NPR News Now - NPR News: 11-23-2024 12AM EST

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

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Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Live from NPR News, I'm Dale Willman. President Trump has tapped former Texas State Representative Scott Turner as his choice to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. MPR's Jennifer Ludden reports that Turner worked on economic development in Trump's first term.

Turner spent nine years in the NFL before entering politics. In 2019, Trump appointed him to lead a council tasked with turning around distressed communities. That included steering billions in private investment to so-called opportunity zones, places struggling with high unemployment and run-down housing. The effort won bipartisan praise, though critics suggested the wealthy investors getting tax breaks saw more benefit than local residents. In his first term, Trump targeted the housing agency HUD for deep budget cuts. Congress pushed back, but the conservative agenda, Project 2025,

again calls for limiting housing aid and shrinking HUD's role. Jennifer Lutton, NPR News. NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta has made an unannounced visit to Mar-a-Lago for talks with President-elect Trump. As Terry Schultz reports, the trip was revealed by Dutch journalists because of Ruta's use of a government plane from his home country of the Netherlands. Most of a NATO Secretary General's appointments are announced publicly, but not this one, even after Dutch media picked up aviation journalist Menno Svart's tweets revealing the trip.

Svart says his first clue was that Ruta didn't show up to an event in the Netherlands, sending his deputy instead. Then a tracking bot Svart manages alerted him that the Dutch government plane was flying to Florida. I had contact with the minister, the department in Holland that has the government plane, and they confirmed that Rutte was on the plane. Rutte is frequently called a Trump whisperer because of his ability to get along with the president-elect.

For NPR News, I'm Terri Schulz in Brussels. NATO and Ukraine are holding emergency talks next week after Russia escalated the fighting in Ukraine by using a hypersonic ballistic missile this week to hit a Ukraine city. Hypersonic missiles travel at five times the speed of sound. Ukraine's parliament canceled a meeting Friday because of the attack. Russia's president says the missile use is in retaliation for Kyiv's use of U.S. and British missiles to attack inside Russia. Hundreds of workers at North Carolina's Charlotte Douglas International Airport could undertake a 24-hour strike next week during the high point of Thanksgiving travel. Dorothy Griffin is one of the workers who clean and sanitize planes

and provide wheelchair escorts. She says workers are fed up with poor working conditions and low pay, so she's voting yes for the walkouts. We're not treated fairly, we're not paid fairly, we're not respected in our jobs of what we do, and we just want higher, you know, more wages and a little respect.

The airport is expecting to handle more than a million passengers over the Thanksgiving holiday. Stocks were up on Wall Street today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 426 points. The NASDAQ was up 31 points. This is NPR News. A federal court in Minnesota today convicted two Florida men in a human smuggling case

that resulted in a family from India freezing to death. Minnesota Public Radio's Matthew Holding Eagle III reports. Jurors took only about an hour to convict defendants Harshkumar Patel and Steve Shand on four counts of conspiracy and profiting from human smuggling. During the trial, prosecutors outlined how the two were part of a larger operation that flew people from Gujarat in India to Canada on student visas, then took them to the Manitoba border so they could walk into the U.S. through Minnesota. On the night of January 19, 2022, a family of four, including children aged 11 and 3, froze to death trying to make the walk in a snowstorm. After the verdict, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Andrew Lugar

described the defendant's actions leading to the deaths as a moral depravity. Sentencing is set for March. For NPR News, I'm Matthew Holden-Eagle III. Bitcoin hit a new high today, closing the week at more than $99,000. The cryptocurrency has been shattering records on almost a daily basis since the presidential election earlier this month. It's now up more than 40 percent over the past two weeks.

Cryptocurrencies and related investments have rallied because of the incoming Trump administration is expected to be crypto-friendly. A civil jury in Ireland has awarded more than $250,000 to a woman who says she was raped by mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor. The woman says the attack took place in a Dublin hotel after a night of heavy partying 2018 she says McGregor brutally raped and battered her McGregor testified that he and the woman had consensual sex and he will appeal the verdict I'm Dale Willman NPR news Know that fizzy feeling you get when you read something really good watch the movie Everyone's been talking about or catch the show that the internet can't get over. At the

Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, we chase that feeling four times a week. We'll serve you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, TV, music, and more. From low brow to high brow to the stuff in between, catch the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.