The latest entry in the fantasy role-playing franchise 'Dragon Age' allows players to make their character trans-identifying and features a scene where one character is forced to atone for “misgendering” someone by performing a series of push-ups. 

Christmas came early as stars, filmmakers and fans gathered for the red carpet premiere of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” — a family-friendly film creators hope will earn a spot among the holiday classics. 

In a world fractured by deep ideological divisions, Nicholas Ma’s new documentary, “Leap of Faith,” seeks to answer the question of whether love can bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides. 

The Recording Academy announced nominations for the 67th annual Grammy Awards on Thursday, with Christian and gospel artists such as Bethel Music, Brandon Lake, CeCe Winans and newcomer Forest Frank receiving nods.

New restrictions on PFAS and what that means for Granite State communities. These chemicals have been found in public water supplies around the state. Used for decades in such products as Teflon and Gortex, they've been linked to serious health problems, spurring communities to take action, including lawsuits. Now, after intense pressure from community activists, New Hampshire officials have proposed some of the lowest PFAS limits in the country. We'll find out what's in store now, in terms of testing, following the health effects of these chemicals, and more.

This summer, towns in southern New Hampshire are breaking ground on what will become the state’s largest regional water system. It is being built in part with money from massive settlements between New Hampshire and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, that used to produce MtBE, a chemical that polluted local drinking water.

New Hampshire is seeing more heat waves due to climate change. And staying cool is even harder this year because of COVID-19. Our new climate change reporting project, By Degrees , has this look at how New Hampshire's cities are coping.

Earlier this year, the city of Lebanon gave a small group of residents the chance to bring not their trash and recyclables to the local landfill, but their compost too. It makes Lebanon one of a few cities in the state helping residents reduce food waste, which is a major contributor to climate change.

COVID-19 has been hard on just about every industry in New Hampshire, and renewable energy is no exception. People worried about money are putting off investing in solar panels, and health concerns have made home energy efficiency visits more complicated. But scientists say investments like these can lower energy costs, and remain a critical way to combat the other big crisis we’re facing – climate change. As part of NHPR’s new climate change reporting project, By Degrees , NHPR’s Annie Ropeik has been trying to find out what might be ahead for the renewable energy industry in the state. Morning Edition Host Rick Ganley spoke with her about what’s next.

The bodies of two poll workers, who were among the five people killed in Missouri after flash floods swept through the state, were discovered early Wednesday.

A 25-year-old Michigan man is facing federal charges after he allegedly threatened violence against conservative Christians over former President Donald Trump winning the presidential election.

Pastor John-Paul Miller is expected to appear in a Myrtle Beach court Thursday for a bond hearing after he was arrested and charged a day earlier with third-degree assault months after the suicide of his wife, Mica Miller.

Jackson Gatlin, a former young adult and online community pastor at The Vineyard Church in Duluth, Minnesota, who was charged last year with sexually abusing five teenage girls, will likely spend at least 13 years in prison and have to register as a sex offender when his sentence is complete after he accepted a plea deal for one of the five charges Wednesday.

The president of Focus on the Family says he’s “encouraged” by Tuesday’s election results even as he acknowledged both victories and setbacks for the pro-life movement.

Barely a year after the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2021, and shortly before they would jet off to Angola in southern Africa with their five children to do missionary work, Beau Shroyer and his wife Jackie Shroyer who was recently charged in connection with his Oct. 25 murder, shared their troubled paths to Jesus and what made them so willing to dive into the mission field no matter the cost.

A GoFundMe campaign seeking to help the family of murdered missionary Beau Shroyer is hoping to raise at least $15,000 to repatriate his body to the U.S. and help his five children navigate “unimaginable loss and uncertainty” as his wife, Jackie Shroyer, faces charges in Angola for allegedly masterminding a murder plot. 

Microsoft's Word program now recommends replacing the term "maternity leave" with more “inclusive” language.

