NPR News Now - NPR News: 09-10-2025 11PM EDT

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

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Support for NPR and the following message come from the estate of Joan B. Kroc, whose bequest serves as an enduring investment in the future of public radio and seeks to help NPR produce programming that meets the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Shea Stevens. A manhunt continues for the assassin who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University today. President Trump is blaming the slaying on political rhetoric from the left. And P.R. Tamara Keith has more.

In the video shot in the Oval Office, President Trump praised Kirk for his conservative activism and commitment to open debate. Trump said what happened to Kirk is a direct consequence of people demonizing those they disagree with in hateful and despicable ways and then turned his ire to the political left. Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died. There have been recent cases of right-wing political violence as well, but Trump didn't mention those. Tamara Keith, NPR News. President Trump's takeover of Washington, D.C. police expired today, but the National Guard and some federal agents, remain in the city. As NPR's Luke Garrett reports, the White House says the law enforcement surge

netted more than 3,300 arrests, many involving immigration. Since August 7th, federal authorities from the FBI, U.S. Marshal Service, and others have arrested 2,310 people, seized 225 guns, and cleared 50 homeless encampments. That's according to a White House official, not authorized to share the data publicly. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser questions whether all these arrests were made in D.C. I would say when I heard them, it seemed like it would have had to be greater than the district proper. That's kind of my first gut reaction. Despite multiple requests, the White House has not provided specific case numbers, charges, or names for those arrested. Luke Garrett, NPR News, Washington.

The Trump administration says a revamped citizenship verification tool has checked over 33 million registered voters. NPR's Jude Jophe Loth, Block. reports that there are still some unanswered questions about the tools' accuracy and data security. SAVE is a federal data system that has long been used to verify immigration status. In recent months, U.S. citizenship and immigration services rapidly made several changes, including linking Save to Social Security Administration data. Now the agency says SAVE can verify the citizenship of most U.S.-born citizens, too. Some Republican-led states are running their voter rolls through SAVE, amounting to almost a sixth of all registered voters so far.

But some election officials from both parties are hesitating or refusing to use the tool, citing outstanding questions, including how the federal government can use the voter data that states upload. Jude Jaffe Block, NPR News. U.S. futures are flat in after-hours trading. This is NPR. FBI Director Cash Patel is being sued by three former employees, alleging they were fired on orders from the White House. The lawsuit seeks reinstatement back pay

and a ruling that the firings were illegal. One plaintiff, Brian Driscoll, alleges Patel, told him that his job stability depended on firing people involved in the prosecution of President Trump. Driscoll is a former commander of the FBI's hostage rescue team. He briefly served as acting FBI director when Christopher Ray resigned in January. Scientists are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their

ability to detect shock waves from colliding black holes. As NPR's Nell Greenfield-Bois reports, the discovery has allowed researchers to probe some of the most extreme events in the universe. It was September 14, 2015, when two massive detectors, one in Washington State and one in Louisiana, caught the distinctive signal of so-called gravitational waves. Predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century earlier, these waves moved through space after being created by categorical. clismic events. In this case, two colliding black holes. Since then, scientists have improved their detectors dramatically. And now in the journal Physical Review letters, researchers describe the clearest signal yet. It let them essentially watch two black holes growing as

they merged into one, allowing them to verify a key theory about the growth of black holes that was put forth by physicist Stephen Hawking in 1971. Nell Greenfield-Boise and PR News. On Asia-Pacific market shares are mixed. and down 1% in Hong Kong. This is NPR 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.