National

Sean Connery, the first actor to portray James Bond and later one of the biggest and wealthiest stars in the history of film, has died at age 90.

Eon Productions, the film studio behind the James Bond films, confirmed the death in a statement on its website.

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

Rachael Shannon gets nostalgic when she thinks of the life she lived in Germany until just a couple of years ago. While she and her husband worked, their children spent their days in child care, creating awesome crafts, building pillow forts and going on outings to farms where they'd dig up potatoes.

"It was like wow times 10," says Shannon, who worked for a U.S. government contractor.

The Trump administration has issued a new executive order that would fundamentally restructure the federal work force, making it easier for the government to fire thousands of federal workers, while also allowing political and other considerations to affect hiring.

StoryCorps' Military Voices Initiative records stories from members of the U.S. military and their families.

Former Army Spc. Garett Reppenhagen has always loved Halloween. Even during his year-long deployment to Iraq in 2004, he still found a way to celebrate.

There's a particular music myth that's been told and retold so many times, it can't possibly be true. It probably persists thanks to a combination of musicians' tendency to romanticize themselves and everyone else's tendency to romanticize an avocation they don't understand. The best example of it is the famous story about Robert Johnson meeting Satan at a crossroads, but there are countless other tales implying the same thing: that great talent requires some sort of devil's bargain, a trade for a crucial aspect of one's humanity.

This summer's massive protests over police brutality, spurred by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, demanded significant changes in policing.

Those protests have moved some cities and states to "reimagine" what departments could look like through changes in funding and legislation. Some efforts stalled, like in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed.

For months now, election officials have cautioned that the winner of the presidential election may still be unknown when election night is over.

Rules in some states don't allow election workers to begin the labor-intensive work of processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. And with a record number of voters casting their ballots by mail, the influx could delay final tallies for days.

In 1959, Dmitri Belyaev made his way to Siberia to look for the most polite foxes he could find.

A Soviet geneticist, Belyaev was interested in how animal domestication occurs — and in what happens biologically when the wild canine evolves into the mild-mannered dog. The thousands of fox fur farms stippling the Siberian countryside at the time were ideal grounds for his experiment.

As some protesters smashed storefront windows to make off with merchandise during the chaos of Monday night's Walter Wallace Jr. protests, some Philadelphia Police officers smashed an SUV's windows and violently yanked out its driver and a teenaged passenger, threw them to the ground, then pulled a small child from the back seat.

The incident was captured on video and streamed live by Aapril Rice, who watched the "surreal" scene from a rooftop across the street.

Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who's charged with fatally shooting two men and wounding a third during a protest in Kenosha, Wis., was extradited from Illinois to Wisconsin following the ruling of Lake County Judge Paul Novak.

Novak denied Rittenhouse's request to remain in Illinois, according to The Associated Press, noting that the defense had characterized the charges as politically motivated. "This Illinois court shall not examine any potential political impact a Wisconsin District Attorney potentially considered in his charging decision," Novak's ruling read.

Updated at 9:57 a.m. ET

New Zealanders have voted to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill, but voted down legalizing marijuana. The questions were put to the country in separate referendums held on October 17^th in conjunction with the general election that elected Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for another term.

The preliminary results from the referendums on two major social questions reflect a potential significant shift in social attitudes in New Zealand.

Raleigh, N.C.'s mayor issued a citywide curfew Friday afternoon ahead of two planned protests over racial justice and police brutality.

Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin announced the curfew will begin at 10 p.m. and continue through Saturday, 5 a.m. citing the desire to keep the demonstrations under control. The curfew doesn't apply to law enforcement, medical personnel, delivery workers, and the media.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania has blocked the Trump administration from outlawing U.S. transactions with TikTok, which was set to take effect Nov. 12, the latest setback in the administration's push to ban the Chinese-owned hit video app.