NPR News

When the annual Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC for short — kicks off Thursday in Orlando, Fla., it might as well be called TPAC.

That's because this year, it is all about Trump.

The former president will headline the event with a Sunday afternoon keynote address, his first speech since leaving office last month.

The day before President Biden's allies on Capitol Hill were set to roll out his sweeping immigration overhaul, a group of activists rallied outside of the headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, projecting a message onto the building's façade.

"ICE is deporting and torturing people," the all-caps message read. "Abolish ICE and CBP," a reference to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The Federal Aviation Administration must address "weaknesses" in its oversight of Boeing that led the agency to miss flaws that contributed to two deadly crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, a federal watchdog has found.

An inspector general's report from the Department of Transportation said U.S. aviation regulators do not understand the plane's flight control software that caused two devastating crashes in 2018 and 2019.

More than 500,000 people have died in the U.S. from COVID-19 since the pandemic hit this country and the world just over a year ago. NPR is remembering some of those who lost their lives by listening to the music they loved and hearing their stories. We're calling our tribute Songs Of Remembrance.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg is facing calls to leave office after newly released video evidence has raised questions about his conduct in the car crash that killed a pedestrian last year.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's draft proposal for a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, calling it "partisan by design."

President Biden's nominee to lead the CIA, William Burns, spent more than three decades as a diplomat. Yet Burns sounded very much like a national security chief at his confirmation hearing Wednesday as he described how the U.S. should be wary of China and its leader Xi Jinping.

"There are a growing number of areas in which Xi's China is a formidable, authoritarian adversary," Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee in his opening remarks.

Seeking to correct an injustice from more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Police Commission voted to posthumously reinstate and honor one of LAPD's first Black police officers.

Robert Stewart spent 11 years on the force before he was unjustly fired, the commission said.

The five-member police commission voted unanimously to reinstate Stewart, Richard Tefank, the executive director of the commission, told NPR.

As President Joe Biden works to overhaul U.S. health care policy, few challenges will loom larger for his health secretary than restoring access to family planning while parrying legal challenges to abortion proliferating across the country.

Physicians, clinics and women's health advocates are looking to Xavier Becerra, Biden's nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, to help swiftly unwind Trump-era funding cuts and rules that have decimated the nation's network of reproductive health providers over the past four years.

Though attention has understandably been on COVID-19 over the last year, nearly as many people in the hospital have died with a different condition: sepsis. A study now casts doubt on a once-promising treatment for this disease.

In 2017, scientists thought they had found a remarkable advance. A researcher in Norfolk, Va., reported that a treatment involving intravenous vitamin C, thiamine, and steroids sharply reduced the risk of death in his sepsis patients.

Vaccines are like milk. Both make us stronger, but if stored at the wrong temperature, they spoil.

The Biden administration will distribute millions of face coverings to thousands of community health centers and food banks in an effort to help vulnerable Americans more easily mask up, officials said on Wednesday.

Amnesty International says it no longer considers jailed Russian anti-Kremlin activist Alexei Navalny a "prisoner of conscience," citing past comments he's made that "reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred."

The cost of repairing damages from the attack on the U.S. Capitol and related security expenses have already topped $30 million and will keep rising, Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton told lawmakers on Wednesday.

The events of Jan. 6, he said, were "difficult for the American people and extremely hard for all of us on campus to witness."

Blanton said that congressional appropriations committees have already approved a transfer request of $30 million to pay for expenses and extend a temporary perimeter fencing contract through March 31.

From Texas Standard:

As many Texans continue to work their way through the ripple effects of last week's storm and outages, there's little question that the operator of the electrical grid system in Texas is in the hot seat. Lawmakers are planning investigations and the governor is demanding the resignation of the chief of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.

From Texas Standard:

There’s been a lot of hype around how farmers can make money from selling the carbon their plants naturally remove from the air, but there are still questions about how much of a difference these markets can make in reducing greenhouse gases.  

The pandemic and polio are colliding in Pakistan.

It's definitely harder for the country to keep up its efforts to wipe out this highly contagious disease. (Pakistan is one of the few pockets in the world where it's still circulating.) But the lessons learned from its polio effort are proving helpful for the coronavirus vaccination campaign.

The backstory

First, a bit of background is in order.

National Book Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is best known for his stories about the Vietnam War, including the 1990 novel, The Things They Carried. But he says he'd give up every book he's written if it meant more time on earth with his two young sons.

Now 74, O'Brien didn't become a father until his late 50s. He says he was initially worried that having children would curtail his ability to write.

A year ago, the kindergartners learning English in Tanya Gan Lim's class were thriving. Back then, she'd bring in props and pictures to help her students learn the language and sound out words. Then she'd lavish them with praise, even if they stumbled, to build their confidence.