The network of roads in the U.S. is expansive – but it was built decades ago. Same for other areas of America’s infrastructure that citizens rely on. The U.S. is making a huge investment in improvements. What can citizens expect?

• Israel strikes Syria: The strikes reportedly hit missile depots for Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group in and around Aleppo’s southern suburb of Jibreen. Syria says the strikes killed and wounded several people.
• Moscow hits Ukraine’s energy network: Ukraine’s armed forces say Russia launched the large-scale attack Friday, with a barrage of 99 drones and missiles hitting regions across the country. 
• Haiti gang violence rises: The country needs between 4,000 and 5,000 international police to help tackle “catastrophic” violence, says the United Nations rights expert for the conflict-wracked nation. 
• U.S. changes how race is categorized: For the first time in 27 years, the government changes how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity. The goal is to more accurately count residents, including those who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.
• Baltimore recovery continues: The largest crane on the Eastern Seaboard arrives by barge so that crews can begin removing the wreckage from the deadly bridge collapse. Four workers remain missing.

Read these news briefs.

After a century in which the global population grew almost fourfold, a turning point awaits. This story is the third in a series about falling birthrates. The first looks at why U.S. parents are having fewer children. The second shows how immigrants are powering a population boom in rural Iowa.

How long are Argentines willing to wait for President Javier Milei to create economic change? Despite growing poverty, many say they’re behind him for the long haul. 

Former President Donald Trump often speaks in impassioned tones, using words that can thrill some supporters while angering detractors who see in them the potential for causing harm. Our senior White House correspondent talks about keeping context and fairness at the fore in her coverage. 

Steve Martin is known for turning high-style goofiness into an art form, the Monitor’s film critic writes. A new documentary offers the notoriously private entertainer an opportunity to consider what it takes for a funnyman to find happiness.

The country music industry felt a bit of an earthquake when Beyoncé, who hails from Texas, dropped her long-anticipated album “Cowboy Carter” on March 29. (Her full name is Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter.) While not all the songs are country music, the album nonetheless marks the formal entry of a prominent Black songwriter into a genre that has long depicted mainly white rural life.

Some fans of country have accused her of cultural appropriation. The album itself will serve as a response. It includes guest appearances by Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, both country royalty. And the first notes Beyoncé shared with the public from "Cowboy Carter" signaled she isn’t dabbling in the genre’s traditions. The single “TEXAS HOLD ’EM,” released last month, opens with unadorned notes on a fretless banjo by Rhiannon Giddens, a prolific modern reclaimer of Black string band music.

That signals a deeper intention. Her album fits into a wider project of African Americans artists reclaiming stories once told by others or erased from history – through food, film, art, and literature. At a time when more societies are grappling with cultural diversities, such storytelling asserts that dignity is inherent to the individual expressing the story.

Art installations such as the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and Netflix documentaries about recovering Black Southern cuisine have caught the restorative and unifying effect of tenderness and empathy.

In his newly published collection of portraits across the South, for example, photographer Rahim Fortune includes an image of a man holding a broad-rimmed Stetson hat across his heart. Entitled “Praying Cowboy,” the photo is one of several capturing Black rodeo and horsemanship that neatly encapsulate an extraordinary turn underway in the telling of the American story.

“These images amplify the sense of communal love that can be found in rural southern communities,” Mr. Fortune told Vogue when he first published “Praying Cowboy” following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. “We want these images to be a form of visual healing.”

Storytelling is the essential element of country, a genre that sprang from Scottish, Irish, and English musical traditions. Yet some of its core elements – the musical structure of the blues, lyrical narration, the banjo – can be traced back to enslaved Africans.

“Most of that history has been erased, some has been hidden and precious little has been acknowledged,” said Alice Randall, the first Black woman to write a song that reached No. 1 on the country music charts and author of a forthcoming book entitled “My Black Country.” The restoration of that history, she said in a 2020 interview with the Public Relations Society of America, involves “an essential aspect of being human and becoming humane.”

That reach for the universal aspects of music resides in the renaissance of Black storytelling to which Beyoncé has tuned her voice. As Eric Weisbard, a music historian, told The Economist, by turning her talents to a host of genres, Beyoncé shows she has “no limit artistically.”