Month: March 2023

He hasn’t yet entered the contest, but even so, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is one of the leading Republicans in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

DeSantis has just released a new book that highlights his pugnacious style and hardline stance on issues ranging from education to public health. And he has attracted even more attention as Florida’s Republican-led legislature began its session Tuesday.

NPR’s Greg Allen has this look at how DeSantis became what some believe is the future of the Republican Party.

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Tennessee passed a bill last week restricting drag shows. The law specifically bans “adult cabaret performances” in public or in the presence of children.

In more than a dozen states, Republican lawmakers have been pushing similar bills.

Historian Jules Gill-Peterson of Johns Hopkins University says laws that target drag have a long history in the U.S, and LGBTQ people have fought back before.

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When Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her re-election bid this week, many people saw the result as a referendum on how she handled crime.

But crime is not just a Chicago issue. Nationally, murders, shootings, and thefts are up. Communities that feel under siege are looking to hold elected leaders accountable for their failure to address the problem. But when agreements on how to solve crime break down along party lines -and even within parties- are politics hindering potential solutions?

Host Michel Martin talks to Thomas Abt, senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, about non-partisan, research-based solutions. We also hear from Ja’Ron Smith, a fellow with Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice reform coalition.

Documents released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit reveal that many Fox News stars knew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were baseless but invited guests who spewed those claims on air anyway.

The documents were released by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its lawsuit against both Fox News and its parent company. They include text messages sent by Fox News personalities and statements made under oath by the network’s controlling owner Rupert Murdoch.

NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik explains that the lawsuit is the latest in a series of ethical breaches during Murdoch’s decades-long reign at the helm of one of the most powerful media companies in the world.

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The Supreme Court is weighing whether or not the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is constitutional based on how it receives its funding.

Last fall a panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals outlined that if funding for a federal agency like the CFPB is not appropriated annually by Congress, then everything that agency does is deemed unconstitutional.

While the agency’s fate is in limbo, its latest initiative is aimed at cracking down on junk fees that can cost Americans a lot of money.

We speak with CFPB’s director, Rohit Chopra, on how unnecessary fees impact everyday people.

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Raghavan Iyer built his career helping Americans get to know the fundamentals of Indian cooking. Now, after years of treatment for aggressive cancer, he has released what he says will be his last book.
NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks to Raghavan Iyer, about the book, “On The Curry Trail: Chasing the Flavor That Seduced the World.”
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Margaret Elysia Garcia tried hard to rebuild her life in Greenville, California after it was devastated by a wildfire in 2021.

But the difficulty of life there — power outages, mud slides, razed streets she could barely recognize — eventually it all became too much. She left her home there and moved to Southern California.

Jake Bittle’s new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change And The Next American Migration, argues that stories like this are becoming more common. From drought-hit farms in Arizona to flooded coastlines in Virginia, it’s a close look at the way climate-fueled disasters are forcing people to move.

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