3pm ET, October 11 | The latest headlines from NPR

0:00This message comes from Angie. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years. For everything, from minor repairs to major remodels, find reviews, pricing, and booking at Angie.com or on the Angie app. This is NPR News Now. The latest headlines every hour. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Janine Herbst. President Trump says Russia and Ukraine agreed to an energy ceasefire, but Russia hasn't commented. And Ukraine's president Zelensky says he learned of it when he read Trump's social media post. Russia attacked the harky region of Ukraine today, hitting near a grocery store that left at least three people dead. Others injured. Meanwhile, Trump has been working to bring down diesel prices in the US without success. And now says he will lift some US sanctions on Russia in return for millions of tons of diesel fuel. Ampures, Mara, Lysen has more.

1:00Although analysts say this latest move may not make much of a difference, it once again shows Trump siding with Russia over Ukraine. Trump has called on Ukraine to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, but he hasn't applied similar pressure to Russia to stop bombing Ukraine's electrical grid or civilian targets. And he says Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky should be replaced by someone more willing to make a deal with Russia. Trump has blamed the Ukrainian strikes for raising oil prices when the biggest driver of higher prices is the war in Iran. His move comes after Congress passed legislation giving him more power to pressure Russia's economy, but critics say allowing Russia to make money by exporting diesel fuel will do exactly the opposite. Mara Lysen, NPR News. Prediction market Kalshi has hired a former FBI agent to run its first anti-money laundering team. As impires Bobby Allen reports, it comes as prediction market firms face increased legal scrutiny from state and federal regulators.

2:04Former FBI agent and federal prosecutors Sean Fern will lead the team. Their focus preventing criminals in the US and abroad from using Kalshi to laundromoney. On a day-to-day basis, I think that involves knowing who our customers are, getting a better understanding of where their money comes from, ensuring that we're not doing business with sanctions entities or parties. Prediction markets allow people to bet on sports, elections, politics, policy announcements. They have exploded in growth, crossing $260 billion in bets this year. That's triple last year's total. But some of those bets have been the subject of investigations over insider trading and market manipulation, like when former Congressman George Santos settled with regulators over rigging a market. Fern says part of his goal is to prevent the money laundering scandals that beset the cryptocurrency industry. Bobby Allen and P.R. News. The remnants of ESR bringing heavy rain and flooding to parts of the mid-Atlantic after hitting Florida Friday night as a category two hurricane. The storm's blamed for at least four deaths.

3:06Meanwhile, the remnants of tropical storm Rachel, battered Southern California with rain, gusty winds, and flooding that will continue in the southwest through tonight. And the powerful category for hurricane Simon is pounding Mexico's Pacific coast. It's expected to make landfall today. This is NPR. Some Chesapeake Bay oyster farmers and harvesters are getting a boost from robots. As NPR's R.E. Daniel reports, an engineer at the University of Maryland is finding new uses for the water robots. Oyster reefs used to abound in the Chesapeake, but overharvesting decimated their ranks. Waterman faced the daunting task of knowing when and where to harvest the adults. Mechanical engineer Miao Yu says the water's so murky that the effort tends to be a stab in the dark. Our goal is to transform that a guesswork into precision. So she and her team scam the seabed using sonar and video footage from a raft-like surface robot

4:07and a smaller underwater robot. They then use AI to stitch the visuals together and analyze them to determine if oysters are present in a live and how big they are. They're still refining the algorithms, but use hoping the technology might one day be modified and scaled nationally. Our NPR news. At the weekend box office, the horror film Other Mommy took the top spot, debuting with an estimated $27 million in ticket sales that's against a reported $19 million budget. And the other big release this weekend, Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, a film about a Facebook whistleblower who leaked incriminating documents to a Wall Street reporter, Wall Street Journal reporter took fifth place with $5 million. Rounding out the top five, the Anne-Hathaway Psychological Thriller Variety with $11 million in second place. I'm Janine Herbst and you're listening to NPR News from Washington. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more.

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