I'm not an astronomer or physicist, but I believe it is possible for a galaxy to be 25 billion light years away, even though the universe is thought to be less than 14 billion years old, because of the expansion of space while the light was traveling.
Other news articles (metro, yahoo) claim that it's 25 million LY distant (which can't be right, that's inside the MW).
I suspect that a single journalist has typoed 12.5 billion as 25 billion, and lots of others have scraped his article.