NPR News: 09-03-2026 2PM EDT

0:00Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. Vice President J.D. Vance is holding the first White House press briefing since press Secretary Caroline Levit resigned. Vance is celebrating Washington's new oil deal with Gadakas, the U.S. gains a majority stake in more than 65 billion barrels of oil through its agreement with Venezuela's second largest private oil company. Good for Venezuelans. It's good for anybody who's buying gas. It's good for the American taxpayer as well. So it's very much a win-win thing. We're very proud of it. And I also just think that it gives supply stability in the energy market. As an extension of the agreement, Chevron says it'll double its production of Venezuela over the next five years. As NPR's Julia Simon reports, that would have implications for the environment. These Chevron assets in Venezuela are some of the most planet-heating oil assets on Earth, says Basha Madovi, political science professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

1:00This expansion is effectively a carbon bomb. And so if Chevron does produce this field, that's roughly 52 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, additional. He says that's equivalent to the emissions of about 12 million gas-powered cars. Chevron did not respond to a request for comment. The Chevron announcement comes as the United Nations says the world has passed a dangerous threshold for global warming. Julia Simon and Pierre News. People across Iran are assessing the damage from a heavy wave of U.S. air strikes. The Iran is reporting military and civilian casualties. While the U.S. says it's forced to struck Iranian military targets. And Pierre said, Diel Al-Shalce has the latest from Istanbul. The U.S. military said its recent wave of strikes were in response to recent Iranian attempts to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and against American service members based in the region.

2:00According to a statement released by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, four members of their aerospace division were killed in U.S. strikes on Tuesday. The Iranian Ministry of Health said that four people were killed during a U.S. strike on a wedding in southern Iran. The U.S. military did not comment on that particular incident, but a U.S. central command spokesperson acknowledged there were reports of civilian casualties during Tuesday's attacks. Iran retaliated on Tuesday by targeting the Gulf and Jordan. Early Wednesday morning, Kuwaiti armed forces said it was intercepting missile and drone attacks coming from Iran. Hadil Al-Shalce and Pierre News is Istanbul. Some of the most influential figures in the global fight for gender equality are honoring Gloria Steinem. She died yesterday at the age of 92. The journalist and activist spent a lifetime championing women's rights, including abortion rights. She said despite the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, her work on reproductive justice was not in vain. It's NPR.

3:02A Massachusetts jury is spending another day attempting to reach a unanimous decision. On whether to find Lindsey Clancy criminally responsible for the 2023 killings of her three young children, which she says happened while suffering postpartum psychosis. The case could end in a mistrial if the jury returns to the judge for a third time, deadlocked. After the panel of nine women and three men went back to judge William Sullivan yesterday to inform him that they were at an impasse, he issued state-specific instruction known as a two-year-old Rodriguez charge. The judge emphasized how important it was for jurors to reexamine their positions without compromising their honestly held beliefs for the sake of reaching a verdict. After eight years traveling through space, a European space agency's mission to the planet Mercury is nearing its destination. Joe Palco reports a spacecraft completed a crucial maneuver earlier today. The mission is called Bepi Colombo. It's actually made of two probes, one that will study Mercury's magnetic field and another

4:02that will take close-up pictures of the planet's surface among other things. In order to reach Mercury, Bepi Colombo needed to fly by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself six times. During its eight-year cruise, the twin probes relied on something called the Mercury Transfer Module for Propulsion, but that module had to be jettisoned before arrival. Now that's happened. The next mission milestone comes in November when the probes will be captured by Mercury's gravity and can go into orbit. For NPR News, I'm Joe Palco. I'm Lakshmi Singh in PR News in Washington. This week on Newsmakers, after more than a decade in comedy, I wasn't sure that we would get here. Robbie Hoffman is fearless. I had a small feeling I wasn't sure, and fully herself. Hello? You can go out and flash. Well, I'm not home now. I'm doing something. We plunge into comedy and success with Robbie Hoffman on NPR's Newsmakers.