The police killing in France of a 17-year old of North African descent sparked protests and violence across the country as well as a national conversation about racism and police brutality. Rebecca Rosman reports from the Paris suburb of Nanterre where the police killing took place. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Marseille, the scene of some of the worst violence. And Ari Shapiro interviews Sebastian Roche, a sociologist who studies policing and race in France. In participating regions, yo...
Jul 06, 2023•10 min
On Wednesday Israel said it concluded a two-day military operation in the Jenin refugee camp meant to root out armed militants. The raid on the camp in the occupied West Bank - complete with airstrikes – was the most intense military operation Israel has carried out in more than 15 years. At least 12 Palestinians were killed and scores wounded. One Israeli soldier was killed. Israel claimed the attack was one that targeted militants and minimized harm to non-combatants. NPR's Daniel Estrin visit...
Jul 05, 2023•9 min
It's been more than a decade since 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' was repealed. Introduced in 1993, the law remained in effect until 2011. During that time an estimated 114,000 troops were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Veterans who received an "other than honorable" discharge from the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" were ineligible for veterans' benefits. That meant missing out on benefits like free VA healthcare, VA-backed home loans or funds for college tuitio...
Jul 04, 2023•14 min
There's nothing obviously patriotic about scarfing down as many hot dogs as you can in ten minutes. So how did competitive eating become so synonymous with the holiday celebrating the Fourth of July? To find out, host Scott Detrow visits a hot dog eating contest in Washington, D.C. And producer Matt Ozug unpacks the evolution of eating as a sport, from a 17th century farmer to today's televised competitions. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense o...
Jul 03, 2023•13 min
The Supreme Court ended its term this week with three rulings that will have far reaching consequences in the lives of millions of Americans. The court struck down President Biden's student debt relief program. It also sided with a Colorado website designer who wants to refuse business to a same-sex couple, and it effectively killed affirmative action in college admissions. All three rulings were a 6-3 split. All of the court's Republican-nominated justices voting against the three justices who ...
Jul 02, 2023•12 min
A week on from an aborted uprising, Vladimir Putin is still standing. But for how long? The brief rebellion, launched by the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin, marked the greatest challenge to Putin's rule since he came to power, 23 years ago. The mercenary leader is now in exile in Belarus and no charges are being filed against him or his followers. So where does that leave Putin, who has a reputation for being ruthless with his enemies? In participating regions, you'll als...
Jun 30, 2023•10 min
The Supreme Court effectively killed race-conscious admissions in higher education on Thursday. In two cases, the court decided that the admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina - both of which consider race - are unconstitutional, ruling the policies violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The decisions reversed decades of precedent upheld over the years by narrow court majorities that included Republican-appointed justices. The rulings could end t...
Jun 29, 2023•12 min
A punishing heat wave has left more than a dozen people dead across Texas. In recent days temperatures have climbed above 100 degrees in many parts of the state. Now the extreme heat is heading east, putting people's health at risk across the Mississippi Valley and the Central Gulf Coast. NPR's Lauren Sommer reports on how climate change and the El Niño climate pattern are increasing the intensity and frequency of heat waves. And Monica Samayoa from Oregon Public Broadcasting reports on how one ...
Jun 28, 2023•8 min
When it comes to American politics, Florida regularly finds its way to the center of the conversation. Often important, if not pivotal in presidential elections, Florida is home to former President Trump and his strongest opponent in the Republican presidential primary for 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis. As he campaigns for the nomination Gov. DeSantis has taken center stage in some of the most contentious battles of the culture war, those around trans rights, book censorship and immigration. But j...
Jun 27, 2023•10 min
Russian President Vladimir Putin faced a direct challenge to his authority over the weekend. Mercenary fighters with the Wagner group took over a military headquarters and launched a march toward Moscow. The group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, eventually called off the uprising. He's apparently accepted a deal to live in exile, and claims the weekend's events were a protest, not an attempt to overthrow the government. NPR's Charles Maynes in Moscow, and Greg Myre in Kyiv, explain what the turmoil...
