The values that Americans view as important have shifted over the last two decades, as younger Americans place less significance on patriotism, religion and having children.
A recent poll shows that 42% of Millennials and Generation Z (ages of 18-38) view patriotism as “very important” compared to almost 79% of people over age 55.
Hard work is the attribute all Americans value the most with 89% of respondents saying it’s a very important quality. Tolerance for others, financial security and self-fulfillment also topped the list.
Overall, about half of people — 48% — say religion is very important to them, down from 62 percent in 1998. While 67% of older Americans view religion or a belief in God as very important, just 30% of the younger group felt the same.
Click on graphic to enlarge
When it comes to having children, 43% say it’s very important. That’s down from 20 years ago, when 59% of people said that becoming a parent was very important.
Forty percent of people say increasing diversity and tolerance of different cultures and races is a step forward, 14% see it as a step backward, while the biggest majority, 43%, say it is both a step forward and a step backward.
Issues like religion and patriotism have traditionally been politically important. However, the changing views of the emerging generation suggest those topics might not be at the forefront in the coming years and politicians will have to adjust their platforms and strategies accordingly.
House Democrats are demanding information on the use of taxpayer money at President Donald Trump’s hotels and properties, including during Vice President Pence’s trip this week to Doonbeg, Ireland. The push is part of an expanded effort this fall to investigate the president’s financial entanglements and business practices.
The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees announced Friday that they sent a series of letters regarding “multiple efforts” by the president, vice president, and other Trump administration officials to spend taxpayer money at properties owned by Trump. They say the spending could violate the Constitution and bolster the case for Trump’s impeachment.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a statement that the spending is “of grave concern” to his committee, which is investigating whether to recommend articles of impeachment to the full House. House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said that his panel “does not believe that U.S. taxpayer funds should be used to personally enrich President Trump, his family, and his companies.”
FILE – House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, prepares for a television interview at the Capitol in Washington, July 26, 2019.
The letters come after Pence stayed at Trump’s resort in Doonbeg , Ireland, this week. Doonbeg is on the other side of Ireland from Dublin, where he had meetings. The Democrats also sent letters to the White House and Secret Service about Trump’s suggestion earlier this month that his Miami-area golf course host next year’s Group of Seven summit with foreign leaders. The Democrats say those instances, among others, could violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bans the president from taking gifts from foreign governments.
The push comes as Democrats are trying to keep public attention on their investigations of Trump. They have spent much of the year probing episodes detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which did not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice. But lawmakers say they think the American public may have even more interest in Trump profiting off of his presidency as they weigh whether to move forward on impeachment.
“We have been focused on the Mueller report and that is a very small part of the overall picture,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the Judiciary panel. “We must get America focused on the ongoing violations against basic Constitutional principles.”
In addition to looking at Trump’s use of his properties, two House committees are continuing to investigate his relationship with banks with which he did business. And the Judiciary panel is also expected to investigate hush money payments that Trump paid to kill potentially embarrassing stories.
Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, another Democrat on the Judiciary panel, says he believes that the misuse of public funds or financial corruption make Americans especially angry. And while people have heard a lot about the Mueller report, he says they may know less about the emoluments clause.
“I think you’ll see a lot more of that in the coming months,” Cicilline said.
Many attending U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s college lecture Friday in his home state of Kansas listened for clues about whether he might run for the Senate next year, though it could be many months before anyone finds out.
Three Democrats and four Republicans are already actively running for the seat held by Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who isn’t seeking a fifth term, and several others are expected to join them. Weeks after Pompeo said a run is “off the table,” though, he is still creating a buzz and looming over the race, as only he has enough name recognition and support among Kansas conservatives to afford to wait until next June’s filing deadline to decide.
If he does run, Pompeo would enter the race as the favorite.
“It’s the Pompeo decision, and then everything else trickles down,” said Joe Kildea, a vice president for the conservative interest group Club for Growth.
Other candidates don’t have the luxury of waiting and the field is likely to grow, with GOP Representative Roger Marshall of western Kansas expected to announce his candidacy Saturday at the state fair.
