The World Health Organization says 92 percent of the world’s population breathes air containing pollutants exceeding WHO limits, in new research released Tuesday.

The new WHO air-quality model, which uses satellite data and ground measurements, “represents the most detailed outdoor (or ambient) air pollution-related health data, by country, ever reported by WHO,” according to a press release from the organization. The report used information from nearly 3,000 places from around the world, doubling the amount of data from the last assessment of this kind.

The WHO research measured particulate matter in the air, such as “sulphates, nitrates, ammonia, sodium chloride, black carbon, mineral dust and water.” It did not account for known pollutants such as nitrogen oxides or ozone — meaning that these are likely conservative figures.

The pollution levels had a staggering impact on health, according to the report, which said: “In 2012, one out of every nine deaths was the result of air pollution-related conditions.” The number of deaths attributable to both indoor and outdoor air pollution totaled approximately 6.5 million worldwide, of which 3 million deaths were blamed on outdoor air pollution — the focus of this report.

“Air pollution continues take a toll on the health of the most vulnerable populations — women, children and the older adults,” Dr. Flavia Bustreo, assistant director general at WHO, said in a press release. “For people to be healthy, they must breathe clean air from their first breath to their last.”

WHO added that lower and middle income countries, where about 87 percent of the deaths occur, bore the brunt of the health impact.

China had the most deaths attributable to air quality in 2012, at 1,032,833, followed by 621,138 in India and 140,851 in Russia. The U.S. had 38,043.

Here is the report’s breakdown by region:

“The WHO Western Pacific and South East Asia regions bear most of the burden with 1.1 million and 799 000 deaths, respectively. In other regions, about 211 000 deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa, 194 000 in the Eastern Mediterranean region, 190 000 in Europe, and 93 000 in the Americas. The remaining deaths occur in high-income countries of Europe (289 000), the Americas (44 000), Western Pacific (44 000), and Eastern Mediterranean (10 000).”

The researchers said that much of the outdoor air pollution comes from sources like “inefficient modes of transport, household fuel and waste burning, coal-fired power plants, and industrial activities.” The model also includes sources not caused by humans, such as sand storms.

Maria Neria, director of WHO’s public health and the environment department, told the Guardian that this improved data on air pollution should be seen as a call to action:

“Countries are confronted with the reality of better data. Now we have the figures of how many citizens are dying from air pollution. What we are learning is, this is very bad. Now there are no excuses for not taking action.”

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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton went head to head Monday night in the first presidential debate.

NPR’s politics team, with help from reporters and editors who cover national security, immigration, business, foreign policy and more, live annotated the debate. Portions of the debate with added analysis are underlined in yellow, followed by context and fact check.

You can follow more highlights of the debate at nprpolitics.org.

Note: The transcript on this page was updated live as the debate proceeded. We are working to correct the transcript as it comes in, but owing to the live nature of the event, there may be some discrepancies.

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The founder of Rolling Stone is selling a minority share of the fabled magazine to a Singapore-based social media entrepreneur, the first time an outside investor has been allowed to buy into the property.

Several media reports say Jann Wenner has decided to sell 49 percent of the magazine, as well as its digital assets, to BandLab Technologies, a social-networking site for musicians and fans.

The sale will not involve Rolling Stone‘s parent company, Wenner Media LLC, and Wenner will retain control of the magazine, The Wall Street Journal reports. Instead, BandLab “will oversee a new Rolling Stone International subsidiary, which will develop live events, merchandising and hospitality,” Bloomberg reports.

The sale comes at a time when Rolling Stone, like virtually every publication, has seen its revenues slip and its subscriber base shrink. It also suffered a major blow to its reputation when it published an article about a purported gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that turned out to be a hoax.

Under Wenner’s son, Gus, the magazine has pursued an aggressive digital strategy, Bloomberg reports:

“Rolling Stone currently reaches a global audience of 65 million people, according to the company. That includes 22 million domestic digital monthly users, almost 18 million social fans and followers, and nearly 12 million readers of the U.S. print publication. The average monthly unique visitors to its website rose almost 40 percent in the first half of this year from a year earlier. It publishes 12 international editions in countries including Australia, Indonesia and Japan.”

“Everyone is trying to figure out the new business model,” said Gus Wenner, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. He runs digital operations at Wenner Media and also oversees ad sales, marketing and digital editorial across the company.

