NPR News: 03-17-2026 12AM EDT

0:00Live from NPR News, I'm Trials Snyder. President Trump continues to press allies to join U.S. efforts to secure the strategic straight-of-war moves. But as NPR's Deepak Shiverham reports, so far, no other countries have publicly committed to helping. Trump says, quote, numerous countries have told him they're on the way to help the U.S. police the straight-of-war moves. But he didn't specify which countries, despite the president insisting that U.S. attacks on Iran have been successful so far, the street still poses a concern. Literally, a single terrorist can put something in the water, or shoot something, or shoot a missile, a small missile. And it's fairly close range because it is a tight area, which is one of the reasons that they've always used that as a weapon. Iran's ability to threaten slow-moving oil tankers in the street has become a headache for the Trump administration. 20 percent of the world's oil supply relies on the passage, and prices have increased since the war began.

1:01Deepak Shiverham and PR News, the White House. A head of a meeting in Brussels Tuesday, European Union foreign ministers appear cool to President Trump's call for help to protect shipping through the straight-of-war moves. A number of U.S. allies, including Germany, Spain, and Italy, say they have no immediate plans to send warships to reopen the street. A judge has blocked key parts of the Trump administration's controversial changes to federal vaccine policies. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued a preliminary ruling in a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups. It puts a hold on a series of changes made by Health Secretary Robert of Kennedy Jr. and an influential CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee that he stocked with members who share his anti-vaccine views. That includes a decision to slash the number of vaccines that the federal government recommends that children receive routinely. The Health and Human Services Department says the government plans to appeal the ruling. Rob Stein and PR News.

2:03The American's democracy rating has plunged by nearly 25 percent since President Trump's return to office, according to a leading report on global democracy, as in PR's Frank Langford reports. The report by the V Dam Institute, which is based in Sweden, so the U.S. fell in its annual democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries. V Dam scholars downgraded America based on everything from Trump's concentration of presidential power to his attacks on the media. Staffan Lindberg is the institute's founding director. Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey ten years to accomplish. Lindbergh is referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who have undermined democracy in their countries over time. NPR reached out to the White House for comment, but is yet to hear back. Frank Langford and PR News. This is NPR. The energy crisis in Cuba is deepening.

3:04Officials say millions are without power. I mean, the third major black outing Cuba over the past few months on Friday's, on Friday, Cuba's president warned that his country had not received oil shipments in more than three months. In January, President Trump warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. A Utah woman who wrote a children's book about coping with grief, following her husband's death, has been convicted of murdering him. Prosecutors say, Curry Richens, poisoned her husband Eric with fentanyl, jurors in Park City, also found Curry Richens guilty of fraudulently claiming insurance benefits. Visits to the country's national parks dipped slightly last year from the record-breaking crowds a year before the Mountain West News Bureau's Rachel Cohen reports. National parks' historic sites and monuments and recreation areas saw 323 million visits in 2025, about 3 percent less than 2024. But the National Park Service says visits were made high, despite the longest-ever government shutdown last fall, which lasted 43 days.

4:07The shutdown, the Trump administration kept parks mostly open, but with sparse staff and services. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, straddling North Carolina in Tennessee, remained the most popular, with 11.5 million visits. Zion National Park Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, rounded out the top five. The Grand Canyon fell one spot in the rankings as a wildfire destroyed a historic lodge and forced closures. For MPR News, I'm Rachel Cohen. And I'm Joel Snyder, you're listening to NPR News.