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National

- Federal judge acknowledges 'abusive workplace' in court order: 2026 Feb 10

- Snowboarder Chloe Kim is chasing an Olympic gold three-peat with a torn labrum: 2026 Feb 10

- FBI releases photos and video of potential suspect in Guthrie disappearance: 2026 Feb 10

- DHS faces funding deadline. And, courts fast-track Somali asylum seeker hearings: 2026 Feb 10

- How the use of AI and 'deepfakes' plays a role in the search for Nancy Guthrie: 2026 Feb 10

- In New Orleans, some Mardi Gras groups swap plastic beads for glass for parade throws: 2026 Feb 10

- Savannah Guthrie releases video pleading for her mother's return: 2026 Feb 10

- Mikaela Shiffrin misses podium in team Alpine combined event, as U.S. takes bronze: 2026 Feb 10

LAW | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:18 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Federal judge acknowledges 'abusive workplace' in court order

By Carrie Johnson

An unnamed federal judge acknowledged to investigators the atmosphere in their court chambers "at times resulted in an abusive workplace" and agreed to take corrective measures after a law clerk complained about bullying, according to an order made public Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The order described allegations that a judge subjected clerks to harassment, verbal abuse and erratic behavior during the COVID pandemic. For example, the judge expected clerks to give weekly updates on some 200 cases assigned to them and would unleash "a verbal browbeating" if the clerks could not provide exact details "at a moment's notice," the order said. On another occasion, the judge banged on the door when a clerk was using a bathroom in chambers, yelling, "that's my bathroom."

The order did not identify the judge in question but two sources familiar with the process told NPR it is U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby, of Maryland. Judge Griggsby, 58, was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate for the lifetime tenured job in 2021.

Earlier in her career, Griggsby worked for the U.S. Justice Department and served as counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. She also worked as the chief counsel for privacy and information policy for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Judge Griggsby did not respond to a message left on her voicemail in chambers Tuesday afternoon. The circuit executive, James Ishida, also had no immediate response. A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington declined to comment.

The newly published order, signed by Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which oversees Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, concluded that at least some of the allegations "may be explained by poor communication, unstated assumptions or misunderstandings between the judge and the law clerks."

But Diaz also found a workplace culture where clerks feared asking questions and faced health issues that they attributed to the stress of their clerkships. Both the complaining clerk and that person's co-clerk accepted transfers out of Judge Griggsby's chambers before their two-year clerkships ended. One of those clerks served only two-and-a-half months before the transfer.

The investigation by the Fourth Circuit included interviews with a judicial assistant and other former law clerks, who reported that they too experienced some similar problems in chambers. Judge Diaz's order said that most of them said they would still work for the judge again despite the intense atmosphere.

Judge Diaz's order said the unnamed judge cooperated fully with the investigation and agreed to several corrective actions, including meeting with a mentor judge to discuss best practices; attending annual workplace training; and informing new clerks they can approach the chief judge with any problems.

An NPR investigation has uncovered problems with the system the judiciary uses to police itself and a widespread fear of retribution. Tens of thousands of employees of the federal courts are not covered by federal anti-discrimination laws and cannot easily sue over misconduct in the office.

Judges exert enormous influence on law clerks, who rely on them for mentoring and lifelong career guidance, tamping down the number of formal complaints against lifetime-tenured jurists.

But some allegations of misconduct are nonetheless breaking into public view. Last week NPR reported on the retirement of Senior Judge Mark Wolf in Boston. Wolf's announcement to leave the bench coincided with a complaint from one of his former clerks.

The Legal Accountability Project, which seeks to bring more transparency into the clerkship process, filed a formal complaint last year against a different federal judge, Sarah Merriam of the Second Circuit Appeals Court.

Aliza Shatzman, founder of The Legal Accountability Project, said the newly public complaint is "just the latest in a long line of examples of the outrageous lack of accountability for federal judges who abuse their power by mistreating clerks."

Shatzman pointed out that in this case, both clerks were reassigned years ago – but she said that it took years for the court to open an investigation into possible judicial misconduct, potentially exposing more law clerks to mistreatment.

She also raised doubts that corrective action like workplace training and meetings is sufficient to change the dynamic in a judge's chambers.

"Because without meaningful discipline, abusive conduct will persist unabated in the federal courts," Shatzman said.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5709042

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2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:03 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Snowboarder Chloe Kim is chasing an Olympic gold three-peat with a torn labrum

By Rachel Treisman

Want more Olympics updates? Subscribe here to get our newsletter, Rachel Goes to the Games, delivered to your inbox for a behind-the-scenes look at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

MILAN — Chloe Kim was just 17 when she won halfpipe gold at the 2018 PyeongChang Games, becoming the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboard medal. She made history again when she won her second — also gold — in Beijing.

Now 25 and the "proud owner of a frontal lobe," Kim is hoping to three-peat, a feat that no halfpipe snowboarder has ever done.

But it won't be easy, especially since Kim is coming into the Olympics with a shoulder injury that kept her from training in recent weeks.

"I have so much anxiety, but thankfully I have matcha and there's good vibes here and my family's out here, so we'll be good," Kim said ahead of Wednesday's qualifier.

She tore her labrum — a ring of cartilage lining the shoulder socket — while training in Switzerland in late January, just weeks after a crash during practice forced her to pull out of a World Cup event in Colorado. The Olympics are actually the first competition of the season for Kim, who qualified a year in advance.

Kim told reporters that she resumed training about two weeks ago, rocking a "very securely taped" shoulder brace. She feels like the brace has made her riding better, perhaps more steady, because she can't move her trailing arm as much as she normally would.

"I think once we're in there and once we're focusing on what we want to do, the tricks we want to do, everything, my mind goes completely blank," Kim added. "I'm not thinking about my shoulder. I'm just thinking about what I'm trying to accomplish in this run. And yeah, it's been working out pretty well."

Kim recalled that she had an "awful practice" right before her competition in Beijing, where she scored so high in her first run that even falls in the second and third didn't keep her from a gold medal. Kim says while she's always anxious waiting at the top, she's confident that her muscle memory will kick in.

"I just like to remind myself that every run is a new run, a brand new opportunity, and just because I had an hour of bad snowboarding doesn't mean that the next 45 seconds are also going to be bad," she added.

Kim remained dominant in the years after Beijing, picking up two more X Games gold medals, two World Cups and a third world championship in 2025.

She says her run for the Olympics is one she's never done before.

"I think if I'm able to pull that off, regardless of where I place, I'll be really content with that," Kim said. "But yeah, everything's feeling good. I have all the pieces done and dialed, so I just need to put everything all together."

Kim is one of two dozen women who will take to the halfpipe on Wednesday to fight for a spot in Thursday's medal event. There will be three other Americans among them: Bea Kim, Maddie Mastro and Maddy Schaffrick.

Despite her injury, Kim is still considered a favorite for gold. One of her biggest threats could come from Korea's Gaon Choi, who is 17 — the age Kim was when she won her first Olympics. Choin has described Kim as her idol.

Kim was full of praise for Choi, whom she has known for years. She called this a full-circle moment, adding that it does make her feel old.

"I met her when she literally started halfpipe snowboarding," said Kim, whose parents emigrated from Korea. "Sometimes it feels like I'm seeing a mirror reflection of myself and my family."

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5709001

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NATIONAL | UPDATED TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:27 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

FBI releases photos and video of potential suspect in Guthrie disappearance

By Alana Wise

The FBI on Tuesday released a series of surveillance photos recovered from the home of missing Arizona woman Nancy Guthrie. FBI Director Kash Patel described the masked individual pictured as armed and said the subject appears to have tampered with the camera.

"Working with our partners - as of this morning, law enforcement has uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at Nancy Guthrie's front door the morning of her disappearance," Patel wrote on social media.

Guthrie, the mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie, was last seen on the evening of Jan. 31.

That night, she attended dinner and game night at one of her daughters' homes and was dropped back at her home just north of Tucson, Ariz., by a family member around 9:48 p.m.

Officials say that several hours later, at 1:47 a.m., Guthrie's doorbell camera disconnected. About a half hour after that, the camera detected movement, but until Tuesday, officials said they had been unable to retrieve the footage.

Twitter

It wasn't until the next day, Feb. 1, when Guthrie did not show up for church, that the family was alerted that something might be wrong and the authorities were contacted.

An investigation of Guthrie's house revealed blood on the front porch that DNA testing has proved to belong to the missing woman. And a camera from Guthrie's home was reported missing.

The FBI has said that it's in possession of a ransom note from the people who say they abducted Guthrie, though it has not confirmed whether the note is genuine.

The ransom note includes two deadlines: one that passed last week on Thursday and another that expired Monday.

Guthrie's three children — Annie, Camron and Savannah — have said that they are willing to cooperate with whoever is holding their mother, including paying her captors, and that they still believe their mother is alive.

In a video released on Instagram on Monday, Savannah Guthrie said: "We believe our mom is still out there."

She also asked for prayers and tips regarding Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708920

UP FIRST NEWSLETTER | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:44 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

DHS faces funding deadline. And, courts fast-track Somali asylum seeker hearings

By Brittney Melton

Good morning. You're reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.

Today's top stories

The Department of Homeland Security's funding will run out on Friday after Democrats refused to approve the money without significant changes to immigration enforcement. As lawmakers search for a solution, a House committee will hear from top immigration officials about their enforcement practices across the U.S.

- 🎧 If a deal is not reached, Congress will need to pass another stopgap bill to fund DHS, NPR's Barbara Sprunt tells Up First. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he will start prepping a short-term funding bill as a backup option. Democrats face an uphill battle with their demands for officers to display identifying information like their last name and a ban on face masks. Many Republicans view these requests as nonstarters. Sprunt says she is watching how GOP lawmakers question top immigration officials today. While they largely back President Trump's enforcement actions, Republicans have to navigate new polling that shows a majority of Americans believe those same tactics have gone too far.

The latest release of Epstein files threatens Britain's ruling government. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces calls for his resignation. He is not implicated in the Epstein files, but he appointed someone who is.

- 🎧 The calls for Starmer's resignation are due to his decision to make Peter Mandelson the ambassador to Washington, NPR's Lauren Frayer says. Mandelson faces police investigation for allegedly passing sensitive U.K. government details to Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson denies any wrongdoing. He resigned from his role last year after revelations that he maintained his friendship with Epstein following Epstein's sex crimes conviction. Police are also investigating former Prince Andrew, who also appears in the files, over whether he leaked sensitive information to Epstein when he was the U.K. trade envoy.

Today show host Savannah Guthrie released another video on Instagram yesterday pleading for the public's help in the search for her mom. She posted the video around the time a deadline outlined in a ransom message passed. Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen near her Arizona home on Jan. 31.

- 🎧 NPR's Bill Chappell says there is no sense that authorities are any closer to finding Nancy, even though multiple local and federal agencies are working on the case. Several media outlets have received ransom messages since Nancy was reported missing. At least one included details about the scene at her home. The FBI says it is taking the messages seriously, but it is not clear that they came from people who took Nancy.

Immigration courts abruptly moved up hearings for dozens of asylum cases filed by Somali migrants over the weekend, according to four lawyers NPR interviewed. Lawyers in Minnesota, Illinois and Nebraska received notices that hearings set for 2028 and others that were not scheduled yet are now happening this month or next. The attorneys fear that the rapid scheduling may stifle due process for their clients. While more than 100 cases have been affected, the attorneys expect that number to climb much higher.

Deep dive

Trump's unpopular policies and actions are creating problems for the GOP. Republicans keep losing special elections and are retiring at a faster rate than Democrats. Voters say they prefer Democrats to control Congress. Democrats' hopes of taking over the House are growing by the day, while the Senate remains a longer shot. Republicans face an uphill battle, particularly to retain control of the House.

- ➡️ An NPR poll showed 36% of respondents approved of Trump's handling of the economy, but a majority said tariffs hurt it. Americans name the economy as their top concern.

- ➡️ So far, 51 members of the House have announced they are leaving their seats going into the 2026 election cycle: 30 Republicans and 21 Democrats.

- ➡️ The president's popularity is an important indicator of electoral success in midterms. Trump's job approval rating is 39%, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, which came out last week.

Picture show

In the children's book The One About the Blackbird, a young boy learns to play the guitar from his grandfather. They share a particular love for one song: The Beatles' "Blackbird." Author Melanie Florence describes the book as an intergenerational love story. As an adult, the boy returns home and plays guitar for his grandfather. Though his grandfather now forgets some things, he never loses his adoration for music. Matt James said his family connection made the story resonate, and he knew he had to illustrate it. James' parents are musicians who perform at retirement homes. Take a look at the artistic decisions he made to illustrate the story.

3 things to know before you go

1. Team USA star Lindsey Vonn announced on Instagram that she suffered a "complex tibia fracture" when she crashed in the Olympic downhill race on Sunday.

2. New research from Mass General Brigham suggests that drinking two to three cups of regular coffee or one to two cups of caffeinated tea daily may lower the risk of dementia. (via WBUR)

3. Project Amplify, Nike's new bionic sneaker, propels wearers farther and faster. NPR tested the prototype at Nike's headquarters before its expected commercial launch in 2028.

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

Transcript

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

One demand by Democrats in the immigration debate is for federal agents to show their faces.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Lawmakers want them to take off their masks and also want top officials to take questions before Congress, which some do today.

MARTIN: I'm Michel Martin. That's Steve Inskeep, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: How, if at all, should the U.K. prime minister be held accountable? Keir Starmer's Cabinet still supports him. He's facing criticism because documents suggest Starmer's ambassador to the U.S. gave sensitive information to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

INSKEEP: Also, "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie posted another plea for her missing mother.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: We are at an hour of desperation, and we need your help.

INSKEEP: A ransom deadline came and went. What happens now? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: Here we go again. The Department of Homeland Security runs out of funding on Friday.

MARTIN: Congress is going through another last-minute drama over the budget as some lawmakers try to shape the tactics of immigration agents. A House committee is also preparing to hear from immigration officials about how that enforcement is being conducted across the country.

INSKEEP: NPR congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt is here. Barbara, good morning.

BARBARA SPRUNT, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Steve.

INSKEEP: How are the talks going?

SPRUNT: Well, a bit stuck right now, which feels familiar, right?

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SPRUNT: Last week, top Democrats sent a list of proposals. Late last night, they said they received a response from Republicans. Neither side has described what was in that response, but Democrats said the outline of that counterproposal didn't include details or propose legislative text, so they dismissed it as incomplete and they said they'll be waiting for details to come their way.

INSKEEP: Not much more time to wait, it would seem.

SPRUNT: That's right. With a Friday deadline, it doesn't give them a bunch of time to delivery. And if they don't reach a deal, then they'd need another stopgap bill to fund the department. So last night, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he's going to start teeing up a short-term funding bill today just in case an agreement can't be brokered in time.

INSKEEP: OK. Now, regular listeners to this program have heard discussion of the various demands that Democrats have, and there's real substance here in people's lives because it has to do with the way that immigration agents behave on the streets of places like Minneapolis and elsewhere. What on that list has begun to seem like it has bipartisan support?

SPRUNT: Well, we know that there's general support from both parties on requiring officers to wear body cameras. In fact, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has already said that the department will send cameras to every field officer in Minneapolis and that that body camera program will be expanded nationwide as funding allows. Now, Democrats want to go a step further. They want to see that put into law. But other proposals remain much more of an uphill battle.

INSKEEP: OK. Why don't you go through those?

SPRUNT: Well, Democrats want officers to display identifying information, like their last names, and they want to ban them from wearing face coverings. And this has seemed to be a nonstarter with a lot of Republicans who say that banning face masks would make it easier for people to dox federal agents. But Democrats counter that that would actually bring immigration enforcement officers in line with civil enforcement, you know, pointing out that sheriffs and police officers, for example, don't wear masks.

INSKEEP: I'm noticing that there's kind of a theme of transparency here - demanding transparency. Democrats at least want the person on the street who works for the taxpayer to identify themselves to this person that they may be grabbing and taking down or doing any number of things to - demanding identity. And at the same time, officials from ICE and Customs and Border Protection are supposed to more or less identify themselves before Congress and face questions about what they're doing.

SPRUNT: That's right, and this will be the bulk of the hearing today. There will be another one before the Senate on Thursday. And it's interesting because Congress is actively negotiating on how to change DHS, and at the same time, this committee gets to question firsthand the people who conduct these operations, which, as you said, have come under so much scrutiny. In fact, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee requested that these officials testify after federal immigration officers shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

INSKEEP: So what will you be watching for?

SPRUNT: I'm curious how the Congressional GOP majority will handle its questioning because they broadly support President Trump's immigration enforcement actions, but they're also contending with public polling that shows a majority of Americans say that enforcement has gone too far.

INSKEEP: NPR's Barbara Sprunt. Thanks, as always.

SPRUNT: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: The Epstein files have tarnished a lot of Americans in politics and business, and they are also reverberating across the Atlantic.

MARTIN: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not implicated in the Epstein files, but he appointed someone who is and is having to defend himself.

INSKEEP: NPR's Lauren Frayer is following this from London. Hi, Lauren.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.

INSKEEP: Why is Starmer apparently facing some calls to resign?

FRAYER: Over the man he appointed to be his ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. So Mandelson resigned last year after an earlier batch of the Epstein files revealed he had kept up communication, friendship with the late sex offender after Epstein's conviction. Now, the latest batch show he allegedly passed sensitive U.K. government information to Epstein. Mandelson denies wrongdoing, but police are investigating. And all of this has led to questions about Starmer's judgment in appointing him in the first place.

INSKEEP: How does Starmer defend himself?

FRAYER: He admits he knew Mandelson was friends with Epstein but says Mandelson lied to him about the extent of it.

INSKEEP: OK. So let's just remember there was a period recently in British history where they had a new prime minister every seven or eight minutes, it seemed. So is there a good chance that Starmer might really resign?

FRAYER: It looks less likely today than it did yesterday. Yesterday, when two of his top staffers - Starmer's top staffers - abruptly quit, then a close ally of Starmer, the head of his Labour Party in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called a news conference to say this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANAS SARWAR: The distraction needs to end, and the leadership in Downing Street has to change.

FRAYER: Downing Street, of course, the U.K. equivalent of the White House. In a parliamentary system, the ruling party can replace the prime minister, and that's what Sarwar is calling for to happen here. But rather than trigger a sort of cascade of more resignation calls, Sarwar was kind of left hanging alone because Starmer's Cabinet rallied around him. And every single member of his Cabinet and also some backbenchers - members of his party who aren't in the government - have issued statements in support of Starmer to stay in office. So Starmer looks like he's living to fight another day.

I just want to say, this is not like an impeachment in the U.S. These are the normal machinations of a parliamentary system. You know, two long-serving British prime ministers - Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair - were both ousted by their own parties in this way and not in elections.

INSKEEP: Yeah. The party can fire their leaders, so to speak.

FRAYER: That's right.

INSKEEP: Where do the royals fit into all of this, given that the king's own brother is in the files?

FRAYER: Yeah, former Prince Andrew. We don't call him that anymore. He's stripped of that title. He settled a lawsuit with one of Epstein's underage victims a few years ago. He denies wrongdoing. But police are now looking into whether Andrew also leaked sensitive U.K. government information to Epstein when Andrew was a U.K. trade envoy. Andrew's not commented on those allegations. But the king, his brother, has been getting heckled over this, and here's what it sounded like yesterday.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Charles, how long have you known about Andrew and Epstein?

(OOHING)

FRAYER: And you hear people sort of saying, oh, get out of here, you know, and cheering for the king. There was a mixed crowd there. But last night, the king issued a statement saying he is willing to cooperate with police if asked about his brother. He's already stripped his brother of his royal titles. He's booted his brother out of a royal cottage on Windsor Castle grounds. So all of this is raising really big questions about the future of the monarchy. The heir to the throne, Prince William, and his wife, Kate, issued their first statement on the Epstein files this week, saying they are deeply concerned.

INSKEEP: Amazing to think about the potential image of the police dropping by to question the king. Lauren, thanks so much.

FRAYER: You're welcome.

INSKEEP: That's NPR's Lauren Frayer.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie has released another video pleading for her mom's return.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GUTHRIE: We are at an hour of desperation, and we need your help.

MARTIN: The video was posted on Monday evening around the time of a deadline outlined in a ransom message. Nancy Guthrie was last seen on Saturday, January 31, in Tucson.

INSKEEP: NPR's Bill Chappell is following this story, which really has captured the attention of a lot of people across the country. Bill, good morning.

BILL CHAPPELL, BYLINE: Hi. Good morning, Steve.

INSKEEP: Does this video - I mean, it really is touching to watch this video. It really catches you. Does it give you any new information?

CHAPPELL: It is wrenching, and in it, you know, Savannah Guthrie just pleads for the public's help in finding her mother. She says her family's now in the second week of a nightmare.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GUTHRIE: No matter where you are, even if you're far from Tucson, if you see anything, you hear anything, if there's anything at all that seems strange to you, that you report to law enforcement.

CHAPPELL: And Guthrie also thanks people for their prayers and support. This is the fourth public appeal the family has made for Nancy Guthrie to be returned to them, but it didn't tell us much new information.

INSKEEP: I guess we should note here, it could be that nothing is going on, nothing is being learned, or something is happening in law enforcement that is not clear to us that we will learn later. Sometimes these cases evolve that way. What do we know based on public information about progress by law enforcement?

CHAPPELL: Right. There are multiple local and federal agencies that have helped to try to find Nancy Guthrie, but we don't have a sense they're any closer to doing that. And several local media outlets in the Tucson area and TMZ have reported receiving ransom messages. At least one of those evidently included details about the scene at Guthrie's house. The FBI says it takes those messages seriously, but it's not said definitively that it's sure one of those messages came from people who took Nancy Guthrie. The FBI did say last week it's investigating a ransom note that included demands with that deadline of Monday. But in her message, Savannah Guthrie did not mention paying a ransom. And on Monday also, the FBI told news outlets it wasn't aware of any, quote, "continued communication" between the Guthrie family and the suspected kidnappers.

INSKEEP: Oh, so the implication is there's been no follow-up to these supposed ransom notes. Has anything changed since this deadline last night?

CHAPPELL: I mean, not that we can tell. Around that time, the sheriff's department issued a statement really similar to what we've seen from them before. It said investigators haven't identified suspects or persons of interest or vehicles that were connected to Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. You know, last week, the police really were emphasizing electronic analysis of things like cameras and cellphones and license plate readers. But the latest statement from the sheriff's department really echoes Savannah Guthrie's message, which they're asking anybody who might have information to call the FBI or the sheriff's department. The FBI also has a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to getting Nancy Guthrie back or to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearing.

INSKEEP: In the absence of any hard information, what is the latest sense of Nancy Guthrie's condition at the age of 84?

CHAPPELL: Well, her family says Nancy Guthrie is physically fragile. They say she has limited mobility. She relies on a pacemaker and needs daily medication. We don't have new information about that, of course, but, you know, authorities say she's mentally sharp. The combination of Nancy Guthrie's physical and mental condition and other circumstances is really what led police to suspect early on that she'd been taken from her home against her will.

INSKEEP: NPR's Bill Chappell. Thanks so much.

CHAPPELL: Sure thing, Steve.

INSKEEP: And to get our ongoing coverage of the search for Nancy Guthrie, you can follow the UP FIRST podcast wherever you get them. The day's top stories will be waiting for you, delivered straight to your phone every morning.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: And that's UP FIRST for this Tuesday, February 10. I'm Steve Inskeep.

MARTIN: And I'm Michel Martin. For coverage of the Olympics, check out UP FIRST Winter Games. That's a new video podcast from NPR. New episodes drop throughout the Games every afternoon at youtube.com/npr.

INSKEEP: Today's UP FIRST was edited by Kelsey Snell, Kate Bartlett, Miguel Macias, Mohamad ElBardicy and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis, and our technical director is Carleigh Strange. Our supervising senior producer is Vince Pearson. Join us tomorrow.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109430

NATIONAL | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

How the use of AI and 'deepfakes' plays a role in the search for Nancy Guthrie

By Ayana Archie, Kat Lonsdorf

The search for Nancy Guthrie continues after she disappeared from her home in Tucson, Ariz., two weekends ago, and impostor kidnappers have swarmed.

Law enforcement has said they've received several ransom notes from people claiming to have the mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie. Savannah and her siblings, Annie and Camron, have been posting videos to social media pleading for Nancy Guthrie, 84, to be returned home and have asked for proof of life before any ransom is paid.

"We are ready to talk. However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated," Savannah Guthrie said in one video and asking for proof that her mother was still alive.

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced and commonplace, it can be difficult to know what's real and what's not, which has complicated the search for Nancy Guthrie, according to law enforcement. But just how difficult is it?

AI can "make up just about anything"

Before the days of artificial intelligence, proof of life could be easily established by having a hostage take a picture holding a newspaper of the day, or talking on the phone, said Joseph Lestrange, who worked in law enforcement for 32 years and now trains law enforcement agencies on identifying artificially generated content.

Now, someone can ask a language learning model to mimic someone's voice or likeness in photos, videos and audio, known as "deepfakes." The models can also devise fake documents, like passports, Lestrange said.

"You give it the right prompts, it can pretty much make up just about anything," Lestrange said.

At federal agencies, digital evidence is usually sent to digital forensics labs. Examiners there can judge the authenticity of a piece of evidence using clues such as its location data or pixels. The tools they use are "very effective," Lestrange said, but it takes time for them to draw conclusions.

"Time is usually of the essence in these kidnapping cases, especially in the current case we're talking about, where the poor woman has some health problems," he said. "So these investigators are really in a challenging situation at this point."

Local and state agencies also may not have access to the same kind of tools, while scams are becoming more complex, and fast, Lestrange said.

Lestrange said some agencies are more willing than others to embrace how artificial intelligence is used. This can start to be corrected if emerging AI companies collaborate with law enforcement to "develop products that make sense," so law enforcement isn't "just relying on the vendors to tell them what they need," he said.

How to protect yourself from AI scams and deepfakes

Although artificially generated content and deepfakes rely on digital tools, human interference and judgment are still a good way to tell if something is off, said Eman El-Sheikh, the associate vice president of the University of West Florida Center for Cybersecurity.

"First, calm down and slow down, because a lot of times scammers will try to create a fake sense of urgency in order to get their way before the other people can figure out that this is a fake," she said.

While on the call, you can say something that you know your loved one is likely to respond to in a certain way. Or you can hang up and call your loved one directly to verify the issue, El-Sheikh said.

People who use social media should avoid publishing sensitive information, such as passwords, addresses and phone numbers, she said. It's also important to keep details regarding your home private, such as when you're leaving the house, or that you live alone.

Also, make sure to review the privacy settings on your apps, and toggle the permissions according to your comfort level, she said.

"It's very important for everybody in the digital world to be very intentional about what information they say online, and about protecting their privacy."

But Lestrange notes that anything you post or share about yourself online can be used against you, even if you're careful.

"It's really a very different world today," he said.

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

We have been following the search for "Today Show" cohost Savannah Guthrie's 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie. That search is now in its second week. The family says that they received a message from people who claim to have taken her from her home, but the family also acknowledged how difficult AI has made it to determine real proof of life. Here's Savannah Guthrie in a recent Instagram post.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: We need to know without a doubt that she is alive.

CHANG: We're joined now by NPR's Kat Lonsdorf to talk about all of this. Hi, Kat.

KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Hey there.

CHANG: OK. So just catch us up here. Where do things currently stand in this case now?

LONSDORF: Yeah. Nancy Guthrie has been missing for more than a week after what appeared to be a routine night at her home where she lives alone in Arizona. Since then, the Guthrie family have posted several videos on Instagram pleading for her return. Meanwhile, there have been multiple reports of ransom notes being sent to various media, and the Guthries have said they are willing to pay a ransom. One TV station said they received a ransom note that demanded $6 million by sometime this evening. Police have not publicly confirmed details about that. But this concern about a fake proof-of-life video is something the FBI has also raised in this case, saying that AI could be used to create a convincing but fake video of Nancy.

CHANG: Absolutely. And explain how realistic AI can be when it comes to fabricating a proof-of-life video.

LONSDORF: Yeah. I mean, Ailsa, this technology has gotten better by leaps and bounds in the past year, even in the past few months, and it will only get better. One reason is because the barrier to being able to create a fake video has gotten so much lower. It doesn't take that much sophisticated technology or knowledge anymore. Almost anyone on the internet can do it.

The other is that it used to take a lot of content to train AI to make a realistic video of someone - you know, hours of video or hours of recordings of their voice. So it was mainly a concern for celebrities. Now you really only need a few images and a few seconds of someone's voice. Here's how Hany Farid put it to me. He's a professor at the University of California Berkeley, who specializes in digital media forensics.

HANY FARID: Even if you have a single LinkedIn profile and somebody listened to your voicemail...

(SOUNDBITE OF FINGER SNAP)

FARID: ...That's it. I have your identity. That's what it takes today.

CHANG: God.

LONSDORF: So someone - you take someone like Nancy Guthrie, who's been on the "Today Show" multiple times...

CHANG: Yeah.

LONSDORF: ...That's plenty of content for a bad actor or a scammer to make a relatively believable fake proof-of-life video.

CHANG: I mean, are there effective ways to tell if a video is fake?

LONSDORF: Yeah. I mean, it can be pretty convincing, especially to an untrained eye. It used to be that someone holding up a copy of today's newspaper and talking straight to a camera would be enough. Unfortunately, those days are gone. That kind of shot can be created fairly easily now. There are a few things that could make it easier to tell, though. You know, the longer a video is, the more opportunity there is for AI to make a mistake - you know, something being off in the background or an extra finger on a hand for even just a few frames - that kind of thing. Or a video shot from multiple angles is also more believable. That's much harder for AI to do for now.

CHANG: At least for now. But I mean, Kat, if all you need is a photo and just - I don't know - a few seconds of someone's voice to make a relatively...

LONSDORF: Yeah.

CHANG: ...Believable video...

LONSDORF: Yeah.

CHANG: ...There must be a lot of opportunities for scams, right? Like, beyond a...

LONSDORF: Yeah.

CHANG: ...Proof-of-life video in a kidnapping.

LONSDORF: I mean, exactly. And I think that's something that people need to be aware of. I mean, hopefully, not many of us will find ourselves in this awful situation that the Guthrie family is in. But fake videos and phone calls that sound or look a lot like loved ones will almost certainly become more prevalent in relatively simple scams - you know, asking for money, that kind of thing.

Farid from the University of California Berkeley told me that one simple way to combat that is to have a passcode or a phrase you share with your loved ones that they can drop into a message if they're ever in distress to let you know it really is them. That's a very analog way to combat a high-tech problem, but it works, and it can help you distinguish a real message from a fake one in a short amount of time.

CHANG: The things that we have to think about now.

LONSDORF: Yeah.

CHANG: That is NPR's Kat Lonsdorf. Thank you so much, Kat.

LONSDORF: Thank you.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707578

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NATIONAL | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:43 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

In New Orleans, some Mardi Gras groups swap plastic beads for glass for parade throws

By Drew Hawkins

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

It's Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, when paradegoers look forward to catching things like beads. Now, often these beads are made of plastic. But plastic beads can be toxic and bad for the environment, so some Mardi Gras organizers are turning to locally recycled glass. Drew Hawkins with the Gulf States Newsroom reports.

CHRIS POMFRET: Just try to be courteous and respectful.

(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS CLANKING)

DREW HAWKINS, BYLINE: It's Saturday morning in Algiers Point in New Orleans. And for this neighborhood, that means it's glass recycling day. Chris Pomfret lives here, and he started the glass collection back in 2019.

POMFRET: It's like a farmer with his herd of cows - they've got to be milked every day. This has to happen every week, no matter what, because the public expects it.

HAWKINS: New Orleans hasn't had a glass recycling program since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. So people in this neighborhood bring their glass - a lot of wine, beer and liquor bottles - to one of the local churches. Pomfret says they collect about 1,000 pounds each week.

POMFRET: It brings the community together. We meet and chat with a lot of people here, which is nice. It serves the community. It serves an environmental purpose, and we've got the people who are happy to do it.

