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In February, Ethiopian-born singer Meklit Hadero was flying home from Uganda to the U.S. when her plane had to land unexpectedly near the Arctic Circle. It was so cold that to keep her fingers warm she put on oven mitts (decorated with an African print) that she'd bought to bring home.

A fellow passenger introduced himself: Leelai Demoz, he's Ethiopian, too. He'd just finished co-producing Difret, a movie based on the true story of a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl abducted by a man who wanted to marry her; the girl shot him and was tried for murder.

Hadero and Demoz hung out, hoped to see the Northern Lights (no luck, it was foggy). By coincidence, a few weeks later, Hadero got a call from Lincoln Center to see if she'd sing at a screening of Difret.

So it's a small world for global artists.

And that's especially true for African musicians who've come to the West. They can get together and mix it up in diaspora more readily than on the continent, says Hadero, who left Ethiopia as a toddler in 1981 and now lives in the Bay Area. "There are 437 million people in the Nile Basin. There are all sorts of political tensions around how we share water," she says. "There are barriers to getting to know each other. There's not a lot of access."

Her solution was to co-found the Nile Project, along with Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis. They invite musicians from the 10 countries along the Nile River to play together and record an album. She was returning from a three-weeks session in Kampala, Uganda, when she had her Arctic detour.

Back home, Hadero talked about her music, how the Nile Project has changed it — and what it's like to be compared to Joni Mitchell. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you contribute any songs to the movie?

No, but I wrote a song for the [concert]. It doesn't have a name yet. It's about the strength and resilience of women and what happens when a personal story becomes a way for a whole country to move forward around a particular issue. The story of the film is how [this practice of abducting a bride] became illegal.

Your new album, We Are Alive, draws from Ethiopia as well — you sing "Kemeken," an Ethiopian folk song.

This post updated at 10:15 a.m. ET.

A Ukrainian government spokesman says one of its warplanes was shot down in the country's east by a Russian air force jet, as the U.S. and Europe stepped up sanctions on Moscow over its support of separatist rebels.

Ukraine says a ground-attack Su-25 was downed by an air-to-air missile Wednesday evening over the eastern region of Luhansk. The pilot reportedly safely ejected before the plane crashed. Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, denied that his country was responsible for the downed plane.

Reuters notes that Kiev's comment on the incident is "the strongest Ukrainian allegation to date of direct Russian military involvement in the conflict."

Separately, another Ukrainian Su-25 was hit by a rebel missile, but suffered only slight damage and landed safely, according to Ukrainian officials.

In another incident last week, Ukraine said one of its AN-26 transports was shot down by a ground or air-launched missile fired from Russia. Two of the eight crew members were killed.

According to the BBC:

"[Pro-Kiev] activists have pointed to videos which appear to show Grad multiple rocket launchers being fired from Russian soil in the direction of Ukraine.

"Nato says that Russian troop numbers on the border have increased again to about 12,000."

Australia became the first country in the world to repeal a carbon tax on the nation's worst greenhouse gas polluters, as Prime Minister Tony Abbott made good on a campaign promise to get rid of the unpopular law.

The Senate voted 39 to 32 to eliminate the tax enacted by the previous center-left government two years ago. The law imposed the equivalent of a $22.60 tax per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions on about 350 of the nation's worst polluters.

"Today, the tax that you voted to get rid of is finally gone: a useless, destructive tax which damaged jobs, which hurt families' cost of living and which didn't actually help the environment," Abbott told reporters in Canberra.

Abbott's government came to power on a promise to eliminate the tax, "assuring voters that removing it would reduce household electricity bills. He plans to replace the measure with a taxpayer-financed AU$2.55 billion fund to pay industry incentives to use cleaner energy," according to The Associated Press.

However, Abbott and Environment Minister Greg Hunt have repeatedly refused to rule out a price on carbon in the future.

The Sydney Morning Herald says:

"Mr Abbott said he did not accept that with the carbon price now abolished, and legislation needed for Direct Action yet to pass the Senate, his government was leaving Australia without a mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"'We are a government which absolutely appreciates that we have only got one planet and we should pass it on to our children and grandchildren in at least as good shape as we found it,' he said.

"'So we are a conservationist government and we will do what we think is the sensible thing to try to bring emissions down.'"

The menus of millennia past can be tough to crack, especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables. For archaeologists studying a prehistoric site in Sudan, dental plaque provided a hint.

"When you eat, you get this kind of film of dental plaque over your teeth," says Karen Hardy, an archaeologist with the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona.

"If you don't clean it off, it mixes up with bits of food and it gets stuck in this area below the gum," she says. "It can calcify within about two weeks, and once it's calcified it's very hard."

That plaque is so hard that it lasts thousands of years. And since Prehistoric folk were not known for their flossing habits, the plaque that survived them can serve as a kind of scrapbook for what they ate and breathed.

Hardy and her colleagues were studying skeletons from Al Khiday in Central Sudan, a burial site that was used between around 2,000 and 9,000 years ago, since before the advent of farming in the area.

Using a few isotope and chemical analysis techniques, Hardy says they found "all sorts of different things" in the teeth of 19 individuals, things like sand, dirt, pollen, plant fibers — even evidence of carbon, from breathing smoke from a fire.

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