NPR News: 02-25-2026 4PM EST
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh.
What concerns were raised about Dr. Casey Means during her Senate confirmation hearing?
President Trump's nominee for Surgeon General is seeking Senate confirmation, but Dr. Casey Means faced concerns at today's hearing about her qualifications and her refusal to publicly endorse support for vaccines to guard against severe illness or deaths during flu or measles outbreaks. Here's NPR's Will Stone.
Casey Means is a wellness influencer, author, and entrepreneur. She graduated medical school but never finished her training to be a surgeon. Much of her messaging around diet and lifestyle aligns with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 's agenda, and she was pressed throughout the hearing about her views on vaccines. Means said she believes in vaccines but stopped short of saying she'd encourage mothers to vaccinate their kids for flu or measles.
Vaccine advocacy has never, or any anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been a part of my message.
Means has questioned the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule in public appearances and the use of oral birth control. When asked, she said birth control should be accessible, but women should know the risks. The medical establishment has largely opposed her nomination. Will Stone, NPR News.
President Trump declared a turnaround for the ages in his State of the Union address last night. NPR's Deepa Shivaram reports on the contrast between Trump's message on the economy and polling on his performance so far.
Voters feel like costs are high. They're criticizing the president for it. Recent polling from NPR PBS News Marist shows that most Americans say the country is worse off than a year ago. and that the State of the Union is not strong. Additionally, more people than ever are describing the direction that Trump is moving the country in as, quote, change for the worse. So this speech was a moment for Trump to try and reset, address all of that. And he did, in a way. He spoke about lowering the cost of prescription drugs. He talked about lower gas prices. He also talked about wanting to lower housing costs and energy bills that have risen in part because of data centers.
NPR's Deepa Shivaram reporting. U.S. soybean farmers urged President Trump to avoid imposing more tariffs on agricultural inputs after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping global import tax. Marlon Hyde of WABE reports the president has enacted a 10 percent global tariff amid rising costs for farming essentials.
Fertilizer, seeds, pesticides and tractors are just a handful of the items farmers regularly buy that have become more expensive under President Trump's trade policies. Andrew Moore is a farmer and board of director member for the American Soybean Association for Georgia and Florida. He says from February to October last year, farmers paid almost one billion dollars in tariffs.
As a soybean producer, we strongly oppose the administration's reimposing these tariffs on agricultural imports and under other authorities.
Moore says farmers need stable input costs to remain competitive. But with President Trump threatening to raise the global tariff to 15 percent, farmers remain in limbo. For NPR News, I'm Marlon Hyde in Atlanta. It's NPR.
A new study suggests large AI models may reinforce global and regional stereotypes when asked to compare certain locations. NPR's Windsor Johnson reports that researchers found chat GPT consistently favored wealthier western regions.
Researchers at Oxford and the University of Kentucky tested chat GPT with more than 20 million comparisons between counties, states and cities. asking, for example, which U.S. state was lazier. Initially, the system pushed back against such generalizations. But when researchers forced it to compare places by rewording the questions, the model tended to reproduce familiar regional stereotypes. Across categories, it often ranked wealthier Western regions more positively. Because the system had to pick one place over another, researchers could also track consistent patterns in its responses. The authors of the study call this the Silicon Gaze. arguing that large language models reflect inequalities embedded in their training data.
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