NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-06-2025 10AM EST

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Korva Coleman. Congress will meet this afternoon to count electoral votes and officially certify the 2024 election for Donald Trump. As NPR's Miles Parks reports, it's the first presidential certification since 2021 when Trump supporters violently overtook the Capitol. Today will be an extraordinary day for American democracy, says Rick Pildes, an election law expert at NYU. Rick Pildes, President, New York State University January 6th is the date, if there is one date, at which we witness the peaceful transfer of power.

Adam Chapnick As president of the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris will oversee the electoral certification today for an election she lost. It is the first certification done under new guidelines passed in 2022 that make it more difficult to disrupt the process. Miles Parks, NPR News, Washington. A major winter storm is striking parts of the central and eastern U.S. Winter storm warnings and advisories are posted from Missouri to New Jersey. Some areas are getting several inches of snow and blustery winds.

National Weather Service lead forecaster Bob Oruvec says temperatures in some areas have been frigid. Low temperatures on Monday morning, still pretty cold across the middle part of the country, as low as minus 15 across the international or across northern Minnesota, International Falls. But generally over the next two days, temperatures east of the Rockies

are gonna be below average and then temperatures west of the Rockies will be above average. The storm has cut power to many people from Missouri to southern Maryland. The tracking site, poweroutage.us, says that more than 112,000 customers in Virginia don't have electricity. Almost 90,000 are out in Kentucky. President Biden is going to New Orleans today. The White House says he'll mourn with families who lost loved ones in last week's attack on Bourbon

Street. 14 people were killed and dozens of others wounded in the attack. Meanwhile, the NFL, the New Orleans Saints, and Saints team owner Gail Benson say they're donating a million dollars to support the victims. Stocks opened higher this morning as US Steel goes to court to salvage its sale to a Japanese steelmaker. NPR's Scott Horsley reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 260 points in early trading. U.S. Steel and its Japanese steelmen pursuing legal remedies after President Biden moved

to block the sale on national security grounds. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, the companies accused the president of violating their due process rights and interfering with a good-faith regulatory review. They say the president was trying to curry favor with the Steelworkers Union, which opposed the deal. U.S. Steel is headquartered in the politically important swing state of Pennsylvania. A separate lawsuit targets the international president of the Steelworkers Union and a rival steelmaking company, Cleveland Cliffs, for trying to scuttle the $15 billion sale. U.S. Steel says it remains committed to defending the transaction.

Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington. On Wall Street, the Dow's up 280 points. This is NPR. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is holding a news conference later this morning. He's expected to discuss his political future. Trudeau has been under pressure to quit as members of his Canadian Liberal Party track polls that suggest they could lose an election. The Liberal Party has governed Canada for nearly a decade. In a post on Xtoday, Elon Musk called the government of Britain, a key U.S. ally, quote, tyrannical.

Musk's timeline On X has been filled with vitriol for British politicians in recent days. That's worried Britons and prompted a rebuke from the prime minister. NPR's Lauren Freyer reports from London. Lauren Freyer Elon Musk has been fixated on a child sex abuse scandal from about 15 years ago in which gangs of mostly British Pakistani men were convicted of grooming mostly white British girls. The far right seized on this. Musk has falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was a top prosecutor at the time,

of failing to go after child rapists. And he wrote that Starmer should go to prison. Asked about this, Starmor told reporters, Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they're not interested in victims, they're interested in themselves. Britons are worried about what this row might mean for US policy, with Musk slated for a role in the incoming President Trump's White House. Lauren Freyer, NPR News, London. Pope Francis is naming a new Archbishop for the Washington D.C. archdiocese. It's Cardinal Warburt McElroy of San Diego. He would succeed Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who is retiring. Again, on Wall Street, the Dow is up 300 points. It's NPR.

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