NPR News Now - NPR News: 12-25-2025 5AM EST

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Louise Skiyvone. As Southern California continues to get hammered by heavy rains, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has declared a state of emergency. Steve Futterman has details. 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 flood waters 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 Futterman in Los Angeles. Christmas Eve at the Vatican.

Leo the 14th has celebrated his first Christmas Mass as Pope offering mass last night at 10 p.m. local time on Christmas Eve in St. Peter's Basilica. The pontiff also planned to celebrate mass on Christmas Day, 12 hours later in the Vatican Basilica, a first for a Pope since John Paul II's leadership of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. In Bethlehem, thousands poured into Manger Square and other sites in the Holy Land, bringing the season back into the region after two years of war in Gaza. Groups marched and played music in Bethlehem and Nazareth, the cities where Christians believed Jesus was born and lived. Millions of Americans will fly during this holiday season. NPR's Joel Rose reports that airlines are hoping to avoid a repeat of the IT meltdowns that have disrupted the industry in years past.

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 Woods 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. The Powerball Lottery has ended a three-month stretch without a winner. Last night, a winning number was drawn for the $1.8 billion jackpot, the second largest purse in U.S. history, the number drawn in Arkansas. Asian shares were mixed in thin holiday trading, where most markets in the region and elsewhere were closed for Christmas. This is NPR. In Nashville, there is new interest in an old Christmas tradition from member station WPLN in Nashville. Justin Barney tells us that banks there once had competing Christmas

choirs made up entirely of employees. That's what you would hear in the lobby of a bank in Nashville in the 1970s. tellers, loan officers, and bank executives of two of Music City's biggest banks. It said it's Christmas. That's Jim Norton, a cameraman for the popular TV specials that the choirs taped. The tradition may have been lost, but they pressed the carols to vinyl. One of those albums was recently rediscovered, and it's uncovered this once-beloved tradition for a new generation.

For NPR news, I'm Justin Barney. French prosecutors say a pro-Russian hacking group has claimed responsibility for a major cyber attack on France's National Postal Service, the attack halted package deliveries just days before Christmas. In Europe and the UK, leaders are calling out the Trump administration for imposing travel bans on five Europeans for certain regulatory policies. The White House charges the five are guilty of pressuring tech firms to censor or suppress. American views. One of the five is Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner responsible for supervising social media rules. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the five radical activists. I'm Louise Ciavone and PR News, Washington. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your

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