NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-04-2025 7AM EST

Episode Date: January 4, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Giles Snyder. Six days of funeral observances begin today for former President Jimmy Carter. Crowds are expected at the Carter Center in Atlanta today. He will lie in repose there before ceremonies move to Washington, D.C. next week. Would a President Carter's significant pieces of legislation when he was in office would have changed mental health care? Here's Katie Ar Arittle reports. President Carter and his wife Rosalyn worked together to pass something called the Mental Health Systems Act in 1980.

Months later it was dismantled. Stephen Sharfstein worked on the legislation. When it was repealed the following year by then President Reagan, and let me tell you elections matter, there was a lot of dismay among the mental health community, the patients, the various professional organizations. However, over time, particularly the next decade or so, a number of the provisions of the act were re-legislated. Sharfstein says even though it was not realized as Carter imagined it, it set forth a vision for policymakers for decades. Katie Ariddle, NPR News.

Now, Speaker Mike Johnson is expressing gratitude for President-elect Donald Trump. After narrowly winning re-election, Johnson won the Speaker's gavel in the first round of voting after he and Trump spoke with two GOP holdouts who then switched their votes. In Pierce, Claudia Grisales says Johnson beat expectations. It's clear that this unruly wing of the House Republican Conference, known as the Freedom Caucus and their allies, have read the room. And they're signaling that they know there's a new sheriff in town, and they know Trump will take office within weeks and exert all of his available resources to make the lives

of any of his opponents miserable. Meanwhile, President-elect Trump is again dismissing the hush money case in New York as an illegitimate political attack. Judge Juan Marchand has set sentencing for next week. He's indicated that Trump will not serve jail time. Trump was found guilty in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton will pay the federal government nearly $16 million to settle fraud allegations.

Texas Public Radio's Paul Flav reports. Prosecutors said Booz Allen used civilian government contractors to obtain confidential bidding and competitor proposal information to rig the bid in their favor for a flight simulator contract. In 2023, a San Antonio-based Air Force contractor, Kevin Seguin, was sentenced to 15 years in prison over this scheme. He took bribes to influence $100 million in contracts over 10 years, said investigators. At least three others have been found criminally responsible for the fraud, including two Booz Allen Engineering Services program managers. The mega defense contractor admitted no legal liability in this settlement.

It's at least the second settlement over false claims acts violations for the company that agreed to pay nearly $400 million to the government in 2023. I'm Paul Flav in San Antonio. And you're listening to NPR News. Investigators say the decorated army soldier who fatally shot himself just before an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas left a note saying it was a stunt to serve as a wake-up call for the country's problems. Investigators say 37-year-old Matthew L no ill will against Donald Trump and that there does not appear to be any link to the attack carried out by another Army veteran in New Orleans on New Year's.

David Lodge has died. The British writer and academic died this week in Birmingham, England. He was 89 years old. In Pierce, Chloe Veltman reports on his life. David Lodge was best known for Campus Trilogy, his satirical novel set to fictional university. Two of the books, Small World and Nice Work, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted for television in the late 1980s. It's no fun at all being Dean of Faculty these days. All you do is give people bad news.

Lodge was born in London in 1935 and grew up in a lower middle class Catholic home. He had a long academic career as professor of English literature at Birmingham University. In a 1990 interview on WHYY's Fresh Air, Lodge blamed academia for making literary discussions impenetrable to the general public. That I think is regressible. David Lodge added it's difficult for people to sustain both academic and literary careers. Chloe Valtman, NPR News. At a White House ceremony this afternoon, President Biden is to award the nation's highest civilian

honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nineteen people are to receive it, including Hillary Clinton, George Soros and Denzel Washington. I'm Giles Snyder. This is NPR News.