The economic cost of the government shutdown is mounting, as workers miss paychecks and contracts stall. President Trump’s feud with Colombia is deepening, with threats to cut aid testing a decades-long alliance. And in France, outrage is growing after the Louvre jewel heist, with political backlash and a security crackdown underway.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Raphael Nam, Tara Neil, Miguel Macias, Mohamad ElBardicy and Martha Ann Overland.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas
We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
Quarterly earnings reports are a long-standing requirement for public companies in the U.S. But the Trump administration wants to axe quarterly releases and just release them twice a year. And there is evidence to suggest this could be better in the long run for companies and investors. On today’s show, we look at the potential benefits and trade-offs of changing how often companies report their financial results.
Today’s episode centers an important voice in the still-unfolding story of Jeffrey Epstein. Virginia Roberts Giuffre survived abuse at the hands of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a number of powerful men. Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year. But before her death, she wrote a memoir called Nobody’s Girl. In today’s interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel, Giuffre’s collaborator on the project, Amy Wallace, and her brother, Sky Roberts, share what it was like for Giuffre to write about what she endured.
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Tuberculosis – the world’s deadliest infectious disease – could be dormant in your system for years before you realize you have it. In the U.S., it’s relatively rare; provisional data shows that there were just over 10,000 cases in 2024. But in other parts of the world, especially lower-income countries, the disease is spreading much more actively. Worldwide, more than 10 million people are diagnosed with an active tuberculosis infection every year. And even though modern medicine has all the tools to cure it, over a million people around the world still die from the sickness annually.
Author John Green thinks that’s a problem. In his book Everything is Tuberculosis, he charts the spread of tuberculosis in the past to the lessons it has to teach us in the present.
Interested in more science and medical history? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.
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The Trump administration's push to expand immigration enforcement -- as part of its deportation efforts -- has created job opportunities in small towns and cities.
We head to one of them -- Folkston, Georgia, a community of about 2,800 residents..
That number will soon swell as immigrant detainees fill up a growing ICE detention center at the edge of town.
The center is in a old prison run by the private prison corporation, the GEO Group, and is set to become the nation’s largest detention facility.We hear about the hopes and fears of the town's residents.
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This episode was produced by Liz Baker, Elena Burnett and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by Hannah Gluvna. It was edited by Eric Westervelt and Justine Kenin. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
As a shaky ceasefire between Israel and Hamas seems to hold and Gaza starts to emerge from war, the immense challenges facing the territory in its eventual recovery are becoming clear. Around ninety percent of buildings damaged or destroyed, there are no funds for reconstruction and unexploded bombs are buried beneath debris. We hear from the U.N. program that has a team on the ground working to clear rubble and rebuild infrastructure about the challenges that lie ahead.
The Trump administration has cut federal funding to colleges and universities it says don’t align with conservative priorities. And now, the White House says it will reward schools that follow in its ideological footsteps.
Five institutions — Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia — have rejected the proposal. The others have yet to comment.
In this edition of “If You Can Keep It,” our weekly series on the state of democracy, we talk about higher education and what’s at stake if academic freedom is compromised.
Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ atplus.npr.org/the1a.
Ken Liu is a big name in science fiction. His latest novel All That We See or Seem takes place in a world that’s not too different from ours. But in the book, AI is more embedded in day-to-day life and one character uses it to guide collective dream experiences. In today’s episode, Liu speaks with NPR’s Andrew Limbong about the novel’s hacker protagonist, dreams as knowledge, and how human patterns influence technology.
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Israel says the ceasefire is back on after it launched strikes on Gaza in response to clashes over the weekend that threaten to unravel a fragile deal. It's day 20 of the government shutdown, but the usual pressure points that push lawmakers toward a deal haven’t been felt yet. And the U.S. steps up military operations in the Caribbean, raising fears and tensions in the region.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Rebecca Rosman, Jason Breslow, Tara Neil, Mohamad ElBardicy and Ally Schweitzer.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas
We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
Some scientists looking to preserve vulnerable species have turned to a controversial technique: synthetic biology. This catchall term often means genetic engineering – introducing new genes to an organism. And a recent narrow vote by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on using the technology shows how divided scientists are on the issue of releasing genetically altered species. Science correspondent Nate Rott wades into the debate with us and reveals whether or not the Union voted to place a moratorium on releasing gene-edited species.
