Author: Matt

Russia’s state news agency Tass reported that the country’s most famous mercenary, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was on the passenger list for a flight that crashed on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg on Wednesday, killing all ten people on board. Despite being on the passenger list, it’s not clear Prigozhin was on the flight.

As head of the Wagner Group, Prigozhin led an unsuccessful mutiny against the Russian military in June. He quickly stood down and struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that would see him exiled to neighboring Belarus. That exile never came and questions swirled about what punishment, if any, Prigozhin would face for crossing Putin.

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Nina Khrushcheva. She is a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York City, and she’s also the great-granddaughter of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

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Former president Donald Trump is the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary. And with a healthy lead in the polls, he’s skipping the first Republican presidential debate on Wednesday.

So how do you prep for a big, televised debate when your biggest opponent decides not to show up?

That’s been the question facing the eight Republicans who will be on stage in Milwaukee on Wednesday night.

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Puerto Rico has seen a string of natural disasters in the past few years – hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and landslides. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, things got even worse.

These disasters have taken a heavy toll on student mental health. They’ve disrupted everyday life – including school. That disruption has seriously impacted educational outcomes for kids and teens on the island.

The Nation’s Report Card shows that more than one-third of fourth graders overall in the U.S are considered proficient or better in math.

In Puerto Rico, that number rounds out to zero. Children on the island have worse outcomes when it comes to graduation rates, and reading scores continue to decline.

Reporter Kavitha Cardoza traveled to Puerto Rico to learn how students and teachers cope.

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The last few elections have brought a wave of self-styled progressive prosecutors into office. They’ve won elections by campaigning on issues like bail reform and alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders. Now, Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors are taking steps to curtail their power, or strip them of it altogether.

We talk to Monique Worrell, who was elected state attorney for Florida’s ninth judicial circuit, which includes the city of Orlando, in 2020. This month, Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis suspended her and installed a replacement. He said her office had refused “to faithfully enforce the laws of Florida,” in its charging decisions. Worrell called her suspension an attack on democracy.

And we talk to Carissa Byrne Hessick, director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina, explains how these sorts of battles are playing out across the country.

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A growing body of research makes it clear that noise pollution can have severely harmful impacts on our health. It has been tied to heart disease and thousands of premature deaths around the world.

Still, our communities seem to get louder and louder. Some people are fighting back – pushing for more regulation and quieter cities.

NPR’s Pien Huang takes a sonic tour of Providence, Rhode Island with researcher Erica Walker and talks about noise pollution solutions with Jamie Banks the founder and president of Quiet Communities, and New York City Council member Gale Brewer.

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The Biden administration is under intense political pressure from Republicans over immigration, who accuse the president of being too lenient toward migrants.

Now, the administration is locking up more unauthorized immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention facilities, and NPR has exclusively obtained more than 1,600 pages of confidential inspection reports examining conditions inside those facilities.

They describe barbaric practices, negligent medical care, racist abuse and filthy conditions.

NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reports on the abysmal conditions detainees are forced to endure.

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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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