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Susan Stamberg and Murray Horwitz again celebrate the festival of light with stories previously commissioned especially for NPR.

Under a sunny African sky, Nelson Mandela was buried Sunday on a hill overlooking his beloved boyhood village. Members of his clan, national leaders and a global audience bid farewell to the man who transformed his country and became one of the world's most revered figures.

Critics bashed Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, a novel that tells the competing stories of a thug, a king, a tabloid hack and an airplane flight. But author Ben Masters says you should ignore the naysayers and pick up this surprising, supple novel. In fact, Masters says, it's a "small 21st-century masterpiece."

The StoryCorps project has collected more than 50,000 stories, many of them shared on NPR's airwaves, and it recently marked its 10th anniversary with a book: Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude From the First Ten Years of StoryCorps. David Isay, the project's creator, tells NPR's Rachel Martin that StoryCorps is like "a shake on the shoulder every week ... reminding you: this is what's important."

Meanwhile talks with the European Union over a trade deal seemed to sour further. An EU official said Ukraine's "arguments have no grounds in reality."

Every answer is a five-letter word. You'll be given a clue for the word. Besides giving you a direct hint to the answer, the clue will also contain the answer in consecutive letters. For example, given "push over hard," you would say "shove."

The professional gamer just got a visa normally reserved for baseball players and other athletes to compete in the U.S., and more international players could follow. "Gaming is their full-time job," says Marcus Graham, a senior manager at the gaming site Twitch.

German leaders made the same decision last week, without an explanation. In the lead up to the Winter Games, Russia has been criticized for its anti-gay laws.

On wooden skis, the Tuvan people of Central Asia have been traversing the snow for at least 4,000 years. Travel writer Mark Jenkins went to the region for National Geographic, where he joined a group of lasso-wielding men on skis tracking elk.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a voluntary program to help reduce the use of antibiotics in animals raised for their meat. As the use of these drugs has increased, so has the incidence of drug-resistant bacteria. So the FDA is concerned about the public health impact of the use of these antibiotics. Arun Rath speaks with Maryn McKenna about the plan, and how it might work. McKenna writes for Wired Magazine and is the author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA.