NPR News: 02-18-2026 12PM EST
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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh.
What are the legal implications of social media addiction in the Meta trial?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the witness stand today in California in a state court trial over whether social media companies are legally responsible for young people's addiction to their products. In Meta's case, platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are under scrutiny. NPR's Bobby Allen reports on the proceedings in Los Angeles.
The trial so far has focused on whether Meta's Instagram and Google's YouTube should be considered defective products for unleashing into the world all sorts of features that we all know by now, like infinite scroll, you keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, autoplaying features, being able to like posts. So the lawyers battling the tech company say the apps are like digital casinos. They argue that Instagram and YouTube affect kids' brains no differently than a slot machine.
NPR's Bobby Allen. Billionaire Les Wexner, founder of L Brands, is being deposed in Ohio today about his close relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The 88-year-old's name appears more than a thousand times in the reams of documents the Justice Department released on Epstein. Wexner denies he knew anything about the wealthy financier's sex crimes involving the sexual abuse of children and rape. The Food and Drug Administration is reversing course and will consider approving Moderna's experimental flu shot after all, the decision coming a little more than a week after the agency refused to review the jab. Here's NPR's Sydney Lepkin.
The FDA rattled the biotech industry when it said it wouldn't even look at Moderna's application to market the first mRNA flu shot. Moderna used its mRNA technology to swiftly create and manufacture its COVID-19 shot during the pandemic. The company wants to use the same technology to make a flu vaccine. Initially, the FDA said it wouldn't review the new shot because the company didn't compare it to a high-dose flu vaccine in older people. Now, Moderna says it will take an aged-based approach and agree to add a confirmatory study after marketing begins that will focus on older adults. The company says the new vaccine would be ready for the next flu season pending FDA approval.
Sydney Lepkin, NPR News. Today is Ash Wednesday, when many Christians begin to observe the season of Lent. NPR's Jason DeRose reports the National Council of Churches is launching a new prayer campaign.
The campaign is called Deliver Us from Evil, which is a phrase from the Lord's Prayer as described in the Gospel of Matthew. The campaign asks participants to wear black on Ash Wednesday as a visible sign of witness and unity, to pray daily at noon throughout Lent, and to post photos of themselves on social media with a sign saying, Deliver us from evil. The largely progressive National Council of Churches represents more than 30 million Christians from 37 different denominations. It's calling on people of faith to, quote, raise their prophetic voices for justice, compassion, and protection of the vulnerable. Jason DeRose, NPR News.
From Washington, this is NPR News. The Chinese government is denying U.S. allegations that it had conducted illicit nuclear tests in recent years. It calls the accusation unfounded. NPR's Jennifer Pak has the latest from Shanghai.
The U.S. is fabricating a pretext to resume nuclear testing, according to a statement from the Chinese embassy in Washington emailed to the media. Most of the world's nuclear powers haven't done nuclear testing since the 1990s. But on Tuesday, the U.S. government shared new details to bolster its claim that China conducted a secret nuclear weapons test back in 2020. It points to a remote seismic station in Kazakhstan that detected a tiny earthquake, which the U.S. says was really an explosion coming from China's main nuclear testing site. Chinese officials say this allegation is part of America's attempt to seek nuclear hegemony. Jennifer Pak, NPR News, Shanghai.
Ahead of the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, still no sign of a breakthrough in the latest U.S.-brokered peace talks.
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