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Kids from across the country compete Thursday night in the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The film Spellbound captured the drama involving 8 kids who competed in the bee 16 years ago.

NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Senators Chris Coons, D-Del., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., about their proposed act which would update the infrastructure of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

NPR's Michel Martin asks a panel of award-winning playwrights how diverse artists are challenging Broadway's landscape, and whether it matters.

President Biden has tested positive for COVID-19 and is experiencing mild symptoms, the White House said Thursday.

The vanguard French artist — whose influence has touched everything from the Mean Girls soundtrack to the Futurama theme — has died at age 89.

The new Apple TV+ drama Severance asks what might happen if a corporation discovered how to disconnect employees' work and non-work memories.

A new seed store and bakery is opening its doors in Cortez for the first time on Saturday. Pueblo Seed & Food Company sells seeds that originated in and are adapted to the desert Southwest, as well as curated seeds from different arid regions all over the world. The company’s farm is located in McElmo Canyon on land protected by a Montezuma Land Conservancy easement, and grows crops like heritage wheat, rye and barley. Nanna Meyer, a baker and co-owner of Pueblo Seed & Food Company, says that she hopes the store will help provide a return to food culture for the residents of Montezuma County after years of isolation during the pandemic. And a new Colorado gun-control law that’s on hold due to a court challenge won’t be going into effect anytime soon.

On Saturday, a community organization held a walk in protest of the White Mesa uranium mill on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. It’s the only one of its kind still operating in the U.S. About 40 people attended the walk, which began in White Mesa, in southeast Utah, and ended at the driveway of the uranium mill. Manuel Heart, Chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, led the protest and spoke to supporters about the need for more regulations from the state of Utah on how the mill uses its wells. Heart says that the Tribe ultimately hopes the state regulatory agency won’t renew the uranium mill’s application for a groundwater discharge permit later this winter. In 1999, samples were collected that indicated a plume of chloroform was present in the groundwater table underneath the mill facility on their property.

This weekend, Colorado’s Department of Transportation says it expects towns and public lands in southwest Colorado to be inundated with visitors coming to see the solar eclipse. The eclipse will be visible in the U.S. early on Saturday along a path starting in Oregon and eventually passing over Mesa Verde National Park, and the Four Corners region. Lisa Schwantes, a regional communications manager for C-DOT, says that hotels in the area have been booked for months, and that Mesa Verde itself expects to see tens of thousands of visitors for this celestial event. Schwantes says it’s also important that people driving on highways this Saturday don’t pull over to the side of the road to view the eclipse, and instead find a designated area. And a grassroots organization in Arizona is pushing to remove the state's right-to-work statute in an attempt to strengthen unionization.

On Friday, a Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council member was indicted by a grand jury for 12 counts of alleged sexual abuse and assault that took place on the reservation. In a special meeting held on Saturday, the Tribal Council moved to place Lyndreth Hemp Wall on unpaid administrative leave indefinitely if he doesn’t quickly resign. They also removed Wall from his appointments to boards and commissions and issued a formal reprimand. Wall is a former Montezuma-Cortez school board member and a well-known figure in the area. If he’s convicted of a felony, he could be removed from the Council by a two-thirds vote that would also bar him from serving on it again. And this weekend, a mainstay of local journalism in southwestern Colorado, the Four Corners Free Press, will print its final issue.