NPR News

Conditions in St. Vincent have worsened, as La Soufrière volcano continues to push ash and debris into the atmosphere. Dozens of individuals have been rescued from the northern part of the island after refusing to evacuate last week. Officials are warning anyone still in the red and orange zones to flee as the mountain presents a new danger to anyone still in the area.

Voters in St. Louis last week delivered a historic victory for Tishaura Jones, the first Black woman elected mayor and the latest triumph for progressive candidates in the St. Louis region.

Amid unrest at local jails, surging gun violence and a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt people of color, Jones said race will no longer be an afterthought in the mayor's office.

In 2019, Danish authorities issued a report stating that the security situation in some parts of Syria had "improved significantly." Last year, that report was used as justification to begin reevaluating hundreds of Danish residence permits granted to Syrian refugees from the area around and including the capital Damascus.

Now some of those refugees are being told, officially, that their time in Denmark is up.

Two of the world's largest electric vehicle battery manufacturers reached a settlement on Sunday that President Biden called "a win for American workers and the American auto industry."

Tamika Palmer says the art exhibition dedicated to her daughter, Breonna Taylor, is everything she hoped it would be; it's peaceful, she says, "to be able to come to this place and just be filled with her spirit."

It's been nearly 13 months since Louisville Metro Police officers shot and killed Taylor in her home. Now a show in her honor is on view at Louisville's Speed Art Museum. It's called "Promise, Witness, Remembrance." Palmer never imagined her daughter would be memorialized this way.

In a narrow lane near Mumbai's docks, commuters on bicycles weave through the crowd as workers push wooden carts loaded with heavy burlap sacks into warehouses.

Thirty-eight-year-old laborer Mohammad Yaqoob unloads sacks full of marbles from a truck. When he gets tired and thirsty, he walks to an ornate stone structure in the middle of the bustling street. It's a drinking fountain, or pyau (sometimes spelled pyaav), as it's called in the local Hindi and Marathi languages.

Richard Thompson has been making music for a very long time. From his days in the late 1960s as a teenage guitar player and songwriter with the seminal British folk rock group Fairport Convention to his roaring partnership with then-wife Linda Thompson, and his many years as a solo artist beyond.

Duke University in North Carolina has announced that it will require students to have a COVID-19 vaccine when they return this fall. And the list of campuses with such policies is growing.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran on Sunday described a blackout at its underground Natanz atomic facility an act of "nuclear terrorism," raising regional tensions.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, stopped short of directly blaming anyone for the incident. Details remained few about what happened early Sunday morning at the facility, which initially was described as a blackout caused by the electrical grid feeding the site.

The U.S. economy added more than 900,000 jobs last month. For most White House officials, that would be considered a banner number. For Janelle Jones, the top economist at the Labor Department, there is much more work for the Biden administration to do.

Jones, the first Black woman to ever hold her position, says it would take a year of similar jobs reports just to get back to where the economy was before the pandemic. But even then, she says, getting back to the status quo is not enough.

La Soufrière, the highest peak on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, began to explosively erupt Friday morning, forcing thousands to evacuate as ash and smoke filled the sky.

And a larger eruption may be on the way.

Coney Island's eccentric orchestra is back: Roller coaster carts tick up, up, up and then plummet and swerve along winding tracks. Rides hum, buzz and creak to the beat of carnival music.

After a year of being shut down due to the pandemic, Coney Island's two amusement parks, Luna Park and Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, have reopened — at a third of their normal capacity.

At Deno's, kids and adults face off to see who can squirt water into the mouth of a clown fastest — and get a balloon to pop like a firecracker.

Any major push to pass an assault-style weapons ban in Colorado is looking increasingly less likely, with the legislature's highest-profile advocate for stricter gun laws saying now — weeks after the mass shooting that killed 10 people at a grocery store in the city of Boulder — isn't the time.

"It diverts all of the attention," says Democratic Rep. Tom Sullivan.

Judy Hoarfrost remembers the day she walked into China a half-century ago.

She was 15 and the youngest member of the U.S. pingpong team, which had been in Nagoya, Japan, competing in the World Championships. Two days before the tournament ended, Team China surprised the Americans with an invitation to come to their country and play some games.

Hundreds of Unit 5 students were quarantined in the past week as McLean County faces a third wave in coronavirus cases, this time affecting more young people.

When an assailant stormed a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., last month and fatally shot 10 people, the suspected weapon of choice — a Ruger AR-556 pistol — captured immediate attention. Not for what it technically was — a pistol — but for what it more closely resembled — an assault-style rifle.

I'd like to salute the great comedy writer Anne Beatts with some her own words. Anne died this week at the age of 74. But many of her signature, boundary-breaking routines are tricky to quote on a Saturday morning radio show.

"I'm often accused of 'going too far,' " she once said. "Behind my desire to shock is an even stronger desire to evade the 'feminine stereotype.' You say women are afraid of mice? I'll show you! I'll eat the mouse!"

From toilet paper to hand sanitizer to disinfecting wipes, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to some major shortages across the United States. While supermarket aisles may have finally returned to their fully stocked state, restaurants across the country are now facing a new and uniquely American shortage — ketchup.

"They are really sweating over it. I mean, it's costing a lot," says Heather Haddon, a restaurant reporter for The Wall Street Journal. "It's, you know, a service issue. So for these restaurant owners, it's not a laughing matter."