NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-24-2024 6PM EST

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. Syrian Christians took to the streets today, the capital of Damascus, after a Christmas tree was burned. It comes as the new Syrian leadership tries to assuage worries that minorities and religious sex will be protected under their leadership. NPR's Idil Al-Shalchi reports from Damascus. Videos posted online showed pro-Christian armed men in pickup trucks waving flags and loudly honking their car horns.

Raise your cross up high, they chanted. The video of a Christmas tree being set on fire in a central Syrian city went viral, stoking worry and anger among Christians. The group currently in charge of Syria is Hey Etarir Hashem, or HTS. It has roots in Al-Qaeda and is a designated terrorist organization by the United States. Local HTS officials said that the culprits were not Syrian and that the tree would be put back up. The new prime minister also announced that December 25th and 26th would be public holidays

in Syria. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Damascus. American Airlines has resumed operations after grounding all flights earlier today. NPR's Joel Rose reports the airline suffered what it's calling a technical issue on one of the busiest travel days of the year. American Airlines says the nationwide ground stop has been lifted after halting all of the carrier's flights for about an hour. Passengers on social media reported that boarding stopped and some planes had to return to their

gates. In a statement, American blamed the problem on a quote, vendor technology issue and apologized to customers for the inconvenience. The airline's pilots told passengers the outage was related to a software issue affecting calculations of weight and balance issues. The brief outage also affected flight planning. Hundreds of flights were delayed, particularly at airports in Charlotte, Dallas, Miami, and other American Airlines hubs. And those delays could ripple across the country for the rest of the day.

Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington. The man accused of setting a woman on fire inside a New York subway train and then fanning the flames with his shirt was arraigned today in Brooklyn Criminal Court. It was a shorter trading day, but stocks gained strongly, with the S&P and the NASDAQ up by over 1%. Stocks traditionally have done well in the last 5 trading sessions of the year and in the first 2 of the new year, hence the nickname Santa Claus Rally. And now traders are hopeful we could see one this year. Stocks had surged after the election of Donald Trump in November, but they have given up some of those gains in December. The bump on Christmas Eve, though, has investors

hoping for a stronger end to the year in Wall Street. Rafael Nam, NPR News. This week's Billboard charts are out and Korean pop band has done something that's never happened before. NPR's Stephen Thompson has the story. Amid the usual holiday songs topping the Billboard charts, the K-pop group Stray Kids has done something truly unique. It's become the first act ever to have its chart history begin with six albums that all debut at number one. The newest is titled Hop.

["Hop"] Until this week, Stray Kids were tied with the late rapper DMX, whose chart career began with five number one albums. Remarkably, all six of Stray Kids' chart-toppers have come out in the past three calendar years. The success of Hop is only the latest big moment for K-pop music. Since 2018, a whopping 19 different K-pop records have topped the Billboard charts, including six each for Stray Kids and the biggest K-pop act of them all, BTS. Stephen Thompson, NPR News.

Government panel after debating a proposed $15 billion acquisition of U.S. steel by Japan's Nippon Steel, has failed to reach any kind of agreement. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. sending its long-awaited report to President Biden, who has been a long-time opponent of the deal, while some federal agencies representing the panel were skeptical that allowing the deal posed any kind of security risk, both Biden and President-elect Donald Trump have opposed the merger and vowed to block it. Critical futures prices were up more than 1 percent today, reversing prior losses amid

a brightening outlook on supply and demand, oil up 86 cents a barrel to 70.10 a barrel in New York. I'm Jack Spear, NPR News in Washington.