
Former USAID head grieves its closure while hoping for its future
Former USAID administrator Samantha Power reflects on a year since USAID's shutdown under the Trump administration and the new direction of US foreign aid.

Former USAID administrator Samantha Power reflects on a year since USAID's shutdown under the Trump administration and the new direction of US foreign aid.

Former President Jacob Zuma is "showing the middle finger" to South Africa after it emerged he met one of the Indian businessmen allegedly at the heart of a huge corruption scandal. A photograph of Zuma and Ajay Gupta in an Indian temple was shared by Indian media this week.

Any Israeli attempt to kill Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, or Mohammad Ghalibaf, the Parliament speaker, would have derailed peace talks, American officials feared.

Lately I've been reading a lot about early Christian martyrs and the late Roman Empire. No, really.

Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine's Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.
▶ VideoWe begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He was addressing the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. The late actor James Earl Jones read the historic address during a performance of Voices of a People's History of the United States, which was co-edited by Howard Zinn.

Funeral ceremonies and processions for Iran's late supreme leader will take place between July 3-9 in several cities across Iran and Iraq before his burial in Mashhad.

On the eve of America's 250th birthday, NPR's Michel Martin asks House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York about the Democratic Party's midterm future.

Lam Wing-kee, who defied China by selling material critical of Beijing, passed away after battling lung cancer.

While relief could come to the Great Lakes and parts of the Northeast over the weekend, the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast will stay hot.

For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.
▶ VideoIn a July Fourth special broadcast, longtime technology reporter Karen Hao discusses her book Empire of AI, which reveals how artificial intelligence companies—especially OpenAI—are accumulating political and economic power while causing significant social, labor, and environmental harms, including worker exploitation in Kenya and threats to freshwater resources in Chile.