NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-19-2025 1PM EST

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

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Live from NPR News, I'm Janine Herbst. President Trump is set to speak in Rocky Mount North Carolina tonight. He's working to overcome voters' gloomy views of the U.S. economy. From the North Carolina newsroom, Adam Wagner has more. Rocky Mount is the largest city in North Carolina's newly redrawn First Congressional District. There will be a five-way Republican primary there, with the party seeking to defeat two-term Democrat Don Davis. Even as the state's Republican-controlled legislature redrew the district to give the GOP an advantage. Jonathan Sutton owns a barbershop near the venue where Trump will speak. Sutton, a Democrat, says he's noticed a decidedly negative sentiment among friends and clients. Just dealing with people, people kind of just saying don't know what's going on, not sure of their feature. An NPR PBS Marist poll found that only 36% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy.

For NPR News, I'm Adam Wagner in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina. The investigation into the motive in the shooting at Brown University that left two people dead and several other injured continues. The suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Valenti, was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire last night. Authorities say he took his own life and they believe he acted alone. He's also suspected of shooting and killing an MIT professor in Massachusetts. Valenti was a former Brown student and a Portuguese national. There's relief in Ukraine after the EU approved loaning the country more than $100 billion over the next two years. And here's Joanna Kikissa's reports, the loan is backed by the EU's own budget instead of frozen Russian central bank assets.

EU leaders fail to agree on using these immobilized Russian assets as collateral for a loan to Ukraine, fearing legal retribution from the Kremlin. Though the loan backed by the EU budget could be more costly, leaders celebrated it as a win. So did Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who says it shows Russia that Kiev has strong support from its allies. The loan will cover two-thirds of Ukraine's financial and military needs over the next two years. Without the loan, Zelensky had warned that Ukraine would have to drastically cut its domestic drone production, leaving the country more vulnerable to Russian attacks.

Joanna Kikis and PR News Kyiv. Federal Transportation investigators are combing through the wreckage of a business jet that crashed yesterday in North Carolina, killing all seven people on board, including retired NASCAR driver Greg Biffel and his family. The C-550 burst into flames when it hit the ground. Authorities say it left Statesville Regional Airport, but 45 miles from Charlotte, but crashed when it was trying to return and land. It's not clear if Biffle was piloting the plane at the time it went down. There's no word on the cause.

of the crash. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. A new report finds children and teenagers are turning to AI chatbots for companionship, emotional support, and role-playing. Empir's Retoo Chatterjee has more on the study from the digital security company, ORA. When kids use artificial intelligence tools, 42% of the time it's for companionship, where kids engage with a chatbot for an ongoing conversation. And frequently, nearly 40% of the time, those conversations involve violent role-playing. Scott Collins is chief medical officer at ORA. It is role play that is interaction about harming somebody else, physically hurting them, torturing them, fighting them, and a lot of it gets pretty graphic.

These conversations also tend to be longer, he says, compared to when they use AI for help with homework. Among 13 to 17-year-olds, kids who spend more time online are also more stressed out by their digital lives. Rithu Chatterjee and PR News. Two dozen Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtles are rehabilitating in Florida after cold waters off Cape Cod left them with frostbite and pneumonia. They migrate north in the summer and they often get stuck on the Cape. Officials say they're suffering from a condition called cold stunning,

which requires antibiotics and fluids. The sea turtles arrived at the Loggerhead Marine Life Center earlier this month, where they're expected to stay until spring, when they can then be released back into the Atlantic. Wall Street's trading higher at this hour. I'm Janine Herbst. NPR News in Washington.