NPR News Now - NPR News: 08-15-2025 8AM EDT

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Kristen Wright. President Trump is soon headed to Anchorage, Alaska. The president will meet one-on-one with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. Trump has been trying to end Russia's war in Ukraine. He's casting today's summit as a prelude to a possible second meeting that would include Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, who was not invited to today's talks. Fleeing the war, some Ukrainians have relocated in Alaska. Zori Oppenna Sovich is executive. director of the New Chance United Relief program. She says Ukrainians are hopeful about the summit. Hope for a ceasefire, truly. Ukraine is not going to be at the table. Ukraine is not going to be at this conversation. Our hope is that they discuss stopping of the killing that is happening and just a complete ceasefire. That's what we want. The U.N. reports the number of civilian war casualties in Ukraine reached its highest level in more than three years last month. Attorney General Pam Bondi has named the head of the DEA as Washington, D.C.'s Emergency Police Commissioner in the federal takeover of the city's police department. Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C.'s Attorney General say it is unlawful. The administration

says the city is full of, quote, bloodthirsty criminals. But data from the Justice Department have shown violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low. Still, NPR's Meg Anderson reports high rates persist in some neighborhoods. Violent crime has been falling citywide after a surge in 2023. But it doesn't feel that way to everyone. NPR spoke with residents in several neighborhoods in D.C. that have more violent crime than the citywide average. They all say crime is a problem, but they also say this temporary crackdown isn't the answer. Michael Fletcher, a barber in southeast D.C., says he would like to see officers be more proactive in preventing crime, but doesn't think sending in federal forces will do that. It's not fixing the problem. It's only making people hate the law. Still, he said,

he had yet to see any noticeable increase in policing for himself. Meg Anderson, NPR News, Washington. College students in computer science once expected an easy jump into six-figure coding jobs, but as AI tools handled more junior programming tasks, some companies are rethinking their hiring of entry-level software engineers. NPR's Windsor Johnston reports. Routine jobs like writing basic code, running tests, and creating documentation are now often automated.

Robert Siemens is a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. He says that means fewer entry-level positions and tougher competition for the ones that remain. The data also suggests that that entry-level work that is AI exposed, there's even more of a decline in demand. According to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, college graduates in their 20s with degrees in computer science or engineering are facing some of the nation's highest unemployment rates. Windsor Johnston, NPR News. This is NPR. The Inca Empire didn't have a system of writing, but it did record information in a complex system of knotted strings.

NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce reports on a study that suggests literacy in this form of record-keeping may have been widespread. The knotted strings are known as Kipu's. Everything from census data to agricultural records got encoded in Kipu's. Most were made of cotton, but recently researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland came across a 500-year-old Kipu that incorporated human hair. That's thought to be a kind of signature of the maker. And a chemical analysis of the hair showed that the person had the plain vegetarian diet of a common person.

There wasn't an abundance of the meat and maize beer enjoyed by the Inca Empire's elite ruling class, which was long assumed to be the only producer of Kipu's. Nell Greenfield-Boice, NPR News. Air Canada is starting to cancel flights ahead of a potential strike by flight attendants. They want higher pay. If they don't reach a contract agreement with the airline by midnight tonight, they could go on strike. The union represents about 10,000 flight attendants. Air Canada operates around 400 daily flights between the U.S. and Canada.

The airline C.O. says they expect to pause all flights by tomorrow morning and that by tomorrow night, the cancellations could affect more than 100,000 Air Canada customers. The flight attendants also want guarantees that they're paid for all working hours. This is NPR.