Becky Sullivan

The equation for COVID-19 hot spots has been clear since the earliest days of the pandemic: Take facilities where people live in close quarters, then add conditions that make it hard to take preventive measures such as wearing personal protective equipment or keeping socially distant.

Major outbreaks in nursing homes this spring shocked the nation. Now, residents of those facilities are among the first in line for the vaccine.

At any hour of any day, somewhere on the radio dial, chances are you can find the voice of Stevie Nicks. This fall, decades after her 1970s breakthrough with Fleetwood Mac, she even became a chart sensation again, after a skateboarding TikTok star gave one of the band's classic songs a boost.

The old metal gumball machine is still there - standing in a corner near the door. It's scorched and some of its plastic is melted but it's still standing there. But very little else inside what was The Good Taste Ice Cream Shoppe in Kenosha is recognizable as the blackened remains of the roof, walls, tables, chairs, and other fixtures are scattered about in heaps of charred wood and twisted and scorched metal.

Rupp Arena is named for Adoph Rupp, the famous University of Kentucky basketball coach whose sustained success in the mid-20th century turned the program into the powerhouse it remains today. The arena has borne Rupp's name since it opened in 1976, just a few years after his retirement.

But now at U.K., a list of demands from the school's African-American and Africana Studies faculty has brought new life to an old debate about the name of the school's basketball arena.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke at a news conference Thursday in Kenosha, Wis., in the parking lot of an auto repair shop where two protesters were shot and killed Tuesday night by a 17-year-old white teen named Kyle Rittenhouse.

The shootings took place during the third consecutive night of protests following the police shooting Jacob Blake, who was shot multiple times at close range and severely wounded by a police officer Sunday.

The police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others — and the wave of protests that followed — have sparked a national conversation about how to prevent police killings and improve relationships between law enforcement and the communities they police.

Six years ago, police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparking a similar conversation. As a result, President Obama convened a panel of experts, activists, authors and academics to rethink policing in America.

Across the country, leaders and activists are seeking ways to improve relations between their communities and the police, including how to reduce encounters that lead to arrests and the use of force. In places such as Kansas City, Mo., this has renewed calls to ease marijuana laws.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of a pipeline company in a dispute about whether a new 600-mile natural gas pipeline could cross underneath the Appalachian Trail on federal land.

The 7-2 decision overturned one part of a lower court decision that had blocked construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which is being jointly developed by Duke Energy and Dominion Energy.

Before she was a hashtag or a headline, before protesters around the country chanted her name, Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old woman who played cards with her aunts and fell asleep watching movies with friends.

That changed on March 13, when police officers executing a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night killed her in her apartment in Louisville, Ky.

David McAtee, owner of Yaya's BBQ, was a beloved fixture in the Russell neighborhood of Louisville, Ky., remembered as a pillar of the community and known to give out his food free of charge, even to local police officers.

His death at the hands of law enforcement has come as a shock to those who knew him.

McAtee, a chef, was killed early Monday morning at his barbecue business when Louisville Metro Police Department officers and National Guard troops responded to reports of a crowd gathered after the city's 9 p.m. curfew near the corner of 26th Street and Broadway.

A meat-packing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where a coronavirus outbreak exploded a few weeks ago, resumed operations on Thursday after a two-week closure.

It's been a tough month for Rocio Tirado.

Tirado works as a chief operations officer at a Spanish-language newspaper serving the New Orleans area, and she relies on sales commissions for a big part of her income. But advertising at the paper has cratered, hurting her take-home pay.

It's not easy with two teenage boys — 15 and 17 — at home all day. So she's applied for food stamps and asked her kids to be less wasteful.

"I talked to the boys and said, 'Look, this is not vacation. You cannot just go and eat. You have to be very careful,' " she said.

When Scott Severs learned about the federal stimulus checks, he was excited at first.

Then he wondered whether he truly needed the help.

Severs works as a natural resources technician for Longmont, Colo., and his wife Julie Bartlett is a federal contractor.

The city, his employer, is expecting a major drop in revenue this year because of the anticipated drop in taxes from income, payroll and sales. Still, for now, both he and his wife have jobs and their paychecks have been coming in.

Before the words "Ukraine" and "impeachment" dominated headlines, before most Americans had heard of Marie Yovanovitch or Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — Adam Schiff sat down to write a cryptic letter.

When Hurricane Michael struck the Panhandle of Florida last October, Keith and Susan Koppelman were huddled in the bathroom of their small, two-bedroom rental trailer just north of Panama City.

"When the winds came we both started praying," says Keith, 49. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is a big storm.' "

After four hours, they finally emerged to survey the damage. The storm's 160-mile-per-hour winds had torn off the porch and peeled away the trailer's tin siding.

After Hurricane Michael blasted through the Florida coastal towns of Eastpoint and Apalachicola, some residents are beginning the long process of cleaning up.

This area, just 30 miles east of where the powerful storm's eye made landfall on Wednesday, was expected to – and did – receive the worst of the storm surge.

NPR journalists Mary Louise Kelly and Becky Sullivan and freelance photographer David Guttenfelder were among the some 150 foreign reporters who visited North Korea last month, at the invitation of the government, to cover celebrations commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Guttenfelder has taken nearly 40 reporting trips to the isolated country since 2000.

Ten years ago, a slow-moving disaster shook the entire country: a financial meltdown that did not leave a single state untouched.

The main catalyst was a housing bubble.

Throughout the early 2000s, housing prices in some parts of the country rose, and rose, and rose. Homes with prices that for decades had steadily grown with inflation were suddenly worth 50 percent or 100 percent more.

A single four-letter word — added to a provision of the tax code — has professional sports leagues scrambling, as teams face what could be millions of dollars in new taxes.

"Real."

The revision changed a section of the tax code that applies to "like-kind exchanges." Under the old law, farmers, manufacturers and other businesses could swap certain "property" assets — such as trucks and machinery — without immediately paying taxes on the difference in value.

It's not every Final Jeopardy response that goes viral. Mine did. And let me tell you, it is very weird.