NPR News: 08-28-2025 10PM EDT

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Live from NPR News, I'm Janine Herbst.

In Minnesota, police say the shooter who opened fire at a Catholic church in Minneapolis yesterday as school children and adults sat in the pews for the first Mass of the school year, fired 116 rounds and left writings describing hate for individuals and some groups.

Two children died, including Hyper.

Myoski and Jesse Merkel's son, eight-year-old Fletcher.

Fighting back tears, he says he wants people to remember his son for who he was and not for being the victim of a mass shooting.

Fletcher loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking, and any sport that he was allowed to play.

Two other children in the family were not harmed in the shooting.

18 other people were wounded in the shooting, 15 of them children, and Paris Jason DeRose has more on their condition.

At Children's Hospital, here, officials say three children remain hospitalized, others were treated and discharged.

At another hospital, Hennepin Healthcare, six shooting victims there are in satisfactory condition.

Two are in serious condition, and one child remains in critical condition.

Hospital staff today praised law enforcement for acting quickly, and they praised students and teachers who protected each other when the shooting began just after morning mass started on Wednesday.

And Pierce Jason DeRose reporting from Minneapolis.

HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill will be named interim director of the CDC after the Trump administration fired director Susan Menares, who's suing to keep her job.

From member station WABE, Christopher Alston reports dozens of CDC employees staged a walkout today in support of the agency's top leadership, several of whom resigned after Menaris was fired.

USA, not RMP!

Members of the public joined current and former CDC employees to line the street outside the center's entrance.

One of the officials who resigned, former chief medical officer Deborah Howry, was met with cheers and applause from the crowd.

I just can't tell you like what CDC means to all of us, the mission, the work, your commitment.

Thank you, and we're so honored to have done this for you.

Howry was joined by Daniel Jernigan and Dmitry Daskalakis, formerly directors of centers overseeing immunizations and infectious diseases.

The three say they were escorted off the property earlier in the day.

For NPR News, I'm Christopher Alston in Atlanta.

France, Germany, and the UK are re-imposing UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.

That further isolates Tehran after its atomic sites were repeatedly bombed during a 12-day war with Israel.

The process, called a snapback by diplomats who negotiated it into Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, was designed to be veto-proof at the UN.

It would again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran, and penalize any development of its ballistic missiles program.

This is NPR News.

A new study finds an interesting link between forest elephants and ebony trees.

Empire's Nate Rott reports: jet black ebony wood is commonly used for stringed instruments and furniture.

Ebony trees are rare.

They're wood expensive.

The new study published in the journal Science Advances comes after nine years of field work to better understand how the tree is spread in West African forests.

Tom Smith, a conservation ecologist at the University of California Los Angeles, says they worked with indigenous groups in Cameroon.

And one day they said, Did you know that ebony is often found in elephant dung and these seedlings often sprout in elephant dung.

They found that by eating ebony fruit and depositing the seeds, the elephants are moving the tree through the forest.

Illegal poaching for the ivory trade has greatly reduced elephant populations, though, the study found, also reducing the number of new ebony trees.

Nate Rott, NPR News.

Are you feeling lucky?

Like nearly a billion dollars lucky?

That's the jackpot for the powerball after no one won last night's drawing.

Now, on Saturday, the jackpot will be $950 million,

the sixth largest prize in the game's history.

The winner can take the money broken out annually over several years or in a lump sum of $428 million

before taxes.

The tickets are sold in 45 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S.

Virgin Islands.

But, of course, the odds are astronomical.

One in 292,201,338.

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