5 things to know for August 20: Smithsonian, Immigration, DC, Texas redistricting, Covid-19
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Hurricane Erin may not be forecast to make landfall, but the sprawling Category 2 storm is still going to impact much of the East Coast as it tracks north this week. On Tuesday, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein declared a state of emergency to prepare for the life-threatening rip currents and storm surge expected to affect the coastal region.
Here's what else you need to know to get up to speed and on with your day.
President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric about the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday, alleging that its museums were too focused on the negative aspects of US history, including 'how bad slavery was.' The comments, which he posted on his social media site, came a week after the White House ordered a review of the Smithsonian's museums and exhibits 'to ensure alignment with the President's directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.' If the Smithsonian refuses to purge materials that conflict with Trump's political directives, it could suffer a fate similar to the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Both organizations lost tens of millions of dollars in federal funding earlier this year, which has affected small museums, libraries, arts programs and research projects across the country.
People applying to live or work in the US will now be screened for 'anti-Americanism' in their immigration applications, authorities said Tuesday. According to a policy update by US Citizenship & Immigration Services, immigration officers will be able to scrutinize applicants' social media posts for any 'anti-American activity.' Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, compared the move to McCarthyism in the 1950s, when authorities prosecuted left-wing individuals amid a widespread public panic over communism and its influence on US institutions. 'The term (anti-Americanism) has no prior precedent in immigration law and its definition is entirely up to the Trump (administration),' Reichlin-Melnick said.
More National Guard troops arrived in Washington, DC, on Tuesday to assist in President Trump's emergency crime crackdown in the nation's capital. The troops, which were deployed from West Virginia, could begin operations as soon as today, a defense official told CNN. Republican governors from five other states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — have also promised to deploy their National Guard troops and escalate Trump's efforts to amass armed forces in the capital. Although the president has repeatedly complained about rising crime in DC, overall crime numbers are lower this year than in 2024.
Some Texas House Democrats ripped up agreements to leave the House floor under police escort and spent Tuesday night in the chamber in protest. They joined state Rep. Nicole Collier, who on Monday refused to 'sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts.' Texas Republicans' efforts to redraw the state's congressional districts in the middle of the decade were hindered when dozens of quorum-breaking Democratic House members left the state. Upon their return to the Capitol on Monday, House Speaker Dustin Burrows ordered constraints put on their movements. The Texas House is aiming to vote on the redistricting measure after it reconvenes today, and Republicans are expected to move quickly to approve their new map, which could potentially eliminate five Democratic US House seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
With Covid-19 levels on the rise in the US, and transmission increasing in at least 45 states, the American Academy of Pediatrics released its updated recommendations for vaccines on Tuesday, including Covid-19 shots. The AAP's guidance is a break from the current CDC recommendations and defies HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced in May that the CDC would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women. The AAP, on the other hand, recommends that all children, ages 6 months through 23 months, should receive a Covid-19 vaccine unless they have allergies to the vaccine or its ingredients. It also recommends a single dose of the vaccine for children ages 2 through 18 years if they are at high risk of Covid-19, residents of long-term care facilities, have never been vaccinated against Covid-19 or live in a household with people who are high risk for Covid-19.
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Her husband, writer/director Jeff Baena, died in January at the age of 47.
That's what major food companies are hoping as they tap celebrities to create new flavors.
The list includes popular slang like 'broligarchy' and 'dululu.'
And will Taylor Swift's new album, which will be available on cassette, turn the trend into a revival?
460 millionThat's how many metric tons of plastic are made each year.
'I represent every Palestinian woman and child whose strength the world needs to see. We are more than our suffering — we are resilience, hope, and the heartbeat of a homeland that lives on through us.'
— Nadeen Ayoub
Ayoub will become the first woman to represent the Palestinian people at the Miss Universe pageant.
🌤️ Check your local forecast to see what you can expect.
It's cool. The '80s are back.
