ReadNOW

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Today’s top stories

It’s been almost 100 days since President Trump took office and promised to deliver mass deportations. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that while arrests have increased, the pace of deportations is, so far, down from the last fiscal year of the Biden administration. Over the weekend, federal authorities say they arrested more than 100 people without legal status at an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs.

• 🎧 Critics say the Trump administration is in such a rush to drive up deportation numbers that they’re making mistakes, ReadNOW’s Joel Rose tells Up First. In one case, a 2-year-old American citizen was deported last week. The mother did not have legal status, but her daughter was born in Louisiana. According to a lawsuit filed by the mother’s attorney, authorities held her and her children without allowing them to speak with anyone before they were deported to Honduras. Concerned by how this case was handled, a judge has set a hearing for next month.

Measles is now considered an outbreak. Almost 900 cases have been confirmed in 30 states since the first was detected in late January. As of this month, the number of cases has already tripled the number of cases in all of 2024. Years ago, officials believed measles had been eradicated. They say vaccine hesitancy is a factor in the disease’s resurgence.

• 🎧 The measles vaccination rate for Gaines County, Texas, where nearly half of the country’s cases have been confirmed, was 82% at the beginning of the year. The Centers for Disease Control says a 95% vaccination rate is needed to prevent outbreaks. To help increase the vaccination rate, local health authorities have set up a pop-up clinic, billboards and local TV ads to encourage vaccinations, says Brad Burt with network station KTTZ. Pediatrician Dr. Ana Montanez says some parents who have decided to forgo the vaccine for measles have turned to unproven remedies, such as Vitamin A.

Canadians head to the polls today to decide the next prime minister. At the beginning of the year, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, was almost guaranteed to take on the title. Then, Justin Trudeau resigned after nearly a decade of leading the Liberal Party. Trump became president, threatened Canada’s sovereignty, and imposed tariffs on Canadian goods. The Liberal Party has surged ahead under its new leader, Mark Carney.

• 🎧 Canadians are angry about Trump targeting their country, saying that he wants it to become the 51st state and imposing stiff tariffs, ReadNOW’s Jackie Northam says. She adds that Poilievre’s problem in this election is that he is seen as copying Trump’s rhetoric. Throughout his campaign, Poilievre expressed a Canada-first mentality. He wanted to close the borders, shrink the government and erase wokism. Carney is widely viewed as unflappable and someone who can handle Trump. The president hasn’t mentioned annexing Canada since Carney took office, and he calls him prime minister rather than governor, as he did Trudeau.

Today’s listen

National Poetry Month ends on Wednesday, but the stories that go with it won’t. That’s why Morning Edition is paying homage to cowboy poetry, a form of poetry that grew from the tradition of cowboys telling stories. Yvonne Hollenbeck, a cowgirl poet, says that for her, the genre is a history of the West, both past and present. Hollenbeck lives on a South Dakota ranch and finds inspiration in cowboy poetry’s daily rhythms. Listen to her and other poets talk about their experience and read excerpts of their work.

From our hosts

by Michel Martin, Morning Edition and Up First host

Last Friday’s show made me think about contrasts.

I’m traveling through time and space here, but stay with me:

I was more than a little excited to interview Tina Knowles, mom to Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Solange Knowles. She has dropped a new memoir titled, appropriately, Matriarch; she considers the members of Destiny’s Child and many others her “honorary” children.

When I first received the book a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what to expect. Would it be like too many celebrity memoirs, heavy on publicity hits but short on substance? It’s not.

Instead, it paints an interesting picture of what it was like to grow up in a barely desegregated Galveston, Texas, where some folks had so little respect from powers-that-be that all seven kids in Ms. Knowles’ birth family wound up with different spellings of their parents’ last name, Buyince. Tina wound up with Beyoncé. The rest is, as they say, history.

Except it isn’t, because this is the first time we’re hearing what it was like, through Tina’s eyes, to go from a little family of up-and-comers to being in the cockpit of the rocket that became Beyoncé’s career. Tina ran a successful beauty salon in Houston, and her husband, Matthew, was a talented salesman. As Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, tell it on their album The Carters, their “great-great-grandchildren already rich.”

That seems a very far distance from one of the (several) riveting stories on last Friday’s show. Our colleague Emmanuel Akinwotu made it to Khartoum, where Sudan’s vicious civil war began. The fighting has spawned one of the world’s most wretched humanitarian disasters. People like former U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield have tried to keep it in the spotlight. In 2023, she brought a small group of reporters, including me, to the border with Chad, where refugees from Sudan were streaming in with one heartbreaking story after another. But it seemed like the world’s attention just could not linger there, with wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Yemen still ongoing.

It all seems so hard to take in — why do some suffer so much, even as others prosper? Why, as the famous seafarer’s prayer asks, is thy sea so great and my boat is so small?

Sometimes it seems that our boat is too small to contain all that is in the world to see. And yet, we try…again and again and again.

3 things to know before you go

1. Shlissel challah, the tradition of baking a special loaf for the first Shabbat after Passover, has been trending across social media. Beautiful photos online have encouraged people who didn’t grow up with the tradition to try baking their own challah.
2. A eerily prescient letter written by first-class passenger Col. Archibald Gracie while onboard the Titanic recently sold at auction for a record $399,000.
3. In 2018, Alexis Agnew left her doctor’s appointment in tears, terrified she might have cancer after receiving irregular test results. On her way out of the office, an employee noticed her distress, stopped her and comforted her in more ways than one while she cried. Agnew says there are not enough words to say how she wants to thank her unsung hero.

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.