NPR News Now - NPR News: 09-29-2025 9PM EDT

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

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For world-renowned cellist Joshua Roman, long COVID caused an identity crisis. That was probably the lowest point. No confidence in my ability to recover crisis of faith about what music meant. On the TED Radio Hour, how he found his way back to music and a new sense of self. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Rylan Barton. A federal judge has stopped. the Trump administration's plan to eliminate hundreds of jobs at the agency that oversees

Voice of America for the time being. The government-funded international broadcaster was founded to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II. The Trump administration has moved to cut 532 jobs from the agency, the vast majority of its remaining staff. The ruling preserves the jobs as the court decides on the underlying case. Vice President J.D. Vance says he thinks a government shutdown is coming and is blaming Democrats. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben reports. Health care is a main reason Democrats oppose Republicans' plan to fund the government. Vance had this to say. So if they want to talk about how to fix American health care policy, let's do it. The Speaker would love to do it. The Senate Majority Leader would love to do it. Let's work on it together.

Democrats want to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that run out at the end of the year and repeal Republicans' recent Medicaid cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimates those cuts could result in millions more being uninsured. Earlier this month, House Republicans passed a resolution to fund the government through November 21st. That measure failed in the Senate where Republicans hold a 53-seat majority. They need 60 votes to pass the legislation. Danielle Kurtzleben and PR News, the White House. Google-owned YouTube has agreed to pay $24 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump in 2021. As NPR's Bobby Allen reports, YouTube is one of several social media sites that banned Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

The settlement documents say most of the money Google is paying will go toward the construction of a Mara Lago-style ballroom in the White House. YouTube's payout follows similar settlements over Trump's suspensions from Instagram, Facebook, and X, formerly Twitter. Free speech experts question the suits, since First Amendment cases tend to involve government censoring speech, not private companies. The White House and Google declined to comment. It comes days after YouTube reinstated accounts suspended over spreading COVID and election

misinformation, including podcaster Dan Bongino, who is now the FBI's deputy director. Bobby Allen, NPR News. The Trump administration is ending the use of paper checks for various government programs today. NPR's Ashley Lopez reports that includes social security programs. This change affects a small percentage of social security recipients. But Nancy Altman, with an advocacy group called Social Security Work, says there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have trouble receiving their checks electronically. They don't have enough money to open a bank account.

They don't have enough money to pay the fees on a checking account. They may have mental issues or they may not have access to the Internet. There may be all sorts of reasons. Social Security officials have been encouraging these individuals to figure out a way to enroll in direct deposit or opt for a debit card service. Altman says she's concerned a government shutdown will make it harder for people to get help with that process. Ashley Lopez, NPR News. This is NPR in Washington. President Trump is levying a 100% tariff on movies made outside the United States.

Trump says the movie production, quote, has been stolen from Hollywood in the U.S. It's unclear how these tariffs would operate since movies and TV shows can be transmitted digitally without going through ports. It's also unclear what it would mean for U.S. movies filmed on foreign locations. Afghanistan's Taliban rulers appear to have cut off the country's main source for Internet. NPR's Dia Hadid reports this comes two weeks after the Taliban first suspended the internet, only to restore it later at much slower speeds. Monitoring groups like net block and proton VPN reported that Afghanistan is in the midst of a total internet blackout after multiple networks were disconnected through the day.

Taliban officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but during the earlier internet suspension, one spokesman said the move was to, quote, prevent evil. Among the many cohorts impacted by these cuts, hospitals, airlines, businesses, women and girls stand out because thousands were undertaking online education courses after the Taliban largely prevented them from attending school after grade six. Dear Hadid, NPR News, Nagpur. OpenAI has announced new parental controls for chat GPT in an attempt to make it safer for teens. The move comes after concerns about AI chatbot security. for young users, including cases where teenagers took their lives after using chat GPT. To activate the feature, parents have to send an email or text to their teens to link accounts.

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