Today's edition of 5 Things AM was edited and produced by CNN's Andrew Torgan.
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Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump has pledged to ‘lead a movement to get rid of' voting by mail. Will Utah be a target?
Eva Przybyla, front, and Nicholas Wells process ballots at the Salt Lake County Government Center in Salt Lake City on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch) President Donald Trump this week vowed to 'lead a movement to get rid of' voting by mail ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 'WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,' the president said in a post on Truth Social Monday. Trump, who has long opposed voting by mail, continued to claim, without evidence, that it's fraught with fraud. Utah has been the only red state among eight that have conducted universal by-mail elections, including six Democratic strongholds and one swing state — a fact that some conservatives here have balked at, while others have defended the state's by-mail system as a popular, convenient and safe voting method. After Trump's post, Utah's top election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, issued a short statement on social media without addressing the president directly. Utah Legislature approves bill to require voter ID, phase out automatic voting by mail by 2029 'The constitutional right of individual states to choose the manner in which they conduct secure elections is a fundamental strength of our system,' Henderson said. The president, however, asserted that states should do what the federal government wants. 'Remember, the States are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,' Trump said. 'They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.' Another high-ranking Republican and member of GOP legislative leadership — Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork — disagrees. McKell told Utah News Dispatch in an interview Tuesday that, like Henderson said, states have the right to choose how to administer their elections, and that he'd push back on an effort to completely undo voting by mail. 'In Utah, we're in a good place. I think there's strong support for vote by mail. There's also strong support for security,' McKell said. He added that's 'the needle we tried to thread' earlier this year when the 2025 Utah Legislature passed a bill that he sponsored to require voter ID and eventually phase out automatic voting by mail in this state by 2026. The aim of that bill, he said, was to preserve voting by mail as an option for Utah voters while also adding a new layer of security. Even though local polls have shown a vast majority of Utahns remain confident in their elections, Gallup polling shows trust nationally has decreased especially among a faction of Republican voters since 2006 as elections have become more polarized. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he ramped up rhetoric to cast doubt on election security and voting by mail. Asked about Trump's comments this week, McKell reiterated it's a matter of states rights. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX 'It is a federalism issue,' he said. 'If it's not enumerated in the (U.S.) Constitution, it's reserved for the states. That's article 10. I think states have the right to dictate how they run their elections.' McKell also defended Utah's track record as a state that has used voting by mail for years, starting with optional pilot programs that counties opted into before moving to universal voting by mail. 'In the state of Utah, Republicans have done really well with vote by mail. We elect Republicans,' he said, also noting that Trump in 2024 won the red state handily. 'There's generally broad support for vote by mail, especially among rural voters and elderly voters in Utah.' He added that 'it's OK if there's some tension between the federal government and state government,' but he argued the Constitution clearly reserves elections for states to control and administer. Pressed on how he'd respond to pressure from the Trump administration to get rid of voting by mail, McKell said, 'I would resist a movement that didn't originate in the state,' adding that he responds to his constituents, not the federal government. 'If there's a movement to change vote by mail, it needs to come from — it must come from — the state,' he said. 'It's a state issue. The states need to be in control of their own elections. Right now, I don't feel like there's a reason to eliminate vote by mail. I think we do a good job.' Utah election audit finds no 'significant fraud,' but raises concern over voter roll maintenance Not all Republicans in Utah embrace voting by mail, however, Earlier this year, McKell's bill was the result of a compromise between the House and Senate to more drastically restrict the state's universal vote-by-mail system. Asked whether Trump's comments could further inflame skepticism around the security of voting by mail in Utah, McKell said it's nothing new. 'We saw these comments before, and even going into the last legislative session, there were folks that opposed vote by mail.' But McKell said multiple state audits 'have shown that our elections are safe and secure,' while legislators have also made efforts to continually improve the system where issues have cropped up, like in voter roll maintenance. It remains to be seen whether Trump's comments could fan some Republican lawmakers' appetite to go after voting by mail during their next general session in January, but McKell said typically every year there's a slew of election bills for legislators to sort through. Asked whether he plans to make any tweaks to his 2025 bill, McKell said he's still talking with clerks about any possible changes. 'I feel like we did strike a really appropriate balance, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look at ways to make it better,' he said, adding that he doesn't have any specific proposals yet, 'but that could change as we get closer to the legislative session.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Miami Herald
