NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-02-2025 5PM EST

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. FBI officials now say it appears the man responsible for a deadly rampage on New Year's Day in New Orleans was acting alone. FBI Counterterrorism Division assistant Christopher Reyes saying evidence shows the timeline before a 42 year old Trumps-adin-Dumar drove a pickup truck into a street packed with revelers, killing 14 people before being shot and killed by police. At this point, investigators believe Jabbar picked up the rented F-150 in Houston, Texas on December 30th. He then drove from Houston to New Orleans on the evening of the 31st, and he posted

several videos to an online platform proclaiming his support for ISIS. Videos showed Jabbar planting explosives in coolers on the street before the attack. The incident occurred hours before the Sugar Bowl game between Notre Dame and Georgia, which was postponed until today. It was expected to draw 80,000 people. President Joe Biden during an event at the White House today also talked about the apparent act of terrorism in New Orleans, promising the U.S. will remain vigilant in pursuing terror groups who seek to attack the U.S. We're going to continue to relentlessly pursue ISIS and other terrorist organizations where

they are, and they'll find no safe harbor here. Speaking about the separate incident in Las Vegas, where a man shot himself in the head inside an explosives-laden Tesla cyber truck which then burst into flames but said as of now there appears to be no link. In that incident in front of a Trump hotel property there were seven injuries but no deaths. A cold front known as an Arctic outbreak is spreading through much of the US as NPR's Rachel Triesman reports the central and eastern parts of the country could see their coldest air of the season.

The National Weather Service says blasts of air from Siberia have reached the northern plains and will spread east and south into next week. The cold front is likely to bring below average temperatures as far south as Florida and the Gulf Coast. Forecasters are also warning of a weekend storm that could dump heavy snow and hazardous ice from the central plains to the mid-Atlantic and northeast. They're encouraging people to stock up on three days' worth of provisions, insulate their pipes, monitor emergency alerts, and check in on their loved ones.

Rachel Triesman, NPR News. Back to the office today for workers at Amazon, and already there are concerns about what that will mean in Seattle, where the e-commerce giant employs about 55,000 people at its main campus there. Amazon had been allowing its employees to work from home three days a week, but now is requiring workers to be back in the office five days a week beginning today. Stocks helped to move Wall Street lower on the first trading day of the new year. All three of the major U.S. market indexes dragged down in part by disappointing sales numbers from electric vehicle maker Tesla. The Dow lost 151 points to close at 42,392.

The S&P was down 13 points. The Nasdaq fell 30 points. This is NPR. A 20-year-old man who broke into Gracie Mansion in New York and allegedly stole a Christmas ornament was due to be arraigned today. Police say the man was apprehended by the mayor's security detail during the early morning hours after being found in an upstairs bathroom. A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams says the mayor was not home at the time of the Predawn

incident. Scientists have analyzed DNA from a mysterious and elusive animal, the marsupial mole, as NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce reports, the mole tunnels beneath the sands of remote deserts in Australia. This mole is so rare, a mere sighting in the wild makes headlines. To learn more about it, researchers analyzed DNA from a single dead mole stored in a museum. Sarah Lucas is with the University of Münster in Germany. She says the genetic evidence suggests that this mole's population size abruptly crashed about 70,000

years ago. I think that is definitely one of the major findings of this paper because they were listed as extremely endangered because we had no idea about what their population dynamics were happening and again it's really hard to find a living one. A report on the finding in the journal Science Advances says the decline may have happened during a period of past climate change. Nell Greenfield-Boice, NPR News. New data company rankings are showing Aeromexico with the best on-time record globally last year, Sirium in its annual rankings released today says nearly 87% of the carrier's flights arrived on time.

Also doing well in the U S was Delta at the bottom of the rankings, Canadian airlines, WestJet, Air Canada, and Denver based Frontier. This is NPR.