FILE – Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, right , Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, speaks Nov. 5, 2015, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Pompeo wasn’t expected to directly address the speculation about his interest in running during his speech Friday at Kansas State University, but that hasn’t stopped others from suggesting he’s the person for the job. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell identified Pompeo as his preferred candidate shortly after Roberts announced in January that he wasn’t seeking re-election.
The GOP hasn’t lost a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, but many Republicans worry about a repeat of the governor’s race last year. Kris Kobach, a nationally known advocate of tough immigration policies, narrowly won a crowded primary, alienated moderates and lost to Democrat Laura Kelly. He launched his Senate campaign in July.
For Kobach’s GOP detractors, Pompeo would solve their perceived problems. His entry would likely clear most of the Republican field, and GOP leaders believe Pompeo would have no trouble winning in November 2020, making it easier for Republicans to retain their Senate majority.
And WDAF-TV reported that Kansas’ other senator, Republican Jerry Moran, told reporters Wednesday at a Kansas City-area event that he didn’t know Pompeo’s current thinking “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he entered that race.”
Fellow Republicans concede that Pompeo, a former congressman and CIA director, has reasons not to run, including the prestige that comes with being the nation’s top diplomat. He’s currently dealing with weighty issues such as new sanctions on Iran from the Trump administration, a tariff war with China and questions about whether hopes for nuclear talks with North Korea are fading.
“I think he can’t say that he’s wanting to run for Senate now,” said Tim Shallenburger, a former two-term state treasurer and Kansas Republican Party chairman. “He’s got to wait, and I think he can afford to wait.”
FILE – Then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is pictured in Lenexa, Kan., June 8, 2017.
Kobach, who served as Kansas’ secretary of state but first built his national profile on immigration issues, has argued that as a Senate nominee, he’d benefit from the higher turnout that normally comes with a presidential election year and a greater focus on issues such as immigration. Some local Republican leaders agree and feel less anxious about Kobach’s possible nomination victory.
Other GOP candidates include Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle; Dave Lindstrom, a Kansas City-area businessman and former Kansas City Chiefs player; and Bryan Pruitt, a conservative gay commentator. Also, Marshall has been flirting with running for months, and other potential Republican candidates include Alan Cobb, president and CEO of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, and Matt Schlapp, the American Conservative Union’s president.
The Democratic candidates with active campaigns are former federal prosecutor Barry Grissom, former Representative Nancy Boyda, and Usha Reddi, a city commissioner in the northeast Kansas city of Manhattan.
Don Alexander, a manufacturing firm owner who is the GOP chairman in Neosho County in southeastern Kansas, said it’s early to be trying to size up the race, almost 11 months before the August 2020 primary. He said he and other Republicans trust Pompeo to “know where he’s needed most.”
President’s support seen
“I’m sure the president doesn’t want him to leave,” said Helen Van Etten, a Republican National Committee member from Topeka.
But Van Etten said comments from Pompeo that he’ll stay on as secretary of state as long as Trump will have him leave an “open door” for a Senate bid.
Some Republicans, such as Alexander, take Pompeo at his word that he won’t run. Others, including Shallenburger, read Pompeo’s statements as meaning he isn’t interested right now but that he may reconsider if he doesn’t like how the race develops.
“He can announce on the filing deadline and cause most of the people in there to get out,” Shallenburger said.
VOA Connect Episode 86 – Choosing to be childless is a growing trend in the United States. We also explore the world of vintage drag race cars, and head to New York, where visually impaired people can get a ride though a park on a tandem bike.
What does a home mechanic do with time, money, and a vintage car? Make a dragster and take it to the track, of course. Members of the Nostalgia Drag Racer League make their fun one fast quarter-mile (.4km) trip at a time.
Hundreds of homes were evacuated and schools closed Thursday as crews battled a stubborn wildfire churning through heavy brush in Southern California.
The blaze near the Riverside County city of Murrieta and unincorporated community of La Cresta grew to more than 2 square miles (5.4 square kilometers) and was 7% contained, authorities said.
There were no reports of structure losses.
“There’s lots of heavy fuel in very steep terrain that we can’t get to on foot,” said Capt. Fernando Herrera with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Aircraft were making continuous drops of water and retardant, he said.