25 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Trump criticizes Smithsonian portrayal of slavery amid call for review
Aug. 19 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump stepped up his criticisms of the Smithsonian on Tuesday, deriding the museums for its negative portrayal of slavery in American history. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform that he would direct his attorneys to "review" the Smithsonian in the same way his administration has sought to reshape colleges and universities. The post comes a week after the White House announced it was subjecting the influential museum consortium to an unprecedented examination of its materials, signaling it had become a focal point in Trump's efforts to transform cultural institutions. In his post, Trump wrote that museums all over the country are the "last remaining segment of 'woke.'" "The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been -- Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future," Trump wrote. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., reacted with a post on X, writing that if "Trump thinks slavery wasn't bad, he clearly needs to spend more time in a museum." Roughly 17 million people visited one of the Smithsonian's 21 museums and galleries last year. Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, who is the first African American to lead the institution and has held the position since 2019, has previously commented on the importance of acknowledging slavery's impact on American history. "I believe strongly that you cannot understand America without understanding slavery, that our notions of freedom, our notions of liberty are juxtaposed with our notions of enslavement," he said in an interview on Face the Nation in 2021. "And so I think that it's not about pointing blame, it's not about remembering difficult moments just to hurt." Last week, three White House aides wrote to Bunch in a letter notifying him the museum would be subject to a review to "ensure alignment with the President's directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions." The reshaping of the Smithsonian and its galleries and museums has been part the Trump administration's goal to remove left-leaning ideology from the federal government and cultural institutions. In March, Trump signed an executive order directing the Smithsonian to eliminate "divisive" and "anti-American ideology" from its museums, pointing to exhibits that "promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive." He also named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, seemingly in opposition to its having hosted performances he disagreed with for promoting so-called woke ideology. The move prompted many performances and performers to cancel shows. Copyright 2025 UPI News Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Texas House to take up GOP congressional map delayed by Democrats' walkout
The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday was set to advance a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as an attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year's midterm election. Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP's slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state's congressional map following the 2020 Census. Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map's passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map. Republicans have said the new districts were drawn purely to maximize their partisan advantage, arguing that the GOP's margins of victory in 2024 supported new lines that entrenched their hold on power. They have also framed the effort as a response to Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere. 'In the context of balancing what Democratic states have already done, what Texas is doing is eminently fair,' Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton and chair of the House's redistricting committee, said this month. 'This is about making sure that when we go into the congressional election in [2026], Republicans are on a level playing field to be able to compete with Democrats.' To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. 'I'm not beating around the bush,' Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi and the map's bill sponsor, said during an Aug. 1 committee hearing. 'We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.' The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the map cannot diminish the voting power of people of color. Democrats have condemned the plan, arguing it widens Republicans' partisan edge by unconstitutionally packing people of color — who are driving almost all of Texas' population growth — into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates. 'These illegal maps are based on already racist and unconstitutional maps that were litigated just barely a month ago,' Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said Monday, referring to an ongoing legal challenge to Texas' current map. 'It can only get worse from there. This is probably — from the experts that we've talked to — the worst racial discrimination in redistricting since the Jim Crow era.' The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers. More all-star speakers confirmed for The Texas Tribune Festival, Nov. 13–15! This year's lineup just got even more exciting with the addition of State Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo; former United States Attorney General Eric Holder; Abby Phillip, anchor of 'CNN NewsNight'; Aaron Reitz, 2026 Republican candidate for Texas Attorney General; and State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin. Get your tickets today! TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
