U.S.

National

One By One, California Agents Track Down Illegally Owned Guns

8:57am August 20, 2013

by Richard Gonzales

California is currently the only state with a program to confiscate guns from residents prohibited from owning firearms. To find them, agents comb through a database of people who legally owned a gun until mental illness or a brush with the law rendered them no longer eligible for gun ownership.

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National

3 Years Later, There's Still Work Left To Be Done On Dodd-Frank

6:58pm August 19, 2013

On Monday, President Obama summoned top financial regulators to the White House to get an update on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act. The legislation was passed in the wake of the financial crisis and is a sweeping overhaul of the nation's financial regulations. But three years after being signed into law, much of Dodd-Frank still isn't in place. Such is the difficulty of re-writing financial rules.

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Cars In America: Is The Love Story Over?

5:29pm August 19, 2013

by NPR Staff

America once had a love affair with the automobile. But a new study shows just how much air has been let out of those tires, and the millennial generation seems to be ambivalent toward owning cars or even acquiring driver's licenses.

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This NASA diagram shows the two Voyager spacecraft inside the magnetic bubble around the sun. But Marc Swisdak believes it's already crossed the heliopause into interstellar space.

Has Voyager 1 Left The Solar System?

2:52pm August 19, 2013

by Geoff Brumfiel

For the past decade or so, scientists have been waiting for the Voyager 1 spacecraft to cross into deep space. New research suggests it already has — over a year ago.

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Amid Struggle For 'Soul' Of GOP, Libertarians Take Limelight

8:16am August 19, 2013

by NPR Staff

Tensions between the traditional wings of the Republican Party and its libertarians have been brewing for years. Leaks of government surveillance information have helped exacerbate the conflict, pushing forward libertarians' stance on civil liberties.

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Katrina Boydon and her mustang Spirit. She adopted the horse as an orphaned foal with a rattlesnake bite on his hoof.

National

Wild Horses Run Free As Adoption Centers Fill Up

6:52am August 19, 2013

by Will Stone

Across the West, the Bureau of Land Management grapples with dwindling holding space for wild horses it has rounded up. But advocates say the bureau's housing of mustangs is not only ineffective but unsustainable. The cost of keeping the horses has tripled since 2000.

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Immigration Reform Activists March To Calif. Farm Country

7:35am August 18, 2013

by Kirk Siegler

Bakersfield is conservative, with a large immigrant and farm labor population. Protesters are pushing the city's Republican congressman to adopt the Senate-passed immigration reform bill — and they've got the support of local Republican leaders.

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Martin Luther King Jr. attends Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965. During this time, the drug war was expanding.

National

The Shift In Black Views Of The War On Drugs

11:57am August 17, 2013

by Arun Venugopal

Attorney General Eric Holder called this week for sweeping changes to America's drug laws. He's part of a growing movement of black leaders pushing for major changes to the nation's 40-year war on drugs. But for decades, many African-American leaders supported tough sentencing rules.

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The Rev. Vonner Horton outside her church in Merry Hill, N.C. For years, Horton and the church have used the state's early-voting system to make sure as many people as possible could vote. She says the new law that shaves a week off early-voting dates wil

In Rural N.C., New Voter ID Law Awakens Some Old Fears

8:51pm August 16, 2013

by Ailsa Chang

Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, North Carolina has a new law to require photo ID at the polls and to shorten early voting. Proponents say the law will stave off voter fraud. Opponents say it will effectively quash the vote of many poor minorities.

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N. America's Oldest Known Petroglyphs Discovered In Nevada

6:22pm August 16, 2013

by Elizabeth Shogren

The carvings etched into limestone boulders near Pyramid Lake in western Nevada show that the early North Americans were surprisingly creative artists. The carvings, which are at least 10,000 years old, are abstract, geometric designs including shapes that look like diamonds and trees.

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