NPR News

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Hacking The Law.

About Steven Wise's TED Talk

Animals like chimpanzees are autonomous beings with rich emotional lives, says animal rights lawyer Steven Wise. He's working to get courts to recognize them as "legal persons" and grant them rights.

About Steven Wise

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Hacking The Law.

About Brett Hennig's TED Talk

Brett Hennig says democracy — and the process of voting — is broken. To fix it, he has a radical suggestion: replacing politicians with a demographically representative selection of random citizens.

About Brett Hennig

Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Hacking The Law.

About Vivek Maru's TED Talk

Often, people who don't understand the law or can't pay for lawyers end up being mistreated. Lawyer and social entrepreneur Vivek Maru calls for a global community of paralegals to place the law on the side of the people.

About Vivek Maru

At 10 a.m. on Sept. 22, Granville Street in Vancouver turned into a river. Brightly colored cardboard salmon, bicycle floats and hundreds of people dressed in costumes flowed down the street, carrying huge silkscreen banners and flags as big as sails printed with the words "Wild Salmon Forever." People sang, beat drums and called the wild salmon home.

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., who has been accused of covering up sexual abuse scandals during his tenure as the bishop of Pittsburgh.

Most of the roads in Florida's Bay County are now impassable. There's no electricity, no working sewers, no gasoline, very little cell service, and a boil water advisory.

"This whole town's destroyed" after Hurricane Michael, says Ryan Smith, a mechanic in Lynn Haven, on the north side of Panama City, Fla.

He's standing outside a red brick apartment complex where most of the roofs are gone and giant pine trees have fallen through some of the buildings.

"This was our house," he says. "Now all our stuff's destroyed."

In March 1980, Patricia Morales Tijerino and her sister had just left a wedding in a little chapel in El Salvador's capital and were on their way to the reception.

"And then I spotted him," Morales Tijerino recalls. "He was in his white cassock."

Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, was standing alone in a garden outside the church.

All F-35 fighter jets deployed to the U.S. and its allies have been temporarily grounded following a crash of one of the aircraft in South Carolina last month.

In a statement, the F-35 Joint Program Office said the U.S. and its international partners had suspended flights of the Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the Lightening II, until a fleet-wide inspection of the aircraft's fuel tubes is completed.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi vowed this week to demand President Trump's tax returns if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives next month.

Pelosi, seeking to regain her gavel as House speaker after elections in November, told The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that the move "is one of the first things we'd do — that's the easiest thing in the world. That's nothing."

Updated at 8:52 p.m. ET

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a message for Republican voters who are celebrating the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh: Get to the polls in November if you want more conservatives sitting on judicial benches.

The Washington Supreme Court has struck down the state's death penalty, saying that it is imposed arbitrarily and with racial bias.

"We are confident that the association between race and the death penalty is not attributed to random chance," the justices wrote in a majority opinion.

The remains of Matthew Shepard, whose death became an important symbol in the fight against homophobia — and whose name is on a key U.S. hate-crime law — will be interred at Washington National Cathedral later this month.

Shepard's parents say they're "proud and relieved to have a final resting place for Matthew's ashes."

When Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince in 2015, just before his 30th birthday, it created a wave of optimism that he could modernize a kingdom that has long resisted change.

Change has come rapidly indeed. Women can now drive, the powers of the religious police have been scaled back, and Mohammed has sketched out plans to overhaul and diversify the oil-based economy.

Tents cover the lawn of a cracked government building in Palu. Coloring books are spread out across a tarp on the lawn. Children play tag in the driveway and wag their arms and hips in the popular "floss" dance, under the shade of palm trees.

This is where they bring children who were separated from their families after the earthquake and tsunami hit central Indonesia last month – as well as kids who were reunited but need trauma counseling.