NPR News Now - NPR News: 10-07-2025 10AM EDT

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

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In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Live from NPR News in Washington, on Corvac Coleman. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Lawmakers are asking her about controversy and turmoil at the Justice Department. Bondi and her top aides have fired several career prosecutors who worked on the Capitol riot cases or investigated President Trump.

Bondi defended her record since taking office. We are returning to our core mission of fighting real crime. While there is more work to do, I believe in eight short months, we have made tremendous progress. towards those ends. But Bondi is also accused of using her agency for political purposes. Her testimony comes less than two weeks after the Justice Department got an indictment against former FBI director James Comey. President Trump has been demanding that Bondi take legal action against Comey.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments today in a case about conversion therapy. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports the case could invalidate laws in half of U.S. states. Inversion therapy, promoted by some conservative Christian groups, is banned for minors by half the states and staunchly opposed as harmful for minors by every major medical association. But today, lawyers for a Colorado therapist will tell the justices that because she uses only talk therapy, banning the practice violates the Constitution's free speech guarantee. Last term, the High Court upheld state laws that ban the use of hormones and other measures to help minors change their sex.

Today, the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak, with a different group of states contending that they ban conversion therapy because it doesn't work and has proven harmful to minors. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. This is the seventh day of the federal government shutdown. It's affecting air traffic controllers who were not getting paid. There were no controllers at the Burbank Airport near Los Angeles last night, although the airport said it was still open.

staffing shortages were also reported in Denver and Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey. Stocks open mixed this morning as President Trump prepares to host his Canadian counterpart, NPR's Scott Horsley reports the Dow dropped about 20 points in early trading. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will visit Trump today at the White House for the second time, hoping to smooth some of the trade tensions that have been sparked by the president's tariffs. Canada is one of the United States' top trading partners. Trump announced the U.S. is buying a stake in Canada's trilogy metals mining company. It's one of the businesses that stands to benefit from the administration's opening of new copper mining territory in Alaska.

Stock in trilogy metals more than tripled on the news. And two mid-sized banks are merging in a deal that would create the nation's ninth biggest bank. Fifth Third Bank Corp is buying Comerica for $10.9 billion. Scott Horsley, MPR News, Washington. On Wall Street, the Dow is now down about nine points. This is NPR. Today is the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel. Nearly 1,200 people were killed by militants and 251 people were abducted.

Following the attack, Israel began to attack Gaza. In the past two years, about 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in attacks by the Israeli military. New research from the Artificial Intelligence Company, Anthropic, finds that college and university professors worldwide use AI to help them in the classroom. Lee Gaines reports. Anthropic used an automated tool to analyze 74,000 conversations professors had with its AI chatbot Claude. The findings show they used it for things like lesson planning and administrative tasks, and some of the conversations were about grading student work. Mark Watkins at the University of Mississippi studies the impact of AI on higher education. And this sort of nightmare scenario that we might be

running into his students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that's the case, then what's the purpose of education? Anthropic also surveyed professors who said grading was the task that AI was least effective at. For NPR news, I'm Lee Gaines. The governing body of men's professional tennis says it'll look at how significant heat affects players. Several competitors dropped out of a men's tennis tournament in Shanghai, China. The near 90 degree heat and 80% humidity have been overwhelming. Players have gotten sick on the court.

Separately, women star Emma Raducanu got sick at a tennis tournament in Wuhan, China, and she withdrew. This is NPR.