NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-29-2025 7PM EST

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

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The indicator from Planet Money is diving into the world of batteries. Not the kind you buy at the grocery store. We're talking really big batteries. The kind that can power thousands of homes. This technology came seemingly out of nowhere. We're digging deep into the battery industry in three back-to-back episodes. Listen to the indicator from Planet Money podcast on NPR. on NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. While President Trump's budget office has walked back a memo it put out freezing spending on federal grants, it's still not clear where things stand. The administration sparked widespread confusion before a federal judge intervened.

NPR's Domenica Montanaro says don't expect the administration to slow down though. The idea is what you've seen make things unclear, make people exhausted, make it harder for the media to focus on one thing and make it harder for the opposition to organize a message around what to focus on. But the backlash to this spending freeze memo shows that there are limits to that kind of strategy. Just because something is done fast doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way to run the government and this is now the first major misstep by the Trump administration. But don't think this is going to mean any kind of dialing back. MPR's Domenico Montanaro. President Trump meanwhile said he'll instruct the Department of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a migrant

detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. More from MPR's Jasmine Garz. At the White House signing of the Lakenreiley Act on immigration, President Trump announced he would be giving an executive order to prepare a 30,000-person facility at Guantanamo Bay to house deported migrants. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them. The Trump administration has also indicated that it is negotiating an agreement

with the president of El Salvador, Naib Boukele, to accept deported migrants. Jasmine Garst and Peer News New York. Facebook parent Metta is agreeing to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited Gaza today. That visit, confirmed by US State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, appears Kat Lonsdorf has more. The Israeli military took Witkoff to the Netzerim Corridor, according to Israeli media.

It's a throughway created by the military during the war to split the Gaza Strip in two. Witkoff's visit to Gaza is the first of any senior US official throughout the war, and in many years. He also met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Wyckoff helped broker the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement, along with other US, Egyptian, and Qatari officials.

His Israeli tour comes after a trip to Saudi Arabia, and days before Netanyahu is expected to travel to Washington to meet Trump. The Trump administration is urging Israel to extend the ceasefire while Netanyahu is under pressure from far-right allies to return to fighting in Gaza. Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News, Tel Aviv. On Wall Street, the Dow was down 136 points, the NASDAQ fell 101 points today. This is NPR. This week's Billboard charts are out and a posthumous album is making a splash. NPR

Stephen Thompson has the story. While he was alive, Mac Miller released a string of top 10 albums, six in all. In the years following his death in 2018, Miller hasn't lost his impact on the Billboard charts. His first posthumous album, Circles, hit the top five back in 2020. Five years later, Miller's estate released a follow-up album. It's a project the late rapper worked on more than a decade ago, but shelved for years. It's called Balloonerism. She don't know, she slept through the field, turned missed it missed it. It was yesterday. So wing right. Fans' appetite for Mac Miller's music hasn't waned.

Balloonerism enters this week's Billboard album chart at number three, behind only Bad Bunny and SZA. Steven Thompson, NPR News. There were blacks of Arctic air that traveled as far south as Florida, bringing snowfall to the state. It's also had an effect on wildlife. At least 17 green sea turtles were found stranded along the northeastern Atlantic coast, suffering what's known as cold stunning, turtles basically debilitated by the cold water and found washed

ashore. Officials at a marine stranding center there, however, say the rescued sea turtles are being treated with antibiotics, fluids and IV feeding. Once they regain strength, officials hope they can be released back into the wild. Crude oil futures prices after briefly moving higher plunged to their lowest settlement this year oiled down $1.15 a barrel to end the session at $72.62 a barrel in New York. I'm Jack Spear, NPR News in Washington.