NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-13-2025 12PM EST

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Lakshmi Singh. Powerful winds threaten to undo days of progress firefighters made toward containing the Los Angeles area wildfires. The National Weather Service is forecasting wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour this week. Tens of thousands of people remain under evacuation orders, and LA County Fire Chief Anthony Moroney signaled that would not end anytime soon. Repopulation will not occur until all areas are safe.

The fires have killed at least 24 people. Thousands more structures are destroyed. In some cases, entire neighborhoods are in charred ruin. Meanwhile, dozens of people have been arrested for looting, and officials say they're now seeing more cases of price gouging. Rental home prices in the region are spiking as the wildfires force, again, thousands of people to look for new housing. From member station LA, as David Wagner reports, a listing on Zillow shows that the rent on one property increased nearly 86% since September. The furnished four-bedroom home in Bel Air

was listed Saturday morning, days after the fires broke out, for $29,500 per month. That's up from $15,900 in September. The home's rental agent, Fiora Aston with Compass, said she told her client, Fiora Aston, with Compass, People are desperate and you can probably get good money and you should move out. She has a second home. So she moved into her second home.

The listing was taken down a few hours after the interview. Journalists for the New York Times and the LA Times are spotting other listings with huge price jumps, and housing policy experts say the fires will likely drive up rents for a long time to come. For NPR News, I'm David Wagner in Los Angeles. Danielle Pletka Reinforcements continue to arrive in California, and the megastar Beyoncé has donated $2 a half million dollars to fire relief. In other news, this week marks President Biden's final full week in the White House before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated. As NPR's Asma Khalid tells us, Biden is beginning his farewell with a final foreign policy speech

today. The president is delivering remarks at the State Department about his foreign policy legacy. It's a full circle moment for Biden. Shortly after entering the White House four years ago, he made a trip to the State Department about his foreign policy legacy. It's a full circle moment for Biden. Shortly after entering the White House four years ago, he made a trip to the State Department to give a speech about America's place in the world. He intends now to talk about the work he's done to rebuild alliances and strengthen the United States global leadership.

But it will undoubtedly also be a moment for him to defend his own choices around some key foreign policy challenges for which he has been criticized, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Asma Khalid, NPR News. From Washington, this is NPR. An earthquake has struck southwestern Japan. The U.S. Geological Survey reports a temblor was a magnitude 6.8. Japan's agency reported a slightly higher intensity. The nighttime

quake triggered a tsunami advisory for Miyazaki and Kochi prefectures, home to more than one and a half million people. Public broadcaster NHK TV reports tsunami waves as high as three feet may have reached land. There were no immediate reports of injuries or severe damage. A new study finds that saber teeth, like those of now extinct saber-toothed cats, were highly specialized for biting prey. NPR's Jonathan Lambert explains how this specialization might have led to their demise. Canine teeth have two main jobs—be sharp enough to puncture and slice things, but durable enough not to break. Sabre teeth are extreme canines, so large and elongated that researchers

were puzzled as to how they didn't break. To figure it out, researchers analyzed the strength and biting ability of canines from nearly 100 different species. The study, published in Current Biology, found that saber teeth were extremely optimized for puncturing prey, likely at the expense of durability. That degree of specialization may have made it harder for saber-toothed predators to adapt to changing environments, the researchers say, potentially leading to their extinction. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.

The NASDAQ is down 284 points or nearly one and a half percent. The Dow is up 51 points. This is NPR.