NPR News: 12-24-2025 10PM EST
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Live from NPR News, I'm Giles Snyder. California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles. A powerful holiday storm is lashing Southern California with heavy rain and gusty winds. Parts of L.A.
What emergency has California Governor Gavin Newsom declared due to the holiday storm?
scorched by wildfires nearly a year ago under evacuation warnings. Kavish Harjai is with LAIS, the NPR member station in Los Angeles.
And of course, with any storm in this area, burn scar areas are of concern. So these are portions of land where because of wildfires, vegetation has been removed and the nature of the soil has changed. And as a result, water isn't absorbed by that burned land as it usually might be. And so that creates dangerous runoff conditions for the land below and makes those burn scar areas susceptible to debris flows.
Much of the state under weather warnings forecasters warning of whiteout conditions in parts of the Sierra Nevada. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer calling the discovery of more than a million additional documents that could be connected to the Jeffrey Epstein case a Christmas Eve news dump. The Justice Department said today it needs more time to review the files to comply with the law that required the full release by last week. New York is leading a multi-state coalition suing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over transgender care. NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin reports that Kennedy is aiming to essentially ban such care for youth nationally, even though it's supported by all major U.S.
medical associations.
Secretary Kennedy published a declaration last week calling gender-affirming care for youth, quote, neither safe nor effective, unquote, to treat gender dysphoria. The declaration then says that if hospitals and doctors provide this care to young patients, they could be barred from getting Medicare and Medicaid payments entirely. Now, a coalition of 19 Democratic-led states and D.C. are asking the U.S. District Court in Eugene, Oregon, to rule the HHS declaration unlawful and block its enforcement. In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James said, quote, Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online. HHS declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Selina Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.
New research suggests that drugs for ADHD don't work the way scientists once thought they did. NPR's John Hamilton has more on a study in the journal Cell.
Scientists analyzed brain scans from thousands of adolescents, including hundreds who were taking drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Dr. Benjamin Kaye of Washington University in St. Louis says he expected the drugs to act on brain areas involved in attention.
What I actually found was that those were the parts of the brain that were least affected.
Instead, the drugs acted on areas that modulate alertness and motivation. The researchers say this appears to improve a child's performance by making them less sleepy and more interested in doing mundane tasks like homework. John Hamilton, NPR News.
The Honduran presidential candidate, backed by President Trump, has been declared the winner of the country's November 30th election. The country's electoral authority says Nasri Esfiro won a tight election marked by weeks of delays, technical problems, and allegations of fraud. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued a statement urging all parties to respect the results and calling for a peaceful transition. Pope Leo has said that to reject the poor or strangers amounts to a rejection of God himself. NPR's Ruth Sherlock reports on the Pope's inaugural Christmas Eve Mass.
In his sermon at St. Peter's Basilica, Pope Leo made what he called a, quote, timely reminder that there is, quote, no room for God if there's no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other, he said. Leo has made care for immigrants a theme of his papacy, and this first American pope has criticised President Trump's immigration crackdown. Leo also quoted his predecessor, Pope Francis, saying that Christmas rekindles hope.
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