HAWKINS: The glass is hauled over to Glass Half Full. The company turns the bottles into sand that's used to help rebuild Louisiana's disappearing coastline. This year, they're also turning some of those bottles into beads.

(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS JINGLING)

HAWKINS: That's because the company's cofounder and CEO, Franziska Trautmann, is also a Mardi Gras queen. She was chosen to be the queen of Krewe du Vieux. The Mardi Gras walking parade is known for its raunchy costumes and satirical themes.

FRANZISKA TRAUTMANN: And I freaked out because Krewe du Vieux is truly one of my favorite parades, not just because it's, like, fun and artistic, but it always has a message.

HAWKINS: The krewe's theme this year is Save Our Wet Glands, characteristic wordplay on Louisiana's coastal crisis, where a football field's worth of land is lost every 100 minutes to erosion and rising sea levels.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HAWKINS: Trautmann used the recycled glass beads to make necklaces, bracelets and key chains to throw to the crowds at their parade last weekend.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HAWKINS: Her message as queen is simple. Mardi Gras can still be fun without plastic beads.

TRAUTMANN: That's not the foundation of Mardi Gras - it's not throwing all of this plastic (laughter). Like, the foundation is, like, the community coming together, experiencing joy despite whatever is going on in the world.

HAWKINS: Residents like Chris Pomfret in Algiers Point agree. And he loves the idea that the glass that they recycle may end up as beads at a parade.

POMFRET: There's nothing more quintessential than that for New Orleans.

HAWKINS: The idea of a more eco-friendly Mardi Gras is gaining momentum, with more krewes moving away from plastic beads to glass ones. It's also, in a way, a return to tradition. Back in the 1950s, all Mardi Gras beads were glass.

For NPR News, I'm Drew Hawkins in New Orleans.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5698250

NATIONAL | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:43 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Savannah Guthrie releases video pleading for her mother's return

By Bill Chappell, Steve Inskeep

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

"Today" show host Savannah Guthrie has released another video pleading for her mom's return.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: We are at an hour of desperation, and we need your help.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The video was posted on Monday evening, around the time of a deadline outlined in a ransom message. Nancy Guthrie was last seen on Saturday, January 31, in Tucson.

INSKEEP: NPR's Bill Chappell is following this story, which really has captured the attention of a lot of people across the country. Bill, good morning.

BILL CHAPPELL, BYLINE: Hi. Good morning, Steve.

INSKEEP: Does this video - I mean, it really is touching to watch this video. It really catches you. Does it give you any new information?

CHAPPELL: It is wrenching. And in it, you know, Savannah Guthrie just pleads for the public's help in finding her mother. She says her family's now in the second week of a nightmare.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GUTHRIE: No matter where you are - even if you're far from Tucson - if you see anything, if you hear anything, if there's anything at all that seems strange to you, that you report to law enforcement.

CHAPPELL: And Guthrie also thanks people for their prayers and support. This is the fourth public appeal the family's made for Nancy Guthrie to be returned to them, but it didn't tell us much new information.

INSKEEP: I guess we should note here - it could be that nothing is going on, nothing is being learned or something is happening in law enforcement that is not clear to us that we will learn later. Sometimes these cases evolve that way. What do we know, based on public information, about progress by law enforcement?

CHAPPELL: Right. There are multiple local and federal agencies that have helped to try to find Nancy Guthrie, but we don't have a sense they're any closer to doing that. And several local media outlets in the Tucson area and TMZ have reported receiving ransom messages. At least one of those evidently included details about the scene at Guthrie's house. The FBI says it takes those messages seriously, but it's not said definitively that it's sure one of those messages came from people who took Nancy Guthrie. The FBI did say last week it's investigating a ransom note that included demands with that deadline of Monday. But in her message, Savannah Guthrie did not mention paying a ransom. And on Monday also, the FBI told news outlets it wasn't aware of any, quote, "continued communication between the Guthrie family" and the suspected kidnappers.

INSKEEP: Oh. So the implication is there's been no follow-up to these supposed ransom notes. Has anything changed since this deadline last night?

CHAPPELL: I mean, not that we can tell. Around that time, the sheriff's department issued a statement really similar to what we've seen from them before. It said investigators haven't identified suspects or persons of interest or vehicles that were connected to Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. You know, last week, the police really were emphasizing electronic analysis of things like cameras and cell phones and license plate readers. But the latest statement from the sheriff's department really echoes Savannah Guthrie's message, which - they're asking anybody who might have information to call the FBI or the sheriff's department. The FBI also has a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to getting Nancy Guthrie back or to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearing.

INSKEEP: NPR's Bill Chappell. Thanks so much.

CHAPPELL: Sure thing, Steve.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708136

2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:25 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Mikaela Shiffrin misses podium in team Alpine combined event, as U.S. takes bronze

By Becky Sullivan

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — Just two days ago, American skier Jackie Wiles had sobbed near the finish line after missing a medal by barely a quarter-second in the Olympic downhill race.

On Tuesday, she was leaping for joy on the podium in Cortina after finishing in third place in the team combined, with an American flag draped around her shoulders and the brand new bronze medal hanging from her neck.

"I feel like I'm going to wake up from a dream at some point," Wiles said after the race. "To be on the good side of it today is a feeling I'll never forget."

Wiles, 33, and her teammate Paula Moltzan, 31, together won the bronze medal in the inaugural Olympic women's team combined event, in which two skiers compete as a team, one skiing the downhill and another skiing the slalom.

Wiles had the fourth fastest downhill time, and Moltzan matched that result in the slalom, for a combined time of 2:21.91.

Austria's Ariane Raedler and Katharina Huber won gold with a combined time of 2:21.66, while Germany's Kira Weidle-Winkelmann and Emma Aicher won silver with a time of 2:21.71.

The result was a surprise for the top U.S. team of Breezy Johnson, who won the downhill gold medal on Sunday, and Mikaela Shiffrin, the world's top slalom skier and the winningest Alpine skier of all time.

Johnson opened the competition with the fastest downhill time, which put the duo in strong contention for a medal. But Shiffrin, who hasn't finished outside the top ten in a World Cup slalom race in over two years, skied a second behind the slalom leader and dropped the pair into fourth place.

"[Breezy] went out, and she just backed it up with another incredible performance, a beautiful downhill run," Shiffrin told reporters after. "I was so inspired by that. And I was really taking that into my own mentality, coming out for the for the solid run and didn't quite nail it."

Shiffrin is the most decorated skier in the history of the sport, with 108 World Cup wins to her name, far more than anyone else, man or woman.

But the Olympics have given her trouble: At the Winter Games in 2022, Shiffrin ambitiously entered all six events but came away empty-handed. On her podcast, Shiffrin recently said that she was still working to "unpack" what had happened.

Tuesday's race was Shiffrin's first appearance at the 2026 Games, and it marked her seventh consecutive Olympic event in which she failed to medal.

"I didn't quite find a comfort level that allows me to produce full speed," Shiffrin said afterward. "So I'm going to have to learn what to do, what to adjust in the short time we have before the other [technical discipline] races."

Coming into Milano-Cortina, the U.S. women's Alpine team was expected to be a powerhouse. In addition to Shiffrin, the team included 41-year-old Lindsey Vonn, the world's top-ranked downhill skier who had made a remarkable career comeback this season before tearing her ACL last month. Then, in Sunday's much-anticipated downhill race, Vonn crashed hard and had to be airlifted off the course.

The emotions of Sunday's downhill race lingered over Tuesday's competition. Sofia Goggia, the beloved 33-year-old Italian skier, lost control on a turn during the downhill leg and recorded a DNF.

Afterward, Goggia told reporters that she had exchanged text messages with Vonn on Monday and felt her suffering. "Mentally, it was really hard to deal with [Sunday]," Goggia said. "I felt today at the start I didn't have the same tension or the same focus I had on Sunday. I was focused on the race, but inside myself I felt I was not so charged up."

On Sunday, the race had paused for around 20 minutes while Vonn received medical attention. Wiles, who was racing just four spots behind Vonn, was forced to endure the wait atop the mountain then race just minutes after a helicopter carried her teammate away.

To finish fourth after that emotional effort was gutting, Wiles said Sunday. "At my age, I don't have many chances left. It hurts. It's really hard," she said, her eyes teary, her voice wobbling. "I'm trying to look ahead. I still have more racing. That's all I can do."

And she did. A pep talk later Sunday night from Moltzan helped them both focus on Tuesday's race, they said. "She said that she couldn't cry anymore, and I said, 'All right, then let's move on and focus for tomorrow,'" Moltzan said. "I just told her I believed in her."

The team format has replaced the traditional individual combined event in international ski racing, as the speed and technical disciplines have diverged to the point where it has become rare for skiers to race in both.

"We had slalom skiers that looked like Bambi on ice in the downhill track and downhillers who looked like they needed a compass to get through the slalom course, and very few that could actually do both," said Johan Eliasch, president of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known as FIS.

The 2026 Winter Games were the Olympic debut of the new format. On Tuesday, Eliasch called the results a "spectacular success."

"We have exactly what we want, which is the best athletes, the best format, in the best sport. So this is definitely here to stay," Eliasch said.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109420

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WORLD | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 2:56 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Pakistan-Afghanistan border closures paralyze trade along a key route

By Betsy Joles

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — For more than three months, Afghan truck driver Anwar Zadran has been parked in Pakistan with a truck full of cement he was supposed to transport from a factory in Nowshera district to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. The task became impossible starting in mid-October, when Pakistan and Afghanistan shut their borders in response to fighting between the two countries, stranding Zadran mid-route near the Torkham border crossing.

He now spends his daylight hours huddled at roadside tea stalls with other stranded drivers, waiting for a sign that restrictions at Torkham will loosen. Every day, Zadran puts on the same thin clothes he arrived in months ago, when the weather was warm — retreating to his truck to sleep in the evenings when the air turns icy cold. "The people are destroyed and the goods are damaged as well," he says. "I wish the border would open soon so that we can get some relief."

Zadran, who is from Afghanistan's Nangahar province, and his fellow drivers are used to intermittent closures along this border, which snakes more than 1,600 miles through the rugged mountains and deserts that separate Pakistan and Afghanistan. Normally hundreds of trucks pass through daily. In the past, border disruptions usually were resolved within days or weeks, but this one has stretched beyond 100 days — the longest closure in recent decades, with no clear end in sight. It has brought trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan to a halt and paralyzed a key transit route that extends across Central Asia.

The closure of five active trade borders is part of a larger dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan over how to handle a deadly surge in militancy, mostly along the border belt, but also including a suicide attack last week claimed by ISIS at a mosque in Islamabad that killed dozens. Pakistan has repeatedly accused Afghanistan of harboring militant groups that carry out attacks on Pakistani soil, a charge Afghanistan's Taliban government denies. Among the groups is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, known as the Pakistan Taliban or TTP, which aims to bring down Pakistan's government and has become more active in Pakistan since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021.

The tipping point came when Afghan and Pakistani forces fired at each other across the border in October. The countries agreed to a ceasefire and took part in multiple rounds of peace talks in Istanbul, Doha and Riyadh. All failed to bring about a resolution. After the ceasefire, the Taliban government accused Islamabad of carrying out airstrikes inside Afghan territory that killed civilians, including nine children. Pakistan denied attacking civilians.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said late last month that Pakistan had no choice but to close its border because the Taliban couldn't commit to stopping militant groups that operate from Afghanistan. "We didn't want to, but they forced us," he said. The Taliban government accused Pakistan of shutting its borders as a way to assert economic and political pressure, and wants Pakistan to provide guarantees that it won't.

Looking for workarounds

In Peshawar, around 40 miles from the Torkham border, business leaders have been forced to look for possible workarounds. On a whiteboard in his office, trader Shahid Hussain has mapped out alternate routes for his exports through China. His shipments of food products to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan normally pass through Afghanistan. But not anymore.

The China route is plausible, Hussain says, but policies for Pakistan to use China for transit trade are unclear. Another option is through Iran. The country is under international sanctions, though, and banking channels with Pakistan are limited. Political instability there also makes this path uncertain.

Hussain, who normally also exports cement to Afghanistan, estimates losses of around $400,000 just from damaged and expired stocks since the border closures started. He stopped paying salaries for his employees starting this month and compares his business of more than 20 years to a tree deprived of water. "There's no work," he says. "And what other activity should we do?"

In January, business leaders from both countries formed a joint committee to assess the situation. The group has so far held two meetings online and hopes to meet in the coming months at the Torkham border if they can get government approval. Both sides agree that the situation is dire and are trying to convince their respective countries' leaders of the same.

But the business community has been left without much leverage, says Jawad Hussain Kazmi, president of the Khyber Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a regional trade body. He heads the joint committee formed last month for the Pakistan side. "Our government has a one-point agenda," he says, "and that's that security problems should be resolved."

Naqibullah Safi, secretary general of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kabul, says the border closures also have halted the entry of goods bound for Afghanistan from other Asian countries, including China, Malaysia and Vietnam. This includes shipping containers full of food, cloth and medical supplies, some of which remain stuck at the port in Karachi.

"This is the worst situation for the private sector," he says.

Safi says there have been minor price increases in Afghanistan for goods including rice, medicine and cooking oil.

Losses in the hundreds of millions

Abdul Salam Jawad, the spokesperson for Afghanistan's commerce ministry, told NPR in a statement sent via WhatsApp that his country's exports to Pakistan (including fruits, vegetables and coal) were around $300 million less last year — when border closures began — than in the previous year. Pakistan's commerce ministry did not respond to a request for trade figures. Last month, Pakistan said it would allow for stuck goods bound for Afghanistan to be re-exported to their countries of origin.

As the prolonged border closures drag on, Afghanistan has sought to diversify its trade with other countries in the region, including India and Iran. As part of this effort, the Taliban government has asked India to help facilitate the movement of Afghan goods through a port in which India has been involved in the Iranian city of Chabahar.

The Taliban separately ordered a complete ban on Pakistani pharmaceuticals starting this month, citing quality concerns — a blockade that could continue even if borders reopen.

Due to limited production in Afghanistan, the country relies on Pakistan for more than 60% of its medicine, and Pakistan's yearly pharmaceutical exports to Afghanistan are worth around $200 million, according to Tauqeer Ul Haq, former chairperson of the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. He says stocks meant for Afghanistan can't easily be redirected, especially temperature-controlled medicine that got stuck in transit. "We fear that it will be wasted," he says. "It will not be usable."

At a market for Pakistani medicine in Peshawar, shop owners are already struggling with the loss of business from Afghanistan, which makes up a significant portion of their sales. In addition to wholesale buyers from Afghanistan, this market serves Afghan patients who come across the border to buy medicines in bulk that are hard to get in their country.

Aslam Pervez, a shop owner and general secretary for Peshawar of the Pakistan Chemists' and Druggists' Association, says he worries for patients who need lifesaving medicines such as insulin.

"From both sides, it's the people who are going to be the losers," Pervez says. "We can't change our neighbor."

Wasim Sajjad contributed to this report from Peshawar and the Torkham border.

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

In October, Pakistani and Afghan forces traded fire across their shared border. It's part of a broader conflict between the neighbors over rising militancy in the region. Since then, borders between the countries have been closed with few exceptions. Trade has ground to a halt. Betsy Joles spoke to people who've been affected by this blockade, and sent us this report.

UNIDENTIFIED TRUCK DRIVER #1: (Non-English language spoken).

UNIDENTIFIED TRUCK DRIVER #2: (Non-English language spoken).

UNIDENTIFIED TRUCK DRIVER #1: (Non-English language spoken).

UNIDENTIFIED TRUCK DRIVER #2: (Non-English language spoken).

BETSY JOLES, BYLINE: Near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a group of truck drivers gathers around the dying coals of a campfire. They've been unable to get the goods they're carrying into Afghanistan.

UNIDENTIFIED TRUCK DRIVER #3: (Non-English language spoken).

JOLES: One of these drivers is an Afghan, Anwar Zadran, who was bound for Kabul with a truck full of cement. He's been stuck here on the Pakistan side for more than three months. Every day, Zadran wears the same thin clothes he arrived at the border in. When he hand-washes them, the winter sun is barely strong enough to dry them out.

ANWAR ZADRAN: (Non-English language spoken).

JOLES: "I wish the border would open soon so that we can get some relief," Zadran says.

Truck drivers on this route are used to intermittent closures of the border, which snakes for more than 1,600 miles between Pakistan and Afghanistan. These closures usually last a few weeks tops, but this one has stretched on much longer, disrupting business across the region. Shahid Hussain is a trader in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, some 40 miles from the border. On a small whiteboard in his office, he's written out alternate routes for his goods headed for Central Asia.

SHAHID HUSSAIN: Islamabad to Tashkent via Afghanistan - 1,581 kilometers.

JOLES: He's figuring out how to send these shipments through China instead of Afghanistan. Hussain compares his business of more than 20 years to a tree with its water supply cut off.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR: (Non-English language spoken).

JOLES: In early January, business leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan formed a joint committee to assess the border situation. Jawad Hussain Kazmi heads the committee from the Pakistan side.

JAWAD HUSSAIN KAZMI: A one-point agenda (non-English language spoken).

JOLES: He says the Pakistani government has a one-point agenda when it comes to reopening the border, and that's improved security. Pakistan has seen an uptick in militant attacks on its soil since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021. Many of these attacks have been carried out by the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistan Taliban. Pakistan's prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said during a workshop in Islamabad in late January that his country wants the Taliban to stop harboring militant groups. But...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRIME MINISTER SHEHBAZ SHARIF: (Non-English language spoken).

JOLES: So Pakistan shut its borders. The Taliban government in Afghanistan has repeatedly rejected Pakistan's accusations. It sees the border closure as a pressure tactic from Islamabad and is seeking to diversify trade with India and others. The dispute has urgent consequences. One significant Pakistani export that is shut out of Afghanistan is medicine.

(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE RUNNING)

JOLES: At a wholesale market in Peshawar, shopkeepers pack medical supplies into cardboard boxes.

(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS BEING PACKED)

JOLES: Afghanistan relies on Pakistan for more than 60% of its medicine, and Pakistan's yearly pharmaceutical exports there are worth around $200 million. In addition to wholesale buyers, shopkeepers say Afghan patients visit the market to buy medicine in bulk that's hard to get in their country. Aslam Pervez, a business owner and trade leader here, says he worries for patients who are insulin dependent.

ASLAM PERVEZ: Insulin-dependent patient there (ph).

JOLES: He says, for them, it can be life-threatening.

PERVEZ: (Non-English language spoken).

JOLES: "We can't change our neighbor," Pervez says. "It's the people from both sides who are going to be the losers." With Wasim Sajjad in Peshawar, I'm Betsy Joles for NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-107945

2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:13 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Reporter's notebook: A Dutch speedskater and a U.S. influencer walk into a bar …

By Rachel Treisman

You're reading the Rachel Goes to the Games newsletter — a look behind the scenes at the Winter Olympics in Italy. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox.

Watching Ilia Malinin skate in person continues to be a surreal experience. I saw him land his backflip at nationals last month, and twice in his first two Olympic skates this weekend. What strikes me every time is the effect it has on the crowd (see Snoop Dogg, for example). The collective roar shakes the room — I could feel it in the seats on Sunday — and seems to zap right back into Malinin's veins for the rest of his skate. I asked him about it after his first Olympic backflip on Saturday.

"It's honestly such an incredible roar-feeling in the environment," he said. "Once I do that backflip, everyone is, like, screaming for joy and they're just out of control."

We're not used to seeing backflips on Olympic ice, in large part because the move was illegal in competition from the late 1970s until 2024 (though that doesn't mean people weren't doing it). Here's a closer look at the backflip, just in time for the men's short event today.

Taking in the action

Yesterday I briefly ventured out of the figure skating arena to the long-track speedskating rink (a totally different venue) to watch the women's 1000-meter race, eager to get a glimpse of Team USA stars Brittney Bowe and Erin Jackson in action. I did! It was thrilling to see their arms and legs move so fast that they almost seemed to be gliding slowly. Ultimately, the headline was Dutch phenom Jutta Leerdam, who won gold and set a new Olympic record in front of a hugely supportive crowd that included her fiancé, American influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul.

But, in the spirit of going beyond the headlines, I wanted to share some things I noticed even before that final heat:

The Milano Speed Skating Stadium should be called Moving Walkway City. The rink is technically attached to the closest metro stop, but it's about a mile on foot to get there (per my Apple Watch, it took 25 minutes each way), and most of that path is lined with the conveyor belt-like structures I've only ever seen at airports. There is also the option to walk on the regular pavement, but why would you choose that when you can feel like a gliding, windblown Twilight vampire? Point is, you really have to build in time for this part of the commute or else you'll end up like the guys behind me, all but shoving people out of the way on the narrow belts as they sprinted loudly ahead.

Each race happens so fast — 1,000 meters is 2 1/2 laps around the rink — that I spent about as much time walking to and from the rink as I did watching the action, a huge change from figure skating's long, late (at least in local time) nights. The speedskating rink was also a lot warmer than the figure skating venue, where I've been chilly even in my thermals. Their layouts are also totally different: I've seen the distinctive speedskating oval on TV so many times, but was struck in reality by the hustle and bustle of the carpeted space in the middle, occupied by timekeepers, journalists and other officials.

I also didn't realize until today that, while each time trial consists of two skaters, others warm up in the lanes right next to them at the same time. The TV cameras make it look like the two who are racing are the only ones on the ice, since they follow right beside them. There's also a small camera whizzing in the air behind them in a way that immediately made me think of the golden snitch in the Harry Potter Quidditch games.

I immediately noticed that probably 80% of the crowd was wearing orange, and that the cheers for the two Dutch skaters were noticeably louder than the robust applause for the U.S. women. I did not see Jake Paul, but I did see a lot of people near me turn towards a particular section of the stands after Leerdam's breathtaking final lap. I took note during a brief break in the action, when the emcee queued up John Lennon's "Imagine" and urged the crowd to sing along (his vision did not really become a reality). And on the return trip, I actually chuckled when I saw volunteers sitting in lifeguard-esque chairs along the long walkway, using megaphones to steer the masses back toward the metro.

What I'm drinking

Pretty much every drink I've had here comes from a plastic bottle: the water that lives in my hotel room, the late-night Coke Zero I buy at the rink, the acqua naturale and/or frizzante I choose from at a cafe.

Back home, I usually keep a reusable bottle in my bag. I was warned about Italy's lack of refillable water bottle opportunities and tried to plan accordingly. But what I didn't know about was the bottle cap situation. Why oh why do they not come completely off? You can unscrew the cap as much as you want, but part of it will always stay tethered to the rim (and sometimes scratch your nose when you try to take a sip).

At first, I thought I was just reaching new levels of sleep deprivation. But then I learned that this is the new norm, thanks to a 2024 European Union directive that aims to encourage recycling and reduce littering. The EU said at the time that bottle caps were among the top 10 most commonly found single-use plastic items on European beaches, posing a threat to the animals that swallow them. Understood! I think anyone who's seen a cute picture of a seal — or lost the cap to a half-full beverage bottle on their way out the door — can come around to that.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708694

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MIDDLE EAST | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:07 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

In Beirut, Lebanon's cats of war find peace on university campus

By Jane Arraf, Jawad Rizkallah

BEIRUT — There are several things that make the American University of Beirut unique. Among them are its 160-year-old liberal arts education in the center of the Middle East. There is its seaside location in a cosmopolitan capital. But hands down, the college's most unusual feature is its campus cats — as many as 1,600 of them.

The cat rescue started during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s when animals sought shelter from street fighting in the 1980s on its campus in the downtown Hamra area. It has evolved into a continuing program to care for cats abandoned during more recent wars.

"There were serious, severe street battles around here, around the university and in Hamra and everywhere. So the cats flocked to AUB en masse because this seemed like protection for them. And they stayed," says AUB staff member Henry Matthews of the civil war era.

Beirut has seen more than its share of war — the latest was a year of fighting between the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israel that began in late 2023. Israel is still launching attacks. In between people fleeing their homes and a severe financial crisis, many abandoned their pets.

"Many people dumped their cats because they don't have any home for them," says veterinarian Rana Bou Khalil, who runs two clinics teeming with cats.

Bou Khalil, who says AUB is a magnet for pet owners who believe their cats will be taken care of if they leave them near the campus, says she has spayed or neutered 1,000 cats in the past two years. From a feline population of 800 a little over a year ago, Bou Khalil says she estimates there are now between 1,200 and 1,600. The exact number, of course, is difficult to determine.

Each one that can be brought to the clinic is sterilized and vaccinated. On the day NPR visits, Bou Khalil is treating a sick kitten left on the sidewalk outside the university gate and the latest in a series of blind cats left by their owners.

There are wire cages with litters of kittens and others with elderly cats. Some are feral but most seem to have been house cats — including purebreds. Some have the long silky fur of Persian cats; others the trademark ears of Scottish folds.

A caretaker spends an hour a day pouring out dry cat food into bowls around the sprawling campus gardens. The clinic tries to adopt out rescued cats but with so many animals being abandoned it barely makes a dent in the feline population.

Not just about cats

The university says cat care does not affect funding for students. It relies partly on donations for their care.

The animals are part of an unusual ecosystem among college campuses. AUB has about 10,000 students. Established in 1866 first as a missionary school, it owns huge tracts of land in downtown Beirut, with extensive gardens rolling down to the Mediterranean Sea.

The university is listed as a leader in the region in environmental sustainability, including water management and renewable energy. Trees planted over many years — with a bird population that Matthews says generally live too high up to be at risk from the cats — shade large parts of the campus.

Matthews says working with the wider community has been part of AUB's mandate from the start. He sees the university's cat population as part of that.

"Most importantly, it teaches the students and the community to be kind to others," he says. "Especially those who are weaker than you, smaller or more helpless than you."

Now you see them, now you don't

With so many cats, it might seem that the campus would be overrun with them. But the feral ones steer clear of humans, while the former house cats have roughly 10,000 students to spread their affection.

Imagine one of those find-the-hidden-object puzzles, except these are cats given sanctuary on the sprawling campus.

There are cats peeking out between the leaves, cats the same color as the windowsills they are sitting on, cats lying among the flower beds.

Love them or hate them

And then there are the bolder ones — the kind that go up to students in the hope of getting bites of their sandwiches. The ones that perch on outdoor tables demanding to be petted. The outlaw cats are the ones that sneak into dorm rooms and classrooms, sometimes jumping up onto chairs while classes are in session.

"I was in a class when suddenly, I just felt something rubbing in my leg," says Ali Itani, a freshman. "I just looked. I saw a girl screaming. It turned out to be a cat. And she was afraid of cats."

"I get that they add some, you know, life and warmth to the campus but they do get very annoying sometimes," says Lara Moukaddam, a first-year student. "They can just walk into class and get up on a chair and you can't do anything about it."

The cats are not supposed to be in classrooms or dorms. But students are not allowed to evict them. Instead, the administration is notified to gently remove them.

Along with the normal stress of dealing with classes and being away from home for the first time, many of the Lebanese students are grappling with the almost ever-present threat of war.

Layla Shahrur, a computer science student, is from southern Lebanon, where Israeli airstrikes are continuing. She says cats are a calming presence when things are overwhelming.

"People are still stressed and afraid," she says. "If you are stressed about something and you go out and pet cats or any other animal, they help you get out of your stress zone."

At the entrance to the university is an inscription of a Bible verse, although the university has been secular for more than a century. It refers to purpose and spiritual wealth.

"It applies for anybody if you read it," says Mimi Touma, an AUB press officer. "'Let them have life and have it more abundantly.' Don't we all want this?"

Even cats.

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

In Lebanon, a historic university offers not just an education in the heart of Beirut, but an unusual sanctuary for cats abandoned during war and economic hardship. NPR's Jane Arraf and Jawad Rizkhallah bring us this report on the American University of Beirut, or AUB, and its 1,600 campus cats.

(SOUNDBITE OF CATS MEOWING)

JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: You don't have to love cats...

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: ...To attend college here, but it helps. There are so many cats.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: AUB veterinarian Rana Bou Khalil says with a huge increase in abandoned pets over the last year, she thinks there's somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 cats on campus.

RANA BOU KHALIL: We sterilized up to 1,000, and we are continuing the program.

ARRAF: That's in less than two years. They also vaccinate them before releasing them onto the sprawling campus.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT SNEEZING)

ARRAF: Some need extra help.

(SOUNDBITE OF CATS MEOWING)

KHALIL: This is a sick kitten left on the gate, and we're trying to save her. We have the blind one left on campus.

(SOUNDBITE OF CATS MEOWING)

ARRAF: There are house cats - all kinds, some of them purebred - and feral cats. There are elderly cats and kittens.

KHALIL: The highest number was abandoned during the war. Many people dumped their cats because they don't have any home for them.

ARRAF: That was the year-long war between the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israel in 2024. Caring for the cats, though, began decades ago during Lebanon's civil war. AUB staff member Henry Matthews tells us...

HENRY MATTHEWS: There were serious, severe street battles around here, around the university and in Hamra and everywhere. So the cats flocked to AUB en masse because this seemed like a protection for them. And they stayed.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).

ARRAF: The university, established in 1866, says cat care does not affect funding for students. It relies partly on donations.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: The clinic adopts out the ones it can, but it barely makes a dent in the population. Fortunately, this is a huge campus full of trees and gardens rolling down to the Mediterranean Sea.

(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLING)

ARRAF: On a previous visit, we go along with caretaker Mohammad Kamal as he calls to hiding cats and pours food into bowls around campus.

MOHAMMAD KAMAL: I feed them every day around 9:30, 10, like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF KIBBLE BEING POURED)

ARRAF: About 45 pounds of cat food a day. It takes him about an hour. Despite that, there are always a few cats hanging around outdoors at lunchtime...

(SOUNDBITE OF KIBBLE BEING SCOOPED)

ARRAF: ...Hoping students will share their sandwiches.

Here's more cats. There's a white and tabby, with a ring tail, licking their lips, and a lovely, long-haired, orange and white sweetheart.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: Most of the cats are nocturnal, so you don't see a lot of them during the day. AUB's green spaces give them lots of places to hide. Even people who say they don't like the cats seem to tolerate them, like Hiyam Ghannam, a teaching adviser.

HIYAM GHANNAM: It's sometimes frustrating. Sometimes they come to the library. They study with us. So yeah, they come to classes.

ARRAF: Layla Shahurur, a computer science student from South Lebanon, where Israeli airstrikes are continuing, says people are still afraid and having cats around helps.

LAYLA SHAHRUR: If you were stressed about something and, like, you go out, you know, you pet cats or, like, any other animal, they help you get out of your stress zone.

ARRAF: According to some students, though, the cats do take liberties.

ALI ITANI: Actually, yesterday, I was in a class. Suddenly, I just felt something rubbing on my leg. I just looked. I saw a girl screaming and turned out to be a cat, and she was afraid of cats.

ARRAF: That's Ali Itani, a freshman. Cats aren't supposed to be in classrooms or dorms, but they don't really follow rules.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: Henry Matthews says their presence teaches students to be kind to other beings who are smaller and more helpless than they are. We go around meeting more students and cats with Mimi Touma, a press officer.

MIMI TOUMA: Hi, Kato. She's so pretty.

ARRAF: I asked her about the inscription at campus entrance. It's from a Bible verse, although the university has long been secular. It refers to spiritual wealth.

TOUMA: It applies for anybody if you read it. Let them have life and have it more abundantly. Don't we all want this?

ARRAF: Even cats, she says.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAT MEOWING)

ARRAF: Jane Arraf, NPR News, Beirut.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109346

WORLD | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:41 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Britain's PM faces calls to resign over former ambassador's ties to Epstein

By Lauren Frayer, Steve Inskeep

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The Epstein files have tarnished a lot of Americans in politics and business, and they are also reverberating across the Atlantic.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not implicated in the Epstein files, but he appointed someone who is and is having to defend himself.

INSKEEP: NPR's Lauren Frayer is following this from London. Hi, Lauren.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.

INSKEEP: Why is Starmer apparently facing some calls to resign?

FRAYER: Over the man he appointed to be his ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. So Mandelson resigned last year after an earlier batch of the Epstein files revealed he had kept up communication friendship with the late sex offender after Epstein's conviction. Now, the latest batch show he allegedly passed sensitive U.K. government information to Epstein. Mandelson denies wrongdoing, but police are investigating, and all of this has led to questions about Starmer's judgment in appointing him in the first place.

