Today’s Top Stories from NBC News
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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2026
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In today’s newsletter: A first-of-its-kind NBC News analysis looks into students’ YouTube activity during school. Texas Senate candidates Ken Paxton and James Talarico crisscross the state in the countdown to Election Day. And the dilemma stalking the Knicks’ NBA title defense.
Here’s what to know today.
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Over the past decade, YouTube has become ubiquitous in the American classroom. Many districts distribute their own laptops and encourage students to watch educational videos but often struggle to effectively restrict what else kids can watch.
That means millions of students have access to billions of videos on a site where they can go from math lessons to videos containing profanity or sexually suggestive scenes in just a few clicks.
In a first-of-its-kind analysis, NBC News reporters examined more than 17,000 videos viewed on students’ devices through a mix of AI and manual review. Several who have struggled with the lure of YouTube said it swallowed up the hours they were supposed to be learning.
One such student, Richard, watched a mix of sports highlights, police chase footage, and AI-generated animations — all on his school-issued laptop, often while sitting in class. His mother eventually asked administrators to block the platform, but they said too many teachers used it for instruction.
“Why can’t you see what this is doing?” she wondered. “This constant, immediate gratification on a screen all day long, instead of healthy interactions being taught by a teacher, is so unhealthy.”
Read the full story here.
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With in-person early voting officially underway in Texas, Senate candidates Ken Paxton and James Talarico are crisscrossing the state to deliver their final urgent pleas to voters.
Paxton, the Republican candidate, spoke to a crowd of about 350 people yesterday in Fort Worth and touted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his event’s marquee speaker. Paxton addressed voters’ economic worries by calling for a $25,000 tax deduction for medical expenses and making Trump accounts for kids permanent.
About 45 minutes away in Denton, Talarico, the Democratic competitor, drew a crowd of 1,450, according to a campaign official, at an event that featured three cast members of the TV show “Friday Night Lights.” Talarico played up successful grassroots fundraising efforts for his campaign while calling out Elon Musk’s $150 million in donations to pro-Paxton groups.
Subscribe to read the full story.
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Dive deeper into the 2026 election:
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- How are things looking in Texas? See who’s running and how Republicans and Democrats fared in past elections. Then, scroll to the end of the page to explore data in other states.
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- For subscribers: NBC News’ chief data analyst Steve Kornacki examines what the polls got wrong about Maine Sen. Susan Collins in 2020 and what’s different this year in The Data Dive, a subscriber-exclusive newsletter on the numbers, trends and data shaping the biggest stories heading into the midterms.
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- President Donald Trump used an antisemitic slur in defending Republican Sen. Roger Moore, who is not Jewish, during a campaign rally in Kansas.
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- Vice President JD Vance declined to endorse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite Trump’s endorsement.
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The 2026-27 NBA season tips off tonight, with the New York Knicks taking on the Philadelphia 76ers at Madison Square Garden. The Knicks are fresh off a once-in-a-generation title run that united the city and captivated the country. But the financial realities of the NBA are threatening to break up the team.
Blame the second apron — a financial threshold that teams are highly disincentivized from exceeding when they acquire or sign players, or else they face with significant hurdles in building their teams. This season, that threshold is $207,824,000.
For the Knicks, not exceeding the second apron could mean seeing Karl-Anthony Towns and Josh Hart sign to other teams. The Boston Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder are also among the teams dealing with the issue.
Why the NBA instituted the threshold and how the rule puts new pressure on players.
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An Australian lawmaker is in critical but stable condition after being hit by a car in what authorities said was a deliberate attack, shocking a nation where political violence is extremely rare.
Helen Haines, a 65-year-old independent member of Parliament, was struck Monday outside her electoral district office in Wangaratta, a town of about 30,000 people in the southern Australian state of Victoria. She underwent surgery overnight. Local media reported that one of Haines’s legs had been amputated and that she was fighting to keep her other leg.
Police charged the driver, who they said was a 43-year-old local man, today with intentionally causing serious injury, dangerous driving causing serious injury and causing harm to a federal official.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that according to eyewitnesses, the driver had passed Haines and then performed a U-turn, hitting her as she was standing by the trunk of her parked car.
Political violence is extremely rare in Australia, where lawmakers are often out in public with little or no security and their accessibility is a point of national pride.
“It’s an Australian tradition to have a chat to a politician that you bump into at the shops,” Josh Roose, an associate professor of politics at Deakin University in Melbourne, told NBC News in an interview.
Read the full story.
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When I was a cub reporter on the DOJ beat, there was traditionally a bit of a lull right around election time, with the Justice Department trying to avoid taking action in politically sensitive cases that could even be interpreted as seeking to influence an election. With the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home last week, that quiet period before Election Day was added to the list of norms we’ve seen broken in Trump’s second term as president.
The Columbus Day search of Omar’s Washington, D.C., home, DOJ alumni say, is exactly the type of “overt activity” that the department traditionally sought to avoid. It comes in the same year that the administration attempted to indict six sitting members of Congress over a social media video Trump didn’t like, brought an indictment they now admit was bogus against an Olympic canoeist over a botched installation job at the Reflecting Pool and indicted the former director of the FBI over an Instagram photo of seashells.
There’s still plenty we don’t know about the Omar case, and we’ll likely only see the full evidence if she’s formally charged. But what we do know, as I reported in this story with Kyle Stewart, is that the Justice Department’s actions here break with history, and that the investigation involves DOJ figures involved in other politically controversial investigations.
— Ryan Reilly, senior Justice reporter
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- Voters in Alberta, Canada, rejected a proposal that would have set them on a path toward independence.
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- Richard Riehle, a character actor best known for his role in “Office Space,” has died at age 78.
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- The fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy when a Mississippi police officer fired at a vehicle during a shoplifting call was a “justified” use of force, the state’s attorney general said.
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- For subscribers: This year is shaping up to be one of the deadliest for firefighters battling wildfires. Some experts think a Trump administration policy is putting more people in harm’s way.
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Thanks for reading the Morning Rundown. Today’s newsletter was curated for you by Elizabeth Robinson and Josh Feldman.
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