It’s a gloomy, rainy Sunday in downtown Portsmouth. I’m hanging out in a dark basement beneath a bookstore waiting to see a creepy Halloween music show for kids. Dozens of children dressed in their Halloween finest crowd the room. There are princesses and superheroes. An elephant finds a seat next to a dinosaur as the show is about to begin. (Editor's note: we highly recommend listening to this story.) Doctor Gasp is dressed in a long black cape with a white skeleton mask covering his face. Jack-o-lanterns cast orange light across a makeshift stage. He gives a lively performance, jumping and dancing while playing his guitar. The kids get up to dance along with him. Monster Mash is a crowd favorite of course. I sat down with Doctor Gasp after the show to find out who he is behind the mask. Dan Blakeslee is actually a folk singer for most of the year. When he first started writing Halloween music, he would play under his own name at his regular shows. “But then it got to be at the point

In a normal year, theaters around the state would be preparing for their summer seasons. With gatherings currently forbidden and uncertainty hanging over their heads, many are simply canceling the whole season. Others are postponing or, as NHPR’s Sean Hurley found out, discovering new ways to reach an audience. Sign up for NHPR's email newsletter for more coverage of coronavirus in N.H.

A new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is coming to PBS this month , and it's all about Ernest Hemingway. NHPR's Morning Edition host Rick Ganley sat down with both Burns and Novick to talk about the new film, their process and what makes a good documentary. [Editor's note: this is a transcript of one small part of the full interview.] Rick Ganley: But why Hemingway? Ken Burns: He's a hugely important writer and he's got a very complicated life, and we like to try to wrestled to the ground these complicated stories. And boy, this is about as wonderfully difficult as any project we've undertaken. Rick Ganley: What strikes me the most is how it goes way beyond that mythic Hemingway. This is the man's man writer image that kind of, you know, gets thrown around a lot. What surprised you most about him as you dug into the project? Lynn Novick: Kind of everything in a way, you know, in that we had some understanding of his work. We could give it like the Cliff's Notes version of his

The Currier Museum of Art 's latest exhibition features the work of Philadelphia-based potter Roberto Lugo. Lugo finds inspiration for his work in his upbringing and his cultural heritage. His new collection, Te traigo mi le lo lai -- I bring you my joy , will be on display at the Currier Museum through September. Lugo will also be in Manchester this summer for a residency with the museum, where he'll be teaching pottery classes. Below are some excerpts from Robert Lugo's conversation with NHPR's Rick Ganley. On Lugo’s inspiration: “ I've always found that it's important for me as a person to not forget where I'm from. I'm from Philadelphia in a really impoverished neighborhood, mostly made up of Black and Latinx people. And so I identify and associate that as a culture and as almost its own society. And so in the tradition that people have represented their cultures in pottery, I do that.” On his new exhibition, Te traigo mi le lo lai -- I bring you my joy : “ One of the reasons why I

“Nobody really comes here,” the waiter at my hotel said. “People only stop when they’re driving through.” I heard that a lot during my recent three-night visit to Thunder Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada.

Christian author and pro-life activist Ryan Bomberger has announced that his cancer is in remission three months after surgery.

Christian Alliance for Orphans celebrated 20 years of ministry at its annual summit where 2,400 supporters from 46 countries came together at Brentwood Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee.

A majority of practicing Christians, including pastors, admit to viewing pornography and a large share say they are comfortable with the habit, a new study has found.

Bonar Tanudjaja, Southeast Asia and East Asia regional director of Generosity Path, shares the core principles of biblical generosity and how the Journey of Generosity has transformed individuals, churches and communities across Asia through sharing stories of people who are radically generous.

Members of the Lakes Area Vineyard Church in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where the late Beau Shroyer and his family were longtime members before moving to Lubango, Angola, to serve as missionaries in 2021, are now reeling in a complex web of emotions after learning that Beau’s wife, Jackie Shroyer, was arrested in connection with his murder in the southern African country just over a week ago.

An Illinois-based congregation has agreed to pay more than $1.4 million in order to disaffiliate from The United Methodist Church following litigation over who owned its property.

After a recent shooting of a Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago and a surge in antisemitic incidents, a ministry focused on sharing the Gospel with Jewish communities is stepping up to equip Christians with tools to support God’s chosen people.

A congregation based in New York City has filed a lawsuit against an entity of the Indiana-based Disciples of Christ, accusing it of refusing to provide $7.3 million in loan funding advances.

