NPR News Now - NPR News: 10-10-2025 11AM EDT

Episode Date: October 10, 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 Khorva Coleman. Israel says a ceasefire with Hamas has now taken effect.

Israel says it has pulled back its troops to areas within Gaza specified by the agreement. Now, Hamas is to free all remaining hostages. The deal was proposed by President Trump. Hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin was involved in back-channel discussions. He says he told Hamas negotiators they needed to get Trump's approval. You have to imagine that you're sitting in a room across the table from Donald Trump, not from Netanyahu. The person you need to convince this Trump, Trump will impose the deal on Israel, when the time is right, when he believes that you are serious about ending this war,

returning the hostages, now longer controlling Gaza. At the end of the day, that's in fact what happened. He spoke to NPR's morning edition. Today is day 10 of the federal government shutdown. Federal workers will go without pay, and that includes members of the U.S. military, the National Guard, and Defense Department employees. They'll miss their first paycheck next Wednesday.

NPR's Amy held reports that now more military members need help to feed their families. Even when they're getting paid, more than a quarter of active duty military families require food assistance. According to the Armed Services, YMCA, they operate food distribution sites

across nine states. One in Killeen, Texas last week, saw a 34% increase in demand. The shutdown has made an already tenuous situation worse. Heather Campbell is a military spouse who lost her own job at a military-based food bank.

She tells ABC News, military families are often single-ins. income with little financial cushion. All of those things together create a really, really scary picture for the nutrition of our military families and their readiness to show up and do the jobs they're asked to do. The Armed Services YMCA is adding more food distribution sites through the shutdown. Amy held NPR News. A federal grand jury has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on bank fraud charges.

James condemned the allegations as the, quote, desperate weaponization of the justice system. NPR's Ryan Lucas reports, President Trump. Trump pressured the Justice Department to prosecute James and other critics. New York Attorney General, Leticia James, has been charged with one count of bank fraud and one count of false statements to a financial institution. The indictment was handed up by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, secured by the same interim U.S. attorney there, who last month brought charges against another prominent Trump critic, former FBI director James Comey. As the Attorney General for New York State, James sued Trump and his company for inflating the value of some of its assets. James won that civil fraud case in a more than $450 million judgment, although an appeals court later tossed the financial penalty. Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington.

President Trump is expected to leave shortly for Walter Reed Military Medical Center. He'll get his second physical this year. The White House says it is routine. Trump says that he feels fine. This is NPR. This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Venezuelan opposition activist Maria Corina Machado. The Nobel Committee says Machado has been tireless in promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela against dictatorship. A U.S. Federal Appeals Court is weighing whether President Trump can deploy National Guard troops on the streets of Portland, Oregon.

This comes as a different federal court judge blocked Trump from deploying National Guard troops in the Chicago area. The governors of Illinois and Oregon don't want them, but the troops are in Memphis, Tennessee. Tennessee's Republican governor has welcomed them, and National Guard troops deployed to Washington, D.C., are still there. Scientists are hoping to treat diseases, including Alzheimer's, by influencing the way cells decide when to die. NPR's John Hamilton has more on efforts to control the process known as programmed cell death. In Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases, nerve cells decide to self-destruct long before they should. So, biotech companies are looking for ways to keep these cells alive by blocking signals that start the fatal process. Doug Green of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital says several firms think they can do this with treatments known as anti-sense drugs.

If they're right, it's going to cure a lot of diseases, diseases that we associate with aging and inflammation. Antisense drugs can keep a cell from making surgery. certain proteins. In this case, the drugs are designed to reduce proteins that carry the signals responsible for programmed cell death. John Hamilton, NPR News. And I'm Corva Coleman, NPR News from Washington.