“We have the quality that most matters, a brand that means something to people and elicits an emotional response,” said Wenner, the son of Jann Wenner, who founded the magazine in 1967.

BandLab was founded by Kuok Meng Ru, the son of agribusiness billionaire Kuok Khoon Hong. It is funded by private investors, including Kuok’s father.

“What has happened last 49 years has already shown that Rolling Stone is more than a brand to people,” Kuok said in a Bloomberg interview. “It is now our shared responsibility to take it into the future.”

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I believe I am one of the few people in the world who actually had tickets to Woodstock. Of course, I never got a chance to use them, because on the first day of the festival, I was filling up relish trays and taking dinner orders from customers at Schrafft’s.

All this came back to me in a rush of memories when I picked up the new book Ten Restaurants that Changed America. Schrafft’s was one of the restaurants listed. “Really”? I thought. “Schrafft’s changed America?”

This was a chain of tastefully decorated havens where ladies gathered for light lunches or ice cream and sweets. It always seemed like the epicenter of the comfort zone to me, a place that change zipped past in a hurry to get someplace more interesting.

As a kid I loved Schrafft’s. I have fond memories of excursions into “the city” with my mother. They started with a train ride that emptied us into New York City’s Grand Central station, then out into the street, where millions of people rushed by me as I held tightly to my mother’s hand. If it was a shopping trip, we’d head to my mother’s favorite store on Fifth Ave., Lord and Taylor’s, which just happened to be right across the street from Schrafft’s. And that meant we always ended the day with a hot fudge sundae at the counter at Schrafft’s. No one has ever been able to match the pure deliciousness of Schrafft’s hot fudge.

Eventually, Schrafft’s opened a restaurant in suburban Westchester County. And I got my first summer job there. This was no glamour waitressing job. This was hard core. In addition to a very unflattering uniform, all waitresses had to wear a ridiculously unflattering hair net and shoes that were the very definition of clodhoppers. And this is where I found myself in the summer of 1969. Think about that for a minute. A lot was going on in the summer 1969. I watched men land on the moon while standing in the lobby of Schrafft’s in between serving pot roast and apple pie.

And then there was Woodstock.

I had to work the first night of the festival but planned to meet up with my friends the next day. By the time I got off work, it was clear that something was happening on that farm in upstate New York that no one had anticipated. By the next morning, the New York State Thruway was backed up practically to the Tappan Zee bridge. The news was rife with stories of unsanitary conditions and a lack of food, shelter and medical supplies. Oh yeah, and by then, Woodstock had turned into a free concert. A lot of the kids who showed up for the festival weren’t inclined to pay for it anyway. So, no, I didn’t end up joining them. The idea of getting stuck in the mud was distinctly unappealing. Besides, my mother didn’t want me to go.

Let’s face it, girls who worked at Schrafft’s, bought tickets to the biggest free rock concert of the century and actually listened to their mothers would have been a distinct minority at Woodstock … a minority of one, I suspect.

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It’s been a rough year for people who believe in free trade. In June, the UK decided to leave the European Union—the biggest free trade block in the world. A potential trade deal between the U.S. and Europe seems to be falling apart. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade deal between the U.S. and 10 other countries — has two very prominent opponents: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

On today’s show, we pack 240 years of trade history into 22 minutes. There’s a Scotsman who was captured by gypsies (possibly), a man who dreamed of world peace (truly), and Robert Smith in the streets with revolutionaries (sort of).

Music: “Funky Festivities” and “Chilltown.” Find us: Twitter/Facebook.

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Harvard University reported that its endowment fund suffered a loss of 2 percent, or $1.9 billion, for fiscal 2016. It’s the single largest annual decline since the financial crisis. The news comes after several years of poor returns calling into question the fund’s investment strategy.

The university’s endowment, totaling $35.7 billion, is still the largest in the nation. (The University of Texas and Yale fill out the top three university endowments.) But it is down from a record $37.6 billion in 2015 when the portfolio earned 5.8 percent.

“This has been a challenging year for endowments and clearly these are disappointing results,” Paul Finnegan, chair of the Harvard Management Co. board, said in a statement. (The 2016 Annual Endowment Report can be found here.)

The medium-to-long-term performance trends show the endowment underperforming key benchmarks.