More than 480 homes were in the mandatory evacuation zone and another 2,270 are under voluntary evacuation orders, according to Herrera.
The blaze erupted Wednesday afternoon on rural land and erratic winds quickly pushed flames down hills toward homes about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.
The cause may have been a lightning strike as hot, muggy weather produced thunderstorms. Those conditions will continue into Friday, the National Weather Service said.
It’s one of a number of fires burning around the state. There’s very little containment of a 1.5-square-mile (3.9-square-kilometer) blaze in rural forest land along the northern Sierra Nevada in Plumas County.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans see weather disasters, like Hurricane Dorian, worsening and most of them blame global warming to some extent, a new poll finds.
And scientists say they’re right.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey shows 72% of Americans think catastrophic weather is more severe, while 4% see it as less nasty. About one-quarter say those disasters are about as extreme as they always were.
Half of those who think weather disasters are worsening say it’s mainly because of man-made climate change, with another 37% who think natural randomness and global warming are equally to blame.
The poll was conducted in mid-August before Dorian formed, pummeled the Bahamas and put much of the U.S. East Coast on edge.
“We continue to loot our environment and it causes adverse weather,” said John Mohr, 57, a self-described moderate Republican in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he was bracing for Dorian’s arrival.
On Tybee Island, Georgia, Tony and Debbie Pagan said they rarely worried about hurricanes after buying their home nearly 50 years ago.
Hurricane David in 1979 and Floyd in 1999 threatened them but did little damage. The last four years haven’t been so kind.
FILE – Destruction lies in the wake of Hurricane Irma in St. Martin, Sept. 6, 2017.
One miss, but two hits
Hurricane Matthew raked the island in 2016 and pushed several inches of floodwater into the Pagans’ low-lying house. Hurricane Irma the following year sent 2 feet of water surging into the home. And this year Hurricane Dorian threatened, but didn’t hit.
“This is climate change, though President Trump denies that it is,” Tony Pagan, 69, a retired electrician, said as he and his wife finished packing to leave Wednesday. “He needs to open his eyes.”
Majorities of adults across demographic groups think weather disasters are getting more severe, according to the poll. College-educated Americans are slightly more likely than those without a degree to say so, 79% versus 69%.
But there are wide differences in assessments by partisanship. Nine in 10 Democrats think weather disasters are more extreme, compared with about half of Republicans.
Americans this summer also are slightly more likely to say disasters are more severe when compared with a similarly worded question asked after hurricanes in 2013 and 2017.
“People are catching up with the science! Extreme events are always partly due to natural variability, but we do think many are increasing in frequency because of climate change,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said in an email.
FILE – Indian residents queue with plastic containers to get drinking water from a tanker in the outskirts of Chennai, May 29, 2019. An unrelenting heat wave triggered warnings of water shortages and heatstroke in India on June 1.
Heat, rain
It’s more than hurricanes. A recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that heat waves are happening more often, are nastier and last longer, while heavy downpours are increasing globally, said NASA and Columbia University climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig.
Chris Dennis, 50, a registered nurse and self-described liberal Democrat in Greenville, South Carolina, said he is seeing more intense and more frequent weather disasters than in the past.
“Years ago, we didn’t hear of these kinds of storms, at least that frequently,” Dennis said, taking a break from watching the CNN forum on climate change for Democratic presidential candidates. He said he kept noticing the damning statistics on carbon dioxide put in the air, saying the “numbers are cranking up like the national debt clock … that’s pretty significant, what we’re doing to our environment.”
Scientific studies indicate a warming world has slightly stronger hurricanes, but they don’t show an increase in the number of storms hitting land, Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said. He said the real climate change effect causing more damage is storm surge from rising seas, wetter storms dumping more rain and more people living in vulnerable areas.
Skeptic
Not everyone sees climate change making weather worse.
Though she’s weary of dealing with storms three of the past four years, Sandy Cason of Tybee Island said she’s not ready to blame climate change. She noted Georgia got hit by several powerful hurricanes in the 1800s.
“If you go back and read, it’s a cyclical thing. It really is,” Cason said. “If you read enough about the old storms, I don’t think you can” attribute the most recent storms to climate change.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,058 adults was conducted Aug. 15-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.
