Year: 2025

Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It’s a drum he’s been beating for years.

Musk is one of the world’s most visible individuals to elevate this point of view. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birthrates in the U-S.

But it’s not just them. There are discussions across the political spectrum about birth rate decline and what it means for the economy.

One response to this decline is a cause that’s been taken up by the right, and it has a name – Pronatalism. Many of its advocates met up recently in Austin, Texas, at “Natal Con.”

Pronatalists think they have a friendly audience in the White House. How do they want to use it?

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Deportation is a complicated process — with lots of layers. As the Trump administration expands the number and scope of deportations – what does that mean in practice? NPR’s Asma Khalid and Ximena Bustillo unpack how deportations are supposed to work — and why so many lawsuits have been filed saying court process has been sidestepped in recent cases.

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The video game industry is huge. Last year alone it generated an estimated $187 billion dollars in revenue.

But it’s also facing a host of serious issues: massive layoffs, the advent of A.I., games that take years to be released, and a schism between big and small developers.

This week’s Reporter’s Notebook takes us inside this evolving industry with NPR’s Vincent Acovino, who recently covered the annual Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

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The country of Myanmar has been in crisis for years. A civil war has been going on since 2021.

And then, last Friday, a devastating earthquake hit, leaving at least 3,000 people dead. The tragedy only deepened the humanitarian crisis in the country.

One person watching the situation closely is Kim Aris. His mother is Aung San Suu Kyi, who was the country’s de facto leader before the military ousted and imprisoned her after a coup four years ago.

When Aris spoke to NPR earlier this week, he wasn’t even sure where his mother was, or whether she was safe.

The earthquake has brought more devastation to Myanmar raising questions about whether the country’s military can stay in power – and about the future of its ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

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Whatever you think of President Trump’s tariffs, there’s one point you have to concede: his interest in them is not a passing whim.

He noted that on Wednesday, in the Rose Garden, when he was announcing the latest, massive round of tariffs. “I’ve been talking about this for 40 years,” he said.

The use of tariffs are a core belief for Donald Trump. Trade deficits are bad, other countries take advantage of the U.S. and tariffs are the way to fix this.

Since the Rose Garden announcement, markets have plunged, other countries have promised to retaliate, and members of his own party have spoken out against the tariffs.

Trump’s tariff plan is designed to eliminate U.S. trade deficits. Are trade deficits actually bad?

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Eight-point-seven billion.

Four-hundred million.

One-hundred-seventy-five million.

These are just some examples of the money the federal government has withheld or is threatening to withhold from various colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Harvard University.

That $8.7 billion figure was announced earlier this week by the Trump administration, which said that it’s reviewing federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard because Harvard has not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus.

Some educators say the administration’s moves to cut funding at colleges and universities amounts to a war on higher education. But the loss of those funds will be felt far beyond the college campuses.

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In President Donald Trump’s telling, tariffs are the political equivalent of duct tape: you can use them to fix anything.

For example, they’re a negotiating tool — he used the threat of tariffs to pressure Canada and Mexico to implement border policies he liked. He also sees tariffs as a revenue source that might help offset his proposed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and as a shield to protect American manufacturing jobs from overseas competition.

With all of these potentially conflicting aims, and with another major round of tariffs expected to be announced on Wednesday, what is the strategy behind them?

Rana Foroohar, a Financial Times columnist and the author of Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World, says they’re an “experiment” that could lead to a big change in the way the global economy works.

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Last week, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that Korean adoption agencies were responsible for widespread fraud, malpractice and even human rights violations.

More than 140,000 South Korean children were adopted by families living abroad in the decades after the Korean war. The report documented cases in which agencies fabricated records and others in which abandoned children were sent abroad after only perfunctory efforts to find living guardians.

Documentarian Deann Borshay Liem was an adult when she first learned the story she’d been told about her identity was a lie. She was adopted by an American family from California in 1966, when she was eight years old. Her adoption records said she was an orphan, but she eventually discovered her birth mother was alive, and she had a large extended family in South Korea.

She shares her adoption story, her reaction to the commission’s report, and her thoughts on what justice looks like for adoptees.

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The AI boom has caused a huge surge in energy consumption, so how is the tech industry thinking about its environmental footprint as it invests in new AI models?

Emily Kwong, host and reporter for NPR’s Short Wave podcast, finds out what solutions are being considered that might meet both consumer demand and address climate concerns.

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After reaching historic levels, fatal overdoses from opioids are dropping rapidly.

Today we bring you a reporter’s notebook from NPR’s national addiction correspondent Brian Mann. He tells host Scott Detrow what it’s been like to cover America’s addiction crisis and explains the significance of the recent decline in opioid deaths.

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