NPR News: 09-01-2025 9PM EDT

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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Amy Held.

Workers over billionaires protests brought out demonstrators across the U.S.

this Labor Day weekend.

In New York City, Harrison Malkin reports Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue was the site of an anti-Trump protest.

You can ask for any tacos.

That's John McCullough, a CUNY professor based in Astoria Queens, protesting what he says Republicans are instituting, a white Christian ethnostate in the U.S.

Phenomenal.

It's a good taco.

We've got,

looks like avocado, maybe chicken, rice.

Great.

Tacos were passed out to protesters with a living wage-for-all sticker on the outer wrapping.

They represented the acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out that traders adopted as shorthand for the effect of tariff policy on financial markets.

Protest signs read, Stop the War on the Working Class, Smash the Patriarch, and Hey Taco, Our Country is Nour Kingdom.

For NPR News, I'm Harry Samalkin in New York.

Congress is getting back to business this week after the August recess top of the agenda, the annual spending battle, as a government shutdown looms at the end of the month when federal funding runs out.

Republicans will need Democratic votes to pass an extension, but it's unclear how the parties may come to terms.

Guatemala's president says they are ready to receive 150 unaccompanied minors per week from the U.S., a day after a federal judge in Washington, D.C.

halted the deportation of some Guatemalan children.

The Trump administration says it's reuniting children with families at the Guatemalan government's request, but immigration advocates argue the process is bypassing the courts.

Renata Castro is a Florida-based immigration attorney.

Illegal violations that are piling up in this case are quite concerning for lawyers in every area of legal practice in the United States.

Advocates in multiple cases are suing on behalf of unaccompanied Guatemalan children to try to stop their removals.

The United Nations is appealing for international aid to help victims of Afghanistan's earthquake last night.

At least 800 people were killed, more injured, with casualties expected to rise.

NPR's Omkar Khandekar has this report.

Spokesperson of UN's refugee agency Babar Baloch said the earthquake came at a time the country was already reeling from a drought and forced expulsion of millions of Afghans from the neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

He said the scale of the disaster far exceeds the capacity of the local authorities.

Since roads are obstructed and mobile networks cut off in many places, aid workers are forced to go on foot to reach victims in remote villages.

Afghanistan is vulnerable to earthquakes because of its location at the intersection of two major tectonic plains.

An earthquake in the country's west in 2022 killed more than a thousand people.

Omkar Khandekar, NPR News, Mumbai.

This is NPR News.

Drug deaths in the U.S.

continue a historic decline according to the latest provisional data from the CDC.

NPR's Brian Mann reports fatal overdoses have now reached their lowest level in five years.

Fatal drug overdoses rose during the pandemic to catastrophic levels, driven in part, according to public health experts, by the rapid spread of street fentanyl.

The latest CDC data shows deaths have now plunged nationwide by roughly a third from the peak.

The latest 12-month period through March of this year found a total of roughly 77,648 U.S.

drug deaths.

A report earlier this year appeared to show drug deaths rising again.

But revised federal data now shows fatal overdoses have declined steadily without interruption for two years.

CDC researchers say revisions are common in complex public health data.

Despite this unprecedented decline in drug deaths, President Trump cites fentanyl as justification for a range of policies from tariffs to the crackdown on migrants.

Brian Mann, NPR News.

The western U.S.

is dealing with above-average warmth, with heat alerts and red flag warnings stretching from California to Oregon.

Forecasters say parts of the Pacific Northwest are likely to experience a possibly record-breaking heat wave with triple-digit highs.

But in the northern plains and in parts of the Midwest, a strong cold front is forecast to send temperatures plummeting by as much as 25 degrees below normal this week.

In tennis, Naomi Osaka and Iga Sviantek are both moving on to the quarterfinals at the U.S.

Open, each winning in straight sets today.

This is NPR News.

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