loads of laughter and sensuality — but she also doesn't fumble the ball when it comes to providing a hard-hitting plot.

With Nov. 3, the last day of the presidential election season, rapidly approaching, officials with the U.S. Postal Service say they have already processed a record amount of election mail this year.

A NASA spacecraft sent out to collect a sample of rock and dust from an asteroid has nabbed so much that it's created an unexpected problem.

Rocks are jammed in the device in a way that's keeping a Mylar flap open, creating a gap that's letting some of the collected pebbles and dust drift out into space.

A committee of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration generally supported the agency's approach to reviewing COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use during a public meeting Thursday.

But the expert panel raised concerns about the expedited regulatory path, including details of the clinical studies the agency will rely on to determine if the potential benefits of the vaccines outweigh the risks.

Imagine The Office, but in St. Petersburg, Russia. And instead of Dunder Mifflin, it's the Russian government's Internet Research Agency. A new online play called Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, co-produced by TheaterWorks Hartford, TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., in association with The Civilians, does just that.