NPR News: 05-08-2026 11PM EDT
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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Dan Ronan. The U.S. military says it has disabled two more Iranian oil tankers. NPR's Quill Lawrence reports the Trump administration says the ongoing attacks do not mean the ceasefire is over.
CENTCOM posted video on social media showing the massive Iranian tankers as their smokestacks burst into flames from precision U.S. strikes. CENTCOM says the tankers were empty and approaching Iranian ports despite the U.S. blockade. For its part, Iran continues to effectively block all commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, stopping oil, gas and fertilizer shipping for a significant part of the globe. This comes after Iran and U.S. forces traded attacks this week, but the White House maintains that a four-week-old ceasefire continues and therefore congressional approval is not needed for the war. Iranian negotiators haven't announced a reply to the latest U.S. proposal to end the war, and the demands of both sides still appear far apart.
Quill Lawrence, NPR News.
Alabama's Republican Attorney General is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a federal court order requiring the state to use a race-based congressional map for the state's upcoming congressional primaries. It comes after Alabama's Republican governor tentatively approved new congressional maps to favor Republicans, part of a broader redistricting push after the Supreme Court removed race as a consideration. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
Democrats fought the legislation pushed through by the Republican supermajority in the Alabama legislature. Democratic State Senator Roger Smitherman says it erases 60 years of electoral gains under the Voting Rights Act.
And that is so disturbing and so wrong, the way that one-third of the people in this state are being disenfranchised, denied an opportunity to have representation.
But Republican Garland Gudger, the president pro tem of the Alabama Senate, says race is the wrong focus.
I think the focus is exactly what the court said, which should be about a partisan line, not about race. And that's, in the end, what they're focused on is, one, the race, where we're focused on partisanship.
Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Montgomery.
The unemployment rate held steady.
Here's NPR's Scott Horsley.
Healthcare, restaurants, retailers, and delivery companies all added jobs last month, while factories and the federal government cut workers. LinkedIn economist Corey Kentenga says it's encouraging the unemployment rate stayed low at just 4.3%. but the opportunities to find a job are still limited.
We still see that there's not a lot of momentum, and job seekers feel that. When we ask our members how they feel about their ability to get and hold a job, that is at historic lows.
Average wages in April were up 3.6 percent from a year ago, but much of that gain is being eroded by inflation, especially with a sharp jump in gasoline prices. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
It's NPR. The Defense Department has released more than 160 records related to UFO sightings. NPR's Bill Chappell reports more files are to be released in the coming weeks.
The documents range from Cold War reports of mysterious flying disks to recent sightings of elliptical objects floating in the air. Those and other records of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs, the new term for UFOs, are now being shared with the public. In one file, a woman who says she's familiar with U.S. military aircraft and drones describes seeing a strange metallic ovaloid floating above a tree line in 2023. She also said that if other people with her hadn't seen the same thing, she wouldn't have spoken up. President Trump has promised unprecedented transparency for such records. He posted on social media that the release will allow the public to decide, quote, what the hell is going on.
Bill Chappell, NPR News.
The planned weekend closure of a nearly 10-mile stretch of Atlanta's very busy I-285, known as the Atlanta Perimeter, has been postponed. Transportation officials said they made the decision just hours before the Friday night closure along the busily traveled west side of the interstate because of the possibility of bad weather.
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