NPR News: 11-20-2025 3PM EST
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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. Congressional Democrats are condemning what they consider the president's call for deadly violence against members of their party. NPR's Claudia Grisales reports that comes after President Trump accused a group of six Democrats of seditious behavior punishable by death on social media.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer assailed the series of extreme truth social posts by President Trump.
What recent events led to President Trump's controversial statements?
That includes resharing a post calling for the hanging of congressional Democrats who previously served in the military and intelligence branches.
The president of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials. This is an outright threat, and it's deadly serious.
The backlash comes days after a video posted by Democratic Senators Mark Kelly, Alyssa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlihan, Chris DiLuzio, and Maggie Goodlander. In it, they said military and intelligence members can refuse the administration's illegal orders. Claudia Rosales, NBR News, the Capitol.
As during the daily White House briefing, if you wanted to execute members of Congress, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said, No, let's be clear about what the president is responding to, because many in this room want to talk about the president's response, but not what brought the president to responding in this way.
Levitt said President Trump does not actually want to see members of Congress executed. Levitt claimed the group was encouraging service members to defy the president's lawful orders, although the lawmakers who have military or intelligence backgrounds said, quote, you can refuse illegal orders and you must refuse illegal orders. The late Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney drew bipartisan tributes at his funeral today. He died earlier this month at the age of 84. President Trump was not in attendance. Cheney was strongly critical of Trump's leadership. In her eulogy, former Representative Liz Cheney, herself a vocal critic of Trump, credited her father with putting country over party. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made a dramatic shift in the agency's position on the relationship of vaccines and autism.
Here's NPR's Rob Stein.
The CDC's website now says a link between vaccines and autism cannot be ruled out. That's a sharp reversal from the CDC's stance that there is no link. The change comes even though a connection between vaccines and autism has long been debunked by a large body of high-quality research. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long promoted the discredited claim. The CDC's change is alarming public health experts. They are already worried about a drop in childhood vaccination, which has led to a resurgence of dangerous childhood diseases like measles and whooping cough.
It's NPR. Today marks 80 years since the Nuremberg trials began. The proceedings to prosecute Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity helped establish the foundations of an international framework for holding offenders accountable for mass atrocities. The Harvard Law School says for the first time it's giving scholars around the globe open access online to a fully searchable digital archive of official evidentiary documents and trial transcripts from all 13 Nuremberg trials. Moss was able to survive nine months of exposure to space outside of the International Space Station. NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce reports researchers were surprised at how well the moss fared in space.
Tamo Michi Fujita is with Hokkaido University. He says a few years ago, astronauts attached the spore-containing parts of a common moss to the outside of the space station. They spent 283 days there before returning to Earth, and most of them were able to successfully germinate in the lab.
How did lawmakers respond to Trump's call for violence?
They didn't mind the space condition. They can keep their life for such a long time.
He and his colleagues say the moss could have survived the harsh conditions even longer, perhaps as long as 15 years. They're now exploring the potential of mosses for constructing new ecosystems in places like the moon or Mars.
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