NPR News Now - NPR News: 02-12-2025 1PM EST

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

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At the Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar indeed performed his smash diss track Not Like Us and brought out Samuel L. Jackson, Serena Williams, and SZA. We're recapping the Super Bowl, including why we saw so many celebrities in commercials this year. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Lakshmi Singh. President Trump says he has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine and other issues. He said they agreed to visit each other's nations and have their teams start negotiations

immediately on the war in Ukraine. On his Truth Social platform, Trump said he would inform Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the White House's conversation with the Kremlin. War on waste, that's the theme of the Doge Congressional Subcommittee's first hearing chaired today by Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. In a display of solidarity at the White House yesterday, President Trump and his Doge point man, tech billionaire Elon Musk, defended the aggressive actions to downsize, touting them as a promise kept. NPR's Tamara Keith has more.

Musk was standing beside Trump, who was ready to sign an executive order that outlines a role for Musk's Doge project in significantly culling the federal workforce. This was the first time that we have seen Musk on camera with Trump speaking at length about the unit known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which is upending Washington and spawning lawsuits claiming that what he and his team are doing is illegal. NPR's Tamara Keith. Consumer prices in January were higher than expected in the U.S. NPR's Scott Horsley reports on the latest inflation data from the Labor Department.

Forecasters had expected to see some moderation in price hikes last month, but inflation remained stubbornly high. Consumer prices in January were up 3 percent from a year ago. Prices rose by half a percent between December and January alone. Stripping out food and energy prices, which bounce around a lot, core inflation was also higher than forecasters had expected. Given the sticky price hikes, the Federal Reserve is expected to take its time before making any additional cuts to interest rates. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.

Health officials have confirmed that a dairy worker in Nevada tested positive for H5N1 bird flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the person been infected with a variant recently found in dairy cattle there. More from NPR's Will Stone. The person only had mild symptoms and is recovering. Genetic sequencing of the virus shows it's the D1.1 variant of H5N1. That's the same variant that was recently discovered in dairy cattle in Nevada. That finding was significant because until now it had only been seen in wild birds and poultry,

not dairy cattle. Researchers are looking into whether the variant could be more dangerous for humans because it led to severe disease in two human cases, including a death in Louisiana. In the Nevada dairy worker, the CDC identified a mutation that suggests the virus is adapting to better replicate in mammals, but so far there's no evidence it's spreading between people. Will Stone, NPR News. US stocks are mostly lower this hour the Dow is down 157 points at 44,431. You're listening to NPR News. A Trump administration official tells NPR the United States is freeing Russian national

ID'd as Alexander Vinnick in exchange for securing the release of an American teacher, Mark Fogel. Astronomers say the chances that an asteroid that is potentially as large as a football field will hit Earth in 2032 have increased slightly. However, the odds of a miss are still heavily in our favor, and Piers Scott Newman has more. Astronomers looking closely at the asteroid called 2024 YR4 say it has about a 1 in 47 chance of hitting Earth more than eight years from now. Larry Deneau is co-principal at ATLAS, the University of Hawaii-based group that discovered

the asteroid last year. He says detecting these near-Earth objects involves examining lots of grainy photographs for faint signs of movement. And at the very faint end, those grainy parts of the image, you know, are indistinguishable from a faint star that's on there, right? We're looking for things that unfortunately also happen to look like noise. Scientists say damage from the impact of an object as big as 2024 YR4 could be devastating if it hit a populated area. Scott Newman, NPR News. Frontier Airlines made a third offer to take over Spirit Airlines, and Spirit has declined

yet again. Spirit says it is focused instead on reorganizing and emerging from bankruptcy. The budget carrier has a court hearing tomorrow. Spirit anticipates restructuring will be completed in the first quarter. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News.