As the Boston Globe reports:

“For the 12 months ended in June, Harvard’s 2 percent loss compared with a 2.3 percent gain in a hypothetical portfolio of 60 percent global stocks and 40 percent global bonds. If the money had been invested just in the US stock market, it would have gained 5 percent…

For 10 years, Harvard reported a 5.7 percent annualized gain, compared with 6.9 percent for a 60/40 portfolio of domestic stocks and bonds.

Over five years the difference is even bigger, with Harvard at 5.9 percent and the US markets delivering an annualized gain of 8.9 percent.”

Harvard Management Co. has been hampered by leadership turnover. It is searching for a CEO after Stephen Blythe, a former Deutsche Bank bond trader, resigned in July after only 17 months on the job, as the Globe reports. HMC has had three investment chiefs in the past 11 years.

One of the questions facing Blythe’s successor will be whether the university maintains its approach of managing its money internally, rather than farming out the job to the best managers it can find on the outside as its Ivy League rival Yale does.

Harvard appears sobered by its portfolio’s past performance. In his closing remarks in the Annual Report, interim chief executive Robert A. Ettl writes,

“As we enter fiscal year 2017, the investment landscape continues to be full of uncertainty. With a backdrop of slowing growth and rich valuations, endowment returns could be muted for some time to come.”

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The U.S. Treasury Department has granted permission to Boeing and Airbus to export commercial planes to Iran, a Treasury spokesperson told NPR. The government has approved a deal — not yet finalized — for Boeing to sell IranAir 80 commercial passenger aircraft.

Thumbs-up from the Treasury is a major step forward on a key portion of last year’s deal between Iran and six world powers including the U.S., in which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from decades-long sanctions. That relief officially started in January, as we reported.

“These licenses contain strict conditions to ensure that the planes will be used exclusively for commercial passenger use and cannot be resold or transferred to a designated entity,” the Treasury spokesperson said.

Boeing and Iran reached a $20 billion provisional agreement in late June for 80 aircraft, as NPR’s Jackie Northam reported.

Since then, the Treasury has “spent months scrutinizing the deal to see what technology will be used on the planes, and whether anyone remaining on a U.S. sanctions list is involved in the deal,” Jackie said.

She added that this marks the first time that Boeing has sold planes to Iran since its 1979 revolution. Jackie reports, “There is ferocious competition between Boeing and Airbus, and a good chance Boeing would be locked out of the Iranian market for decades if it didn’t get this approval.”

The new aircraft are a major step toward modernizing and expanding “the country’s elderly fleet, held together by smuggled or improvised parts after years of sanctions,” as Reuters reported.

The Treasury also granted Boeing’s competitor Airbus a license to sell 17 aircraft to IranAir, as Jackie reported. “Even though Airbus is based in Europe, it needs U.S. approval because its planes contain sophisticated technological equipment made in America. That includes the computers and navigational equipment.”

Both companies received the green light to sell a mix of wide-body and single aisle jets, Jackie said.

She has reported that this deal is seen as an important test case for doing business with Iran, including big questions on financing:

“Commercial aircraft are one of the very few products U.S. companies are allowed to sell to Iran. Even so, a deal has to be done without using American dollars or the U.S. financial system. This creates a problem even for international companies wanting to sell to Iran because most foreign banks have partnerships with American banks.

“[Former Treasury official Elizabeth] Rosenberg says that’s why all eyes are on Boeing to see if it can find innovative ways to pick through this financial minefield.”

The deals are also likely to “test conservative opposition” to the nuclear agreement in both the U.S. and Iran, as Reuters reported. In the U.S., many Republican lawmakers are against selling Iran planes, as are some conservatives in Iran.

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The U.S. government wants to help you take your hands off the wheel.

The Department of Transportation on Tuesday issued its Federal Automated Vehicle Policy, which outlines how manufacturers and developers can ensure safe design of driverless vehicles, tells states what responsibilities they will have and points out potential new tools for ensuring safety.

Regulators say they want to prepare for the transition to self-driving vehicles, which they say will save money, time and lives. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx tells NPR’s Robert Siegel he hopes these guidelines will ensure that safety is a priority as the technology continues to be developed.

