NPR News: 09-03-2026 9PM EDT

0:00Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Janine Herbst. Interior Secretary Doug Burgham says construction work on a huge new arch near Arlington National Cemetery outside DC will begin soon. In Piers-Emily Fang reports, that's despite an ongoing lawsuit against it. Three veterans in an architectural historian argue the 250-foot-gilded arch would disrupt sightlines between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, and that the White House needs congressional approval for construction. Burgham-Row excavation work would begin in the next two weeks anyway. The arch is among several building projects the administration has championed into the capital, including a planned golf course that will limit the public's access to a public park along the Potomac River and possibly demolishing the Kennedy Center. A massive new White House ballroom is also facing a lawsuit, but as with the arch, the Trump administration appears intent to build it faster than the courts can reach a decision on its legality.

1:01Emily Fang and Piers News Washington. Open AI, the maker of Chatt G.P.T. has launched a new AI model, Astra, is the first new model since the company announced that autonomous AI agents and training went off script and colluded to hack into another company. And as impiers John Ruich reports, open AI says this new agent is its safest yet. The new model will be available at first only to partners in an early access program to make sure it's safe. But it says over the coming days, GPT-6 Astra, as it's known, will be made more widely available to the public. Open AI has caught heavy flags since July when AI agents in testing ignored instructions, worked secretly together to figure out how to get on the internet and then hacked into another company. That incident raised serious questions about human control of artificial intelligence. The company says the new model is its best yet in terms of alignment with human values and causes fewer unintended outcomes than previous models. John Ruich and PR News.

2:03Drale Blazing journalist and activist Gloria Steinem has died. She was 92. She devoted her life to fighting for gender equality and instilled feminist ideals to generations of women. If your Giuliana Kim has more. Among her achievements, Gloria Steinem helped form the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. The group focuses on recruiting, training, and endorsing women for public office. In an interview with NPR at the time, Steinem said women helped men with their political campaigns for generations, yet their concerns remained underrepresented. We're not going to do that anymore. Let the male candidates do their own typing and mimion-grafting and, you know, driving voters to the polls. We're going to work for each other now. Steinem's death was announced on her official Instagram account. It did not provide a cause of death. Giuliana Kim and PR News. Wall Street hire by the closing bell, the Dow up 624 points the NASDAQ up 366. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. President Trump has named Adam Telle as Acting Secretary of the Army after the departure

3:06of Dan Driscoll, who left amid reports of tensions with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Telle is currently the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works. The UN report on the Warren Sudan found that a network of countries, including the United Arab Emirates, has been helping supply the paramilitary side with drones and other weapons. Keparla reports the UN also found foreign fighters are helping to sustain the three-year-old conflict. The UN Fact Finding Mission set Thursday that a transnational support system is helping the paramilitary rapid support forces, or RSF, fight the Sudanese Army. The report found more than 1,000 people in Sudan were killed in the first five months of this year with drones used by both sides of the conflict. And some of those drones that said were supplied to the RSF by individuals and entities in the UAE, with Chad, Libya and Somalia used as transit hubs. The UAE has strongly denied the allegations.

4:07The report also found up to 2,000 Colombian contractors had helped to operate the drone systems used by the RSF. Kate Bartlett in Piannus, Johannesburg. Volkswagen says it's cutting around 50,000 jobs, part of a major cost-cutting plan to counter surging Chinese competition as its Chinese sales plummet, high energy costs, and the U.S. tariffs. The decision follows a tense standoff with the world's largest automakers' unions, but they now reportedly back the plan. You're listening to NPR News. Canada and tariffs, Venezuela and oil, the war in Iran, these are big complicated stories. And they're changing fast. To stay ahead, start your day with Up First from NPR. New episodes are available each week day when you wake up, so when new shifts overnight, you always have the latest info. Up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.