Year: 2023

The CDC says that a new omicron variant called EG.5 is causing a summer wave of COVID cases.

Yet, COVID is nowhere near the threat that it was more than three years ago at the beginning of the pandemic.

And that might be one of the reasons that people are cruising again on big ships following a COVID-19 decline.

WLRN reporter Tom Hudson tells us how one of the hardest hit industries during the peak of the pandemic is trying to make a comeback.

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A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

The indictment also includes charges against former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, along with a number of so-called fake electors.

In charging former President Donald Trump and his allies, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is relying on Georgia’s broad set of RICO anti-racketeering laws

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It’s been two years since the Taliban entered Kabul, throwing the final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan into chaos. Crowds of people desperate to leave the country surrounded the airport.

Tens of thousands of Afghans were airlifted out before American troops pulled out. Many more are still trying to reach the U.S. Some are risking their lives to cross the border from Mexico.

NPR’s Tom Bowman has the story of one family who traveled from Afghanistan to Virginia, by way of Pakistan and Mexico, to get medical care for their young daughter.

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For the past few months, President Biden’s top foreign policy advisors have been working as intermediaries between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Eventually they want to get the two countries to agree on a deal to finally establish formal diplomatic relations.

It would be a breakthrough for Israel to get that recognition, after decades of Arab hostility stemming from the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam’s holiest sites, and it’s an oil giant in the region.

But it seems like an almost impossible three-way agreement. So, what’s standing in the way?

NPR’s Daniel Estrin, who covers Israel, speaks with Felicia Schwartz from the Financial Times, Bader Al Saif, an assistant professor of history at the University of Kuwait, and fellow NPR correspondent Aya Batrawy, who covers Saudi Arabia, to understand what challenges remain for the two countries to normalize relations.

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As the battle over book bans in schools and libraries continues to play out in various states across the U.S., the toll it’s taking on librarians is coming at a great cost — personally and financially.

Many librarians are speaking up about fearing for their jobs and safety.

Yet some conservative activists see the current fight playing out as necessary to protect children.

NPR’s Tovia Smith traveled to Louisiana where tensions have been flaring up — pitting librarians against book ban advocates in the local community.

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Hawaii may be a tourist attraction to many Americans, but for over a million people, it’s their home. And like any state in the US, it is not immune to the effects of climate change.

This week brought a devastating reminder, as wildfires stoked by Hurricane Dora spread across the island of Maui. Dozens have been killed in the fires and thousands have been evacuated. Much of the historical town of Lahaina lies in ruins.

Hawaii, like many other places on the planet, has experienced less rainfall in recent years, making it more prone to devastating wildfires that seemed unimaginable a generation ago.

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The number of overdoses from fentanyl continues to soar, as do concerns from those in Washington. Immigration authorities say illicit fentanyl is flowing into the U.S. from Mexico through official ports of entry.

Not everyone believes that’s the full story.

NPR’s Joel Rose traveled to the border to find out what’s really happening.

Fentanyl is largely smuggled by U.S. citizens and other authorized border crossers. We hear the story of one of the smugglers.

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In past wars, updates have trickled out slowly — often tightly controlled by the militaries involved. In the war in Ukraine, every day is a firehose of nearly real-time information, in the form of cell phone footage captured by civilians, updates from satellite intelligence companies and embedded military bloggers.

NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre explains how that’s shaping perceptions of the war in Russia, in Ukraine and around the world.

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One Republican senator from Alabama is single-handedly holding up over 300 senior-level military promotions and appointments.

Senator Tommy Tuberville says he’s doing it to take a stand against a Defense Department policy that reimburses travel expenses for military personnel who have to leave their states to get an abortion or other reproductive care.

Tonya Murphy is a military spouse who went to Capitol Hill to hand deliver a petition signed by hundreds calling on lawmakers to stop the impasse. She explains how this political standoff is impacting military families.

And NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman gives us the big picture overview of how all of this is affecting the Pentagon and, potentially, national security.

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July was almost certainly the hottest month, globally, on record. It was also a month in which many lives were upended by weather related-disasters — the sort of disasters that are increasingly likely as climate change continues.

So what do the people who lived through those disasters make of all this?

We asked Dr. Frank LoVecchio, an emergency room doctor at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., about trying to keep people alive who spent too much time out in the deadly heat.

And Michelle Eddleman McCormick, general manager at the Marshfield Village Store in Vermont, about living through extreme flooding.

And Will Nicholls, of the Cree Nation of Mistissini, editor-in-chief of The Nation magazine, about how historic wildfires in northern Quebec have affected his community.

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