Life from NPR News in Washington, I'm Louise Skivone.
Congress has managed to avoid a government shutdown, as voters head to the polls this
“fall, passing a bill to extend federal spending through mid-December, and PR Sam Gringlass”
reports. The extension avoids the political peril of a prolonged shutdown ahead of the mid-terms. The Senate already passed the measure in August, and the House has now followed with a bipartisan vote 370-48. Congress failed to prevent two record-long shutdowns in the last year, as lawmakers came
to impasses over expiring House subsidies and proposals to limit the tactics of immigration agents. In the end, Democrats extracted few concessions, and Congress eventually passed funding agreements, set to expire at the end of this month. Pauks to fund the government again for a full fiscal year broke down this summer, now that
funding fight has been punted to the end of the year. Sam Gringlass NPR News The U.S. military is coming to grips with a big resignation, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll who clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth, turned in his resignation to directly to President Trump, and PR's Tom Bowman has to tell.
He told the President a number of things, according to a person close to him. He said the U.S. is losing the Iran war. He talked about how the war is drastically reduced to stockpile of missiles, talked about the difficulty in getting the Pentagon budget through under Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth. Then he said, modernizing the military, a key focus of Driscoll was not going forward,
because Heggseth is firing people who know what they're doing.
This person said Driscoll basically laid it down.
“I think there was a hope Driscoll would stay through the midterms, but I'm told he'll”
leave this week. And PR's Tom Bowman, at least two people are dead after a flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend. One person is still missing. The deluge adds to a growing list of summer floods, and PR's Ava Berger reports.
Saturday, water rushed through the Grand Canyon, a site that's becoming all too familiar. Surging waters have devastated communities across the country this summer. Last month, at least seven people died in floods in northwest Indiana, thousands were without power for more than a week. Earlier in July, West Virginia officials said that some areas received four and a half inches
of rain in 37 minutes. Researchers like Brad Udahl, a call out of state university, say climate change connects these intense floods, and is potentially making them stronger. It's not at all crazy to be thinking something unusual is going on here, and that what's unusual is climate change.
Scientists expect the warmer climate to continue to intensify rain in floods. Ava Berger and PR news. This week at the top of Mount Catadna in Maine, Dale Sanders, who calls himself Graybeard, became the oldest hiker to complete the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, it took him a year. He is 91 years old.
This is NPR News in Washington. As campaigning gets underway in France ahead of next spring's presidential election, a proposal by the country's far right is creating an uproar, NPR's elder beersley reports Marine Le Pen's conservative populist party wants to fight Islamist extremism by banning Muslim headscarves in public.
The party says to fight extremism, it plans to hold a referendum to ban wearing the Muslim headscarf in public. The proposal is causing an uproar playing out on talk shows like this one on BFMTV, opponents argue that it would be impossible to implement and a waste of time.
“But National Rally Parliamentarian, Laurel and Jaco Belly says the measure is important”
to preserve the character of the country. You can practice whatever religion you want, he said, but in public we should put no beliefs higher than those of the French Republic. So no veil. French secularism is meant to guarantee neutrality and bans all "ostentatious religious
signs in public schools and French government buildings, but not in public critics say the far right uses secularism to discriminate against French Muslims, Eleanor Beardsley and Pernou's Paris." Having been asked to do so by President Trump, Apple Maps has changed Lake Ontario's name to Lake America for U.S. users.
It's still Lake Ontario on Apple Maps in Canada. Apple follows the lead of Google, which after Trump signed an executive order changing the lake's name, went along with the change on its maps for Google users in the U.S. and they're again in Canada. It is unchanged.
I'm Louie Skivani, and PR News, Washington. Canada and tariffs, Venezuela and oil, the war in Iran, these are big, complicated stories. And they're changing fast. To stay ahead, start your day with up first from NPR. New episodes are available each week day when you wake up.
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