by Brittney Melton

January 25, 2026

Good morning. This week, former sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya entered the Minnesota U.S. Senate race, the House Oversight panel voted to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress, and a jury acquitted a former Uvalde school officer in a trial linked to the Robb Elementary shooting.

Today's top stories

Federal immigration officers shot and killed a man yesterday morning in Minneapolis, according to officials. Authorities identified the man as 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse and Minneapolis resident. The incident, which was caught on video by eyewitnesses, marks the third shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. The city's mayor, Jacob Frey, said he intends to seek a temporary restraining order from a judge on Monday to immediately stop the Trump administration's immigration crackdown

ICE and federal agents face off with Minneapolis residents and protesters following the fatal shooting of a local resident earlier in the day near Nicollet Avenue and West 26th Street in south Minneapolis.

Erin Trieb for NPR

➡️ Minneapolis Emergency Management Director Rachel Sayre spoke with NPR’s All Things Considered about how her department is working to help the community and how Saturday’s shooting and the aftermath of these incidents remind her of conflict zones in areas outside of the U.S.
➡️ Renee Macklin Good's death at the hands of an ICE agent ignited a firestorm of political unrest in Minneapolis. It also exposed a slew of colliding political factors in a city that already faced escalating conflict between the Trump administration and state Democrats. Here’s how the city became the focal point of a political crisis.
➡️ A deadly standoff with white separatists more than three decades ago forced federal agents to rewrite their rules on lethal force. Now, as Minneapolis reels over the recent fatal shootings, the city is questioning whether it's time to revisit use-of-force rules.

A reality check on retail prices

by Alina Selyukh, NPR business correspondent

How long does it take to scavenger-hunt for 114 items at a Walmart supercenter?

My job as a retail correspondent involves (perhaps unsurprisingly) an extensive amount of shopping. I’ve bought some of the last supplies at Party City and Bed Bath & Beyond’s going-out-of-business sales. I’ve spent 24 hours inside Mall of America orbiting a (what is it doing there?) rollercoaster park. Once, in a bizarre stroke of reporting serendipity, I stood in the checkout line of my usual Target when the chain’s cash registers (globally!) died from a computer meltdown.

But nowhere have I spent more time shopping than Walmart — specifically, the Walmart Supercenter in Georgia’s Liberty County, about an hour southwest of Savannah.

An illustration of grocery items in a shopping cart, with upward- and downward-pointing arrows above certain items.

Connie Hanzhang Jin/NPR

In 2018, we first visited this Walmart to shop for back-to-school supplies with a local mom (plus her VERY organized 7-year-old) and a local fourth-grade teacher. We wanted to see how global trade shows up in the baskets of regular American shoppers. (“You just broke my heart,” said the teacher, laughing, as she discovered her Crayola pencils had come from Brazil and not the Pennsylvania factory she’d visited with her kids.)

This was during President Trump’s first term in office and his first tariffs campaign, which had unexpectedly hiked the cost of imports. Winding through that Walmart, we thought it could prove illuminating to trace real-life impacts of this new trade war by tracking some actual prices at this actual store. So, NPR’s Shopping Cart was born.

Choosing Walmart for the project made sense: The chain is America’s most popular supermarket. Its scale as the world’s largest retailer gives it power to negotiate with suppliers to set some of the lowest and most stable prices out there. So when prices move at Walmart, it can be an indicator of bigger themes at play: crop failures, shipping crises and, well, tariffs.

In the fall of 2019, we delivered our first price-check report on NPR’s basket of about 80 products, many of them imported. A dog leash, a screwdriver and a lamp — all made in China — had gotten notably pricier. But the impact of tariffs was uneven; they had yet to hit store shelves in earnest. We visited that December to record end-of-the-year prices, preparing for the likelihood of eye-opening comparisons in late 2020.

