NPR News: 04-01-2026 7PM EDT

Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Ryland Barton. Three, two, one, booster ignition and lift off. The crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins. Four astronauts are on their way to fly around the moon. NASA launched humanity's first lunar trip in 53 years. The 32-story rocket blasted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The crew's capsule will circle Earth before hurtling 1,000 miles beyond the moon and making a U-turn to come back around the other side. The entire mission will take 10 days and span 230,000 miles, ending with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. President Trump says he will bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages if it doesn't open up the Strait of Hormuz. Trump's remarks come a day after he said he was nearly ready to wind down the war. Trump also said that Iran's president asked for a ceasefire, but Iran's foreign ministry spokesman called the claim false and baseless. The Supreme Court seems skeptical of President Trump's restrictions on birthright citizenship. Trump's order declares that children born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily are not U.S. citizens. Trump appeared in the courtroom a first for a sitting president. Immigration has been a central issue to his presidency, as NPR's Mar-Aliason explains. His immigration policies right now are net negative. They used to be some of his biggest positives. People like the idea of a secure border and deporting criminals, but they haven't been happy about how he went about mass deportation. So his support among voters on immigration has dropped. His support among Latino voters has plummeted largely because of this issue. So if the justices rule in his favor and say citizenship is not given to every baby born in the U.S., there will be a lot of happiness on the right, energy, motivation, and also on the left who are against his immigration policies. We don't have really good polling on that yet. NPR's Mar-Aliason reporting. An overhaul of federal homelessness spending remains blocked after an appeals court ruling. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports it's the latest blow to the Trump administration's push to set new conditions for such aid. Last fall, the federal housing agency issued a plan to slash money for permanent housing and shift it to programs that require those seeking assistance to first work and stay sober. Housing Secretary Scott Turner said that would nudge people towards self-sufficiency. The change would have upended two decades of bipartisan federal policy, and local aid groups warned it could push 170,000 people back into homelessness. In its latest ruling, the appeals court cites evidence that the longtime focus on permanent housing has proven effective, and it noted that Congress recently approved a budget to fund that approach. In a statement, the housing agency HUD says the current approach is misguided and it remains committed to reforming it. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News, Washington. U.S. stocks largely rose today as hopes grew that the war with Iran could end soon. This is NPR. Advocacy groups and experts are criticizing YouTube for serving up AI slop, that is low-quality artificial intelligence generated videos to children. They say the videos distort kids' sense of reality and dominate their attention spans. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan has said a managing AI slop is one of the company's priorities for 2026. Mpox, the virus formerly known as Monkeypox, became widely known as it spread around the globe in 2022. That outbreak was primarily driven by sexual contact, but as NPR's Jonathan Lambert reports, new research suggests outbreaks can shift over time to spread through other kinds of physical contact. In 2022, Mpox was spreading primarily among men who have sex with men. Since then, the context of outbreaks has changed. In 2024, for instance, large numbers of children were infected. That shift may stem from changes in how the virus spreads over time, according to a new paper in Science Advances. Researchers investigated the recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They found that early cases were driven by sexual contact, sometimes with a few individuals acting as super spreaders. But later, close, non-sexual contact with those initial cases and subsequent ones took over. Ultimately, that non-sexual transmission can lead to larger outbreaks. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. Amsterdam is marking 25 years since the world's first gay marriages were celebrated in the Netherlands. Three couples married at City Hall this morning, just after midnight. More than 40 countries now allow same-sex marriages. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who's gay, says the milestone inspired him as a teenager. This is NPR News from Washington. Do you ever wish you could predict the future? Well, some scientists try to do that every year. Forecasting, wind, cherry blossom trees will bloom each spring. It's a wild guess, but there is some science involved. And there is a lot riding on the peak bloom forecast. Tourism, climate change models and more. Listen to Shortwave on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast to hear how scientists are predicting the future.