"Life from NPR News and Washington, I'm Windsor Johnston.
The outcome of Tuesday's election in Virginia is raising new questions about how much control Democrats could gain in the midterms. Voters narrowly passed a measure that will likely put more Democrats in the House. Virginia is one of several states looking to offset President Trump's push to redraw congressional maps to favor Republicans.
Governor Abigail Spamberger says the vote sends a broader message about what people want."
“"I think that what it shows is that voters want to take a stand against so much of”
the chaos that they see in Washington that's impacting their lives. And the sort of gamesmanship that the President has pursued, they don't want that going uncontested. And we had the opportunity with the votes of the people with a referendum to take a stand and push back against that."
The new map could allow Democrats to win 10 of Virginia's 11 congressional seats up from 6 currently.
El Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified on Capitol Hill 4 as second straight day, appearing
before a Senate committee Kennedy said that he'll restore a specialized service for LGBTQ+ youth on the 98 suicide and crisis lifeline. NPR's retu-changery reports the White House shut down the service last year. The 98 lifeline offered a press-three option for LGBTQ+ youths to get specialized mental health support until it was shuttered last year.
“In February of this year, President Trump restored funding for that service in a new funding”
bill, but the service hasn't been restored yet. At the Senate hearing this week, Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin asked Secretary Kennedy if he plans to restore the service. "I do, Senator, and President Trump has lots of faith that we shouldn't be dividing people that we should be being inclusive." But I did hear you just say, "Yes, you commit working on getting it up now."
Kennedy did not offer a timeline for when the service would be up and running again, retu-chaturgy and peer news. Tesla reported surprisingly strong first-quarter earnings, although CEO Elon Musk cautioned investors that the company will be spending big in the months ahead. In PR's Camila Dominozki reports Tesla continues to stay his future on new technologies.
EV sales helped drive the higher-than-expected profits.
But that positive cash flow is dwarfed by the $25 billion Tesla plans to spend this year
on things like chips, software, and manufacturing lines to build a humanoid robot called Optimus. On the sunny rooftop of the Tesla diner in Los Angeles, Optimus was not scooping popcorn as it's famously done on social media, that kind of disappointed Tesla investor Alan Jung, but he's still all in on Musk's vision for the future.
“"I think Tesla will change the world of human beings."”
And it's that faith, more than any single quarter's earnings, that his driven Tesla stock price. Camila Dominozki and PR news, Los Angeles. This is NPR.
A new study finds more than 17 million people in eight cities along the Atlantic and Gulf
Coast, face a higher risk of flooding. Researchers use machine learning, historical data, and multiple risk factors to map vulnerability in coastal areas. The study published in its science advances is one of the most detailed looks yet at flood risks in U.S. cities, among the findings more than 4 million people in New York City are
at risk, and in New Orleans, nearly all residents and buildings are considered vulnerable. Only humans lived in small communities across Africa for millennia. Climate influenced where they settled, along with disease, that's according to new research. Science reporter Ari Daniel has more on the new study. A team of researchers wondered whether malaria, a long time lethal disease carried by mosquitoes
may have influenced where early humans lived, so they took a set of climate models, spanning the last 74,000 years, overlaid where mosquitoes would have lived and compared that to where people were, based on archaeological evidence. The result was clear, as University of Cambridge evolutionary ecologist Andrea Manika. Basically, they were just not persisting in the areas where malaria would have been problematic.
Then some 15,000 years ago, when the sickle cell anemia mutation arose, which can offer protection against malaria, people's avoidance of the regions with the disease began to break down. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel. I'm Mr. Johnston, NPR News, in Washington.
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