NPR News Now - NPR News: 11-03-2025 3PM EST

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. The Trump administration says this month it's paying out about half of the federal food assistance people would normally get through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This, after two, federal courts said the Agriculture Department had to release the funds to people who face food insecurity. Snap serves about 42 million people, roughly 12 percent of the U.S. population. The government shutdown is closing in on the record. for the longest in U.S. history. And as NPR's Tamara Keith tells us, President Trump has spent nearly half that time outside of Washington, D.C. Since the shutdown began October 1st, President Trump has been out of town for 15 days. That includes two foreign trips and two trips to his

Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. There, this past Friday, he hosted an extravagant Great Gatsby-themed costume party. On Air Force One, Trump said he doesn't need to negotiate and it's up to Democrats to end the shutdown by backing down. All they have to do is vote to open the country, and we only need five Democrats. Past presidents, including Trump himself, have canceled international trips during shutdowns, to stay in Washington to negotiate, or at least look like they're trying to end it. Tamara Keith, NPR News. Works not getting done.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are furloughed or working without pay. Then there are the contractors. NPR Scott Horsley takes a closer look at a segment. that the Chamber of Commerce finds is at risk of losing around $3 billion a week. A lot of government contracting has been halted, and unlike federal employees, contractors are not guaranteed to be made whole once the shutdown ends. Bernard Yaros, with the global advisory firm Oxford Economics, estimates that every workday the shutdown goes on,

some $800 million worth of contracts, are not being awarded. Now, again, a lot of that work is merely postponed, not scrapped. But Yaros says about half those contracts would typically go, to small businesses and they may be getting impatient. NPR Scott Horsley. The Red Cross says it's facilitated another exchange of bodies across the Israel-Gaza border. NPR's Lauren Fair reports. In the latest exchange, Israel returned to Gaza the bodies of 45 Palestinians, a day after Hamas handed over those of three Israeli soldiers. The Israeli Prime Minister's office says all three were killed on October 7, 2003, then carried into Gaza. In a statement,

the mother of soldier Omar Nutra, a dual U.S. Israeli citizen, said the return of his body marks the end of her family's long night. Gaza's health ministry says only about a third of the Palestinian bodies returned in this ceasefire have been identified because of a lack of DNA kits. So the ministry has been posting photos of human remains online so that families might identify them. Lauren Freyer, NPR News Romola in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. This is NPR News. A global hunger research group is confirming famine conditions in Darfur, Sudan for the second time in just over a year. Internal fighting has intensified and life-saving supplies are being blocked from reaching tens of thousands of people.

The integrated food security phase classification says famine conditions are marked by collapse in livelihoods, starvation, an extremely high. malnutrition. In the U.S., we are coming off a weekend of rolling clocks back an hour and recovering from a series of Halloween festivities. The weekend was carried for Hollywood Studios. And P.R. at Ulippi reports was the worst at the box office for 2025. To be fair, there was a lot going on. To be fair, there was lots going on. College sports, trick-or-treating, and Major League Baseball, and no new major film releases. Black Phone 2, and the romance, regretting you, topped a terrible box office that pulled in only around $50 million.

That's not only the worst weekend of the year. It ended the worst October since 1997, not counting the year of the pandemic. Audiences avoided films like The Smashing Machine, the Neutron movie, and the Bruce Springsteen biopic. It's hard to factor in K-pop Demon Hunters because Netflix, which released it, does not report its numbers. New iterations of Wicked, Zootopia and Avatar come out just in time for the holidays. Netta Ulibe, NPR News.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 200 points. This is NPR News.