INSKEEP: How does Starmer defend himself?

FRAYER: He admits he knew Mandelson was friends with Epstein, but says Mandelson lied to him about the extent of it.

INSKEEP: OK. So let's just remember there was a period recently in British history where they had a new prime minister every seven or eight minutes, it seemed. So is there a good chance that Starmer might really resign?

FRAYER: It looks less likely today than it did yesterday. Yesterday, when two of his top staffers - Starmer's top staffers - abruptly quit, then a close ally of Starmer, the head of his Labour Party in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called a news conference to say this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANAS SARWAR: The distraction needs to end, and the leadership in Downing Street has to change.

FRAYER: Downing Street, of course, the UK equivalent of the White House. In a parliamentary system, the ruling party can replace the prime minister, and that's what Sarwar is calling for to happen here. But rather than trigger a sort of cascade of more resignation calls, Sarwar was kind of left hanging alone because Starmer's Cabinet rallied around him. And every single member of his Cabinet and also some backbenchers - members of his party who aren't in the government - have issued statements in support of Starmer to stay in office. So Starmer looks like he's living to fight another day. I just want to say, this is not an impeachment in the U.S. These are the normal machinations of a parliamentary system. You know, two long-serving British prime ministers - Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair - were both ousted by their own parties in this way and not in elections.

INSKEEP: Yeah. The party can fire their leaders, so to speak.

FRAYER: That's right.

INSKEEP: Where do the royals fit into all of this, given that the king's own brother is in the files?

FRAYER: Yeah. Former Prince Andrew - we don't call him that anymore. He's stripped of that title - he settled a lawsuit with one of Epstein's underage victims a few years ago. He denies wrongdoing. But police are now looking into whether Andrew also leaked sensitive U.K. government information to Epstein when Andrew was a U.K. trade envoy. Andrew's not commented on those allegations. But the king - his brother - has been getting heckled over this, and here's what it sounded like yesterday.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED HECKLER: Charles, how long have you known about Andrew and Epstein?

(CROSSTALK)

FRAYER: And you hear people sort of saying, oh, get out of here, you know, and cheering for the king. There was a mixed crowd there. But last night, the king issued a statement saying he is willing to cooperate with police if asked about his brother. He's already stripped his brother of his royal titles. He's booted his brother out of a royal cottage on Windsor Castle grounds. So all of this is raising really big questions about the future of the monarchy. The heir to the throne, Prince William and his wife, Kate, issued their first statement on the Epstein files this week, saying they are deeply concerned.

INSKEEP: Amazing to think about the potential image of the police dropping by to question the king. Lauren, thanks so much.

FRAYER: You're welcome.

INSKEEP: That's NPR's Lauren Frayer.

(SOUNDBITE OF VALIUM AGGELEIN'S "BIRD WINGS")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707201

WORLD | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:45 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Cuban fuel shortage: U.S. blockade of oil grounds flights in Cuba

By Eyder Peralta

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The U.S. blockade of oil for Cuba is starting to have serious effects. One big one - Cuba's airports have run out of fuel. NPR's Eyder Peralta reports.

EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: The U.S. has had an embargo on Cuba for decades. But the Trump administration has tightened the screws, and its latest move is designed to starve the island of fuel. After the U.S. took military action in Venezuela, it stopped oil shipments from there. Mexico then became the biggest provider of oil to Cuba, and then President Trump tacitly threatened Mexico, saying any country shipping oil to Cuba would face tariffs. According to Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba hasn't received an oil shipment since December.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT MIGUEL DIAZ-CANEL: (Speaking Spanish).

PERALTA: "What does it mean not to allow a drop of fuel to enter a country?"

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DIAZ-CANEL: (Speaking Spanish).

PERALTA: "It means the disruption of food production, public transport, our hospitals."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DIAZ-CANEL: (Speaking Spanish).

PERALTA: "Our schools." In the days that followed, Cuba announced new limited schedules for everything from government buildings to banks to trains and ferries in order to save fuel and electricity. And then Cuban authorities warned airlines that all its major airports had run out of fuel. Air Canada suspended its flights and said it would send empty planes to pick up the 3,000 Canadians on vacation packages in Cuba. Cuba gets a lot of its foreign currency from visitors, and Canadians make up a vast majority of the tourists who visit Cuba. Cuban officials say they will subsist with creativity and help from friendly nations.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said the oil shipments were on pause, but that Mexico had sent two ships with 800 tons of food aid. Sheinbaum said the sanctions against Cuba and the threats against them were, quote, "unjust." You could be against the Cuban government, she said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: (Speaking Spanish).

PERALTA: But sanctions should never affect the people.

Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Mexico City.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707553

WORLD | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:45 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Israel passes measure to make purchasing real estate from Palestinians easier

By Daniel Estrin

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Israel is taking new steps to exert more control in the occupied West Bank. They're changing the rules in a region that already lives under complicated regulations. Some areas are controlled directly by Israelis. Others have limited jurisdiction by the millions of Palestinians who live there. Now Israel is changing the rules in those areas in ways that feel to some like Israel is formally annexing the territory that it has long occupied. The Trump administration is saying the president does not support that. NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Tel Aviv.

DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: The Israeli Cabinet on Sunday approved a series of sweeping measures for the West Bank. One measure would make it easier for the government and Jewish settlers to purchase real estate there for future Israeli settlement. Israel is also taking more control over two ancient religious sites in Palestinian areas, stripping planning powers from the Palestinian Authority. And Israeli enforcement agencies will now enter areas under Palestinian self-governance to act, for instance, against environmental hazards.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BEZALEL SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).

ESTRIN: Israeli Cabinet Minister and West Bank settler Bezalel Smotrich visited a Palestinian garbage dump to promote the new moves. He spoke to settler media outlet Channel 7. He says these new measures kill the idea of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the two-state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The United Nations secretary-general called to reverse the moves, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

STEPHANE DUJARRIC: The Secretary-General warns that the current trajectory on the ground, including this decision, is eroding the prospects for a two-state solution.

ESTRIN: The Palestinian Authority called on the U.N. Security Council to intervene. Arab and Muslim countries condemned the move, including close allies of President Trump, like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They said Israel was accelerating attempts at illegal annexation. In a statement, the Trump administration says the president does not support annexing the West Bank. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said Israel is doing everything but annexing in name, while U.S. officials are focused on Iran and Gaza.

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: So long as they do not annex legally and say, OK, this is ours, Trump doesn't see any reason to intervene.

ESTRIN: Ben-Ami took part in peace talks with Palestinians in the year 2000 but says Israel's actions in the West Bank mean the two-state solution is dead.

BEN-AMI: Those of us who fought for peace with the Palestinians believe that this is suicidal for Israel.

ESTRIN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not speaking about these West Bank moves at all as he heads to the White House for a meeting Wednesday with President Trump to talk about Iran.

Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

(SOUNDBITE OF COLM MAC CON IOMAIRE'S "EMER'S "DREAM (AISLING EIMEAR)")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707522

VENEZUELA AND U.S. RELATIONS | UPDATED TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 3:50 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Venezuelans test limits of new freedoms

By Manuel Rueda

Heard on Morning Edition

CARACAS, Venezuela — On a weekday morning in central Caracas last week, a group of students did something bold - something they hadn't tried in several months — stage an anti-government protest.

The students at Venezuela's Central University were demanding the liberation of Venezuela's remaining political prisoners. But a broader sense of anger against the Venezuelan government was also on display, as students chanted slogans against acting President Delcy Rodríguez, and her brother Jorge, who heads Venezuela's National Assembly.

In the main campus square, students unfurled a blue-and-white banner declaring, "Free them all." Nearby, a truck with giant speakers played a viral protest song celebrating the U.S. military's capture of former President Nicolás Maduro.

"Where is China, where is Russia," the lyrics go. "Where are the communists that were going to save him?"

Just weeks ago, a protest like this one could have landed people in jail. But Venezuela's authoritarian government, — still dominated by allies of Nicolás Maduro — has relaxed some of its more repressive measures as it faces pressure from the U.S. to implement political reforms.

Slowly, students, unions and opposition activists are taking advantage of this moment to express their views, probing the limits of free speech after years of repression and the constant threat of detention.

"We are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel," said Jesus Leopoldo, a law student who showed up at the protest. "We have not transitioned yet to the Venezuela we want" he added, "And that is why we are here, protesting peacefully."

Across Venezuela, celebrations have broken out, as the government releases activists who had been charged with treason under Maduro's rule.

In the coming days, Venezuela's president is expected to sign a sweeping amnesty law that could secure freedom for hundreds more prisoners still behind bars — a move that has advanced quickly through the National Assembly and is being billed as a step toward national reconciliation.

While Venezuela is still far from a full democratic transition, these developments have given some "oxygen" to those who are seeking reforms in Venezuela, says Nicmer Evans, a political scientist and journalist who was released from prison last month.

Evans recently attended a protest outside the nation's Supreme Court, where public servants — including teachers and nurses — demanded wage increases after three years without a pay raise.

As the protest unfolded, around thirty police officers surrounded the demonstrators and kept them separate from a much larger group of government workers who had been bused to the same location for a pro-Maduro rally.

"As you can see the government is still trying to intimidate us," Evans said. "But at least we are not being forced out," he added, describing that as a small sign of change.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders who had been in hiding for months are beginning to step back into the public eye.

Delsa Solórzano, a prominent former legislator, spent 17 months in hiding to avoid arrest. She reemerged publicly at the end of January, holding a press conference to demand freedom for the nation's political prisoners.

"In what civilized mind do you think that it's acceptable to persecute people simply because they think differently from you?" she asked.

That demand has reverberated beyond the political stage. Across Caracas, outside the Helicoide—one of Venezuela's most notorious prisons—relatives of political prisoners are also speaking up.

Every night, for the past month, they have staged vigils to demand the release of their loved ones, carrying photos of those who are still in prison.

"We should not have to be scared of expressing ourselves," said Atali Freites, the mother of Juan Freites, a 35 year old opposition activist who has been in prison for more than two years.

Freites was a regional campaign manager for opposition leader María Corina Machado in the months leading to the 2024 election.

"He has committed no crime" Freites said. "Only wanting to improve this county."

Evans, the political scientist, said that the release of political prisoners, and an amnesty law, are just the first step towards recovering democracy in Venezuela.

"The media here are heavily censored so we also need to change that" he said. "And we need to reform the judicial system," he added, so that the ruling party loses its grip over the nation's judges.

More than 60 news sites are still blocked in the country by internet providers according to Andres Azpurua, an expert on media censorship in Venezuela.

"The government doesn't want a protest movement to get out of hand," Azpurua said. "They want to control narratives, and have the capability to do that," because judges still comply with the ruling party's orders.

But recent incidents make clear just how precarious this moment really is.

On Sunday, a group of heavily armed men rearrested opposition leader Juan Pablo Guanipa just hours after he was freed from prison, where he had spent more than eight months in detention. Government officials accused Guanipa of violating the terms of his release. He was released Wednesday and is now under house arrest.

In the few hours in which he was free on Sunday, Guanipa led a loud motorcade that staged protests outside several prisons in Caracas.

"At this moment, we only have the expectation that a transition to democracy will begin," Evans said. "But we haven't yet moved beyond the release of some prisoners."

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

To Venezuela now, which is entering uncharted territory weeks after the U.S. removed former president Nicolás Maduro. As lawmakers debate releasing people charged with political crimes under Maduro, Venezuelans are cautiously taking to the streets, testing their new freedoms. Manuel Rueda reports from Caracas.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #1: (Chanting in Spanish).

MANUEL RUEDA, BYLINE: Just weeks ago, a protest like this one could have landed people in jail. But now at Venezuela Central University, students are starting to express their views more openly.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #1: (Chanting in non-English language).

RUEDA: At a square in the center of campus, hundreds gather to call for the release of the nation's remaining political prisoners. Some unfurl a blue and white banner that says free them all.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOS COMUNISTAS ¿DONDE ESTAN?")

KILOMETRO INTERNACIONAL: (Singing in Spanish).

RUEDA: Nearby, a truck with giant speakers plays a song that celebrates the capture of former president Nicolás Maduro.

JESUS LEOPOLDO: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "We're seeing a light at the end of the tunnel," says law student Jesus Leopoldo (ph). "We have not transitioned yet to the Venezuela we want," he adds, "and that's why we're here protesting peacefully."

Venezuela's government has relaxed some of its repressive measures as it faces pressure from the U.S. to implement political reforms.

(CHEERING)

RUEDA: Celebrations have broken out in several cities as the government releases some political prisoners, and later this week, there could be more to come. Venezuela's interim president is expected to sign an amnesty law that could secure freedom for hundreds more still behind bars. These developments have encouraged some Venezuelans to express their views openly for the first time in months, testing limits once imposed on them by the government.

NICMER EVANS: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "The only way for us to get our democracy back is to keep on fighting for it," says Nicmer Evans (ph), a political scientist and journalist who was released from prison last month.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #2: (Chanting in Spanish).

RUEDA: Evans recently joined a protest outside the nation's Supreme Court, where public servants, including teachers and nurses, demanded an increase in wages, which have not been raised in the past three years. As we speak, about 30 police officers surround the demonstrators. They separate them from a larger group of government workers who were bused in for a pro-Maduro rally.

EVANS: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "As you can see, the government is still trying to intimidate us," Evans says. But we're not being forced out, he adds, saying that's a sign of progress.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DELSA SOLORZANO: (Speaking Spanish).

(APPLAUSE)

RUEDA: Meanwhile, opposition leaders who have been in hiding for months are stepping back into the public eye. Delsa Solorzano, a prominent former legislator, was in hiding for 17 months to avoid arrest. She resurfaced at the end of January and held a press conference to demand freedom for the nation's political prisoners.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SOLORZANO: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "In what civilized mind do you think that it's OK to persecute people, just because they think differently from you?" She said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in Spanish).

RUEDA: Outside the Helicoide, one of Venezuela's most notorious prisons, relatives of political prisoners have also been speaking up. For the past month, they have held nightly vigils, praying for the freedom of their loved ones and carrying photos of those who are still in prison. Atali Freites (ph) says her son, Juan (ph), an opposition activist, has been behind bars for two years.

ATALI FREITES: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "He has committed no crime," she says, "only wanting to improve this country."

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #3: (Chanting in Spanish).

RUEDA: Evans, the political scientist, said that an amnesty law is just the first step towards recovering democracy.

EVANS: (Speaking Spanish).

RUEDA: "The media is still heavily censored," he says. "We must reform the judicial system," he adds, "so that the ruling party loses its grip over the nation's judges." While U.S. military pressure appears to have helped with the release of prisoners, Evans says Venezuelans will have to keep up the pressure on their government.

(SOUNDBITE OF HORNS HONKING)

RUEDA: This weekend, jubilation over prisoner releases was bittersweet. Among those freed was Juan Pablo Guanipa, a close ally of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Hours later, he was taken away by heavily armed men and detained, accused by the government of violating the conditions of his release. It's a stark reminder of how precarious this moment remains.

For NPR News, I'm Manuel Rueda in Caracas.

(SOUNDBITE OF THEE SINSEERS AND JOEY QUINONES SONG, "LIKE I CAN GIVE")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5706626

POLITICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:46 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Trump is threatening to block a new bridge between Detroit and Canada from opening

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to block the opening of a new Canadian-built bridge across the Detroit River, demanding that Canada turn over at least half of the ownership of the bridge and agree to other unspecified demands in his latest salvo over cross-border trade issues.

"We will start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY. With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset," Trump said in a lengthy social media post, complaining that the United States would get nothing from the bridge and that Canada did not use U.S. steel to built it.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge, named after a Canadian hockey star who played for the Detroit Red Wings for 25 seasons, had been expected to open in early 2026, according to information on the project's website. The project was negotiated by former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder — a Republican — and paid for by the Canadian government to help ease congestion over the existing Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor tunnel. Work has been underway since 2018.

It's unclear how Trump would seek to block the bridge from being opened, and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on more details. The Canadian Embassy in Washington also did not immediately return a request for comment.

Trump's threat comes as the relationship between the U.S. and Canada increasingly sours during the U.S. president's second term. The United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement is up for review this year, and Trump has been taking a hard-line position ahead of those talks, including by issuing new tariff threats.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, has spoken out on the world stage against economic coercion by the United States.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said the Canadian-funded project is a "huge boon" to her state and its economic future. "You'll be able to move cargo from Montreal to Miami without ever stopping at a street light," Slotkin told The Associated Press.

"So to shoot yourself in the foot and threaten the Gordie Howe Bridge means that this guy has completely lost the plot on what's good for us versus just what's spite against the Canadians," Slotkin said.

Michigan, a swing state that Trump carried in both 2016 and 2024, has so far largely avoided the brunt of his second-term crackdown, which has targeted blue states with aggressive immigration raids and cuts to federal funding for major infrastructure projects.

Trump and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have also maintained an unusually cordial relationship, with the president publicly praising her during an Oval Office appearance last April. The two also shared a hug last year ahead of Trump's announcement of a new fighter jet mission for an Air National Guard base in Michigan.

While Canada paid for the project, the bridge will be operated under a joint ownership agreement between Michigan and Canada, said Stacey LaRouche, press secretary to Whitmer.

"This is the busiest trade crossing in North America," LaRouche said, saying the bridge was "good for Michigan workers and it's good for Michigan's auto industry" as well as being a good example of bipartisan and international cooperation.

"It's going to open one way or another, and the governor looks forward to attending the ribbon-cutting," LaRouche said.

Rep. Shri Thanedar, the Democratic House representative of Detroit, said blocking the bridge would be "crazy" and said Trump's attacks on Canada weren't good for business or jobs. "The bridge is going to help Michigan's economy. There's so much commerce between Michigan and Canada. They're one of our biggest partners," Thanedar said.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Ann Arbor brushed aside the president's threat, saying she's looking forward to the bridge's opening later in the spring. "And I'll be there," Dingell said.

"That bridge is the biggest crossing in this country on the northern border. It's jobs. It's about protecting our economy. It was built with union jobs on both sides," said Dingell. "It's going to open. Canada is our ally."

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708607

POLITICS | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 8:13 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Japan's Takaichi to pursue conservative agenda after election landslide

By Anthony Kuhn

SEOUL — Japan's first female Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, brought the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) its biggest electoral victory in its 71-year history, fueling her ambitions to pursue to a political agenda which she herself says could "split public opinion."

The snap elections for the lower house of parliament were held despite the shortest campaign period in post-war history, and massive snowstorms across much of Japan.

Benefitting from Takaichi's popularity, the LDP won a two-thirds majority in the lower house, enough to override vetoes by the opposition-controlled upper house.

It would also allow the LDP to initiate amendments to Japan's pacifist constitution, which the party has sought to revise since its founding in 1955, and Takaichi said she would pave the way for an eventual referendum on the issue.

It's the biggest majority any single Japanese party has won in the lower house in the post-war era. An unprecedented 90% of candidates fielded by the LDP won.

Charismatic Japanese leaders, including Takaichi's mentor former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have helped the LDP stage comebacks before.

It's a feature of Japan's politics, which RAND Corporation Japan expert Jeffrey Hornung says "are always very personalistic. People always look to the leader, not so much the party."

Japan's Nikkei stock index jumped to a record high, bond yields went up, and Japan's currency the Yen initially went down, before reversing course later.

Questions and criticisms remain about how Takaichi will pay for these priorities, given that Japan's government debt is more than 200% of GDP.

But Takaichi apparently feels her mandate will empower her to sweep aside obstacles.

"We have advocated policies facing significant opposition," Takaichi said at LDP headquarters, "including a major shift in economic and fiscal policy, strengthening our security policy, and enhancing intelligence capabilities."

Takaichi's lopsided victory comes amid a general shift to the political right in Japan.

Following Takaichi's election as LDP president last year, the LDP's coalition partner of 26 years, the centrist Komeito Party, left the bloc. The LDP then joined a new coalition with the right-wing populist Japan Innovation Party.

Komeito joined a new coalition called the Centrist Reform Alliance, which lost most of their seats in the snap election, prompting their leaders to resign.

Takaichi also restated at her press conference her intention to revise Japan's National Defense Strategy and related documents. She did not say what exactly she might change, but she has previously hinted that she could rework the country's longstanding policies not to possess, produce or share nuclear weapons.

"This year marks 10 years since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe advocated a free and open Indo-Pacific," Takaichi told the press conference. "I aim to deepen this vision."

The first Trump administration adopted the concept of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, envisioning like-minded nations upholding a rules-based international order against revisionist powers, implied to mean China.

Takaichi pledged to continue to use the Japan-U.S. alliance as the cornerstone of foreign policy, and plans to meet with President Trump next month.

Trump is scheduled to visit China in April. Takaichi, meanwhile, is at the center of a diplomatic stalemate with Beijing, over her comments that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response.

The Trump administration emphasizes that its allies must bear a greater share of defense and other burdens.

And RAND's Jeffrey Hornung says Takaichi may be better positioned than her predecessors to deliver such results.

"She can't say anymore, 'well, I can't do that because the opposition parties will turn it down.' I mean, she has the numbers to pass policies and do things."

Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Tokyo.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Japan's first female prime minister gambled that she could use her popularity to revive her ruling party. Her bet paid off, and she scored the party's biggest landslide ever in snap elections on Sunday. NPR's Anthony Kuhn has more.

ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi pinned rosettes above the names of winning candidates for the House of Representatives at Liberal Democratic Party headquarters. The LDP had lost two previous elections in a row. But Sophia University political scientist Koichi Nakano says that Takaichi appeared to voters to offer something new.

KOICHI NAKANO: Compared to her predecessors, of course, she projects a fresh image because her predecessors are all dull, old men in gray suits.

KUHN: The LDP won a two-thirds majority in the lower House, enough to override vetoes by the opposition-controlled upper House. A new center left coalition, meanwhile, lost more than half of its seats. Takaichi will likely take this as a mandate to pursue her conservative agenda, including more defense spending and possibly revising Japan's pacifist constitution. Jeffrey Hornung is a Japan expert with the RAND Corporation.

JEFFREY HORNUNG: It's really amazing given that she's only been prime minister since October, and to already be in control of this much political capital.

KUHN: Japan's stock market climbed to new highs in anticipation of Takaichi's stimulus spending and tax cuts. President Trump congratulated Takaichi and will host her at the White House next month. Takaichi is currently at odds with China over her comments that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response. She might ask Trump for help with that. Jeffrey Hornung says Takaichi may face U.S. demands for Japan to contribute more to their alliance.

HORNUNG: She can't say anymore, well, I can't do that because the opposition parties will turn it down. I mean, she has the numbers to pass policies and do things.

KUHN: China could choose to wait Takaichi out. But that could take a while as she doesn't appear to be going anywhere soon.

Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Seoul.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOWERCASE NOISES' "THE HUNGRY YEARS")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5706602

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LAW | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:41 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Ghislaine Maxwell refuses to answer House committee's questions, appeals for clemency

By Vanessa Romo

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Ghislaine Maxwell showed up by video for a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Although she didn't say much, she pled the Fifth Amendment. Maxwell, who was found guilty of being at the center of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring, is serving a 20-year prison sentence. In a moment, we'll hear from a Democratic lawmaker who witnessed this deposition. We begin with the facts from NPR's Vanessa Romo.

VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Democrats and Republicans on the panel came armed with a slew of questions. Who were the other co-conspirators involved in grooming and recruiting underaged girls? Who were the other men who sexually abused or even raped them? But Epstein's former employee, girlfriend and accomplice refused to testify. Ghislaine Maxwell invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Then one of her lawyers made a counteroffer. If the committee, quote, "truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened," he said, she'd do it if the committee granted her immunity or President Trump conceded clemency. He added that Maxwell can also clear Trump and former President Bill Clinton of any wrongdoing. Irate committee members swiftly responded, among them Representative Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat from New Mexico.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MELANIE STANSBURY: This was an effort to essentially try to secure her pardon by keeping her mouth shut. And we will not allow this silence to stand.

ROMO: Speaking with reporters after the hearing, House Oversight Committee Chair Republican Congressman James Comer said he was disappointed but that the committee's investigation will continue.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JAMES COMER: I personally don't think she should be granted any type of immunity or clemency.

ROMO: Maxwell's attorney did not offer any clues about the type of evidence she may have. This is not the first time Maxwell has been deposed. In July, the 64-year-old was questioned for two days by Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general. Here is how she characterized her experience of Trump, who had a friendship with Epstein.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.

STANSBURY: Shortly after that deposition, she was moved from a federal correctional facility in Florida to a minimum security prison in Texas. Trump has not ruled out previous overtures for a pardon for Maxwell.

Vanessa Romo, NPR News.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708150

LAW | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:30 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Ghislaine Maxwell appeals for clemency from Trump as she declines to answer questions

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, declined to answer questions from House lawmakers in a deposition Monday, but indicated that if President Donald Trump ended her prison sentence, she was willing to testify that neither he nor former President Bill Clinton had done anything wrong in their connections with Epstein.

The House Oversight Committee had wanted Maxwell to answer questions during a video call to the federal prison camp in Texas where she's serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, but she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions that would be self-incriminating. She's come under new scrutiny as lawmakers try to investigate how Epstein, a well-connected financier, was able to sexually abuse underage girls for years.

Amid a reckoning over Epstein's abuse that has spilled into the highest levels of businesses and governments around the globe, lawmakers are searching for anyone who was connected to Epstein and may have facilitated his abuse. So far, the revelations have shown how both Trump and Clinton spent time with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, but they have not been credibly accused of wrongdoing.

Dressed in a brown, prison-issued shirt and sitting at a conference table with a bottle of water, Maxwell repeatedly said she was invoking "my Fifth Amendment right to silence," video later released by the committee showed.

During the closed-door deposition, Maxwell's attorney David Oscar Markus said in a statement to the committee that "Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."

He added that both Trump and Clinton "are innocent of any wrongdoing," but that "Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation."

Maxwell's appeal hits pushback

Democrats said that was a brazen effort by Maxwell to have Trump end her prison sentence.

"It's very clear she's campaigning for clemency," said Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat.

Asked Monday about Maxwell's appeal, the White House pointed to previous remarks from the president that indicated the prospect of a pardon was not on his radar.

And other Republicans push backed to the notion quickly after Maxwell made the appeal.

"NO CLEMENCY. You comply or face punishment," Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, wrote on social media. "You deserve JUSTICE for what you did you monster."

Maxwell has also been seeking to have her conviction overturned, arguing that she was wrongfully convicted. The Supreme Court rejected her appeal last year, but in December she requested that a federal judge in New York consider what her attorneys describe as "substantial new evidence" that her trial was spoiled by constitutional violations.

Maxwell's attorney cited that petition as he told lawmakers she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights.

Family members of the late Virginia Giuffre, one of the most outspoken victims of Epstein, also released a letter to Maxwell making it clear they did not consider her "a bystander" to Epstein's abuse.

"You were a central, deliberate actor in a system built to find children, isolate them, groom them, and deliver them to abuse," Sky and Amanda Roberts wrote in the letter addressed to Maxwell.

Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a low-security prison camp in Texas last summer after she participated in two-days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The Republican chair of the committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, had also subpoenaed her at the time, but her attorneys have consistently told the committee that she wouldn't answer questions. However, Comer came under pressure to hold the deposition as he pressed for the committee to enforce subpoenas on Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After Comer threatened them with contempt of Congress charges, they both agreed to sit for depositions later this month.

Comer has been haggling with the Clintons over whether that testimony should be held in a public hearing, but Comer reiterated Monday that he would insist on holding closed-door depositions and later releasing transcripts and video.

Lawmakers review unredacted files

Meanwhile, several lawmakers visited a Justice Department office in Washington Monday to look through unredacted versions of the files on Epstein that the department has released to comply with a law passed by Congress last year. As part of an arrangement with the Justice Department, lawmakers were given access to the over 3 million released files in a reading room with four computers. Lawmakers can only make handwritten notes, and their staff are not allowed in with them.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, spent several hours in the reading room Monday morning. He told reporters as he returned to the Capitol that even if all the House members who triggered the vote on releasing the files "spent every waking hour over at the Department of Justice, it would still take us months to get through all of those documents."

Democrats on Raskin's committee are looking ahead to a Wednesday hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi, where they are expected to sharply question her on the publication of the Epstein files. The Justice Department failed to redact the personal information of many victims, including inadvertently releasing nude photos of them.

"Over and over we begged them, please be careful, please be more careful," said Jennifer Freeman, an attorney representing survivors. "The damage has already been done. It feels incompetent, it feels intimidating and it feels intentional."

Democrats also say the Justice Department redacted information that should have been made public, including information that could lead to scrutiny of Epstein's associates.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sponsored the legislation to force the release of the files, said that after reviewing the unredacted versions for several hours, he had found the names of six men "that are likely incriminated by their inclusion." He called on the Justice Department to pursue accountability for the men, but said he could potentially name them in a House floor speech, where his actions would be constitutionally protected from lawsuits.

Massie, along with California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, said they also came across a number of files that still had redactions. They said that was likely because the FBI had turned over redacted versions of the files to the Justice Department.

Khanna said "it wasn't just Epstein and Maxwell" who were involved in sexually abusing underage girls.

Release of the files has set in motion multiple political crises around the world, including in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is clinging to his job after it was revealed his former ambassador to the U.S. had maintained close ties to Epstein. But Democratic lawmakers bemoaned that so far U.S. political figures seem to be escaping unscathed.

"I'm just afraid that the general worsening and degradation of American life has somehow conditioned people not to take this as seriously as we should be taking it," Raskin said.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109413

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IMMIGRATION | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:37 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Top 5 takeaways from the House immigration oversight hearing

By Ximena Bustillo

Heard on All Things Considered

Immigration agency leaders appeared before Congress for the first time since two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Democrats, and some Republicans, on the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday took the opportunity to criticize the tactics used by officers on the ground and the strategy of top Trump administration officials to curb illegal migration.

The criticism came as congressional funding is set to expire on Friday for the Homeland Security Department — the department that houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The hearing underscored how deeply divided Republicans and Democrats remain on top-level changes to immigration enforcement in the wake of the shootings. It suggested Congress is inching closer to another stopgap bill to fund the department in the absence of deeper agreement.

Here are some other takeaways from the hearing:

1. Deaths of two U.S. citizens stay top of mind

Both Republicans and Democrats discussed the deaths of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, the 37-year-olds killed by DHS officers in two separate incidents.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino, N.Y., the Republican chairman of the committee, called the deaths, as well as increased violent rhetoric generally, "unacceptable and preventable."

"The safety of law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect must always come first. When officials or elected leaders rush to conclusions about law enforcement, or their fellow Americans, public trust suffers," Garbarino said in his opening remarks, calling for a "complete" investigation.

"I cannot put myself in the shoes of law enforcement, nor can I imagine what the families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are enduring today," he said.

But ICE acting Director Todd Lyons — who hasn't been confirmed by the Senate yet — deflected questions regarding the deaths. He said he would "not comment on any ongoing investigations."

He also sought to deflect criticism of President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for labeling Pretti as a "domestic terrorist," saying as elected or appointed officials, "that's their right to their comments."

But Lyons, in response to Democrats' questions, did emphasize that U.S. citizens shouldn't be caught up in immigration enforcement.

"ICE officers and special agents are trained in the Immigration and Nationality Act, so anyone that is here legally or lawfully or a US citizen should not be concerned about being deported or detained," Lyons said. He later drew a distinction between someone being "arrested" – which he acknowledged could happen to a U.S. citizen — and being "detained" on a longer basis.

NPR witnessed multiple instances in Minnesota where immigration agents drove around Minneapolis and questioned people about their immigration status, with the state's attorney general saying U.S. citizens were detained.

The detention of U.S. citizens has also happened under prior administrations. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that over a five-year period, U.S. citizens had encounters with immigration officers that could lead to their arrest and even deportation.

2. Bipartisan questions about training and internal oversight

ICE and CBP officials broke down training and resources available to officers, in response to repeated questions about how officers are treating U.S. citizens and others.

