Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Louise Schiavone. 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.
Chapter 2: What emergency measures are being taken in Southern California due to heavy rains?
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, rockslides 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 XIV 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, NPR News.
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