NPR News

Federal prosecutors are charging 10 former NFL players accused of defrauding the league's health care program, resulting in payouts of $3.4 million for medical equipment they allegedly never purchased.

It was a busy fall morning at Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C. Myrieme Churchill found a clearing in the arrivals hall and scanned the crowd.

One by one, her people showed up: A black father and daughter from Tennessee. A white couple from Georgia. A Somali immigrant. Two South Asians — one from Canada, one from Britain. Churchill greeted them in a blend of languages: Salaam! Bonjour! Welcome to D.C.!

Two years ago, the Grammy Awards faced a moment of reckoning after its then-leader, Neil Portnow, said that women had to "step up" in order to be recognized in the music industry. He's gone now. And the Recording Academy, the membership organization which gives out the Grammys, is trying to reinvent itself from top to bottom. It's under new, female leadership — and with the Grammy ceremony coming up on Jan.

U.K. voters are heading to the polls Thursday for a general election to select 650 members of Parliament — and determine the futures of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The election is expected to have high turnout, with key questions about Brexit left to resolve.

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time and were scheduled to close at 10 p.m. (5 p.m. ET). That's when the first projections of the results will likely emerge. So far on election day, the most popular figures at polling stations seem to be dogs.

Just more than a week after Germany announced the expulsion of two Russian diplomats, citing evidence of a state-sponsored contract killing in Berlin, the Russian government has retaliated in kind.

The country's Foreign Ministry announced Thursday that, "guided by the reciprocity principle," it was declaring two members of the German diplomatic mission in Moscow to be personae non gratae.

On Dec. 26 last year, in a town surrounded by tea and rubber plantations in central Sri Lanka, residents discovered Buddhist statues had been vandalized on the side of the road. In the middle of the night, some saw young men speeding away on motorbikes after they'd shattered glass cases protecting the statues and hacked off the stone and marble Buddhas' noses and hands.