Lyons said that officers undergo three months of training, which includes 47 days at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in Georgia. Law enforcement officers and special agents who were certified in the past got to have a shorter training module, focused on just topics like the Immigration and Nationality Act.

"They would have to go through the rigorous immigration training, which, unfortunately ... immigration law is just as confusing and long as [the] tax code," Lyons said.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., asked Lyons how many ICE officers have been fired for their conduct. Lyons declined to comment on personnel matters.

But Lyons did denounce some of the language immigration officers were caught using on video. For example, in a video shared on social media after Pretti's death, an officer can be heard telling a woman: "if you raise your voice, I will erase your voice."

When asked about the footage, Lyons said he hadn't seen it but said ICE "does respect and adhere to the First Amendment" and that the statement heard in the video "doesn't represent the values of the men and women of ICE."

3. Republicans share some concerns with Democrats

Republicans voiced concern about two issues that Democrats have frequently raised: roving patrols and the use of body cameras.

Under the second Trump administration, CBP, which houses the Border Patrol agency, has taken a leading role in enforcing federal immigration laws in the interior of the country, rather than strictly near the borders.

In response to widespread criticism of the events in Minneapolis, Trump removed Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino from serving as the public face of the immigration presence there, replacing him with White House border czar Tom Homan. Trump later said in an interview that "maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch" when it comes to immigration enforcement.

GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas, said he believed "roving patrols should be done at the border rather than in the major cities of the United States." He also applauded the leadership changes in Minneapolis as "returning to the original mission of ICE."

Lawmakers from both parties have also pushed for greater use of body cameras to aid in oversight of agents' actions on the ground.

Lyons said that ICE had 3,000 cameras for 13,000 officers and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott noted that only half of 20,000 CBP officers have body cameras.

Lyons pledged to Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-Texas, that body camera footage of enforcement in Minneapolis would be released to the public and that he welcomes all officers getting such cameras.

Scott, from Customs and Border Protection, also pleaded for Congress to fully fund the body camera program for his agency, too, noting that while there has been money for the physical devices, there have not been the personnel to fully implement the body camera program.

"So fund the entire program so that we can be transparent and that we can make sure America knows what we're doing, because that trust is critically important," Scott urged lawmakers.

Noem, the homeland security secretary, has said the department is sending body cameras to every field officer in Minneapolis and that the body camera program would be expanded nationwide as funding allows.

Democrats want this codified into law.

4. Most requests were still partisan

The rhetoric and questions still seemed largely split along partisan lines. Republicans described the work done by ICE as "remarkable," while Democrats called for the "abolishment" and "dismanteling" of the agency.

Other Democratic proposals continue to face an uphill battle for GOP support, including calls for officers to display identifying information such as their last names on their uniforms, and to prohibit them from wearing face coverings.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., asked Lyons whether he would commit to unmasking his officers. Lyons said no. And Republicans argued that banning face masks would make it easier for people to dox federal agents — a common refrain from the administration.

5. ICE was in the spotlight, while CBP, USCIS — and the looming shutdown — took a backseat

Both Republicans and Democrats peppered Lyons with questions about his agency's operations. But lawmakers generally did not drill down into the changes at CBP and USCIS, despite those agencies' growing roles in immigration enforcement over the last year.

Questions for CBP's Scott still centered around border enforcement. That comes even as the Border Patrol has gone beyond its traditional jurisdiction of 100 miles from U.S. borders to conduct enforcement in cities like Minneapolis, and lead operations in Illinois, North Carolina and Louisiana.

All three agencies hedged in response to questions about whether their operations would be affected if DHS shuts down on Friday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow reminded lawmakers that his agency is funded primarily by the fees people pay when they submit various forms and applications, so his employees would still get paid.

And ICE and CBP both got a huge infusion of cash from Congress in Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer — making ICE the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency.

Lyons said the shutdown could affect the Department of Homeland Security's work related to transnational crime, but he did not note any impact to immigration operations. And Scott also didn't detail how the shutdown would affect personnel, just saying: "I agree America becomes less safe."

Their responses suggest any lapse in funding could most affect non-immigration agencies inside the Department of Homeland Security, like the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency — potentially spelling trouble for U.S. air travel and disaster response.

—NPR's Barbara Sprunt contributed to this report.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5708757

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ELECTIONS | UPDATED TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 5:38 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Malinowski concedes to Mejia in Democratic House special primary in New Jersey

By Stephen Fowler, Mike Hayes, P. Kenneth Burns

Heard on All Things Considered

Former congressman Tom Malinowski conceded Tuesday to challenger Analilia Mejia in a closely watched Democratic primary in a special election to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill.

"I congratulate Analilia Mejia on her hard won victory in the NJ-11 special primary. I look forward to supporting her in the April general election," Malinowski said in a statement.

The Associated Press has not yet made a call in the race. Last Thursday, Mejia led by a narrow margin as polls closed in the district. Some mail-in ballots remain to be counted.

The Democratic nominee will face Randolph Township Mayor Joe Hathaway, the only Republican to run, in the special general election to replace Sherrill. Sherrill resigned from her seat shortly after winning the gubernatorial race last November.

The special primary contest is one of the first elections in the 2026 midterm cycle where Democrats hope to capitalize on voter dissatisfaction with President Trump's second-term agenda. After losing the White House and the Senate in 2024, the party earned numerous victories in special elections and saw a surge of support in the 2025 November general election, including Sherrill's landslide victory.

Malinowski's comeback bid was supported by New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, who touted the two-term congressman's experience.

"Tom Malinowski knows the House of Representatives. He knows Congress. He knows New Jersey," Kim said in a video. "He knows how to be able to stand up to Donald Trump, and that's what I need right now is someone there as a partner with me in the Capitol."

Malinowski represented a neighboring congressional seat from 2018-2022, but lost to Republican Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. after redistricting added more Republicans into his district.

Malinowski's prior experience in Congress was an important factor in the lead-up to this race, says Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.

"With a short runway of a special election — name recognition, money, experience — all can matter," he said.

But Mejia, director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, was endorsed by several progressive groups and politicians including independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Locally, she received the endorsement of Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey's largest city.

"In a moment of rising authoritarianism, of economic insecurity, of state-sanctioned violence, any old blue just won't do," Mejia said at the event with Sanders. "If you send weak sauce to Congress, we will get weak sauce back."

Mejia has also called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"You can't reform that. It's not fixable," she said at a January event at William Paterson University. "Get it out. Kick it over. It is done. Forget it."

Immigration enforcement became a dominant theme of discussion among candidates in the primary, heightened by the fatal shootings of Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota.

The latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll finds 65% of Americans feel that ICE has "gone too far" in enforcing immigration laws, with a growing number of independents and Democrats sharing that sentiment.

For his part, Malinowski faced attacks from a super PAC aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over a 2019 vote for a bipartisan Department of Homeland Security funding bill. But he has been outspoken about the Trump administration's recent immigration tactics and a desire to "defund ICE's brutality."

Earlier this month, Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for the super PAC, United Democracy Project told The New York Times, "Tom Malinowski is talking about conditioning aid to Israel," adding, "That's not a pro-Israel position."

In the statement congratulating Mejia Tuesday, Malinowski decried the "massive flood of dark money that AIPAC spent on dishonest ads during the last three weeks," adding that he supports Israel as a "democratic and Jewish state."

In response to Malinowski's statement, AIPAC spokesperson Deryn Sousa said Tuesday that the organization "will be very active this election cycle supporting Democrats and Republicans who strengthen the U.S.-Israel partnership and opposing those—of either party—who may seek to undermine it."

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5703636

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POLITICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:41 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., talks about viewing the unredacted Epstein files

By Michel Martin

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Several lawmakers also got access to unredacted versions of the Epstein files at Justice Department offices yesterday. This, after they criticized the heavy use of redactions in the publicly available version of the files. Democrat Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia got access to the unredacted files on a government computer, and he's on the line with us now. Good morning, Congressman.

SUHAS SUBRAMANYAM: Good morning.

MARTIN: First, let me ask about Ghislaine Maxwell's appearance before the House Oversight Committee on which you sit. I understand that she requested to - or her lawyers did - to reduce or perhaps vacate her 20-year sentence in exchange for her testimony. Her lawyer says she will clear both President Trump and former President Bill Clinton of any wrongdoing. What do you make of that?

SUBRAMANYAM: Well, I think it's pretty clear this is part of a campaign by her to get clemency, and she's trying to essentially use this investigation that we're conducting as a means to doing that, as well as the idea of clearing a Democrat like Bill Clinton and a Republican like President Trump in the process. So she was trying to appeal to both parties, in my mind, and she's really just trying to get out of prison. And what I'd like to see, though, is this president make a clear commitment to not pardoning her because if she thinks there's a pardon that's on the horizon, then she's not going to talk to us or cooperate with our investigation.

MARTIN: Well, she was already moved to a less restrictive environment after she was previously questioned by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. And I wonder if you feel that that has led to some belief or expectation that this is possible.

SUBRAMANYAM: Oh, I think she's - exactly. She's been emboldened by this administration. She feels like she has leverage. She really should be back in that original prison. There's no reason why she should have been transferred in the first place. So I'm very, very disturbed by that. I know a lot of the victims are disturbed by that, and they're disturbed by the idea that she could potentially get that clemency that she's looking for.

MARTIN: Is there anything else that the committee can do to get her to answer questions and presumably truthfully?

SUBRAMANYAM: Well, it's tough because we're not law enforcement, right? And, you know, I don't think she should even be allowed to plead the Fifth because she's already a convicted criminal at this point. And her habeas petition, which is what she cited, is not enough to allow her to plead the Fifth. But because we have such little leverage and we're not law enforcement, it's hard to really force her to talk to us. And, you know, she has perjured herself many times and is a liar.

MARTIN: Well, to that point, a last question about this. If she is a liar, as you say, what else is there to be learned from her testimony?

SUBRAMANYAM: It's a good question. I like to think that, you know, perhaps she feels some guilt at some point and decides she's going to try to do the right thing by the victims. But even in that, you know, deposition room, she looked like she had very little remorse. She looked very defiant. And she simply didn't want to talk to us.

MARTIN: So let's turn to the files that you examined. What stood out to you?

SUBRAMANYAM: What stood out to me was how heavily redacted the files were in an unnecessary way. There are many instances where people who were not victims were redacted. And, you know, we're not necessarily talking about famous people in many instances, but we're talking about the idea that, you know, someone who regularly traffics women was redacted for some reason because they themselves were a woman. That happened many times in the files. And so I think the DOJ needs to go back and unredact a lot of these files. The reality is, they, I think, made the assumption that perhaps just because someone was a woman doesn't - means that they were also a victim. And that's simply not the case. Something else that kept coming up was, you know, entire pages, entire blocks of text were redacted when that wasn't necessary either. And so I think these redactions were not in accordance with the law or the spirit of the law, and certainly not the transparency the American people need.

MARTIN: Do you have authority to make some of this information public yourself? And if so, how would you decide what should be made public?

SUBRAMANYAM: Well, remember, as part of the Oversight Committee, we subpoenaed the administration for the release of the files to us so that, you know, we could do some of the work of redacting the files and not leave it to Department of Justice that we simply don't trust at this point, but they never complied with that subpoena. So I do believe that I have the ability and right to release, you know, some of the things that were unredacted. I've seen other members that have released, you know, at least hints of what was in redacted files. I think the question that we're all pondering is, you know, what is the right way to do that? You know, some of these names are folks that I simply don't know who they are. I wouldn't want to presume that they're not a victim, either, and I'd want to do some more research. So one of the things that is paramount for us is making sure that we take the time to not identify victims or...

MARTIN: OK.

SUBRAMANYAM: ...Hurt victims in any way.

MARTIN: That is Congressman Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia. He is a Democrat. And thank you so much for joining us.

SUBRAMANYAM: Thank you.

MARTIN: And I do want to note that NPR has reached out to Republican leaders in Congress and the Department of Justice. Those invitations remain open. We'll bring those conversations to you whenever they agree.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707293

PLANET MONEY NEWSLETTER | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:30 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

How much power does the Fed chair really have?

By Greg Rosalsky

President Trump recently nominated Kevin Warsh to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. And it's got us thinking about the power of the Fed chair, and where that power comes from.

On paper at least, the chair of the Fed doesn't seem like he or she should be that powerful. The Federal Reserve Act, which created America's central bank, established a bunch of limits on the authority of any one person to shape our economy.

The Fed chair, for example, only has one out of 12 votes on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the crucial decision-making body that sets interest rates. One of 12! It's hard enough for me and a small group of my friends to pick which movie to watch. I can't even imagine trying to convince a majority of eggheads — at least seven — on some fancy committee what the proper interest-rate policy should be to achieve the Fed's dual, sometimes-conflicting mandate of low, stable inflation and a strong labor market. That said, the Fed chair obviously does more than just try and herd cats on this important committee.

And, so, we've been wondering, is the Fed chair actually that powerful? And, if so, why?

Princeton University economist Alan Blinder researches and teaches about the Fed (he's been a frequent guest on Planet Money). Blinder served as vice chair of the Fed back in the mid-1990s. That's the Fed's number 2, right behind the head honcho, who was then Alan Greenspan.

"He was the boss," Blinder says of Greenspan. And yeah, he says, Fed chairs actually do have "a great deal" of power. "Now, you wouldn't learn that by just reading the Federal Reserve Act."

To understand the scope of this "great deal" of power, we first need to make clear what "the Fed chair" job actually entails. The Fed chair is actually the chair of two different bodies — the Board of Governors and the FOMC. They're appointed by presidents and confirmed by the Senate to be the Chair of the Board of Governors for four-year terms. The board is made up of six other members who are also presidentially appointed and confirmed by the Senate (in staggered, 14-year terms to safeguard the institution's independence from any particular president).

The Board of Governors has a big professional staff and oversees a bunch of important financial stuff, from banking supervision and financial regulation to payment systems to economic research to the day-to-day operations of the Fed. That's one important area where the Fed chair exercises power.

But Fed chairs are — by tradition, not law — also the chair of the FOMC, which, again, is arguably the most important policymaking organ of the Fed because they're the group that makes the crucial decisions about interest rates. It's where most of the exciting action is. Each year, typically at their first meeting in January, FOMC members vote on who will chair their important committee — and by long-standing tradition, they always select the Fed chair (they don't have to; more on this in a bit, because the fact that the president doesn't actually appoint the head of the FOMC could be relevant if there was ever a battle over Fed independence).

It's true, Blinder says, that the Fed chair "only has one vote out of 12 on the FOMC and could in principle be outvoted." However, in practice, "it has never happened in the history of the Federal Reserve."

Wow. That's worth repeating. On the crucial FOMC decisions about whether interest rates should go up or down, the Fed chair has never been outvoted!

Meanwhile, it's also extremely rare for the Fed chair to be outvoted on the Board of Governors.

David Wessel, a long-time economics journalist who now is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, pointed to what seems to be the last instance where the Fed chair was outvoted on the Board of Governors. That was under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker, all the way back in 1986 — the same year the band Europe released "The Final Countdown" and people apparently thought it was cool to wear neon spandex and leg warmers. In other words, a long time ago.

What explains the Fed chair's incredible track record?

Now, just because the Fed chair has always been in the majority at the FOMC and has almost always been in the majority at the Board of Governors doesn't mean that they're dictating to these bodies what they should do.

That said, a recent working study by Cooper Howes, an economist at the Fed, and three other academic economists, analyzed FOMC meeting transcripts over a few decades. And they found that the final policy decision that the FOMC made about interest rates lined up virtually "one-for-one with the Chair's preferred change." They conclude that "while disagreement is pervasive among FOMC members, when it comes time to make a decision, the Committee largely follows the Chair's preferences." It confirms previous findings from other economists and political scientists, including Chappell, McGregor, and Vermilyea (2005).

Gary Richardson, an economist at UC Irvine who served as the first official historian of the Federal Reserve System, says this evidence may overstate how all-powerful Fed chairs actually are. He suggests that the Fed chair's incredible track record of triumphing in committee votes may be partly the result of a give and take between them and the other committee members. Fed chairs, he suggests, read the room in the weeks or months prior to official votes and — seeking a consensus — they reshape their own policy preferences in anticipation of what they know other committee members will want.

We were curious what people who served on the Board of Governors and FOMC had to say about this debate over the Fed chair's influence over votes.

Lael Brainard served as a member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors between 2014 and 2023, under the leadership of Fed chairs Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell. She says it's true that FOMC members can influence the Fed chair's policy preferences through their public speeches, conversations, and so on.

But, in her experience, when it came close to the FOMC meeting, the chair usually had clear preferences for what they wanted the Fed to do. They would call her and other members on the phone in the run-up to FOMC meetings to get a sense of what they were thinking and how they would likely vote on the chair's proposed actions. However, they didn't do this with "a blank slate," she says. "It was really about getting people on board with their preferences." In other words, they lobbied the FOMC to get what they wanted.

Blinder had a similar story about Alan Greenspan. "He had firm opinions most of the time," Blinder says. "He let you know what those opinions were before you voted, so it wasn't like everyone's gonna vote and then, 'Oh, Greenspan had a different view.' No, he let everybody know. And so the choice you had when it came time to vote was whether you were gonna defy this deeply respected and exalted chairman or go along with him, even if you didn't quite agree with him."

In short, all the sources we spoke to agreed that the Fed chair exercises a ton of power over both the FOMC and the Board of Governors, even though much of that power can't be found formally written down in the law.

So where does the Fed chair's power come from?

So why, if the Fed chair is only one of many votes in a crucial financial institution that shapes our economy, does he or she seem to have so much power over it? There are at least a few important reasons.

First, the Fed chair has power over the Fed's communications. Fed chairs are the ones who hold the important press conferences. They are the ones, who, by law, testify before Congress. They are the "most visible figure at the Fed," Wessel says. Call it the economic bully pulpit.

Imagine a Fed chair going in front of microphones and cameras, and saying something like, "Inflation is out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it." Markets would go bananas. People would be crying about their 401Ks. There would be pandemonium on Wall Street. Fed chairs speak for their institution, and that institution really matters for the economy. Their mouths have power — and the other board and committee members know it. That may be one reason why they tend to defer to the Chair.

Second, the Fed chair isn't just the chair. He or she is effectively the Fed's CEO, says Richardson. That is spelled out in the law: the Federal Reserve Act says the chair is the Fed's "active executive officer." And just like any other CEO, the Fed chair has broad authority over day-to-day management — including significant influence over hiring, firing, and promotions among the Fed's staff. They are the staff's boss. And that authority can help Fed chairs shape which data, analyses, and reports other Fed authorities see when they vote on crucial matters.

In the run up to FOMC meetings, Brainard says, committee members are given what's known as "The Tealbook." Basically, it's a report, put together by the Fed's economists, that contains data, charts, and deep-dive analyses about the direction of the economy that are relevant for the votes FOMC members have to make.

Brainard says this report was always super high-quality. It's not like Fed chairs get staff to cook the books or anything like that. The data is real. "But the data lends itself to different interpretations, particularly at turning points in the economy," she says. And the way the data is presented can sometimes matter. Through their sway over the staff, the chair can use the Tealbook and other staff reports to influence how members vote.

Being the Fed's chief executive also gives the Fed chair the power to make small decisions, like "who gets parking, and who gets to park where," Richardson says, and big decisions, like who serves on which committees. In that recent study by Howes and colleagues, they hypothesize that FOMC dissenters are met with "punishment" by the chair that reduces their influence in the institution. In other words, the chair has some carrots and sticks that they may use to nudge members in directions they want.

Additionally, Fed chairs tend to serve much longer on the Board and FOMC than other members. While Governors can serve up to 14 years on the Board, most spend much less time than that. The longer tenure, Richardson says, may increase the chair's gravitas and institutional knowledge, and it may be another reason why Board and FOMC members defer to them.

Third — and importantly — the Fed chair sets meeting agendas, including proposed policy actions. "The  Federal Open Market Committee meetings and the Board meetings are not just free-for-alls where anybody brings up anything they want," Blinder says. "There's an agenda, and they stick to the agenda — and the agenda is set by the chair."

One prominent example of why agenda control matters came after the 2008 financial crisis, when Ben Bernanke was Fed chair. Basically, the Fed cut interest rates all the way to zero — and then it couldn't push them any lower to stimulate the economy. The Fed's conventional weapon had lost its power. So Bernanke had to develop and put on the agenda an entirely new, unconventional weapon — "Quantitative Easing" (QE) — to try and get the economy growing again (QE was basically the Fed buying a boatload of mortgage-backed and other securities to try and push down longer-term interest rates).

Bernanke was uniquely qualified to lead this agenda, because he had spent years studying things like the Great Depression as well as Japan's more recent struggles with near-zero interest rates, which were instances where central banks found their traditional policy levers no longer worked.

Wessel had a fun way of describing this. " One way to think about it is Ben Bernanke was like the guy who was studying dinosaurs, and everybody said, 'Well, that's intellectually interesting, but who cares?' And then one day on the horizon, a Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up — and they were like, 'Well, thank God the guy in charge knows something about dinosaurs.'"

This gave Bernanke extra gravitas. And, combined with his institutional authority and powers — he was able to put unconventional monetary policies on the agenda. While those policies proved to be controversial, he was able to convince strong majorities on both the Board of Governors and the FOMC to pursue them during a time of crisis. (Side Note: Trump nominee Kevin Warsh once served on the Fed Board and the FOMC. He voted for early rounds of QE, but later became an influential critic of the policy).

Finally, and relatedly, the Fed chair has shown an incredible power to build consensus within the decision-making bodies of the Fed. We alluded to this before when we shared the incredible fact that the Fed chair has never been outvoted on the FOMC and has rarely been outvoted at the Board of Governors.

One big reason for this consensus, Blinder says, is a tradition of deferring to the chair. "The belief on the Fed is that it's damaging to the institution to defy the chair."

Brainard agreed that there's an institutional norm on supporting the chair, especially in difficult moments for the economy. "There is — for people like myself —  a desire to show some unity and support for the chair — even if you might have modest differences in terms of where you think that outcome should be," Brainard says.

Fed officials are public servants, and they know their actions and words can have huge effects on the economy. The Fed is most powerful and effective when it speaks with one voice. Speaking with one voice is a clear and powerful signal to markets, and officials like Brainard have deferred to the chair because they believe it helps "shore up the strength and credibility of the institution."

For example, Brainard says, back in 2015, when she was fresh on the Board of Governors, she faced a difficult decision about whether to support raising interest rates. Fed Chair Janet Yellen had "put in place a lot of communications and work to prepare to raise rates for the first time since the Great Financial Crisis," Brainard says. At the same time, markets were looking a tad bit shaky. "So I thought it was the wrong moment to raise rates," she says. "But because it was so significant that it was the first interest rate rise since the Great Financial Crisis, I thought it was very important to show solidarity and support of the chair, defer to her judgment and move forward with that."

Part of this tendency of members to defer to and support the chair depends on who is actually selected to serve in these positions. For example, President Trump appointed Stephen Miran last year, and since then Miran has defied the tradition of consensus and become a consistent dissenting vote against Chairman Jerome Powell, pushing the Fed to more forcefully cut interest rates.

A new Fed chair

So, yeah, historically, the Fed chair has really mattered for the actions of America's central bank. But much of their authority boils down to a kind of soft power, which is a product of tradition, norms, and the social and political dynamics of serving in these bodies. In extreme circumstances — like, say, if a president tried to strip the Fed of independence and forced them to pursue inflationary policies — that could change.

"The chairman depends on the loyalty and respect of the other people on the FOMC," Wessel says. "And if we had a chairman who was really out to lunch, then I think we would learn the chair's power is limited  by his ability to command the respect of the committee.  So the challenge that every new Fed chair has coming in is that the institution is loyal to the chair. They give you the benefit of the doubt, but if it turns out that they think you're nuts or irresponsible, they can turn on the chair and make it impossible for him to get his way."

In other words, within the internal structure of the Fed lies a dormant power that could be awakened.

Over much of the past year, President Trump has been pressuring Jerome Powell to lower interest rates and many believe it's not a coincidence that there's now a federal criminal investigation of cost overruns in a major Fed building renovation project pursued under his tenure. Indeed, Jerome Powell released a statement and said, "The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President." Trump has also sought to fire Biden appointee Lisa Cook from the Board of Governors. It's all been pretty unprecedented, and, within that context, the nuances of the Fed's structure have gotten more focus.

For example, the fact that the Fed chair doesn't, by law, have to be the head of the FOMC was cited by some observers as a potential way for the Fed to safeguard their independence and fight President Trump's push to get them to lower interest rates. Many fear that handing the Fed's power to President Trump — or, really, any president — would ultimately result in worse inflation and be damaging to the economy (check out this Planet Money Spotify playlist of episodes about Fed independence).

Jason Ma, writing over at Fortune, stressed that Jerome Powell's term as Fed Governor ends in 2028, and, even if he was replaced as Fed chair by a Trump ally who wanted to push rates to the floor, it would be possible for Powell to continue serving as FOMC chair and command the necessary majority to fight that.

However, President Trump's recent nomination of Kevin Warsh seems to have tamped down on this talk.

" This view of a possible civil war on the FOMC has been greatly diminished by the nomination of Kevin Warsh," Blinder says.

That's because Warsh previously served on the Fed's Board of Governors and FOMC, has a track record of caring a lot about runaway inflation, and he's well respected. Plus, Blinder says, he's personable and isn't the type of person who would bang on the table at FOMC meetings.

For many, Trump's selection of Warsh was surprising, considering the president has been urging a more dovish stance at the Fed for significantly lower interest rates — and Warsh has a reputation as an inflation hawk.

That said, nobody knows what sort of conversations Warsh has had with President Trump, whether he would have a stiff backbone in the face of presidential pressure, and what decisions Warsh will ultimately make if he gets approved by the Senate and takes the big job.

One thing is for sure though: the job he does will significantly matter for all of us.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109375

POLITICS | UPDATED TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 11:05 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Immigration officials testify before House as DHS funding deadline approaches

By Barbara Sprunt

Top officials from three immigration government agencies are testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security amid heightened calls for oversight of DHS and as lawmakers debate changes to the department ahead of a Friday funding deadline.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting Director Todd Lyons, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow are appearing before the panel on Tuesday and return to Capitol Hill on Thursday to testify before the Senate.

Watch the hearing, set for 10 a.m. ET Tuesday, live:

The hearing follows requests from committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., in the aftermath of the killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who was shot multiple times by federal immigration officers.

"Transparency and communication are needed to turn the temperature down," Garbarino said in a statement announcing the hearing.

The hearings will be a balancing act for Republicans. The congressional GOP majority broadly supports President Trump's immigration enforcement actions, despite several voicing concerns in the aftermath of two fatal shootings in Minneapolis.

But the Trump administration's immigration tactics have been scrutinized by the public. New polls show a majority of Americans say federal agents have "gone too far" in enforcing immigration laws.

DHS funding deadline approaches

The hearing is part of a broader focus on immigration this week. Lawmakers are considering potential changes to immigration enforcement operations at the behest of Democrats who refused to fund the agency without reforms.

Republicans sent Democrats an offer on a path forward on Monday, according to Democrats and a White House official. Details of that proposal were not publicly released and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., quickly dismissed the offer.

"Republicans shared an outline of a counterproposal, which included neither details nor legislative text," the two said in a statement. "The initial GOP response is both incomplete and insufficient in terms of addressing the concerns Americans have about ICE's lawless conduct. Democrats await additional detail and text."

Last week, Jeffries and Schumer sent a letter to their GOP counterparts, outlining their proposals.

Some, like requiring officers to wear body cameras, have bipartisan support.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said the department is sending body cameras to every field officer in Minneapolis and that the body camera program would be expanded nationwide as funding allows. Democrats want this codified into law.

Other proposals face an uphill battle, including calls for officers to display identifying information on their uniforms, such as their last name, and to prohibit them from wearing face coverings.

Republicans have said banning face masks would make it easier for people to dox federal agents.

Jeffries said banning masks brings immigration enforcement officers in line with civil enforcement.

"We want to make sure that ICE agents are conducting themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country," Jeffries said on NPR's Morning Edition. "Police officers don't wear masks. County sheriffs don't wear masks, and state troopers don't wear masks."

Democrats are also calling for a prohibition on the use of funds to conduct immigration enforcement near medical and child care facilities, schools and churches. They want to see expanded training of agents and the removal of officers from the field in the event of an incident until an investigation is conducted. They also want to require agents to verify that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.

Additionally, Democrats are calling for a mandate requiring immigration officers to only use warrants signed by a judge to make arrests. They say the current use of administrative warrants — written by DHS and not signed by a judge — could violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., called Democrats' proposals "a ridiculous Christmas list of demands" and said they were "not negotiating in good faith."

If lawmakers don't reach a deal this week, another stopgap bill to fund DHS in the short term would be needed. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters on Monday he hopes to begin work on a temporary funding bill on Tuesday, but said he is hopeful congressional Democrats and the White House will find common ground and forge ahead with a deal.

Unlike past shutdowns, only DHS is at risk of closing its doors. A lapse in funding would affect agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency — potentially affecting air travel and disaster response.

However, ICE would likely keep operating even if there is a shutdown. That's because DHS got more than $70 billion in separate funds from Congress over the summer as part of a broader spending increase on border and immigration enforcement.

Both the Senate and the House are expected to be on recess next week for Presidents Day. If the DHS funding issue is not resolved, the Senate may need to stay in Washington to address any lapse.

NPR's Ximena Bustillo contributed to this report.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-109330

POLITICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:43 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Top immigration officials to testify before House as DHS funding deadline approaches

By Barbara Sprunt, Steve Inskeep

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The Department of Homeland Security runs out of funding on Friday. Congress is going through another last-minute drama over the budget as some lawmakers try to shape the actions of immigration agents.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This hour, a House committee is also hearing from immigration officials about how that enforcement is being conducted across the country. In a few minutes, we'll hear from one of the members of that committee, Democrat Dan Goldman of New York. But we're going to start with the latest of the negotiations.

INSKEEP: NPR congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt is here. Barbara, good morning.

BARBARA SPRUNT, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Steve.

INSKEEP: How are the talks going?

SPRUNT: Well, a bit stuck right now, which feels familiar, right?

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SPRUNT: Last week, top Democrats sent a list of proposals. Late last night, they said they received a response from Republicans. Neither side has described what was in that response. But Democrats said the outline of that counterproposal didn't include details or propose legislative text, so they dismissed it as incomplete, and they said they'll be waiting for details to come their way.

INSKEEP: Not much more time to wait, it would seem.

SPRUNT: That's right. With a Friday deadline, doesn't give them a bunch of time to delivery, and if they don't reach a deal, then they'd need another stopgap bill to fund the department. So last night, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he's going to start teeing up a short-term funding bill today just in case an agreement can't be brokered in time.

INSKEEP: OK. Now, regular listeners to this program have heard discussion of the various demands the Democrats have. And there's real substance here in people's lives because it has to do with the way that immigration agents behave on the streets of places like Minneapolis and elsewhere. What on that list has begun to seem like it has bipartisan support?

SPRUNT: Well, we know that there's general support from both parties on requiring officers to wear body cameras. In fact, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has already said that the department will send cameras to every field officer in Minneapolis and that that body camera program will be expanded nationwide as funding allows. Now, Democrats want to go a step further. They want to see that put into law. But other proposals remain much more of an uphill battle.

INSKEEP: OK. Why don't you go through those?

SPRUNT: Well, Democrats want officers to display identifying information like their last names, and they want to ban them from wearing face coverings. And this has seemed to be a nonstarter with a lot of Republicans, who say that banning face masks would make it easier for people to dox federal agents. But Democrats counter that that would actually bring immigration enforcement officers in line with civil enforcement, you know, pointing out that sheriffs and police officers, for example, don't wear masks.

INSKEEP: I'm noticing that there's a kind of a theme of transparency here, demanding transparency. Democrats at least want the person on the street who works for the taxpayer to identify themselves to this person that they may be grabbing and taking down or doing any number of things to, demanding identity. And at the same time, officials from ICE and Customs and Border Protection are supposed to more or less identify themselves before Congress and face questions about what they're doing.

