Jenny Gathright

As the five-day cease-fire along Turkey's border with Syria continues to falter, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) tells NPR he thinks the deal is "really terrible."

"I'm naturally soft spoken," Laetitia Tamko says. "But when I sing, I'm not soft spoken."

Much of Infinite Worlds, the first album Tamko recorded as Vagabon, was her with a guitar, singing achingly introspective songs about the search for home and safety. Tamko says when she recorded it, she was uncomfortable with how deep her voice was. But now, hundreds of live performances later, she's embraced it.

Ahead of a week when President Trump will have his first face-to-face meeting with the Ukrainian president, Democratic calls for investigation of Trump's communications with Ukraine have intensified.

Mary Lou Williams seemed to learn early that playing piano would keep her alive.

Maybe she realized this at age six, when she started venturing to her white neighbors' homes to play piano for them. As Williams later recalled to the journalist John Wilson for the Jazz Oral History Project at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, she got the neighbors to stop throwing bricks into her family's house by giving them private concerts.

Blizzards are affecting much of the Great Lakes region this weekend, and the National Weather Service says it's "shaping up to be a historic storm." The snow is just one part of a massive storm system affecting areas from the Gulf Coast to northern Wisconsin and Michigan.

The Bialowieza Forest, which spans 350,000 acres between Poland and Belarus, is home to a vulnerable population of about 600 bison. But this winter, the forest also became home to a reddish brown cow who decided to escape domestic life for some time in the wild. Poland's TVN24 news portal reports an ornithologist first spotted her in November, wandering the outskirts of the forest with a herd of about 50 bison.

Jamila Woods stays pretty busy. The Chicago singer, songwriter and poet released her debut album, HEAVN, last summer. And when she wasn't recording, she could be found working with young artists in her community as the Associate Artistic Director at the arts nonprofit Young Chicago Authors and as an organizer of an annual youth poetry festival called Louder than a Bomb. "My community doesn't feel like an extra piece of what I do — it feels very integral to my creative process," Woods says.