Jun 26, 2023•9 min
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act is a $1.2 trillion law meant to spur a massive infrastructure renewal and rebuilding program complete with new bridges, railroads and highways. It also allocates $65 million to expand internet access to all. Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, is the man Biden tapped to make sure the massive job gets done. We speak with Landrieu about the Affordable Connectivity Program – which provides monthly $30 subsidies for lower-income individuals to buy Inter...
Jun 25, 2023•13 min
Last June, when the Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade decision, which had stood for nearly 50 years, the constitutional right to abortion ceased to exist. While reproductive health providers had been fearing, and preparing for the possible reversal for years, it still left millions of people seeking reproductive health care in flux. A year on, state controlled access to abortion continues to shift in many locations across the country. We hear from people who have been forced to make decisio...
Jun 23, 2023•13 min
There has been no shortage of confrontations between the U.S. and China this year. This week, shortly after a trip by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing, intended to thaw relations with China, President Biden likened Chinese President Xi Jinping to a "dictator" in off the cuff remarks. A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry called that "an open political provocation." Before that there were dust ups over TikTok and a Chinese spy balloon. But one of the most intractable and vol...
Jun 22, 2023•11 min
As climate change gets worse, California is seeing larger and more dangerous wildfires. And in response some insurers are leaving the state behind, finding the growing risk too high to pay. Host Ailsa Chang talks with Michael Wara, who directs a climate and energy policy program at Stanford, about the financial calculus insurers are making as the threat of climate-fueled disasters grows. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to mana...
Jun 21, 2023•9 min
Time is running out to locate the submersible vessel that went missing Sunday, on a voyage to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. The U.S. Coast Guard estimates the five people aboard the vessel, known as the Titan, could run out of air by Thursday morning. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue was aboard the same vessel to take the same voyage last year. He says its interior is the size of a minivan, it's built with a combination of off-the-rack and highly technical components and it has ...
Jun 20, 2023•10 min
While Black people in this country have been celebrating Juneteenth for decades, what is sometimes referred to as Emancipation Day or America's "second Independence Day" is only being celebrated as a national holiday this year for the third time. June 19th marks the date in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the U.S. learned they were free. on that day, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army delivered the news to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas. But for African Americans, th...
Jun 19, 2023•12 min
Made in America. It may be a catchy political slogan, but it's a lot more complicated than it sounds. So many things we use everyday come from China. In 2018 - former President Donald Trump launched a trade war with the country, eventually slapping tariffs on more than 300 billion dollars worth of Chinese imports. Two and half years into the Biden presidency – those taxes are still here. To understand why, NPR's White House correspondent Asma Khalid spoke with policy makers, economists and even ...
Jun 18, 2023•12 min
It depends on when, and where you grew up, but you can probably name a few of your favorite sit-com dads - from Mike Brady and his "bunch", to Homer Simpson, to Andre Johnson from Blackish. There is no single, universal way to be a father. There are as many ways to be a dad as there are dads. This year, for Father's Day, we asked a variety of different dads to tell us their stories about what fatherhood means to them. And we have a story that puts a new twist on the old saying "like father, like...
Jun 16, 2023•13 min
A deadly and addictive chemical normally used as a horse tranquilizer is being mixed into illegal drugs.Xylazine has been around for a while, but over the last year authorities have been seeing it turn up in higher quantities all over the country. In recent weeks, U.S. Drug Czar Rahul Gupta has been sounding the alarm, even acknowledging public health experts and police are mostly in the dark about how Xylazine took hold so quickly.NPR's Juana Summers speaks with addiction correspondent Brian Ma...
Jun 15, 2023•10 min
When Kim Hyun-woo stepped into the NPR studios in Washington, he was doing something that in his past life would have gotten him killed - speaking frankly with an American journalist. That's because Mr. Kim spent 17 years working for North Korean intelligence at the Ministry of State Security. He defected in 2014 and lives today in South Korea. In a rare glimpse behind the curtain of one of the most isolated countries in the world, he shared his thoughts on pathways to diplomacy between Washingt...