SPRUNT: That's right, and this will be the bulk of the hearing today. There will be another one before the Senate on Thursday. And it's interesting because Congress is actively negotiating on how to change DHS. And at the same time, this committee gets to question firsthand the people who conduct these operations, which, as you said, have come under so much scrutiny. In fact, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee requested that these officials testify after federal immigration officers shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

INSKEEP: So what'll you be watching for?

SPRUNT: I'm curious how the congressional GOP majority will handle its questioning because they broadly support President Trump's immigration enforcement actions, but they're also contending with public polling that shows a majority of Americans say that enforcement has gone too far.

INSKEEP: NPR's Barbara Sprunt. Thanks, as always.

SPRUNT: Thank you.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707411

POLITICS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:43 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., talks about DHS reforms ahead of looming funding deadline

By Michel Martin

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

For more on this, I'm joined by Congressman Dan Goldman. He is a Democrat from New York, and he serves on the House Homeland Security Committee. Good morning, Congressman. Thanks for joining us.

DAN GOLDMAN: Good morning, Michel. Great to be with you.

MARTIN: So let me start with today's hearing. You and your colleagues will hear testimony from senior leaders at ICE, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. What's the goal for you for this hearing today?

GOLDMAN: I want answers. I want to understand how they can justify essentially wreaking havoc and terror and killing American citizens all around the country in the name of immigration enforcement. The data is very clear that they are lawless. There's clearly use of excessive force and outside the bounds of the Constitution. But also the people they're going after are nowhere close to the worst of the worst. In fact, the vast majority of them have no criminal history whatsoever. And so we'll be looking for some understanding as to what the changes are that they intend to implement to respond to this outcry from the American people.

MARTIN: Do you think that your - any of your Republican colleagues share these concerns?

GOLDMAN: I do believe my Republican colleagues share these concerns. The question is, how willing are they to go public with them? It is notable, as Barbara said, that the - this hearing was called the day that Alex Pretti was killed. Saturday afternoon, the chairman issued a letter saying he wanted to hear from the ICE director and CBP director. And so there was clearly a response from Republicans, many of whom are up for reelection in November. And immigration has been something that they've leaned on in a misdirected way, but it is nonetheless now something that the public is outraged by their conduct. So I'll be interested to see how many of them actually go public in this hearing with criticisms.

MARTIN: So Democrats laid out 10 demands last week that they want to see before agreeing to fund DHS. And we understand that there is some agreement on body cameras. That's one of the things that Barbara Sprunt talked about, but that Democrats want to see this codified into law. Republicans, at least the administration is saying that this is dependent on funding. They'll start in Minneapolis first and then kind of roll it out as funding becomes available. But what else? What other things do you see as a bottom line for you?

GOLDMAN: Well, the body cameras need to be mandatory. It's not simply enough that you're supplying them, and it's quite odd to say that ICE does not have enough funding when it got $75 billion from the big ugly bill. But a lot of this is transparency because you have essentially masked secret police roaming the streets, demanding citizenship papers from people, killing people and having no consequences. So they're able to act with impunity because they're being protected by the Department of Justice. So, yes, first thing first, no masks. I was a federal prosecutor for 10 years. None of the criminal law enforcement agents who were actually going after bad guys wore masks. That's not the way we do things in America. You need to be transparent and you need to be accountable. That, for sure, is a nonstarter for us.

Other things is just simply implementing what the law already is. I don't see why it should be a problem to get a judicial warrant to search a home. That's what the Fourth Amendment requires. And much of this is reining in the lawless violence. But for me, Kristi Noem needs to go, and that's going to be a baseline. And I'm also very concerned about the efforts by this administration to interfere in the upcoming election by usurping power and grabbing voting rolls, voting machines, etc.

MARTIN: I don't know that that is part of the scope of this hearing or the individuals that you expect to hear from today would even have authority in this matter. But just to the question of face masks. I mean, Republicans have said publicly that that's a nonstarter for them. Have you heard anything privately that leads you to believe that there's negotiation on some of these other points?

GOLDMAN: Other than that, there's no good rationale or basis for them to say it's a nonstarter. Judges have been doxed repeatedly. Republicans don't seem to care about that, and you won't be doxed if you're following the law and you're not outrageously violating the civil rights of Americans and immigrants. So it is - this is not something that they can win in the court of public opinion because I think, A, their statistics are completely inflated and made up. We haven't seen any evidence of additional doxing. But moreover, that's the point, is that you have to act within the law, not behind a mask.

MARTIN: What I'm - I'm still trying to understand what convinces you that there may be a negotiation space on this point. And you keep referring to sort of the court of public opinion. We know from polling, for example, that Democrats are very disturbed by what they're seeing in the streets. Independents are very disturbed by what they're seeing in the streets. So we see Americans, overall, are very disturbed by what they're seeing on the streets, but it doesn't seem to be that Republicans, as a group of voters, don't seem to be as disturbed. They still seem overwhelmingly to support the government or the Trump administration's administration efforts. So I guess I'm wondering what leverage do you see that would encourage some of your Republican colleagues to see things your way?

GOLDMAN: Well, if you really want to get down to brass tacks, they need independence to keep the House majority. That's just a fact because they'll have to win battleground districts, and right now they're losing those significantly. So they can't just rely on Republicans to hold the House. I mean, that's a cynical political view of it. The other view is just simply that it's posturing on their part because there is no basis why civil immigration enforcement officers should be able to conceal their face and identity when criminal law enforcement agents do not. And that's the way that our democracy works. This is not some sort of USSR, where you have mass secret police roaming the streets with impunity.

MARTIN: You were a prosecutor, as you mentioned, for many years. Were you ever doxed? Did you ever feel threatened in the course of doing your job? Your identity was never secret.

GOLDMAN: No, I was never doxed as a prosecutor, although I have received many death threats as a member of Congress. In fact, I prosecuted mob bosses and certainly have received more threats from Donald Trump and his supporters than I ever did from the mafia.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, what do you say to those who believe a shutdown would be meaningless? Because, as you just pointed out, ICE received an enormous funding boost in the last bill, the $75 billion. A shutdown would affect other parts of DHS, like disaster response. What do you say to that?

GOLDMAN: Right. Well, if TSA is shut down, the Coast Guard shut down, FEMA is shut down. Those are significant areas of the Department of Homeland Security that the Republicans will be shutting down because they want to continue this lawlessness.

MARTIN: That's Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York. Thanks for joining us. And I want to note we have open invitations to Republican leaders in Congress to join us on this program, and we will bring them to you when they agree to speak with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF OLLIE MORRIS' "STRIVE")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707285

Health

- This complex brain network may explain many of Parkinson's stranger symptoms: 2026 Feb 10

- In a world built for sitting, here's how to stay active — even when stuck inside: 2026 Feb 10

- Hospitals are posting prices for patients. It's mostly industry using the data: 2026 Feb 10

- Modest 'mental exercise' can reduce risk of dementia for decades, study finds: 2026 Feb 9

- Olympic COVID restrictions are gone, but some athletes are still self-quarantining: 2026 Feb 9

- Need a new path in midlife? There's a school for that and a quiz to kickstart it: 2026 Feb 9

- New study finds many tuberculosis diagnoses may be incorrect: 2026 Feb 9

- March for Life attendees may have been exposed to measles, DC Health warns: 2026 Feb 9

SCIENCE | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

This complex brain network may explain many of Parkinson's stranger symptoms

By Jon Hamilton

Parkinson's disease does more than cause tremor and trouble walking. It can also affect sleep, smell, digestion and even thinking.

That may be because the disease disrupts communication in a brain network that links the body and mind, a team reports in the journal Nature.

"It almost feels like a tunnel is jammed, so no traffic can go normally," says Hesheng Liu, a brain scientist at Changping Laboratory and Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study.

The finding fits nicely with growing evidence that Parkinson's is a network disorder, rather than one limited to brain areas that control specific movements, says Peter Strick, a professor and chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study.

Other degenerative brain diseases affect other brain networks in different ways. Alzheimer's, for example, tends to reduce connectivity in the default mode network, which supports memory and sense of self. ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) primarily damages the motor system network, which controls movement.

Understanding the network affected by Parkinson's, which affects about 1 million people in the United States, could change the way doctors treat the disease.

A mystery solved?

People with Parkinson's often have symptoms that vary in ways that are hard to explain.

For example, someone who usually is unable to stand may suddenly leap when faced with an emergency. And Parkinson's patients who can still walk may freeze if they try to carry on a conversation.

"So you know that their movement problems [are] not simply related to their motor circuits," Liu says, but also to circuits involved in thinking and emotion.

For decades, scientists struggled to explain how these circuits are linked.

Then in 2023, a team led by researchers at WashU Medicine in St. Louis discovered a brain network that does seem to connect movement and thinking.

They named it the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN. And Liu's team thought it might explain some of the odd symptoms seen in Parkinson's.

So they used MRI data on more than 800 brains to compare the SCAN networks in healthy people with those in Parkinson's patients.

The team found that patients had abnormally strong connections between the SCAN network and brain areas known to be affected by their disease.

Instead of making communication better, Liu says, those strong connections were causing a traffic jam that kept signals from getting through.

Treating the network

Next, Liu's team looked to see what happened to the SCAN network when people with Parkinson's got deep brain stimulation — a treatment that delivers pulses of electricity to areas affected by the disease.

"When the stimulator is turned on, the connectivity was immediately lowered," Liu says, allowing brain traffic to flow normally again.

To see how other treatments altered the SCAN network, the team studied patients receiving the drug levodopa, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and focused ultrasound stimulation.

"All these effective treatments are actually acting on this same circuitry," Liu says, "and the effect is, remarkably, identical."

The finding is just the latest to show how the conventional wisdom about Parkinson's has changed.

"In the past, people thought of Parkinson's disease as the classic movement disorder," Strick says. "But it's clear now that multiple systems are involved."

People with Parkinson's often describe symptoms that go far beyond problems with voluntary movement, such as tremor, slurred speech and a shuffling gait.

Lesser known symptoms include chronic constipation, a reduced sense of smell, sleep disorders, memory lapses and fatigue — all of which involve brain systems with no direct link to voluntary movement.

Not a drunk

This sometimes unpredictable mix of symptoms can be misinterpreted in a way that feels stigmatizing to patients, doctors say.

Strick recalls one man whose early symptoms included a sudden drop in blood pressure when he stood up.

"He would fall down, unexplainably, and people thought he was a drunk," Strick says, adding that the man was actually pleased when he got a medical diagnosis that explained his behavior.

The new study appears to explain odd symptoms like that, Strick says. They're occurring, he says, because the SCAN network includes brain areas that normally control involuntary functions, like heart rate, digestion and blood pressure.

SCAN areas also include those that affect REM sleep, and certain types of memory and thinking.

Current treatments for Parkinson's don't fix these non-motor problems, Liu says. But future ones might, he says, by targeting overlooked areas in the brain's SCAN network.

Transcript

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Parkinson's disease does more than cause tremors and trouble walking. It can also affect sleep, smell, digestion and even thinking. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on new research suggesting that's because the disease disrupts a brain network that links the mind and body.

JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: People with Parkinson's often have symptoms that are hard to explain, says Hesheng Liu of Changping Laboratory in Beijing. For example, he says patients may be able to walk most of the time but freeze up when a path becomes narrow or someone asks them a question.

HESHENG LIU: So you know that their movement problems is not simply related to their motor circuits. It's also related to their cognitive circuits.

HAMILTON: But it hasn't been clear why. Then several years ago, a team led by researchers at Washington University in Saint Louis discovered a brain network that seems to connect movement and thinking. They named it the somato-cognitive action network - or SCAN. And Liu's team thought it might explain some of the odd symptoms of Parkinson's. So they used MRI data on more than 800 brains to compare the SCAN networks in healthy people with those in people with Parkinson's.

LIU: In the patients, the connectivity in this SCAN network is abnormally high.

HAMILTON: The network linking thoughts and actions has too many connections. Liu says this causes signals to get stuck.

LIU: It almost feels like a tunnel is jammed, so no traffic can go normally.

HAMILTON: Next, Liu's team looked to see what happened to the SCAN network when people with Parkinson's got deep brain stimulation, a treatment that delivers pulses of electricity to areas affected by the disease.

LIU: When the stimulator is turned on, the connectivity was immediately lowered.

HAMILTON: Allowing brain traffic to flow normally again. Liu wanted to know how other treatments altered the SCAN network. So his team studied patients being treated with the drug levodopa, magnetic stimulation and focused ultrasound.

LIU: All these effective treatments are actually acting on this same circuitry, and the effect is remarkably identical.

HAMILTON: And treatments seemed to be more effective when they focused on areas that are part of the SCAN network. The research appears in the journal Nature. Peter Strick, a neurobiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, says it reflects a better scientific understanding of a disease that affects about 1 million Americans.

PETER STRICK: In the past, people thought of Parkinson's disease as the classic movement disorder. But it's clear now that multiple systems are involved in Parkinson's disease.

HAMILTON: Stick says patients often describe symptoms that go beyond tremor, slurred speech and a shuffling gait. These include chronic constipation, a reduced sense of smell, sleep disorders, memory lapses and fatigue, all of which involve brain systems with no direct link to voluntary movement. Strick recalls one man whose early symptoms included a drop in blood pressure when he stood up.

STRICK: He would fall down unexplainably, and people thought he was a drunk. There's such a stigma attached to that that when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, he said, there, I'm not a drunk.

HAMILTON: Strick says the new study appears to explain symptoms like that. They occur because the SCAN network includes brain areas that control involuntary functions like heart rate, digestion and blood pressure.

STRICK: You don't say, well, OK, I'm going to stand up now, and so I've got to increase the blood flow in my brain. This is sort of the housekeeping that's taken care of for you.

HAMILTON: If your brain is healthy. Strick says current treatments for Parkinson's don't fix problems like that. But future ones might, he says, by targeting overlooked areas in the brain SCAN network.

Jon Hamilton, NPR News.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5702451

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BODY ELECTRIC | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

In a world built for sitting, here's how to stay active — even when stuck inside

By Manoush Zomorodi, Sanaz Meshkinpour

[This piece by Manoush Zomorodi also appeared in the Body Electric newsletter. Sign up here for a biweekly guide to move more and doomscroll less.]

It's the season of "inside." The kind of weather that turns your home into a little terrarium: warm light, hot drinks, a laptop — and a lot of sitting.

We don't think of it as a modern invention, but all the time we spend seated is relatively new: For most of human history, chairs were relatively rare (usually a symbol of power), and everyday life involved a lot more shifting, squatting, perching, and getting up and down.

Why we sit so much

Then mass production made chairs cheap, plentiful and — crucially — everywhere. Offices. Schools. Living rooms. Once chairs became the norm, stillness started to look like "proper" behavior. By the late 1800s, seating was being designed to keep bodies in place for repetitive work. Later, school reinforced the lesson ("sit still to succeed") and television reinforced it at home ("sit still to relax"). Today, phones and computers make it the default. We've built our world around sitting.

Where movement fits in

It can feel hard to integrate movement into your day, even when you want to. But movement breaks can help us feel more human, especially in winter.

So here's your weather-proof challenge: pick two and do five minutes each today.

- March in place (or do arm circles) during a call. You don't need to be on camera.

- Do laps around your dining room table — bonus points if you put on one song and dance

- Stair loop. Up and down for 2–3 minutes, then stretch, then repeat

- Hallway commute. Walk the length of your home while you scroll (slow enough to be safe)

Forget working out — let's just interrupt the spell that sitting and staring at a screen casts over us!

More about the history of chairs and, of course, how to integrate movement breaks into real life are in the Body Electric book, out in almost exactly four months.

We love to hear from you!

Send us a video of yourself or email us at BodyElectric@npr.org to share your thoughts on how to keep moving.

Sign up for our Body Electric newsletter, or share it with a friend.

Didn't hear the Body Electric series? Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the NPR App.

This story was written by Manoush Zomorodi and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/g-s1-108985

HEALTH | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Hospitals are posting prices for patients. It's mostly industry using the data

By Darius Tahir

Republicans think patients should be shopping for better health care prices. The party has long pushed to give patients money and let consumers do the work of reducing costs. After some GOP lawmakers closed out 2025 advocating to fund health savings accounts, President Donald Trump introduced his Great Healthcare Plan, which calls for, among other policies, requiring providers and insurers to post their prices "in their place of business."

The idea echoes a policy implemented during his first term, when Trump suggested that requiring hospitals to post their charges online could ease one of the most common gripes about the health care system — the lack of upfront prices. To anyone who's gotten a bill three months after treatment only to find mysterious charges, the idea seemed intuitive.

"You're able to go online and compare all of the hospitals and the doctors and the prices," Trump said in 2019 at an event unveiling the price transparency policy.

But amid low compliance and other struggles implementing the policy since it took effect in 2021, the available price data is sparse and often confusing. And instead of patients shopping for medical services, it's mostly health systems and insurers using the little data there is, turning it into fodder for negotiations that determine what medical professionals and facilities get paid for what services.

"We use the transparency data," said Eric Hoag, an executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, noting that the insurer wants to make sure providers aren't being paid substantially different rates. It's "to make sure that we are competitive, or, you know, more than competitive against other health plans."

Poor compliance from hospitals

Not all hospitals have fallen in line with the price transparency rules, and many were slow to do so. A study conducted in the policy's first 10 months found only about a third of facilities had complied with the regulations. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services notified 27 hospitals from June 2022 to May 2025 that they would be fined for lack of compliance with the rules.

The struggles to make health care prices available have prompted more federal action since Trump's first effort. President Joe Biden took his own thwack at the dilemma, by requiring increased data standardization and toughening compliance criteria. And in early 2025, working to fulfill his promises to lower health costs, Trump tried again, signing a new executive order urging his administration to fine hospitals and doctors that didn't post their prices.

CMS followed up with a regulation intended to up the fines and increase the level of detail required within the pricing data.

But so far, "there's no evidence that patients use this information," said Zack Cooper, a health economist at Yale University.

In 2021, Cooper co-authored a paper based on data from a large commercial insurer. The researchers found that, on average, patients who need a scan pass six lower-priced MRI providers on the way from their homes to an appointment for a scan. That's because they follow their physician's advice about where to receive care, the study showed.

Executives and researchers interviewed by KFF Health News also didn't think opening the data would change prices in a big way. Research shows that transparency policies can have mixed effects on prices, with one 2024 study of a New York initiative finding a marginal increase in billed charges.

The policy results thus far seem to put a damper on long-held hopes, particularly from the GOP, that providing more price transparency would incentivize patients to find the best deal on their imaging or knee replacements.

Difficulties with price-shopping

These aspirations have been unfulfilled for a few reasons, researchers and industry insiders say. Some patients simply don't compare services. And, unlike with apples — a Honeycrisp and a Red Delicious are easy to line up side by side — medical services are hard to compare.

For one thing, it's not as simple as one price for one medical stay. Two babies might be delivered by the same obstetrician, for example, but the mothers could be charged very different amounts. One patient might be given medications to speed up contractions; another might not. Or one might need an emergency cesarean section — one of many cases in medicine where obtaining the service simply isn't a choice.

And the data often is presented in a way that's not useful for patients, sometimes buried in spreadsheets and requiring a deep knowledge of billing codes. In computing these costs, hospitals make "detailed assumptions about how to apply complex contracting terms and assess historic data to create a reasonable value for an expected allowed amount," the American Hospital Association told the Trump administration in July 2025 amid efforts to boost transparency.

Costs vary because hospitals' contracts with insurers vary, said Jamie Cleverley, president of Cleverley and Associates, which works with health care providers to help them understand the financial impacts of changing contract terms. The cost for a patient with one health plan may be very different than the cost for the next patient with another plan.

The fact that hospital prices might be confusing for patients is a consequence of the lack of standardization in contracts and presentation, Cleverley said. "They're not being nefarious."

"Until we kind of align as an industry, there's going to continue to be this variation in terms of how people look at the data and the utility of it," he said.

How industry uses the data

Instead of aiding shoppers, the federally mandated data has become the foundation for negotiations — or sometimes lawsuits — over the proper level of compensation.

The top use for the pricing data for health care providers and payers, such as insurers, is "to use that in their contract negotiations," said Marcus Dorstel, an executive at price transparency startup Turquoise Health.

Turquoise Health assembles price data by grouping codes for services together using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence. It is just one example in a cottage industry of startups offering insights into prices. And, online, the startups' advertisements hawking their wares often focus on hospitals and their periodic jousts with insurers. Turquoise has payers and providers as clients, Dorstel said.

"I think nine times out of 10 you will hear them say that the price transparency data is a vital piece of the contract negotiation now," he said.

Of course, prices aren't the only variable that negotiations hinge on. Hoag said Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota also considers quality of care, rates of unnecessary treatments, and other factors. And sometimes negotiators feel as if they have to keep up with their peers — claiming a need for more revenue to match competitors' salaries, for example.

Hoag said doctors and other providers often look at the data from comparable health systems and say, "'I need to be paid more.'"

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5704792

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HEALTH | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 5:13 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Modest 'mental exercise' can reduce risk of dementia for decades, study finds

By Jon Hamilton

Heard on All Things Considered

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Even a modest amount of mental exercise appears to reduce the risk of dementia for decades. NPR's John Hamilton reports on a new study of people who did a specific type of cognitive training more than 20 years ago.

JOHN HAMILTON, BYLINE: The study involved cognitive speed training, which pushes the brain to process information more quickly. And the result is good news for people like George Kovach, who started doing this sort of exercise a decade ago.

GEORGE KOVACH: I was interested in taking care of my neurons.

HAMILTON: So Kovach signed up for an online program called BrainHQ, which includes the same cognitive speed training used in the study.

KOVACH: I think I've done over 1,300 days of BrainHQ exercises.

HAMILTON: Kovach says they're more challenging than a typical video game.

KOVACH: These things are hard, but you do get better at it. It makes your brain work. I look at it like doing sit-ups.

HAMILTON: Which Kovach also does. And he says, at 74, his brain is working better than ever. A study of more than 2,800 older adults suggests Kovach is on the right track. It found that people who got 10 hours of cognitive speed training plus some booster sessions were about 25% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. Marilyn Albert, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, says, remarkably, the protection lasted for 20 years.

MARILYN ALBERT: We now have a gold-standard study that tells us there's something that we can significantly do to reduce our risk for dementia.

HAMILTON: The study appears in the journal, Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research And Clinical Interventions. It used Medicare records to see what happened to people from a federally funded experiment that began in 1998. Albert says she didn't expect to see a benefit two decades later.

ALBERT: The fact that it's lasted and had an impact over 20 years is astonishing.

HAMILTON: The study, called ACTIVE, included exercises for memory and reasoning as well as speed, but only speed training had a long-term impact. Henry Mahncke, a neuroscientist and the CEO of BrainHQ, says it appears to trigger something called implicit learning, which involves acquiring automatic skills like riding a bike.

HENRY MAHNCKE: You could learn to ride a bike in about 10 hours of training. And then, hey, if you don't practice riding that bike for the next 20 years, your brain actually still has been rewired through brain plasticity. You now have a bike-riding brain.

HAMILTON: BrainHQ's version of this has people watch a computer screen. At some point, Mahncke says, a car or truck appears in the center and then something else shows up toward the edge.

MAHNCKE: If you had all day to look at that, anyone could figure out what's in the center - is it a car or a truck? - whereas something in your peripheral vision. But it doesn't give you all day. It shows the image on the screen to you very quickly and then it goes away.

HAMILTON: As you get better, the exercise gets faster. Mahncke says getting long-term results with just a few sessions raises an obvious question.

MAHNCKE: What if people had kept doing the speed training, right? What if they did the booster sessions once per year?

HAMILTON: An ongoing study funded by the National Institutes of Health may help answer that question. It's called the PACT study, and it has enrolled more than 7,000 people 65 and older. Jennifer O'Brien of the University of South Florida says, instead of 10 hours of training, participants will complete 45.

JENNIFER O'BRIEN: They are all doing a baseline series of training and then training boosters after the first year and after the second year.

HAMILTON: But O'Brien says people don't have to become mental marathoners to protect their brains. She says you can start with just 10 hours of training spread over a month or so.

O'BRIEN: And then you can stop, and likely you're going to see some benefits that are lasting. If you can do that every year, those benefits could last longer, and you could see the impacts all the way towards preventing dementia.

HAMILTON: O'Brien says the first results from the PACT study are likely to arrive in 2028. John Hamilton, NPR News.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5702423

2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 8:02 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Olympic COVID restrictions are gone, but some athletes are still self-quarantining

By Nathaniel Herz

Heard on All Things Considered

For most people, if not everyone, the pandemic days of masking are behind us.

In certain corners of the Winter Olympics in Italy, though, things still look a lot like they did in COVID times.

Some athletes are taking extreme measures to stay healthy.

When members of the U.S. women's cross-country ski team walked into a news conference in a packed room at the start of the Olympics, each of them wore a mask. Jessie Diggins, the team's top athlete, said the same rules apply if she's inside with her husband, who's staying not with Diggins at the Olympics, but with family.

"He wants to protect my health, too. And he knows how important this is," America's most decorated cross-country skier said. "And it's like, we've been waiting 10 years to have the rest of our lives together all the time, and not worrying about sickness. We can wait two more weeks. It's OK."

Locked down, but that's OK

At the last Olympic Games, in China, a positive coronavirus test could put athletes in an isolation hotel.

Things aren't that serious this time around. But athletes in cross-country skiing are among the most susceptible to respiratory viruses, and many are being extra cautious to stay healthy during the most important competitions of their lives.

Not only are many skiers and coaches wearing masks indoors, but America's cross-country team, and some from Scandinavia, have dispensed with the Olympic Village altogether and are renting out their own hotels, where they can avoid busy cafeterias and control who comes in and out.

"We're pretty locked down trying not to get sick and trying not to waste energy," said Ben Ogden, another star on the U.S. team.

"But that's OK, because, like, we have six, seven of our best friends, like, that are inside the bubble."

Not every team, though, can afford a setup like the Americans. Cross-country skiers from nations with smaller budgets are still staying inside an Olympic Village in the mountains near their competition venue.

And teams competing in other sports in the Olympic hub city of Milan are taking drastically different approaches altogether.

Ain't nothin' but a heartache

Members of the Finnish women's hockey team, for instance, were belting out Backstreet Boys together at a karaoke party at a restaurant in Milan, just before the Olympics started.

A few days later, the International Olympic Committee announced their game against Canada had to be postponed due to several cases of norovirus on Team Finland's women's hockey squad.

"It probably was a nice moment, just between teammates," said Anni Arko, a sports reporter for the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti. "But it was such a big risk. Like, I just couldn't believe my eyes that they actually did that."

Iltalehti wrote a scathing column about the norovirus outbreak, contrasting it with the extreme measures taken by Finland's cross-country skiers.

At the last Olympics, Arko says, the team's star, Iivo Niskanen, "was thanking his wife a lot, because he was not seeing his friends and family. But also his wife was not seeing basically anybody, so the family wouldn't get any infections and Iivo would be healthy."

Niskanen has so far been spared from illness. He was healthy for Sunday's skiathlon race and placed 17th.

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

For most people, if not everyone, the pandemic days of masking are behind us, right? But in certain corners of the Winter Olympics in Italy, things are still looking a lot like they did during COVID times. Reporter Nat Herz brings us this piece on the extreme measures that some athletes are taking to stay healthy.

NAT HERZ: When members of the U.S. women's cross-country ski team walk into a news conference in a packed room at the start of the Olympics, each of them is wearing a mask. Jessie Diggins, the team's top athlete, says the same rules apply if she's inside with her husband, who's staying not with Diggins at the Olympics but with family.

JESSIE DIGGINS: He wants to protect my health too. And he knows how important this is. And it's like, look, we've been waiting for 10 years to have the rest of our lives together all the time and not worrying about sickness. We can wait two more weeks. It's OK.

HERZ: At the last Olympics in China, a positive coronavirus test could put you in an isolation hotel. Things aren't that serious this time around, but athletes in cross-country skiing are among the most susceptible to respiratory viruses, and many are being extra cautious to stay healthy during the most important competitions of their lives. Not only are many skiers and coaches wearing masks indoors, America's cross-country team and some from Scandinavia have dispensed with the Olympic Village altogether and are renting out their own hotels where they can avoid busy cafeterias and control who comes in and out.

BEN OGDEN: We're pretty locked down, trying not to get sick and trying not to waste energy.

HERZ: Ben Ogden is another star on the U.S. team.

OGDEN: But that's OK because, like, we have six, seven of our best friends, like, that are inside the bubble.

HERZ: Not every team, though, can afford a setup like the Americans'. Cross-country skiers from nations with smaller budgets are still staying inside an Olympic Village in the mountains near their competition venue. And teams competing in other sports in the Olympic hub city of Milan are taking drastically different approaches.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED HOCKEY PLAYERS: (Singing) Tell me why. Ain't nothing but a heartache. Tell me why. Ain't nothing but a mistake.

HERZ: This is members of the Finnish women's hockey team singing karaoke at a restaurant in Milan just before the Olympics started. A few days later...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED NEWSCASTER: An update from Italy - the Canadian women's hockey team will not be facing off against Finland in a preliminary game today. The International Olympic Committee announced the game has been postponed until February 12, after cases of norovirus were identified within Team Finland.

HERZ: Anni Arkko covers sports for the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti.

ANNI ARKKO: It probably was a nice moment just between teammates, but it was such a big risk. Like, I just couldn't believe my eyes that they actually did that.

HERZ: Arkko wrote a scathing column about the norovirus outbreak, contrasting it with the extreme measures taken by Finland's cross-country skiers. At the last Olympics, Arkko says the team's star, Iivo Niskanen...

ARKKO: Was thanking his wife a lot because he was not seeing his friends and family, but also his wife was not seeing anybody so the family wouldn't get any infections and Iivo would be healthy.

HERZ: Niskanen has so far been spared from illness. He was healthy for Sunday's skiathlon race and placed 17th. For NPR News, I'm Nat Herz in Predazzo, Italy.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5702394

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HOW TO THRIVE AS YOU AGE | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Need a new path in midlife? There's a school for that and a quiz to kickstart it

By Allison Aubrey

Heard on Morning Edition

If you find yourself asking "what's next?" in your life, there's a boom industry of personal growth retreats and curricula to help navigate midlife transitions, big or small.

The first step requires some introspection: "Who am I now? Or who do I want to become?"

These are incredibly common questions, especially at key transitions in life, whether that's launching children and becoming an empty-nester, walking through a career disruption or navigating the loss of a partner through divorce or death.

"I think of midlife not as a crisis, but as a chrysalis. It's that middle stage between caterpillar and butterfly," says Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy and author of the The Midlife Manifesto. "You're letting go of some things and something else is being created at the same time."

Conley describes his organization as "a midlife wisdom school," and it's among the new crop of courses and workshops — including at universities and community colleges — that promise to help people navigate life's big shifts.

Take a quiz, discover an archetype

These courses fill a gap. Many people long for transformation — to try something new — in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, but unlike young adults graduating from college, there's no ceremony to celebrate the arrival to midlife or encourage a fresh start.

Making change requires work — and time. "You need practices and tools and a community to support you during this time," Conley says.

One tool developed by The Modern Elder Academy is a pathfinder quiz that identifies eight types of midlife paths. Think of them as your archetype.

Are you a seeker, craving adventure or reinvention? Or a lone wolf – fiercely independent, but also looking for connection. Perhaps you're an impact-maker: You want to make a difference in this world or help solve a problem, or perhaps a sage, with a desire to share your wisdom.

Betsy Benoit, who is in her early 60's and lives in Portland, Oregon, took the MEA quiz during a time of transition.

"What I discovered was, it was spot on," she says. The results revealed two parts of herself, coming together in midlife.

"It was shockingly accurate," she says. "It pegged me as following the path of the seeker," someone who is craving adventure, meaning and reinvention.

Benoit is also a lone wolf type. "I really embraced being alone," she says, especially amid the pandemic. Yet she also realized she was ready for deeper connections.

She took a six-week online course, called Navigating Transitions, through MEA, in 2021. Leading up to this time, she'd lost her job and gotten divorced after three decades of marriage. "My world just kind of exploded," she recalls.

"The course helped me plunge back into life and friendships," she says. And when the pandemic was over, she met up with other MEA alumni, both virtually and in person, finding a crew of fellow seekers who seemed ready to put the scars of the past behind them and embrace something new.

