NPR News: 12-11-2025 7AM EST
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Live from NPR News, I'm Janine Hurst. Attorney General Pam Bondi says the FBI and the Coast Guard seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. NPR's Quill Lawrence reports the U.S. has sanctioned Venezuela's oil industry.
Bondi posted a video on social media showing U.S. forces boarding the vast oil tanker by helicopter. She said U.S. agents executed a seizure warrant on board and that the tanker has been sanctioned for years and is known to smuggle crude oil from Venezuela and also Iran. President Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom he accuses of narco-trafficking. The U.S. has assembled the largest naval fleet in decades off the Venezuelan coast and offered $50 million for Maduro's arrest. This news came as pro-democracy activist Maria Corina Machado snuck out of hiding in Venezuela en route to Norway to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Quill Lawrence, NPR News.
More than 40 lawmakers in Congress sent a letter to federal regulators asking them to crack down on companies that are charging disabled military veterans millions of dollars. Chris Arnold reports the move follows an investigation by NPR.
Under federal law, it's illegal to charge veterans money for help filing initial disability claims. They can get that service for free. But NPR found that companies have been charging vets as much as $10,000 or $20,000 for it. And some vets said that that was after a company didn't even do much to help them. Congressman Chris Pappas, a Democrat from New Hampshire, says some of the tactics NPR reported on are disturbing.
This is predatory in nature. that veterans are forking over a huge amount of money for this. It's shameful, it's outrageous, and we've got to do something about it.
Pappas wants the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies to take action to protect disabled vets. Chris Arnold, NPR News.
The Federal Reserve voted to cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point yesterday, the third cut since September, as the job market slows but prices continue to climb faster than policymakers want. The vote was close, with three dissents, two of them wanting to hold rates steady. Fed Chair Jerome Powell says he and his colleagues will be cautious about lowering rates in the future with just one possible next year. And Pierre Scott Horsley has more.
We are going to get a whole lot more information about both inflation and unemployment before the next Fed meeting in January. And that's something we have been really starved for in the last couple of months. Because of the government shutdown, we never got those numbers for October. And the November numbers have been delayed until next week. So the next time Powell and his colleagues gather, we may have a clearer picture of which way the economy is headed.
NPR's Scott Horsley. The news sent markets higher yesterday, but this morning U.S. futures contracts are trading lower. Dow futures down about one-tenth of a percent. You're listening to NPR News. People in western Washington state started packing up and fleeing rising rivers as heavy rain caused those rivers to rise. The National Weather Service says an atmospheric river is swelling rivers toward record levels, with major flooding expected in areas like Skagit River north of Seattle. Governor Bob Ferguson has declared a state of emergency. Yesterday, dozens of vehicles were backed up at a sandbag filling station in the city of Mount Vernon. Authorities are warning people in the river's floodplain to be ready to evacuate.
The Weather Service expects several days of heavy rain along the coast. Archaeologists in Britain say they found the earliest evidence of humans making fire. As NPR's Nate Rott reports, the findings suggest that humans started making fires 350,000 years earlier than previously thought.
You don't have to be eating cooked meat or sitting next to a fireplace to understand the benefits that fire would have provided to early humans. The ability to start fires was a major evolutionary tool that we continue to benefit from today.
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