Jun 14, 2023•11 min
On Tuesday, former president Donald Trump appeared in a federal courthouse in Miami where he pleaded not guilty to 37 criminal charges, including obstruction and unlawful retention of classified documents at his Florida home and private resort Mar-a-Lago. He is the first former U.S. president to face federal criminal charges. Trump and many of his supporters have called the indictment politically motivated. NPR's White House correspondent Franco Ordonez has been following Trump's case and he spo...
Jun 13, 2023•10 min
The U.S. is in the midst of a drug crisis, with opioid overdose deaths climbing to epidemic proportions. And overdose deaths among young people, between the ages of 10 and 19, have been on the rise with sharp increases in recent years. Across the country, cities and states are looking for strategies to help kids survive the opioid crisis. At a school in Virginia, students are learning how to obtain and use the lifesaving overdose reversal nasal spray Narcan that was recently made available for s...
Jun 12, 2023•13 min
For more than a year the PGA, the world's leading pro golf league, has basically been at war with the upstart Saudi-funded LIV Golf league. Lawsuits and countersuits were filed as the the leagues competed for marquee golfers and control of the narrative around the game. Some PGA players resisted big paydays to join LIV because they were critical of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the source of the league's seemingly endless supply of money. But last week, the two leagues announced a plan to jo...
Jun 11, 2023•13 min
Federal Indian boarding schools left a decades long legacy of abuse, neglect and forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Last year, when the federal government finally acknowledged its role — that painful history drew attention to a few schools that remain open. NPR's Sequoia Carrillo and KOSU's Allison Herrera visited Riverside Indian School in southwest Oklahoma to find out how a school that once stripped children of their Native identity now helps strengthen it. In participating regions, ...
Jun 09, 2023•11 min
Every year about 600,000 thousand people are reported missing in the United States per the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database. In 2022, about 34,000 people reported as actively missing were people of color. But people of color who disappear seldom get the same amount of media attention devoted to white people who go missing - especially white women and children. The late journalist Gwen Ifill coined the phrase "Missing White Woman Syndrome" to describe the media's fascination wit...
Jun 08, 2023•16 min
Being Black and an immigrant is an increasingly common phenomenon in the South, where 1 in 10 Black people are immigrants. Still, despite growing numbers of Black immigrants in the region, their experience is fraught with worries over discrimination and assimilation. NPR's Leah Donnella reports on hurdles Black immigrants face in order to drive in Tennessee, a state with one of the fastest growing populations of Black immigrants in the South, and with few options for transportation. See pcm.adsw...
Jun 07, 2023•11 min
When people speak about God in various religions, the deity is typically referred to using the masculine pronoun "He." In Islam, Allah is not depicted as male or female — Allah has no gender. Yet Allah has traditionally been referred to, and imagined by many, as a man. Some Muslim women have begun to refer to Allah with feminine or gender neutral pronouns. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Hafsa Lodi, who wrote about this movement in the religion magazine The Revealer , about what's driving this. In...
Jun 06, 2023•8 min
Wars are expensive. And Russia's invasion of Ukraine has had an impact on the economies of both countries. NPR's Julian Hayda, in Kyiv, reports that international assistance is allowing Ukraine to stabilize its economy and avoid collapse. The Russian economy seems to have remained resilient in the face of sanctions and other trade and financial restrictions. But NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith reports on how that could be changing. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help...
Jun 05, 2023•12 min
While it may seem like Black-focused media is at a high these days, the reality is only 4% of all media in the U.S. is Black-owned. Moreover, experts say that biased practices from advertisers make it harder for Black-owned media companies to be profitable. NPR's Eric Deggans talks to Byron Allen, about his ambitions to grow his media empire, hold advertisers to account, and control the narrative of how Black people are represented in media. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local new...
Jun 04, 2023•14 min
Lullabies. We all know one. Whether we were sung one as a baby or now sing one to our own children. Often, they're used to help babies gently fall asleep. But lullabies can be more than that. They can be used to soothe, to comfort, and to make children feels closer to their parents and vice versa. We hear from Tiffany Ortiz, director of early-childhood programs at Carnegie Hall, about their Lullaby Project, which pairs parents with professional musicians to write personal lullabies for their bab...
Jun 02, 2023•14 min
