NPR News: 07-22-2026 8AM EDT
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Kristen Wright.
Why is Congress weighing a $67 billion emergency Pentagon funding request?
The Republican-led Congress is weighing a $67 billion emergency funding request from the Pentagon. This comes on the heels of the expanding war in Iran.
Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth told Senate appropriators the department could face shortfalls without the urgent funding. But he faced heated resistance from some senators angry with the direction of the war. Here's Michigan Democrat Gary Peters.
You don't have a strategy. You don't have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war. The men and women are going to be able to do it, but they need to have leadership.
And a visibly frustrated Louisiana GOP Senator John Kennedy repeatedly told Hegseth to give Congress, quote, straight answers. 18 U.S. service members have been killed in the war and nearly 500 injured. Claudia DeSales, NPR News.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired the country's top military commander. It's the second major shakeup in Kyiv's military leadership in the last week. NPR's Greg Myhre says Zelensky made this latest move following days of protests calling for the general's ouster.
What questions did senators raise about Pentagon strategy and leadership?
In a late-night social media post, President Zelensky dismissed the head of the armed forces, General Oleksandr Sersky. The general, age 60, was credited with winning several key battles in recent years. But he's also a Soviet-trained officer who favored rigid battlefield tactics. He clashed with the popular defense minister, 35-year-old Mikhailo Fedorov, a leading advocate of innovative drone warfare. Zielinski fired Federoff last week. That ignited the protests in support of Federoff and against the general. Zielinski has named a new general to lead the military, but still has an acting defense minister for now. Greg Myrie, NPR News, Kiev.
The director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History was on Capitol Hill yesterday answering questions from members of a House subcommittee. As NPR's Anastasia Sielkis reports, Republicans on the panel argued the museum has become infected with what they called woke ideology.
The hearing was convened by the House of Representatives Doge Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Tim Burchette of Tennessee.
The American story is the birth and growth of a great nation founded on powerful ideals on which we aim to fully achieve. But in the museum's current telling, history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.
Those criticisms closely mirror the language of a report recently issued by President Trump's Domestic Policy Council. Anthea Hartig, the museum's director, defended the institution she runs as nonpartisan and independent. Anastasia Tsoukas, NPR News, New York.
This is NPR News in Washington. Scientists say they hope a new NASA telescope set to launch next month will give them insights into black holes. Scott Macione with member station WYPR reports on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
The hardest part about observing black holes is that they're black and hard to see, even on a high-resolution telescope. The best way to look for them is to look at the stars they're shredding apart with their massive gravitational pulls. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch on August 30th, partly to detect black holes that existed up to 11 billion years ago. Mitchell Carman, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is the lead on the study. Studying black holes is really studying the most extreme phenomena Parts of physics, and it's all a part of trying to understand how the world works, even in the biggest and in the smallest scales. The Roman telescope will have the same resolution as the Hubble telescope, but with a much larger field of view.
For NPR News, I'm Scott Massioni in Baltimore.
OpenAI is reporting what it describes as an unprecedented cyber incident. And the company says its artificial intelligence technology acted autonomously, hacking into the systems of an AI startup called Hugging Face. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says in a statement the security incident compromised Hugging Face's infrastructure.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:04
2
Why is Congress weighing a $67 billion emergency Pentagon funding request?
0:04–1:15
3
What questions did senators raise about Pentagon strategy and leadership?
1:15–4:51
4
Why did Ukraine's president fire the top military commander this week?
4:51–4:58