A booming field

Over the last five years, post-pandemic, there's been a boom in what Conley calls "transformational travel," which he says appeals to those in transition.

"People are choosing to use their travel, time and money to actually transform themselves," Conley says."And because people in midlife are often at the low point of life satisfaction, this is not a bad investment."

Conely speaks from behind the wheel of his car, as he shuttles between gathering spaces on the picturesque MEA campus. It is located on a ranch in the high plains of New Mexico outside Sante Fe, with stirring views of the Sandia, Ortiz and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges.

As the population ages and the number of college students declines, institutions of higher education are actively cultivating a crop of midlife and older students.

The share of the U.S. population over 65 is growing quickly, shifting the balance of the population toward retirees.

The Nexel Collaborative is a group of  institutions that have launched various course offerings. They include: Change Makers program at University of Colorado at Denver; The Midlife Academy at the University of Minnesota; the Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford University in California; and the Encore Transition Program at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

"For so long we've defaulted in retirement to the idea that 'graying is playing'," says Marc Freedman who has written several books on creating purpose and meaning in the second half of life. And, indeed, many empty-nesters and people with more free time turn to games including golf and pickleball. As important as play is, it's clear some people are looking for more.

Freedman is the founder of a non-profit organization that seeks to foster connections across generations, called Co-Generate. He also designed and led an inaugural group of midlife seekers through a program at Yale University, called the Experienced Leaders Initiative — which guides participants through a 6-month, midlife reset.

"I discovered in the process that this was much more about people's deeper aspiration," he says.

He points to the benefits of structured midlife transition programs.

"They're not only helping to provide guidance, but they're providing a deep sense of community and the opportunity for people to learn from each other, " he says. And it's also possible to take a do-it-yourself approach.

Longevity benefits?

One of the pay-offs of doing the work of midlife discovery, is that it can help lead people towards a path that brings a renewed sense of purpose, which is, in itself, one key to thriving in midlife.

When longevity researchers study all the factors that play a role in keeping people healthy and vital for longer, they find having a sense of purpose can be beneficial.

"A sense of purpose and life satisfaction seem to play a role in enhancing health longevity," says David Rehkopf, a social epidemiologist at Stanford University. Though purpose is likely not as important as key health behaviors such as not smoking, exercising and prioritizing physical activity, he points to research that shows a link between purpose and lifespan.

DIY options, too

When Laura Walker, a participant in the Yale initiative, started on her transition journey last year, she began by asking herself a question: "What can only I do?"

She aims to find a path that incorporates "my weird mix of gifts and scars and experience," she says. Walker is the past president of Bennington College and also a former public radio executive.

Walker says she was inspired by others in her group.

"By hearing about their struggles, their breakthroughs and seeing them ask for help and be vulnerable, I was inspired to follow suit," Walker says.

For those beginning their journey, "my advice is to design a learning and discovery project guided by freedom, joy, curiosity, and possibility," Walker says. She offers three tips to get started:

- Feed your curiosity: Walker's advice is to read widely. She points to practical resources, such as the Stanford Center on Longevity's material on reimagining your "Map of Life" Check out podcasts and books, including fiction with themes of transition and reinvention. "Let yourself be surprised by what captures your attention," she says.

- Find your fellow seekers: Find others who are at your stage of life – or those a bit further down the path. You could look to former colleagues, neighbors, friends, or friends of friends. Walker says check out resources such as the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, faith-based communities, and online communities such as the women-led group Lustre, whose tagline is "Not old. Not done. Still cool."

- Take a three-dimensional approach: The Yale initiative uses the framework of "Looking Inward, Looking Outward, Moving Forward." Put simply, we need to turn inward to understand ourselves, and also look outward to explore and connect. Freedman says the "outward pillar" was organized around the question: "What is the need that needs you most?" Another way to think of it: Where do your priorities meet the needs of the world?

It's similar to the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which is finding the nexus between what you love, what you're good at, and what the world needs.

Longer lives, more opportunities

As you face transition, it's helpful to see the new opportunities that were not available to previous generations.

"Understand that you are at the forefront of a generation that is living longer and that you will be part of a redefining and rethinking how we live our whole lives," Walker says.

Freedman says he'd love to see society adopt policies to encourage midlife learning. For instance, he thinks far more people could benefit from a midlife "gap year" – just like some college kids take – than can currently swing a year off from work and family financial obligations. One idea is to give people the opportunity to take a year of Social Security benefits early, in order to finance such a break, and then delay taking benefits after a later retirement.

"I don't think that there's any point in time in midlife or even beyond that you actually stop seeking," says Betsy Benoit, describing a series of curves and switchbacks in her own journey.

Through MEA she has found a group of like-minded friends who now spend their vacations together. They gather for group meals, but often pursue their own activities during the day – a hike, a museum visit or a painting class. "It's given me a community," she says.

Their support, combined with all the self-knowledge she's gained has been invaluable.

"It lights the path around me," she says.

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

There are a growing number of programs reframing a midlife crisis as a midlife transition. NPR's Allison Aubrey visited a midlife wisdom school in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: The first step to a transition is a little introspection. Who am I now, or who do I want to become? Chip Conley is founder of the Modern Elder Academy. He says these are incredibly common questions as we age.

CHIP CONLEY: I think of midlife as not a crisis, but a chrysalis. It's that middle stage between caterpillar and butterfly. You're evaporating, you're letting go of some things and something else is being created at the same time.

AUBREY: Many people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond are ready for transformation.

CONLEY: But it also needs practices and tools and a community to support you during that time.

AUBREY: An easy way to get started with midlife exploration is to take an online quiz that was created at Conley's Modern Elder Academy. It's free, available to anyone and helps you identify your midlife archetype. Are you a seeker, craving adventure, a lone wolf who is fiercely independent but also looking for connection, or maybe an impact maker - you know you aim to make a difference. Betsy Benoit (ph), who lives in Portland, Oregon, learned she was a blend of types.

BETSY BENOIT: What I discovered was it was spot on. It pegged me as two different things. It pegged me, number one, was following the path of the seeker.

AUBREY: The seeker craves adventure, meaning or reinvention. They're hungry for what's next and not afraid to go look for it. The quiz showed Benoit is also part lone wolf.

BENOIT: I had really kind of embraced being alone, especially after COVID. You've learned to walk alone, but you're also ready for deeper connections.

AUBREY: Benoit discovered this during a tumultuous time in her life. She was in her mid-50s.

BENOIT: I lost my job. My husband and I decided to get a divorce after 31 years of marriage. And my world just kind of exploded.

AUBREY: She signed up for an online course at the Modern Elder Academy in 2021 and met lots of people in her group with similar stories and scars. Like her, many were also curious, lifelong learners, eager to embrace new possibilities. Chip Conley says his dream was to build a place to bring midlife seekers together. And he says his program is now part of the growing trend of transformational travel.

CONLEY: People choosing to use their travel time and money to actually transform themselves. And because people in midlife are often at the low point of life satisfaction, this is not a bad investment.

AUBREY: Midlife journeys can be a bumpy ride, says Marc Freedman, who has written several books on creating purpose and meaning in the second half of life. He's the founder of a nonprofit organization called CoGenerate.

MARC FREEDMAN: For so long, we've defaulted to a kind of graying is playing, you know, retirement as a time to play golf and pickleball.

AUBREY: Which can be great fun. But Freedman says leading a program at Yale called the Experienced Leaders Initiative, which brings older people together for a six-month reset, was eye opening.

FREEDMAN: I discovered in the process that this was much more about people's deeper aspiration.

AUBREY: He says midlife transition programs are popping up all over the country, from big universities to community colleges.

FREEDMAN: They're not only helping to provide guidance, but they're providing a deep sense of community.

AUBREY: Freedman says he thinks society would benefit if every grown-up could take a gap year.

FREEDMAN: We need a period of time that will allow us to shed our previous roles and assumptions about ourselves and to explore and try on new ones. So I think it's really important.

AUBREY: Betsy Benoit says finding a group of like-minded seekers has been helpful.

BENOIT: I don't think that there's any point in time in midlife or even beyond that you actually stop seeking.

AUBREY: Now she feels like she has a path forward.

Allison Aubrey, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF DANGER MOUSE & DANIELE LUPPI'S "ROMAN BLUE")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5611404

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HEALTH | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 4:52 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

New study finds many tuberculosis diagnoses may be incorrect

By Gabrielle Emanuel

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest infectious disease. One-point-two million people died of TB in 2024, that according to official numbers, plus 10 million get sick from it each year. But as NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports, a new study in Nature Medicine is casting doubt on those numbers.

GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: Nicolas Menzies has spent years poring over TB data, and he's zeroed in on an issue.

NICOLAS MENZIES: Problem is that the tests we have for TB disease are, frankly, not very good.

EMANUEL: Menzies coauthored the new study and is a professor at Harvard School of Public Health. He says well over a third of TB diagnoses in low- and middle-income countries don't actually use TB tests. They're made by a doctor or nurse looking at a patient's symptoms.

MENZIES: Prolonged cough, weight loss, night sweats, things like this.

EMANUEL: Between imperfect tests and human error, Menzies says there are a lot of misdiagnoses. He says, often, the TB diagnosis is missed. And even more often, people are incorrectly told they have TB.

MENZIES: Amongst all of those individuals who are diagnosed and treated for TB every year, perhaps a quarter of them, and maybe even higher, might not have TB disease.

EMANUEL: That may mean they have another condition, perhaps as serious as lung cancer or pneumonia. This has real consequences - the cost of the grueling, monthslong TB treatment, plus the side effects. And worst of all, Menzies found in another study done in Brazil that patients who are incorrectly diagnosed...

MENZIES: Actually have much worse outcomes, much higher mortality rates than those people who were being treated for TB.

EMANUEL: They're chances of dying were almost double, likely because whatever condition they actually had needed prompt treatment. Marcel Behr founded the McGill International TB Centre. He praises the rigor of the study.

MARCEL BEHR: The issue about whether we have false positives, I think, has been understudied.

EMANUEL: He sees this paper as a call to improve TB tests and also to get health workers to use the tests that do exist and are better than they once were.

BEHR: It takes a little while for doctors to adapt. They say, I'm used to treating this as TB - we have a lot of TB here, so I'm going to continue to treat it as TB.

EMANUEL: But the study also has its critics. Lucica Ditiu heads the Stop TB Partnership.

LUCICA DITIU: If the purpose of the paper is to say that we need better tools, better diagnostics, that I think is spot on. If it is to say that, oh, my goodness, clinical diagnosis is so bad, then this is very damaging.

EMANUEL: She says clinical diagnosis is key, especially in remote areas. She says her focus is on access to tests and to doctors.

DITIU: Our biggest problem in TB is we have a huge number of people that are not diagnosed at all in any shape or form, millions.

EMANUEL: Shifting the focus away from these patients to all the incorrect diagnoses could backfire, she says. She worries doctors will be reluctant to diagnose in case they might make a mistake, and global health funders could grow hesitant to fund treatment. Menzies doesn't want to see that happen. But he says it's critical to get a clear picture of true TB rates.

Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR News.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5704273

HEALTH | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2026 • 7:06 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

March for Life attendees may have been exposed to measles, DC Health warns

By Kristin Wright

Health officials are warning that confirmed cases of measles may have spread at this year's National March for Life rally and concert in Washington, D.C.

Thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators converged upon the National Mall and other locations in the nation's capital for the annual event at the end of January. The DC Department of Health says it's working to identify people who are at risk.

"DC Health was notified of multiple confirmed cases of measles whose carriers visited multiple locations in the District while contagious," the agency said in a press release on Sunday. "DC Health is informing people who were at these locations that they may have been exposed."

Potential exposure sites from Jan. 21 to Feb. 2 include major transit such as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Union Station, an Amtrak Northeast Regional train and D.C.'s subway system, according to DC Health. The agency says infected individuals also visited the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and Catholic University.

Children's National Hospital issued a public health notice concerning potential exposure in its Emergency Department. The notice said a Virginia resident, who was confirmed to have measles, visited the department while contagious on Feb. 2.

The U.S. is dealing with its biggest measles outbreak in decades. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 733 confirmed measles cases in 20 states so far this year alone, as of last Thursday. According to the CDC, 95% of the cases involved people who are unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown.

South Carolina's outbreak started in October 2025 and quickly surpassed an outbreak in Texas. Cases in South Carolina continue to grow. The Department of Public Health reported 44 new confirmed cases on Friday, bringing the total in the state to 920. Earlier last week, officials in the state reported that the rate of new confirmed cases had slowed. They warn that people may have been exposed in this latest round of new cases in several locations, including a Target store in Taylors, S.C., and the Social Security Administration in Spartanburg, S.C. The outbreak is centered in Spartanburg.

In an interview on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz urged Americans to receive measles vaccinations. In recent months, the Trump administration has rolled back the number of diseases it recommends immunizations for, but federal guidance for measles immunizations has not changed.

Global health officials are concerned about the spreading of measles in the United States. The World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization has invited the U.S. to meet in April to review the country's measles elimination status. The U.S. is in danger of losing its status as a country that has eradicated the disease. The Trump administration said it formally completed its withdrawal from the WHO last month.

D.C.'s Health Department is advising anyone possibly exposed who is not fully vaccinated or has a compromised immune system to contact the health department or health care provider.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5705972

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SCIENCE | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

An ape, a tea party — and the ability to imagine

By Nathan Rott

The ability to imagine things that aren't real — to make believe — is a fundamental part of being human.

What starts as imaginary friends and playing pretend develops into an ability, over time, to step out of reality. To daydream and plan a summer vacation. To invent a new recipe. To put oneself in another's shoes.

It's long been thought that this ability to imagine is unique to humans.

But now, a series of sterile tea parties with a remarkable ape named Kanzi suggests some of our closest ancestors may have the ability too.

"It tells us, for one, that the roots of our imagination were present in the common ancestors that we share with [great apes], which lived 6 to 9 million years ago," says Chris Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "It also tells us there's much more interesting mental life out there in the world than we previously thought."

Krupenye is co-author of a new study, published in the journal Science, that aimed to test — for the first time in a controlled experiment — whether apes have the cognitive ability to play pretend.

The subject of the study was Kanzi, arguably the world's most famous bonobo — an endangered species of ape that's a smaller cousin to chimpanzees. Raised in captivity, Kanzi had an amazing ability to communicate with humans using symbols and a broad understanding of the English language. (He died last year at the age of 44.)

When asked questions, Kanzi could answer.

"And one of the ways he could respond is through pointing — and that's not a common behavior for apes," Krupenye says. "They don't typically point in the way that humans do."

That ability allowed Krupenye and his co-author, Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, to ask Kanzi questions like they would a human child.

Youtube Video

So to test whether he had the cognitive ability to imagine, they modeled their experiments off a series of developmental psychology studies that were conducted with children in the 1980s. Those studies used a pretend tea party to see if kids could track an imaginary object, like a cup of pretend juice.

"With Kanzi, we were able to do more or less the exact same thing," Krupenye says.

At Kanzi's home, the Ape Initiative in Des Moines, Iowa, Krupenye and Bastos set up a series of recorded tea parties.

In one of the experiments, the researchers would set two empty, transparent cups on a table between them. They'd then take an empty, transparent pitcher and pretend to pour juice in both. They'd then pick up one cup and pretend to pour the nonexistent juice back in the pitcher.

"At that point, there's only one bit of imaginary juice left in the remaining cup," Krupenye says. "So [we'd] push the table forward and ask Kanzi: Where's the juice?"

Roughly 70% of the time, Kanzi pointed at the correct place.

For decades, scientists have observed apes doing things in the wild and in captivity that look like pretend play. Young female chimpanzees have been seen carrying around a stick or log and treating it like a baby or doll. But it's difficult to know if that's what they're pretending.

The new study shows that apes — or at least one, in Kanzi — could do more than just play pretend, says Kristin Andrews, a professor of philosophy at City University of New York, who was not involved in the study.

"[Kanzi's showing] pretense and imagination, which takes it to another step," says Andrews, who focuses on animal cognition and minds.

Pretense and imagination is the ability to hold in mind a version of the world that isn't real, while pretending that it is. Andrews says it's a valuable cognitive skill, in part because it allows an individual to play out different scenarios in their head before making a decision.

"It helps them make choices," she says.

Whether bonobos and chimpanzees are actively doing this in the wild is difficult to say, she says, "But what I think the study with Kanzi tells us is that great apes have the capacity to hold these alternative representations" in their mind. And it's possible, she adds, other animals can too.

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The ability to imagine things that aren't real is a fundamental part of the human experience. Scientists have long suspected some animals also have the ability to imagine and play pretend. NPR's Nate Rott reports on a new study that shows at least one can.

NATE ROTT, BYLINE: It's important to note before we really get into it that the subject of this new study is a pretty remarkable ape. This isn't his first time on NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

ADAM COLE, BYLINE: Kanzi is a bonobo, a smaller cousin of the chimpanzee. He doesn't use hand...

JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Kanzi - he's the world's most famous bonobo and a bit of a show off. But Kanzi's little sister...

ROTT: Kanzi was raised in captivity and lived that way the rest of his life. He died last year at the age of 44. But what got him full-page pictures in Time magazine and National Geographic, with an accompanying video segment for the latter, was his ability to communicate with humans using symbols and his comprehension of the English language.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED CARETAKER: Look right at the camera. Good boy. You're doing so good. Just a couple more.

JOEL SARTORE: I realize as they talk to Kanzi, he understands almost everything they say.

ROTT: A study published in 1993 found that when Kanzi was 8 years old, he could outperform a 2-year-old human when given more than 600 spoken instructions.

CHRIS KRUPENYE: We don't know exactly what he grasped, but you could ask him a question and often he would respond in the way that he should.

ROTT: Chris Krupenye is a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a coauthor of the new study. He worked with Kanzi before he died.

KRUPENYE: And one of the ways he could respond is through pointing, and that's not a common behavior for apes. They don't typically point in the way that humans do.

ROTT: Krupenye says this ability to point allowed researchers to more or less ask Kanzi questions like they would a human child. And the question Krupenye wanted to answer is whether animals also have the cognitive ability to make believe.

KRUPENYE: Kids will have tea parties with their dolls. They might have an imaginary friend. They might play house with their friends. So they're showing these roots of imagination within the first years.

ROTT: And there's been observations of apes in the wild and in captivity doing similar things.

KRUPENYE: Young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying around sticks or logs in ways that look like they're treating them like a doll or a baby.

ROTT: What's less clear is whether they're actually playing pretend, which is why Krupenye set up a series of controlled experiments with Kanzi to test, for the first time, whether one of humanity's closest relatives can track an imaginary object by running an experiment very similar to what psychologists have done to test imagination in kids.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED RESEARCHER: All right. So let's play a game. Let's find the juice, OK?

(SOUNDBITE OF CUP CLATTERING)

ROTT: Think of it like a really sterile tea party - Kanzi on one side of the table, a human partner, a researcher, on the other.

KRUPENYE: And on the table, the partner would put two empty, transparent cups.

ROTT: Before pretending to pour juice into them from an empty, transparent pitcher. They'd then pretend to pour the imaginary juice from one of the cups back into the pitcher.

KRUPENYE: And at that point, there's only one bit of imaginary juice left in the remaining cup, and the partner pushed the table forward and asked Kanzi, where's the juice?

ROTT: And roughly 70% of the time, Kanzi would pick the right one. Now, Krupenye says this is an experiment of one individual and a pretty unique one at that. So more research is needed to make a broad generalization about whether all bonobos or other apes can do this. But the fundamental question of whether only humans can imagine...

KRUPENYE: For that question, all you need is one clear demonstration to say, no, it's not unique to humans.

ROTT: And he thinks this new study published in the journal Science is that. Nate Rott, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707560

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SCIENCE | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 4:53 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

US scientists adapt after the Trump administration's funding blows

By Kate Grumke

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

The Trump administration's cuts to federal research funding have left many scientists in a precarious place. Harvest Public Media's Kate Grumke asked researchers in the central U.S. how they're adapting.

KATE GRUMKE, BYLINE: A pontoon boat loaded with scientific equipment motors across a small lake in central Missouri. University of Missouri associate professor Rebecca North is having her perfect day.

REBECCA NORTH: I love being out in the field, and we don't get to go out as much as we like.

GRUMKE: It was a warm day for December, but still cold enough that the boat has to break through ice to get to a test site.

(SOUNDBITE OF ICE BREAKING)

GRUMKE: North and her team are here to get an overall idea of the health of this private lake. But today, something is different. For the first time, she's being paid by a homeowners' association. North lost federal funding for multiple projects last year, so now she's looking for new ways to cover the cost of research.

NORTH: For the first time in my scientific career, I have a GoFundMe or a donation button on my website.

GRUMKE: She's not alone. Scientific efforts have changed dramatically under Trump's second administration, according to interviews with more than a dozen scientists in eight states. They say Trump slashed the federal scientific workforce, canceled thousands of federal grants and clamped down on specific subjects like climate change and environmental justice.

BONNIE KEELER: It's been really, really tough.

GRUMKE: Bonnie Keeler is director of the Water Resources Center at the University of Minnesota. In the last year, she had three major federal grants terminated, totaling more than $14 million in lost funding. She says the abrupt termination of these projects wasted taxpayer money.

KEELER: It's a terrible way to end a research project, given no advanced warning or opportunity to meaningfully wind down the work.

GRUMKE: But in some cases, that work will go on. Outside organizations are trying to fill gaps, including Climate Central, a U.S.-based nonprofit. Kristina Dahl is the group's vice president for science.

KRISTINA DAHL: So many parts of the climate and weather enterprise in the federal government have been decimated.

GRUMKE: In the last year, Climate Central started doing multiple things the federal government used to do, like publishing a list of billion-dollar disasters and holding monthly climate briefings. But Dahl says organizations like hers won't come close to filling the void.

DAHL: Even collectively, all of the U.S.-based climate and environmental nonprofits don't have the same capacity as the federal government.

GRUMKE: Doug Kluck is one of the many former federal scientists who left their positions in the last year. After 33 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he retired early because he was afraid of being fired and losing health benefits for his special-needs son. He says the last year has been a little like the Dark Ages, but he doesn't think it will last.

DOUG KLUCK: You can downplay climate change all you want. You can call it something else. It doesn't really matter, and we're all going to be affected by it, whether we like it or not. And I'm not saying this is a belief system. This is a pure science and physics issue.

GRUMKE: Trump spokesman Kush Desai told Harvest Public Media in a statement that the American government is the largest funder of scientific research, and the administration is, quote, "committed to cutting taxpayer funding of left-wing pet projects."

For NPR News, I'm Kate Grumke.

(SOUNDBITE OF ADAM BEN EZRA'S "TAMING THE BULL")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5698287

Climate

- The quest to warn everyone on Earth about deadly weather: 2026 Feb 10

CLIMATE | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

The quest to warn everyone on Earth about deadly weather

By Rebecca Hersher, Ryan Kellman, Tat Odoum

Heard on Morning Edition

In November 2025, a massive storm rolled across the lower Mekong River delta, dumping multiple inches of rain onto the wide, flat river plain that covers much of Cambodia.

The river rose and rose. The force of the water churned up mud from the river bottom. The muddy water flowed downstream and rushed into the many farming and fishing towns that line the Mekong's banks.

Forty-six-year-old Chhum Chhin experienced the flood firsthand. "The water was everywhere," she explained, standing in the shade of her home, which is elevated above potential floodwaters on 12-foot-tall concrete pillars in the central Cambodian village of Roka Thom.

Chhum has lived along the Mekong her whole life. Last year, she says, the water was higher than she had ever seen it. It washed away crops and left a thick layer of mud on everything in its path: vehicles, buildings and fields.

But the damage from the flood could have been much worse. When the water arrived, Chhum and all her neighbors were gone, along with their cows and chickens. There were no fatalities in her community. And when the water receded, residents went back to normal life almost immediately.

"The things we do here during a flood, they save lives," says Vy Sievmeng, the officer in charge for the disaster management committee in Cambodia's Tbong Khmum province, which is one of the most flood-prone areas in the country. "In the past, a lot of people died and a lot of livestock drowned when there were big floods," he says, but that no longer happens.

Cambodia's nascent success makes the country an outlier among its peers. Only about half the world's least developed and small island nations have functioning warning systems, according to a 2025 United Nations report, and the mortality rate from disasters is six times higher in countries without robust weather-warning systems.

As climate change causes more extreme and dangerous weather, from deadly heat waves to record-breaking hurricanes and flash floods, a growing consortium of U.N. agencies, governments and philanthropic groups is racing to make weather warnings available to everyone on the planet. And they are relying on local knowledge to make the warnings effective.

Cambodia's progress in protecting its residents offers lessons for other parts of the world about the profound lifesaving power of simple, low-tech weather warnings, particularly in places where there is already strong local commitment to protecting residents. It also highlights the many challenges of saving lives and livelihoods as the Earth heats up.

A deadly problem

Cambodia's annual floods carry nutrient-rich mud into the rice and vegetable fields that are the backbone of the country's food supply and economy. Seeds planted in that mud can grow incredibly quickly.

But the floods can also be deadly, routinely taking hundreds of lives. And flood risk is only growing in the region, as climate change makes Southeast Asian monsoons more extreme and less predictable. Periods of unseasonable drought are followed by torrential rain that leads to massive floods.

Just last year, widespread floods killed hundreds of people in five countries across Southeast Asia. In 2022, floods killed more than 1,000 people in Pakistan and displaced millions more.

One reason for the high death tolls in such disasters is a lack of basic weather-warning systems.

"Early warnings are not an abstraction," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a speech last year. "They give farmers the power to protect their crops and livestock, enable families to evacuate safely and protect entire communities from devastation."

The residents of wealthy countries generally get warnings before extreme weather arrives. In the United States, the National Weather Service issues official warnings that trigger alerts on radio, television and cellphones.

As a result, the U.S. has some of the lowest per capita fatality rates from weather in the world, despite widespread exposure to heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme events, according to an annual climate risk analysis sponsored by the German government.

"We take that for granted in some places," says Jason Watkins of the World Meteorological Organization, which is part of the United Nations.

The quest to warn everyone, everywhere

In 2022, the U.N. set out to fix the global weather-warning problem. Guterres set a goal of extending severe-weather warnings to every person on Earth by 2027, with a $3.1 billion price tag.

The agency is not on track to meet that goal, and in 2024 Guterres noted that the least developed countries were still "lagging behind."

But money has been flowing nonetheless. So far, the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund has spent more than $2 billion on early warning systems around the world, and other major contributors — the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank — together have spent about $2.5 billion on such projects.

The United States has historically been a major contributor to the Green Climate Fund, but in January, the Trump administration said the U.S. would no longer participate in the fund. That will deprive the fund of billions of dollars in contributions but won't otherwise affect its operations, according to the United Nations. The U.S. has also officially pulled out of the landmark Paris climate agreement.

A portion of the international funding that has already been collected for early warning systems went to Cambodia, which is among the most flood-prone countries in the world. Between 2023 and 2025, U.N.-affiliated agencies spent $5.5 million upgrading the country's flood forecasts and warnings, and an additional $7.8 million will be spent in the coming years.

Representatives from Cambodia's disaster management, meteorology and hydrology agencies declined to be interviewed, saying they were too busy managing crises related to the ongoing conflict between Cambodia and neighboring Thailand. Still, at a 2021 event launching the U.N.'s work in Cambodia, Cambodian officials welcomed international investment in the country's flood-warning systems. "Quick action is needed to manage flood risks, so international cooperation is very important," said Soim Monichoth, who helps lead Cambodia's Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology, according to a World Meteorological Organization account of the event.

"There certainly has been progress over the last few years," says the World Meteorological Organization's Watkins, who leads the United Nations' work in Cambodia. Residents who used to get little or no warning about floods now get flood forecasts up to five days in advance, thanks to upgrades to weather-forecasting computer models and the satellite data that they rely on, he explains.

And with U.N. support, local leaders in three communities reworked evacuation plans to better protect the most vulnerable people, including those who live in low-lying areas and those who are elderly or have small children. That effort is supposed to expand across the country in the next three to four years.

The U.N.-backed program also tapped into long-held community knowledge. The program funded local meetings with residents where community members talked about which areas were most flood-prone, since longtime residents often have the most granular and useful information about how water moves across the landscape.

"We know which areas have the most severe flooding," says Chan Chomroeun of the Pursat Provincial Committee for Disaster Management in central Cambodia, which oversees an extremely flood-prone pilot area near the country's massive Tonle Sap lake.

Watkins says that local expertise is crucial. "People are very much in tune with the land — they rely on the land for their livelihoods," explains Watkins. He sees the U.N. funding as a support system for the work that local people are already doing, as opposed to a top-down solution.

The power of a voicemail

One of the areas that received U.N. support is the fishing village of Prek Touch, on the banks of the Mekong River north of the capital. Long wooden boats line the water. Women clean the day's catch as men repair their nets.

Floods are a normal part of life in the late summer and fall months, when monsoon rains cause the river to rise repeatedly. The houses are on tall stilts, and usually the living quarters stay dry even when the water is at its highest. Most families have lived there for multiple generations.

For decades, floods killed people in the village each year. Children were particularly likely to drown, says 49-year-old Kly Phally, who has four children. "We tried to keep them from playing near the water during the floods," she explains. But residents didn't always know when the water would rise or how high it would get. And they had nowhere to evacuate to, so most families just stayed in their homes and waited out the water.

That began to change about 10 years ago. Between 2013 and 2015, the local government opened an evacuation shelter — a compound with space for livestock as well as people — on higher ground nearby, and it launched a new weather-warning system with the help of the European nonprofit People in Need. Residents with cellphones could sign up for weather alerts, which came as voicemails and text messages on the popular communication app Telegram.

But not everyone has a cellphone. As part of the U.N. initiative in the last few years, local leaders were encouraged to find ways to warn vulnerable residents — including elderly people, those with small children and others who might need help evacuating — when a flood is coming.

The solution they came up with was simple. When a flood is coming, local officials in Prek Touch and another village that received U.N. support hook up their phones to their car speakers and drive through town broadcasting the warnings at high volume, so people who don't have cellphones can hear the details of the warning firsthand.

The alerts now end with this request: "If you receive this message, please inform your friends, colleagues, all family members and those in need in your community."

A life-or-death test

Years of efforts were put to the test in 2025, when some of the worst flooding in memory swept across Cambodia.

As torrential rains fell across the region in early November, a cellphone alert went out, warning residents in Prek Touch that a flood would occur the next day, and telling them to evacuate.

"They used the loudspeaker to tell everyone," says 82-year-old Ker Sman, who has lived in the village his whole life and says he is its oldest resident. Although he has a cellphone, he says he did not receive a flood alert on it.

After he heard the loudspeaker warning, Ker was unsure what to do. He put his belongings in his home and considered sheltering there, as he had in the past, although he was worried that his home might not survive if the water rose too high. When he saw that everyone else was evacuating, he decided to do the same. A neighbor gave him and his wife a ride to the shelter.

Every household did the same, residents say. "When we heard the alert, we put everything in the house, locked the door and then took the children and the cattle to the shelter," remembers Kly, the mother of four. "We were safe there."

It ended up being the right decision. "The water flowed very fast," remembers Kly, pointing across the road at the 20-foot concrete pillars holding up her neighbor's home. About 15 feet off the ground is a smudged line of mud: the high-water mark. No one would stand a chance in such a torrent.

The entire village camped out at the local evacuation shelter for a few days, along with their cows and chickens. After the water receded, life went back to normal within a couple of weeks, Kly says. There was one fatality, according to residents: a young child whose family lives on a boat and so wasn't able to evacuate.

Saving lives, losing livelihoods

Cambodia's successes are still relatively small scale, says the World Meteorological Organization's Watkins. In late 2025, Cambodia's government officially endorsed U.N. efforts to expand weather warnings across the country and give residents even more time to evacuate before floodwaters reach them.

But saving lives is just the first step, residents say. In interviews with nearly two dozen people in two of the most flood-prone provinces in the country, the same theme emerged over and over: Cambodians are surviving floods only to return to ruined fields.

