Consider This from NPR

Imagine standing in water shallow enough to just barely hit the soles of your feet. And then it rises so fast that in just about ten minutes, it's up to your neck. That's how fast the Guadalupe River in Texas rose last week, according to state officials. Twenty-six feet in less than an hour. That flooding left dozens dead, devastated homes and businesses. Officials, emergency crews and volunteers...

If you're a parent, decisions about vaccines have gotten a lot more confusing recently. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s health department is walking back longstanding recommendations. NPR's Pien Huang speaks with a pediatrician and a vaccine researcher to discuss how the changes may affect public health - and how frontline conversations are going between pediatricians and families. For sponsor-free episo...

Independence Day means different things to each of us. On this 249th birthday for America, we spend some time looking at different definitions of America by revisiting NPR's 2018 series: American Anthem — which had the simple goal of telling 50 stories about 50 songs that have become galvanizing forces in American culture. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for C onsider This+ via...

President Trump put essentially his entire domestic agenda in one bill. It would significantly cut clean energy incentives, Medicaid and food assistance programs — and double down on tax cuts, immigration enforcement and national defense. Despite opposition from Democrats, and divides within the Republican Party, it passed through Congress. How did that happen? And what does it mean for American t...

This summer marks 80 years since the end of World War II when Allied forces liberated Nazi-occupied Europe, and also began to discover the horrific scale of the Holocaust. An estimated six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime. With the passage of time, there are fewer and fewer survivors who can tell the stories of what they witnessed and endured. Once fringe ideas of Holoc...

The massive tax and spending bill central to President Trump's agenda is one step closer to reality. After weeks of negotiations and 49 consecutive votes that started Monday morning, the senate approved President Trump's signature domestic policy bill around lunch time Tuesday. It now goes back to the House of Representatives where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson will have to reconcile the senate...

The massive budget bill that Senate Republicans are debating pays for some of its tax cuts by slashing hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid spending. The latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates nearly 12 million people will lose health insurance if the Senate version of the bill becomes law. Trump insists the cuts come from eliminating waste, fraud and abus...

A number of Supreme Court decisions handed down this term have expanded the power of the president while limiting the power of the courts. How has this term changed the relationship of the judicial and the executive branches? NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Greg Stohr from Bloomberg about what we've learned about the makeup and direction of the court from this year's rulings. For sponsor-free episo...

Although President Trump launched air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, the administration has chosen a different path when dealing with Kim Jong Un, the leader of nuclear-armed North Korea. For our Reporter's Notebook series, host Scott Detrow speaks with NPR correspondent Anthony Kuhn about covering Trump and Kim's past negotiations and the difficulties of reporting on North Korea. For...

Three different federal judges have issued nationwide blocks to President Trump's executive order to deny U.S. citizenship to some babies born to immigrants in the U.S. These court orders are called universal injunctions. But when the case reached the Supreme Court, the administration didn't focus on the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. Instead, government lawyers put most of their...

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has spent years spreading doubt about the safety of vaccines and linking them to autism. Dozens of studies have debunked the theory, but it has nevertheless persisted for years. Part of the reason why may be that autism diagnoses have soared over the last few decades. Dr. Allen Frances is psychiatrist who led the task force that created...

Tens of millions of people across the US are currently under a heat advisory. And the extreme heat isn't just affecting people. You may have seen videos online of the heat causing asphalt roads to buckle. It is impacting rail travel too. Amtrak has been running some trains more slowly, as have the public transit systems of Washington and Philadelphia. Mikhail Chester, an engineering professor at A...

Three years ago, the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. As the legal landscape shifted, the medical landscape of reproductive care was faced with a serious question. Where would people turn for abortions? Abby Wendle, from NPR's Embedded podcast team, has been reporting on self-managed abortions, and how the medical community's views on it have change...

On Monday, Iran struck back against the United States, firing missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar. The retaliatory strikes come two days after the U.S. attacked nuclear sites in Iran. In a twist, President Trump thanked Iran on social media for giving advance notice of the attacks, "which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured." Host Mary Louise Kelly speaks with NPR corre...

The U.S. joined Israel's war on Iran and over the weekend bombed three of the country's nuclear sites, including Fordo, located deep inside a mountain. In the aftermath of the bombing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Trump on the attack. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted that the U.S.'s attack would have "everlasting consequences." The move by the Trump admini...

Frank Langfitt has covered the world. Now he reports for NPR as a roving correspondent, focusing on stories that help us understand a changing America. Recently, he covered both the military parade that brought tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling through the nation's capital, as well as the No Kings protests where people in dozens of cities across the country rallied against politicizatio...

Last weekend, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed at their home by a man impersonating a police officer. The attack comes amid a rise in political violence. Last year alone, Capitol Police investigated more than 9,000 threats against members of the U.S. Congress. Former U.S. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords knows the horrors of gun violence onl...

Many Afghans who helped the US military or who were persecuted by the Taliban for other reasons found refuge in the United States. They were granted Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, by the US government. Now the Trump administration has revoked TPS for Afghans. So what happens now? NPR's Monika Evstatieva reports that for thousands of Afghans in the United States, and many stuck in limbo abroad...

In 2003, the U.S. launched a war in Iraq based on what turned out to be bad intelligence about weapons programs, then spent years mired in a conflict with no clear end. Today, President Trump is threatening to bring the U.S. military into another Middle East conflict. As with Iraq, the justification for a potential attack on Iran is the alleged threat of a nuclear weapon. We talk to journalist Ste...

The United States has worked for decades to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Now Israel says it is attacking Iran to remove that threat. What are the stakes in this conflict, not only for the two nations directly involved, but for the US and the world? Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Aaron Stein, the President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute about those stakes and the history of...

Around this time every year, the U.S. Supreme Court ends its term with a bang. The Justices typically save their biggest rulings for June. Outstanding cases include the president's birthright citizenship executive order, a Tennessee law blocking gender-affirming care and a Texas law requiring age verification for porn sites. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg walks through the cases th...

Since the start of his second term, President Trump has been at odds with the federal courts. The protests in Los Angeles are just the latest series of events to raise huge questions about presidential power: in this case, whether the president can use military force to control protests. NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who has a stark warning: that Trump's...

Kentucky is one of the poorest states and is likely to see billions of dollars cut from Medicaid and other government benefits if Trump's spending bill becomes law. For our weekly Reporter's Notebook series we hear from Kentucky Public Radio's Sylvia Goodman and Joe Sonka . The two reporters traveled through rural eastern Kentucky to gauge how cuts could impact people who rely on federal assistanc...

Early Friday local time, Israel finally did what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been threatening to do for years: It launched a massive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, killing top military commanders, nuclear scientists and — according to Iran — dozens of Iranian civilians. The attacks have once again plunged the volatile region into uncharted waters. NPR correspondent Hadeel al-Shalch...

Kilmar Abrego Garcia: a name that's become near-synonymous with the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown. Abrego Garcia was arrested by ICE agents on March 12th, as he was leaving his job in Baltimore. In the days and months that followed, the fate of the 29-year-old father of three was in the hands of the Trump administration and El Salvador's President. At the time of his arrest the admi...