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Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Noor Rahm. President-elect Donald Trump has selected billionaire investor Scott Besant to serve as his Treasury Secretary. Trump has chosen Russell Vogt to be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vogt was involved with drafting Project 2025, a blueprint for government changes. Trump has tapped former Texas State Representative Scott Turner as his choice to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Turner worked on economic development in Trump's first term, as NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports. Turner spent nine years in the NFL before entering politics. In 2019, Trump appointed him to lead a council tasked with turning around distressed communities. That included steering billions in private investment to so-called opportunity zones and
Places struggling with high unemployment and rundown housing. The effort won bipartisan praise, though critics suggested the wealthy investors getting tax breaks saw more benefit than local residents. In his first term, Trump targeted the housing agency HUD for deep budget cuts. Congress pushed back, but the conservative agenda Project 2025 again calls for limiting housing aid and shrinking HUD's role.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News. The U.S. life expectancy is around 77 years, but when researchers dug into the data, they found huge disparities within 10 different groups in the country.
NPR's Ping Huang has more in the story. The 10 Americas are divided by geography, race and ethnicity, and income level. The America with the highest life expectancy is Asian America at 84 years. The American Indian and Alaska Native population living in the West has the lowest life expectancy at 64 years. Tom Boyke with the Council on Foreign Relations co-authored the study in The Lancet.
He says the huge difference surprised him. It is stark. It has now grown to over 20 years, and that's a gap that you really see in different countries. Boyki says it's as if people in the U.S. are living in 10 different countries health-wise. Ping Huang, NPR News. Countries attending the climate talks in Azerbaijan are still trying to reach agreement on increasing financing pledges by wealthy countries to help developing nations tackle climate change.
Lisa Majora was appointed by the UN to monitor the proceedings, which were supposed to end yesterday. She says these talks regularly overrun, but this year has been out of the ordinary. I think there's been an ongoing deterioration of the quality of the process over the years, and this might quite be the culmination of it.
We don't have the right voices in the room. We don't have the voices of scientists, the voices of people who have been negatively impacted by climate change. And on the other hand, we have an over-representation of corporate lobbyists. She was interviewed by the BBC. This is NPR News in Washington.
Rescue crews are searching through rubble in central Beirut after an Israeli airstrike early this morning. Lebanese health officials say at least 15 people were confirmed dead. This was the fourth strike in the Lebanese capital in less than a week.
Today, Ukrainians are marking Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination, to describe when millions died of starvation on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. NPR's Hanna Palmyrenko reports from Kyiv. Holodomor commemorates the period in the 1930s when Russian authorities confiscated Ukrainian food supplies as part of a crackdown on rebellions over Soviet attempts
to control the region and centralize their agricultural output. This triggered a widespread famine that resulted in the deaths of at least 3 million Ukrainians.
Ukrainians are drawing parallels between the Soviet repression then and the current suffering of Ukrainians in the Russian-occupied territories and along the front lines. They are placing lighted candles on the windowsills of their homes to commemorate those who died and will stop for a minute of silence at the end of the day.
31 countries, including the United States, recognize Holodomor as genocide. Hanna Palomarenko, NPR News, Kyiv. Heavy rain and snowfall in the northeastern U.S. have allowed officials in New Jersey to lift statewide fire restrictions. A major fire is now contained after burning more than 5,300 acres of forest land in New Jersey and New York. I'm Nora Rahm, NPR News in Washington.
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