NPR News Now - NPR News: 04-25-2025 8PM EDT

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

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On this week's Wild Card podcast, Brett Goldstein says even though his shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking get emotional, he doesn't. I'm a crybaby. I guess I thought you might be like a closet crier. No. I mean, I write all this stuff because then I don't have to live it. Whoa. She's like, I got him.

I'm Rachel Martin. Brett Goldstein is on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. A federal judge has halted President Trump's executive order, ending collective bargaining rights for most federal employees. As NPR's Andrea Shue reports, the White House had argued the move was necessary to ensure the security of the country. The case was brought by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal employees across several dozen agencies. The union argued that stripping federal workers

of their collective bargaining rights had nothing to do with national security, but instead was punishment for the union's legal challenges to the president's actions, including his mass firings of employees. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman granted the union's request to block federal agencies from implementing the executive order, finding it unlawful. That preserves collective bargaining rights at agencies where NTEU has members, for now. Already, many agencies had stopped allowing employees to have their union dues taken out of their paychecks. Andrea Hsu, NPR News. President Trump says talks aimed at brokering a deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine have

gone well. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, met today with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are very close to a deal and the two sides should now meet at very high levels to finish it off, Trump said in his post. Quote, most of the major points are agreed to. We will, however, be working whatever is necessary to help facilitate the end of the cruel and senseless war, Trump wrote.

The price in Gaza of the little food left on the markets is now sold by as much as 1,400%. The UN says that's because Israel's been blocking the entry of everything into Gaza for months and food is running out. And Beerus, Ayubotrawi has more. The UN World Food Program says it has no more stocks of food to support charity kitchens in Gaza.

The soupy beans served at these charity kitchens are what half of Gaza's been surviving on. But the UN agency says these hot kitchens will now run out of food in the coming days. Already all of Gaza's bakeries shut down weeks ago because flour and cooking fuel ran out. There's more than 100,000 tons of food aid ready to enter Gaza, along with medical supplies and other life-saving aid. But Israel's government is blocking all of it, saying this is to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages. Aid groups in countries around the world say Israel's violating international law.

A young boy died over the weekend in Gaza from hunger, one of 53 children the health ministry says have died from malnutrition in the war. A Abul Trawi NPR News, Dubai. President Trump has backed off his contention. He could fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell if he wanted to, saying he does not now plan to do that. However, Trump has not given up on calling on Powell and even the central bank to cut short-term interest rates.

And if the Fed were to lower rates now, most economists say would not necessarily reduce borrowing costs for consumers. That's because they say administration's tax policies are inflationary, driving the Fed to keep rates higher for longer to prevent inflation from taking off even more. Stocks gained ground on Wall Street. The Dow is up 20 points. The Nasdaq rose 216 points. This is NPR. Scientists have had one week to pour over claims that a distant planet is showing possible signs of life. NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boys reports one astronomer has already done a new analysis to cast doubt on the findings. Jake Taylor at the University of Oxford specializes in using the James Webb Space Telescope to study the atmospheres of faraway planets.

So he reanalyzed the published data from the group that claimed to have found life-associated gases on planet K2-18b. His conclusion? There's too much noise in the data to reliably detect any signals. The researchers who made the original claims say that this analysis was too simplistic to be relevant, but Taylor disagrees, saying it's a commonly used method. More reassessments are expected in the coming weeks as the full set of data from the telescope's observations of this planet will be made

public on Saturday. Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, has pleaded not guilty in federal court today. The 26-year-old Mangione faces the death penalty in the case. Today's arraignment attracted several dozen people to the courthouse, including former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who spent seven years behind bars for stealing classified government information. Crude oil futures prices moved higher today, though they were still down a bit for the week with the oil market under pressure due to expected oversupply and uncertainty over the future of U.S.-China trade talks.

Oil rose 23 cents a barrel to $63.02 a barrel in New York. I'm Jack Spear, NPR News.