NPR News Now - NPR News: 08-28-2025 10PM EDT

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

NPR News: 08-28-2025 10PM EDTLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Snap Judgment. Their new series, A Tiny Plot, follows a group of homeless people in Oakland as they fight to create their own encampment run by their own rules. It's a bold experiment in freedom and community. Listen to Snap Judgment wherever you get your podcasts. Live from NPR News, I'm Janine Herbst. In Minnesota, police say the shooter who opened fire at a Catholic Church in Minneapolis yesterday as school, children and adults sat in the pews for the first. mass of the school year, fired 116 rounds and left writings describing hate for individuals and some groups. Two children died, including Hyper Myoski, and Jesse Merkel's son, 8-year-old

Fletcher. Fighting back tears, he says, he wants people to remember his son for who he was and not for being the victim of a mass shooting. Fletcher loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking, and any sport that he was allowed to play. other children and the family were not harmed in the shooting. Now, 18 other people were wounded in the shooting, 15 of them children, and peers Jason DeRose has more on their condition. At Children's Hospital here, officials say three children remain hospitalized, others were treated and discharged.

At another hospital, Hennepin Health Care, six shooting victims there are in satisfactory condition, two are in serious condition, and one child remains in critical condition. and hospital staff today praised law enforcement for acting quickly, and they praised students and teachers who protected each other when the shooting began just after morning mass started on Wednesday. And peers Jason DeRose reporting from Minneapolis. HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill will be named interim director of the CDC after the Trump administration fired director Susan Menares,

who's suing to keep her job. From member station WABE, Christopher Alston reports dozens of CDC employees staged a walkout today in support of the agency's top leadership, several of whom resigned after Manaras was fired. U.S.A. Members of the public joined current and former CDC employees to line the street outside the center's entrance. One of the officials who resigned, former chief medical officer, Deborah Howery, was met

with cheers and applause from the crowd. I just can't tell you what CDC means to all of us, the mission, the work, your commitment. Thank you. honored to have done this for you. Howie was joined by Daniel Jernigan and Dimitri Daskalakis, formerly directors of centers overseeing immunizations and infectious diseases. The three say they were escorted off the property earlier in the day. For NPR News, I'm Christopher Alston in Atlanta.

France, Germany and the UK are reimposing UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. That further isolates Tehran after its atomic sites were repeatedly bombed during a 12-day war with Israel. The process called a snapback by diplomats who negotiated it into Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers was designed to be veto-proof at the U.N. It would again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran, and penalize any development of its ballistic missiles program. This is NPR News.

A new study finds an interesting link between forest elephants and ebony trees. MPIRS Nate Roth reports, jet black ebony wood is commonly used for stringed instruments and furniture. Ebony trees are rare. They're wood expensive. The new study published in the journal Science Advances comes after nine years of fieldwork to better understand how the tree is spread in West African forests. Tom Smith, the conservation ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles,

says they worked with indigenous groups in Cameroon. And one day, they said, Did you know that ebony is often found an elephant dung in these seedling often sprout and elephant done. They found that by eating ebony fruit and depositing the seeds, the elephants are moving the tree through the forest. Illegal poaching for the ivory trade has greatly reduced elephant populations, though, the study found also reducing the number of new ebony trees.

Nate Roth, NPR News. Are you feeling lucky? Like nearly a billion dollars lucky? That's the jackpot for the power ball after no one won last night's drawing. Now, on Saturday, the jackpot. will be $950 million, the sixth largest prize in the game's history. The winner can take the money broken out annually over several years or in a lump sum of $428 million before taxes.

The tickets are sold in 45 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. But, of course, the odds are astronomical, one in 292,201,238. You're listening to NBR News. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and Cs apply.