Events that occurred this week in Christian history include the martyrdom of a Georgian king, a social reformer claims to have a vision, and the founding of a Baptist denomination.

After promising to refund the donations of members who questioned the stewardship of his church's finances, outspoken Tennessee Pastor Greg Locke has reneged on that offer. His attorney has allegedly threatened at least one donor who asked for their money back.

Vice President Kamala Harris has conceded the election, promising Americans that there will be a “peaceful transfer of power” and stressing loyalty “to our God,” while also promising to keep fighting.

A CNN panel discussion about the 2024 presidential election results got heated Friday night as one guest faced allegations of "transphobia" for asserting that the Democratic Party's staunch support for allowing trans-identified males to compete in women's sports contributed to the election loss.

Max Abner and Dahlia Nayar, Ph.D. candidates in performance studies, will present their in-progress dissertation research.Max Abner is a PhD candidate, musician, and curator who hails from Louisville, KY, has deep roots in Chicago, and is currently based in Oakland. Working from an anti-colonial settler positionality, he draws together discourses from sound studies, Indigenous studies, and critical theory to approach what he calls settler sound, a concept that accounts for the ways in which contested relations to colonized land play out in aural aesthetics. His dissertation attends to settler sound in the Bay Area experimental music/sound art scene. He has essays set for publication in Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance (Routledge) and Power in Listening: The Sound Out! Reader (NYU Press), his recorded curations can be heard on his music label Pontac Publications, and his live performance curations can be experienced at Beauty Supply Arts in Oakland. Dahlia Nayar’s project studies embodied manifestations of Quiet in multiple mediums of minoritarian performance. Her study curates a constellation of contemporary artists working in dance, theater, sound, and visual art with an attention to how Quiet emerges through bodies in relation to layered contexts and multiple subjectivities. She proposes that, as a minoritarian aesthetic, Quiet activates an ephemeral commons through resonance and attunement that allows expansive possibilities of relationality. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dahlia toured nationally and internationally as a choreographer, performer, and multimedia artist. She is a recipient of the Jacob Javits Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Choreography, and the National Dance Project Touring Award.

If you've spent the last several years staring into the abyss of transgenderism, you learn to endure it by drinking deeply of some good biblical medicine: laughter (Proverbs 13:22).

This is a test of American resolve, a test of whether we will keep our commitments to our NATO allies and to our allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan or whether we will shrink back into the neo-isolationism that was a catalyst for world war a century ago.

Virginia sits down with her idol, rocker and writer Patti Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith, lets us in on his writing process before an event recorded for radio in Portsmouth. The workshop was recorded backstage. #writing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alice Dreger is a historian of science, anatomy, and medicine, known for her work studying and advocating for people born with atypical sex disorders. She famously resigned from Northwestern University in protest of academic censorship, and gained some infamy on Twitter for live-tweeting her son's sex education class. We had a delightful chat with her about her writing process in advance of the paperback release of her book, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Columbus Blue Jackets start a new season Thursday night. The Jackets open the season at home inside Nationwide Arena against the Boston Bruins, and expectations are down following a 2015-2016 season that ended with the Jackets as one of the league's worst teams.

A Most Anticipated Book from: New York Times * People* Associated Press * Time * Saturday Evening Post * Real Simple * Book Bub * Alta * Chicago Tribune * Harper's Bazaar From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own. The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of

It is called Zika Virus Infection. It was discovered in Uganda and has since spread across Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, affecting 75 per cent of the population of an island in Micronesia and now it is ravaging Latin America. The first case in the United States of America was discovered recently. Possible links with microcephaly in Brazil and increased incidence of the serious Guillain-Barré syndrome are being monitored by scientists. The first case of Zika Virus Infection was confirmed on December 31, 2015 in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, unincorporated territory of the United States of America. The patient did not have a history of travel outside his native island three months before the onset of illness, leading scientists to conclude that the virus has spread to Puerto Rico and was contracted there. Worrying manifestations of the disease and other developments are being observed in Brazil, where there have been 3.174 cases of microcephaly, and 38 deaths, across 684 municipalities and 21 federal units. The link between pregnant mothers being infected with Zika Virus and their babies developing microcephaly is being investigated - the WHO is sharing information with member states of PAHO and is advising them to be on the alert for similar cases.

