Summer Travel Surge and Wildfire Challenges

Ukrainian officials say Russia launched its largest airstrikes since the start of the conflict. Sunday's attack, which killed 12 people, happened only hours before a prisoner exchange. Memorial Day is considered the unofficial start of summer and the summer travel season, but a deadly midair collision in the nation's capital in January and reports of air traffic control outages have raised safety concerns. Also, government forecasts predict an above normal wildfire risk for some parts of the country yet cuts to the US Forest Service makes fighting fires harder.

Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.

Today's episode of Up First was edited by Ryland Barton, Catherine Laidlaw, HJ Mai, Mohamad ElBardicy. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Lindsay Totti. We get engineering support from Damian Herring and our technical director is David Greenburg.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy