NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-14-2024 8AM EST

Episode Date: December 14, 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 in Washington, I'm Giles Snyder. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Jordan, huddling with Arab foreign ministers and the UN envoy on Syria.

NPR's Michelle Kellerman reports that the US wants to see a secular state emerge following the dramatic fall of Bashar al-Assad. Secretary Blinken met with the UN special envoy to compare notes on Syria. To, again, think through how we can support the Syrian people in this time of both opportunity but also a real challenge. U.N. envoy Gare Pedersen says it's critical to have an inclusive political process that

brings together all communities in Syria. He also wants to make sure that state institutions don't collapse, leading to chaos and infighting. The U.S. has carried out strikes to keep ISIS from reemerging in Syria. Israel has taken up positions in a buffer zone near the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, drawing criticism from Arab states and the U.N. Michelle Kellerman, NPR News, Tel Aviv. An American citizen who was among thousands of prisoners freed from Syrian jails has been handed over to U.S. forces.

29-year-old Travis Timmerman was held for seven months in a Damascus prison after being arrested for illegally entering the country. A New York state doctor is being sued for mailing abortion pills to a woman in Colling County, Texas. The physician named in the suit, Dr. Margaret Carpenter, is a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which aims to bring abortion care to all 50 states, Sarah Boden reports.

Texas has a near total ban on abortion, but Carpenter practices in New York, where abortion is not only legal, but also that state has what's called a shield law. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, a number of progressive states passed shield laws in order to protect clinicians like Carpenter from prosecution from other states that contributed to the expansion of abortion access via telehealth. And this Texas lawsuit may be the first to put the strength of shield laws to the test. For NPR News, I'm Sarah Bowden. State and local officials are demanding answers to the mysterious drone sightings in the northeastern U.S. There have been sightings from Maryland to Connecticut, many of them in New Jersey.

Some officials are calling for them to be shot down if they can't be identified. Matthew Morello is the mayor of New Jersey's Washington township. Until the federal government tells the state government to take action, they can do nothing but watch them. And I'm sorry, but that's just disconcerting to those of us that are living out here. And we're just watching these things up in the sky and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. The drone sightings have led to a lot of speculation, but the FBI and the Department of Homeland

Security say they have no evidence that the sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign origin. And you're listening to NPR News. South Korean President Yoon Seok-yool is describing today's successful impeachment vote in parliament as a temporary pause of his presidency and in a statement he said he will never give up. Yoon survived an impeachment vote last weekend, but parliament voted again today over his attempt to impose martial law.

Yoon's powers have been suspended. South Korea's Constitutional Court will now decide whether to remove Yoon from office. A federal appeals court has left in place a mid-January deadline requiring the popular short video app TikTok to be sold or face a ban in the United States. The court in Washington, D.C. rejected the request to halt enforcement of the deadline until the Supreme Court reviews the company's challenge of the law. The popularity of obesity drugs is on the rise. A new report from ZocDoc, the online platform for booking, shows patients are asking their doctors about them

more and more. Here's NPR's Sydney Loughkan reporting. ZocDoc, an online scheduling platform, says a lot more patients are booking consultation appointments with their doctors to ask about semaglutide. That's the active ingredient in blockbuster obesity drug Wigovie and type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic. ZocDoc says there were 53% more of these appointments in 2024 than in 2023. The company's data showed some insights. For instance, ZocDoc says the day Oprah did a special about Ozempic, it saw a bump in appointments. More weight loss consultations were also virtual, compared with most other ZocDoc appointments, which in person. The report has its limitations, however. ZocDoc doesn't show whether patients were able to get and fill their prescriptions for these

drugs. Sydney Lepkin, NPR News.