AP Photo The number of overweight children under five years of age is set to almost double from 42 million to 70 million worldwide, which is a ticking global pandemic. The United Nations Organization blames the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages and asks governments to reverse the trend. 1990 - 31 million overweight under-5s. 2014 - 41 million overweight under-5s. 2024 - a projected 70 million overweight under-5s. And the focus of the UNO's concern is that many of these cases of childhood obesity are occurring in developing countries. The culprit? "The marketing of unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverages is a major factor in the alarming increase", reads the report by the Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (ECHO), presented this week to the World Health Organization. Direct negative effect on health and education Childhood obesity can have a direct negative effect on educational development, quite apart from posing economic hardship and physical and mental health consequences. The phenomenon cuts across all socio-economic groups and is not restricted to Western Europe and North America. Around three-quarters of overweight children of this age group reside in Asia and Africa: around half in the former and a quarter in the latter.

Kent McLellan, a 32-year-old American neo-Nazi who fought in the Donbass as part of the Nazi Right Sector* movement, who then joined Azov Battalion* after Russia launched the special operation in Ukraine, returned to Florida and started sharing his experience with media outlets. Some of his interviews do not fit into the framework of what American propaganda says about the Ukrainian conflict. In a conversation with Juan Sinmiedo, Ken "Boneface" McLellan busted myths about the coup on the Maidan, about today's Ukraine, and about how many neo-fascists Ukraine has actually sheltered.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of private military company Wagner, was killed in a plane crash on August 23. His Embraer ERJ-135BJ Legacy 600 plane crashed in the Tver region. Prigozhin was 62. Prigozhin was born in 1961 in Leningrad. He lost his father in his early childhood, and was raised by his mother and stepfather. Yevgeny Prigozhin received his first criminal record when he was 18, the second and third one followed soon afterwards. After he was released from prison, Prigozhin decided to open his own business. He and his stepfather started selling hotdogs in Leningrad.

World War Three that may put an end t your existence as a human civilisation, will set off on its destructive march from the Middle East. This is what a number of prominent figures, as well as seers and mystics predicted. Perhaps the most famous modern forecast on the subject came from the late leader of the Liberal Democratic Party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, authors of AZ numerology project said while collecting predictions about the Middle East conflict. Speaking on Vladimir Solovyov Live in 2019, Zhirinovsky voiced an opinion that elections in Ukraine were its last, as "such a country simply will not remain on the map by 2024.” Moreover, the crisis in the Middle East will be so intense everyone will completely forget about Ukraine. 

Pilot Viktor Belenko, who hijacked a Soviet MiG-25 interceptor fighter to Japan and sought political asylum in the United States, died in the US. He was 76. The pilot, who literally brought USSR's advanced technology to Western specialists, died on September 24. A routine notice of his death appeared in the obituaries section of The Washington Post two weeks later. The New York Times published an article about Viktor Belenko's life in November. Belenko's sons Tom and Paul were staying with their father at the time of his death. The pilot got married in the USA, but later divorced. He is survived by two children and four grandchildren. They decided not to hold a memorial service.

Liya Zaurbekova, a young woman who escaped from her family in Chechnya and took refuge from her relatives in the police department in Moscow, left Russia, the woman's lawyer Natalia Tikhonova said adding that she could not disclose any other details for her client's safety. Adam Delimkhanov, an associate of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, believes that Zaurbekova will be returned to her family in the republic. In turn, Alexander Ionov, a member of the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia, who reported her escape, urged not to exaggerate the degree of the threat for the Chechen woman who left her home due to mental and physical violence. Adam Delimkhanov, Kadyrov's adviser and State Duma deputy, believes that Liya Zaurbekova was misled after she found herself under someone's influence. The girl is being manipulated, Delimkhanov believes.

The Kemerovo regional court ruled to send Alexander Spesivtsev, a resident of Novokuznetsk, to compulsory treatment, the regional Office of the Public Prosecutor said. The defendant, Alexander Spesivtsev, is a serial killer, who killed at least 34 victims and ate them during the 1990s. Spesivtsev will undergo treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.