Congress

NPR plans to make cuts totaling more than $5 million over the course of the coming fiscal year to bring its annual budget into balance. Meanwhile, local stations are asking for more help.

The Austin lawmaker, first elected in 2004, chaired the influential House Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security committees. He is the second Texas Republican this week to bow out of Congress.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 13 Texas residents, states that the redrawn districts in the new map — which Gov. Greg Abbott says he’ll “swiftly” sign into law — are racially discriminatory and violate voter protection laws.

"Republicans think they can walk all over us," Sen. Carol Alvarado said in a post on social media Friday afternoon. "Today I'm going to kick back. ... Going to be a long night."

The House approved a Trump administration plan to rescind $9 billion in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The money would have gone to help finish the Waterloo Greenway and to projects that help domestic violence survivors and people transitioning out of homelessness.

Trump addressed a sharply divided Congress, as he claimed an electoral mandate and vowed his administration was "just getting started." Throughout the speech, he faced repeated jeers from Democrats.

Common misperceptions are that only abortion-seekers are affected, that Democratics could have codified protections before, and that Congress can easily get rid of federal laws restricting abortion.

It has almost no chance of becoming law as the Senate pursues negotiations focused on improving mental health programs, bolstering school security and enhancing background checks.

That's up from 143 incidents in a report issued in 2021. Officials partly credited reducing stigma around the issue for the new reports, many of which are older and went unmentioned at the time.