NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-07-2025 1PM EST

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. A federal judge is blocking the release this week of a final report by special counsel Jack Smith. Smith had said his two-volume report on the classified documents and election interference cases involving President-elect Trump could be released as early as Friday. NPR's Greg Allen reports Judge Eileen Cannon now says the report cannot be released until there is a ruling by a federal appeals court. Trump's co-defendants in the classified documents case filed an emergency motion with Judge

Cannon asking her to block the report's release. The lawyers say the two-volume draft report is the work of, quote, a rogue actor with a personal and political vendetta against the defendants. Judge Cannon dismissed the charges against Trump and his co-defendants in July, ruling the special counsel Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional. Trump's co-defendants have filed a similar emergency motion with the federal appeals court. Cannon says her injunction blocks release of the report until three days after the appeals court rules on the motion. Greg Allen, NPR News Miami. Earlier today, Trump addressed a broad range of issues at a news conference in Mar-a-Lago.

On Canada, he complained about the small size of its military and reiterated that he thinks hockey great Wayne Gretzky should run for prime minister, his remarks coming a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to resign. He again pledged to put massive tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and he also said this. We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Trump said he planned to reverse President Biden's permanent ban on new offshore drilling along most U.S. coastlines and Trump again referenced a wish to acquire Greenland. We need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean people have been talking about it for a security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran.

I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. His eldest son, Don Trump Jr., is making a day trip to Greenland, but local officials say no. Political meetings were scheduled today. 11 men held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been transferred to Oman. The move, a last-ditch effort by President Biden

to get closer to his goal of closing the detention facility. Here's NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer. The transfer of the 11 men who are all from Yemen has cut Guantanamo's detainee population nearly in half. Just 15 prisoners remain there now. All the transferred men had been captured after the 9-11 terror attacks. The Pentagon says they are former al-Qaeda and held them for more than two decades without charge or trial.

National security officials eventually determined they were no longer dangerous enough to continue holding. The U.S. has transferred four other Guantanamo inmates in recent weeks, motivated by the assumption that transfers may stop once Donald Trump returns to the White House. Despite this late push, the Biden administration is unlikely to be able to close Guantanamo's prison and court before Trump takes office. Sasha Pfeiffer, NPR News.

It's NPR. A Louisiana patient is the first person in the U.S. confirmed to die from bird flu. Yesterday, state health officials announced the patient had been hospitalized with severe H5N1 avian flu infection. They say the person had contact with sick and dead birds in a backyard flock. The patient was over the age of 65 and had underlying medical problems. Since March, 66 confirmed bird flu infections have been reported in the U.S. Most were detected among farm workers exposed to sick poultry or dairy cows.

In most cases, the symptoms were mild. The number of transgender teenagers in the U.S. is extremely small, according to a study published yesterday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, and PR Selena Simmons-Stefan reports that small group has been the subject of intense focus from Republican lawmakers in the last few years. The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard and Folk's Health, a virtual LGBTQ health care company. They used a data set of private insurance claims that included more than 5 million adolescents and found that less than 0.1% of them are transgender and receive gender-related medicines. Here's

lead author Landon Hughes of Harvard. It's a very, very small number of people and has managed to eat up all of the oxygen in our political discourse over the last few months in many ways. The incoming Trump administration has pledged to enact a number of policies that would affect this small group, including a federal ban on gender-affirming care for youth. Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News.