NPR News

At his first campaign rally after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump appeared to back away from supporting a possible expansion of background checks in favor of a push for more attention to mental illness.

"There is a mental illness problem that has to be dealt with. It's not the gun that pulls the trigger — it's the person holding the gun," Trump said to roars and a standing ovation from the Manchester, N.H., crowd.

A federal appeals court in California ruled that migrant children detained by U.S. immigration authorities must be provided with edible food, clean water, and basic hygiene items such as soap and toothbrushes, in accordance with a decades-old court order.

North Korea rejected further peace talks with Seoul on Friday on the same day it launched at least two projectiles — the sixth such test in a month, according to South Korea's military.

The statement from North Korea followed a speech on Thursday by South Korean President Moon Jae-in marking the 74th anniversary of Korean independence. In it, Moon vowed reunification of the Korean peninsula by 2045 — a subject that Pyongyang views as provocative.

A standard river barge can hold about the same amount as 60 semitrucks. In early June, 642 of them had floated to a standstill near American Commercial Barge Line's office outside Cairo, Ill.

"That's just me. That's not the other fleets in the area," said Mark Glaab, facility manager there. "That's just ACBL."

When Elizabeth Coffey-Williams first came out to her family as transgender in the late 1960s, the language of gender identity wasn't what it is today.

"A lot of the words that they have today, like transgender and non-binary, they didn't have them," Elizabeth, who was in her early 20s at the time, told her niece Jennifer Coffey in a recent StoryCorps interview.

The southern resident killer whales that live off the coast of Washington state are hungry, because there are fewer and fewer of the salmon they depend on. To help them, the state is looking at removing a series of dams.

Dam removal would help salmon travel up the river to spawn and down the river to the ocean, where the orcas can eat them.

Yoel Alonso sat in a cell for 10 months before he ever met with a lawyer. His wife had to travel 1,000 miles to visit him at the remote Louisiana facility where he was detained.

Alonso is not imprisoned for committing a crime. In fact, he turned himself in to immigration officials last October, seeking asylum from Cuba. Since then, he has been detained in two rural facilities — first in Louisiana, and now in Adams County, Miss. — where he is faced with daunting legal hurdles. Chief among them: Alonso has met his lawyer only once in his nearly 11 months in federal custody.

Asian and European markets put in a mixed performance a day after fears of a looming global recession triggered an 800-point drop in the Dow — one of the biggest one-day sell-offs on Wall Street ever.

In Asia, indexes in China and Hong Kong were mostly in positive territory, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite and Hang Seng both posting modest gains. South Korea and India were also up.

Updated at 5:41 p.m. ET

Planned Parenthood says it will formally withdraw from the nation's family planning program for low-income people within days, unless a federal court intervenes.

Updated at 4:22 p.m. ET Thursday

Officials in Philadelphia are praising city law enforcement for peacefully resolving a chaotic episode Wednesday night in which a gunman armed with an AR-15 and a handgun fired off more than 100 rounds, hitting six police officers, then barricaded himself inside a residence, creating a more than seven-hour standoff.

The suspect is now in custody and all six wounded officers have been released from local hospitals.

When they started practicing medicine, most surgeons say, there was little or no information about just how many pain pills patients needed after specific procedures.

Most children enrolled in Medicaid who get a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder don't get timely or appropriate treatment afterward. That's the conclusion of a report published Thursday by a federal watchdog agency, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General.

Japan's new emperor followed in his father's footsteps, expressing "deep remorse" for his country's role in World War II as part of an annual ceremony marking its surrender, while Prime Minister Shinzo Abe followed another recent tradition on Thursday — sending an offering to the Yasukuni shrine that honors, among others, some of Japan's most notorious war criminals.

Fifty years ago, the tiny town of Bethel, N.Y., was transformed into a teeming city of more than 400,000 people brought together by peace, love and music. Today, the site of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, as it was officially called, is on the National Register of Historic Places. For some who were there, it's a place of pilgrimage, memories and the site of a museum full of memorabilia.

At 74, Steven Hoffenberg spends a lot of time reflecting on his long and checkered past, which included a lengthy prison sentence for running a Ponzi scheme.

Since last weekend, he says his thoughts have increasingly turned to the man he says conspired with him in that scheme — the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in his cell at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center last Saturday.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the nation's most prestigious universities, stands accused of hurting workers in the company's retirement plan by engaging in an improper relationship with the financial firm Fidelity.

A lawsuit headed to trial in September alleges that MIT ignored the advice of its own consultants and allowed Fidelity to pack the university's retirement plan with high-fee investment funds that ended up costing employees tens of millions of dollars. In return, the lawsuit said, MIT leveraged millions of dollars in donations from Fidelity.