Technology firms and academics have joined together to launch a “deepfake challenge” to improve tools to detect videos and other media manipulated by artificial intelligence.
The initiative announced Thursday includes $10 million from Facebook and aims to curb what is seen as a major threat to the integrity of online information.
The effort is being supported by Microsoft and the industry-backed Partnership on AI and includes academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, University of Oxford, University of California-Berkeley, University of Maryland and University at Albany.
Tool to detect altered video
It represents a broad effort to combat the dissemination of manipulated video or audio as part of a misinformation campaign.
“The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer,” said Facebook chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer.
Schroepfer said deepfake techniques, which present realistic AI-generated videos of people doing and saying fictional things, “have significant implications for determining the legitimacy of information presented online. Yet the industry doesn’t have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them.”
The challenge is the first project of a committee on AI and media integrity created by the Partnership on AI, a group whose mission is to promote beneficial uses of artificial intelligence and is backed by Apple, Amazon, IBM and other tech firms and non-governmental organizations.
A woman in Washington views a manipulated video, Jan. 24, 2019, that changes what is said by President Donald Trump and former president Barack Obama, illustrating how “deepfake” technology can deceive viewers.
Threat to democracy
Terah Lyons, executive director of the Partnership, said the new project is part of an effort to stem AI-generated fakes, which “have significant, global implications for the legitimacy of information online, the quality of public discourse, the safeguarding of human rights and civil liberties, and the health of democratic institutions.”
Facebook said it was offering funds for research collaborations and prizes for the challenge, and would also enter the competition, but not accept any of the prize money.
Oxford professor Philip Torr, one of the academics participating, said new tools are “urgently needed to detect these types of manipulated media.
“Manipulated media being put out on the internet, to create bogus conspiracy theories and to manipulate people for political gain, is becoming an issue of global importance, as it is a fundamental threat to democracy,” Torr said in a statement.
President Donald Trump is continuing his run of recognizing American sports greats with the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Trump has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to pro-basketball great Jerry West, formerly of the Los Angeles Lakers, during a White House ceremony.
Trump says West “richly deserved” the medal for his years as a player, general manager and supporter of the nation’s war veterans.
The 81-year-old West noted his humble beginnings growing up in West Virginia and where sports has taken him, saying “it never ceases to amaze me the places you can go in this world chasing a basketball.”
Last month, Trump awarded the medal to 91-year-old basketball great Bob Cousy. Earlier this year, golfer Tiger Woods received the same honor.
The world is focused on the Bahamas, where thousands are just beginning the long and painful struggle to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Dorian.
International search-and-rescue teams are spreading across Abaco and Grand Bahamas islands looking for survivors. Crews have started clearing the streets of debris to set up emergency food and water distribution centers.
The U.S. Coast Guard and British Royal Navy have ships docked off the islands, and the United Nations is sending in tons of ready-to-eat meals and satellite communications equipment.
The Royal Caribbean and Walt Disney cruise lines, which usually carry happy tourists to Bahamian resorts, are instead using ships to deliver food, water, flashlights and other vital aid.
Death toll at 30
The death toll on the Bahamas stood at 30 late Thursday, but with entire villages and marinas wiped off the map, officials say they have no doubt that number will rise.
Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis calls the damage left by Dorian one of the greatest crises in his country’s history.
“As prime minister, I assure you that no efforts will be spared in rescuing those still in danger, feeding those who are hungry and providing shelter to those who are without homes,” he said. “Our response will be day and night, day after day, week after week, month after month until the lives of our people return to some degree of normalcy.”
Dorian spent Thursday pummeling North and South Carolina with strong winds and heavy rain, along with causing more than a dozen tornadoes and waterspouts that led to additional damage.
Dorian landfall forecast
Forecasters do not expect Dorian to make a direct landfall Friday but will instead skirt the North Carolina coast, bringing life-threatening storm surges to North Carolina and southern Virginia before moving away from land.
Dorian will remain a potent storm straight into the weekend, however, with tropical storm warnings posted as far north as Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, according to the National Hurricane Center.
