NPR News Now - 7pm ET, October 07 | The latest headlines from NPR

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

The latest headlines from NPR at the top of this hour. The stories you hear are written, reported and fact-checked by NPR journalists.  Learn more about the standards of our journalism at npr.org/ethics. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is NPR News Now. The latest headlines every hour. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Rylan Barton. President Trump is heading to San Antonio today as new polling shows deep disapproval among Latino voters who are key to his election in 2024. The city is about 65 percent Latino. Only about a quarter of Latinos say they approve of the job the president is doing right now. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is telling Europeans to quote, wake up from their slumber and save Western civilization.

His speech in Athens was filled with Christian nationalist rhetoric, as NPR's Michelle Kellman reports. With the Acropolis as a backdrop, Secretary Rubio says the world has much to learn from the men of ancient Greece, who knew there was nothing selfish about fighting for their own interests. But he says nationalism has become a dirty word, and now the West is at a crossroads. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place

at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. Rubio says the Trump administration plans to dominate the fields of drone warfare, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence, which Trump is trying to rebrand as superintelligence to play down calls for regulations. Michelle Kellerman and PR News, the State Department. The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a $70,000 fee for international students who are seeking to work in the state department.

the U.S. It's the latest effort from the Trump administration to crack down on foreign enrollment. The change would represent a blow to American colleges and universities that heavily recruit students from overseas as a source of tuition revenue. The public has 60 days to comment on the proposal. Support for Medicare for All is the highest. It's been in at least a decade, according to new polling. Kate Wells with our partner KFF Health News reports. If you go to one of Democratic Senate candidate Abdul L. Syed's town halls in Michigan, you will hear the crowd chant the campaign slogan. Money out of.

Two and three Americans now say they favor Medicare for All, according to polling from KFF, a health policy research organization. But many of them don't actually know what it means, and that support fluctuates based on what pollsters told them about it. Medicare for All usually means a single insurance program run by the federal government that replaces or radically changes private insurance. Opponents argue that Medicare for All would raise taxes and could lead to treatment delays. That's Kate Wells with our partner, KFF Health News.

The FCC is considering a request to loosen rules on political robocalls, including those with AI-generated voices. Current federal laws banned most robocalls to cell phones. A conservative group called Club for Growth is seeking the change, arguing it could improve voter communication and polling accuracy. Consumer advocacy groups warn the change could lead to a surge of unwanted and misleading calls before the midterm elections. This is NPR News. Nearly a month after President Trump signed a Russia sanctions bill named after Lindsey Graham's Senate leaders and both parties are urging the administration to use the new law to help Ukraine. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the senators say they want the Trump administration to more quickly clamp down on the flow of money fueling Russia's war, especially the shadow fleet of tankers Moscow is using to transport oil. A new study finds that modern indigenous populations share many ancient microbes that most of the world is missing.

And Pierce Ping Huang reports. The Haza people of Tanzania and the Chimani people of Bolivia live thousands of miles in an ocean apart. Yet researchers compared their gut bacteria and found they had 90% of the same species in their digestive tracts. Justin Zonembourg at Stanford University is senior author on the paper. These populations in South America and in Africa and probably in other parts of the world, are transmitting microbes over generations. The similarities in their gut bacteria are remarkable. Sonnenberg and his colleagues found that most of these bacteria are missing in modern,

industrialized people, which raises questions like whether losing these microbial species could affect susceptibility to chronic and inflammatory diseases, such as certain cancers or diabetes. The paper is published in the journal Nature, Ping Huang and PR News. There's a race to the bottom of the NFL standings four games into the season, A record-tying five teams have no wins one month in, marking just the seventh time that's happened in NFL history and the first time since 2019. I'm Rylan Barton. This is NPR News from Washington.