NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-14-2024 7PM EST

Episode Date: December 15, 2024

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Janene Herbst. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, will pay $15 million and post an apology to settle a defamation suit filed by President-elect Donald Trump. Earlier this year, George Stephanopoulos repeatedly asserted that Trump had been found liable for rape. In Piers David Folk and Flick reports, a civil jury instead found Trump liable for sexual abuse. Back in March, Stephanopoulos was pushing his guest, a U.S. representative who was herself raped as a young woman, on why she would support Trump. He incorrectly referred to a court verdict from last year, in which a jury found that

Trump was liable for sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, but not rape. The judge in that case said what transpired as determined by the jury fit the commonly understood definition of rape, but not the narrow one under New York state law. ABC will pay the $15 million to a foundation for Trump that's typically used to fund a presidential library and a million dollars for Trump's legal costs. Both Trump and Stephanopoulos were to be questioned under oath for Trump's defamation suit in coming days. David Folkenflich, NPR News.

The U.S. says Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. has been in direct contact with members of the rebel group HTS today, which led the effort to oust the Assad regime. The U.S. once considered that group a terrorist organization, but Blinken says the U.S. is ready to work with them. And he says he signed off on a set of principles to guide Syria toward a peaceful, nonsectarian country. Meanwhile, rebel fighters in Syria have been uncovering huge stockpiles of the illegal amphetamine Captagon in various warehouses across the Syrian capital.

President Bashar al-Assad's family and associates profited from the manufacturing and trade of Capitagon, turning Syria into one of the world's biggest narco states. Impirz Hadil al-Sholchi visited one of these drug warehouses. I'm standing in what was probably the living room of this fancy luxury villa overlooking the Damascus countryside. But the smell in here is so strong. It smells of chemicals stacked behind me to the ceiling are these drums of chemicals that were used for the Captagon and there's also these stacks that look like flower bags but again they have the chemicals that are used to make Captagon. There are all these heavy

duty machinery also used to make the drug in a very incongruous setting with these chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. And the end product was Captagon, these tiny pills that propped up the Syrian economy under Bashar al-Assad. Imperial Sandil Al-Shalchi reporting from Damascus. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is recovering from hip replacement surgery at a U.S. military hospital in Germany after she fell during a bipartisan congressional trip to Luxembourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge in World War

II. Her office as the 84 year old continues to work but won't attend the rest of the events. This is NPR. Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company has agreed to pay 650 million million to settle a federal probe of its role in helping to aggressively spur sales of the highly addictive opioid painkiller Oxycontin for Purdue Pharma. McKinsey told NPR in a statement that it's deeply sorry for past client service to Purdue and for the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to work for Purdue. This comes on top of the nearly $900 million McKinsey agreed to pay in opioid settlements

with state and local governments. As part of the deal, McKinsey has agreed to refrain from any work in the future involving controlled substances, including opioids, and to face closer federal oversight. Some San Francisco residents woke up to a notification from the National Weather Service today warning of a possible tornado amidst a windy and rainy storm in the Bay Area. Lakshmi Sara from member station KQED has more. The warning is now over, but the National Weather Service says it's the first time non-coastal parts of San Francisco have ever been under a tornado warning. Radar showed a thunderstorm capable of

producing a tornado with winds of 45 miles per hour. Dalton Beringer is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Most of the issues that we're going to deal with with tornadoes are going to be landfalling water spouts. So in this case it kind of looked like that was the case with the storm. That's why we issued the tornado warning. Barringer said San Francisco Airport measured an 83 mile per hour wind gust early Saturday morning. For NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Sinha.

And I'm Janine Herbst, NPR News in Washington.