NPR News Now - NPR News: 10-09-2025 1AM EDT

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

NPR News: 10-09-2025 1AM EDTLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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, I'm Shia. Stevens. Ten Democrats from Texas have signed a letter asking Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to withdraw the state's National Guard troops from Illinois. Houston Public Media's Alexandria Hart has the story. The 10 Democrats are calling on the governor to stop cooperating with the Trump administration

on the deployment of Texas's National Guard troops to Chicago or any other U.S. city. They say there's no legal justification for sending the troops to police other states. Congressman Al Green is among those signed. He says before Trump, the public wouldn't have been okay with using the National Guard like this. And now he's talking about using the actual military in our cities, which is in contravention of the Constitution. There's no insurrection going on that I'm aware of. All but two of Texas's Democratic members of Congress signed the letter. I'm Alexandra Hart in Houston. President Trump says Israel and Hamas both accepted the first phase of an agreement to end the war in Gaza. The U.S. plan calls for release of all hostages and Palestinian prisoners. It also calls for Israeli troops to

fall back to an agreed-upon-upon demarcation line. As NPR, Franco Ordonez reports, Trump made the announcement on social media. This is something that he campaigned on, ending his conflict. In his inauguration speech, he talked about wanting to be remembered as a peacemaker. There is still a lot of uncertainty here. You know, this is a conflict that's been going on for generations. Talks have been going on for months. there have been numerous failed ceasefires, and really so many foreign policy experts I speak with argue that Trump has a tendency to announce peace deals before peace actually happens. NPR's Franco Ordone is reporting. The Trump administration appears to be expanding its military campaign against suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

While the administration says Venezuelan vessels are being targeted, Colombia's leaders says a boat carrying his nation's citizens have been attacked. More from John Otis. U.S. officials say American airstrikes in the Caribbean have destroyed four drug smuggling boats from Venezuela and killed 21 people. The legality of these military attacks remains unclear, and now Colombia has been drawn into the conflict. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on social media that the U.S. destroyed a boat carrying Colombian citizens, and that a, quote, new war scenario had opened up in the U. the Caribbean. The White House called Petro's statement baseless and reprehensible. It's another blow to

relations between the two nations, which were once close allies. Last month, the U.S. revoked Petro's visa after he called on U.S. troops to disobey the orders of President Trump. For NPR news, I'm John Otis. U.S. futures are virtually unchanged in after-hours trading on Wall Street. This is NPR. French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to name a new prime minister, the country's fifth, in the past year. The announcement makes it unlikely that Macron will call snap elections. Sebastian LeCornu resigned as Premier on Monday after being in the job only a few weeks. Macron dissolved Parliament in June of last year after the far-right National Rally Party won nearly a third of the seats.

The last of ten escapees from a New Orleans jail has been apprehended. convicted murderer Derek Groves was arrested after a SWAT team found him hiding in a crawl space under her home in Atlanta. He and nine other inmates to escape through a hole behind a jailhouse toilet in May. The MacArthur Foundation has announced 22 winners of this year's Genius Grants. Those receiving $800,000 each include artists and scientists. As NPR's Nell Greenfield Boyce reports, one of the winners has been dubbed the Black Hole Destroyer. Kareem Elbadri is an astrophysicist at Caltech. put out by the MacArthur Foundation, he explains that he focuses on binary star systems.

Half of all stars in the universe are not single like the sun is, but they're orbiting another star. These orbiting companions interact and can affect each other's evolution, leading to radically different outcomes than you'd have for a single star. As part of his work, he's found that several purported black holes were not, in fact, black holes at all, but stars that had been stripped of an outer layer and appeared abnormally bright. Nell Greenfield's voice, NPR News. The MacArthur Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR. On Asia-Pacific market, shares are mixed at this hour. This is NPR News. Across the country, states and counties are rushing to change their voting rules. Stacey Abrams says these attacks on voting rights are part of the authoritarian playbook. You may not be into politics,

but politics is into you and it is a stalker. Listen to Code Switch in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.