Then the pandemic put a stop to our data-gathering. By the time we revived our project in 2022, inflation was rampant. Americans were spending COVID stimulus checks and getting higher pay after the Great Resignation. We’d seen chaos in global supply chains and wild swings in fuel costs. NPR’s Shopping Cart report showed rising prices and two cases of “shrinkflation”: a slightly smaller Dove soap bar and less laundry detergent in a Tide jug, for the same price as before.

Since then, inflation has cooled. In 2024, I decided to actually buy the 21 of 96 items on our list that had declined in price. I wrangled a meal out of it; my dinner of sweet potatoes, black beans, salmon, pork chops and onion-flour gravy was hefty and so very beige.

In 2025, Trump’s new tariffs took the project full circle to its origin. Last month, we returned with a shopping list that’s grown to 114 items, imported and U.S.-made, from nearly every aisle of the supercenter. The price-check revealed a story of extreme weather around the world, America’s latest trade war, another case of Tide shrinkflation and (finally!) cheaper eggs. It took us 7 hours and 27 minutes inside a Walmart to find each item, check the size, compare the price, re-confirm and snap a photo for fact-checking. You can see the full list and read our analysis here.

Check out more great reads from the NPR network you may have missed:

➡️ North Carolina just wiped the slate clean for 2.5 million residents by eliminating their medical debt. All of the state’s hospitals agreed to scrap bills dating back to 2014 and automatically discount care for low-income patients. Medical debt is estimated to affect 1 in 12 Americans, and other states are also taking action to address the $220 billion problem.

➡️ Prediction market apps like Kalshi are exploding under the Trump administration. Young traders are betting large sums of money on everything from deportations to election outcomes. But as real-world crises turn into monetary winds, critics worry that turning politics into a gamble gives insiders the ability to abuse their access to influence market odds.

➡️ New court documents revealed more ways that DOGE improperly accessed and shared sensitive personal data last year. Former Social Security chief data officer Chuck Borges says this should be a wake-up call for Congress to investigate how the data is being used. An NPR review shows how DOGE used that information to push dubious fraud claims, directly shaping Trump administration policies on immigration, benefits and elections.

➡️ After the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis, some swing voters who supported Trump in the 2024 election worry that his deportation efforts are going too far. While focus groups aren’t polls, NPR observed online focus groups with 14 voters to gauge how the president’s supporters are currently react to his policies. Here’s what we discovered.

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Pod Club

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Thanks for tuning in last week to the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode, “What are our dream TV crossovers?” It explores how some TV mashups feel organic, while others amount to little more than weird stunts. The hosts also dreamed up their ultimate television show crossovers, like Gilmore Girls and Nashville.

Today, we’re listening to 1A. In the episode “How Change Affects Our Brains And Identities,” cognitive scientist Maya Shankar dives into the neuroscience behind who we become when our plans are upended. She explores how we navigate upheaval in her latest book, The Other Side of Change, by looking at how change affects the brain and our identities.

After listening, do any of the insights change the plans you want to implement in your life? Let us know by clicking here.

Love podcasts? For handpicked episode recommendations every week, check out Pod Club — a newsletter written FOR podcast fans BY podcast fans. Subscribe here!

And on The Sunday Story from Up First, a special NPR documentary investigates the dismissal of last-minute warnings about the space shuttle Challenger over 40 years ago, exploring what that decision meant for those who desperately tried to stop the launch.

All In

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It's time for the Sunday Puzzle! For this week's on-air challenge, NPR Puzzlemaster Will Shortz will provide you with clues for two words. Insert the letters A-L-L inside the answer to the first clue to get the answer to the second. For example, if you are provided with “Opposite of good / Romantic song,” the first answer would be BAD. Add A-L-L in this answer to get the answer to the second clue: B(ALL)AD. Test your skills here. Check the page later to hear the answers, or catch them live on Weekend Edition at 8:41 a.m. ET.

This week's online challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Name a famous living singer whose first and last names together have four syllables. The second and fourth syllables phonetically sound like things a dog walker would likely carry. What singer is this? Submit your answer here, and you could win a chance to play next Sunday's on-air puzzle.