NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-25-2025 11AM EST

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Windsor Johnston. Pope Leo celebrated a Christmas Day Mass in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican today. He's the first pontiff to do so in more than 30 years. NPR's Ruth Sherlock reports the Pope urged the faithful to care for those who are suffering. During the mass, Pope Leo blessed the faithful. In this first Christmas Day message, he highlighted the plight of those caught in war in Gaza and of refugees and the displaced.

He spoke of young people conscripted into militaries who, quote, on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths. He said peace is possible and urged people not to remain cold to people suffering because he said, when the fragility of others penetrates our hearts, When their pain shatters our rigid certainties, then peace has already begun. Ruth Sherlock, MPR News.

Southern California is getting slammed by heavy rain. Steve Utterman reports, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has declared a state of emergency. The declaration comes after a day of floods, fallen trees, mudslides, traffic jams, and power outages. The move paves the way for the city to deploy adequate resources to deal with the storms. Earlier, California Governor Gavin Newsom also issued a state of emergency. Right now, the forecast does not look good. A new series of powerful storms will hit the area today. Ariel Cohn is with the National Weather Service.

We're going to see the floodwaters be reinforced, landslides, rock slides, and mudslides, all being reinforced across the area. In some mountain areas, more than 10 inches alone fell on Wednesday. The storms are expected to continue into Friday. For NPR news, I'm Steve Fudderman in Los Angeles. Millions of Americans will fly during this holiday season. NPR's Joel Rose reports airlines are hoping to avoid a repeat of the technical meltdowns that have disrupted the industry. It's been three years since a major winter storm brought Southwest Airlines to its knees. While other airlines managed to get their operations going within days, Southwest did not.

Since then, Chief Information Officer Lauren Wood, says Southwest has made big investments in technology so it can anticipate and respond to outages more quickly. We may have a tech outage, but you care less about it if it's a five-minute recovery, and I have many of those, versus I had one major tech outage, and it took me down for a day. Southwest is just one of many airlines that have been forced to ground their planes because of IT outages. The test is how quickly they can get their planes and their customers back in the air. Joel Rose and PR News. You're listening to NPR News from Washington. The Justice Department says it may need a few more weeks to finish releasing files tied to the Jeffrey Epstein case despite missing a deadline from Congress.

Officials say more than a million additional records were recently discovered by federal prosecutors and the FBI. The DOJ says attorneys are working around the clock to review them and apply legally required redactions. The most popular Christmas movie on broadcast and streaming TV is Home Alone. NPR's Netta Ullaby reports, the movie from 1990 has been the top-ranked film by Nielsen for three out of the past four December's. Home Alone takes place over Christmas. It's about a little boy left behind when his family goes on vacation. It's been the most watched holiday movie every December since 2021, except for last year when the prime video movie Red One took the top spot. The action movie stars Dwayne Johnson as head of Santa's security detail.

Someone took next. Other recent top-ranked Christmas movies include Elf, Home Alone 2, and National Lampoom's Christmas Vacation. The movie A Christmas Story benefits from a 24-hour marathon that runs on TBS and T&T. And although there's debate about whether Die Hard is really a Christmas movie, Nielsen says last year it landed on the holiday list at number 11. Libby, NPR News. Someone in Arkansas is waking up a billionaire. A single ticket matched all six numbers to win the 1.8 billion powerball jackpot drawn last night, the second largest in U.S. history. This is NPR News.