NPR News

Chinese President Xi Jinping is ready for a change — specifically the transformation of the international system and China's role within it. In a 2016 speech before government ministers and provincial leaders, Xi provided an early signal of his intent: "China has become a major factor in changing the world political and economic landscapes. ... We need to work harder to turn our economic strength into international institutional authority."

The selections were winnowed down from 1,637 books.

On Wednesday, the National Book Foundation announced the 25 books that remain in the running for the National Book Awards, now in its 69th year.

The writers come from such places as Pittsburgh, Norway, Iran and Poland, and many of them have delved into some of the most pressing conversations of our time: racism, masculinity, addiction, the destruction of indigenous culture, class divides and corporations.

And for the first time since the 1980s, the judges will also honor a work in translation.

When Sadie Dupuis, the lead singer and songwriter of Speedy Ortiz, started playing guitar in her early teens, she didn't think of herself as a female guitarist — at least at first.

"I knew that I was the only girl in my high school who played. But it wasn't until I started touring as an adult and seeing how few women were on bills that it started to really matter to me that I was a woman who could play technically challenging parts," Dupuis says.

Political junkies hoping to hear something new from the top two candidates for Oregon governor didn’t find much Tuesday night, as Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and Republican Rep. Knute Buehler met for their third and final debate.

Four years ago, Jocie Adams of The Low Anthem, stepped aside from the Rhode Island band she was a member of to begin the next evolution in her musical career as lead singer for Arc Iris. This Friday, Arc Iris will release its third album, Icon Of Ego, via Ba Da Bing Records.

Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city's eroded harbor. It's all part of Billion Oyster Project's restaurant shell-collection program.

The mottled spots giraffes are known for aren't random, according to a new study that suggests that the patterns are inherited maternally — and that they may impact the chances of a calf surviving its first few months of life.

The roundness and smoothness of a giraffe's spots are inherited through its mother, wildlife biology researchers reported in the academic journal PeerJ last week.

"Donald Trump!" said Melissa Brunner from Georgia, as she posed for a photo in front of the recently inaugurated U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

Beckah Shae, a Nashville-based singer-songwriter popular on Christian radio, snapped selfies alongside the creamy limestone wall inscription reading: "EMBASSY/UNITED STATES OF AMERICA/JERUSALEM, ISRAEL/DONALD J. TRUMP/PRESIDENT."

Doctors have gradually come to realize that people who survive a serious brush with death in the intensive care unit are likely to develop potentially serious problems with their memory and thinking processes.

This dementia, a side effect of intensive medical care, can be permanent. And it affects as many as half of all people who are rushed to the ICU after a medical emergency. Considering that 5.7 million Americans end up in intensive care every year, this is a major problem that until recently, has been poorly appreciated by medical caregivers.

In the basement of a suburban Philadelphia home, half a dozen high school freshman boys recently met to munch on chips and pretzels — and to talk about sexual assault in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

A Jewish group called Moving Traditions, sponsored by Temple Sinai in Dresher, Pa., brought them together as part of its programs to encourage teenagers to talk about this and other difficult issues.

Not so long ago — the administration of President George W. Bush — $1 million could get you elected to Congress. Now, four weeks from Election Day, Democrats say 60 of their candidates raised that much or more, just in the last three months.

Fueled by an energetic base of small donors, Democrats are going into the final stretch of the election with a substantial financial advantage, erasing Republicans' typical fundraising edge.

The end of the fight over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination sets up a new battleground over abortion rights, and activists on both sides of the issue are gearing up for what's likely to be a series of contentious battles from the high court to state legislatures.

A Missouri judge ruled on Tuesday that state election officials can no longer tell voters they must show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. The ruling blocks part of Missouri's voter identification law.

Cole County's Judge Richard Callahan said the state cannot advertise that a photo identification is required to cast a ballot. "No compelling state interest is served by misleading local election authorities and voters into believing a photo ID card is a requirement for voting," he wrote in his ruling.

Updated at 5:30 a.m. ET Thursday

Tropical Storm Michael is weakening as it churns across south-central Georgia.

On Wednesday, Michael was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. in more than a quarter-century, according to the National Hurricane Center.

UPDATE (Oct. 9, 1:35 p.m. PT) — Both Portland State University police officers who shot and killed an African-American man in June say they fired after they saw the man point a gun at them, according to grand jury transcripts released by the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office on Tuesday.

The transcripts reveal for the first time the officers' perspective of the moments leading up to the death of 45-year-old Jason Washington on June 29 outside the Cheerful Tortoise Bar in downtown Portland.

When people living with HIV walk out of prison, they leave with up to a month's worth of HIV medication in their pockets. What they don't necessarily leave with is access to health care or the services that will keep them healthy in the long term.

Lara Alqasem, a 22-year-old Florida native, landed at Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport last Tuesday, expecting to start her studies in human rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Instead, she has spent the past week detained.

Alqasem, whose father is of Palestinian heritage, was barred from entering the country and accused of supporting a boycott of Israel that was started by Palestinian leaders.

Passwords that took seconds to guess, or were never changed from their factory settings. Cyber vulnerabilities that were known, but never fixed. Those are two common problems plaguing some of the Department of Defense's newest weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The flaws are highlighted in a new GAO report, which found the Pentagon is "just beginning to grapple" with the scale of vulnerabilities in its weapons systems.