Asked to predict how soon self-driving vehicles will represent, say, 25 percent of the cars on the road, Foxx says, “I don’t know about percentages, but it’s very clear that there is a growing interest in the marketplace to bring these vehicles into the lives of Americans. And it’s incumbent upon us to get ahead of it and to make sure that safety is part of the thought process at the very beginning, and that’s part of what our policy will set forth.”

Interview Highlights

On why self-driving cars need federal regulation in the early stages

Well, I would say that there’s not really a conflict between innovation and safety. That you can actually have innovation, you can have safety, and you can innovate in the safety arena if you take the right approach.

We did not have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration back when the Model T was put on the assembly line, and if we had, we probably would have saved untold numbers of lives by having that kind of vigilance at the beginning. We have that opportunity today. This is a once-in-a-hundred-year moment to capture a technology while it’s in its early stages and build a culture of safety within it, and that’s what we intend to do.

On whether the guidelines require manufacturers to share research

We’ve had good experience with data sharing among highly competitive cohort of industry. I would say the Federal Aviation Administration is our best example of this, where data is shared anonymously, but it has helped us in many ways predict safety challenges and avert safety challenges within the industry.

We think this model could be used in the auto industry, particularly with a driverless environment where there is going to be so much more data available than we currently have today. We certainly want to encourage collaboration within the industry.

On the issue of liability with self-driving cars

I think that’s a question that’s going to need further conversation, and in the guidance we’ve laid out we expect the states to be engaged in that discussion as well. …

The policy recognizes there are areas that we have deep knowledge today and can develop policy around, and there are areas that need to be discussed over a longer time frame and that’s one of them.

On whether U.S. infrastructure is ready for self-driving vehicles

Well, I have questions about whether our streets are in a condition for human drivers today. That’s why I went and argued so strenuously for a long-term surface bill. Obviously, our infrastructure needs to be kept at a good state of repair.

I also believe that over the next decade or so we’re going to start integrating more technological capability into the infrastructure itself — much more sophisticated street signal alignment. The street lights networks that we have today actually communicating with cars, and turning off when there are no cars on the road, and turning on when there are. I think you’re going to see a lot of that technology take root, and you’re going to see it at the municipal level, at the state level.

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After a 330,000-gallon spill shut down a gasoline pipeline in Alabama Sept. 9, fuel shortages and high gas prices are occurring across the southern United States this week, NPR member stations report.

Emily Siner of Nashville’s WPLN tells NPR’s Newscast that prices there have risen about 20 cents per gallon since Thursday, and officials are urging drivers not to fill up unless they need to.

“The closure is already affecting some stations in the state. An employee at a Shell station in Columbia told WPLN that it was out of gas for about two hours Friday morning until a new shipment came in.”

Siner interviewed Nashville driver Brett Kern — who happens to be a Tennessee Titans football player — who told her he was almost on empty when he finally found gas at a station off I-65.

“I was 0 for 6 on Saturday, 0 for 3 yesterday, and then I called about four stations this morning,” Kern said. “This was the first one that had it.”

Patrick DeHaan, a senior analyst at GasBuddy.com, told Siner that Tennessee can get gas from the Midwest or a Memphis refinery, but supplies are harder to come by in other states, including Georgia.

WABE’s John Lorinc reports that gas prices are up 30 cents in the past week to $2.47 a gallon, and that stations are struggling to keep up with demand. A local motorist described a shuttered gas station.

“‘Lights are completely dark, there’s no one there. There’s signs on the pump. Yeah. I was like, I didn’t know it was this bad,’ said Kimberly Williams, a resident of Atlanta.”

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has declared a state of emergency, Lorinc reports, allowing gas truck drivers to work longer-than-normal hours.

Colonial Pipeline Company tells the Associated Press that it’s aiming to have a temporary bypass running around the leak by the end of the week. In a statement the company said supplies from a second pipeline “have been delivered and/or are in route to terminal locations in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina.”

Some lucky breaks meant that the fuel spill was well-contained and didn’t make it into nearby waterways, the AP reports.

“From an ecological standpoint, the spill couldn’t have happened at a better place or time because the terrain funneled the fuel into [a nearby retention] pond and the water was low enough in the small lake to enable it to hold the gas, said [environmentalist David] Butler, of Cahaba Riverkeeper.”

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Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched their photo-sharing app with a server that crashed every other hour. Despite a chaotic start, Instagram became one of the most popular apps in the world.

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