NPR News: 05-13-2026 6PM EDT
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What recent events led to President Trump's visit to Beijing?
Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Ryland Barton. President Trump arrived in Beijing today. China is closely aligned with Iran, and the state visit was initially delayed by the U.S. war with the Islamic Republic. NPR's Tamara Keith has more about how the conflict will factor in in talks with President Xi Jinping.
China and Iran are close allies and trading partners, and the U.S. has just spent weeks bombing Iran and is now blockading all ships connected to the country. Meanwhile, there are questions about whether China has assisted Iran. Trump has mostly downplayed those concerns. As he was leaving Washington, Trump insisted he didn't need anything from China when it comes to Iran.
How is the conflict in Iran affecting global shipping routes?
Though that may just be posturing because Trump had previously taken to social media to ask China to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
NPR's Tamara Keith reporting. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has meant more business at the Panama Canal. More ships are using the canal and at higher prices since the war broke out in Iran. NPR's Jackie Northam has this report.
The Panama Canal Authority says daily transits have increased more than 10% over the past two months. But the biggest change has been the types of vessels using the canal. The number of container ships has dipped slightly, while the number of tankers carrying oil and liquefied natural gas has jumped 29% as they search for other options beyond the Strait of Hormuz. They are last-minute reservations and have to use an auction system. In April, fees averaged $380,000, nearly six times higher than before the start of the Iran War. The Panama Canal Authority says some vessels are paying more than a million dollars to cross. In a press release, the Canal Authority said amid all the geopolitical complexities, the canal remains an open and reliable option for vessels.
Jackie Northam, NPR News.
A new report offers details on math and reading scores for students in the U.S. As NPR's Corey Turner reports, the researchers say big losses in learning didn't begin with the coronavirus pandemic some six years ago, but years earlier.
The annual report is called the Education Scorecard, and it comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth. Pouring over decades of math and reading scores, the researchers say America's students hit a learning recession, not during COVID-19, but around 2013. Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.
In fact, you wouldn't really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There's been just a steady kind of decline.
As for why learning got so derailed, the researchers have two theories. One, a big federal education law was essentially abandoned around 2013. meaning school leaders started feeling less pressure to improve. And two, social media use among U.S. youth started to skyrocket. Corey Turner, NPR News.
Kevin Warsh was confirmed in a Senate vote this afternoon as the next Federal Reserve Chair, succeeding Jerome Powell. This is NPR News. The Vatican has issued a final warning to a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics It says the Society of St. Pius X will be excommunicated if they go ahead with their plan to consecrate bishops without the Pope's consent. It amounts to the gravest challenge to Pope Leo's authority to date. He's been seeking to heal divisions within the traditionalist Catholics that worsened under Pope Francis. The parent company of classroom management platform Canvas has struck a deal with hackers that took the software offline and threatened to leak student data. NPR's Sequoia Carrillo reports the terms of that deal were not disclosed.
When students and teachers logged onto Canvas last week in the middle of final season, many were met with a black screen with a note from a ransomware group demanding money in exchange for control back of the platform. The platform came back online a short while later, but the state of the stolen data remained a question for a few days. Now, Instructure, the parent company of the software, has released a statement saying an agreement was met with the bad actors in exchange for return of the data, destruction of data, and promises for no extortion of any Instructure customers.
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