Live from MPR News on trial Snyder on Capitol Hill, Dr.
the Fifth Amendment during Tuesday's hearing on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Although it pains me to do so, because of the respect, I have for the legislative branch”
of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to reframe from answering your questions. Thank you. Dr. Fauci was subpoenaed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul to appear before the committee
he chairs. The two have long spared over the pandemic and Fauci accused Senator Paul of being obsessed with seeing him behind bars. Paul's committee has scheduled a contempt of Congress vote against Fauci for next week. The Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rate study Wednesday, but the Central Bank
left the door open to raise rates on the future of inflation, remains elevated as Imperial Scott Horsesley reports. This was the second rate setting meeting that by Kevin Worsh, who took over his chairman of the Central Bank in May, worst old lawmakers this month, he and his colleagues are determined to restore price stability after five years of uncomfortably high inflation.
That task has been made harder by the U.S. War with Iran, which is triggered a spike in energy prices. Gasoline prices have moderated from their wartime peak this spring, but renewed fighting around the straight-of-war moves could keep pump prices elevated for months to come. Three members of the Fed's rate setting committee dissented from today's decision, saying
they would have preferred to raise the benchmark rate by quarter percentage point. Scott Horsesley and PR News, Washington. Senate judiciary committee has delayed a vote on Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general.
“The vote had been scheduled for later this morning, but two key Republicans, Texas Senator”
John Korn, and in Tom Tila, Southern North Carolina, say they will not support Blanche without written assurances from the Justice Department about the controversial Trump IRS settlement. The U.K. last year recorded the biggest rise in anti-Semitic incidents of any country with a major Jewish population, that's according to a new report, NPR's Law and Fraer reports
from London. The J7 task force Tally's anti-Semitism in the seven largest Jewish diaspora countries.
Together, they're home to more than 90 percent of the world's Jews outside Israel.
Of those countries, the U.K. had the biggest spike in anti-Semitic incidents last year. Australia had the deadliest with 15 people killed at a Hanukkah event on Sidney's Bondi Beach. Overall, 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews living outside Israel in more than three decades.
The U.K. government recently allocated more than $330 million to boost police protection
“for Jewish communities, and an independent review of anti-Semitism in schools and colleges”
is due this autumn. Lauren Fraer and PR News London. And you're listening to NPR News. Jordan State-run news agency says the country has shot down five missiles launched from Iran.
The attack toward Jordan came as the U.S. at its drug dozens of Iranian Revolutionary
Guard targets, including military command centers and drone facilities. U.S. military says that launch attacks and response to Iran's firing missiles at U.S. troops in Jordan. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.N. Senior Ebola Coordinator warns that health efforts must be scaled up rapidly to control the outbreak in living stone reports.
According to the latest Congress government figures, more than 3,300 people have been infected since the outbreak was declared in May, and more than 1,400 people have died. The U.N. Senior Ebola Coordinator, Julian Heinus, says efforts to contain Ebola need to accelerate. At the moment, we are not at the speed and the scale and the agility, the virus requires for us.
So we definitely have a challenge there, and we're working to address that. One of the ways of speeding up would be to better divide up the roles among organizations involved in the response. This would free up space to focus on specialized medical care, failing to speed up soon would make Ebola even harder to contain.
For NPR News, I'm Emmett Livingstone in Kinshasa. The financial markets in Asia are a mixed and Thursday trading after Wall Street laws ground following the conclusion of the Fed's two-day rate setting meeting, Fed policy makers left interest rates unchanged, all three major U.S. stock indexes finished down by more than one and a half percent.
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