Up First from NPR - Russia Intensifies Attacks On Ukraine, Summer Travel Season, Wildfire Forecast

Ukrainian officials say Russia launched its largest airstrikes since the start of the conflict. Sunday's attack, which killed 12 people, happened only hours before a prisoner exchange. Memorial Day is considered the unofficial start of summer and the summer travel season, but a deadly midair collision in the nation's capital in January and reports of air traffic control outages have raised safety concerns. Also, government forecasts predict an above normal wildfire risk for some parts of the country yet cuts to the US Forest Service makes fighting fires harder.

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Today's episode of Up First was edited by Ryland Barton, Catherine Laidlaw, HJ Mai, Mohamad ElBardicy. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Lindsay Totti. We get engineering support from Damian Herring and our technical director is David Greenberg.


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The Indicator from Planet Money - The dawn of search engines

Today on the show, we bring you a special episode from the Understood feed at CBC podcasts. It's an excerpt from a series called Who Broke the Internet hosted by Cory Doctorow. The four part series details his criticisms on the state of the modern internet and what we can do about it.

From his conversations with Eric Corly the publisher of 2600, an iconic hacker magazine, best known under his hacker name Emmanuel Goldstein, to Clive Thompson a tech and culture writer to Steven Levy the author of "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives" this excerpt digs into how search engines started.

You can listen to more of the podcast here.

Related episodes:
The hack that almost broke the internet (Apple / Spotify)

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NPR's Book of the Day - Karen Hao’s new book is a skeptical look at Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s AI empire

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit meant to conduct artificial intelligence research that would benefit the general public. In the company's early days, reporter Karen Hao arranged to spend time in OpenAI's offices and noticed the culture there was incredibly secretive. That secrecy raised questions for Hao that ultimately resulted in her new book, Empire of AI. The book is an intimate look at the company behind ChatGPT, but also at the industry-wide race to control AI. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Steve Inskeep about early disagreements between founders Sam Altman and Elon Musk, Altman's talents for fundraising and storytelling, and how the AI race is reproducing elements of colonial empire.

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Short Wave - The Great Space Race … With Clocks

It's Memorial Day, Short Wavers. This holiday, we bring you a meditation on time ... and clocks. There are hundreds of atomic clocks in orbit right now, perched on satellites all over Earth. We depend on them for GPS location, Internet timing, stock trading and even space navigation. In today's encore episode, hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber learn how to build a better clock. In order to do that, they ask: How do atomic clocks really work, anyway? What makes a clock precise? And how could that process be improved for even greater accuracy?

- For more about Holly's Optical Atomic Strontium Ion Clock, check out the OASIC project on NASA's website.
- For more about the Longitude Problem, check out Dava Sobel's book,
Longitude.

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Consider This from NPR - Misinformation channels to the Oval Office

President Trump's spreading of the false claim that South Africa is perpetrating a genocide against its white inhabitants is just the latest example of misinformation making its way from corners of the internet into presidential statements or even policy.

This isn't the first time that a falsehood that began on the fringes of the right-wing made its way to the Trump White House. NPR's Scott Detrow and Lisa Hagen examine how these beliefs have been able to reach the Oval Office.

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Up First from NPR - The Class of 2025

A lot has changed in higher education since President Trump took office. This week on The Sunday Story, Ayesha reflects on her own college graduation, and she sits down with three graduating college seniors. They talk about how funding cuts have upended their postgrad plans and how the last semester has made them think differently about what college is all about.

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Consider This from NPR - The Supreme Court’s Trump Dilemma

The Supreme Court has become the focal point of the legal battle over President Donald Trump's executive authority – and presidential power more broadly.

Few reporters are as prepared as NPR's Nina Totenberg to report on this unique moment.

Over the last fifty years, Totenberg established herself as the preeminent Supreme Court reporter in America. She's broken countless stories – including allegations of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas during the justice's 1991 confirmation hearings.

For this week's Reporter's Notebook host Scott Detrow speaks with Totenberg about this crucial moment in the court's history and consequential cases she has covered over the years.

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Up First from NPR - National Security Council Shakeup, George Floyd Murder and Political Extremism

Another major shakeup at the White House National Security Council. Officials tell NPR that dozens of staff were fired yesterday. Also, Sunday marks five years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. His death triggered a reckoning with racism. But we explore how Floyd's murder also fueled conspiracies and political extremism.

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Consider This from NPR - Can Trump suspend habeas corpus?

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem got a pop quiz at a senate hearing this week. The question came from Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan, of New Hampshire.

Hassan asked Noem to to explain habeas corpus.

For the record, habeas corpus is the legal principle, enshrined in the Constitution, that protects people from illegal detention.

The reason that this bit of Latin is under discussion – is because the Trump administration says it's considering suspending habeas corpus.

This core constitutional protection has been an obstacle to the President's mass deportation plan.

Habeas corpus is a principle that's hundreds of years older than America itself.

What would it mean if the President suspended it? And could he, under the Constitution?

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1A - The News Roundup For May 23, 2025

After an early-morning vote to open debate, the House passed the Republican spending and tax bill this week. Now, it moves to the Senate.

Elsewhere in Washington, President Donald Trump welcomed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for a meeting in the Oval Office where he lectured the visiting leader and made false claims about supposed persecution of white Afrikaner farmers.

Despite Gaza being on the edge of famine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces launched a new offensive in the region that will supposedly bring the entire area under Israeli control.

In his first general audience, Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday called for aid to be allowed to enter Gaza.

The European Union is engaged in a war of words with Israel after the IDF fired warning shots at an E.U. diplomatic delegation visiting the city of Jenin.

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