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Forty-eight years ago, a small Costa Rican girl watched the first moon landing on a neighbor’s TV set.  “I told Mami, ‘I want to reach the moon,’ ” Sandra Cauffman says. And she pretty much has. One of only a handful of Hispanic woman leaders at NASA, the US space agency,  Cauffman has watched rockets roar into space carrying the Mars-orbiting MAVEN satellite and other exploratory equipment she worked as a NASA engineer. She says, “I marvel at my own journey.”

EXPLAINER: Can a sitting U.S. president can be charged with a crime? One of the oldest constitutional questions, it is a complicated matter. The issue has become newly relevant as a special counsel investigates possible links between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russians who attempted to interfere with the 2016 election. There is no clear answer.

The case of a woman who went back to North Korea after defecting has South Koreans wondering. Lim Ji-hyun made a new life for herself as a TV personality in the South and then “returned home” to the communist state three years later. South Korean police are attempting to determine whether she was kidnapped in April, when she traveled from Seoul to China and then disappeared. A video featuring her was posted last week on North Korea’s official website (Uriminzokkiri). In it, she says life in the capitalist South was like “living in hell.”

Tear gas filled the air in Dakar’s city center this week as police dispersed an opposition demonstration called by former president Abdoulaye Wade to denounce the organization of Sunday’s election.  Wade’s return to the country to lead the main opposition coalition has been just one spark raising the temperature during this campaign period. Voters will choose from a record 47 lists, casting their ballots by party rather than for individual candidates as they seek to fill ​165 seats in the National Assembly.

Payback time in California. Now that the drought is over farmers are looking to replenish underground aquifers. At the Terranova Ranch near Fresno, they have been flooding working vineyards with thousands of cubic meters of water in the hopes that the water will filter down to the groundwater below without hurting the grape crop. It’s an experiment that researchers would like to test throughout the Central Valley, which produces one-quarter of US food.

Ranna, 24, is a third-generation refugee. An Oromo Ethiopian woman, she was born in Saudi Arabia but deported to Ethiopia when she was 16. During a government crackdown on Oromo activists in 2015, she was forced to flee. A smuggler booked her, her mother and her brother on a flight to Indonesia, where they knew no one and did not speak the language. But Indonesia granted them refugee status. They have made a home in Pasar Minggu Baru, a South Jakarta neighborhood that has come to house an enclave of East African refugees and asylum-seekers.

Comeback for Stalin?  Historians generally agree that Josef Stalin was a dictator who killed and terrorized millions of people through a repressive police state. However many Russians see him differently.  According to a poll by the state-backed VTsIOM polling agency “more than half of Russians (62 percent) agree that plaques, busts, [and] paintings that talk about the success of Stalin should be put in public places.” People are starting to see him more as an “effective manager” and a symbol of Soviet-Russian power.