NPR News: 03-25-2026 4PM EDT

0:00Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. The White House is disputing reports the U.S. put forward a 15-point plan to end the war with Iran and that Iran rejected it. Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said today there are elements of truth. And Pierre-Zemlifang reports Iran says it will end the war and strikes on its neighbors only if the U.S. adheres to several conditions, including payment of war damages and reparations. The U.S. has been pushing Iran to reopen the straighter foremose and let energy exports flow to the rest of the world again. Iran has refused, and Iran's state broadcaster reports a senior political security official has rejected a U.S. proposal, setting up five conditions. These include ending the war only if the U.S. stopped assassinating Iranian leaders and setting up mechanisms to ensure the U.S. could not wage war on Iran again. The official also asked for the U.S. to pay for war damages. That's NPR's Emily Fang reporting.

1:00A California court is siding with a woman who says meta and Google should be held liable for the depression and anxiety she suffered after getting hooked on social media when she was a child. Los Angeles jurors say the tech giants should pay a combined $3 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiff known only as Kaylee. Kurt Wackner covers social media for Bloomberg News. He spoke to NPR's here and now that $3 million seems like a small number for the multi-trillion dollar companies, but then again, they face thousands more similar lawsuits. For years, a lot of these criticisms of these companies has been around the content that they carry, that people see things on their feed, they receive things and messages that are the real problem, and what made this particular lawsuit unique and what thousands of others are trying to get at is that it's not so much what the content says, but it's the design of the products themselves. This idea that algorithms and infinite scrolling in particular are things that keep people addictive meta and Google also face punitive damages the companies say they will fight

2:03today's verdict in California in a similar one yesterday in New Mexico. Immigration and customs enforcement deployments to American cities are a central part of President Trump's immigration crackdown. A new NPR analysis found that they also left local cities with a huge bill. In Los Angeles, the surge of immigration enforcement agents in June meant that LAPD had to spend big on over time to respond to protests. Around $17 million on over time for just eight days in June. In Portland, a federal ICE facility in the city became a big protest site, and local police say their response times for service calls more than doubled because officers had to be at the building. Local cops were also left physically and emotionally exhausted. Jacqueline Diaz, NPR News. From Washington, this is NPR. Drought could be increasing antibiotic resistance in soils according to new research.

3:08NPR's Jonathan Lambert reports that resistance seems to be ending up in some hospitals. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise worldwide. There's typically point to human overuse as the main driver, but antibiotics and resistance to antibiotics ultimately trace back to bacteria in the soil, and soils around the world are becoming drier from climate change. To see if this might impact resistance levels, researchers analyzed soils from around the globe. They found that drier soils tended to have bacteria with more resistance genes, and some of these genes were exactly the same as those found in human infections at local hospitals. The study also found that hospitals in drier areas tended to have more resistant infections, a problem that could worsen with climate change. The research was published in the journal Nature Microbiology, Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. The half million dollar world food prize goes to a Dutch food scientist this year for his work promoting global food safety.

4:09Iowa-based organization Credits hope Lelyveld and his Global Harmonization Initiative with helping prevent millions of cases of foodborne illness reducing food waste and dismantling barriers to trading humanitarian aid. Critics have raised concerns about the credibility of the world food prize because of financial backing from big corporations accused of prioritizing profit and sideline local farmers to the detriment of food safety and climate friendly practices. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News. Listen to this podcast Sponsor Free on Amazon Music with a Prime Membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR News Now Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.