"The water washed away all my seeds," said 58-year-old Chhay Sophal, as he raked sticks off his empty plot in December. He doesn't own very much land. Losing one harvest means he has nothing to sell for months, he explained. More than half of Cambodians are directly involved in agriculture, according to a survey conducted last year by the United Nations.

It's a reminder that floods can be economically devastating, even if they are no longer deadly.

"What would help? We need levees, dams and retention ponds, so we can control the water better," says Vy, the disaster official in Tbong Khmum province, which includes the area where Chhay farms. "If we could collect the water during floods, we could use it to irrigate the fields when the weather is dry."

Better weather forecasts could also help. In many wealthy countries, the government provides seasonal weather forecasts, which can help farmers make decisions about which seeds to plant and where and when to plant them. Such forecasts require sophisticated data analysis.

"In the future, we'd like to develop some tools that can provide seasonal information," says Watkins. "This is the reality for many people."

Mom Sophon and May Titthara contributed to this story.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Millions of people across this country have heard and seen weather warnings in the last few weeks about excessive cold or snow or windstorms, or floods. In many parts of the world, people have no warnings, with often deadly results. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports on an effort to change that.

REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: The Cambodian village of Prek Touch is right next to the Mekong River. It's a fishing community, and floods are a part of life here. But like a lot of places, the floods here are getting worse because of climate change. Kly Phally and Sen Srod are fish sellers in town.

Did this neighborhood flood?

(CROSSTALK)

TAT ODOUM: Three times, yeah. The water come to destroy the house.

HERSHER: The other voice you hear there is Tat Odoum. He's a Cambodian journalist who worked with me on this story. The women told us that the water nearly destroyed their homes three times in the fall of 2025 alone. The last flood, in November, was the worst one, which was strange because usually the strongest monsoon rains come earlier than that. It's another example of climate change. As the Earth heats up, the monsoon rains get less predictable. Anyway, they say during the November flood, the water was very powerful and very high.

People are gesturing like it was up to their necks.

ODOUM: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).

ODOUM: The number.

HERSHER: Yeah.

ODOUM: And the...

HERSHER: Oh, the line above it?

ODOUM: Line, yeah, yeah.

HERSHER: That's this here?

ODOUM: Yeah. Yeah.

HERSHER: Wow.

The water line is about 10 feet off the ground. Stuff was floating away, they say, fishing nets, buckets, children's toys.

So this was a really bad year?

ODOUM: Yeah, that is a bad one.

HERSHER: OK.

Floods like these can be deadly. Just last year, floods killed hundreds of people in five countries across Southeast Asia. One reason is that a lot of countries don't warn people about severe weather. That includes about half of the world's least developed and small island nations, according to a 2025 United Nations report. A growing consortium of U.N. agencies, governments and philanthropic groups are trying to fix that problem. Since 2022, the U.N., the World Bank, and other contributors have spent more than $4 billion on weather warning systems. Here's U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres speaking last year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Disaster-related mortality is at least six times lower in countries with good early warning systems in place.

HERSHER: The goal is to protect everyone on Earth by 2027, although the U.N. acknowledges it will likely not meet that goal. Still, some places are seeing the benefits, including Cambodia, which the U.N. has touted as a success story. Vy Sievmeng is a disaster official in Cambodia's Tbong Khmum province, one of the most flood-prone parts of the country.

VY SIEVMENG: (Non-English language spoken).

HERSHER: "In the past, a lot of people died and a lot of livestock drowned when there were big floods," he says. But not anymore, because they monitor the level of the river and warn people when floods are coming, which is what happened in the village of Prek Touch. A day before the November flood, cellphones in town started getting voicemails that sounded like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).

HERSHER: "There will be minor flooding that may affect your area in Tbong Khmum province," the warning says, before giving directions about how to evacuate. Kly Phally, the fish seller, immediately packed up her family's belongings, including their chickens.

KLY PHALLY: (Non-English language spoken).

HERSHER: "When we heard the announcement, we took our children to the safe house," she explains. That's the government-run evacuation site up the road. And you didn't need a cellphone to get the warning. The village chief hooked his phone up to a car speaker and drove through town broadcasting the message on repeat. That's how 82-year-old Ker Sman and his wife found out.

KER SMAN: (Non-English language spoken).

HERSHER: "They announced it via loudspeaker," he says. And then a neighbor gave the elderly couple a ride. When the floodwaters receded, everyone returned to their homes. By the time we visited, about a month after the flood, life was back to normal. It was a hot afternoon. Kids were doing backflips off the fishing boats into the river.

(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)

HERSHER: What happened here is an example of the profound, life-saving power of simple, low-tech weather warnings. Vy Sievmeng, the Cambodian disaster official, says international funds have reinforced what the local government and residents were already doing.

SIEVMENG: (Non-English language spoken).

HERSHER: "The things we do here during a flood, they save lives," he says. It's not perfect. The water destroys buildings and crops. It's still economically devastating, but it's less deadly than it used to be. Rebecca Hersher, NPR News.

INSKEEP: That story was field produced by Ryan Kellman and Mom Sophon.

(SOUNDBITE OF TITLE FIGHT SONG, "SAFE IN YOUR SKIN")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5544181

Education

We've been to school. We know how education works. Right? In fact, many aspects of learning — in homes, at schools, at work and elsewhere — are evolving rapidly, along with our understanding of learning. Join us as we explore how learning happens.

Race

- A daughter reexamines her own family story in 'The Mixed Marriage Project': 2026 Feb 10

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 1:39 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

A daughter reexamines her own family story in 'The Mixed Marriage Project'

By Tonya Mosley

Heard on Fresh Air

Almost a decade after her father's death, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts still had 25 boxes of his research that she had yet to sort through. When she moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, she brought the boxes — and finally opened them.

Roberts' father, Robert Roberts, was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The boxes contained transcripts of nearly 500 interviews he had conducted with interracial couples across the city, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, all the way to couples who are married in the 1960s.

"They were absolutely fascinating," Roberts says of the transcripts. "I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the Color Line, the Black Belt."

Initially, Roberts saw the project as a chance to finish her father's work, but as she examined the documents, she learned more about her own family — including the fact that her mother, Iris, a Black Jamaican immigrant, had assisted in her husband's research.

"When I got to the 1950s interviews, I discovered that my mother was conducting all the interviews of the wives, while my father conducted the interviews for the husbands," Roberts says. "Finding out that my mother was involved ... created curiosity I had about my family, about their marriage, and then I began to think about how it related to me and my identity as a Black girl with a white father."

In her new book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, Roberts dives into her parents' research and her surprise at learning that she was included as participant number 224 in the files. She also shares her own thoughts on interracial relationships.

"My father thought that interracial intimacy was the instrument to end racism, and I think it's really flipped the other way," she says. "We end racism when we will see the possibility of truly being able to love each other as equal human beings."

Interview highlights

On white European immigrant women marrying Black men in the early 20th century

These were immigrant women coming from Europe who had no familiarity at all with the racial caste system in Chicago. … So when they marry Black men, in fact, they thought that marrying an American citizen would help them assimilate into American culture. So they had no idea … that if they married a Black man, it would do the opposite to them. They would be lower in their status than they were as white immigrants. And so many of them would say, "I found out that I had to live in a colored neighborhood. I had to leave my white neighbors. I had left my family in order to marry this Black man and move into the Black Belt. I now couldn't even tell my employer my address, because if they found out my address, they'd know I must be living with a Black man." Why else would a white woman be living in the Black Belt?

They were afraid they would lose their jobs, and many reported that they were fired as a result of their employer finding out that they were married to a Black man. They were met with stares when they got on the streetcar. Many said that if they were going on a streetcar in Chicago, they would go on separately and pretend they didn't know each other so that no one would know that they were married.

On the difference between her father's and mother's notes in the project

My father, much to my horror, was very anthropological in terms of the physical traits of the people he interviewed. He wrote about the "Negroid traits" and whether the child had any trace of "Negroid blood" and that sort of thing. Again, remembering he was doing this in the 1930s.

My mother was much more interested in the personality traits of the people she interviewed and what their furniture looked like and her own emotions. And there's just so many delightful things. The way in which she interacts with the children when she's interviewing the wives — there's a lot more attention to what the children are doing. I can't remember a single interview where my father really describes the children's behavior. He describes their physical appearance, but my mother would describe their behavior and their interaction with the mother. All of that is part of the interview and her notes, and she writes it almost like a screenplay. It's really, really wonderful to read.

On the fetishization of interracial intimacy and biracial children

There was this visceral feeling I felt whenever a Black man, a Black husband, would talk about his preference for being with white women. These ideas that interracial intimacy has an extra excitement to it. It has an extra titillation to it — that kind of idea came up in many of the interviews — and I just have a very visceral revulsion at that kind idea, a sort of a fetishization of interracial intimacy and also of biracial children. The idea that whitening children makes them more attractive or makes them more intelligent or more appealing, more lovable. And whenever that came up, I just, sometimes I had to just throw the interview down because I couldn't stand that kind of thinking.

On her decision to identify as Black in college and hide her dad's whiteness

I now regret that I hid the fact that my father was white, that I denied him that part of my identity or denied the reality that he was part of my identity. … I think I very wrongly believed that if they knew my father was white, I somehow wouldn't be as much an integral part of these groups, that they might feel differently about me. …

I realized by the end of working on the memoir that I am a Black woman with a white father [and] I should not deny all that my father contributed to my identity. I would not be the Black woman I am today, I probably would not have done the work against racism and against the demeaning of Black women, I would have not done the [work] to uplift Black women if it weren't for my father and all that he taught me. And I need to appreciate and acknowledge all that my father contributed to the Black woman I am today.

On what this project has taught her about love and race

It showed me more powerfully than anything I'd ever read before how the invention of race, the lie that human beings are naturally divided into races, can erase the very ties of family. ... In my own case, my father's younger brother, my uncle Edward, disowned him when he married my mother. And even though he lived in the Chicago area and I had cousins who lived there, I never met them because of this rift, this divide between my father and his brother.

Working on the memoir also made me realize that all the work I've been doing throughout my career was trying to answer this question of, what does it take to love across the chasm of race? That's what these couples are telling us, even the ones who were still racist. ... They're telling us what it takes to challenge and dismantle structural racism in America. And so, to me, these interviews persuaded me even more that we can believe in our common humanity. We can overcome the seemingly unbreakable, unshakable shackles of structural racism. But it can't be simply by pretending that the sentiment of love or even loving someone across the racial lines will do it. We have to see the work that it's going to take to do that.

Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

Transcript

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is legal scholar and author Dorothy Roberts. For decades, Roberts has challenged the idea that institutions, like medicine, the law, and child welfare, are neutral. Her landmark books, "Killing The Black Body" and "Torn Apart," helped reshape how we understand the policing of reproduction, parenting and race in America. Her new book now turns that lens inward. It begins with 25 boxes of her late father's papers.

Robert Roberts was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago and over the course of 50 years conducted hundreds of interviews with interracial couples across the city, an extraordinary archive dating back to the 1930s. Her mother, Iris, a Black Jamaican immigrant, was his wife. And what Roberts finds inside those boxes challenges the story she'd always believed about her own family.

Roberts is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur fellow. The memoir is called "The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir Of Love, Race, And Family." Dorothy Roberts, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DOROTHY ROBERTS: Thank you so much, Tonya. It's such a pleasure to be on this program.

MOSLEY: A pleasure to have you. And let's start with these 25 boxes because you tell us right from the start of the book that they were sitting in your basement for almost a decade after your parents died. And the date on the first transcript is February 1937. And this date stopped you in your tracks. You actually described feeling frozen, kind of like you were going to faint as you clutched those papers to your chest. What was it about that date in particular that undid you?

ROBERTS: Well, I always assumed that my father was writing his book on interracial marriage, conducting the interviews that were the basis of this book he was working on in the 1960s while I was growing up. I have very vivid memories of him conducting the interviews and being up in his study on the third floor writing the book. It really dominated my childhood. And so I assumed because of that that he got interested in interracial marriage and wanted to learn the stories of Black-white couples because he met and fell in love with my mother, which happened in the 1950s. And so now, discovering this transcript of an interview from 1937, it just completely upended my understanding of my father's research and its relationship to my family.

You know, I'm thinking, well, first of all, how in the world did my father even get interested in this topic when he was only 21 years old, having grown up in a segregated white neighborhood in Chicago, being so young? I just - it was a mystery to me. But then, in addition to that, it really flipped the relationship I thought he had with my mother and his research because now I knew it wasn't that his falling in love with my mother and marrying her motivated him to do this research. It might have been the opposite - that he was first interested in interracial marriage, and then he married my mother.

MOSLEY: That made you sit with some really uncomfortable and complicated feelings and grapple with some things about whether your father was really attracted to your mother for who she was or if it was because he was looking for a Black woman to date and then ultimately marry. And you finally came to some conclusions, which makes the book just so striking.

But your father had tried for decades to turn all of this research into a book. He had a deal with Simon & Schuster and another publication. So you went into this thinking, as you're opening those pages and reading and discovering, that maybe you might finish the work that he had done. But when did you realize that the book you needed to write wasn't exactly his work?

ROBERTS: Yes, you're right. I first thought, I'll finish the book that my father never published, because I found nearly 500 interviews in these boxes, and they were absolutely fascinating, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, you know, all the way to couples who were married in the 1960s. And all of the stories were so intriguing. I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the color line, the Black Belt. All of this could make a fascinating book, I thought. And that was my first plan.

But as I immersed myself in the interviews, I began to learn more about my father because the very questions he asked, his notes in the transcripts, finding out that my mother was involved, you know, all of this created a curiosity I had about my family, about their marriage. And then I began to think about how it related to me and my identity as a Black girl with a white father. And the more and more I delved into the interviews and thought about the meaning for me and my family and my identity, I was just compelled to write a book about that. And so it turned from a kind of sociological or anthropological study of couples - Black-white couples in Chicago over several centuries into an exploration of my own family and my own identity.

MOSLEY: Yeah. I want to - before we get to all of those points, I really want to understand a little bit more about who your father was because here he is training as an anthropologist in the 1930s, but at 16, your father would spend several months in a village in Northeast India, where he watched caste dictate who could marry whom. And do you think - do you suspect that is where he was able to see more clearly the systems in place in the United States and sort of draw that line?

ROBERTS: Yes, I think there had to be a connection. He traveled around the world, literally, with his grandmother on this trip to and from India. And he writes in his diary about making friends with tribal boys in India. He writes about wearing the clothing that they gave him, all of this without any sense of judgment whatsoever. And then when he gets to college, I find some of his papers where he talks about his white privilege. He's challenging the professors, you know, who believe that white - in white superiority. Basically, they believe in inherited traits that determine how capable you are. My father writes, I don't believe that. That's not true. Everyone is just as capable. It's just that I have the benefit of people not discriminating against me because of my Nordic heritage - and when he was 17. So he was already, for some reason, open to the idea that there was a racial caste system in Chicago, like the one in the South, he writes, and that it could be dismantled. He also had the mission of ending racial caste. He thought it could be done through interracial marriage. But that was his ultimate mission.

MOSLEY: Let's get into some of the transcripts. So the questions your father asked in the 1930s, they really reveal so much about what these couples were up against. And one of the women your father interviewed was Mrs. Tyler (ph).

ROBERTS: Yes.

MOSLEY: She's described as a Bohemian immigrant who spent her 16th birthday on Ellis Island. She married a Black man in Chicago, barely speaking English, not a lot of understanding about America's racial hierarchy. And there's a passage where she reveals this to your father, really with painstaking clarity. Can I have you read it?

ROBERTS: (Reading) The racial hierarchy that had eluded Mrs. Tyler became painfully clear soon after her wedding in March 1928. A cab driver asked if she wasn't afraid to be dropped off in the colored section. She was turned away when she tried to stay at a hotel with her husband. When I came, I thought it was free for everybody. That's what they said about America in the old country. That isn't true, she said. I don't think I ever would have married as I did if I knew all this. I wouldn't have the nerve.

MOSLEY: Thank you for reading that. And I want to take this even further 'cause there's a phrase that Mrs. Tyler uses where she says she feels like an innocent criminal to be married to a Black man. Your father ended all of these interviews with this same question. He asked everyone - if you had your life to live over, would you marry the same person? And you noticed women like Mrs. Tyler - when they were alone speaking to your father, their answers, especially white women, changed depending on whether their husband was in the room. What were some of the things that they shared that kind of bolstered, almost, what Mrs. Tyler is saying here about her surprise?

ROBERTS: Well, you have to understand that these were immigrant women coming from Europe who had no familiarity at all with the racial caste system in Chicago. And as Mrs. Tyler said, she thought - she had heard - that America was a land of freedom. So when they marry Black men, in fact, they thought that marrying an American citizen would help them assimilate into American culture.

So they had no idea, women like Mrs. Tyler from Europe, that if they married a Black man, it would do the opposite to them - they would be lower in their status than they were as white immigrants. And so many of them would say, I found out that I had to live in a colored neighborhood. I had to leave my white neighbors. I had to leave my family in order to marry this Black man and move into the Black Belt. I now couldn't even tell my employer my address because if they found out my address, they'd know I must be living with a Black man. Why else would a white woman be living in the Black Belt? They were afraid they would lose their jobs. And many reported that they were fired as a result of their employer finding out that they were married to a Black man.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dorothy Roberts. She's a legal scholar, MacArthur Fellow and the author of several books on race in America. Her new memoir, "The Mixed Marriage Project," tells the story of her parents' interracial marriage and the nearly 500 transcripts her white father left behind from decades of interviewing Black and white couples in Chicago. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking to Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur fellow. Her new memoir, "The Mixed Marriage Project," is built around her discovery of her late father's research - decades of interviews with interracial couples in Chicago - and forces her to reckon with her own conclusions about her father's scholarship.

I want to stay in the 1930s because your father didn't just collect interviews. He found his way into that world. And one of the most fascinating discoveries in the transcript is the Manasseh Society. It's a social club for interracial couples in Chicago. But even inside this community, which is built around love across the color line, there is a hierarchy. Who was welcome and who wasn't?

ROBERTS: That's right. My father soon discovers, when he starts collecting the names and backgrounds of members because he wanted to interview them, that Black women were almost entirely excluded. Now, it is true that there were more white women married to Black men.

MOSLEY: And why do you - why was that?

ROBERTS: Well, that's a question we could ask today. You know, why is it that, you know, even today it's more common that white women will marry Black men than white men will marry Black women? And that was true at the time my father was conducting interviews in the 1930s as well. So some of it is just statistical. It - there were just more of the couples that were white women and Black men in Chicago. But from the statements that the white wives make when my father presses them on why there was this absence of Black women from their club, they say horrible things about Black women. They say, well, we don't really like Black women because they have looser morals.

And this was a theme that cut throughout the 1930s interviews - the fact that they, many, many of the couples, mentioned that white men were having sex with Black women but weren't marrying them. And what these wives in the Manasseh Society and some of - actually, some of the Black men as well were saying was the reason why white men are sleeping with Black women but not marrying them is because Black women are so licentious, they don't require marriage. So they blamed Black women for the rarity of white men marrying Black women instead of looking for other reasons why. You know, my father suggested, well, maybe it's because they're looked down on - these marriages are looked down on so much. I also wonder if part of it is the privileges that white men would lose when they married a Black woman.

MOSLEY: Well, I mean, you make this very striking observation that Black men who loved white women, especially in these transcripts, may have really felt like they were opposing white supremacy, while for many Black women, interracial intimacy overall has never really looked like liberation. And your father's notes are kind of quiet on this. I mean, he was a white man attracted to Black women, which on its own is kind of a breach of taboo. But he doesn't name the contradiction. And I wondered if you read that silence as diplomacy or something else.

ROBERTS: Yeah, I often wondered what my father thought when he's hearing all these stereotypes about Black women. And he made it very clear in the interviews from in his early 20s, he was already attracted to Black women and was dating Black women and bringing them to parties and that kind of thing, looking for Black women to dance with and all of that. And so I wondered what he thought when he heard these disparaging comments about Black women, and he never really said anything.

There was one time when he did kind of lash out at a white daughter - well, she was actually a biracial daughter of a Black man he interviewed. But she liked to think of herself as being able to pass as white, and she was happy that her children could pass as white. And she said she couldn't understand how white women would marry a Black man and potentially have children who were colored. You know, and my father lashed out at her, the only time I saw ever in the interviews that he really got angry (laughter) with someone and said, you shouldn't get so upset, you know, when we talk about interracial relationships.

MOSLEY: Your mother, Iris, she was an educated, Black Jamaican woman. And she was also your father's research partner.

ROBERTS: (Laughter) Yeah.

MOSLEY: She conducted interviews alongside him. She wrote a lot of the field notes. You, though, did not grow up knowing any of this. How did discovering her role change the story you told yourself about your parents?

ROBERTS: Yes, that was another major discovery I made in the interviews. When I got to the 1950s interviews, I discovered that my mother was conducting all the interviews of the wives while my father conducted the interviews of the husbands. And I had no idea that my mother was so involved in the research. She was tracking down some of these couples. She was interviewing them. She was writing up her notes and typing up the transcripts.

And it really changed my view of the whole project because, growing up, it was always Daddy's book. You know, she was cheering him on. In fact, she was more interested in him publishing this book than he was. (Laughter) You know, she was constantly telling him...

MOSLEY: Yeah. Pushing him, yeah.

ROBERTS: ...Bob, finish the book, finish the book, because she was very ambitious. And she had given up her Ph.D. work in order to have me and my sisters and raise us. And she supported his work in so many ways. And so, I could see now, after discovering her deep involvement in the research, why she was so frustrated (laughter).

MOSLEY: Well, what did your mom actually write in those field notes? What was her voice like as a researcher in comparison, maybe, to your dad's voice?

ROBERTS: Yeah, I was so delighted to see my mother's voice in the notes and the very way she wrote up the interviews, because while my father, much to my horror, was very anthropological - in terms of the physical traits of the people he interviewed. You know, he wrote about the negroid traits and whether the child had any trace of negroid blood and that sort of thing. Again, remembering he was doing this in the 1930s. My mother was much more interested in the personality traits of the people she interviewed and what their furniture looked like, and her own emotions. And there's just so many delightful things.

The way in which she interacts with the children when she's interviewing the wives, there's a lot more attention to what the children are doing. I can't remember a single interview where my father really describes the children's behavior. He describes their physical appearance, but my mother would describe their behavior and their interaction with the mother. All of that is part of the interview and her notes, and she writes it almost like a screenplay. It's really, really wonderful to read.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is author and scholar Dorothy Roberts. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC DOLPHY AND BOOKER LITTLE'S "MRS. PARKER OF K.C. (BIRD'S MOTHER)")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and I'm continuing my conversation with Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Over a career spanning more than three decades, Roberts has written some of the most influential books on race in America - "Killing The Black Body" on reproductive control, "Fatal Invention" on the myth of biological race and "Torn Apart" on the child welfare system. Her new memoir, "The Mixed Marriage Project," turns the lens on her own family. In it, she documents her father's extraordinary archive of nearly 500 interviews with interracial couples in Chicago and the lesson she pulled from it as a Black woman in America.

How did this make you grapple with your own thoughts about interracial relationships? Of course, you grew up with your parents and lots of couples around you who were interracial, and so there is an acceptance there. But, I mean, inherently, as a Black woman in America, how did these transcripts kind of make you grapple with your own feelings about it?

ROBERTS: Oh, I grappled with my own feelings with every single interview I read in so many - multiple levels. There was this visceral feeling I felt whenever a Black man, a Black husband, would talk about his preference for being with white women. You know, these ideas that interracial intimacy has an extra excitement to it, it has an extra titillation to it - that kind of idea came up in many of the interviews, and I just have a very visceral revulsion. That kind of idea - it's sort of a fetishization of interracial intimacy and also of biracial children, the idea that whitening children, you know, is - makes them more attractive or makes them more intelligent or more appealing, more lovable. I - and whenever that came up, I just - sometimes I had to just throw the interview down because I couldn't stand that kind of thinking.

MOSLEY: Do you think that some of your - that visceral reaction and feeling to the Black men in the transcripts talking of how they felt kind of, like, titillated by it, by the idea of dating outside of their race - it feeling like a rejection of self for you?

ROBERTS: Yes. It's when the Black men would describe their feelings for white women in a way that they couldn't possibly have toward Black women because Black women are Black. You know, the - for example, Mr. Sussex, whom I suspect was my piano teacher - he said that when he found out he could date white women, they became more attractive to him than Black women. He stopped dating Black women when he found out he could date white women. It wasn't that finding out he could date white women expanded the range of women he could date. It was that it was a rejection of Black women.

Now, there's also this complexity to it that because Black men were punished, lynched, killed for even showing some attention to white women, you know, based on the accusation that they had sex with a white woman, I can see how Mr. Sussex is now saying, all right. My ability to date white women is in defiance of that history. So it seems as if it's something that is challenging white supremacy, whereas the history for Black women is sexual exploitation, rape by white enslavers. And so for many people, when Black women love white men or white men love Black women, it's - and this came out in the interviews - it seems as if it's just a continuation of white supremacist, patriarchal power of white men. And I don't think that that's necessarily the case.

You know, I can see in my own family, my father revered, respected my mother. He loved her. He was committed to her. And throughout reading these interviews, what I always wanted to do and what I felt most strongly about was challenging all the ways that Black women have been demeaned, have been vilified - our sexuality, our childbearing, our mothering. You know, that's what my whole career has been about. And I really did have a very strong reaction against every time that kind of thinking came up in the interviews.

MOSLEY: There's a moment in the book I'd love for you to read. You're going through the boxes in your office, and you find a folder. And the folder had a number on it - 224. And can I have you read from there?

ROBERTS: (Reading) Inside are four documents - a college paper I submitted for a sociology class, two versions of an essay I wrote, one in longhand, the other typed, and a typed letter my father wrote to me. I feel dizzy as the realization sets in. I am research participant No. 224. Daddy had created a file on me and placed it among the folders containing notes and transcripts from his interviews with other children of interracial couples.

By now, I know that his fascination with interracial families began long before he started one of his own. I have long understood that my mother, my sisters and I were inextricably tied to his scholarly obsession, woven into his lifelong pursuit of interracial intimacy. But discovering that he considered me an actual subject of study? That was a whole new level of entanglement. I begin to wonder - was I born entirely from his love for my mother, or was I in some way an extension of his mission to document and popularize mixed marriages? It unsettles me to think that my sisters and I may have been unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment designed to prove the viability and perhaps even the superiority of interracial unions.

MOSLEY: Thank you for reading that. And I want to ask you, what did that discovery, first off, do to you? And what answers did you come to after sitting with that discovery?

ROBERTS: At first, I was really shocked to find that I was a participant, a research subject in his study now of the children of interracial couples. And I did wonder initially, was I part of an experiment of his, trying to prove his theory that biracial children were well-adjusted and weren't tragic mulattos, that we could do well in school and do well in society? But, you know, I was so close to my father. I knew how much he loved me. I was so entangled in his work because he brought it into our family's life. And he discussed it with me so much. And so I knew that his including me in the project was not because he thought of me just as a research subject, but because he thought of me as part of his entire life's work.

And I began to realize that that actually made him even closer to me. It meant that I was even closer to him. I was involved in every aspect of his life. You know, there are lots of children who feel separated from their parents and separated from their parents' work and even feel that their parents' work is more important to them, to their parents, than they are. I never felt that way about my father. I always felt that I was essential to him.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dorothy Roberts. Her new memoir is called "The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir Of Love, Race, And Family." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET'S "OUT OF THIS WORLD")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking to Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur fellow. Her new memoir, "The Mixed Marriage Project," is built around her discovery of her late father's research and forces her to reckon with her own conclusions about her father's scholarship.

Your father's thesis was that if interracial unions were allowed to flourish, they would prompt demands for social equality, that basically interracial marriage could help dismantle this caste system that he believed America was under. Do you think that there was something he could not see precisely because of where he stood and something that you could see precisely because of where you stand?

ROBERTS: Ah, certainly, we had debates throughout even my childhood about whether or not interracial marriage could dismantle racism. And I...

MOSLEY: Really? Do you remember when was the first time you all had that debate?

ROBERTS: Well, it began not so much with a debate, but with his trying to persuade me of his views. That began very early. I mean, as early as I can remember, my father was trying to persuade me that the answer to America's race problem was interracial marriage. And he told me that over and over and over again. Along with, I have to say, his main message was that all human beings are equal, there's only one human race, and the only reason why Black and white people are not moving together for greater racial justice is because of invented divisions between us. So that was his main message, and that I agree with to this day.

But the idea of the power of interracial love by itself was something I began to question. I don't remember exactly when. But I know for a fact that when I read "Black Power," by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, when I was in seventh grade, that I began to have a very different perspective than my father. I do believe that, beginning at that young age, I recognized the power of structural racism and could not accept his view that interracial love by itself would be strong enough to transcend it or overcome it or dismantle it.

ROBERTS: And so from that time on, we began to have debates about it. But, you know, my father always respected my opinion. That's something I also learned in the file that I found about me, that he kept this file, even though the file contained wording that adamantly disagreed with him. But he still kept it, and he still loved me, and he still respected my opinion.

MOSLEY: How did those conversations influence your own dating life as a young person?

ROBERTS: (Laughter) Well, the biggest influence on my dating life until I went to college was my mother, who wouldn't allow me to date because she wanted to make sure that I focused solely on my studies. I have only dated Black men, and it's hard to say how my parents' marriage or my father's research or my conversations with my father influenced that. But I have just been attracted to Black men. And maybe in relationships with Black men, it could also be that Black men found me attractive and gravitated toward me, as well as my gravitating toward them.

MOSLEY: Why do you think it's so hard to untangle the why?

ROBERTS: You know, this is something I really struggle with. The very question of what is the role of race in the first place in whom we find attractive, you know, whom we decide to date and marry. Isn't it the case that when you marry someone or find someone attractive of your own race, that it depends partly on race? You know, so I kept asking myself, is it different than if you find someone attractive of - from another race, or even if you only find people of another race attractive?

You know, I have always been in relationships, intimate relationships with Black men. Is that because I find Black men attractive, and is that because I'm choosing them based on race? And is that different from if I found white men attractive and dated white men and chose to marry a white man based on race? Somehow I think there's a difference, but I'm - it's hard to say, partly because these are emotions and feelings that it's difficult to figure out where they come from. You know, it - you can't really do a sociological study of it. And that's just part of the - you know, the nuance, the complexity, the mystery around this topic of interracial intimacy and interracial marriage.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dorothy Roberts. Her new memoir is called "The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir Of Love, Race, And Family." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD & BILL EVANS' "PIXIES")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking to Dorothy Roberts, the acclaimed legal scholar and MacArthur Fellow. Her new memoir, "The Mixed Marriage Project," is her most personal work, built on the discovery of her father's nearly 500 interview transcripts with interracial couples.

In college, you not only identified as Black, but you tried to hide that your father was white. And what did this book force you to confront about that choice?

ROBERTS: Yes. I now regret that I hid the fact that my father was white, that I denied him that part of my identity or denied the reality that he was part of my identity. I found that what I wrote to him, for his eyes, was extremely hurtful. I could hardly believe that I wrote to my father that I had hid that he was my father because he's white. I couldn't...

MOSLEY: At the time, do you feel like you were trying to hurt him? Do you remember why you did that?

ROBERTS: I think I was just trying to write the reality of how I felt. I'm - I believe that my father must have asked me to write an essay about my racial identity that he would put in a file about me. I mean, I didn't know he would put it in the file, but he wanted me to write about it for him to read. And, you know, I didn't know he had a file on me. But when I wrote that - and I don't remember exactly my feelings, but I'm pretty sure I thought, my father is researching this, and he wants to know how his daughter feels about it. And so I wrote very honestly what I felt at the time.

This - I was a first-year student in college, or perhaps this was the summer after I finished my first year. And that was the year that I was so intent on making sure I could be part of this group of Black students and - I think very wrongly - believed that if they knew my father was white, I somehow wouldn't be as much an integral part of this group, that they might feel differently about me. I think I was wrong about that, and now that feeling seems so strange to me. But I did have to grapple with it when I came across what I had written in that essay and also just in general, reading these interviews, thinking about my father and my shifting identity to - not wanting to think of myself as mixed, as - or even just as human, as my parents taught me to think, but to really identify as a Black woman.

