"Moldovans will be asked on Sunday to decide whether EU membership should be designated a strategic goal in the country’s constitution, a move that would further distance the former Soviet republic politically from Russia. The EU referendum coincides with Moldova's presidential election, where the country’s pro-Western leader Maia Sandu is seeking a second term against a field of mostly pro-Kremlin candidates. Both votes will take place against a backdrop of Russian meddling, including evidence of vote buying and disinformation, according to Moldovan authorities. The Kremlin has denied the allegations.

The European Commission accepted Moldova's candidacy to join the EU in 2022 and opened accession negotiations in June this year. The EU has pledged almost $2 billion in economic support for Moldova to help the country accomplish the necessary reforms to achieve membership, and improve infrastructure badly in need of an upgrade.

While various opinion polls over recent months show that most Moldovans support EU membership, residents in predominantly Russian-speaking regions like the north, or Gagauzia in the south, still favor stronger ties with Russia over EU membership."

"You might expect that mortgage rates would be falling right now after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a half-point last month.

Instead, mortgage rates jumped higher. The latest data from Freddie Mac showed that the average 30-year mortgage rate had increased to 6.4%, more than a quarter-point higher than it was two weeks ago.

The news is probably an unwelcome surprise to the folks who had been hoping for lower interest rates to finally come off the sidelines and start shopping for a home.

Here’s what’s going on — and what it means for those trying to buy a home now."

BEIRUT, Oct 16 (Reuters) - The batteries inside the weaponised pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles' heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness - the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product - they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel's Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

"Former President Donald Trump once again appears to be in the driver’s seat in this presidential election.

When looking strictly at the polls, Trump now has the edge in two states and the other five most closely watched states are toss-ups. At the end of August, Vice President Harris had leads large enough in three of the seven states for them to lean in her direction, according to an NPR analysis of polling averages at the time.

Now, Trump has taken over the lead in an average of the polls in the seven swing states for the first time since Harris got in the race."

Allred’s sharp divergence from Beto O’Rourke’s more active campaign style has stirred dissent among some Democrats. His allies say it’s working.

Six years after Beto O'Rourke’s electrifying Senate campaign set the standard for Texas Democrats seeking statewide office, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred is taking a completely different approach in his own bid to oust U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Allred, a third-term Dallas congressman, has been far less visible on the campaign trail, opting for events with smaller and more curated audiences in the major cities and select suburbs, rather than the casual town hall-style rallies O'Rourke held in every corner of the state. And instead of O’Rourke’s unapologetic liberal stands which activated legions of young voters, Allred has adopted a more calibrated message aimed at winning over moderates. He’s running ads that portray him as "tough" on the border and willing to work across the aisle, while keeping his distance from his party's standard-bearers, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Allred's sharp divergence from O'Rourke's more active and freewheeling style has stirred dissent and even signs of panic among a segment of Texas Democratic activists who say Allred should be holding more rallies, small-dollar fundraisers and other publicly accessible events. The more buttoned-up approach, they argue, is unlikely to inspire the sort of grassroots energy that helped O'Rourke build a juggernaut volunteer turnout operation and come within three points of ending Texas Democrats’ statewide drought

"English-learning students’ scores on a state test designed to measure their mastery of the language fell sharply and have stayed low since 2018 — a drop that bilingual educators say might have less to do with students’ skills and more with sweeping design changes and the automated computer scoring system that were introduced that year.

English learners who used to speak to a teacher at their school as part of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System now sit in front of a computer and respond to prompts through a microphone. The Texas Education Agency uses software programmed to recognize and evaluate students’ speech.

Students’ scores dropped after the new test was introduced, a Texas Tribune analysis shows. In the previous four years, about half of all students in grades 4-12 who took the test got the highest score on the test’s speaking portion, which was required to be considered fully fluent in English. Since 2018, only about 10% of test takers have gotten the top score in speaking each year."

We see you, hard-core NPR readers — just because it's summer doesn't mean it's all fiction, all the time. So we asked around the newsroom to find our staffers' favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and more.

LOS ANGELES – President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.

ST. LOUIS — Five states have banned ranked choice voting in the last two months, bringing the total number of Republican-leaning states now prohibiting the voting method to 10.

Missouri could soon join them.

If approved by voters, a GOP-backed measure set for the state ballot this fall would amend Missouri’s constitution to ban ranked choice voting.

ST. LOUIS — Five states have banned ranked choice voting in the last two months, bringing the total number of Republican-leaning states now prohibiting the voting method to 10.

Missouri could soon join them.

If approved by voters, a GOP-backed measure set for the state ballot this fall would amend Missouri’s constitution to ban ranked choice voting.

Andy Kim couldn’t rest one evening last September.

“I didn't get a single minute of sleep that night,” he recalled in an interview with NPR, “I really felt like I had to do something and really show people that, you know, when there's these problems in our politics, that there are people who want to step up and try to fix it.”

The problem was his fellow New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bob Menendez. Last fall, Menendez was indicted for the second time on corruption charges. The news might not have rocked most voters in New Jersey — where as many as 80% of its residents said they viewed the state’s politicians as at least “a little” corrupt, according to a May 2023 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll.

MUMBAI, India — Two days before police finally came to arrest him, the Rev. Stan Swamy recorded a video of himself speaking directly into the camera.

"They want to put me out of the way," the ailing 83-year-old Jesuit priest said.

His voice sounded frail. But what he was saying was explosive.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said, was targeting him in retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Indigenous people in Indian jails. A sociologist as well as a Roman Catholic clergyman, Swamy had recently published a study of 3,000 people jailed for being members of banned Maoist groups. He found that 97% of them had no such affiliation and that many of their trials were held without lawyers, in a language they didn't understand. He'd filed a case on their behalf in the state court of Jharkhand, where he lived. All of this had embarrassed the government, he said.