NPR News Now - NPR News: 08-07-2025 10PM EDT

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

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There's a lot of news happening. You want to understand it better, but let's be honest, you don't want it to be your entire life either. Well, that's sort of like our show, here and now anytime. Every weekday on our podcast, we talk to people all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show. Check out Here and Now Anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR.

Live from NPR News, I'm Janine Herbst. The White House says President Trump is. opened a meeting with Russian President Putin about a ceasefire in its war on Ukraine. But speaking from the Oval Office, Trump says he's not making a possible meeting contingent on Putin meeting with Ukrainian president Zelensky. They would like to meet with me and I'll do whatever I can to stop the killing. This after the White House pushed back on claims by Russia that a meeting between Trump and Putin had been agreed to with a location decided upon.

Putin's comments come on the eve of a White House deadline for Moscow to show progress. and ending its three-year-old war in Ukraine or suffer additional sanctions. Meanwhile, Zelensky said in a video statement tonight that Ukraine should be part of ceasefire talks, and he says Ukraine is confident the war can be ended with a lasting peace, thanking Trump for what he calls his openness to find a real solution. Senior FBI officials who had a role in investigating now President Donald Trump are being forced out. And Pierce Carey Johnson reports the reasons for the latest round of terminations are clear. The highest profile departure at the FBI is Brian Driscoll. He briefly led the Bureau as acting director

at a time when the White House demanded a list of investigators who worked on cases related to the Capitol riot. Driscoll ran a group that responded to critical incidents and had won several awards. He wrote colleagues he didn't know why he was being fired. Also on the way out is Stephen Jensen who led the Washington Field Office at the FBI. The Agents Association says the men carried out. their duties with integrity, and they followed the law. The Association says firing FBI investigators without due process makes the country less safe. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington. NPR has obtained police body cam footage from the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.

NPR's Tom Dreisbach reports the video shows a Department of Justice official urging the rioters to, quote, kill police. During the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Jared Wise went up to a police line and called the cops Nazis. You are the Nazi. You are going to stop him. You can't see it. As he watched officers being attacked, Wise yelled, kill him. Wise did not personally attack police, and he pleaded not guilty to charges that he aided and abetted an assault, that we admitted to yelling kill him. President Trump issued mass pardons for January 6 defendants and dismissed Wise. case. Now, the Department of Justice has hired Wise as a senior advisor. In a statement,

the department called him a valued member of their team. Tom Dreisbach and PR News. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac says the average rate on a 30-year note is down to its lowest level in four months at 6.63 percent, reflecting a sharp pullback and long-term bond yields, which lenders use as a benchmark for pricing home loans. This is NPR. New York City officials say they've identified three more. victims of the 9-11 terror attacks that happened nearly 24 years ago. And Pierce Brian Mann reports, scientists were able to confirm the names using new DNA analysis techniques.

City officials named two of the persons newly identified who died in 2001. Ryan Fitzgerald, a young trader in the Twin Towers that day, and Barbara Keating of Palm Springs, California, a 72-year-old passenger on one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center. Her son, Paul Keating, says years of work by forensic scientists, helped his family find closure. That is amazing. They're doing this for us. New York City's chief medical examiner says scientists have now identified remains from roughly 40% of those killed that day in Manhattan. Remains of another adult woman were also identified. Her name is being withheld at the request of family members.

Brian Mann, NPR News, New York. The EPA is terminating $7 billion in. funding for solar programs approved under the Biden administration. That includes projects for nearly 1 million low-income households. Environmental groups, state departments of energy and other advocates say they will sue to prevent the EPA from killing those grants. Solar is a renewable energy that's widely regarded as a way to introduce cleaner power onto the electric grid and lower energy bills for consumers. U.S. futures contracts are trading higher at this hour. All three major indices up about two-tenths of a percent. I'm Janine Herbst, NPR News in Washington.

I'm Rachel Martin, host of Wildcard from NPR. I've spent years interviewing all kinds of people, and I've realized there are ideas that we all think about, but don't talk about very much. So I made a shortcut, a deck of cards with questions that anyone can answer, questions that go deep into the experiences that shape us. Listen to the Wildcard podcast only from NPR. We are.