NPR News

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday night, just days after striking a settlement with more than 2,000 local governments over its alleged role in creating and sustaining the deadly opioid crisis.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday he will push for a ban on some e-cigarettes amid a health scare linked to vaping — a move that would follow a similar ban enacted by Michigan and a call from President Trump for a federal prohibition on certain vaping products.

Updated at 10:52 p.m.

Ric Ocasek, the lead singer of the rock band The Cars, died Sunday in New York; he was found unconscious Sunday afternoon at his townhouse in Manhattan. A New York Police Department spokesman confirmed Ocasek's death to NPR. There is some confusion about Ocasek's age: The NYPD said that he was 75; public records list his age as 70 years old.

Country music has a gender problem. Women only make up 16% of country artists, and even fewer are songwriters.

When women do break into the mainstream — the likes of Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves — they're often young. The average age of the genre's top female artists is 29 years old.

Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET

Iran says it is not behind Saturday's drone attacks on oil plants in Saudi Arabia, denying accusations from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Tehran was responsible for "an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply."

Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, said in a tweet on Sunday that Pompeo was turning from "max pressure" to "max deceit."

Updated at 12:45 p.m. ET Monday

The United Auto Workers began a nationwide strike just before midnight on Sunday at General Motors after both sides failed to agree on a new contract over issues including wages, health care and profit-sharing.

Production across the U.S. is expected to be halted, affecting nearly 50,000 worker at 33 manufacturing plants in nine states as well as 22 parts distribution warehouses until a new contract is hammered out.

Emine Dirican, a beautician from Istanbul, tried to be a good wife. But her husband hated that she worked, that she socialized, even that she wanted to leave the house sometimes without him.

She tried to reason with him. He lashed out.

"One time, he tied me — my hands, my legs from the back, like you do to animals," recalls Dirican, shuddering. "He beat me with a belt and said, 'You're going to listen to me, you're going to obey whatever I say to you.' "

Today, it's almost hard to remember just how different the Texas government was back in the 1970s. That's when Molly Ivins scorched a trail through good-ol'-boy politics like a flamethrower through a cactus patch.

"The legislature was fairly corrupt in those days," she said to NPR in 2006. "And the fact that it was, and that everybody knew it, and that people laughed about it, struck me as worth reporting. And I thought: Why not put it in the way it is?"

On-air challenge: Every answer is a holiday that goes by "____ Day." I'll give you anagrams of the words that go in the blanks, you name the holidays.

Example: ROAR + B --> ARBOR (Arbor Day)

1. GAL + F
2. HARE + T
3. BOAR + L
4. RESHOT + M
5. STRAFE + H
6. SERVANT + E
7. YAWNERS + E (2 words)
8. IMMORAL + E
9. DISPENSER + T
10. VENETIANS + L
11. INDENTATIONS + U (2 words)

Farmers in the rural Midwest say they are struggling because of President Trump's ongoing trade war and a recent decision the president made on renewable fuels made from corn and soybeans that benefits the oil industry.

"We're tightening our belt," farmer Aaron Lehman says while driving his tractor down a rural road near his farm north of Des Moines, Iowa. "We're talking to our lenders, our landlords [and] our input suppliers."

80% of the world's vanilla is grown by small holding farmers in the hilly forests of Madagascar. For a generation the price languished below $50 a kilo (about 2.2 pounds) but in 2015 it began to rise at an extraordinary rate and for the past four years has hovered at ten times that amount, between $400 and $600 a kilo.

Can you see it? The fire in the photo above?

A single tree burning doesn't put up much smoke.

There's a flash of lightning, sizzling across the sky. Then, a pause, as bark smolders and flames creep, building heat until poof: a signal in the sky.

Philip Connors, gazing outward from a tower, sees it as a new dent on the crest of a distant ridge. He's spent thousands of hours contemplating the contours of southwest New Mexico. The fuzzy smudge is out of place.

A Virginia judge has blocked efforts to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was at the center of the deadly violence that erupted in Charlottesville in 2017.

In a ruling issued this week, Judge Richard E. Moore said that any effort to remove the Lee statue would violate a state historic preservation statute and issued a permanent injunction preventing its removal. His decision extended to a separate monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that city leaders and local activists had hoped to get rid of.

Updated at 4:51 p.m. ET

Yemen's Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for drone strikes on two Saudi Aramco oil facilities early Saturday, according to a statement by a Houthi spokesman.

There was once a time when MoviePass subscribers could see a movie every single day for the cost of $9.95 a month. Now, the company has officially shut down the service and its future is still undetermined.

MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics notified MoviePass subscribers on Friday that it would be interrupting the service effective Saturday.

President Trump says that Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, has been killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region.

In a statement released by the White House on Saturday, Trump said bin Laden's son was responsible for "planning and dealing with various terrorist groups." His death, he said, "not only deprives al-Qa'ida of important leadership skills and the symbolic connection to his father, but undermines important operational activities of the group."

British police have arrested a 66-year-old man in connection with the theft of a solid gold toilet from a palace west of London.

The toilet, titled America, is a work of art by the 58-year-old Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It had been installed for an exhibition at England's Blenheim Palace earlier this week.

Blenheim Palace confirmed the theft in a statement posted on Twitter.

The complex remembrance process for longtime Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe continued Saturday with a state funeral. Mugabe, who was ousted in a 2017 military coup, led Zimbabwe for 37 years and died last week at a Singapore hospital.

This essay has been excerpted from the forthcoming book Liner Notes For The Revolution: Black Feminist Sound Cultures by Daphne A. Brooks, which will be published by Harvard UP in 2020.

María Fernanda Papa was 4 years old when she and her family arrived in Miami. She'd begun dancing back home in Venezuela, and when she and her parents settled in the U.S., she asked if she could continue practicing ballet. Eventually, they found a spot for her in an "amazing school," says María, now 16.

On a hot June day in Fort Scott, Kan., as the Good Ol' Days festival was in full swing, 7-year-old Kaidence Anderson sat in the shade with her family, waiting for a medevac helicopter to land.

A crowd had gathered to see the display prearranged by staff at the town's historic fort.

"It's going to show us how it's going to help other people because we don't have the hospital anymore," the redheaded girl explained.

Residents are desperately trying to conserve water in the Native village of Nanwalek, located on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. The village, home to the Sugpiaq tribe, is currently in a severe drought.

Nina Kvasnikoff's family is eating off paper plates, collecting water from the ocean to flush toilets and washing themselves with sponges.

"It doesn't feel like you're clean. You feel like you're just splattering a little bit of water," she says.

Director Ken Burns has told the story of America through the lens of the U.S. Civil War, baseball, jazz and the war in Vietnam. Now, he's telling it again through the soundtrack and the struggle of country music.

News organizations now refer to President Trump's whoppers — from the size of his inaugural crowds to a hurricane threatening Alabama — as routinely as referring to rain in Seattle.