NPR News Now - NPR News: 05-07-2025 11PM EDT

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

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These days, there's a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider This from NPR is a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory, and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Shae Stevens. Three former Memphis police officers have been acquitted in the 2023 beating death of Tyree Nichols.

NPR's Debbie Elliott reports that attorneys for the Nichols' family are calling the verdicts a devastating miscarriage and denial of justice. A jury pulled from Chattanooga found fired Memphis police detectives Tadarius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Justin Smith not guilty. District Attorney Steve Mulroy was at a loss after the verdict given the video evidence showing officers repeatedly beating and kicking Nichols and leaving him gasping for his life with no medical attention.

I personally think any fair-minded person who watches the video would come to the conclusion that everybody there had some responsibility for Tyron Nichols death. The ex-officer still faced sentencing on federal civil rights convictions. Nichols family is pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Memphis. Debbie Elliott, NPR News. The Trump administration is moving forward with its mass deportation plans. It is now considering sending deported migrants to Libya.

A federal judge says that doing so would violate a court order to give migrants facing deportation the chance to argue their cases in court. Attorneys representing people with final deportation orders sought the ruling, following reports that migrants from Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines would soon be flown to North Africa. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is taking aim at immigration policies in Illinois. From Member Station WBEZ, Mawa Iqbal reports on Noem's comments during a stop in Springfield. Flanked by Republican state lawmakers, Noem blasted Illinois' sanctuary policies, which limit state, county and local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Governor Pritzker has created a sanctuary here for those criminals and invited them here with free health care, free housing, free assistance, and facilitated them being protected from being brought to justice. In a statement, Governor J.B. Pritzker defended the state's sanctuary status, saying Illinois quote, doesn't need to abuse power or ignore the Constitution to keep our people safe. For NPR News, I'm Mawa Iqbal in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands gathered in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican today to await the results of the first conclave vote to elect a new pope. NPR's Ruth Sherlock was with the crowd as black smoke

emanated from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel indicating that no agreement had yet been reached on a new pontiff. I'm surrounded by nuns and priests and other faithful who say they've come to pray to help the cardinals understand God's will and choose the right pope. They're not the only ones who've come to see this. A seagull is perched on the roof of the Sistine Chapel with a front row seat. NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Rome. This is NPR. home. This is NPR. Pakistan is vowing retaliation for the India missile strikes that killed at least 31 Pakistanis and injured more than 50 others. Indian airstrikes at targets in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir today, saying the attack, was carried out in response to last month's massacre of Hindu

tourists. Islamabad denies involvement in that attack in which gunmen killed 26 people. The nuclear armed neighbors have expelled each other's diplomats and closed their borders and airspace. A new study has found that 99.999% of the deep sea floor remains unseen by human eyes. As NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boish reports, this is a region of the globe that is dark, cold, and hard to reach. More than half of the planet's surface is covered by the deep ocean. Sonar can map the shape of the seafloor, but seeing what's happening there means sending lights and a camera down into the dark. Katie Croft-Bell is with a nonprofit called the Ocean Discovery League. She recently made a

database of all the expeditions that send any kind of probe down to see how much of the deep sea floor has actually been seen since the 1950s. It ends up being an area of less than the size of Rhode Island. In the journal Science Advances, she and her colleagues report that most of the explored areas are with 200 nautical miles of the United States, Japan and New Zealand. So it's a fairly narrow sample of the global seafloor. Nell Greenfield-Boise, NPR News. U.S. futures are virtually unchanged and after hours trading on Wall Street, Asian markets

are higher. This is NPR News. You may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block markets are higher. This is NPR News.