NPR News

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is now the tenth Democrat to qualify for next month's Democratic primary debate.

Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, who later became a part of President Obama's cabinet, met the final benchmark on Tuesday after a CNN poll showed him at 2%, giving him the requisite four surveys where he hit that threshold. He had previously already attained the required 130,000 unique donors from 20 states.

For months, Hong Kong's streets have seethed with discontent. Scenes from the semiautonomous region show protesters, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands, many wearing surgical masks and carrying umbrellas that have come to signify resistance.

The images are astonishing, and the issues that set them in motion are complex.

So here's a primer breaking down the major players, why they have poured into the streets and the response so far from China.

Mifepristone is one of a regimen of two drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to end an early pregnancy. It's also prescribed to help reduce the severity of miscarriage symptoms. But it is heavily regulated in ways that can make it hard for women to obtain.

When Kim Gordon dropped "Murdered Out" three years ago, her first single under her own name, she didn't ascribe it any significance. "It just kind of happened randomly," she told NPR at the time.

To consider a women's Hall of Fame in American music is to come face-to-face with that music's debt to African-American religious life. The biggest names in blues — Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox — all came up singing in the makeshift choirs of black churches in the South. What Billboard magazine first christened "rock and roll" were the Holy Roller hymns of gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

The Pentagon says it has tested a U.S. missile that exceeds limits set down by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War agreement between Washington and Moscow that was officially scrapped less than three weeks ago.

The news cycle is driving us to the edge of madness, so why not switch off, unplug and pick up a book? We know you could use a laugh right now — and luckily, several thousand of you told us all about the books, stories and poems that make you laugh.

Updated at 9:25 a.m. ET

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has appealed to the European Union to scrap a deal forged by his predecessor that's aimed at preventing the reestablishment of a hard border between Britain's Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state, as a precondition for any Brexit deal.

A 10-minute drive from the White House — where immigration has a top spot on the President's "to-do" list — a museum has filled three of its floors with artists' reactions to displacement, relocation and flight.

Strong majorities of Americans from across the political spectrum support laws that allow family members or law enforcement to petition a judge to temporarily remove guns from a person who is seen to be a risk to themselves or others, according to a new APM Research Lab/Guns & America/Call To Mind survey.

Native Californian Leslie Ogden has seen her share of wildfires, but never did the retired schoolteacher dream one would roar into her own neighborhood as happened on the night of Dec. 4, 2017.

"On the curve of this street as you come in, one of the houses was in full flame," she recalled while standing on the front deck of her home recently. "And it was sending a river — probably 10 yards wide — of embers across the street. It was this river of fire."

Nearly two decades into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. suddenly appears to be nearing an agreement with the Taliban that could bring the remaining 14,000 U.S. troops home.

That's causing unease inside the Afghan government, which has been left on the sidelines as the U.S. and the Taliban have held multiple rounds of talks this year in the Gulf nation of Qatar. The latest round wrapped up last week without a deal, but with signs of progress.

Jury selection is underway in the manslaughter trial involving a white Florida man who shot and killed an unarmed black man last year during a dispute over a handicapped-accessible parking space.

The incident involving Michael Drejka took place outside Circle A Food Store, a convenience store in the city of Clearwater and was captured by surveillance footage. It also reignited a national debate over Florida's controversial "stand your ground" self-defense law.

Drejka is on trial for the killing of Markeis McGlockton.

Tear gas and truncheons returned to Zimbabwe's cities in recent days, as protesters took to the streets to express their discontent at the deteriorating economy. Protests began on Friday in Harare, the capital, where crowds were dispersed by baton-wielding police. Scores were arrested and up to a dozen were injured.

Zimbabwe faces its worst cash crunch in a decade, and some fear the threat of more anti-government protests risks pushing the country to the brink of a protracted political crisis.

Police officers in California will be required to use lethal force only as a "necessary" response to a threat — not merely as an "objectively reasonable" one — under legislation that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Monday. Under the tighter standard, deadly force is legal only in instances where there are no other options.

Locusts are not just a biblical plague. They're swarming around the world. Still. Again.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the desert locust situation is serious in Yemen and at the Indo-Pakistan border.

The United Kingdom is headed for another showdown next month over Brexit, an issue that has paralyzed British politics for several years and ended the careers of the two previous prime ministers.

This year, Parliament thrice defeated a U.K. withdrawal agreement that then-Prime Minister Theresa May's government had negotiated with the European Union. Parliament reconvenes on Sept. 3.

Here are some of the key challenges facing Boris Johnson, the new prime minister, who has vowed to take the U.K. out of the European Union one way or another on Oct. 31.

Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET

Planned Parenthood is leaving the federal Title X family planning program rather than comply with new Trump administration rules regarding abortion counseling.

The new rules, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year, prohibit Title X grantees from providing or referring patients for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency.

As you walk into Ibiza, a dance club in the middle of Goma, the bouncer takes your temperature, and you have to wash your hands with a bleach and water solution. Then you walk past a little gazebo and into the strobe lights, and you're welcomed by a black-and-white portrait of the late, great rumba musician Papa Wemba. The band, its members dressed in matching silk shirts, is already setting up.