News
National Guard member dies from injuries. And, death toll in Hong Kong fire rises
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Today’s top stories
Sarah Beckstrom, one of two West Virginia National Guard members who were shot in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, has died. President Trump announced the 20-year-old’s death during a Thanksgiving call to service members. Beckstrom and the other Guard member, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, were on patrol a few blocks away from the White House when the alleged gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, opened fire. Wolfe remains in critical condition. In the wake of this shooting, the Trump administration is launching a comprehensive “reexamination” of thousands of refugees and migrants who have been admitted to the U.S. and granted green cards.
This photo combination shows West Virginia National Guard Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe (left) and Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who were injured in Wednesday’s shooting in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Attorney’s Office/AP
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U.S. Attorney’s Office/AP
- 🎧 Lakanwal served in Afghanistan alongside U.S. forces as part of an elite counter-terrorism unit connected to the CIA and the military, NPR’s Brian Mann tells Up First. The alleged gunman applied for asylum during the Biden administration and was granted protection in April of this year under the Trump administration. Trump has called for an effort to “denaturalize migrants” and “deport” foreign nationals. Mann notes that the Trump administration’s narrative suggests that Lakanwal was allowed into the U.S. without proper vetting, indicating that this could be a broader issue. But sources like the nonprofit group AfghanEvac tell NPR that Lakanwal would have been scrutinized repeatedly in Afghanistan and before he arrived in the U.S. Experts say that while the vetting process for Afghan refugees was audited and found to be imperfect, it was thorough. They also emphasize that the majority of refugees from Afghanistan are living in the U.S. peacefully.
At least 128 people have died after a massive fire engulfed a high-rise housing complex that houses around 4,600 people in Hong Kong from Wednesday to Friday. This is one of the region’s deadliest blazes in decades, and authorities have indicated that the death toll may continue to rise. The police have arrested three men for alleged manslaughter in connection with the fire. Here’s what else we know.
(Just a few) of the Books We Love
Hey folks – Andrew Limbong here, host of NPR’s Book of the Day podcast. I’m tapping in this week to let you all know about our annual recommendation engine, Books We Love. If you wanna come and hang and keep chatting about books stuff, subscribe to the books newsletter!
This week, NPR dropped its massive year-end book recommendation tool, Books We Love. It’s not quite a year-end list, 10 best or whatever, seeing as there are more than 380 books included. Instead, it’s a way of saying: Here’s a bunch of books. There’s something in here for you.
But I get it — 380 is a daunting number, even with Books We Love’s handy-dandy filter tag system. So here’s just a small slice, a sliver, a taste of a few of the books several of our staffers and critics were into this year.
📚 The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami — You know that spooky feeling you get when you make small talk with someone about needing a new TV, and your phone then just happens to send you the latest TV deals? This dystopian novel is like that but scarier. Emily Kwong, host of NPR’s Short Wave, writes, “I found The Dream Hotel instructive for navigating a society beset by mass surveillance — where the only escape can be found in shouldering risk together.”
- 📚 King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby — If gritty crime fiction is more your thing, Cosby’s latest centers around a family-run small business that gets roped into being involved with a local drug gang. If you think you’ve heard this one before, that small business happens to be a crematorium. Weekend Edition producer Melissa Gray writes, “This story spins and spins violently to a dark and satisfying conclusion.”
- 📚 Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy — This time of year finds lots of folks feeling … different, complicated, conflicting feelings about their parents. The novelist Arundhati Roy wrestles with her own ambivalent feelings about her mother in this new memoir. Morning Edition host Leila Fadel writes, “It’s a story of turbulent love and of liberation that is beautiful, witty and at times uncomfortable to read.”
- 📚 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green — You might recognize TB by its more romantic name, consumption. But … it’s weird there was a time when we romanticized this deadly disease, right? In this book, Green presents TB as very much a present, fatal, yet curable concern. Here & Now producer James Perkins Mastromarino writes that the book is “witty, cogent and achingly beautiful.”
Again, this is just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of books we’ve got on this year’s edition of Books We Love, as recommended by our staffers and critics. But if you’re into this and want to read about books all year round, subscribe to the books newsletter!
Black Friday stories you may have missed
It’s gift-giving season, and some consumer and child advocacy groups are raising concerns about the latest buzz-worthy AI toys
Elva Etienne/Getty Images
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Elva Etienne/Getty Images
The nonprofit children’s safety organization Fairplay is urging gift-givers to refrain from purchasing AI toys for kids this holiday season. In an advisory, Fairplay and other child and consumer advocacy groups highlight the potential dangers of toys such as interactive dolls and children’s robots designed to mimic human behavior and engage with kids as if they are friends. The advisory points out that these toys exploit children’s trust and can disrupt human relationships, among other negative effects.
Muralist Maxx Moses is putting the “Black” in Black Friday. For the second year in a row, he’s hosting the Black Friday Artists Market at the Graffiti Gardens in San Diego. Moses painted the walls of the studio, which he uses to partner with local organizations. The market will feature a diverse group of emerging and established local artists, aiming to celebrate Black culture, community and economics. (via KPBS)
This holiday shopping season, expect deep discounts as retailers aim to encourage cautious shoppers to splurge. The National Retail Federation predicts a record-breaking season, with Americans projected to spend over $1 trillion on gifts, food, and decorations, reflecting a growth rate of about 4% — similar to last year.
Now that the Thanksgiving excitement is over, it is time for millions of Americans to make that long trek home. For some, the trip means dealing with car sickness. If you are one of those people, don’t fret, NPR’s How To Do Everything podcast has the guidance you need to make the ride better.
Weekend picks
Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value.
Neon
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Neon
Check out what NPR is watching, reading and listening to this weekend:
🍿 Movies: In Sentimental Value, a well-known filmmaker works on his next feature while he tries to reconnect with his estranged daughters. According to Pop Culture Happy Hour, his endeavor highlights the complexity between art and parenthood.
📺 TV: This week marked the beginning of the end for Netflix’s 1980s-set horror drama Stranger Things. But will this final season provide a satisfying conclusion? Here’s what NPR critic Eric Deggans has to say. (Warning: there are spoilers ahead).
📚 Books: Do you really need MORE recommendations after Andrew Limbong’s essay? If the answer is yes, check out four books that were released this week, which range from a deep dive into crosswords to a posthumous collection of short stories.
🎵 Music: Now that Thanksgiving is over, as Mariah Carey famously says, “It’s time…” to turn on the holiday music. Download the NPR app today and explore our special collection of holiday music streams from across the NPR network, from the perfect soundtrack for your next party to the finest holiday jazz.
🍽️ Food: Are leftovers taking over your fridge today? Chef Kathy Gunst offers recipes to help transform them into something possibly even better than when you first ate them.
This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
Nebraska Medicine
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Nebraska Medicine
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Nebraska Medicine
The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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