NPR News Now - NPR News: 10-08-2025 1PM EDT

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

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The federal government has shut down. What are lawmakers arguing about? And what does it mean for you? The NPR Politics Podcast is here to make sense of it all, giving you updates and news every day to keep you informed. The NPR Politics Podcast. Listen every day. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Janine Hurst. Former FBI director James Comey has pleaded not guilty to two criminal charges in a Virginia courtroom today. He was charged last month with lying to Congress, five years ago, after President Trump demanded federal prosecutors speed up their investigation into one of his most prominent critics. And Pierce Carey Johnson was in the courtroom and has more. President Trump had publicly urged the Justice Department to bring up. Comey requested a jury trial and the judge scheduled it for January 5th. In California, authorities arrested 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderneck for allegedly starting what became the devastating Pacific Palisades fire in January that left 12 people dead, more than 23,000

acres burned, and thousands of structures destroyed. Officials say he started an earlier fire that wasn't suppressed, and that became the Palisades fire. He was arrested near his home in Florida and will have an appearance in a courtroom in Orlando this afternoon. Kenny Cooper is ATF Los Angeles Special Agent in charge. He says the investigation continues. Although we cannot share every detail of this investigation. It is a still is, it's still an active investigation, and judicial proceedings remain ahead. There's no word on a motive. Air traffic control staffing issues delayed flights across the U.S. for a second straight day yesterday. And here's Joel Rose reports the head of the control union says pressure is mounting as the government shutdown enters its second week.

The Federal Aviation Administration says staffing shortages have caused delays at a growing list. of airports, including Nashville, Chicago O'Hare, Newark, Houston, and Dallas. Nearly 11,000 certified air traffic controllers are required to work during the government shutdown, but don't get paid until it ends. The head of the union that represents those controllers, Nick Daniels, told NPR's morning edition that the shutdown is making a difficult situation worse. The longer that this lasts, it's going to place a continued strain on air traffic controllers, the stress, the pressure. Daniels says the U.S. was already thousands of air traffic controllers short before the government shutdown. Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington.

Top officials from the U.S., Qatar, and Israel. And talking right now, joining a third day of talks between Israel and Hamas and Egypt. Negotiators are tackling the toughest part of a U.S. peace plan to end the war in Gaza. Hamas wants guarantees from President Trump that Israel won't resume its military campaign after Hamas releases the rest of the hostages. Meanwhile, the Israeli military has intercepted a nine-boat flotilla in the Mediterranean Sea detaining activists who are trying to break Israel's blockade on Gaza and deliver much-needed humanitarian aid. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. 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 has more. Anthropic used an automated tool to analyze 74,000 conversations professors had with its AI chatbot clod. 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 the sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is 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 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three scientists, Richard Robson, Omar Yagi, and Susuma Kittagawa, for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them. The new materials can store energy, harvest water from desert air, and scrub toxins from water. All three of the scientists will share the $1.1 million prize.

The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced tomorrow, and the Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. All Streets trading higher at this hour, the Dow is up 138 points, the NASDAQ up 187. I'm Janine Herbst, NPR News, in Washington. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times.

So listen to the Fresh Air Podcasts from NPR and WHYY.