NPR News Now - NPR News: 02-14-2025 3PM EST

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

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There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately. 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been A Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast on NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Lakshmi Singh. Vice President JD Vance had a stinging message for European leaders in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Their biggest problem, he said, comes from within Europe. NPR's Deepa Shivaram reports. Vance didn't mince words in his speech at the annual security conference.

He scolded Europe for what he said is censorship of right-wing views and shutting people out of the democratic process. He also downplayed interference from Russia in democratic elections. If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,

then it wasn't very strong to begin with. Vance also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the conference. Deepa Sivoram, NPR News, The White House. The Department of Justice has seen a series of resignations in the last 24 hours after the DOJ ordered prosecutors to drop their bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The order raised concerns about a quid pro quo after Adams said he'd use his executive powers to allow federal immigration

authorities to operate at the city's Rikers Island Jail. Matthew Galuzzo, former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, spoke with NPR's Here and Now about concerns about political interference within the DOJ. The justification that's been given by Emile Boeve, the deputy attorney general, just confirms it because they're not even hiding the fact that this dismissal of the indictment is not based on the merits of the prosecution at all. It has nothing to do with whether Mr. Adams is guilty or not of these charges of corruption. And it just has to do with essentially a policy decision being made by them.

On Fox News today, Mayor Adams denied that he agreed to help Trump officials in exchange for getting the corruption case against him dropped. Appearing alongside him, the president's border czar, Tom Homan, warned that if Adams does not come through on enforcing immigration policy, he'd be back in New York City. The National Endowment for Democracy is cutting all grants this week and moving to furlough employees as part of a dramatic downsizing of the federal government. The congressionally funded Pro-Democracy group underpins much of the U.S.'s support for nonprofits, media groups, and dissident organizations, including for China and Iran, which NPR's

Emily Fang now reports are now halting their work. The endowment, or NED for short, is unpopular among autocrats who accuse it of being a tool for regime change. Elon Musk is now using that language, too. The head of President Trump's Government Efficiency Unit wrote this month on the social media site X, which he owns, that NED is a quote, scam, and cited a Chinese Foreign Ministry article accusing NED of being a CIA front. And this week, two people at NED told NPR that the organization suddenly can no longer

access its funds. It's had to send emails to grantees that they should stop incurring expenses. That has devastated many pro-democracy organizations because they say very few people fund their often quite dangerous work. Emily Fang, NPR News. This is NPR. In Los Angeles, the city is recovering today after a winter storm system dropped as much as five inches of rain. Among the areas hardest hit, Pacific Palisades and Altadena still recovering from last month's wildfires. Steve Futterman has

the latest. There were some close calls. An L.A. County fire employee had his SUV pushed into the Pacific Ocean by a mudslide. He was rescued. All day long, people were on alert. Ariel Cohn of the National Weather Service. There will be the potential for very severe debris flows to occur. At times there were torrential rains, streets were flooded, cars were trapped by mud and had to be abandoned. Some homes and businesses sustained damage, but for the most part the big fears of massive and deadly debris flows didn't happen. The Southern California area is not home free yet. The

mountains and foothills and affected fire areas remain saturated and there is still the potential for mudslides. For NPR News, I'm Steve Futterman in Los Angeles. Nevada is suspending a cage-free egg law in light of the soaring price of eggs in that state and across the United States. Nationwide consumers have been seeing record high prices from a shortage tied to a nationwide bird flu outbreak. Since the onset of the H5N1 virus in recent years, tens of millions of birds have been euthanized including egg-laying chickens.

At last check on Wall Street, the Dow is down 128 points. The S&P is up a fraction. The Nasdaq has climbed 52 points. It's NPR News.