NPR News

Oregon legislative leaders want to help federal workers in the state who continue to work without pay.

Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, said Friday that it’s unfair that only federal workers who are furloughed without pay are able to apply for unemployment benefits.

“I’d like to think this Legislature will not take the view this is a federal employee, it’s a federal problem,” Courtney said during a legislative preview with reporters. “We will step up.”

Oregon’s bottle deposit system is recycling more containers than ever before despite major disruptions in global recycling markets.

Last year, Oregon recycled 90 percent of the beverage containers covered by its bottle deposit system. The rate has jumped from 64 percent just two years ago and the total number of bottles recycled reached an all-time high of 2 billion in 2018.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee will take his most visible step yet towards a possible bid for president when he visits New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, on Monday and Tuesday.

According to a report by Billboard magazine on Friday afternoon, R. Kelly has been dropped by RCA Records. The move comes in the wake of a documentary series called Surviving R. Kelly that aired on Lifetime and cataloged more than 25 years of accusations of sexual and physical abuse made against Kelly by a number of women, including seven who were interviewed on camera.

Last summer, All Things Considered and Atlas Obscura took a road trip up the West Coast. Along the way, they met Bob Carr, the creator of Bob's Crystal Cave near Joshua Tree, Calif., where he welcomed visitors for 15 years.

Bob died earlier this month at age 80. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth and daughter Zena. Bob "died as he lived — on his own terms and with dignity and grace," Elizabeth says.

A 

An Iranian-American woman arrested five days ago during a visit to the U.S. is testifying behind closed doors to a grand jury in Washington, D.C., a U.S. federal judge said Friday.

The disclosure by Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, marked the first time any U.S. authority has provided information on the mystery surrounding Marzieh Hashemi, an anchor on Press TV, the English-language version of Iran's state television.

A new proposal from the Trump administration could dramatically change the way the government cleans up radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Nucl

Officials in Columbia, S.C., have evacuated more than 400 people from a public housing complex after finding multiple gas leaks that constituted an "imminent danger to life."

Two men were discovered dead in separate units on Thursday morning. Police haven't confirmed the deaths are tied to the gas leaks, but say they don't suspect foul play.

It has been a long, long time since New York City's newsstands have been bereft of copies of The Forward. Founded as a Yiddish-language daily in 1897, the newspaper once known as The Jewish Daily Forward endured a host of major changes over its long life span — but through them all, the small publication reliably went to press with news that its predominantly American Jewish audience often couldn't find elsewhere.

But that will change come springtime.

In the years following her previous album, 2014's Are We There, Sharon Van Etten has had her hands full. She not only reissued her debut, the singer also acted in the Netflix series The OA, became a mom, wrote a movie score, and began pursuing a degree in psychology at Brooklyn College.

The Department of Defense released Friday the names of three Americans who died in a suicide bombing at a restaurant in Manbij in northern Syria. A fourth U.S. casualty was a military contractor and has not yet been identified in the attack that is said to have killed 15 people.

I watched a sea lion die last summer. The large animal was emaciated, its spine and ribs visible below its fur. Its hind limbs were immobile as it dragged itself from the shore to the water. Once in the harbor, without the use of its rear flippers, the sea lion struggled to stay afloat. It sank, resurfaced and sank again.

I called a hotline, but it was too late. The animal never came back up.

Latin American singer-songwriter Juan Wauters exists somewhere at the cross-section of debonair and everyman, a phenomenon likely explained by his teenage migration from Uruguay to Queens in the early 2000s. After signing to Captured Tracks, Wauters quickly became a fixture of New York's DIY circuit, providing lead vocals and guitar for pop-punk project The Beets and releasing several solo albums, including 2014's Who Me? and 2015's N.A.P.: North American Poetry.

Updated at 3:53 p.m. ET

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have agreed to a second meeting following their initial summit last year.

"President Donald J. Trump met with Kim Yong Chol for an hour and half, to discuss denuclearization and a second summit, which will take place near the end of February. The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at a place to be announced at a later date," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced after Trump met Friday in the Oval Office with the North Korean envoy.

Zimbabwe has constricted Internet access amid a week of deadly protests following an increase in gasoline prices.

Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, the country's largest mobile phone operator, said early Friday that it had been directed by the government to shut down all Internet access for the second time in a week.

Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November in part by promising to work across the aisle and get things done. Now the newly elected freshmen must decide how they will use their newfound power in the face of the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history.

"There is no such thing as Chicano hippies! And playing Mexican music??"

That was my father's reaction when I described seeing five honest-to-goodness Chicano hippies with beards and ponytails playing mariachi music at a Chicano student leadership retreat at UC Davis in 1975. Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles, the group called themselves.

Tesla is reducing its workforce by 7 percent — more than 3,000 jobs, according to a recent staffing estimate — as the company continues its efforts to bring lower-cost electric vehicles to market.

CEO Elon Musk announced the layoffs on Friday in an email to staff, saying the company is facing "an extremely difficult challenge."

Updated at 10:15 p.m. ET

The office of special counsel Robert Mueller used a rare statement on Friday night to dispute the report by BuzzFeed News that President Trump had instructed his former lawyer to lie to Congress.

The Justice Department announcement appeared not quite 24 hours after the explosive story from Thursday night. Although it didn't go into detail, the response suggested the story didn't correctly reflect the special counsel's dealings with Trump's ex-fixer.

About one-third of the more than 3 million Venezuelans who have fled their nation's deep economic crisis have settled in next-door Colombia. But some of these refugees, instead of finding safe haven, are being recruited into Colombia's guerrilla groups, human rights and military officials tell NPR.