News From NPR

A federal judge in Mississippi has permanently blocked the most restrictive abortion law in the country that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of gestation.

Each autumn, farmer Amandeep Singh has just a few days to prepare his fields for the next crop. He must clear stubble left over from the rice harvest, before planting wheat, which grows over winter.

Amandeep, 42, is from a long line of farmers in India's breadbasket, in the northern state of Punjab. Like his father and grandfather before him, he'd always burned the residue known as rice straw – the dry stalks of the plant after the grain and chaff have been removed. It's the fastest, cheapest way to prepare his fields for the next planting.

Evacuee Roxanne Peters had planned to prepare food tomorrow, for Thanksgiving dinner.

"I was celebrating at two different houses. We were invited to two different places, and I was cooking, you know, potluck," she said.

Both those homes burned to the ground in the historic Camp Fire. The scale of the fire's destruction is so spread out that very little of the towns of Paradise, Magalia and Concow remain. So far, the fire scorched 230 square miles — an area the size of Chicago.

"I'll be giving thanks this year that we made it out alive," Peters says.

Mississippi was set for a fairly mundane midterm election runoff next week — deciding who would win the final undecided U.S. Senate seat in a state that easily elects Republicans, until a senator greeted a cattle rancher.

In a video posted on Twitter last week, Republican Sen. Hyde-Smith is talking to a tall man. A rancher named Colin Hutchinson is seen putting his arm around Hyde-Smith at an event in Tupelo, Miss., earlier this month.

When Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her bid last week to become governor of Georgia and the first black woman ever elected governor of any state, she issued a stinging indictment of Georgia's voting system, a system overseen by her Republican opponent Brian Kemp, who was the state's top election official during the 2018 midterms.

"Democracy failed Georgia," said Abrams in a speech acknowledging Kemp would be the state's next governor.

Last March, Tony Schmidt discovered something unsettling about the machine that helps him breathe at night. Without his knowledge, it was spying on him.

From his bedside, the device was tracking when he was using it and sending the information not just to his doctor, but to the maker of the machine, to the medical supply company that provided it and to his health insurer.

Schmidt, an information technology specialist from Carrollton, Texas, was shocked. "I had no idea they were sending my information across the wire."

A milestone oil development project in Alaska's Arctic waters is having to extend its construction timeline to accommodate the warming climate. The recently approved Liberty Project — poised to become the first oil production facility in federal Arctic waters — has altered its plans due to the shrinking sea ice season.

After more than three months in jail and last-minute confusion over his release, Shahidul Alam, a renowned Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist whose imprisonment drew international criticism, is a free man.

A dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had at least 13 pounds of garbage in its stomach, including 115 plastic cups and two sandals, according to a team of researchers including the World Wide Fund For Nature.

"Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful," Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia, told The Associated Press.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the Trump administration will appeal a federal judge's ruling temporarily blocking the government from unilaterally imposing new asylum rules.

Speaking at a news conference at the U.S.-Mexico border, Nielsen said of the decision Monday by U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar, "this is a dangerous ruling."

Federal officials have indicted more than 40 people linked to the Ghost Face Gangsters, a violent white supremacist street gang operated largely from inside Georgia prisons.

The Libyan coast guard forcibly removed more than 70 migrants from a ship that had rescued them after the migrants refused to disembark, saying they had been imprisoned and tortured in Libya before and feared going back.

The migrants have now been placed in Libyan detention centers, which are notorious for human rights abuses including torture and slavery. Several migrants were reportedly injured in the forced removal and have been hospitalized.

Updated at 4:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday

President Trump has made explicit that the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia will be defined by business deals and a shared opposition to Iran — and not the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

"If we abandon Saudi Arabia, it would be a terrible mistake," Trump told reporters outside the White House on Tuesday. "We're with Saudi Arabia. We're staying with Saudi Arabia."

It was a typical London scene at No. 10 Downing Street on Tuesday: wet and gray, a television reporter wading into the seemingly bottomless bog that is Brexit, when in a flash there was the feline fix ushering in some much-needed levity.

Larry the cat, who lives at and lords over the Prime Minister's residence, sat on the stoop, waiting for a human to do his bidding and let him in out of the damp.

House and Senate negotiators are reportedly close to finalizing a framework on a farm bill compromise in hopes it will pass both chambers of Congress and be on the president's desk by the end of the year.

According to a spokesperson for Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., House and Senate committee staff worked through the weekend and again on Monday "exchanging offers daily" as last details are being ironed out.

More than 50 people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted a gathering of scholars celebrating a religious holiday in Kabul on Tuesday, Afghan government officials said.

Cut Caesar salad off the menu this week: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says a multistate E. coli outbreak is underway, and romaine lettuce is to blame.

Thirty-two people are sick, including 13 who were hospitalized; no deaths have been reported. An additional 18 people were sickened in Canada.

Evidence points toward romaine lettuce as the likely source, but the CDC can't get more specific than that.

The sudden outbreak of chickenpox at a North Carolina private school isn't exactly surprising.

At least 36 students have become infected with the disease at Asheville Waldorf School in the city of Asheville — a school that has among the highest rates of parents who received an exemption from the state's vaccination requirements.

Mabel Román Padró wishes she hadn't had to sue Puerto Rico's government.

But because she did, it translated an important report about Hurricane Maria into Spanish so she and most of the island's residents could read it.

"Access to information has always been hard here," Román said.

Two years after Massachusetts voters approved the recreational use of marijuana in the state, adults with a valid ID can now buy some Moonshine Haze and a slew of other cannabis commodities.

As of 8 a.m. ET, Tuesday, two Massachusetts marijuana dispensaries opened their doors to customers 21 and older seeking recreational pot, a first on the East Coast.

"God don butta my bread!"

That's how you say "my wish has been granted" in pidgin English in Nigeria. It's one of the many pidgin phrases that Prince Charles sprinkled into his speeches in Africa's most populous nation during a nine-day trip to West Africa in November.

He also said, "If life dey show you pepper, my guy make pepper soup!" — akin to the saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

The audiences laughed.