NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-12-2024 4PM EST

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. The U.S. is working to bring home two Americans from Syria. One is American journalist Austin Tice, who has not been seen since 2012. His whereabouts are still unknown. The other is a self-described Christian Pilgrim who says his name is Travis Timmerman. Local residents in Syria say Timmerman was found wandering barefoot in a suburb of the capital, Damascus. The American says he'd been detained for several months.

Timmerman turned up days after the Assad authoritarian regime was toppled. The White House says there is currently no evidence that reported drone sightings in New Jersey pose a threat to national security or public safety. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says there's also no evidence of a foreign nexus. While there is no known malicious activity occurring, the reported sightings there do however highlight a gap in authorities. And so we urge Congress to pass important legislation that will extend and expand existing counter drone authorities. President Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in Israel today to talk

about Syria, Lebanon and the war in Gaza. And he thinks Israel and Hamas are close to a ceasefire and hostage deal. Here's NPR's Michelle Kellerman. Among the hostages still being held by Hamas are seven Americans, three of whom are presumed to be alive. That's according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who says he's trying to close a hostage deal this month. We've been close before and haven't gotten there so I can't make any promises or predictions to you but I

wouldn't be here today if I thought this thing was just waiting till after January 20th. Sullivan says he's been coordinating with the incoming team for President-elect Trump and traveling next to Egypt and Qatar, the countries that have been talking to Hamas. Michelle Kelliman, NPR News, Tel Aviv. With the incoming Trump administration poised to impose mass deportations, New York City's Democratic Mayor Eric Adams sat down this afternoon with the president-elect's choice for border czar Tom Homan.

Mayor Adams said he wanted to talk about working with Homan to address security and the deportation of violent criminals. At a news conference afterward, Adams also raised concerns about protecting law-abiding immigrants and many undocumented children, who he says are victims of crime. We can't find them. We don't know if they're doing child labor. We don't know if they're doing sex crimes. We don't know if they're being exploited. 500,000 children. There's a level of hypocrisy that everyone that states they want to protect everyone but innocent individuals who are victims of crimes and children. Critics accuse Mayor Adams of capitulating to political pressure at the expense of stronger protections for migrants in the U.S. U.S. stocks have ended the day

lower. The Dow closed down 234 points or half a percent to end the day at 43,914. The S&P was down 32. The NASDAQ was down 132 points. It's NPR News. The Department of Justice says a hospital in a small Northern California town agreed to pay the federal government and the state more than $10 million to resolve false claims allegations. The DOJ accuses Oroville Hospital of wrongfully seeking Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for ineligible medical services. The false claims allegedly include medically unnecessary inpatient admissions, the use

of erroneous diagnosis codes, and a kickback and physician self-referral scheme. Most people living outside of Africa today have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA due to early modern humans and Neanderthals interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago. Reporter Ari Daniels says new research has refined the timing of that event. Ancient specimens tend to be in rough shape. So Arav Sumer, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute, was fortunate to analyze the genomes of a set of well-preserved early human remains from Europe. She and her colleagues determined how many generations

had passed since Neanderthals and the predecessors of these individuals interbred. We estimate now between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago for multiple generations, possibly over hundreds or thousands of years. Meaning that our ancestors ultimately fanned out across the world on the more recent side of what researchers have believed, adding a little more clarity to the complex story of human origins. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel. It's NPR.