NPR News Now - NPR News: 04-17-2025 8AM EDT

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Korva Coleman. A federal judge says the Trump administration is likely in criminal contempt of a judicial order. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg says the administration purposefully ignored his order to bring back U.S. planes carrying deported migrants to a prison in El Salvador. And Pierce Adrian Florido says the Trump administration now faces a choice. Boasberg gave the government until next week to do one of two things. He said it could, in his words, reassert custody of the men it deported so they can challenge their deportations in federal courts.

They are still in that Salvadoran prison and many of their families have denied that they are gang members. If the government chooses not to do that, though, Boasberg said, then he wants the names of the specific government officials who ignored his order. He said he will force them to testify and if necessary, he will appoint a lawyer to criminally prosecute them for contempt and they could face fines or prison. And here is Adrienne Florido reporting. The Trump administration has appealed the judge's decision.

President Trump welcomes Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloney to the White House today. She is the latest foreign leader to talk with Trump about his global tariffs. Last week, Trump suspended a fresh round of U.S. tariffs on most nations for 90 days. But his earlier 10 percent tariffs are still in effect for all countries, along with some others. Yesterday, Trump received a delegation from Japan. Trump cheered what he called progress in trade negotiations with Japan, but Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba played that

down. Speaking through an interpreter, Ishiba said the talks were only the first step. Of course, the discussions going forward won't be easy, but President Trump has expressed his desire to give the negotiations with Japan the highest priority. I believe that this discussion has led to the next step, and I appreciate this. He spoke through a BBC interpreter. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared that autism is epidemic in the U.S. NPR's Rob Stein reports,

Kennedy has vowed to quickly identify the cause. Kennedy is citing new statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as evidence that autism is epidemic in the U.S. The number of children diagnosed with autism increased from 1 out of 36 to 1 out of 31 kids between 2020 and 2022, according to the new CDC report.

Kennedy says he's launching a new research project to identify an environmental toxin that he thinks is to blame. Independent experts say the autism numbers are up because of better diagnoses and the cause is likely a complex combination of factors including genetic predisposition. Rob Stein, NPR News. On Wall Street in pre-market trading, Dow futures are down about one and a half percent. It's NPR. Utility officials in Puerto Rico are working to restore electricity to the U.S. territory.

The entire island went dark yesterday afternoon. Not only did people lose power, hundreds of thousands also lost access to water. The utility now reports more than 41 percent of customers have had their power restored. The National Weather Service is warning that critical to extreme fire weather conditions now exist in the central and southern U.S. Conditions are ripe for wildfires to break out from Arizona to Nebraska. Scientists have detected chemical signatures in the atmosphere of a distant planet.

These could suggest the presence of life. As MPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyys reports, some scientists are excited, but others are skeptical of the finding. The planet orbits a star about 124 light-years away. Researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to study the tiny fraction of starlight that filtered through its atmosphere. Their analysis detected an abundance of sulfur-based gases that on Earth are made only by life, such as marine microbes. Astronomer Nikhu Madhusadan is with the University of Cambridge. To be very frank, it was astounding. I had never imagined that this is what we would see.

He says this planet could be an ocean world teeming with alien life, but the detection of these gases needs to be confirmed and there may be unrecognized ways of making them without life. Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News. And I'm Corva Coleman, NPR News from Washington.