NPR News Now - NPR News: 05-18-2025 3PM EDT

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

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A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up first podcast from NPR. Live from NPR News in New York City, I'm Duah Lisi Kautau. Walmart CEO Doug McMillan recently

warned tariffs will soon increase prices for the consumers at the retail giant. Now McMillan is on the phone with the White House after President Trump told Walmart to eat some of the cost of tariffs. And Piers Luke Garrett reports. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson is in direct talks with the Walmart CEO. He tells CNN consumers could see price hikes. Walmart will be absorbing some of the tariffs. Some may get passed on to consumers. The Treasury Secretary also defended the whiplash of the on-again and off-again reciprocal tariffs. Besson called it strategic uncertainty.

He also threatened that the Trump administration will bring back high reciprocal tariffs if certain countries don't come to the table. President Trump has put them on notice that if you do not negotiate in good faith, that you will ratchet back up to your April 2 level. Besson said this goes for 18 important trading partners, but he did not say which ones or how quickly these tariffs would return. Luke Garrett, NPR News, Washington. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky met with Pope Leo XIV today following the pontiff's

inaugural mass. Tomorrow he'll speak to President Trump Trump who seeks to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine now in its fourth year. Trump also plans to speak with leaders from Russia and NATO as NPR's Charles Maynes reports. The phone calls come in the wake of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul, Turkey on Friday, their first direct negotiations since the early days of the war. That led to an agreement for a mass prisoner swap, but fell short of Western demands Russia join Ukraine in signing on to an immediate 30-day ceasefire.

Instead, Russia has kept up the military pressure, launching mass drone attacks over the weekend. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also signaling that may not change. In an interview on state television, he insisted Russia maintain the means to meet its military objectives and see the war through to what he called its logical conclusion. Charles Mains, NPR News, Moscow. Emergency crews continue to work to restore electricity to households that were hard hit by deadly tornadoes in Missouri and Kentucky Friday night. The small town of London, Kentucky suffered the most deaths, 18 so far.

Reporter Karen Czar with member station WUKY has been in London since yesterday. You can hear chainsaws and heavy equipment everywhere, but the amount of debris here is so massive. It could take weeks to clean up and then the recovery process could take years. We are still rebuilding from deadly tornadoes that hit western Kentucky that was in 2021 and deadly flooding in eastern Kentucky that was in 2022. Karen Zarr with Member Station WUKY. You are listening to NPR News from New York City.

The extremist group Al-Shabaab claims it's behind a suicide bombing that today killed at least 10 young people at a military recruitment site in Somalia's capital Mogadishu. The country's Ministry of Information said security forces are on the scene and that it launched an investigation into the attack Sunday morning. Calling all orange cat lovers, this one's for you. Unlike tigers or orangutans, the orange fur of cats is linked to their biological sex. And PR's Emily Kwong has more on a scientific breakthrough in feline genetics. After decades of searching, scientists have pinpointed the exact gene responsible for

calico tortoiseshell and orange cats like my orange tabby, Zuko. Scientists have long suspected that orange color was a sex-linked trait. Now, research teams in the United States and Japan have independently located and characterized the mutation responsible for the orange color. Study author Greg Barsh says the Stanford team partnered with cat lovers and community scientists to gather orange cat DNA samples. It's an example, I think, of how scientists and the public can work together to not only uncover cool things, but also learn important aspects

about biology. Both teams recently published their results in the journal Current Biology. Emily Kwong, NPR News. Portugal, Poland, and Romania are all holding presidential elections today. This is NPR News. Know that fizzy feeling you get when you read something really good, watch the movie everyone's today. This is NPR News.