NPR News

In this session, I'm bringing a little bit of my hometown of Toronto to you by way of The Wooden Sky. The band first blew me away at a live show about a decade ago. And then I realized the very tall lead singer looked familiar – hey, that guy was a teaching assistant in my radio production class back at University.

Danish police have identified remains that washed ashore in Copenhagen as that of Kim Wall, the Swedish journalist who died aboard inventor Peter Madsen's personal submarine earlier this month. Authorities announced Tuesday that they had matched Wall's DNA with a female torso, which was found without a head, legs or arms.

The United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has urged the U.S. government to reject racist speech and ideology and criticized its "failure at the highest political level" to unequivocally condemn the racist violence at Charlottesville, Va., earlier this month.

With an eye on the future of online retailing, Walmart and Google are teaming up to go after rival Amazon in a play that also targets the growing market for voice-activated shopping.

Starting next month, Walmart customers will be able to access hundreds of thousands of products from the company's shelves — everything from dish washing soap to dining tables — via the online retailing service Google Express. Until now, Walmart's enormous inventory was available online only through the company's own website.

Established singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke returns to the Mountain Stage, recorded live in Harrisonburg, Va. Brooke first performed on the program as part of the ethereal-yet-dissonant pop duo The Story, during the 1990s coffeehouse music wave.

A heartsick surface Navy is vowing to find answers after a series of incidents that could make the peacetime Western Pacific deadlier for U.S. troops this year than Afghanistan.

The Navy began, as it often does, with accountability: On Wednesday, it fired the three-star admiral whose command in the Western Pacific suffered at least four big accidents this year, two of which may have killed a combined 17 sailors.

An officer aboard the destroyer USS Stethem also was lost overboard near the Philippines on Aug. 1.

The National Interagency Fire Center has now labeled the Chetco Bar Fire burning in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest near Brookings, Oregon, the "top priority fire" in the country. 

The fire is burning 98,000 acres and is 0 percent contained.

Firefighting resources are thin nationwide, and the "top priority" designation gives fire officials a better chance of getting the additional resources they need when they ask for it. 

More than 1,000 personnel were battling the blaze as of Wednesday morning.