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Updated at 3:25 p.m. ET

The USS Boxer used electronic measures to take down a drone that the U.S. says was operated by Iran's military, according to Pentagon sources familiar with the situation. The Navy says the drone was destroyed in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday after it came close to the vessel and repeated warnings went unheeded.

Iran has disputed the U.S. claims, saying that all of its drones are accounted for — and suggesting the U.S. ship might have accidentally taken down one of its own military drones.

Most former Dalton School students agree on at least one thing: Jeffrey Epstein was charismatic.

"If you had had him [as a teacher] then, you would've liked him, too," says Eve Scheuer Lubin, who was Epstein's student during his brief tenure as a teacher in the mid-70s. The Dalton School, where he taught, is a private school in Manhattan with a reputation for attracting talented students and affluent parents.

Something strange is happening to Pengyin Chen's soybean experiments at the University of Missouri's Fisher Delta Research Center in Portageville, Mo.

"You see how small they are?" says Chen, gesturing at a field filled with thousands of small plots of soybeans.

In this music game, songs from famous musicals are rewritten to describe the plots of famous non-music dramatic stage plays. It's a crossover the Tony Awards would never themselves allow.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

In this game guest-hosted by the host of HQ Words, Anna Roisman, contestants mash-up two initialisms: The first is a government agency, and the second could be anything. For example: if your tax returns are being audited by Kate McKinnon, you've sent them to the I-R-S-N-L.

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

In this final round, the contestants — plus special guest Bowen Yang — are asked to identify, given a pair of events, which came first?

Heard on Bowen Yang And Matt Rogers: I Don't Think So, Honey!

The Lion King: The Gift, Beyoncé's executive-produced album inspired by the 2019 motion picture, has been delivered.

The Netherlands' Supreme Court has affirmed that the country's troops are partly to blame for the deaths of 350 Muslim men and boys after the fall of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. But in a break with an earlier ruling, the court lowered the Dutch liability for the massacre to 10%, from 30%.

As a college sophomore, I knew exactly what the Apollo astronauts would find when they arrived on the moon: a desolate rockscape, craters shining white in reflected earthglow — and a big, black monolith.

Stanley Kubrick showed us all of that in the top-grossing movie of 1968 — 2001: A Space Odyssey — a full 15 months before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind. And even Kubrick was late to the party: Moviegoers had been heading moonward from pretty much the moment there were filmmakers to lead the way.

In 1985, a team of country-music legends formed The Highwaymen, a supergroup combining the talents of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.

The racist rhetoric from President Trump attacking four freshmen Democratic women, who he tweeted should "go back" to their countries of origin, escalated Wednesday night at his campaign rally in North Carolina.

"Send her back," the crowd chanted, during a riff in which the president criticized Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born American citizen from Minnesota.

The Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and President Donald Trump have met before — on Twitter, where they sparred. Next week, they will be meeting in real life, as Khan heads to Washington, D.C., for a three-day visit.

Iran would commit to permanent nuclear inspections in exchange for a permanent lifting of U.S. sanctions, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told NPR's Steve Inskeep on Thursday.

"We can do it right now in order to make sure that people can be at ease that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons ... in exchange for a permanent lifting of sanctions ratified by U.S. Congress, exactly as envisaged for 2023. We can do it now," Zarif said. He was in the U.S. to attend a United Nations meeting.

This story is part of the StoryCorps series of conversations.

A half-century ago, America's dreams were realized in space. The power of U.S. innovation and spirit took the Apollo 11 crew to the moon and back.

That mission was possible because of a diverse team of engineers, astronauts and mathematicians. It was also possible thanks to the help of one 10-year-old boy who was in the right place at the right time.

Updated at 12:45 p.m. ET

Members of Congress likely won't confine themselves to former special counsel Robert Mueller's report when they question him next week in two open hearings, staffers said.

Mueller, who is reluctant to appear, has said he would confine himself to what he's already written — but the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence won't.

In the predawn hours of June 21, explosions at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in South Philadelphia shook houses, sent fireballs into the air and woke up nearby residents.

"Three loud explosions, one after the other, boom, boom boom!" says David Masur, who lives about two miles from the plant and has two young kids. "It's a little nerve-wracking."

So your doctor has told you some of the scariest words you can possibly hear: You need surgery. What do you do next?

If you need an emergency surgery, like an appendectomy or a procedure after an accident, you usually don't have much choice in the matter. You'll likely get it done in the hospital where you went to the emergency room, unless the hospital isn't equipped to do it. If that's the case, you'll get transferred.

Updated at 9:50 a.m. ET

Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the freshman Democratic congresswomen facing attacks from President Trump and his supporters, was cheered as she arrived back at her home district in Minnesota on Thursday.

A crowd of people at the airport in the Twin Cities held banners with slogans such as "Stop Racism Now" and chanted "welcome home Ilhan" as the congresswoman emerged from her flight.

Most days, 25-year-old Chavonne can push her student loan debt to the back of her mind.

Between short-term office jobs in the Washington, D.C., area, she drives for Uber. But once in awhile, a debt collector will get hold of her cellphone number — the one she keeps changing to avoid them — and it all comes back fresh. "I'll be like, 'Oh no!' " she says. "It's a sad reminder that I owe somebody money!"

In April, she got another reminder when the government seized her tax refund.

All this for a degree she never finished.

Updated July 19 at 12:25 p.m. ET

Mark Morgan, acting head of Customs and Border Protection, said on Thursday that his agency is rolling out the Trump administration's new asylum rule as a small "pilot" for now but that officials expect it to be blocked in court.

Good news came out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday: Preliminary data shows reported drug overdoses declined 4.2% in 2018, after rising precipitously for decades.

One of the rarest birds in New Zealand is having its best breeding season in decades, potentially doubling the population.

The orange-fronted parakeet, known locally as the kākāriki karaka, is in the midst of a prolonged mating season after a beech seed bonanza, Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage said in a statement on Wednesday.