NPR News Now - NPR News: 10-28-2025 1PM EDT

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. Millions of people in Jamaica are bracing for Hurricane Melissa to make landfall. The National Hurricane Center said in its noon alert that the eye of the Cat 5 storm was approaching the island's southwestern coast. Covering the storm's impact from Mexico City, NPR's Aida Peralta reports on the life-threatening destructive magnitude of this 185-mile-per-hour hurricane. I think the headline here is that this is a monster storm. It's not an overstatement. Hurricane Hunter plane just measured its central pressure at 892 milibars. And the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm,

and just six other Atlantic storms have had a pressure under 900 millibars. So what's clear is that Hurricane Melissa will go down in history. NPR's Ada Peralta reporting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the military to carry out immediate powerful strikes on Gaza, a move that threatens to undermine the two-week-old ceasefire that President Trump brokered between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The announcement came after Netanyahu met with senior security ministers to discuss a response to what Israel called an attempt by Hamas to stage the return of the partial remains of a hostage

whose body the militants were supposed to return under the terms of the ceasefire. Israel had already located most of the remains earlier in the war. Israel released drone footage that it said showed Hamas operatives burying a bag with remains in the ground so that the International Committee of the Red Cross could, quote, find them. Netanyahu called the move a clear violation of the U.S. negotiated ceasefire. Amazon says it's laying off 14,000 corporate workers in a big wave. of cost cutting. NPR's Alina Seljuk reports the company is trying to slim down while it spends big on the AI race. Amazon says it's cutting about 4% of its corporate workforce. A note to

employees cites a goal of, quote, reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets. The company has faced intense pressure from investors to tighten its finances, in part that's because it overhired during the coronavirus pandemic, and in part because it's so far delivered disappointing growth of its AI business in the race against Microsoft and other rivals. And note that Amazon is among NPR's recent financial supporters. CEO, Andy Jassy, in June, wrote to employees that generative AI would mean fewer corporate workers in the next few years. The company will deliver its latest financial report on Thursday. Alina Seluk, NPR News.

U.S. stocks are trading higher this hour with the Dow up 373 points or roughly three quarters of a percent. This is NPR news. President Trump has met with Japan's new Prime Minister Sana A Takaichi. NPR's Anthony Kuhn with more. Prime Minister Takaichi played up her role as protege of the late ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and entertained and flattered Trump much as Abe did during Trump's first term. She gifted him one of Abe's golf putters, served him American beef and rice, and said she'd nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The two governments issued a list of prospective investments. that could be part of the $550 billion in investments, Japan promised, in exchange for lower U.S. tariffs. President Trump's next and last leg of his journey will take him to South Korea for a regional economic summit and expected bilateral meetings with the leaders of China and South Korea. Anthony Kuhn in PR News, Seoul. In 1812, hundreds of thousands of men in Napoleon's army perish during their retreat from Russia. Unexpected pathogens may have helped hasten the soldier's demise. Ari Daniel with more. A new study examined the ancient DNA found in the teeth of 13 of Napoleon's soldiers

exhumed from a mass grave in Lithuania. Researchers found that two bacteria, one that causes paratiphoid fever and the other relapsing fever, had likely helped kill the men. These results, along with earlier work, reveal the soldiers were under microbial assault on all fronts. Michaela Binder is a bioarchologist who wasn't involved in the study. These wars were anything but glamorous. For some of them, the death in battle would have been a relief. A relief, she says, from bodies riddled with disease.

For NPR news, I'm Ari Daniel. It's NPR.