Like a lot of young women her age, 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson had a date Friday night — but unlike many of her peers, Jefferson's date was with her 8-year-old nephew. They were enjoying a heated video game that went into the early hours of Saturday when police arrived at the house Jefferson shared with her mother. Officers were responding to a nonemergency call from James Smith, a neighbor who knew Jefferson's mother was not well. (Jefferson, a pre-med graduate of Xavier University, had...

Updated at 4 p.m. ET Turkish-backed militias carrying out attacks in northern Syria came very close to American forces on the ground on Tuesday, putting them and their base "directly at risk," a U.S. official in Syria tells NPR. "The Turkish forces violated a standing agreement with the U.S. to not get close enough to threaten U.S. troops on the ground," the official says. "U.S. forces responded with a show of force using aircraft to demonstrate the forces were prepared to defend themselves,...

Updated at 10:02 a.m. ET House investigators are hearing testimony Monday from Fiona Hill, the former White House adviser on Russia, who is appearing in private and faces questions as part of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Hill, 53, a British-born American foreign affairs expert, resigned as Trump's top Russia analyst just days before the president's controversial July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, an exchange that sparked the...

Updated at 8:11 p.m. ET The interim chief of the Fort Worth Police Department apologized on Tuesday to the family of Atatiana Jefferson in the aftermath of her fatal shooting by a police officer while she was in her home. "This incident has eroded the trust that we have built with our community and we must now work even harder to ensure that trust is restored," said Interim Police Chief Ed Kraus. Aaron Dean, the officer who shot Jefferson, resigned from the department and has been charged...

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money' s newsletter. You can sign up here . Last year, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was battling to win the Democratic primary, his campaign solicited a donation from the Greater New York Hospital Association, according to a recent report from The New York Times . The hospital lobbying group gave over $1 million to the New York State Democratic Party. And not long after, according to the Times, "the state quietly authorized an across-the...

In an interview with ABC News that aired Tuesday morning, Hunter Biden said his involvement in the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma was, in retrospect, "poor judgment on my part," although he said he did "nothing wrong at all." Biden asked, "was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is ... a swamp in many ways? Yeah." Biden also reiterated that he will not work for any foreign companies should his father become president. Biden added that while he doesn't regret being...

A British couple and their 3-month-old son are being detained in a federal immigration facility in Pennsylvania after they say they accidentally strayed across the U.S.-Canada border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested the family for unlawfully entering the country while on vacation in British Columbia. The family said that while driving, they swerved down an unmarked road to avoid an animal. "This is how the scariest experience of our entire lives started," wrote Eileen...

This year's Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars who revolutionized the effort to end global poverty: Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT and Michael Kremer of Harvard are essentially credited with applying the scientific method to an enterprise that, until recently, was largely based on gut instincts. But how does their approach work in practice? Why is it considered so ground-breaking? And how much has it actually changed life for the world's poorest? Here's an...

Just over a month after Hurricane Dorian slammed into the northern Bahamas, parts of the island nation are still in ruins, thousands of people remain displaced and rebuilding has only just begun. "We are moving as quickly as we can to get up and running," says Michael Jones. "But when that will be is anyone's guess." Jones is standing in front of the business he's run in Marsh Harbour for the last eight years. It's the largest town on Great Abaco Island and before the storm was the commercial...

A thief walked into a San Francisco gallery on Sunday afternoon, plucked a rare Salvador Dalí from an easel in the front window, and strode out the door. Rasjad Hopkins, associate director at Dennis Rae Fine Art Gallery, was working at the time. The door to the gallery was open, and Hopkins had his back turned. "Snatch and run," Hopkins tells NPR. It took just a few minutes to realize the etching was gone. For some reason, the work hadn't been locked with a tether as it normally was. Hopkins...