NPR News Now - NPR News: 05-27-2025 8AM EDT

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

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A lot has changed in higher education since President Trump took office. Everything that's been going on has kind of changed my life plans. Students have come to me and just, they feel really scared. On the Sunday story, how members of the class of 2025 are feeling about the state of higher ed and their own futures. Listen now to the Sunday story on the Up First podcast from NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Corva Coleman. President Trump has again vented anger at Harvard University. Writing online, he said he's considering moving three billion dollars of grant

money to trade schools across the U.S. The Trump administration is already pulling other federal funding from Harvard, accusing it of anti-Semitism, a charge Harvard officials deny. The administration has told international students at Harvard they have to leave the university or they will lose the ability to stay in the U.S. A federal judge has halted that demand. There is a status hearing on the case this morning in Boston. The Senate now has the multi-trillion-dollar government spending plan passed last week by the House.

NPR's Cory Turner reports the legislation includes a first-of-its-kind national private school voucher plan. The government can't directly fund private religious schools so Republicans in Congress are looking to do it indirectly using the tax code. A private citizen could make a donation to a nonprofit called a scholarship granting organization which would then bundle that money into vouchers for students to attend private schools. What's more, folks who donate would get a generous dollar-for-dollar tax credit, meaning if they give $5,000, they could knock five grand off their tax bill.

And if donors give stock, instead, they can avoid capital gains taxes. By one estimate, the plan would cost the U.S. government more than $23 billion in lost revenue. Corey Turner, NPR News. SpaceX is preparing another test launch of its massive Starship rocket as early as today. NPR's Jeff Brumfield reports there were two failed launches earlier this year. The rocket is called Starship and SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes it will one day take people to Mars. First, though, it's got to get into space.

Its last two test flights exploded minutes after launching from Texas. The debris rained down over the Caribbean. This time, SpaceX says it solved the problem, which it traced to one of the spacecraft's engines. The FAA recently cleared SpaceX to launch Starship as many as 25 times a year from Texas. It also expanded the hazard zone in the event another spacecraft explodes during launch. And the regulator told SpaceX to time launches so that there will be fewer civilian aircraft crossing beneath the path of the rocket.

Jeff Brumfield, NPR News. Police in Philadelphia say a mass shooting has killed two people and left nine others injured. The shooting happened late last night in a city park. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel says officers in the park heard rapid gunfire. We have our team up there, crime scene is now going through, looking at the shell casings, we'll be able to determine if it was one weapon or multiple weapons, but it's pretty rapid fire so we're pretty confident that there probably was a switch on this guy.

Police say no arrests have been made. Three of the injured people are teenagers. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. Authorities in Louisiana say they've recaptured three more escaped prisoners. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. Authorities in Louisiana say they've recaptured three more escaped prisoners. They were part of a group of 10 that broke out of a New Orleans jail earlier this month. Two of them are caught in Texas. That leaves two prisoners still at large.

The jailbreak was brazen. The group slid through a hole behind a toilet. Louisiana authorities allege the prisoners had help in escaping. They have arrested nine people, including a jail plumber. The Scripps National Spelling Bee gets underway today, and Pierre's Ava Pukac reports the bee is marking its 100th anniversary. The first winning word of the inaugural Scripps National Spelling Bee was gladiolus. Only nine spellers competed that year. Now, 100 years later, 243 spellers are competing across four days. As part of the bee, the spellers

participate in a vocabulary round, answering multiple choice questions that script says are designed to advance the bee's focus on word knowledge and literacy. The final round of this year's bee is set for Thursday evening. If the competition goes long, it could feature a newer element of the competition, the spell off. Each remaining speller gets 90 seconds to spell as many words as they can from a predetermined list of words, with the champion being the speller that spells the most words correctly. Ava Pugacz and PR News. Former New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel has died at the age of 94. He was a founding member of the Congressional

Black Caucus and the first black American to run the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel was also a Korean War veteran. No funeral details for Rangel have yet been announced. I'm Korva Coleman, NPR News. You're listening to the NPR Network. Live from NPR News, I'm Korva Coleman, NPR News.