And I realized by the end of working on the memoir that I am a Black woman with a white father. I should not deny all that my father contributed to my identity. I would not be the Black woman I am today. I probably would not have done the work against racism and against the demeaning of Black women. I would not have done the work to uplift Black women if it weren't for my father and all that he taught me, and I need to appreciate and acknowledge all that my father contributed to the Black woman I am today.

MOSLEY: You know, your 2011 book, "Fatal Invention" - I want to talk about it just for a moment in the context of this work because you argued that race is a political category, something Europeans invented to oppress other groups. You've talked about that through our conversation, and your father spent all this time really believing that interracial relationships could dismantle that system. But your book made me see that this designation doesn't just sort people. It severs families.

You write about children who looked Black, were forced to live in a different part of the city than their white mother and brother, who had married white. And so they had the same blood, but they were different sides of the color line because one part of the family could pass and the other could not. And so many Americans, including myself, have white blood relatives in this country whom we will never know to this very day because of that false construct. The designation is what makes us strangers. So I'm just wondering - what did this project teach you about the limits of really what love can do?

ROBERTS: It showed me more powerfully than anything I'd ever read before how the invention of race, the lie that human beings are naturally divided into races, can erase the very ties of family. And that might be the most striking evidence of just how overwhelming, how powerful the belief in race is. The fact that it can take a family that is related to each other, you know, by blood, by genetics, whatever term you want to use, and erase that relationship is an extremely, extremely powerful and insidious way that race can operate.

In my own case, my father's younger brother, my uncle Edward, disowned him when he married my mother. And even though he lived in the Chicago area and I had cousins who lived there, I never met them because of this rift, this divide between my father and his brother. And so working on the memoir also made me realize that all the work I've been doing throughout my career was trying to answer this question of, what does it take to love across the chasm of race?

You know, that's what these couples are telling us, even the ones who were still racist, you know? Even though the - both the ones who were racist and the ones who challenged racism - it - they're telling us what it takes to challenge and dismantle structural racism in America. And so, to me, these interviews persuaded me even more that we can believe in our common humanity. We can overcome the seemingly unbreakable, unshakable shackles of structural racism. But it can't be simply by pretending that the sentiment of love or even loving someone across racial lines will do it. We have to see the work that it's going to take to do that. You know, my father thought that interracial intimacy was the instrument to end racism. And I think it's really flipped the other way that as we end racism, that's when we will see the possibility of truly being able to love each other as equal human beings.

MOSLEY: Dorothy Roberts, thank you so much for this scholarship, for this book and for this conversation.

ROBERTS: Thank you, Tonya. It's been really a delight and an honor to be able to speak with you. I really, truly appreciate it.

MOSLEY: Dorothy Roberts' new book is called "The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir Of Love, Race, And Family." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, investigative journalist Vicky Ward spent decades investigating sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. We'll talk about the revelations in the Epstein files, the 3 million pages of documents that have been released to the public and the implications for survivors. I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5704334

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By Chloe Veltman

Heard on Morning Edition

The buildings at Nike's world headquarters — the Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton, Ore. — are named after the likes of Serena Williams, Jerry Rice and Mia Hamm. But the company doesn't recognize only sports superstars as athletes.

"If you have a body, you're an athlete," said Mike Yonker, who heads up the team developing Project Amplify — Nike's new bionic sneaker.

Accordingly, the Project Amplify footwear system is aimed at a broad audience. "Amplify is designed for that everyday athlete to give them the energy they need to go further, to go faster, with greater levels of confidence," said Yonker. "It's like an e-bike for your feet."

Even as some elite athletes are strapping skis and skates to their feet in an effort to move ever faster at this year's Winter Olympics in Italy, Nike and other companies in the footwear and mobility sectors are on a quest to help humans move farther and faster in everyday life — using digital technology.

Nike said it plans to launch Project Amplify commercially in 2028. The system, tested in prototype form by NPR at the company's headquarters, consists of fairly standard-looking sneakers with a carbon fiber plate running through the soles. These sneakers are attached at the back to close-fitting, 3D-printed titanium leg shells that cinch to the calves. The battery-powered contraptions, containing complex motors, sensors and circuitry, weigh a couple of pounds and look like something out of Terminator or RoboCop.

"What it's doing is learning how your ankles are moving, how long your steps are, taking the algorithms and customizing them for you," said Alison Sheets-Singer, Project Amplify's lead scientist. "So that when it turns on, it feels natural and smooth."

A phone app powers the footwear system on and off and can be used to toggle between various speed settings in "walk" and "run" mode. When activated, the leg shells pick up the heels and propel the feet purposefully forward.

A long quest for speed

Human beings have an innate desire to move faster on foot, whether for practical reasons or thrills and pleasure, said Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

"The Nike Amplify comes from this long legacy of trying to increase speed and use science to help us get there," Semmelhack said.

Semmelhack points to ice skates made of bone from the 1600s, 19th-century in-line roller skates and an iconoclastic pair of crescent-shaped, metal rocking-shoes patented in the early 20th century.

Athletic-shoe manufacturers initially worked to increase the wearer's speed in the 1970s by using lighter materials — switching out rubber and leather for nylon and foam. Electronics started appearing in sneakers in the 1980s. The Adidas Micropacer and Puma RS-Computer shoe used sensors to track a runner's distance. Nike even came out with self-lacing high-tops a decade ago — the Nike Air Mag. The limited-edition product brought to life the futuristic sneakers featured in the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II.

Youtube Video

But none of these innovations used digital technology to increase velocity, because of power constraints. "The energy needed to propel a human being forward is so significant that we do not have an energy source yet that is small enough that can be placed within a shoe," Semmelhack said.

That's why Nike and others working on electronic-assisted running and walking systems today, such as the Massachusetts-based startup Dephy — which collaborated with Nike on Project Amplify and also recently launched its own similar product, Sidekick — include ergonomic leg shells to power their products. Some of these systems avoid shoes entirely; for instance, the Ascentiz H+K takes the form of a motorized knee and hip exoskeleton. (According to Nike, Project Amplify is designed to have enough battery life, roughly, to enable the wearer to complete a 10-kilometer run. The batteries are rechargeable and can be switched out for a fresh set if the wearer wants to go for longer.)

Expanding mobility horizons

Despite the power challenges, the electronic-powered, motorized footwear space is a busy one. More than a dozen startups were exhibiting their innovations in the "bionic, footwear, exoskeleton" category at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one of the world's most prominent annual showcases for tech innovation. Many of these products are focused on helping people solve mobility issues, rather than necessarily aiding those who already walk and run with ease to do so faster.

"We've described a phenomenon called 'personal range anxiety,' where people are now making decisions about which activities they opt in and out of based on asking themselves, 'Will I be comfortable? Will I be in pain? Will I be able to keep up with my friends and family?'" said Dephy co-founder and CEO Luke Mooney. "And so we're helping them restore that confidence."

Some experts see a future where these footwear systems make a similar impact on walking and running as electronic bikes have made in recent years on mountain biking.

"E-bikes have changed the landscape of mountain biking for people that maybe didn't have the ability or were getting older and still wanted to participate," said Mark Oleson, a former Adidas executive who has worked on many innovation projects in the athletic shoe sector and who currently heads up the women's volleyball footwear and apparel company Avoli. "There's a huge opportunity where companies are asking, 'How do we get someone into a sport or into a recreational activity that they normally wouldn't have the ability to do?'"

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Winter Olympians strap on skis and skates to move ever faster. For others, there's the promise of electronic-powered sneakers. NPR's Chloe Veltman offers this glimpse into a faster future.

CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Serena Williams, Jerry Rice and Mia Hamm all have buildings named after them at Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton, near Portland, Oregon.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LEBRON JAMES: Going down.

VELTMAN: In the Lebron James Innovation Center, the basketball player's recorded voice can even be heard in the elevators.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JAMES: Floor 1.

VELTMAN: But the company doesn't only recognize these sports superstars as athletes.

MIKE YONKER: If you have a body, you're an athlete.

VELTMAN: This is Mike Yonker. He heads up the team that's developing a new type of bionic sneaker.

YONKER: It's like an e-bike for your feet.

VELTMAN: Yonker says Nike's Project Amplify is aimed at a broad audience.

YONKER: Amplify is designed for that everyday athlete to give them the energy they need to go further, to go faster, with greater levels of confidence.

(SOUNDBITE OF BIONIC SHOE FOOTSTEPS)

VELTMAN: The Project Amplify shoes I'm taking my first ungainly steps in on a big indoor track at Nike HQ don't immediately inspire confidence. But the power hasn't been switched on yet, and they're just a prototype. Nike says it currently aims to launch the product in 2028. On my feet, a pair of fairly standard-looking sneakers with a carbon fiber plate running through the soles. Cinched to my calves, close-fitting, 3D-printed titanium shells that look like something out of "Terminator" or "RoboCop." The battery-powered contraptions attach to the sneakers at the back. They contain complex motors, sensors and circuitry. Alison Sheets-Singer is Project Amplify's lead scientist.

ALISON SHEETS-SINGER: What it's doing is learning how your ankles are moving, how long your steps are, taking the algorithms and customizing them for you so that when it turns on, it feels natural and smooth.

VELTMAN: When Sheets-Singer activates the footwear system using a phone app, my legs feel a sudden hug.

Ooh. That is a most uncommon feeling (laughter).

SHEETS-SINGER: Can you describe it?

VELTMAN: Kind of feels like my feet are being pushed more aggressively forward.

ELIZABETH SEMMELHAC: The Nike Amplify comes from this long legacy of trying to increase speed and use science to help us get there.

VELTMAN: This is Elizabeth Semmelhac. She's the director of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada. Says athletic shoe manufacturers initially tackled the issue of speed in the 1970s with lighter materials. Electronics started showing up in sneakers in the '80s. The Adidas Micropacer and the Puma RS Computer Shoe used sensors to track a runner's distance. Nike even came out with a self-lacing high top a decade ago, making real the sneakers in the movie "Back To The Future II."

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II")

MICHAEL J FOX: (As Marty McFly) Power laces. All right.

VELTMAN: But Semmelhac says none of these innovations use digital technology to get the wearer's feet moving further or faster.

SEMMELHAC: The energy needed to do something like propel a human being forward is so significant that we do not have an energy source that is small enough that can be placed within a shoe.

VELTMAN: That's why Nike and others working on electronic-assisted footwear today, such as the Massachusetts-based startup Dephy, include leg shells to power their products. Thomas Turner is the author of the 2019 book, "The Sports Shoe: A History From Field To Fashion." He says as the technology improves, these systems could expand people's ability to move with greater ease. But Turner also wonders, what happens if the tech gets hacked?

THOMAS TURNER: Being strapped into a mechanism that's possibly being controlled by some figure far off via computer networks, and you are forced to walk in places that you didn't want to walk or do things that you didn't necessarily want to do. That's a bit of a weird one.

VELTMAN: No dystopian fantasies today at Nike HQ as I run up the company's intimidating outdoor training ramp. It's about the length of two city blocks and graded to feel like a pretty stiff session on a treadmill.

OK. Full speed ahead.

The footwear system quickly kicks into gear, picks up my heels, and propels my feet forward up the hill.

Whoo. Yeah.

Nike scientist Alison Sheets-Singer is running up in regular sneakers. I leave her in the dust.

SHEETS-SINGER: About two-thirds of the way up, it starts getting really hard, and I really wish I had assistance also (laughter).

VELTMAN: On our way back indoors, we pass by a life-size bronze statue of marathon superstar Eliud Kipchoge.

Oh, yeah, even in these shoes I would never run as fast as that fella.

SHEETS-SINGER: Neither will anyone else (laughter).

VELTMAN: I find that I'm comforted by this fact.

Chloe Veltman, NPR News, Beaverton, Oregon.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5698195

CULTURE | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:44 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Students' push for change results in new Latino history exhibit in Chicago

By Jessica Pupovac

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The Trump administration's efforts to change what's displayed at the Smithsonian and other places makes clear something curators have known all along - designing exhibitions means choosing a point of view. But you don't have to be a government official to want a say in how a story is told. Reporter Jessica Pupovac takes us to Chicago, where Latino high school students asked for more collaboration and change.

JESSICA PUPOVAC: It was 2019 when students from the Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy traveled to the Chicago History Museum. This is a recording shared by their teacher.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Well, welcome.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hi. Nice to meet you.

PUPOVAC: They didn't come for a tour. They came with a list of demands, and they were a little nervous.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MONCE GUTIERREZ: My name is Monce, and I'm here to stand with and for my people.

PUPOVAC: This was the second visit for Monce Gutierrez (ph) and the other students. The first time around, they found very little representation of their communities. They demanded a meeting with museum leadership, and it worked. They met with a senior vice president, several curators and other staff members to tell them how the museum looked from their perspective.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ROGELIO VILLEGAS: We did see an exhibit on Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. But we would like to see more people in Chicago 'cause basically, this is a Chicago history museum.

PUPOVAC: Rogelio Villegas said a massive '78 Chevy lowrider in the lobby was stereotypical and more of an LA thing.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

VILLEGAS: It doesn't represent us as people, and we would like to see a change in that.

ANTON MIGLIETTA: I felt like this was going to be an exciting journey...

PUPOVAC: Anton Miglietta was their teacher.

MIGLIETTA: That also may teach them that change is hard.

PUPOVAC: Miglietta says at the end of the meeting, museum leadership promised to continue the conversation and do better. And now, after six years of relationship building, fundraising, development, the Chicago History Museum has opened "Aqui" - or here - "En Chicago."

ELENA GONZALES: My name is Elena. I'm the curator of "Aqui En Chicago."

PUPOVAC: Elena Gonzales was the lead curator.

GONZALES: This is an exhibition that is a response to students from Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy. We, in this exhibition, are saying this is your history as you stand on these generations of people who've come before you doing that type of work.

PUPOVAC: It tells the story of how Latino people made Chicago what it is today. It celebrates foods that became city staples like the tamale, first introduced at the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago, tells the story of protests in the '70s and '80s that led to the creation of new schools in Latino neighborhoods, and acknowledges the 2019 campaign with its many artifacts, including poster board signs the students made and shared on social media with messages like Latinx history matters.

GONZALES: The students who started this were some of our first interns on the project, but we actually expanded our internship program to include students from across the area.

PUPOVAC: That's just one of many ways they built this exhibit with community input, and that continues. People can still contribute photos to a digital scrapbook or record Indigenous languages for the collection.

GONZALES: If you've heard that saying nothing about us without us - right? - we want to be telling Chicago's history in collaboration with local communities of all different kinds.

PUPOVAC: "Aqui En Chicago" will be on display at the Chicago History Museum through November of this year.

For NPR News, I'm Jessica Pupovac in Chicago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ANTONIO SANCHEZ'S "DOORS AND DISTANCE")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5682026

CULTURE | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2026 • 4:43 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Double Dutch is having a moment

By Leslie E. Thompson

Heard on Morning Edition

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

OK, you don't need any special tech for this sport. Double Dutch, a daily activity of my childhood, is enjoying a comeback. I did not know it ever left. But reporter Leslie Eiler Thompson heads to Washington Square Park in New York City to learn the ropes.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROPES SNAPPING)

LESLIE EILER THOMPSON, BYLINE: Double Dutch is a way of jumping rope that uses two ropes instead of one, with two people turning the ropes on either end and a person jumping in the middle. It began as a child's game in urban neighborhoods and has been passed down for decades, primarily through the play of young Black girls. And double Dutch is finding a resurgence, especially through viral videos on social media of pop-up events in heavily populated city centers like this one.

SHAKIRA LEE: Stay right there. Don't go nowhere. Stay right there. Don't go nowhere. Stay right there. Don't go nowhere, don't go nowhere, don't go nowhere.

THOMPSON: That's Shakira Lee, and she's the coach for this pop-up event. She's been teaching double Dutch for five years.

LEE: I spent a lot of time in the Bronx. We have a big, big playground. And before we'd go to school, every time after breakfast, we'd run out into the playground and just play double Dutch.

There we go.

(CHEERING)

LEE: There we go. There we go. Spin around.

THOMPSON: Lee grew up in the foster care system, learned double Dutch from her foster siblings.

LEE: Back then, it was more so of a escape, coping mechanism. And it's grown into something much more bigger that I can't even describe. Like, it's the family. It's the joy.

She got that. She's a natural, she's a natural. Who's next? You next?

THOMPSON: So now Lee teaches the sport, whether through private lessons or pop-up events throughout New York City. And her favorite people to coach are those who have never done it before.

LEE: Give me 10 minutes. Ten minutes, that's all it takes.

THOMPSON: In fact, most of the people who jumped at this pop-up event were beginners, just like me when I had my own turn in the ropes.

LEE: One, two. One, two.

THOMPSON: (Screaming). Oh, my gosh.

LEE: Just like that. What did I say, in less than 10 minutes?

THOMPSON: Less than 10 minutes.

LEE: Let's get you back in the rope.

THOMPSON: And when any of us went long enough or spun around in the ropes, the crowd that had formed around us would cheer and celebrate, including coach Shakira Lee.

(CHEERING)

LEE: What I learn, I'm passing it down. I want to build generational memories. I want to build generational experiences. And every time there's a session, I look forward to it.

One, one, one, one.

(CHEERING)

LEE: One, two. One, two. One, two. One, two.

THOMPSON: For NPR News, I'm Leslie Eiler Thompson.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEYS N KRATES' "DOUBLE DUTCH")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5670407

CULTURE | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 5:37 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

The glass left from yahrzeit candles can be another way to memorialize a loved one

By Deena Prichep

Heard on All Things Considered

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

In Jewish tradition, after someone dies, the anniversary of their death is marked by lighting a yahrzeit candle. It comes in a stubby glass holder a couple inches high, and it burns for 24 hours to remember and honor the person you have lost. And after the candle has burned, you're left with that little glass. As Deena Prichep reports, in some families, that old glass has found a new use.

DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: Ruth Lebed's grandmother came from Eastern Europe, a part that was sometimes Russia, sometimes Poland. She never learned English very well, but she was an amazing baker.

RUTH LEBED: She would make ruggelach and she would make strudel and all of these little delicacies that you really didn't see in bakeries.

PRICHEP: After her grandmother died, Ruth and her mom tried to recreate her recipes, specifically her hamantaschen - little jam-filled cookies for the Purim holiday, which called for a glass of juice.

LEBED: And we're all like, what's a glass?

PRICHEP: So they tried a cup - didn't work. One of their everyday juice glasses - also wrong.

LEBED: And then, finally, my mom said, you know what? Grandma used to keep all of her yahrzeit glasses.

PRICHEP: And that was it. Yahrzeit glasses were mentioned as far back as the Middle Ages, but the mass-produced glass holders came later. Ads for yahrzeit candles from Standard Oil Company start showing up as early as 1914. The glasses of a hundred years ago were a bit bigger than today's - like a small juice glass, thick and beveled, sturdy enough to hold a candle that burns a whole day. The kind of sturdiness that new immigrants, like Ruth Lebed's grandparents, would want to hold onto.

LEBED: They didn't have a lot of money, so whatever they could reuse, they reused.

PRICHEP: Which is fine because the yahrzeit glass is not officially a sacred object. There's nothing in the Torah. It's a custom.

SARIT WISHNEVSKI: The candle is a mechanism. It's a way for us to bring ourselves into a moment.

PRICHEP: Sarit Wishnevski leads Kavod v'Nichum, a Jewish group that supports people preparing bodies for burial and caring for mourners. She says because there's no official liturgy, people can light the yahrzeit candle and figure out what it has to say to their own personal mourning.

WISHNEVSKI: We don't get over people, right? We carry them with us forever. And it's a really beautiful way to remember those people and to dedicate time to the people who are with us.

PRICHEP: But not everyone has that reaction to the yahrzeit candle.

HASIA DINER: It really freaked me out.

PRICHEP: Hasia Diner taught Jewish history at New York University. When she was growing up, her father and stepmother lit a lot of yahrzeit candles.

DINER: There'd be the glass for all of her relatives killed in the Holocaust - you know, her parents, her husband. To me, it was just traumatic to see these things.

PRICHEP: Diner says she didn't want to see the glasses with flames in them. And she didn't want to see them on the table filled with orange juice or used to cut out dough for poppy seed cookies. But it made her realize that death is a part of life. And looking back now, Diner sees it as kind of beautiful.

DINER: Just to think that that cookie that I am biting into came from the glass to remember my mother, that's kind of really powerful.

PRICHEP: To some extent, the generations who came before are always in the room when you make an old family recipe. But using a yahrzeit glass - this physical reminder of loss - makes that presence even more concrete in a way that's sort of bittersweet and beautiful and maybe even delicious. For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep.

(SOUNDBITE OF SHYGIRL SONG, "HEAVEN")

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5690273

CULTURE | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 4:49 PM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Bad Bunny's joyful defiance captivates Super Bowl halftime

By Adrian Florido

Heard on All Things Considered

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

The Seattle Seahawks trounced the New England Patriots to win Super Bowl 60 last night. But for millions of Americans, especially many Latinos, the main attraction was the halftime show. Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop superstar, delivered a performance centering a message of unity as well as pride in Latin American culture at a time when many Latinos feel under attack. NPR's Adrian Florido is here to talk about the show. Hey, Adrian.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.

DETROW: So Super Bowl halftime show - always a big event. Always the thing we're talking about the next day. But this was unique and historic.

FLORIDO: It was. It was the first time that the halftime show was not primarily performed in English. Bad Bunny, though he's a U.S. citizen, sings only in Spanish. And it was an exuberant 13 minutes. Like everything that Bad Bunny does, Scott, it was a celebration of Puerto Rico and its rhythms, deftly mixing reggaeton, plena, salsa.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).

FLORIDO: The elaborate staging was also a feast for the eyes. It took us through Puerto Rican sugarcane fields to a Puerto Rican house party to a New York City block party to a Latino couple's wedding. And the choreography and the dozens of dancers were also a lot of fun to watch. It was clearly a showcase of the beauty and vibrancy of Latino cultures. But it was also, Scott, dripping with symbolism and with political messaging.

DETROW: Right. This comes after a full year of something we talk about nearly every day on the show, massive deportation efforts. And at the Grammys last week, Bad Bunny made headlines shouting ICE out and criticizing the president's crackdown on illegal immigration.

FLORIDO: Yeah. He was not so explicitly political last night, but he did send very clear messages that he disagrees with the administration's mass deportation policies and its narrowing view of who gets to be American. Listen to the only words - some of the only words that Bad Bunny did speak in English last night.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BAD BUNNY: God bless America.

(CHEERING)

BAD BUNNY: (Inaudible) Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador...

FLORIDO: After saying God bless America, he named every country in the Americas from the south to north, ending with the United States and Canada and his homeland, Puerto Rico. Dancers around him held up the flags of each country. It was a broadly inclusive vision of the Americas. And there were also other symbols of protest, Scott. We saw street vendors selling tacos and shaved ice, the kinds of vendors who are cherished in many American cities but who today are being whisked away by immigration agents.

DETROW: Yeah. And that leads to the inevitable backlash to this show, right? Many conservatives...

FLORIDO: Yeah.

DETROW: ...Including President Trump, were not happy that the NFL picked Bad Bunny. And the conservative group Turning Point USA hosted an alternative halftime show.

FLORIDO: Yeah. In a post on Truth Social, President Trump last night called Bad Bunny's show an affront to the greatness of America. And he also wrote, quote, "nobody understands a word this guy is saying." The conservative counterprogram was a much more modest concert held in front of a small crowd. Some people were wearing MAGA hats. It was streamed online and on a few conservative channels. Singer Brantley Gilbert kicked it off by declaring this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BRANTLEY GILBERT: This is real American.

FLORIDO: The show was not explicitly political, Scott, except for a few moments. After headliner Kid Rock performed, the audience began chanting the name of Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point founder who was assassinated last year.

DETROW: Two very different views of Americanism on display. But, look, in Bad Bunny's big performance, what else stood out to you, Adrian?

FLORIDO: Well, you know, at the very end, Bad Bunny held up a football and he pointed it directly at the camera. It was inscribed with the words, together we are America. And then he said, in Spanish...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BAD BUNNY: (Speaking Spanish).

FLORIDO: We're still here.

DETROW: And that's not the only time he's used that phrase.

FLORIDO: That's right. It's something that he's said about Puerto Ricans resisting displacement on the island - we're still here. But last night, it took on a wider meaning given the government's efforts to expel immigrants. As Bad Bunny said this, the jumbo screen at Levi's Stadium flashed the words, the only thing more powerful than hate is love.

DETROW: That is NPR's Adrian Florido. Thank you so much.

FLORIDO: Thank you, Scott.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5707262

2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026 • 11:20 AM EST | VIEW ON NPR

Ilia Malinin's Olympic backflip made history. But he's not the first to do it

By Rachel Treisman

Want more Olympics updates? Subscribe here to get our newsletter, Rachel Goes to the Games, delivered to your inbox for a behind-the-scenes look at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

MILAN — Ilia Malinin's skyward jumps have earned him the nickname the "Quad God," but it's his backflip that everyone seems to be talking about.

The U.S. figure skater performed the move in his first two programs on Olympic ice, landing the latter on a single blade and sending the arena into a frenzy.

"It's honestly such an incredible roar-feeling in the environment — once I do that backflip everyone is like screaming for joy and they're just out of control," Malinin said. "The backflip is something that I'm sure a lot of people know the basics of … so I think just having that really can bring in the non-figure skating crowd as well."

Malinin, who trained in gymnastics when he was younger, first debuted his backflip in competition in 2024 — the year the sport's governing body lifted its ban on the move.

His moves in Milan aren't just awe-inspiring, but historic: Malinin is the first person to legally land a backflip at the Olympics in five decades.

It was controversial from the start

Terry Kubicka, also an American, became the first skater to land a backflip in international competition at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics.

"There was a lot of controversy leading up to the Olympics, because I did it for the first time a month before at the U.S. Championships," Kubicka told U.S. Figure Skating decades later. "At the time, there was no ruling on as how it would be [scored] and the feedback that I got was that judges did not really see it as a pro or con because they didn't know how to judge it."

The International Skating Union, the sport's governing body, banned the backflip the following year, in part because of the level of danger and in part because it violated the principle of jumps landing on one skate.

But the backflip didn't totally disappear. Some elite skaters — including 1984 gold medalist Scott Hamilton — continued landing the move in non-competitive settings, like exhibition shows.

And one skater even dared to bring a banned backflip on to Olympic ice.

France's Surya Bonaly landed a backflip on one blade at the 1998 Nagano Games, even while injured, in what is widely considered a brave act of defiance.

She knew she couldn't get the scores she needed to win, but was determined to make her mark on history anyway. It did cost her points but it also cemented her trailblazing legacy, especially as a Black athlete in sport with a relative lack of diversity.

"I appreciate more and I feel more proud of myself now, today, than years ago for when I did it," Bonaly said in 2020.

The backflip comes back

In recent years, a handful of skaters — including U.S. defending Olympic champion Nathan Chen — have backflipped at exhibition galas, much to viewers' delight.

The move reached an even bigger crowd at European Championships in 2024, when French skater Adam Siao Him Fa landed one in his free skate program, enjoying such a comfortable lead that the deduction wouldn't matter. He did it again at the World Championships the same year, and still walked away with a bronze medal.

In a full-circle twist, Kubicka — the first to land an Olympic backflip — was a member of the technical panel that watched Siao Him Fa do it at worlds, and gave him the requisite two-point deduction, almost exactly 50 years later.

Later that year, the International Skating Union officially reversed its backflip ban starting in the 2024-2025 season, explaining on its meeting agenda that "somersault type jumps are very spectacular and nowadays it is not logical anymore to include them as illegal movements."

The backflip can no longer lose a skater points, but it doesn't count toward their technical score either (it's not a required move). It could, however, boost a skater's artistic score and confidence.

"Oh, that's my favorite part," U.S. competitive skater Will Annis, 21, said after landing a backflip at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in January. "Every time the crowd goes crazy for it, and it's actually easier than everything else I do, so it's really fun."

His definition of "easier" is that "you can be a little off and still land it" on two feet.

Annis told NPR he had long been able to do a backflip on the ground, but didn't bother learning how to bring it to the ice until he saw Siao Him Fa do it. He was inspired by that protest but didn't have time to rebel himself: He says the ban was lifted just days before his first competition.

Full article: https://www.npr.org/nx-s1-5705380

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FBI releases photos and video of potential suspect in Guthrie disappearance: 2026 Feb 10

DHS faces funding deadline. And, courts fast-track Somali asylum seeker hearings: 2026 Feb 10

How the use of AI and 'deepfakes' plays a role in the search for Nancy Guthrie: 2026 Feb 10

In New Orleans, some Mardi Gras groups swap plastic beads for glass for parade throws: 2026 Feb 10

Savannah Guthrie releases video pleading for her mother's return: 2026 Feb 10

Mikaela Shiffrin misses podium in team Alpine combined event, as U.S. takes bronze: 2026 Feb 10

World

Pakistan-Afghanistan border closures paralyze trade along a key route: 2026 Feb 10

Reporter's notebook: A Dutch speedskater and a U.S. influencer walk into a bar …: 2026 Feb 10

In Beirut, Lebanon's cats of war find peace on university campus: 2026 Feb 10

Britain's PM faces calls to resign over former ambassador's ties to Epstein: 2026 Feb 10

Cuban fuel shortage: U.S. blockade of oil grounds flights in Cuba: 2026 Feb 10

Israel passes measure to make purchasing real estate from Palestinians easier: 2026 Feb 10

Venezuelans test limits of new freedoms: 2026 Feb 10

Trump is threatening to block a new bridge between Detroit and Canada from opening: 2026 Feb 10

Japan's Takaichi to pursue conservative agenda after election landslide: 2026 Feb 9

Law

Ghislaine Maxwell refuses to answer House committee's questions, appeals for clemency: 2026 Feb 10

Ghislaine Maxwell appeals for clemency from Trump as she declines to answer questions: 2026 Feb 10

Politics

Top 5 takeaways from the House immigration oversight hearing: 2026 Feb 10

Malinowski concedes to Mejia in Democratic House special primary in New Jersey: 2026 Feb 10

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., talks about viewing the unredacted Epstein files: 2026 Feb 10

How much power does the Fed chair really have?: 2026 Feb 10

Immigration officials testify before House as DHS funding deadline approaches: 2026 Feb 10

Top immigration officials to testify before House as DHS funding deadline approaches: 2026 Feb 10

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., talks about DHS reforms ahead of looming funding deadline: 2026 Feb 10

Health

This complex brain network may explain many of Parkinson's stranger symptoms: 2026 Feb 10

In a world built for sitting, here's how to stay active — even when stuck inside: 2026 Feb 10

Hospitals are posting prices for patients. It's mostly industry using the data: 2026 Feb 10

Modest 'mental exercise' can reduce risk of dementia for decades, study finds: 2026 Feb 9

Olympic COVID restrictions are gone, but some athletes are still self-quarantining: 2026 Feb 9

Need a new path in midlife? There's a school for that and a quiz to kickstart it: 2026 Feb 9

New study finds many tuberculosis diagnoses may be incorrect: 2026 Feb 9

March for Life attendees may have been exposed to measles, DC Health warns: 2026 Feb 9

Science

An ape, a tea party — and the ability to imagine: 2026 Feb 10

US scientists adapt after the Trump administration's funding blows: 2026 Feb 9

Climate

The quest to warn everyone on Earth about deadly weather: 2026 Feb 10

Race

A daughter reexamines her own family story in 'The Mixed Marriage Project': 2026 Feb 10

Culture

'E-bike for your feet': How bionic sneakers could change human mobility: 2026 Feb 10

Students' push for change results in new Latino history exhibit in Chicago: 2026 Feb 10

Double Dutch is having a moment: 2026 Feb 10

The glass left from yahrzeit candles can be another way to memorialize a loved one: 2026 Feb 9

Bad Bunny's joyful defiance captivates Super Bowl halftime: 2026 Feb 9

Ilia Malinin's Olympic backflip made history. But he's not the first to do it: 2026 Feb 9